Rev. Michael Holmen's Sermons: Recent Episodes
rev.michael.holmen@gmail.com
Sermons preached at Peace Lutheran Church, Oelwein, IA and Our Redeemer Lutheran Church, Independence, IA. This is a dual parish of The Lutheran Church--Missouri Synod. We use the one year, historic lectionary.
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Jesus said, “Whoever would save hislife will lose it, but whoever loses his life on account of me will save it.”
Back home on the farm it was not uncommon for kittens to beborn around this time of year. The momma cats liked the hay mow of our barn.The old bales of hay and straw provided nooks and crannies for secluded littledens. We kids liked to find these newborn kittens and tame them. The kittenswere terrified at first. Their fur would be sticking out and their clawsextended, but eventually they would trust you. You could tell when your job wasdone when the kitten would start to purr while lying on your lap.
The image I would like to bring to your mind is perhaps oneyou’ve experienced. Sometimes these kittens would be a few weeks old before wewould find them. Kittens grow up quickly. These older kittens would want to runaway, but if they couldn’t, they would fight back. They were still quitehelpless, but they wanted you to believe they were far from helpless. Theywould puff out their fur, arch their backs, growl, and make that weird spittingsound with their mouths as they would strike out with their paws.
This was quite intimidating. The kittens were quiteharmless, but they made me think twice. It was 99% bluffing. If the kitten werefacing a real enemy, all this play-acting would be futile. All the enemy wouldneed to do is snatch the kitten up in its jaws, and that would be the end ofthat.
Human beings can be like those bluffing kittens when itcomes to things that are stronger than us. Sin is much stronger than us. I wishwe could always and easily tell sin to take a hike, but sin often gets thebetter of us. Our guilt is stronger than us. We accumulated so much guilt by ourevil deeds. The devil is stronger. Death is stronger. We are quite helpless. Weare like kittens.
However, it is not uncommon to think we can somehow defeatthese enemies. If we bristle out our fur, arch our backs, and strike out, maybewe’ll be left alone. With sin and guilt, for example, the most common strategyis simply to forget about them. As time passes, the pangs of conscience lessen,but does forgetfulness really make our sin go away? Does shutting our eyes orpulling the blanket over our heads make the monster go away?
Another strategy for dealing with sin and guilt is to fightback. Maybe God’s commandments are old fashioned or impractical. Maybe youcouldn’t live the life that you want to live and still keep God’s commandments.God wants us to be happy, doesn’t he? “Live and let live” is great advice for acertain kind of peaceable life. However does this make sin and guilt go away?Maybe our conscience is soothed for yet another day, but the enemy remains.
The strategies regarding death can be similar. Nothing ismore common than ignoring death. Put it out of mind so that you can more fullyembrace whatever good might be coming your way. This sounds like good advice, andmaybe it has its place, but does it make death go away?
Or maybe instead of taking death seriously we can celebrate life.Hopefully the person in question is good enough so that we can celebrate. Hopefullythey didn’t commit any gross sins—at least not publicly. Hopefully they wereonly guilty of the common and respectable sins that church people commit.Otherwise it might feel strange to celebrate. But, in any case, what does itmatter? It is all for nothing. Even with all this bragging and story telling theperson remains quite dead. A few short decades later, they will be quite forgotten.
In all our dealings with these forces we are likedefenseless kittens. We do what we can. We put on a show. But nothing canreally be done. It’s all play-acting. It’s all bluffing. Our very real enemies haveus in their jaws whether we make a fuss or not.
I think this might help us better understand a statement ofJesus’s that can be quite enigmatic otherwise. He said on one occasion: “Whoever would save his life will lose it, but however loseshis life on account of me will save it.” We might think that we have noother choice than to playact and to bluff. We have to cope somehow. But if wecommit ourselves to these strategies for dealing with these very real enemies,then we will have a very different savior in our minds than Jesus—and what apathetic Savior it is too. A kitten pretending to be a tiger? By trying to saveour own life we will lose it.
But what is the alternative? The alternative is to believein Jesus. However, this belief will be under the cross. That means we will bein unfavorable conditions and will suffer loss. As Jesus said, “Whoever would save his life will lose it, but however loseshis life on account of me will save it.” We must lose our life withJesus. What does that mean? It means that we allow whatever nasty enemies whohave invaded our comfy little den to bite and devour us, while believing, atthe same time, that they will not be triumphant. Though they do their worst—thoughthey have me in their jaws—I will prevail because my God is for me and notagainst me. God will save me when the time is right even if I should end up intheir gullet, in the belly of a large fish, or in a den of lions.
Let’s apply this to the enemies we’ve already talked about. Thereare a lot of ways to cope with sin, but Jesus is the only one way to be victorious.Repent and believe the good news that Jesus is the Savior of sinners. But evenwhen we have done this, sin remains a powerful enemy. I wish that we Christianscould become so strong that we could always tell sin to take a hike, but wearen’t. Seasoned Christians know that the devil has very good aim with hispoisoned arrows. He can find the gap in our armor so that we fall into sinquite against our will.
Our situation with death is very similar. Try as we might,we can’t avoid it. This is true for Christians and non-Christians alike. We alldie. The difference with Christians is that we believe Jesus when he says: “I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in mewill live even though he dies, and whoever lives and believes in me will neverdie.” The first part of that statement is clear enough. We believe thateven if we should die, yet we will live because we will be resurrected. Butwhat about the second part when he says, “Whoever livesand believes in me will never die?” The apostles died. Christians fortwo thousand years have died. Did none of those live and believe in him?
No. They were believers. And they didn’t die—not really.They died in the belief that this slight momentary affliction of death wouldlast but a little while; salvation comes with the morning. Sometimes the NewTestament calls death a sleep. When we go to sleep at night we do not fallasleep with horror. We know that the morning is coming. Not only will we wakeup, but we will even feel refreshed and energized. So it is with those who diewith faith in Jesus, the resurrection and the life.
Unfortunately, those who really will die are like foolishkittens who think that they can save themselves by playacting. They think theycan stave off death or come to terms with it. They think memories orcelebrations can make the person live on in some sense. This posturing and fussand bother are as insubstantial as smoke. They don’t know how strong theirenemy is. Imagine the horror the kitten feels when their show doesn’t work, butthey find themselves in the jaws nonetheless. That is death.
I understand perfectly why people do playacting. It can seemlike the only recourse we’ve got. It can seem defeatist to admit anything isstronger than us. We are told always to fight, and for good reason. We don’twant to be in those jaws. Playacting is a way to convince ourselves that weneed not be in those jaws. The kitten is desperate not to be picked up becauseit doesn’t know what might happen. One thing is sure: it will lose control.
In order to be a Christian we must lose control, so tospeak. We must put ourselves and our futures into the hands of a God who hastold us that he has our best interests in mind even as we are going throughpainful or scary circumstances. And this is not like a fairy tale where theenemy is no more and can no longer hurt us. It will be like that in heaven, butnot until then. The apostles said this plainly. They said, “It is only through many hardships that we will enter thekingdom of God.” We kittens have many enemies and their teeth are sharp.However, we have hope! Even if we should die, yet shall we live, and declarethe praises of the Lord.
On Good Friday it is fitting to think about our enemies suchas sin and death, which are more powerful than we are. Good Friday and Easter showus that Jesus is more powerful than sin and death. However, Jesus saves in avery special way. He doesn’t ignore sin and death. He doesn’t go around them.He doesn’t go over them or under them. He goes through them. The jaws clampedon him, just as they clamp on us. However, what looked like defeat, proved tobe victory.
The same thing is true for us Christians. We cannot get ridof sin. We cannot avoid death. We go through these things. They bite and gnashwith dreadful effects, but even while they are doing their worst, we believethat we will be victorious and they will be defeated. Jesus willsee to that.
Jesus said, “Whoever would save hislife will lose it, but whoever loses his life on account of me will save it.”Amen.
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When we use the word “peace” we often think of calmness,tranquility, the lack of fighting. There are different ways to achieve such acondition. For example, a graveyard is quite peaceful in its own way. Eventhough there are many people in close proximity, there is little fighting. Thereis also little love, little joy, but there is a kind of stillness and calmness.
Another way calmness can be achieved is through theestablishment of such severe law and order that everyone becomes too scared tostep out of line. Totalitarian governments come up with punishments and displaysof power that intimidate the people they rule over. Almost all of the greatempires of history have used these tactics.
The Roman government, for example, once crushed a slaverevolt and sent a powerful message afterwards. They crucified 6,000 captured slavesalong the Appian Way. For 120 miles one person after another hung there dead oncrosses. The message was clear: Don’t mess with those in power. It worked. Peoplewere frightened. There was a kind of peace.
This is one way you could understand the events of Holy Weekthat we have entered into today with Palm Sunday. The Jewish leaders wanted akind of peace. Jesus had been disturbing their peace. So they solved a problem.Jesus had been getting too popular. He had raised Lazarus from the dead. Uponentering Jerusalem he went to the temple and made quite a scene. He flippedover tables and let animals loose. The Jewish leaders wanted to know who hadgiven him such authority.
Jesus was obviously out of control. He needed to be dealtwith. The usual measures of getting dirt on someone wouldn’t work with him. Norcould they turn the people against him. The people loved him more than theyloved the Jewish leaders. There was only one sensible course to take, and theytook it. They arrested him in the middle of the night. They immediately convictedhim in their kangaroo court. They applied pressure to Pontius Pilate. By thetime the people of Jerusalem were hardly finished with their breakfast Jesuswas already nailed to the cross! It was already too late. Efficiency like thatwould make any dictator tip his beret with respect.
For some of us, though, this kind of thing really makes ourblood boil. It was so unjust! The leaders were supposed to be the best of thepeople, but in fact they were the worst. They were vain. They were vindictive.They were cowards. They purposely engaged Jesus in an unfair fight. They didn’tdispute with him in the open. It was all arranged behind closed doors. Theirdirty deeds were done with the cover of darkness. Some of us might like to takeour clubs and swords and give them a taste of their own medicine.
This might have been how Peter felt. We’ve been studyingPeter in our Adult Bible Study. When the Jewish leaders came to arrest Jesus inthe middle of the night, Peter took out his sword and cut off the right ear ofthe high priest’s servant. I can’t help it: a part of me says, “Hurray forPeter!” At least one of those scoundrels felt a little pain! But that sets meat odds with Jesus himself.
Perhaps you remember how Jesus rebuked Peter. He told him toput away his sword. He said, “Shall I not drink the cupthe Father has given me to drink?” He also said, “All who take the sword shall perish by the sword.”
Indeed, that is how it goes. History tells this story overand over. The story goes like this: The oppressors oppress until those theyoppresse rise up and take away their power. But without fail, those who wereformerly oppressed, when it’s their turn, also oppress whomever they can takeadvantage of. They, then, become the target until one day a knife is foundsticking out of their backs. The situation is always unstable because hatred isjust below the surface. Power is maintained only with the utmost vigilance.Knowing that they hate you, you must strike first, before they strike you. It’skill or be killed. “Whoever takes the sword, perishesby the sword.”
The best peace to be hoped for is the peace of thegraveyard. If all goes well you eliminate your opponents before they eliminateyou. Then you live happily ever after. That was the Jewish leaders’ theory ofpeace, and they dealt with Jesus accordingly.
However, this theory did not originate with them. It is mucholder. It goes back all the way to the gray mists of the earliest recordedhistory. The first human being born in the natural way was named Cain. He had abrother named Abel. One day Cain became annoyed with his brother Abel. Abel wasdisturbing his peace. So Cain bashed his head in, and reestablished the peace.Problem solved. No more Abel; no more annoyance. He lived happily ever after… Excepthe didn’t. Maybe you remember the story. He thought that he would live happilyever after, but in fact he was haunted for the rest of his life by the dirtydeeds he did in secret. This is some kind of peace, but it leaves much to bedesired.
Is there another kind of peace? Most do not believe so.Jesus says, “Broad is the gate and easy is the way thatleads to destruction, and many enter thereby. Narrow is the gate and hard isthe way that leads to eternal life, and few there are who find it.” Mostpeople believe what simply comes naturally to all of us: We will be better offif we are in control. We will be richer if we take what someone else has. Wewill be happier if we eliminate those who annoy us. Kill or be killed. Thisworld is made up of winners and losers. See to it that you are like the Jewishleaders, who obviously won, instead of like Jesus, who obviously lost.
But did he? That is the question! This is why theresurrection is so important. If Jesus rose from the dead, then he was rightand his ways are best. If he did not rise from the dead, then the Jewishleaders were right. The message would be: Let no scruples get in the way ofyour ambitions. If Abel didn’t want to get killed, he should have killed Cainbefore Cain killed him. If Jesus didn’t want to get arrested and killed, heshould have dismissed Judas long ago, armed his supporters, and stormed thechief priest’s palace. The strategy is not hard to understand. Do whatever isbeneficial to you, and don’t do whatever might be beneficial to others.
What is hard to understand and to learn is Jesus’s peace. Tolearn Jesus’s peace you have to change your mind, which is what the word“repent” means. You have to think so differently that the Bible speaks of thischange as being born again, or that we must be crucified with Christ and raisedwith him. So much must change that it is beyond our powers. Faith is a miracleworked by the Holy Spirit. But what comes at the end is worth it. What comes atthe end is peace.
Jesus spoke about this peace in those chapters in John thatwe talked about during our midweek series. Jesus said, “In me you have peace. In the world you will have trouble, but take heart:I have overcome the world.” Again, Jesus said, “PeaceI leave with you. My peace I give to you. Not as the world gives do I give toyou. Let not your hearts be troubled, neither let them be afraid.” Thoseare words of quiet confidence. Although he knows that is death is but hoursaway, he is not like a drowning rat, desperate to survive. Jesus said, “You trust in God. Trust also in me.”
Trust in Jesus because his resurrection happened. Theresurrection and judgment that is coming at the end of this world is real too. Thisis what all those who live only for their own ambitions deliberately ignore. Theresurrection is coming! When that happens, those who appeared to have won willlose. Those who appeared to have lost will win. “Thefirst shall be last, and the last shall be first. There is nothing that is secretthat won’t be revealed, and there is nothing that is hidden that won’t beexposed.” These are clear teachings of Jesus.
Now if you are like me, then you probably have your owndirty deeds done in darkness, the exposure of which would bring about intense embarrassmentor perhaps even fear. To you I say, “Do not be afraid so long as your peace isin Jesus.” Your peace in Jesus will be stronger than your sins. Jesus’srighteousness speaks louder than our failings.
But don’t go on thinking that your dirty deeds of darknesswill get you ahead in life. They won’t. They harm you; they don’t bless you.Even if you managed to gain the whole world by unrighteousness, the time wouldcome when you would regret it—even if you somehow managed to make it intoheaven. Change your mind; change your ways. Light, truth, life, and all othergood things come from Jesus. Repent and believe the good news that Jesus hasovercome the world, and his peace will reign forever and ever!
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Our church is known for holding to certain standards thatother churches may not emphasize as strongly. We take seriously the sixthcommandment, “You shall not commit adultery.” Thiscommandment has many applications. We believe that marriage, as the one-fleshunion instituted by God, is a lifelong covenant between husband and wife. To goagainst this is sin. Adultery is sinful. Divorce, when contrary to God’sdesign, is sinful. Fornication is sinful. Living together is sinful. We callfor repentance in these areas because unrepentant sin separates us from God,and we cannot, in good conscience, allow members to continue in sin withoutaddressing it.
We also teach that same-sex sexual relationships arecontrary to God’s order. Those who experience same-sex attraction are called todeny themselves, repent, and follow Jesus, just as all of us are called to denyour sinful desires and follow him. This is not easy, but it is the path ofdiscipleship.
Additionally, we care deeply about the third commandment:“We should fear and love God so that we do not despise preaching and his Word,but hold it sacred and gladly hear and learn it.” This is why, in April, our congregationalassembly will vote on a policy requiring members to partake in communion atleast four times a year. If members are absent without explanation orcommunication, they will eventually be removed.
These standards may seem strict, but they exist for a goodreason: to help one another get to heaven. If a congregation isn’t focused onthis, it has lost its way. Repentance is essential for true faith. Without it,we remain alienated from God’s commands and promises.
However, holding firm to these standards can create adangerous mentality. It’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking, “As long as Ifollow these rules, I’m good.” Or what’s worse: “I easily follow these rules, what’swrong with them?” I’m good; they’re bad. This is self-righteousness—a deadlyspiritual condition.
This was the Pharisees’ problem in Jesus’s day. Theymeticulously followed certain rules—washing their hands a certain way,observing the Sabbath with extreme care—but they ignored weightier matters likejustice, mercy, and faith. Jesus accused them of “strainingout gnats while swallowing camels.” They were so focused on the thingsthat they wanted to emphasize—things, by the way, that they were already doing—thatthey were unaware of how recklessly they were breaking God’s commandments inother ways.
Throughout the Gospels it is clear that the Pharisees wereannoyed with Jesus. In the end, they hated him so much that they got him killed.Why did they hate him so much? It was because he pointed out those things they didn’twant to have pointed out. He showed them their hypocrisy. They saw themselvesas the “good people,” unlike the “sinners” they looked down upon. They didn’tfornicate, commit adultery, or skip church. Jesus shattered their self-image. Heshowed them that they were just as sinful as those people they loved to despise,if not more so, because they ignored the deeper commands of God whilepridefully clinging to their own self-righteousness.
We’re no different. None of us like to be told we’re wrong.If someone criticizes me, my first reaction is defensiveness. I might think, “Well,you’re not perfect either!” or “I’m not wrong—you are!” It’s rare, to say theleast, to immediately respond with, “You’re right. I was wrong.” Yet, if or whenwe should come to that point, it’s exceedingly good for the soul. It’s thebeginning of trying to live in the truth—however painful that might be—insteadof covering our tracks with lies.
This brings us to Jesus’s commands in Gospel reading today.His words are challenging, even offensive to our natural instincts. I suspectthat there were all kinds of reactions among you. Maybe some of you didn’t hearhis words at all because you were zoned out. Maybe you heard them and thought,“That sounds weird. I’m not smart enough to understand that.” Maybe you heardthem, and then purposely put them out of mind.
Let me remind you of what Jesus said: “Love your enemies. Do good to those who hate you. Bless thosewho curse you. Pray for those who abuse you.” When have you hadaffection for the one who was trying to make your life miserable? When did youdo something nice to the person who gives you dirty looks?
But we’re not done yet. Unfortunately, it gets much worse—practicallyridiculous: “To one who strikes you on the cheek, offerthe other also, and from one who takes away your outer garment, do not withholdyour inner garment either. Give to everyone who begs from you, and from one whotakes away your goods do not demand them back.”
This is where a person could get upset. How could Jesus makesuch awful commands? “Give to everyone who begs?”Most of those people are crooks and drug addicts! And we are to sit idly by oreven forfeit our goods to scoundrels? Once they’ve taken our stuff, weshouldn’t demand it back? Let us shunt aside these ridiculous things, lest theyshould see the light of day!
And yet, of course, even while I react this way, I’m stillone of the good ones. I go to church, don’t I? The failure to do—the failure toeven try!—Jesus’s commands doesn’t make me a bad person. If he wanted me tofollow them, he should have made better commands!
I don’t think there is any other way to handle thesecommands—at least not at first—if we are to really wrestle with them. The easyway to deal with them is simply to ignore them or somehow explain them away as notbeing applicable. But if we are to take Jesus’s commands seriously, I thinkthey have to make us upset. We really, really don’t want to follow thesecommands.
Notice how this puts us in the same position as those peoplewith whom I started—the people who might be looked down upon. Those who strugglewith God’s commands regarding marriage, divorce, or relationships have theirreasons, just as we have our reasons for resisting Jesus’s call to love ourenemies or give generously. We all pick and choose which commands we followbased on what feels reasonable or convenient to us.
The ray of hope comes, when, God willing, we start to cometo our senses and think: “God’s commands are not bad, like I originallythought, but rather good.”
Instead of mocking Jesus’s commands, what if we were torealize that being merciful as our heavenly Father is merciful is a good thing?To be faithful to one’s spouse unto death—for better, for worse, for richer,for poorer, in sickness, and in health—is honorable and sacred. God’s Law is notbad or foolish. It is holy, righteous, and good. For that very reason itexposes us as sinners. It exposes our pride, self-centeredness, and unwillingnessto suffer. But this exposure is not meant only to shame us—it’s meant to healus. To be exposed as inadequate is painful and embarrassing, but it’s part ofthe cure.
John the Baptist and Jesus had a very simple message that isjust as applicable today: “Repent, and believe the Gospel.”First of all, with “repent,” if you findyourself resisting God’s commands—whether about marriage, generosity, or lovingyour enemies—I encourage you to pause and ask yourself why. What if ourresistance is not because of some defectiveness of the commands, but because ofthe hardness of our hearts? What if God is calling us to something deeper,something more beautiful than we can imagine?
That, indeed, is just what he is doing. He is calling us outof our hypocrisy, fakery, being judgmental, covering our tracks with lies, sothat we may come into his grace and his truth. When we come to Jesus we don’tneed to pretend to be good people anymore. We can confess our sins, and God, who is faithful and just, will forgive our sins andcleanse us from all unrighteousness. Already in the midst of beingexposed as evil, we can and should fully embrace God’s acceptance of us inJesus, knowing that his grace extends on an on. The difficulty—the seemingimpossibility—of keeping God’s commands reveal our need for God’s grace. Wecannot do these things by our own strength or willpower. But we surely will notdo these things if we’ve made up our mind beforehand that we don’t need to do themor won’t do them.
Believe—have faith—in God’s promise to transform us, notbecause of anything we have done, but because of what Christ has done for us.As we repent and believe the Gospel, do not be afraid. Be very courageous! God, who has begun a good work in you, will bring it tocompletion on the Day of our Lord Jesus Christ.
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Jesus chose twelve men to be his apostles. With about halfof those we hardly know anything more than their names. With the rest, we knowa bit more, but not too much. The Gospels tell us primarily about Jesus, not hisdisciples. The disciple we know the most about is Peter, who is also calledSimon. Our Gospel reading tells us more about him.
Our reading begins by telling us about a crowd who was pressingin on Jesus, eager to hear him. They were so packed together, it was as if theywere laying on him—their interest was that intense! But where was Peter? Not inthe crowd. He was down the shore, cleaning his nets. Why? It wasn’t because hehated Jesus. The reason might be hinted at later in the reading: he had workedall night and caught nothing. Fishing was his livelihood—no fish meant no food,no income, no way to pay the bills. He had to get ready to try again.
Maybe you’ve been there—stuck in a job you don’t like,grinding through mundane tasks. It’s exhausting. It’s depressing. A personmight wonder how to escape.
One of the most plausible solutions for no longer needing towork is money. If you get enough money you could retire early. Move to a beachsomewhere. But maybe that goal is out of reach for you. Instead you might justdream about having a nice little nest egg. If only I had a little more, I wouldhave to live hand to mouth. These thoughts make sense. Money can do a lot!
Maybe Peter had thoughts like that while he was bending overhis nets, cleaning them out for the millionth time. If only he wouldn’t have towork so hard. If only he could get ahead.
What is interesting about Peter is that if those were his goals,then Jesus made them come true, but then Peter left all of that behind. WhenJesus drove the fish into the nets, Peter had never had a bigger catch. Theboats were so full they began to sink. So many fish! So much money! But insteadof celebrating, and instead of investing, he left it all behind. It says, “When they had brought their boats to land, they lefteverything and followed Jesus.”
I would like to consider what happened to Peter. Why did heleave that bonanza behind to follow Jesus? But before we begin to answer that,I think it is helpful to point out how difficult the answer will be for us totake seriously. We have been trained since infancy that money and power are themost important and useful things in life. Therefore we have some commands thatwe live by, according to that principle: Do what is best for you. Seek your ownadvantage. The more you can get for yourself, the better. These are taken to bethe basic facts of life, and only a fool or a fanatic would live otherwise.That is probably how most of us took Peter’s actions today when we heard them.We thought, perhaps unconsciously: “That has nothing to do with me. I am not anapostle. Peter is some strange sort of person that I am under no obligation toimitate.” That is not true, if you want to be a disciple of Jesus.
Jesus says in another place, “Whoeverfinds his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will keepit for eternal life.” This verse is a good way to understand what tookplace with Peter. Maybe he had been dreaming about boat-fulls of fish that makehim rich. If he made enough money, maybe he could start a franchise. Then otherpeople could do all the work, and he could cash all the checks. That’s not whathappened. If Peter had dreams like that, he left them behind for somethingbetter.
But was it better? That is the question. Should you orshould you not be a follower of Jesus? Is it better to deny yourself, to takeup your cross, and follow Jesus, or is it better to indulge yourself, avoid alltrouble and suffering, and chase your own dreams?
When Peter left behind the many thousands of dollars worthof fish to follow Jesus he was rejecting a way of life that many assume to bethe best life possible. Many assume that there is nothing higher or better thanchasing after your own success. Peter, in contrast, put himself completely inthe hands of Jesus with his kingdom. He became a disciple, which means, “student”or “follower.”
The life that ensued for Peter wasn’t filled with wealth or prestige,but God did give him each day his daily bread. God gave him a good consciencethrough the forgiveness of sins. He was given the hope of seeing the glory ofGod in heaven. On the other hand, Peter faced suffering, embarrassment, andfailure. He wept bitterly, was criticized, imprisoned, and, according totradition, crucified upside down.
Was this life better than the self-seeking life he leftbehind at the beach? Absolutely! Already it was far more honorable, plus thereis the resurrection from the dead. Let us not discount the importance of theresurrection. Paul says that were there is no resurrection from the dead, thenwe Christians are to be pitied above all people. If there were no resurrection,then perhaps it would make sense to live in the way that is so common among us,where the highest goals in life are merely to maximize pleasure and minimizepain. On the other hand, however, if there is a resurrection from the dead,then it is foolish not to live under Christ in his kingdom. Otherwise wewill find ourselves to have been on the wrong side.
It is safe to say that we live in a time and among a peoplewho do not take the resurrection seriously. We are thoroughly earthly minded. Ourculture values profit, growth, and success above everything else. We are taughtto be completely self-obsessed. The mantra most of us live by is: “If it isn’tgood for me, then I’m not doing it.” That is a pathetic and ultimatelyunsatisfying way to live.
Jesus’s ways are better. Jesus teaches us to live outside ofourselves in God. God is righteous and just. He loves life. He cares for thepoor and hurting. He reaches out to people who are regarded as untouchable andunclean. He is not threatened by bluster and intimidation. He loves what isright. To be is to enter into this realm of God. What he likes we are to like.What he hates we are to hate. What he speaks we are to speak. And this is wheredisciples get into trouble. There has never been a shortage of people who thinkthat they can dictate whatever they want to have happen, and they will punish whoevergets in their way. The disciples of Jesus get in their way, and this causestrouble.
Peter along with almost all of the other apostles would be putto death for continuing to testify to Jesus and Jesus’s ways when powerfulpeople told them to stop. Christians’ willingness to die for the sake of Christcan be puzzling because people’s default understanding is that this life iseverything. Why needlessly suffer?
But Christians believe in Christ’s kingdom that will resultin the resurrection. That is the glory we must strive after, otherwise it won’tseem as though the sacrifices are worth it. It is always easier to leave thedevil be, to leave evil alone, to allow this world to rot with all of itscorruption instead of fighting, but that is what you have been called to do.You have been called to follow Jesus.
Where should you go? You need not go anywhere necessarily. Thereis no shortage of evil or corruption all around us. There is a great deal ofevil within us, with our sinful flesh, that we can fight against. Peter couldhave been a disciple of Jesus within his livelihood of being a fisherman ifJesus hadn’t specifically called him to be an apostle. There are temptationsand evil particular to being a fisherman and businessman that Christians arecalled to fight against and correct. All of us, no matter what our callings inlife are, have temptations and sins and corruption that are particular to oursituation. It is easy, of course, not to care. You will have fewer troubles ifyou only care about yourself. But that is not the point of life.
God revealed the point of life to Peter. It is to followJesus the Christ. He is at work in his kingdom fighting against the devil, theworld, and our own sinful nature. The Holy Spirit is writing God’s Law on thehearts of Christians. The world is getting ready for the resurrection from thedead, and we all, as Christians, have our part. We are all members of the bodyof Christ. Therefore, this life that we have been called into as followers ofJesus is not a hobby, or a way to pass the time. Nor is it senseless orfoolish. Nothing is more serious and practical.
Let God’s kingdom come. Let his will be done. Amen.
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I’d like to begin today by setting the scene for our Gospelreading. It is from Luke chapter 4, so this is towards the beginning of thestory of Jesus. Not long before our reading Jesus was anointed with water andthe Holy Spirit when he was baptized. Then he went out into the wilderness tobe tempted by the devil. With our reading today he has come back to Galilee andNazareth, which is his hometown.
Thus our reading today is a report of what was happeningearly on. People were just beginning to hear and know about Jesus. This wasbecause of what Jesus himself was saying and doing. However, Jesus is notalways believed in and accepted. At the end of our reading, the people ofNazareth wanted to throw him off a cliff.
In the sermon today I’d like to look more closely at Jesus’ssermon, which was based on a section of Isaiah. We will see how Jesus’s sermonwas applicable to the people at Jesus’s time as well as being applicable toourselves. Then I’d like to consider how and why Jesus was rejected. This,also, I think you will see, is applicable to us.
So, let’s take up the main point of Jesus’s sermon. Here is aportion of what he read from Isaiah: “The Spirit of theLord is upon me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor.”When Jesus was finished reading he said, “Today thisScripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” Jesus was saying thatthis prophecy was about him.
Let’s look more closely at this prophecy. It says, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me.” We know that theHoly Spirit came down upon Jesus in the form of a dove at his baptism. It says,“Because he has anointed me to proclaim good news tothe poor.” This is a good, general statement about what Jesus does. Theword “anointed” is the meaning of the word“Christ.” Jesus is the anointed one. The reason why he has been anointed is “to proclaim good news to the poor.” “Good news” is the meaning of the word “Gospel.” Thuswe have a couple short statements that well describe Jesus: He is the anointedone, the Christ. He proclaims the Gospel, good news, to the poor.
Good news is always welcome to the poor. Poverty is a majorhindrance to the enjoyment of life. It prevents people from doing what theywould otherwise like to do. People might not be able to buy what they wantbecause they are poor. People might be able to go to the doctor because theyare poor. If it gets really bad, people might not be able to buy food. Povertyis the lack of power to do what you want.
Throughout the Gospels you can read about how Jesus helpedpeople who didn’t have the resources to help themselves. People came to him whowere in the grips of evil spirits. The evil spirits made them miserable, butthey lacked the power to get them out. People came to Jesus who were sick withvarious diseases. If any of you have had diseases that don’t go away, you knowhow tiring and frustrating that can be. Helplessness in the face of a diseasethat is stronger than you can be very frightening. It might mean the death ofyou. Jesus helped people like that.
Let me pause for a moment to point out that Jesus continuesto have good news for the poor. This has not stopped, nor has it been lessened fromthe reports of Jesus’s miracles that we hear about in the Gospels. A lot ofpeople assume that since miracles like that aren’t very common, Jesus must nolonger be at work, or that his work is strictly spiritual and thereforesomewhat unreal. The truth is that Jesus’s work after the resurrection isstronger and more profound than anything he did before. The works Jesus doesand will do are greater.
Let me give you a few examples. Jesus forgives sins. Maybeyou have grown cold to that idea, but maybe I can refresh it for you by asimple question: What are you able to do to make up for the evil you have done?There’s nothing. You are powerless. You are poor. The good news that isproclaimed to the poor is that the blood of Jesus cleanses us from all sin.
Or how about those diseases? How about that progressiveonset of death that we call getting old? How about death itself? What can youdo in the face of these things? Our options are severely limited, even with allour medical advances. The good news is that by his death Jesus defeated thepower of death, and by his resurrection he opened the kingdom of heaven to allbelievers.
Let me give you one more healing that I am especiallylooking forward to. What can be done with our evil minds and souls? What can bedone with our anger? What can be done with our dirty minds, our coveting, meanness,sadness, apathy, coldness towards life, and a host of other evils? We arebombarded with commercials for various drugs, some of which might helpsomewhat, but they can’t ever get to the core. The resurrection means healingnot only for our bodies, but also our minds and souls. Believing in Jesus istrusting him to do things that otherwise seem impossible.
So, to get back to our text: After he finished reading fromIsaiah Jesus said, “I’m the fulfillment of what you heard. I preach good newsto the poor. I set people free from unbreakable chains.” And, as it turns out,the people were quite receptive. “How interesting!” they said. “He speaks sowell! Maybe I’ll sign up for his newsletter. It’s especially surprising since oneof our own. He’s Joseph’s son, is he not?”
This is the point at which everything changed in the story.The change is so abrupt that it’s easy to miss. Everything was going fine, thepeople were enjoying Jesus, but then Jesus said some more stuff and they wereno longer pleased. They started to push and shove him towards the brow of acliff. What happened?
It's Jesus’s fault really. Jesus turned on them. After they startedtalking about him as the mere son of Joseph, Jesus knew that they wouldeventually be dissatisfied with him, and he told them so. Others—foreigners—wouldbelieve in him, but they would be left out in the cold. He brought up a coupleOld Testament examples with the prophets Elijah and Elisha through whom God didmiracles to foreigners, but not to his own people. This was what upset hishearers in his hometown. If he would have just left them be with their lukewarmadmiration, they wouldn’t have had such a violent reaction—at least not at thatpoint. Jesus got pushy, and they didn’t like that.
This is not uncommon. There are several examples in theBible where people responded to the Gospel by saying, “How interesting. I wouldnot be opposed to hearing more about that in the future.” However, the messagethat Jesus preaches is not just a pleasant way to pass the time or to be partof a community. Jesus’s message is “Repent, and believethe Gospel.” Another way of saying the same thing is: “Change your ways,change your mind, believe the good news that Jesus preaches to the powerlesspoor.” That is an all or nothing proposition. Either you will change your mindor you won’t. Either Jesus will have all of you, or you will reject him.
Jesus speaks this way in other places as well. It alwaysmake us nervous, because we are afraid to commit completely and totally. So,for example, Jesus says: “Whoever loves father ormother more than me is not worthy of me, and whoever loves son or daughter morethan me is not worthy of me. And whoever does not take his cross and follow meis not worthy of me. Whoever finds his life will lose it, and whoever loses hislife for my sake will find it.” That is being “all in” on Jesus. It isdifficult and scary, but it makes sense if you think about it.
Jesus is the difference between total bliss and freedom onthe one hand or total sadness and imprisonment on the other. Either Jesus setsyou from all your enemies—even those that you thought were impossible toovercome. Or you are still stuck—powerless and impoverished—in the face ofthings much mightier than you. It makes sense that this must be an all ornothing kind of thing.
Jesus is not like an insurance policy that you stick in thefiling cabinet until you have to use it. Jesus is Christ the king who is atwork with the Gospel and sacraments. He is converting one soul at a time by thepower of the Holy Spirit. The purpose of his kingdom is to destroy all the evilworks of the devil. You don’t fight wars with insurance policies. Wars involvetotal commitment.
The people at Nazareth refused to be completely seriousabout Jesus. They thought he was interesting. They thought he was a goodspeaker. They would have told you that they were on his side! But they quitbeing on his side when he told them that their lukewarm approval wouldn’t cutit. Eventually their lukewarm approval would turn to criticism, because then itis only a matter of time before Jesus says or does something that doesn’t meettheir complete approval.
It is easy to apply this to ourselves. We are not unlikethose Nazarenes! None of us, including myself, are comfortable “losing our lives” as Jesus puts it. None of us are aseager as we should be to take up our cross and follow him. It is much easier tobelieve that merely being a fan of Jesus is good enough. And, if you thinkabout it, how convenient! We can feel good about being a fan without having tolive as a soldier of the cross, denying ourselves.
But this fakery only makes sense if there is no real wargoing on. There is a war. Jesus is our king. He is fighting against the deviland all evil, including the evil that is found in us, his Christians. Thenature of the situation requires us always to repent and believe the Gospel. Repentand go “all in” with Jesus. You will not be disappointed!
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Donald J. Trump will begin his term as president at noon,January 20th. Have you been planning for what will happen January 21st?Have you been making lists, getting everything ready, rehearsing what you willdo for the day after the inauguration? Probably not. I haven’t either. I don’tthink a lot will change with our new president. It isn’t really about him. I’mcynical about what elected officials can do in general. The people who hold thereins of power—the people who are massively wealthy, who can write the checks—won’tlet too much change, unless it is to their own benefit. Things will probablykeep going on like they have for a long time. I am not expecting any massivechanges.
What about Christ’s kingdom? Is our attitude the same thereas well? Our festival today is somewhat like Jesus’s inauguration as theChrist. Jesus’s baptism marks the beginning of his great words and deeds thatare recorded in the Gospels. Immediately after his baptism Jesus was very busy.He was tempted by the devil, swamped by sick and demon possessed people,teaching in the synagogues, doing one miracle after another. Things looked likethey were changing for the better, but then Jesus was arrested, crucified anddied. That was when the cynicism began in earnest. Folks had wondered whetherJesus might have been the Christ, but he couldn’t have been since he died.
That was the end of the road for the vast number of peoplewho had once believed in Jesus. At one point there had been many thousands whowere interested in Jesus being made king by force, but any hope of that wasgone when everyone could see him hanging dead on the cross.
Even after Easter the picture didn’t improve very much asfar as the disciples were concerned. John chapter 21 seems to indicate that thedisciples went back to their old livelihood of fishing. Acts chapter 1 tells usthat the number of believers in Jerusalem was only about 120. That is a far cryfrom many thousands. Even with the great day of Pentecost, when 3,000 repentedand were baptized—that was less than the feeding of the 5,000, or the feedingof the 4,000.
Cynicism is a way to protect yourself from beingdisappointed. Cynicism is when you don’t get your hopes up. Having your hopesdashed is painful. The higher the hopes, the more intense the desire, the worsethe pain. To prevent getting hurt you can check yourself out. Things will staythe same. Why bother? Just go gentle into that good night.
This is a way to insulate yourself from pain. Disappointmentswill not hit you as sharply. But there is a terrible cost. With cynicism thingswill, at best, stay the same, but more likely get worse. If you won’t getinvolved, if you won’t change your ways, if you won’t hope for change, thennothing is going to change. It is forfeiting to the powers that be.
This defeatist attitude is disastrous in all areas of life,but it is especially devastating for faith in Christ’s kingdom. If we would nothave hope in Christ, then we are left with how things are. Paul calls these theelementary principles of this world, to which we are enslaved. We are enslavedto the devil. We are enslaved to our desires. We are enslaved to pursuing mereself-interest. Our chains have been put on by ourselves, which are our fearsand insecurities, our dread of pain and suffering.
How differently the bible speaks about Christ’s kingdom! Paulsays: “For freedom Christ has set you free!” TheGospels speak of Christ “proclaiming liberty to the prisoners!”And indeed, Jesus set people free from all kinds of disabilities and ailmentsin the Gospels. The people loved that! We slaves love to get a little taste offreedom. But a lot of people thought that that kind of thing was over and donewith when Jesus died, and even when he rose. The risen and ascended Christremains at work in his kingdom, but a lot of people would like it better if hewould do those old sorts of things that helped people along in their pursuit oftheir own self-interest.
But here is what we should realize: the work of Christ inhis kingdom is not less after his death and resurrection, it is more. The workof Christ with his death and his resurrection, the baptism with which hebaptizes, and the body and blood that he distributes is more. It’s deeper. Itgets to the root. The root is evil itself, and Jesus reverses it. The seeminglyinvincible powers of sin, death, profit, power, and all the rest are notinvincible. Jesus promises a reckoning for the powers that be who so often oppressand steal and murder and seemingly get away with it. They will be burned withan unquenchable fire. Everything will be turned upside down. The first will belast and the last will be first. John baptized with water; Jesus baptizes withthe Holy Spirit and with fire.
Whatever hopes we might have about Christ’s kingdom, theyare inevitably inadequate. You want to be healed of an ailment, a defect, oldage, and son. You want to be the man that you should be. You want to be thewoman that you should be. “For freedom Christ has setyou free!” These things and more are yours. If they are not alreadyfixed somewhat in this life by the healing work of the Holy Spirit, then theywill be completely fixed by the resurrection. The goodness of the resurrectionis more than we can imagine. Paul says, “No eye hasseen, nor ear heard, nor has it entered into the imagination of the heart ofman what God has prepared for those who love him.” Even if you try toimagine what Jesus’s kingdom will be like, you’re going to fall short. Whatcomes to pass will be greater.
Cynicism, therefore, is incompatible with Christianity.Cynicism is managing your hopes so that you won’t get hurt when they inevitablydon’t come to pass. If you are managing your hopes for Christ’s kingdom, youare simply being an unbeliever. If you believe that Jesus can’t or won’t helpyou, then you are an unbeliever.
Unbelief is by no means uncommon, even among those who wouldlike to consider themselves to be Jesus’s disciples. We see that all the timein the Bible. We see that in particular with the Gospels’ accounts of theresurrection. Even the closest of Jesus’s disciples lost their faith when Jesusdied, and they were slow to believe after the resurrection. They were flesh andblood, just like us, with all our hiccups and insecurities. However, we cannotlet our doubts and insecurities interfere with what is plainly testified.Jesus’s kingdom is glorious, even if we lack the faith to believe.
Jesus’s kingdom is glorious among us. Let us not doubt thateither. Whenever anyone comes to believe that the seemingly invincible powersare not invincible because Jesus is greater—that is a miracle worked by theHoly Spirit. Whenever anyone remains in the faith—that is an ongoing miracle ofthe Holy Spirit. These believers will one day be caught up together with theLord in the clouds for an adventure that is too great for words to describe.
It does not please me, therefore, when I hear something thatis quite common among us. It is quite common for people to comment on how largeor small a gathering is—and usually it is how much smaller the gathering isthese days. This strikes me as largely missing the point. It would like thepeople in Jesus’s day who could have scoffed at the smaller number who gatheredafter the resurrection. I could imagine that some of them must have said: “Doyou remember how many people there were at the feeding of the five thousand orthe four thousand? The attendance these days is greatly reduced.”
Christ’s kingdom is not about crowds or impressing those whohave the ability to count. Christ’s kingdom is about setting people free and changinghearts and minds. This is always an individual affair. Each individual eitherremains enslaved in their unbelief or they are set free through faith in Jesus.Whenever a sinner repents, the angels rejoice, and we should too. The kingdomof God remains at work. It is glorious, but the glory is only apparent to thosewho have the eyes to see and the ears to hear.
So as we consider the inauguration, so to speak, of Christ’skingdom with Jesus’s baptism, we should cast away cynical thoughts. Cynicism isnot very attractive or useful in general, but it is particularly inappropriatewhen it comes to Christ’s kingdom. Our problem is not that we have too low of thoughtsand hopes and dreams. Our problem is that we do not think as grandly as we mustif we are beginning to understand Christ’s kingdom. We are too earthly minded.
Therefore, I’d like to close with a passage that speaks tothis. In Colossians chapter three Paul says: “If youhave been raised with Christ, then seek the things that are above, where Christis, 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 hiddenwith Christ in God. When Christ, who is your life, appears, then you also willappear with him in glory.”
When Christ appears, you will appear with him in glory. Thatis more than enough for anyone who is hungry for that which is good.
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I have been a pastor for many years now, but this is thefirst New Year’s Eve service I have ever preached for. In Iowa neither of mycongregations had services on New Year’s Eve or New Year’s Day. If memoryserves, I attended a New Year’s Eve service when I was a kid. However, mychildhood congregation more often had New Year’s Day services. New Year’s Dayis eight days after Christmas, which means that the focus is on thecircumcision and naming of Jesus.
So tonight is the first time I’ve every preached for a NewYear’s Eve service. As I considered the texts that you heard tonight, I wasstruck by how differently the Bible teaches compared to what is customary withthe New Year. For example, New Year’s Eve is a well-known party night. A lot ofpeople get drunk on New Year’s Eve.
Jesus says in our Gospel reading: “Staydressed for action and keep your lamps burning, and be like men who are waitingfor their master to come home from the wedding feast, so that they may open thedoor to him at once when he comes and knocks.” Imagine Jesus coming tofind people soddenly drunk. How can they open the door when he knocks? Losingyourself in food, drink, drugs, and other pleasures is an agreeable way to passthe time. It’s not nonsensical. It’s a way to cope, to forget the troubles oflife, and to receive some comfort. It’s understandable, but how differently ourLord Jesus speaks in our reading tonight!
Another thing we associate with the New Year are New Year’sresolutions. It’s a time to set goals, make plans, and fix what we don’t like. Ifwe believe in ourselves and don’t give up, we can achieve our dreams.
Compare this to our Old Testament reading. God says to hispeople: “In returning and rest you shall be saved; inquietness and in trust shall be your strength.” We do not naturallybelieve that returning and resting will do anything good for us. We do notbelieve that quietness and trust are our strength. We believe in ourselves. Allthat’s needed is to be sufficiently motivated. If only we could staysufficiently motivated, then all our New Year’s dreams would come true, and wewould be outstanding.
All of our readings tonight would have us look to someoneelse besides what we customarily look to for betterment. How can 2025 be betterthan 2024? Our readings encourage us to believe more firmly in God.
This has to do with the first table of the Law, the firstthree of the Ten Commandments. You should have no other gods. You should fear,love, and trust in God above all other things. You should not believe in otherthings, no matter how useful those other things might appear to be.
The second commandment is that you should not misuse thename of the Lord your God. Instead of misusing God’s name, you should use itwell. God’s name is used well by calling upon it in every trouble, praying,praising, and giving thanks. But in order for anyone to use God’s name rightly,that person must believe that it will work. The reason why we do not pray likewe should is because we do not believe like we should. We do not worship Godthe way we should is because we do not believe in him the way we should. Unfortunately,we believe that we can be better blessed spending our time and energy pursuingother things.
So how can we believe in God more firmly? There is only oneway to do that. We must hear the Word of God that tells us about him. The Wordof God is inspired by the Holy Spirit. It is living and active. It producesfaith. Therefore, as the catechism teaches about the third commandment, weshould not despise God’s Word, or assume that we already know it sufficientlywell. If that were true—if you knew it well enough already—then your prayerswould be much more fervent than they are currently. We should gladly hear andlearn God’s Word so that we know God better, so that we believe in him moreconfidently, and so that we can better speak to him with our prayers andpraises.
The first three of the Ten Commandments have to do with ourspiritual health. God spoke these commandments for our good, for our benefit. Itis good for us to believe in God with all our heart, soul, strength, and mind,because he is the only God. The other things that we treat like gods willdisappoint us in the end, even if, in the meantime, we manage to get somepleasure or comfort from them.
We should be prepared, not just for 2025, not just for somesmall, momentary, change in our fortunes, but for meeting our Maker. We’ve madeit to the end of 2024. What if 2025 is the last year in which we will live?What if 2025 is the year that gets chiseled onto our gravestone? What if 2025is the year that Jesus comes back? Jesus said in our reading: “The Son of Man is coming at an hour you do not expect.”We must be prepared to meet to God.
To meet God well there is no substitute for believing whathe has said. If you managed to climb all the mountains of the world,accumulated all the wealth, all the knowledge—whatever you could possiblyaccomplish—none of that can ever do what taking to heart what God has said willdo.
And the good news is that what God has said is good. He has revealedthat he is for us, and not against us. Paul says in our epistle reading, “If God is for us, then who can be against us? He who did notspare his own Son but gave him up for us all, how will he not also with himgraciously give us all things?”
Paul is using sound logic. God is for you. How do you knowthat? Because you are so awesome, cool, healthy, and what not? No. You knowthat because he gave his Son, Jesus, to be your Savior. God’s good will towardsyou doesn’t depend on you. He is the one who acts. He is the one who saves. God’sWord teaches that your confidence should be completely in him. Even if youshould end up with troubles, poverty, shame, or danger, Jesus remains theSavior. Even if you walk through the valley of the shadow of death, your GoodShepherd is with you. He will take you where you need to go.
In conclusion, God’s Word gives us the opportunity toreorient ourselves. Instead of looking for happiness in any number of things,look to God instead. There is nothing like God. There is no help like God’shelp. Listen to what his Word says. Believe in him. Call upon his name withyour prayers and praises.
Then you are dressed for action, ready for your master tocome home from the wedding feast.
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Jesus Christ is the light of the world, the light nodarkness can overcome. In our reading John puts it this way: “In him was life, and the life was the light of men. The lightshines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.” Again,Jesus is spoken of this way: “The true light, whichenlightens everyone, was coming into the world.” Here comes Jesus. Herecomes the light.
One of the simple statements that the apostles use todescribe a Christian is that a Christian has moved from darkness to the light.Peter encourages us to “proclaim the excellencies of Godwho has called us out of darkness into his marvelous light.” Paul says,“You formerly were of the darkness, but now you arelight in the Lord. Walk as children of light, for the fruit of light is foundin all that is good and right and true.”
If the fruit of light is in everything that is good andright and true, then the deeds of darkness must be bad and wrong and false. Anexample of that was when Jesus was betrayed and arrested. One of the 12 did it.Judas had already been operating in the dark for some time. He kept the moneyfor their little group, and he had been helping himself. He struck a deal withthe chief priests and elders. He would lead them to Jesus so that they couldarrest him, nice and quiet-like, when there was no one else around. Judas usedan amazing sign. He would kiss Jesus when he greeted him. Then the soldierwould know who to arrest.
Judas, with a band of soldiers and Jewish officials, came toJesus either very late on Maundy Thursday, or, more likely, in the very earlymorning hours of Good Friday. He said, “Greetingsteacher!” and he kissed Jesus, but Jesus said to him, “Judas, do you betray the Son of Man with a kiss?” ThenJesus asked the officials and soldiers: “Why do youcome out against me with clubs and swords? I have always been public with myteaching, and yet you didn’t seize me when I was out in the open.” ThenJesus said, “But this is your hour, and the power or authorityof darkness.”
What happened there was bad and wrong and false. Jesus wasbetrayed by his friend. Jesus was rounded up in the middle of the night, whenthe multitudes of people who loved him were asleep. Jesus’s enemies didn’t carewhether what they were doing was honorable or not. They just wanted to win.
Darkness has its advantages. If you want to impose your willwithout anyone getting in the way, then operating in secrecy and darkness isthe way to go. Jesus was arrested when most people were still sleeping, and alreadyby nine o’clock in the morning he was nailed to the cross. The powers that beengineered the whole thing so that it would be over before it even began.Everyone, including the disciples, thought that it was a done deal. Theauthorities had used darkness, yet again, and carried the day.
Paul characterizes the time that we live in as being a timeof darkness. The story of history has largely been a story of darkness. Onefellow gets the better of another fellow. Now he’s king. But today kings don’thold the power anymore. The people who hold the power today are in business. Byand large, the story of business is darkness too. Somebody figures out someclever way to get more from his employees or more from his customers or hesabotages his competitors. Then he uses his ill-gotten gains to buy off politicianswho will pass laws that will further his empire. The rule he follows is alwaysthe same: He wants more for himself and less for others.
We are largely powerless against these powers andauthorities. Never before have human beings had such ready access toinformation with the Internet and all, but who can know what is true and nottrue? There is information, disinformation, misinformation. The darkness is badenough already, but it is only made worse when false lights and false christs comealong and say, “Trust us. We’ll fix everything for you.”
Jesus Christ is the light of the world; the light nodarkness can overcome. Jesus has come for judgement. Jesus says, “This is the judgement: The light has come into the world, andmen loved the darkness rather than the light, because their deeds were evil. Foreveryone who does wicked things hates the light and does not come to the light,otherwise he would be convicted of his evil deeds. But whoever does what istrue comes to the light, so that it may be clearly seen that his deeds havebeen worked in God.”
Here is the choice: The light or the darkness. Do you wantGod to prevail in Jesus Christ or do you want to do what you want to do underthe cover of darkness? It seems like it should be an easy choice, but doingwhatever we want is awfully enticing. It’s how we first learned to lie andoperate in the darkness. If you good enough at that kind of thing, nobody else needsto know the truth. When the light comes, you can’t hide anymore. You’ll beconvicted. You’ll lose the shiny, white façade and be revealed as a sinner.
That’s how it is, strangely enough, for those who have beenconverted. Those who believe in Christ, who believe in the light, are exposedby that very same light as being evil. Christians should not hide their sins.That’s the old strategy of fig leaves and bushes from the Garden of Eden thatwon’t get you very far with God. Instead we should plead guilty before God likewe do when we confess our sins:
I am a poor, miserable sinner. I have sinned with my mind, bythe words I have spoken, and by the deeds that I have done. I deserve God’stemporal and eternal punishment. That is what the light reveals about me.
But the light is not merely like a searchlight or aninterrogation light. It does not solely expose what is hidden or evil and to donothing more about it. The light of Christ exposes, but it also heals andforgives. It obliterates the darkness so that it is no more. We are transferredfrom the kingdom of darkness to the kingdom of light. Jesus came to seek andsave the lost.
Jesus says as much in the same section that I quoted fromearlier. He says: “God loved the world in this way,that he sent his only begotten Son, that whoever believes in him should notperish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world tocondemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.Whoever believes in him is not condemned.”
God has sent his Son. He is the light. This light will save thosewho are in darkness, but we cannot remain in darkness. If we prefer thedarkness to the light, then we are on the wrong side. Jesus heals. He’s alsocoming to judge. The powers that be in this present age of darkness believethat they are on top of the world. They believe that they can do anything theywant whether their actions be honorable or dishonorable. But their time islimited. They better hope that they can live long lives, because that is allthe good times they will have.
What is much more prudent is to embrace Jesus, the light andlife of men, who has come into the world. As Paul encourages us, we should castaway the works of darkness. Whatever is bad, wrong, and false will not help usin the long run. Grace, mercy, and truth come from Christ. They radiate outfrom him like light from its source. You have something better with Jesus. Jesuswill win. The light will scatter the darkness.
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Our Gospel reading is appropriate as we approach thecelebration of the birth of Jesus. Our Gospel reading describes something thathappened not long before Jesus was born. Mary, Jesus’s mother, visited herrelative, Elizabeth. Both Mary and Elizabeth were pregnant with very special babies.Mary had been visited by the angel Gabriel who told her that she would conceiveand bear a son. She was to name him Jesus because he would be the Savior.
Elizabeth’s pregnancy was also unusual. Elizabeth and herhusband Zechariah were old and had not been given any children. Zechariah hadalso been visited by Gabriel who told him that he and his wife would conceivein their old age. The child was to be named John. Zechariah and Elizabeth didconceive about six months before Gabriel went to Mary.
So in our reading today Mary was pregnant with Jesus andElizabeth was pregnant with John the Baptist. Luke says that Elizabeth wasfilled with the Holy Spirit. She is filled with joy, and she speaks severalblessings. She blesses Mary: “Blessed are you among women.” She blesses Jesus: “Blessed is the fruit of Mary’s womb.” She blessesherself. She rhetorically asks: “Why is this granted tome that the mother of my Lord should come to me?” Her thoughts turn toher son. She comments on how her baby leaped for joy at Mary’s greeting.
Finally, Elizabeth blesses Mary for her faith. PerhapsElizabeth’s thoughts turned to what it might have been like when Mary heardGabriel’s message. Elizabeth said, “Blessed is she whobelieved that there would be a fulfillment of what was spoken to her from theLord.” Not every woman would believe that she could conceive whileremaining a virgin simply because the Lord said so. Mary did. She said to God:“Let it be done to me according to your Word.”
Elizabeth moves from one blessing to the next. Everyone is blessed.All are exceedingly happy. What I’d like to consider today is why they are sohappy. I’d also like to pay attention to our own happiness. Happiness isimportant to us. We all would like to be happy. So, in fact, before we considerwhat makes these women happy, I think it would be beneficial first to considerwhat makes us happy. We can then be on the lookout for what might be differentwith these women.
There are a lot of things that can make us happy. Hungerbeing satisfied with food makes us happy; thirst, with drink. We have manydesires and needs. We want and need affection, comfort, entertainment. We liketo be right. We like to be the best. We like making progress. Getting richer isbetter than getting poorer. Getting stronger is better than getting weaker. Thereare so many ways to be happy, and we like them all. The more, the better; themore, the happier.
Now let’s consider these women’s happiness. What makes themhappy doesn’t exactly fit the pattern we’ve sketched out. They aren’t gettingstronger, richer, better. Elizabeth’s life didn’t get easier with her pregnancyin old age. Mary’s life was thrown into turmoil to a much greater degree. Marybecame pregnant when she wasn’t married. Everyone would have assumed that thepregnancy was the result of fornication. Joseph, her fiancé, had no otherchoice but to assume that she had been unfaithful. An angel had to intervene totell him otherwise. Mary would have had a hard time of it because most wouldnot believe what sounds like a far-fetched story—that Mary was pregnant withthe Son of God by the power of the Holy Spirit.
Consider, additionally, the several clues about Mary andJoseph’s poverty and powerlessness. When they came to Bethlehem they couldn’tget a room. If they had more money, they could have compelled someone toprovide for them. Later, when the sacrifices were made in the Temple, thecheaper option of two pigeons was offered instead of the more expensive lamb. Theseclues indicate that Mary and Joseph were poor. The baby was born into poverty: “No crib for a bed” to laydown his sweet head.
If we place ourselves into Mary’s shoes, we can see how shelacked things that we regard as essential for happiness. So how can she behappy? How can Elizabeth be happy for her when trouble is on every side? Sheeven makes the audacious claim that Mary is blessed over and above all others.The only explanation is that they were focused on things that aren’t oftenlooked to for happiness. We might sum up all that they were feeling by saying: Theywere happy because the kingdom of God was coming upon the earth.
What is the kingdom of God, and why is it a good thing? Wecan’t hardly talk about a kingdom without talking about the king. Something youmight keep an ear open for the next couple days is how often Christmas carolswill sing about Jesus being the king, or the Lord: “Joy to the world, the Lord has come.” Or: “Come and worship, come andworship, worship Christ, the newborn king.” The good news of great joy thatis for all people is, as the angel declared on Christmas night, that unto us aSavior has been born who is Christ the Lord.
The work of Christ the King in his kingdom is made plain inthe Gospels. Jesus did several things. He taught the Word of God that has alwaysbeen calling people away from evil, away from the devil, towards that which isgood and true—life giving and life protecting. Jesus taught people to believein the only true God instead of the various false gods. Jesus acted with power,performing miracles. His many cleansings, healings, and restorations to life werea foreshadowing of the greater work he will do when he resurrects the dead.
Over and above all these things, but also at the very rootof them, Jesus suffered and died. As our epistle reading mentions, he offeredhis body once for all. My favorite line of all the Christmas carols is the onewhere it says: “Nails, spearshall piece him through. The cross be borne for me, for you. Hail, hail theWord made flesh, the babe, the Son of Mary.” The king sacrificed himself.The result is forgiveness, righteousness, and life for everyone.
So if we return to the happiness and joy of Elizabeth andMary, we can see that it is outside of them. The kingdom of God is coming. Happinessdepends on the king, not on themselves. So long as their faith in this kingdoesn’t fail, nothing can take their happiness away. Whatever sadnesses mightcome, they cannot undo the march of progress the kingdom of God will make.
You can see this in both their lives. Both Elizabeth’s andMary’s unborn baby boys would eventually be killed at the hands of evil men. Simeonprophesied to Mary in the temple: “A sword will passthrough your heart.” Mary mourned at the death of her Son, but God willturn all mourning into gladness. Jesus died, but then he rose. Then his kingdomonly entered a new phase, the song swelled to an even higher pitch. Joy willgrow, even if, in the meantime, we pass through the valley of the shadow ofdeath.
This joy is available to each and every one of you. All thatis needed is to be like Elizabeth and Mary: Believe in Jesus’s kingdom. Tobelieve is not some great challenge or a puzzle you have to figure out. It isonly a matter of believing the testimony that is given about Jesus, and testimoniesabound! Elizabeth gave her testimony in our reading. The angel gave histestimony on Christmas night. The apostles, evangelists, prophets,prophetesses, deacons, and deaconesses all gave their testimony, and they allsay the same thing: Jesus Christ is Lord. He does all things well. He sets allthings right.
This is good news, which comes to us from the outside. It doesnot place any demands upon us. It does not require any preparation. Think ofall those people in the Gospels whom Jesus helped. Did the blind man have tostart improving himself before Jesus would give him sight? No. The blind manremained as blind as a bat. The deaf man remained as deaf as a stone, untilJesus made them otherwise. The only thing that happened to them prior to theirhealings was that they were given hope in Jesus the king by the good news thatwas told them.
The same thing is true for us today. We have problems. Wemight have a bad reputation. We might be poor. We might be blind, deaf, lame,demon possessed. Believe in Jesus.
And let’s apply this to sin. One of the most frustrating partsabout being a Christian is that we end up falling into sin, even though we reallydon’t want to—or at least a part of us doesn’t want to. What do we do withthat? We almost can’t help thinking that we must clean ourselves up in order tobecome acceptable before God. That seems right. To do otherwise can make itseem as though sin doesn’t matter. We have to take our sin very seriously.
These are not altogether bad thoughts, but they can make uslose sight of the one thing that makes all the difference—the one thing thatmakes us happy with a happiness that no one can take away: Jesus is the king.He saves sinners. He baptizes you, you don’t baptize yourself. He forgives you,you don’t forgive yourself. The kingdom of God is on a roll with the preachingof the Word that Jesus is the Savior. What is asked of us is not a greatburden: Stick with the king. Listen to his Word. Jesus will do everything hehas promised. Jesus is going to win.
So you, like Elizabeth and Mary, may fully embrace thegoodness of the kingdom of God that made them so happy that blessings wereflying all over the place. The kingdom of God is the best, because Jesus is thebest. No matter what is going on, no matter how disappointed you might be in yourselfor in others, Jesus Christ is Lord.
“ComeThou long-expected Jesus, born to set Thy people free.” Amen.
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I remember being very distressed by splinters when I was akid. Splinters are not terribly serious. You won’t die from having a splinter. Theydo cause a bit of discomfort, but what’s far worse, is that the splinter has tocome out. To get the splinter out, the finger must be turned over to an adult.What might the adult do? Armed with a needle or tweezers, the adult must digaround in there until the splinter comes out. I remember asking, “Can’t we justleave the splinter in there?” I didn’t like how the splinter ached, but I more dislikedthe much sharper pain involved with getting it out.
I think this is helpful for what can happen to usspiritually. Just as it is by no means unusual that a kid gets a splinter whileplaying, it is very common to fall into sin. Just as a kid regrets doing whathe was doing whereby he got the splinter, so also a person can regret havingsinned. The advantage or the pleasure of the sin soon passes, and we are leftwith a dull ache. We’ve disappointed ourselves. We thought that we were betterthan that. Maybe we’d promised ourselves, “Never again!” and now look at whatwe’ve done. What a shame.
But besides that dull ache of disappointment, the splinterof sin doesn’t hurt too badly. It’s nothing compared to the much sharper pain ofbeing caught. That is very embarrassing. So our natural reaction is to try tomanage sin on our own. We’ll cover it up. We’ll lie about it if we have to. Eventually,with the passage of enough time, we’ll forget about it—and that’s a relief. Ifwe manage to pass though this experience without too much pain, we might drawthe conclusion that our sins didn’t harm us. We got a splinter, but—like we sohoped for when we were children—it didn’t need to come out. It seemed to havegone away on its own.
With splinters we can easily see the childishness ofbelieving that it will just go away on its own. The splinter will causeinfection. The poison of infection will spread. The more time passes, the worseit will get. The splinter must come out.
We are not as good at seeing how childish it is to believethat sins won’t harm us. Just as a splinter inevitably has an effect on thehealth of a finger, so also sins have an effect on the soul. Think back to thesins that you committed even when you were a little kid—3, 4, 5 years old. Sinsdarken the mind. They create a habit of lying. Already at a young age we caneasily draw the conclusion that sins will not harm us so long as we do not getcaught.
But sins are nasty and ugly, full of puss and consequences.Unlike splinters, which only affect the person who has them, sins affectothers. One person’s nastiness draws out the nastiness of another. The bibleshows that sin affects the whole community. The entire people of Israel neededto be cleansed when only a portion had sinned. Therefore we should not be sononchalant to think that sins cannot affect a congregation, a classroom, aworkplace, a family, or a couple. Sins are no child’s play.
However, a very powerful spiritual force fights against thisunderstanding of sin. It is far worse enemy of Christianity than evolution orwokeism or whatever other boogeymen Christians might fear. This spiritual forcedoes everything within its power to lull people to sleep with gentle phrasesabout the harmlessness of sin. It says, for example, “All this fuss and botherabout sin is counterproductive. If we want the church to grow we must focus onother things! What’s the use of sticking with old fashioned morals when even theold fashioned couldn’t keep them? Or Jesus’s commands: aren’t they unreasonable?Show me one person who forgives, who gives, who is without anger or lust.”
And maybe I haven’t quite caught the tune that would makeyou shut your eyes to the seriousness of sins, but I know that tune is outthere, because we human beings all have the same basic hope. Somewhere in allof us is the hope that our sins won’t matter. Our sins aren’t deadly. We canmanage them without any great change. There is no need to go through the sharppain of repenting them. Just leave them be and hope for the best.
When people believe that sins do not matter, that they donot cause much harm, then the devil has won. This is exactly how the devilwants us to deal with our sins. He wants us to believe that sins are fine ornatural or funny or unimportant. Everybody does them, so what’s the harm? He’llblabber on and on until he finds something that sticks. And he’ll find it too,because, as I’ve said, there is a part of all of us that wants to believe thesplinter does not need to be taken out.
The devil starts to lose his grip on people when they movefrom not caring to caring. This happens when people start to hate the splinter,start to hate sin. So long as people believe that they can peacefully coexistwith sin, they remain in the devil’s grip. But sometimes people get sick of themuck and guck and puss and stench of sin. People hate the lovelessness, thechaos, the shame, the hatred, the broken relationships. They get sick of thatsplinter that has caused them so much grief. They want the splinter out!
This is when tax collectors, prostitutes, drug addicts, liars,porn addicts, alcoholics, scrooges—losers of all kinds—might turn to Christ.They hate their life which has been ruined by sin. They want something else.They long for healing, and they are willing to humble themselves in order toget it.
The fundamental posture of all disciples is always the same.It’s the posture we see in people in the Gospels. People came to Jesus who wereblind, deaf, lame, mute, demon-possessed—absolutely wretched. They said,“Jesus, help me!” It is the same posture of those who hate their lives, hatethemselves, hate their sins, hate the splinters with all their puss and filth.“Jesus, heal me!”
When such people come to believe that Jesus forgives them,that Jesus died for them, that Jesus will make them better, they then hate allthe more the devil with his practically infinite lies, all of which minimizethe importance of sin. On the other hand, they begin to like what God hascommanded and taught—stuff that they formerly might have rejected and foughtagainst. They’ve been converted. They renounce the devil and all his works andall his ways, and they have embraced a new Lord and God from whom they wanthelp. They no longer want to be on the side of sin and lies and false hope. Theywant to be on the side that fights sin, that’s true, that embraces the light, eventhough it means that they have fallen into the strong and terrifying hands ofGod. If suffer they must, then suffer they will! Suffering is by no means theworst thing. Health, life, truth—that is to say, God’s kingdom—this is what theywant.
What I’ve spoken about today—a kind of insanely long introduction—isan attempt to get at something that otherwise might be difficult to understandabout our Gospel reading. Our Gospel reading talks about how John the Baptist’spreaching was successful, particularly among those whom you’d think would bethe most resistant. John was successful among the unwashed masses. Why did Johnthe Baptist come to be loved by the tax collectors and sinners? Was it becauseJohn the Baptist told them that they were fine just as they were? That theirsins didn’t matter? No. Just the opposite.
John hated sin. He wasn’t scared of it either. He didn’tbelieve that it was inevitable or invincible or any other garbage that thedevil likes to say about sin. John himself couldn’t really do anything aboutsin, but he was an ambassador for Jesus, who was coming after him, whose sandalstrap he was unworthy to untie. The Christ is the only one who forgives sins. Hepromises to wash away all the stains and puss and filth for the life to come.
So, to use the analogy we’ve been working with today, Johnwas someone who would speak the truth. He would say, “That’s a splinter. Thatneeds to come out. You’ll be sorry if it doesn’t.” Since we all know the painof getting a splinter out, we can understand why some people hated John. Theypreferred their false belief to the truth of God’s Word that—even thoughpainful—would have helped them.
But some people loved the possibilities that opened up bythe Word of God that John spoke. They were so full of splinters, they were sosick of the consequences of their sins, that they embraced John’s baptism forthe forgiveness of their sins. They didn’t want to go on with the misery of loneliness,helplessness, and hopelessness. They wanted health, life, and light. Theywanted Jesus to be their king instead of the devil. Disciples of Jesus show upin the most unexpected of places.
All of us, including me, have our splinters. They are notcute. They are not harmless. Even if we manage to forget them, they don’t stopsilently pumping out their poison. They have to come out. How? We can’t do itourselves. We can’t get deep enough. We have to turn ourselves over to theadult, so to speak. We have to turn ourselves over to Jesus. That requirescourage. What will he do? Is that a needle or a tweezers I see?
But don’t be too afraid. Jesus is good at what he does. Heis the good physician who has come to heal those who are sick, who have need ofhim as a physician.
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Our Gospel reading today gives us a description of what Johnthe Baptist preached. John preached repentance, which means, “Change yourways,” or “Change your mind.” John told people that God’s wrath, God’s angerand punishment of sinners, was coming. That’s why they should change their ways.If they have not been good, they will be judged accordingly. “The axe is laid to the root of the trees. Every tree thatdoes not produce good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire.”
Some who heard John were persuaded. They repented. Theywanted help for how to change their ways. John taught them what is inthe Bible: “If you have two tunics, then give to himwho has none.” Some people, who were pretty nasty and rough, wanted totheir ways. Tax collectors, who were more like the mafia than our modern dayIRS, wanted to know what they should do. John said: “Don’tcollect more than what you are authorized to do.” Same thing with somesoldiers. “Don’t extort money by threats and false accusations.Be content with your wages.”
At the end of our reading John the Baptist talked aboutJesus. Jesus would be like John, only greater. John baptized with water. Jesuswill baptize with the Holy Spirit and fire. John warned about the comingjudgment. Jesus will do the judgment. The winnowing fork is in his hand.He will thresh out the grain. The wheat will be gathered into the barn, but thechaff will be burned with unquenchable fire.
This was John’s preaching. Luke speaks of it as being “goodnews.” At the end of the reading Luke says, “So withmany other exhortations John preached good news to the people.” Doeswhat John preached sound like “good news” to you?
It might not. It is easy to be troubled by what John says. Hesays that God is wrathful and that he punishes. People will be cut down andthrown into the fire. Jesus is characterized along the same lines. Thewinnowing fork is in his hand. He will separate the wheat from the chaff. Thechaff will burn. Is all this wrath and all this fire really necessary? Isn’tthere a more civilized way?
Questions like these are unavoidable for modern dayChristians. Most Christians refuse to speak as plainly as John the Baptist,because it seems like a very poor strategy. It can be scary for people to hearabout God being spoken of like that. What’s more to the point is that it cansound unreasonable to talk about God like that. It doesn’t sound rightthat God, who is described as being loving, should punish anybody. Hell isdescribed as a place of torment with an unquenchable fire. How can God be likethat?
It is much easier to imagine a god (whom many people believeto be the true one) that doesn’t have wrath, who won’t torture or torment. Havinga god like that sounds like a much better deal. A god that basically says,“Live however you want,” sounds nice. He sounds like he would be easy to getalong with. And if God isn’t someone I can get along with, then why bother? Ican live just as well without him.
Hearing rhetoric like this is quite common. Many people assumethat it is because we have become more sophisticated in our modern times. We’vediscovered things, supposedly, that discredit the God of the Bible, making himmuch less believable. However, it is easy to show you that this is not modernor sophisticated. It is the way human beings have been since the beginning, whichyou can see in the Bible itself. We’ll briefly consider the story of Adam andEve. You will see the very same impulses in them that we have in thetwenty-first century.
This story should be familiar to you. God commanded Adam andEve not to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. If they did, theywould surely die. But along came the serpent who introduced doubt. Why shouldthey be forbidden to eat just from this tree? That’s kind of random andarbitrary. If they were God, they probably wouldn’t make a law like that. They’dlet people eat from whatever tree they wanted.
Then the serpent explained that God wouldn’t punish them ashe had said he would. They’d be fine. In fact, they’d be greatly improved!They’d be like God, knowing good and evil. So, having been convinced, Eve ate,and Adam ate too.
What comes after this is what I’d like you especially tothink about: that time between their eating and before God came. Adam and Eveknew that something had changed. They were ashamed of their nakedness. But whathad to be foremost in their minds was the hope that the serpent had been right.The serpent had said that no wrath and no punishment would come. If the serpentwas right, then they could go on living like they had.
Notice what was “good news” for Adam and Eve during thistime. It is the same “good news” that modern people believe in—but not justmodern people, all unrepentant people of all times have this hope. They hopedthat the God who had threatened to punish them for their sins didn’t exist.That God was completely intolerable to them. Maybe they could get on board withthe idea of some other god that would be altogether different from thiswrathful, punishing God, but they couldn’t tolerate a God who might intervene. Buttheir hopes were dashed.
God showed up. God did care. God would punish. Adam and Eveshowed the great sophistication of the human race, including modern humans, byacting the same way we all do when we have gotten caught. They acted like three-year-olds.They hid in the bushes. They stammered excuses. They tried to pass the buck. Theydid not care about anything except saving their own skin.
God—amazingly—did not give Adam and Eve what they deserved. Hedidn’t kill them that day, although he did pronounce curses against them. God’sanger was especially directed against the serpent, the devil. God spoke of thegreat violence that would happen between the serpent and his Son. The serpentwould injure his Son’s heel, but the Christ would crush the serpent’s head.
Already with this first telling of the story of Jesus, thereis wrath and punishment for sin. The serpent’s head would be crushed, groundinto the dirt. God doesn’t just say, “Oh well, never mind.” The Law of God isnot annulled as though it were unimportant. As Jesus says, “Not one jot, not one tittle of the Law will pass away untileverything is fulfilled.” Everything was fulfilled when the wrath of Godfor sin was poured out on his beloved Son. The wrath was so severe that Jesuscried out: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”As Paul says about Jesus, “He who knew no sin, becamesin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.”
Is this violent retribution good news? It depends on whose sideyou’re on. If you don’t want to change your ways or change your mind, if youdon’t want to believe that God cares about what you do, if you want to just beleft alone to live how you see fit, then this is not good news. “Good news” foryou would be that God will ignore you and leave you to your own thoughts andactions. Then you can go on being your own god, so to speak, making up foryourself what is good and what is evil. The rules for wat is good and evil arequite simple. What is good is whatever is good for me. What is evil is whateveryou don’t like. There is no reference to what is just or right. The refrainthat is sung in every possible key is: “My will be done.”
The alternative is to say to God, “Thywill be done!” That is a scary prayer if you think about it! Adam andEve couldn’t bring themselves to pray that prayer as they heard God’s footstepsin the garden. God’s will being done was the last thing they wanted. So it canbe for us too! Maybe we have lots of tunics and we don’t want to give any ofthem away. Maybe we’ve been making our livelihood by cheating and fraud. Maybewe’ve created the life for ourselves that has no reference to God, hiscommandments, his promises, or the cross that Jesus gives to all of hisdisciples. That can be a pleasant life, and we might not want to change.
“Thy will be done!” turns ourlives over to God. It is a prayer of repentance. It is a prayer for change. Mylife is clay. You, God, are the potter. Make of me the vessel that you see fitto make! This is the intensity of faith. We can’t foresee exactly what God willdo. We can only believe that it will be good.
Believing that it will be good is the only way we can makeany sense of the wrath that is to be revealed when Christ comes again in glory.None of us want to be burned as chaff. None of us want those we love to be cutdown and thrown into the fire. But we are obviously dealing with righteousness,justice, and goodness that is far above us. Probably no amount of skilledargumentation will ever make us perfectly comfortable with John’s preaching,but maybe that’s in the nature of repentance and faith.
Despite whatever misgivings we might have, the preaching isactually remarkably clear. We are presented with two fundamentally different alternatives.Either we can repent and believe in Jesus, or we can hope that things will staythe same. Either you must cast in your lot with Jesus, or you must cast in yourlot with the serpent who said that no wrath or punishment will come. Theycannot both be true. Either Jesus is the king who will set things right or whatthe serpent was basically correct: “You surely will not be punished. When youdie, that will be it.”
Hopefully you have heard enough about Jesus to know that youare much better off changing your ways, and casting your lot with Jesus, thanremaining as you are and hoping God isn’t who has said he is.
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“Blessed is the King who comes inthe name of the Lord!”
The Gospel reading today is when Jesus entered Jerusalem onPalm Sunday. There are some unusual aspects to this story. Jesus told hisdisciples how they would find a donkey’s colt when they entered the village.They didn’t need to buy the colt. They would only say, “The Lord has need of it,” and the colt would be sent along.
The animal upon which Jesus sat is also unusual. Donkeys arealready somewhat small animals to ride. A colt would have presumably been evensmaller. Matthew, in his Gospel, tells us that the colt’s mother might havealso been involved. I’m not sure what that would have looked like. In addition,this colt had never been ridden. That means he wasn’t broke. Nevertheless,Jesus was placed upon him and it seems to go fine as he rode into Jerusalem.
All these strange details are not just strange for the sakeof being strange. They have Old Testament connections. Zechariah, a prophet wholived about 500 years before this, wrote: “Rejoicegreatly, O daughter of Zion! Shout aloud, O daughter of Jerusalem! Behold, yourking is coming to you; … humble and mounted on a donkey, on a colt, the foal ofa donkey.” What was happening with Jesus was not accidental. Jesus isthe king that Zechariah wrote about. The rejoicing of Palm Sunday was therejoicing that Zechariah wrote about.
And these last two elements are really the key features.What is most important about Palm Sunday is that Jesus is the king, and thathis disciples are recognizing him as such. That Jesus is the king is not alwaysrecognized by everyone. It is an article of faith. It is either believed or notbelieved. Presumably there were a lot of people in Jerusalem that day who didnot believe that Jesus is the king. His disciples did. They were convinced bythe signs that Jesus had done.
You are familiar with the signs Jesus did. These, also, wereprophesied in the Old Testament. The prophet Isaiah lived over 700 years beforeJesus, and he said that when the great king would come he would “open the eyes of the blind, the ears of the deaf would beunstopped, the lame would leap like a deer, and the tongue of the mute wouldsing for joy.” Jesus had done these things and more. In fact, justbefore Palm Sunday he had raised Lazarus, who had been dead for four days. Hewas doing all things well. They loved it, and they were praising God with aloud voice. I would imagine that they were wondering to themselves: “What is hegoing to do next?”
Especially, “What is he going to do next as he entersJerusalem?” Thus far Jesus seems to have spent most of his time in the north,in Galilee, far from Jerusalem, which was the center of power. The temple wasin Jerusalem. The leaders of the Jews were in Jerusalem. Pontius Pilate, the Romanleader, was in Jerusalem. What was going to happen when Jesus, “The King of theJews,” would come into contact with the powers that be?
I’m pretty sure that the disciples on Palm Sunday werethinking, “He’s going to keep on doing all things well! He’s going to be a goodking!” Good kings set things right. They get rid of corruption. They help thosewho need help. They put down those who oppress. No more lying, cheating, andgetting away with it.
Jeremiah, another Old Testament prophet, speaks of Jesusthis way in our Old Testament reading. He says, “Inthose days and at that time a righteous Branch will spring up from David.”Jesus is that righteous branch. And what will he do? Jeremiah goes on: “He shall execute justice and righteousness in the land.”
This is exactly what Jesus went on to do during Holy Week. Youcan read about that for yourselves. The first thing that Jesus did was he wentto the Temple. He pushed out all the buyers and sellers and money changers. He causedpandemonium. He flipped over tables. He let loose their animals. He said tothem, “It is written, ‘My house shall be called a houseof prayer for all nations,’ but you have made it a den of robbers!”
On the days following this the powers that be tried toentrap and ensnare Jesus. They needed Jesus to slip up with something he mightsay so that they could nail him. So they sent their sneakiest and best. Theytried every which way to trick him, but it didn’t work. Just as the discipleshad been hoping on Palm Sunday, Jesus continued to do all things well.
I think by the time of Maundy Thursday the disciples werealmost drunk with excitement. Luke tells us a stunning detail about whathappened when Jesus instituted the Lord’s Supper. Not long after Jesus hadsaid, “This is my body which is given for you,”and “This is my blood which is shed for you,” Luketells us that the disciples were arguing with one another over who was thegreatest. They were in high spirits. They were already filling Jesus’s cabinet.Who would be secretary of state? Who would be attorney general?
Given the disciples’ eager expectation, you can perhaps see howthe crucifixion, which would happen less than a day later, would crush them. Itwas cruel—even in the way it got carried out. It wasn’t a fair fight. Those inpower never want a fair fight. They arrested Jesus in the middle of the night.They rigged their kangaroo courts in the middle of the night. Already by 9o’clock that morning Jesus was nailed through his hands and his feet to thecross.
Those in power know how to get things done for their ownadvantage. They know how to do things in such a way where they come out on topand none’s the wiser to their evil deeds done in secret. History—but often anunwritten history—is filled with power crushing reformers. Those who speak thetruth and fight for what is right are marginalized and eliminated. The winners havetheir perspectives written into the history books that glorify their deeds andignore whatever evil they have done. Thereby they appear to have won, butappearances can be deceiving.
They better enjoy whatever they have gained for themselvesby all their sneaking around because a time is coming when, as Jesus said, “Whatever you have said in the dark shall be heard in thelight, and what you have whispered in private rooms shall be proclaimed on the rooftops.”This will happen because the king is coming to judge. Again, as Jesus said, “Nothing is covered up that will not be revealed, or hiddenthat will not be known.” It will be as Jeremiah prophesied: “The king shall execute righteousness and justice in the land.”
The disciples were not wrong with their thoughts about Jesusbeing the king. The disciples also were not wrong about this king doing allthings well, setting things right, rooting out lies, and establishing justiceand peace. Their only mistake was that they weren’t thinking quite deeplyenough. They were thinking that Jesus would be merely an earthly king. Jesus isthe king to which all powers must bow—even the powers of sin, death, and thedevil. Jesus continued to do well on Holy Week. By his death and resurrectionhe set things right in such a profound and fundamental way that it is beyondour understanding.
If we lived at the time of these disciples we wouldrejoice—and rightly so—at Jesus’s opening the eyes of the blind, unstopping theears of the deaf, making the lame leap like a deer, and the tongue of the mute singfor joy. These are very fine miracles. Often Christians wish that they couldsee some miracles like that to bolster their faith. But the truth is that themiracles that Jesus works now and in the future are greater.
Jesus works now by the Holy Spirit to turn the hearts ofsinners so that they believe in the mercy of their Creator and Judge. The HolySpirit produces fruit in the hearts of believers so that they have love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness,faithfulness, and self control. Instead of joining in with the powers ofevil that seem to offer so much advantage for earthly power and for theindulging of our desires, Jesus’s disciples resist the ways and means of devil,the prince of this world. They work at not lying, not manipulating, notintimidating, not coercing, and so on. They work on following Jesus’s commandsthat promise blessings to those who have the guts to keep them. These are notsmall things!
And the miracles of the future will be even greater. They arebeyond my ability to communicate them. Jesus, the king, helped so many peopleas we hear about in the Gospels. That same king will help us. He will give usnew bodies that will be like his glorious, resurrected body—better, even, thanthe restored body of Lazarus. He will purify and strengthen our minds and soulswith love and light. He will set all things right like a good king is supposedto. Great wonders are in store for us!
Therefore, we are not all that different from the multitudeof disciples who rejoiced as Jesus entered Jerusalem. We, like they, mightwonder, “What is he going to do next?” We, like they, might wonder, “What isgoing to happen when Jesus comes into conflict with the powers andprincipalities?” It looks like we’re in for show! They’ll kick up a fuss, no doubt,wanting to hold on to their wicked ways, but their days are numbered. The kingis coming.
“Blessed is the King who comes inthe name of the Lord! Peace in heaven and glory in the highest!”
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In our Gospel reading we meet a woman with whom we mightthink we have little in common. She’s old. She’s a widow. She’s extremely poor.The most unusual thing mentioned about her is that even though she is poor, shemade a contribution for the poor. Which aspect of this woman’s life would youlike to emulate? Probably nothing. We want spouses who are living and helpful.We want money and power. However much we have, we are not interested in giving itaway.
But whereas Jesus might not be all that impressed with us,he definitely was impressed with this woman. He called over his disciples and pointedher out. “She’s put in more than all the rest, eventhough other people put in much larger amounts.” Whereas we might beimpressed by donations in the millions, Jesus was impressed by a donation thatwould be about $2 in today’s money.
We might not want to be like her, at least not at first, butJesus admires her. That gives us reason enough to consider her. We should learnfrom this woman. She might teach us something we need quite badly.
The first thing we must consider is why this woman gave whatshe did. She herself was poor, and yet she contributed to the poor. How canthis be explained? A person might simply say that she was insane, or perhapseven wrong to have done what she did. She shouldn’t have given that money. Sheshould have kept it for herself. But Jesus doesn’t seem to think that she’sinsane or that what she did was wrong, so there must be some other explanation.
It seems to me that the only reason why she could give whatshe did was because she didn’t think she needed it. We might think she neededit, but she didn’t. We aren’t given her exact thoughts, but maybe she believedthat two more dollars would come to her in some other way. We are prone tothink in terms of luck or karma, but I don’t think this woman believed in thosefalse gods. She believed in the Lord God of Israel. She believed that he wouldgive her that day her daily bread. She was free to give what she did, becauseshe knew God would still take care of her.
This faith caused her to be like another creature whom Godhas made. She was like the birds of the air. Have you ever thought about whatkind of life birds live? They’ve got their little nests, but that’s about it.Every morning they wake up not knowing where their food is going to come from.They do not have pantries or storehouses. You might think that they would bevery worried about this, but they are not. The first thing they do when theywake up is offer up a cheerful song of praise to their Creator. A new day ofgrace awaits them. This woman must have been as cheerful and free as the birds.
Now you might ask: “How?” From a certain perspective itlooks as though everything is going wrong with her life. She’s old. She’s poor.She’s powerless. She lost her husband. What more is there to live for? No greatchange in her fortunes appear to be forthcoming, especially if she keeps givingher money away. But these are ugly thoughts, prompted by our reason and commonsense.
Faith has little to do with reason and common sense. Theexamples of faith that we read about in the Scriptures strike us very often asbeing close to insanity. This poor woman giving all she had to the poor canseem insane. The similar actions of the woman in the Old Testament reading canstrike us the same way. She took the flour and oil that should have fed her sonand gave them to Elijah. A classic expression of faith that defies not onlyreason but even morality was Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his son Isaac.Reason and common sense fight against faith because they operate according todifferent rules.
We are given this rule regarding faith: “Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence ofthings unseen.” Those who believe are grasping and holding on to God,whom they can’t see. They don’t know where the path will go that God puts themon. They don’t know the quantity or the quality of the daily bread they willreceive, but what is important is they know that the one who is in charge oftheir lives is their heavenly Father. They know that he loves them. He sent hisSon to die as the sacrifice for them. If God has given his Son, his dearesttreasure, how can he not give them whatever else they need?
Therefore, whether a Christian is rich or poor, healthy orsick, young or old, powerful or powerless, it is all the same. God isunchanging with his will and his promises. God will take care of them eventhough their circumstances might change.
Paul says in Philippians chapter four: “I have learned whatever the situation I am in to be content.I know how to be brought low, and I know how to abound. In any and everycircumstance, I have learned the secret of facing plenty and hunger, abundanceand need. I can do all things through him who strengthens me.”
Oftentimes that last part, “I can doall things through him who strengthens me,” is taken from its contextand used for decorations or for sports teams. I’m afraid that when it is read apartfrom its context that our reason and common sense might interfere so that it isnot understood correctly. “I can do all things” sounds as though I can doanything. If I can do anything, then I would like to be some kind ofsuperhuman. I can have a fabulous life. I can win at all athletic contests. Iwill have a charmed life because “I can do all thingsthough him who strengthens me.”
But as you heard the context of that passage, it is clearthat Paul is not telling us that we can be some kind of superhero. Our reasonmight chime in here and say, “Here we go with all the hedging and managingexpectations. Of course it sounded too good to be true.” But believe it or not,he is actually talking about something greater. A superhero is only happy whenhe or she is winning. What happens when the superhero gets old? What happenswhen the charmed life is no longer charmed? What happens when your spouse dies?What happens when your kid dies? What happens when you become poor? Included inthe “all things” that I can do is to lose, tosuffer, to have my life turned upside down.
Consider, again, the old woman. We know that she hassuffered. We know that her husband has died. We know that she is poor. Beingpoor carries along with it all kinds of annoyances and irritations. Nevertheless,she cheerfully put in her last two dollars. God, who had taken care of her thusfar, would continue to do so. Through faith in him she was doing “all things through him who was strengthening her.” Andit was marvelous. Even Jesus was impressed.
This power to do all things, even to suffer negative things,through Jesus, is an important corrective for today’s world. We live at the endof a period of time when reason and common sense have been used to greateffect. Technology has been developed through reason and common sense that enablesus to do things that previous generations would have regarded as magic. We haveaccomplished so much. All of us are extremely rich compared to this woman whoonly had two dollars to her name.
Given all these abilities and all these accomplishments, youwould think that we would be happy. But instead it seems that we should beswamped with sadness. There is so much hopelessness. There is so much despair.People wonder what the point of living is. Our birthrates are plummeting. Ourliveliness seems to be withering on the vine.
Isn’t it strange that at the very time when we have reachedthe pinnacle of what human being have been able to accomplish thus far, that weare swamped with sadness? For what ails us, I do not think that moretechnology, more reason, and more common sense will help us. I have reason tobelieve that that would only make a bad situation even worse.
We have a spiritual problem. Spiritual problems needspiritual solutions. We need what human beings have always needed, which isGod’s love. We need faith in this God who loves us, to set us free from ourfears of suffering, our fears of loss, our fears of the paths that God mightset us on, the outcome of which we cannot see. Faith in God’s love enables us tobe cheerful, and sing like birds, not only when we are winning, but also whilewe suffer. Paul says “I can do all things.” Hemeans that. Included in those “all things” are lossand sadness, while knowing that we will have the ultimately victory because ofour God.
Jesus gives us great spiritual abilities. Jesus gives us theability to say, “Even though I am a sinner, yet I am forgiven and holy.” “Eventhough I am poor, yet I am rich.” “Even though I die, yet shall I live.” Jesusmakes the future bright!
Therefore, do not be afraid. Be bold and very courageouslike this woman in our Gospel reading. The God who has taken care of you thusfar, will take care of you until the supreme adventure begins in heaven.
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When we think about being blessed or being happy we usuallythink about wealth, abundance, security, contentment, and so on. Happiness goestogether with strength, ability, and freedom. If we have the wherewithal and ifwe have the opportunity, then we can do what we want. If we should beconstrained with our resources or freedom, then we might not be able to do whatwe want. We most easily and naturally believe that blessedness or happinesscomes from being able to do whatever we want. We usually associate not beingable to do whatever we want with sadness.
Did you notice how Jesus’s teaching was strange along theselines? What we usually associate with sadness, Jesus declares as blessedness orhappiness. Let’s look at a few of the things Jesus said.
He said, “Blessed are the poor inspirit.” Is being poor ever good? It’s always better to be rich. Even ifJesus is not talking about money, doesn’t it sound better to be rich in spirit?Someone being rich in spirit sounds a lot more interesting than someone beingpoor in spirit.
Jesus said, “Blessed are those whomourn.” If someone is mourning, then things haven’t gone their way.Someone has died whom they would prefer were still alive. Something has gonewrong that they wish wouldn’t have happened.
“Blessed are the meek.” Themeek are humbled. They can’t be impressed with their own importance. We enjoythe feeling of being impressed with ourselves.
“Blessed are those who hunger andthirst for righteousness.” If I had to choose between being hungry andthirsty for righteousness and being full of righteousness, I would much ratherbe full of righteousness. Then I could feel good about myself.
From these examples, you can see how Jesus teaches strangethings. If we would turn Jesus’s statements into their opposites, then theywould make much more sense: Blessed are the rich. Blessed are those who arehaving a great time. Blessed are powerful. If the world would have its own setof beatitudes, or blessings, they would sound like this: “Blessed are the rich,because they can buy whatever they want.” “Blessed are those who are having agreat time, because they are making the most of this life.” “Blessed are thepowerful, because nobody is pushing them around.”
Don’t these worldly beatitudes make more sense? We moreeasily and naturally live our lives when we don’t have to rely on God. If wecan see to things ourselves, then God doesn’t matter as much. What does matteris having the necessary resources and freedom. You better make sure you’ve gotenough of that. And what must be feared above all else is lack and loss. Lackand loss are surefire recipes for misery and sadness.
That’s one way of thinking, and it’s pretty persuasive. It’swhat comes most easily and naturally. But one of the ways that Jesus is spokenof in the Gospels is that he has come to “proclaim goodnews to the poor.” The poor don’t have anything. The good news is thatthey are going to get stuff. Where there was lack and loss there will beabundance and life. Jesus will bring this about. Or, at least, that’s theclaim.
Is there a way that I can prove it? No, I’m sorry, I can’t. Thepromises of abundance and life in Jesus can be only either believed ordisbelieved. Either Jesus is God and Lord and he will bring about what he haspromised, or he is wrong. The poor aren’t blessed. Those who mourn aren’tblessed. The powerless aren’t blessed. Either the rules of life that are laiddown by Jesus are how things are, or how things are is governed by the rulesthat we much more easily and naturally believe. Either a person will put his orher trust in Jesus or a person will put his or her trust in those worldlyrecipes for happiness.
Today as we observe All Saints’ Day we must consider this faithin Jesus. Faith in Jesus is how a person is a saint, which means a “holy one.” Onlythose who become holy are in heaven. Saints receive their holiness throughfaith in Jesus. They believe that he will keep the promises that he has made—promiseslike you find in the beatitudes. All of the beatitudes, or blessings, thatJesus spoke of contain promises. They are really glorious promises, if you willchallenge yourself to think about what they mean and believe that they canactually come to pass.
He says, “Yours is the kingdom ofheaven.” God’s kingdom in heaven can’t be described. The Scriptures saythat it is beyond us, no matter how hard we try.
Jesus says, “God will comfort you.”How good do you think God is at comforting someone? You perhaps remember thecomfort that comes from being in the arms of your dad or your mom or yourhusband or your wife. God will comfort those who mourn.
Jesus says, “You will inherit theearth.” World history is full of vain and ambitious men and women who havestrained every fiber of their being to attain mastery over the earth. Jesus saysyou will inherit it.
“You will be filled with righteousness.” Instead oftemptations being victorious over you, you will be victorious over temptations.
Jesus says, “You will receive mercy.”We hear about God’s mercy all the time, but now we only know his mercy byfaith. What will it be like to have our empty sack filled up with the undeservedgood things of God?
Jesus says, “You will see God.”The Scriptures emphatically state that no one has seen God. “No one can see God and live,” it says over and overagain. What will it be like to see God?
Jesus says, “You will be called sonsof God.” This is not a slight or an insult to you female saints. Jesusis the only Son of God. By being called “sons of God” Jesus is saying that youwill be like him.
These are good promises. But then Jesus makes a differentkind of promise. He promises us that we will be persecuted. He says that wewill be reviled. That means that people will say that you are a fanatic. Youare impractical. You are a fool about money. You are a fool to love your enemy.They will pronounce curses upon you that you will be poor and miserable andabused because you don’t follow the rules of this old world. That is what youwill get for following Jesus.
It can be scary to be reviled and persecuted and to have allkinds of evil spoken against you. And this will not be done just by strangers.Elsewhere Jesus says that this will come from our nearest and dearest. Householdswill be divided. Families will be divided. This last promise is so bad, that wemight think that we should just leave off with all this. It’s not nice. It’sdisturbing. It’s divisive. Religion is supposed to be peaceful and serene.
Except it’s not. Jesus said, “I havenot come to bring peace, but a sword.” Jesus is on the warpath as kingagainst the devil and against all his falseness. Whenever Jesus drove outdemons, they convulsed their victims and cried out and put up a mighty fuss. Theydidn’t want to lose control of their victims, and so it is with all the false rulesand false gods that possess people today. They don’t want to lose their grip.They want to hold us captive. They don’t want us to believe in this who hascome who proclaims good news to the poor.
But these false rules and false gods are bad. They don’tkeep their promises. They couldn’t, even if they wanted to, because their poweris limited. They only pretend to be almighty.
No matter how rich you are, no matter how powerful you are,no matter how many memories you make, no matter how good of a life you believethat you can make for yourself, none of these things can forgive your sins.None of these things can defeat death. None of these things can fill you with God’slove. None of these things can prepare you for seeing God. Only Jesus can dothese things.
Believe in him! Are you poor? Will you become poor? Are youpoor in spirit—kind of dumpy and something of a nobody? Believe in Jesus! Hehas good news for you even though you lack so much: “Yoursis the kingdom of heaven.” Are you mourning? Are things not going yourway? Did you imagine that your life would be altogether different? “Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.”Thus and so you can do with all these statements of Jesus. There are promisesin there for those who will believe.
Faith, therefore, makes all the difference. John says in hisepistle: “This is the victory that has overcome theworld—our faith.” The saints who have gone before us all have this onething in common: They believed in Jesus. You believe in him too. Believe, andthen just wait and see how all the promises he has made will come true. Jesuskeeps his promises.
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On my day off last week I was at my dad’s farm near AlbertLea. I was there to help with the harvest, but in a different way. My sisterand her family were visiting from Florida. She has a son in the sixth grade wholoves running machinery. So my help was not so much me doing stuff. I was more ridingalong, supervising, and coaching my nephew who isn’t quite experienced enoughto run the tractor all by himself.
As I was sitting next to my nephew I couldn’t help butremember when I was his age. That was when I was learning how to run machinery.I was seeing the tasks we were doing through his eyes. Some of those tasks areintimidating: Backing up to wagons. Pulling full wagons. Gears could grind.Stuff could break. There is an element of fear. Stuff could go wrong.
Not all fear is bad. Fear goes together with learning newthings. Fear happens when you leave the safety of what is familiar to master theunknown. Life without fear would be a life without challenge. That would bepretty boring.
It is not uncommon for people to think that being aChristian is pretty boring. When was the last time you were afraid to be aChristian, a disciple of Jesus? Maybe never! But if that is your experience,then your experience would be different from the disciples we heard about inour Gospel reading. They were frightened by what Jesus said.
First of all, Jesus said, “Howdifficult it will be for those who have wealth to enter the kingdom of God.”It says that the disciples were amazed. Maybe another way to say what was goingon is that they were saying to themselves, “What are you talking about Jesus?”
But Jesus did not back down. He went on: “Children, how difficult it is to enter the kingdom of God! Itis easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich personto enter the kingdom of God.” It says that the disciples were “exceedingly astonished.” “What in the world are youtalking about? How could you say something like that?”
The third time the disciples are spoken of as being astonishedor afraid is at the end of the reading. As I read that, try to picture thescene in your mind’s eye. It says, “And they were on theroad, going up to Jerusalem, and Jesus was walking ahead of them. And they wereamazed, and those who followed were afraid.” Jesus is up ahead. Nobody’swalking with him. The disciples slink along behind. They’re afraid. They’reafraid to be Jesus’s disciples. New experiences are in store for them based onwhat Jesus said.
The challenge that Jesus says down for his disciples is notto cling to wealth. How does a person not cling to wealth? There’s really onlyone way: You have to be willing to give it away. You have to be willing to givemore and take less, or maybe even to give it out freely for no servicesrendered. That is a new experience. No one has to teach us to snatch and graband horde. We’ve been doing that since we were toddlers. As we get older we areoften trained by teachers and authorities that what’s ours is ours, and wedon’t have to give anything to anybody, and the more that we can accumulate forourselves the better. Therefore, in the pursuit of ever-increasing wealth, youshould give as little as you possibly can, and take as much as you possiblycan, and that is how the game is played. I suspect that none of you have beenfrightened by this philosophy that I have just laid out. It is utterlyfamiliar.
What might be frightening—if you are willing to take Jesusseriously—is his statement: “How hard it will be forthose who have wealth to enter the kingdom of God.” And again, he says:“How hard it is for anyone to enter the kingdom of God.”This is new. I thought it was easy to enter the kingdom of God. I thought nochange was necessary to enter the kingdom of God—the church word for that is“repent.” I didn’t know I had to change. I didn’t know that I had to repent toenter the kingdom of God.
Now, one way that you could take Jesus’s words is that he isslamming the door on all who have wealth: “Get out and stay out!” But there isanother way that you can take Jesus’s words. You can see them as a challenge togrow up. We can’t stay babies forever. We can’t remain in our merely naturalstate where we are grabbing, snatching, and hording. If you want to remain likethat you are basically saying that you would like to go to hell, because hellis the place where people go who practiced their whole lives to be masters ofsnatching, grabbing, and hording. The only problem is that you, also, would be snatched and grabbed, and youprobably won’t like that.
If we are going to enter the kingdom of God we have tobecome different. We have to learn from our teacher and master, Jesus, the waysof love. This will be something new. We have to learn about giving, sufferingand bearing the cross. We are all naturally afraid of suffering and pain, butJesus and the Holy Spirit can teach us that the fear of suffering doesn’t haveto control our lives. If we suffer, we know that we will be comforted. Even ifwe die in our pursuit of love, we know that we will be resurrected.
These are not childish teachings. These are very grow-up,Christian teachings that require courage. These are the teachings of theKingdom of God that will prepare us for heaven instead of hell. Heaven is aplace of love. God dwells there, and God is love. The love of heaven is so pureand rich that we can’t even begin to grasp it. Maybe we could try by sayingthat everyone in heaven loves so purely and richly that they would do anythingfor you. They would suffer the loss of everything for you. But they won’t haveto. Because heaven is the place where all things have been made new. It is the placewhere, as Revelation 21 puts it: “death shall be nomore, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for theformer things have passed away.”
To arrive at the place where God dwells, where love dwells—whatmight a person give for that? Let’s say you have 100 million dollars. Is thatwhat you are going to hold on to? It’s just a bunch of zeros in some EdwardJones account somewhere. You can’t even lie on it like the dragons of old wholiked to sleep on their heaps of gold. You would rather have those zeros on apiece of paper than to be kind, to be generous, to be merciful? It’s ano-brainer which is better! That is not to say it isn’t a challenge—a change—whichbrings fear, but the challenge is worth it.
Suppose I said to my nephew: I know that you want to run thetractor, but just think of all the stuff that could go wrong! The steeringcould fail. You accidentally drive into the ditch. You could fall out thewindow and be crushed to death when the tractor rolls on top of you. Those arefoul, ugly thoughts. They falsely inflate fears, which might cause someone toremain in immaturity, to remain in safety.
Jesus does not want his disciples to remain immature andwithout fruit. We all have to grow up. We all have to change. We all have torepent. We might be afraid, but let’s all agree that a boy learning how to runa tractor is a good thing. How much more, then, is a disciple of Jesus growingup in the love that Jesus teaches a good thing? Jesus’s teachings and Jesus’scommands set us on an adventure, but that adventure is totally worth it.
And you do not go on that adventure alone. If you getrejected, Jesus accepts you. If you suffer, Jesus will comfort you. If you die,Jesus will resurrect you. Therefore, there is no reason why you should evergive in to your fears. You, understandably, might be afraid to give away wealth.The voice of fear might say: “What if I end up being miserable?” Your wealth enablesyou to do a lot of nice stuff for yourself.
Or take another command of Jesus’s: You might be afraid tolove your enemy. Enemies have been known to do some hurtful things. Don’t beafraid. Jesus, your teacher and master, teaches good things, not bad things. Youcan’t go wrong if you will take the risk of being obedient to him. But youcan’t know that goodness until you take the plunge.
But suppose you try to carry out Jesus’s commands and you fail.What then? Should you wish that you had never tried in the first place? That’sa loser’s mentality. If you fail, then ask Jesus to forgive you. Then get rightback up on that horse. It’s inevitable that a person will get bucked off whilelearning to tame a horse. How can we expect that it should be easy to tameourselves? Or what kind of ride might we have if we make up our mind to loveour enemy? Who knows what might happen!
On these adventures it's almost certain that mistakes willbe made. Gears will accidentally be grinded. My nephew, by the way, didn’tgrind the gears even once this past week. I was the one who accidentally grindedthe gears—but don’t tell dad. On second thought, maybe you can tell him. Ithink he would forgive me.
Right next to the forgiveness of sins, growing up in love asChrist’s disciple and student is the best of things. It sets us on adventuresalready in this life, and those adventures will continue on into the next. Don’tbe ruled by your fears. Put your trust in Jesus. He will protect you. He willpick you up when you have fallen. He is your Lord and Savior.
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Jesus’s commands can seem unreasonable and unrealistic. Letme give you an example. In Luke chapter 6 Jesus commands that we give to thosewho ask of us, and if our goods should be taken away that we should not demandthem back. Upon hearing that we are to give to anyone who asks, and that weshould not demand back what has been taken, there is a part of every one of usthat rebels against this command. It doesn’t seem like it will work out verywell for us. All our stuff will be taken away. So we don’t do it. We setJesus’s command aside.
But there is another way of looking at it. A person couldbelieve that Jesus’s commands are good. A person could believe that things willgo better if we follow Jesus’s command, if we give to those who ask, and notdemand back from those who take. God must be the biggest factor in thisscenario. God would have to protect you. God would have to repay what was takenfrom you. Can you trust him? In order to accept Jesus’s command about givingand not demanding back we have to believe that God loves us and will take careof us. Jesus’s commands require faith. Hearing his commands with faith changes ourperception of them.
We heard Jesus’s commands concerning the irrevocability ofmarriage and the unsuitability of divorce in our Gospel reading. Divorce isvery emotional, painful, and complicated. Nobody gets married with the hopes ofgetting divorced. I won’t be covering all aspects of this topic in this sermon.Pastor Bertram and I would be happy to speak with you more about any questionsor thoughts you might have one on one. For the purposes of our time togethertoday, though, I’d like to look at Jesus’s commands regarding marriage anddivorce as requiring faith.
When Jesus was asked about the permissibility of divorce Ithink his answer surprised both his opponents and his disciples. His opponents,the Pharisees, knew that Moses allowed for divorce. I think Jesus surprisedthem when he told them that that was an accommodation for their hardness ofheart. A hard heart is an unbelieving heart. Husband and wife are not supposedto separate. From the beginning man and woman have been joined in marriage sothat they become one flesh. What God has joined together, let not man separate.
It seems that the disciples were surprised by this commandalso. They asked Jesus about it afterwards. Jesus did not soften his stance onthe irrevocability of marriage. If a husband divorces his wife and marriesanother, he is committing adultery against his first wife. If a wife divorces herhusband and marries another, she is committing adultery against her firsthusband. Marriage, in God’s sight, is not ended by a certificate of divorce. Itis ended by God when he brings about the death of one or the other of thespouses. If God ends the marriage, then the surviving spouse is free to marryanother.
Upon hearing Jesus’s teaching our immediate reaction mightbe that all of this is way too black and white. What about this circumstanceand that circumstance? And there might be validity to those circumstances. Not everydivorce is sinful. Some divorces are justified. Jesus himself, in a parallelpassage, says that divorce may be granted when adultery has been committed bythe other spouse.
But we all know that not all divorces are because ofadultery or abuse or abandonment. Many divorces happen because husband and wifedo not get along. That is not unusual or surprising. We all have our sinfulflesh that is as wicked as can be. We also have the devil who is always readyto blow any sparks he can find into a raging, consuming fire. Divorce is notirrational. It seems like it is a good solution to an all too common problem. Whyshould two people be chained together when they no longer want to be together?
Although this seems reasonable, it doesn’t seem to play outthis way in actual experience. Becoming one flesh with someone is not merelybiological or social or economic. As Jesus shows in our reading, God isinvolved in this union. God joins together. Divorce pulls apart. Those whodivorce often feel lingering pains. Maybe some problems have been solved by thedivorce, but new ones arise. The happiness that was hoped for doesn’t always comeor doesn’t always last.
When Jesus teaches about the irrevocability of marriage andthe unsuitability of divorce, he is actually showing us a way for happiness,for blessedness. If you have experienced difficulties in your marriage, or ifyou are currently experiencing difficulties in your marriage, then Jesus’s commandsmight seem to be offering the opposite of happiness or blessedness. It mightseem as though Jesus is only making the situation worse. Now not only can younot have the hope of happiness from getting divorced, if you do get divorced,then you’ll have to feel guilty about it.
Although this might be a common way of hearing Jesus’scommands, it isn’t the only way. Consider again the commands that I began with.Jesus commands us to give to those who ask, and not to demand back from thosewho take. One could interpret those commands in such a way that Jesus intends tomake us miserable. Jesus wants us to lose all our money. Jesus wants us to beabused by evildoers and have no recourse so as to defend ourselves.
But is this what Jesus really wants? Does he want us to bemiserable? He wants just the opposite. He wants us to be happy and blessed. Hepromises that if we follow his commands that we will be blessed. Strangelyenough, if we were to follow his commands we might end up with less money, but wewill nevertheless end up with more. Undertaking Jesus’s commands with faithmakes the scenario appear altogether different.
So it is also with Jesus’s commands about the irrevocabilityof marriage and the unsuitability of divorce. If you leave God out of thepicture it can seem like the gloomiest of commands. It can sound like God iscruel and wants to take away all joy and happiness by keeping people stuck inmiserable marriages. But that is not the only way it can be looked at. We canlook at these commands with faith.
Looking at your marriage with faith is to realize that Godhas been and is completely involved. God has joined you together with yourspouse. We know that because you have not just been dating or going steady. Youhave made your promises before God, to one another, and to society. You havepromised that you will love and cherish this person for better for worse, forricher for poorer, and in sickness and in health until death parts you. BecauseGod has put you together with this person, you know that that is where youbelong. Because God has put you together with this person, you know that Godwill care for you even if you are going through some troubles.
Now, I wish that there weren’t any troubles. I wish that everyonealways got along splendidly. I wish that everyone always had more than enoughmoney so that they would never have to ask another person for money. I couldwish for a lot of things along these lines, but my wishing wouldn’t make it so.We live in a broken world with much suffering. How should we respond to thisbrokenness? Jesus’s commands direct us in the way that we should go. Hiscommands help to undo brokenness. We don’t have to sit idly by with brokenness,believing with the rest of the world that nothing can be done. We candemonstrate our faith by cheerfully giving when called upon to do so. We candemonstrate our faith by cheerfully looking to the future with the one to whomwe have been joined by God to be one flesh.
I understand how what I have said could be painful for thoseof you who have difficulties in your marriage. To be cheerful about yourmarriage seems like something you gave up on a long time ago. You haven’t beenlooking forward with cheerfulness. You’ve only been trying to survive. But thisis where Jesus’s commands can be the most helpful. Although you might not beable to see any light at the end of the tunnel or anywhere else for thatmatter, God is the creator of light. What might God do if you were to believe? Whatmight God do if you joined yourself wholeheartedly to his teaching? There’s notelling what might happen—what adventures God might put you on—but I’m surethat it would be good!
There is no way for me to prove to you that obeying Jesus’scommands, being his disciple, will be good for you. The only way you can knowthat is by taking the plunge yourself. You have to believe that giving to theone who asks will do you good. You have to believe that not demanding back whatwas taken from you will bring you happiness and blessedness. You have tobelieve that Jesus will protect you and lead you in the way that you should go,even if that path might be filled with painful sacrifices and frighteningchallenges.
What is good for you to know, though, is that you are notstuck. Jesus’s commands and promises open up possibilities that are so oftendeemed to be impossible. Jesus is Lord. All things have been put under his feet.Therefore, there is always hope. Nothing that we do in faith will be in vain. Listeningto Jesus brings us on the right paths that bring about love and healing.
Hopefully today you have seen that none of us believe as weought. None of us are as convinced as we should be that Jesus’s ways. Thereforewe can all change our ways. We can all repent and believe the good news thatJesus is Lord. Jesus forgives and will set right all that has gone wrong. Inthe mean time be led by Jesus’s good commands and promises.
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Jesus said, “If anyone would befirst, he must be last of all and servant of all.”
Being recognized is a deep human need. Being recognized iswhen a person is accepted and appreciated for who they are. People can berecognized for all kinds of different things: “You are talented.” “You are hardworking.” “You are funny.” It feels good to be recognized. Usually peoplecultivate their lives in such a way that they can continue to be recognized.Funny people enjoy being recognized as funny, and so they are always coming upwith new bits. What do you want to be known as? Smart, successful, caring,hard-nosed, charming? You’ll do what’s necessary to continue to be known andrecognized as such.
This is simply how we are. There would be no sense in tryingto get rid of this impulse. We need to be accepted and appreciated. To try todo away with this would be as silly as trying to do away with sleeping, eating,or drinking. That said, the desire to be recognized can go awry.
For example, what often happens is that a person not onlywants to be recognized, he or she doesn’t want others to be recognized. Let’ssay a woman is pretty. Maybe she’d like to be the prettiest. That means she’d likeit if nobody was even close to being as pretty as her. Or let’s say there are manychildren in the family. Which of them is the favorite? There can only be onefavorite. To be the child that mom or dad loves most feels good. I think youcan see where problems arise. Being the prettiest can bring about meanness andconceit. With favorites in families there can be lifelong resentment. It’s nothard to see how these things can be bad.
What is to be done? I think a lot of people believe nothingcan be done. We have no other choice than to accept things as they are. Thebest will be the best and the worst will be the worst. Since that is the waythings are, you should try your hardest to be the best. Then you’ll get thatrecognition you crave. If someone is not getting recognition, then it’s becausethey aren’t trying hard enough. If they tried harder, then they’d be recognizedtoo.
This is a very powerful philosophy. It makes sense. It’sassumed to be correct. It’s everywhere. To learn something different,therefore, will require effort. You’ll have to learn new and different rules. TakeJesus’s statement in our Gospel reading. He said, “Ifanyone would be first, he must be last of all and servant of all.” To befirst be last. It almost sounds non-sensical. Those are opposites of oneanother. If the first are last, then they can’t be first. The first are firstand the last are last.
But Jesus helps us with what he says after that. “If anyone would be first, he must be last of all and servantof all.” Being the servant of all throws a different light on things. Itshows us a different way that we might use what has been given to us. Whatcomes naturally to us is to use whatever we have to promote ourselves. We tryto make the case that we are the greatest. But if we would serve, then we woulduse what we have for others—to lift them up, to do them good.
Consider something I’ve already mentioned—prettiness. It canseem to be something that is only good for the girl who has it, but it doesn’thave to be used that way. A pretty girl can give her prettiness to her man. Shewants him to enjoy her prettiness instead enjoying her prettiness for herselfor using her prettiness to distinguish herself from others. Or a pretty girlcan love the girls who have not been given what she has been given. She canforget about her prettiness and associate with the lowly—not in someostentatious, obnoxious, ugly way, but in a genuine, friendly way. Thereby shegives away her prettiness to those who are less so, and who might be somewhatshunned because of it.
Boys can do this too. Boys often value different things thangirls. Athletic boys can hang out with non-athletic boys—bearing with them, notridiculing them and demeaning them. Boys who know how to use guns or tools orother desirable things can take in those who don’t. In this way a boy givescover to another.
You know how it usually goes, though, don’t you? A hierarchyis what comes naturally. The best are at the top. The worst are at the bottom. Thoseat the top differentiate themselves from the rest with their greatness. Theyare not like them. They are best. The rest are not. Those at the bottom shouldknow their place and burn with envy. That’s the way it is—so so many say.
That’s not correct if Jesus is correct. Maybe Jesus is afool. Lots of people don’t believe him. But he says that greatness is not whenyou use what you have for yourself. Greatness is when you are the last of all and the servant of all. Greatness iswhen you lift up others, when you help and improve others. The lowlier thepeople you can help, the better, because when you are helping really lowlypeople you are being like Jesus.
Think of the way that Jesus is. If ever there was anyone whois the best, then that would be Jesus. But how does Jesus use his greatness?Does he point at disappointing people and say, “Look at how much better I amthan you!” “Look how sinful you are and how righteous I am!”
No. Jesus doesn’t do this. He could if he wanted. He trulyis so much better and so much more righteous than we are. But he doesn’t use whatis his to stare at himself in the mirror, admiring himself, comparing himselfto those who do not have what he has. He uses what is his to help those who arewithout. He makes others better.
And there’s no one who’s too low for him. There’s no oneabout whom he says, “Ach! That one is too disgusting!” He rejects no one. Therejection is always on the other end. The sinner says he doesn’t want toassociate with him. The proud one says, “I won’t have your condescension andcharity!” But as far as Jesus is concerned, he is willing to be last of all. Heis the servant of all. The word “all” meanswithout exception. He will help you.
You can see how Jesus’s friendliness, Jesus’s reaching out,Jesus’s free acknowledgement, acceptance, and approval of people is beautiful,helpful, and good. Another word that we could use to describe all this activityof Jesus is “love.” Jesus loves us, therefore we should love others. Theapostle John has written, “We love, because he firstloved us.”
There are a lot of people who want to be recognized. Theyare aching for it. You can give them that. Now I’m sure you could come up withexcuses for why you shouldn’t. I’m sure that if you used your eagle-eye glassesfor fault-finding, you could find faults in anyone. Thank God Jesus didn’t dothat to you. If Jesus were looking for faults in you, so as to excuse himselffrom help you, I’m sure he could have. But he didn’t. He loves you, so youshould love others.
And, as I mentioned before, the lowlier the person, thebetter. The more like Christ you will be. So love that person whom you have foundto be distasteful. Love that person from whom you will get no benefit in return.Jesus says that we should love even our enemies.
Jesus’s saying is a strange recipe for greatness: “If anyone would be first, he must be last of all and servantof all.” You might be saying to yourself, “That won’t make me happy.That will make me miserable.” Don’t be so sure. Loving and being loved are thehighest things in life. The more you love the more you’re loved. There’s nolimit to how much you can love. Jesus says that he can become the water of lifein us so that we become like a spring. A spring of water just keeps going andgoing. Life and love bubble up even unto eternal life.
To do the opposite of this cannot turn out well. This is animportant warning. People think it is neither here nor there if they are asvain and conceited as peacocks. Not so! James warned us in our Epistle readingthat jealousy and selfish ambition are demonic. Demons hate and hamper anddestroy life. So do the proud and cruel self-promoters. Hell, because it is theopposite of heaven, would seem to me to be the place where there is no love—atruly terrifying possibility. No love!
You know how good love is, so don’t shut yourself up awayfrom it. Do not strive to be the greatest by comparing yourself. Greatness iswhen you use what has been given to you to make other people better. Greatness isbeing like Jesus. Love like him. Be the last of all and the servant of all.
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If you can imagine what it would be like to be deaf andunable to speak, then you might understand why Jesus said “Ephphatha,” which means “beopened” in our Gospel reading. Deafness and muteness close a person inon himself. It is difficult to take in the thoughts of others because youcannot hear them speaking. It is difficult to communicate one’s own thoughtsbecause the speaking is not clear.
Hearing well and speaking well can easily be taken forgranted. We don’t know a good thing until it's gone. Restoring losses likeblindness, deafness, lameness, or muteness dramatically improves people’s lives.
Our Old Testament reading from Isaiah 35 talks about changinglives for the better. Isaiah lived more than 700 years before Christ, but hetalks about things that Jesus did: “The eyes of theblind will be opened, the ears of the deaf unstopped; the lame man shall leaplike a dear, and the tongue of the mute will sing for joy.” Jesus didmany miracles having to do with precisely these ailments. Think of how theirlives were changed for the better.
There are several videos on the Internet that show somethingsimilar. Perhaps you’ve seen them. The videos show little kids getting glassesfor the first time, or hearing aids or implants for the first time. These kids alreadyknow mom and dad, but they had never seen them clearly or heard them clearly.The first time they can see or hear they are filled with awe. Joy comes overtheir faces. Sometimes there are tears. The world opens up for them. That’slife and liveliness. It is as Jesus said, “I came sothat you may have life, and have it more abundantly.”
Jesus’s bringing of abundant life is, again, fulfilling whatIsaiah wrote. All of Isaiah 35 is about the restoration of life that the Christbrings about. Dry, dead, and barren places like the desert will come to lifeand bloom. Fraud, violence, and death will be no more. The redeemed will enterinto Zion with singing. Everlasting joy shall be upon their heads.
What features most prominently in Isaiah 35, however, is lifewith God. It says, “They shall see the glory of theLord, the majesty of our God.” We heard at the beginning of our OldTestament reading these words, “Strengthen the weakhands, and make firm the feeble knees. Say to those who have an anxious heart,‘Be strong, fear not! Behold, your God will come with vengeance, with therecompense of God. He will come and save you.’” Those are bracing words ifyou have the guts to believe them. “You will see God,” and “God is coming foryou.”
If you think about it, isn’t it the case that we need to be“opened up,” so to speak, to this reality of God—that we should see him, thathe’s coming for us? Blind people need to be opened up to the reality of seeing.Deaf people need to be opened up to the reality of hearing. It’s not like sightsand sounds don’t exist when someone is blind or deaf, it’s just that theycannot perceive what’s actually there. So it is with God. Our inability orunwillingness to acknowledge him doesn’t mean that he doesn’t exist. To nolonger be severely hampered—to no longer be blind, deaf, lame, and mute when itcomes to God—requires a miracle along the lines of the man whom Jesus helped inour Gospel reading. We need to be opened up, otherwise we won’t even know whatwe are missing.
So it can be also for those who are physically blind, deaf,lame, or mute. Those conditions can be lived with. They are not fatal. It’sjust that large swaths of reality and joy are withheld. We can be that way withGod too. In fact, that is our natural predisposition. We by nature are closedoff from God, and we think that’s just normal.
Consider your daily routine. It’s so easy to go through anentire day without hardly giving a single thought towards God. We just followour routine: Get up, make coffee, take a shower, go to work or school, comehome, watch Netflix, go to bed. God is there the whole time, but we havenothing to do with him. It’s as though we were blind, deaf, lame, and mutetowards him without even knowing it.
I could almost see Jesus groaning over us like he did withthe man in our Gospel reading. “Wake up you sleepy head!” I could see Jesussaying to us, “Be opened.” Life is more thanfood and drink. Life is more than work and vacation. Life is more than amusingourselves to death. We can be as unthinking and uncaring as livestock, consumingwhat’s given to us, oblivious to the coming slaughter. That’s not how we are tobe. We are much greater than the other animals. We have been made in the imageof God. That makes us capable of high and divine things that we should take in,consider, and interact with. We can know things like truth, justice, mercy, peace,sacrifice, hope. On top of all these things we can even know God.
Now, I can hear some critics saying that all that stuffabout truth, mercy, and so on is a waste of time and money. There are a lot ofpeople—the most powerful people in our society—who think that jobs, money,business, technology, and so on are the only things that matter. All that otherstuff is too high-falutin’. These people usually pride themselves for theirpracticality and for living in the real world.
They’re wrong! They don’t live in the real world. They’vemade for themselves a world that doesn’t have a Creator in it who daily andrichly provides me with all that I need. The real world has God in it. The realworld has God’s commands and curses, his promises and blessings. Just because aperson is unable or unwilling to acknowledge that, doesn’t make it so.
Imagine if there were a blind man who didn’t believe thatsuch a thing as sight exists. He’s utterly convinced of that because he’s neverexperienced it. Thus this arrogant man would like to impose his lack and hispoverty on everyone else. So it is with those who scoff at God’s Word, whoscoff at Jesus’s sacraments, who scoff at truth, love, beauty, and so on. Why?Because it’s work that’s important. Or amusements are important. Or it’s simplya matter of being anesthetized and vegging out to pass the time.
I know a lot of people like this. I know myself. I know thatI can very easily pass my days without much thought regarding God. I know, asanother example, that I do not love God with all my heart, with all my soul,with all my strength, and with all my mind. A spiritually blind person might respond,“Well, no one can do that, so who cares?” But what if we really are supposedto? What if we really can? What if Jesus was sent to cure our blindness? Whatif Jesus is meant to open up in us a closed-off-ness that we just thought wasnormal?
Jesus says, “I came that you mayhave life, and have it more abundantly.” Jesus turns back the cursesthat hamper life. He heals physical blindness, deafness, and so on. Everyonecan see the goodness of that. What is not realized as frequently is that Jesusopens us up spiritually to things we wouldn’t otherwise know. We wouldn’totherwise know these things, because these things are only learned from theprophets, from Jesus, and from the apostles. Just as the blind man doesn’t knowwhat it means to see until sight is given, so also we do not know what it islike to know God until Jesus opens us up to that.
We can know God by his Word. We can learn how to live withhim in his creation from the Psalms. We can learn about our future fromprophesies like Isaiah 35. We can begin to love God by the power of the HolySpirit. We can think about God more often than never or twice a day. We cancall upon him in prayer. We can restrain ourselves when we know that goingfurther down the path of temptation would bring us into sin. We can begin to livea new life. What some can’t see or hear we can begin to see and hear.
But, as the apostle says, “Now wesee in a mirror dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now we know in part,then we shall know fully, even as we have ben fully known.” Paul istalking about how we only get an inkling in this life. I suspect an experience awaitsus that is something like those videos that I mentioned at the beginning ofthis sermon. Those little kids never knew that they could see so well until thefirst time those glasses were put on their faces. They didn’t know howbeautiful Mom’s voice was until they heard it. So it will be also for us.
What will it be like to see God? What will it be like tolook Jesus in the face? Jesus opens us up to this hope with his Gospel. No onehas seen God except Jesus who came from God. And yet, because of Jesus, we willsee God in his holiness and splendor. I suspect that just a moment of that willcontain more living in it than our entire life here below.
Therefore, do not be deceived. Don’t be tricked out of thishealing. Jesus warns us against following those who are blind: “If the blind lead the blind, they will both fall into the pit.”Do not be blind to God. Do not be blind to truth, love, righteousness, sin,justice, redemption, and many other spiritual things. Our world is full ofpeople who say that none of that matters. They are blind. They are closed in onthemselves. “Ephphatha!” Be opened to God and toone another. He who has ears to hear, let him hear!
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Let’s begin by defining a couple words: defilement andsanctification. These words are opposites. Defilement is when someone is madeunclean and unholy. Sanctification is when someone is made holy. Whether we aredefiled or sanctified is of utmost importance for how God regards us. If we aredefiled, then we are unacceptable before God. It’s like having something rottenin your home. It stinks. Put that stuff outside. It doesn’t belong in thehouse. That is how are we before God when we are defiled.
Being sanctified is the opposite. When we are holy, webelong with God. One of the ways that the Bible talks about holiness is bybeing properly dressed. When we are properly dressed we have no need to beashamed. If we were found in our underwear, or naked, we would be ashamed. Butwhen we are properly clothed we are acceptable. We can be seen. So it is forthose who are holy.
Defilement describes a state of being where we have nobusiness being together with God. Sanctification describes a state of beingwhere we belong together with God.
Understanding defilement and sanctification is essential forunderstanding the religion that God gave to the Israelites at Mt. Sinai in theOld Testament. God wanted the Israelites to be holy so that they could be withhim and he could be with them. To make the Israelites holy God instituted many laws,rituals, and practices. Moses wrote these down in Exodus, and, especially, inLeviticus. The entirety of Leviticus is God’s instructions for avoidingdefilement and what is to be done if someone has become defiled.
One of the regulations that God gave at that time was aboutclean and unclean foods. Clean food could be eaten without defilement. Uncleanfoods would defile the eater. For example, beef and lamb could be eaten. Pork,shellfish, and several other animals would defile the eater. We won’t get intothe whys and wherefores of this. You can read about that yourself in Leviticus11. What I’d like to point out is that according to the laws God gave to theIsraelites, there was such a thing as unclean food that would defile theIsraelites if they ate it.
This is important background information for our Gospelreading. For the nearly 1,500 years, from Moses to Jesus, the Jews observed thedistinction between clean and unclean food. But then in our Gospel reading Jesussays: “Hear me, all of you, and understand: There isnothing outside a person that by going into him can defile him, but the thingsthat come out of a person are what defile him.”
Let’s apply Jesus’s words to unclean food. Unclean food issomething from outside. It defiles. Is Jesus rejecting the distinction betweenclean and unclean food? Yes, he is. Jesus is even clearer, later, with hisdisciples when they asked him to explain himself. He said, “Then are you also without understanding? Do you not see thatwhatever goes into a person from outside cannot defile him, since it enters nothis heart but his stomach, and is expelled?” (Thus Jesus declared all foodsclean.) Jesus said, “All foods are clean.”
There seems to be an obvious contradiction between whatLeviticus 11 says and what Jesus says in our Gospel reading. Leviticus 11 saysthat there are several foods that what will defile you. Jesus says, “Nothing from the outside can defile a person. What defiles aperson is what goes out from a person.” The Pharisees and scribes—alwaysquick to point out any faults they find with Jesus or with his disciples—thoughtthat Jesus was taking away from what God had commanded. We heard in our firstreading that nothing should be added or taken away from what God has said.
But instead of thinking that Jesus is contradicting theScriptures or taking something away, it might be helpful to think of what he isdoing as fulfilling the Scriptures. The Law that God gave to theIsraelites at Mt. Sinai was binding for a time, but that was not meant to be anarrangement that would last for all time. Something new would take its place. Thiswas, in fact, already prophesied at that time.
In Deuteronomy 18, which is at the same time as Mt. Sinai, Mosesspeaks of a mysterious Someone who is to come, who will be like him, but evengreater. Moses calls this one the “prophet.” He says, “TheLord your God will raise up for you a prophet like me from among you, from yourbrother Israelites. Listen to him.” Jesus is the fulfillment of thisprophecy. Moses says, “Listen to him.” Thepeople had listened to Moses. Now we should listen to this Prophet. Moses saysso. So if Jesus declares that all foods are clean, then we should believe allfoods are clean. Jesus is Lord.
In order to do this, however, you must understand who Jesusis. You must correctly identify him as the prophet spoken of by Moses. Theproblem with the scribes and Pharisees was that they didn’t believe, or didn’twant to believe, that Jesus is this prophet. They didn’t want to listen to himeven though Moses told them that they should. Because they didn’t want to believethat Jesus is Lord, having authority over all things in heaven and on earth,they instead saw him as an enemy. They thought that he was contradicting Moses,taking away from Scripture, leading people astray. They became convinced thatthey would be doing God a favor if they got rid of him, and eventually they crucifiedhim.
This question, of who Jesus is, is important and highlyconsequential for every human being—not just for those scribes and Pharisees. Weknow what they thought of Jesus. What do you say about Jesus? Youranswer is of eternal significance. The Catechism teaches us the correct answerfor what we should say about Jesus. It says, “I believe that Jesus Christ is myLord.” That is the shortest creed in Christendom. What does it mean to be aChristian? Being a Christian is believing that Jesus Christ is your Lord.
When it comes to what we’ve been talking abouttoday—defilement and sanctification—Jesus being your Lord makes all thedifference. The Catechism goes on to describe Jesus’s lordship, what he does asmy Lord: “I believe that Jesus Christ is my Lord who has redeemed me, a lostand condemned person, purchased and won me from all sins, from death, and fromthe power of the devil; not with gold or silver, but with his holy, preciousblood and his innocent suffering and death.”
You can hear defilement language and sanctification languagein that description of Jesus’s lordship. We hear defilement language when weare spoken of as lost and condemned persons. We are defiled by what is in usand what comes out of us. It is as Jesus says in our Gospel reading, “What comes out of a person defiles him… From the heart comesevil thoughts, sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, coveting,wickedness, deceit, sensuality, envy, slander, pride, foolishness.”
Does what Jesus says describe you? Do you have evilthoughts? Are you guilty of sexual immorality, which in the Greek is porneia,which is where we get the word pornography? Do you covet? Do you lie? Do yougossip? I, unfortunately, have done these things and more, which means that Iam a lost and condemned person. As far as how I am in myself I am defiled andhave no business being together with God. I should be swept out and put withthe rest of the trash.
But there is sanctification language too—the opposite ofdefilement. The Catechism says that Jesus has redeemed me—a wonderful word! Iam redeemed! I have been purchased. I have been won—not with gold or silver,but with the holy, precious blood and the innocent suffering and death of myLord and your Lord. The sacrifice of this Lamb of God has brought about aneternal redemption so that all who trust in him will be clothed with holiness soas to live together with God.
In conclusion, defilement and sanctification might not bethe most common words. But whether we are defiled or sanctified is of eternalsignificance. Whether we are defiled or sanctified determines our relationshipwith God. When we are living in sin and unbelief, we are defiled. When we callout to Jesus in faith and say, “Have mercy on me, a sinner,” we are sanctified.
The stakes have been raised, so to speak, from what wasgiven at Mt. Sinai. Jesus reveals that our defilement is much deeper than wewould otherwise think or imagine. It goes all the way down into our heart, thecore of our being. But the remedy is also deeper. God has sent his Son to bethe Lord who redeems us.
Jesus is the one about whom Moses prophesied. We shouldlisten to him. What he has to say is not bad for us sinners, but good and lifegiving. As Jesus himself says, “I have not come inorder to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved throughme.” Listen to him.
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Jesus said, “Blessed are those whohunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be filled.”
Our Gospel reading today is the middle of a conversationthat turned into something like an argument. The conversation is between Jesusand some Jews who were seeking him. The reason why they were seeking him wasbecause they had been fed with the five loaves and two fish. That impressedthem. They were ready to get on board with Jesus. Why shouldn’t he be king?Then we’d have loaves and fishes aplenty.
But when Jesus had been found, he put a damper on theirplans. He said, “You shouldn’t work for food thatperishes, but for the food that endures to eternal life.” Jesus wouldnot only feed their bellies, but their souls too. There is a food that does notperish in the eating of it, but endures to eternal life. Jesus is that food. Hesays, “I am the bread of life.”
As you heard in the reading, this redirection of theirintentions didn’t go over very well. They grumbled. They couldn’t understandhim. They had liked the bread that they had eaten before. Why couldn’t he justmake some more. That would make them happy. But Jesus as bread? What does thateven mean and what are they supposed to do? Eat him? That’s ridiculous. Theywant bread made from barley, not bread made of flesh.
But Jesus’s goal wasn’t to do whatever needed to be done inorder to be popular. When you understand that Jesus wasn’t trying to entertainthe crowd, or seek their approval, but instead to speak the truth about hisFather and about himself, then his words become more understandable. Theybecome more understandable, but only to those who will believe. If you will notbelieve, then Jesus’s words will be strange at best but what is much morelikely is that you will be repulsed by them. If you will believe, then what hesays is simple and wonderful.
Let’s take his main statement, which begins our reading. Hesays, “I am the bread of life; whoever comes to meshall not hunger, and whoever believes in me shall never thirst.” Jesusis the bread of life. Faith eats him. If you eat this bread, then you will nothunger and you will not thirst. This could be referring to physical hunger andthirst if need be. I wouldn’t put it past Jesus who fed 5,000 with five loavesand two fish. But physical hunger and thirst are not the only kind of lack we mighthave. Spiritual hunger and thirst are much more important. Spiritually wehunger and thirst after righteousness. Hungering and thirsting afterrighteousness is another way of saying that we haven’t got any. We aren’trighteous.
We are well aware how damaging it can be to lack food anddrink. We can’t live very long without them. What about righteousness? Can welive without righteousness? In a sense we can, but it isn’t much of anexistence.
If we are living without righteousness then we are alwaysneeding to live in delusions and under the cover of darkness. We have to hide, sowe aren’t found out. We don’t want to be exposed otherwise people will knowwhat we are really like. It is very important to delude yourself about God, orabout what happens when we die. If you are not righteous, then you cannot enjoythe thought of meeting God or being judged by him unless you make yourselfforget all the stuff that you have done. Without righteousness we do well tostay away as long as we can, until we can stave off death no longer. Then ourfear begins in earnest.
If a person was righteous, then he or she would not need toworry. It would be nice to have no fear. But many people do not believe that becomingrighteous is possible. That’s understandable. Consult your own experience. Whohasn’t done shameful, embarrassing stuff? Don’t we all need to hide from thelight lest our evil deeds be exposed? That sounds right to me. We’ve all blownit one way or another. But this is where Jesus’s words in our reading today areso important. They address this need that can seem so impossible to do anythingabout. Be that as it may, Jesus still says what he says.
He’s the bread of life. All you who hunger and thirst forrighteousness—because you haven’t got any—may eat him and be filled. Then youare righteous. Then you can stand in the judgement. You need not fear thelight. Why? Because Jesus was punished in your place for your sins, and hegives you his own righteousness as the Son of God in the place of yoursinfulness.
I admit that the picture is strange. Jesus tells us to heathim because he is the bread of life. The Jews grumbled among themselves. Whatdoes he mean when he says that he is bread? How are we supposed to eat him? Ourbrains work the same way as their brains worked, so I think we can understandtheir confusion. But Jesus does not back down. He doesn’t apologize. He pressesforward with his points and, if anything, gets only more extreme.
Extreme actions are needed to cure our lack ofrighteousness. It is not just saying you’re sorry. It’s not trying harder.Those are some not so extreme actions that come to mind. We must eat Jesus, theliving bread sent from heaven. Desperate times call for desperate measures. Wedesperately need righteousness. Every other attempt will leave us hungry. Thenthe best we’ve got to combat our lack of righteousness is deluding ourselves ortrying to stay in the darkness.
This is all completely unnecessary. Jesus lays out his Father’swill in such a simple way in our reading today. He says, “This is the will of him who sent me, that I should losenothing of all that he has given me, but raise it up on the last day. For thisis the will of my Father, that everyone who looks on the Son and believes inhim should have eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day.”
So simple: Look to the Son. Believein him. You’ll have eternal life. Any sinner can grasp hold of thatbecause he says nothing about making it up to God. He says nothing about payingfor your own sins. If you know anything about yourself you know that youhaven’t got that in you. Instead, it’s “Look to theSon. Believe in him.” That’s the Father’s will. You had norighteousness, but now, believing in Jesus, Jesus has fed you with himself asthe bread of life. It’s as simple as that.
This reminds me of my favorite statement about evangelism.Evangelism is telling people the Gospel, which is the good news about Jesus.Someone has said that evangelism is like one beggar telling another beggarwhere to get bread. Beggars, as you know, don’t have any money. They can’t buyanything. No food. So when beggars get food they like it. They might even telltheir friends where they found it.
So, also, with us Christians. We are beggars when it comesto righteousness. We haven’t got any. But then Jesus comes along and says,“I’ll be your righteousness. I am the living bread thathas come down from heaven. Eat and be satisfied. Eat and live.” Thebeggar goes from hungry to full. Shouldn’t we beggars tell our fellow beggars wherewe got bread? They too may be forgiven. They too may be completely righteousthrough faith. Point them in the direction of Jesus who wishes to make himselfknown throughout the world by means of us beggars. We have tasted and seen thatthe Lord is good. Blessed is the man who takes refuge in him.
Jesus said, “Blessed are those whohunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be filled.”
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About a month ago we heard a reading that was similar to ourGospel reading today. In that reading Jesus and the disciples embarked in aboat to cross the Sea of Galilee. All of a sudden a great windstorm arose sothat water was filling the boat. The disciples ran back to Jesus, who wassleeping in the stern, and said, “Don’t you care thatwe are dying?” And Jesus rose from his sleep, rebuked the wind and thewaves, and there was a great calm. Then Jesus said, “Whyare you so afraid? Have you still no faith?”
Our reading today is similar. The disciples are again in aboat, although this time Jesus was not with them. Jesus had sent them across whilehe went up on a mountain to pray. In our reading today a strong wind arose, butit was not so strong that the boat was in danger of sinking. It just made forterribly hard work as they rowed against it. They rowed for hours until Jesuscame to them walking on the water. The disciples assumed that he was a ghost.No human being can walk on water. Jesus told them that it was him. Don’t beafraid. When he got into the boat, the wind ceased.
Then Mark says, “The disciples wereutterly astounded.” But I think that’s lacking something. Perhaps a morecolloquial translation might be: “The disciples wereout of their minds,” or “Their minds were blown.”But not in a good way—at least according to Mark—because he goes on to say, “They were utterly astounded, because they did not understandabout the loaves; their hearts were hardened.”
Mark brings up the loaves. He is referring to what we heardabout last week—Jesus’s feeding of the 5,000. Jesus multiplied five loaves andtwo fish so that 5,000 men ate until they were full. The disciples didn’tunderstand this. Their hearts were hard. It seems that what Mark is saying isthat after such a magnificent display of Jesus’s power nothing should surprisethem—not even walking on water. The disciples didn’t get it. They were unbelieving.
The disciples’ unbelief is the aspect of both readings thatI’d like to focus on. In both readings the disciples are identified as lackingfaith. In the reading from about a month ago Jesus asked them, “Do you still have no faith?” And in our reading todaythe disciples’ hearts are described as being hardened. These twelve men werethe people who were closest to Jesus. How could they have no faith?
Maybe they did—at least according to their own estimation. Isuspect that if we could travel back in time to interview the disciples, we mightfind that they would not have agreed with Jesus’s and Mark’s characterizationof them. I think if we were to ask them whether they had faith they would havesaid, “Of course we have faith!” That would be pretty convincing too. They hadleft their livelihoods behind. They had followed Jesus. They heard his teaching.They saw his miracles. These all seem to be very good reasons to believe thatthey had faith, and yet they didn’t.
This shows that there is a difference between sayingyou have faith or believing you have faith and actually havingfaith. I think these disciples would have said that they had faith and believedthat they had faith, but when push came to shove they had no faith. This wasn’tthe last time either.
When Jesus was arrested the disciples quit believing in him.The shepherd was struck and the sheep were scattered. This was despite theirintentions and vows of allegiance. Just a few hours before, when Jesus wasinstituting the Lord’s Supper, all the disciples said that they would ratherdie than forsake him. Peter said that even if all the other disciples wouldleave him, Peter wouldn’t, but we know what Peter did a few hours later. When repeatedlyquestioned whether he was one of Jesus’s disciples, Peter finally said, “I blankedy-blank don’t know the man!” And the roostercrowed.
What we can learn from the example of the disciples is that eventhe “best” Christians, who have the best advantages, can fool themselves whenit comes to the estimation of their faith. There’s no reason to believe thatthe disciples were being anything but sincere on Maundy Thursday when they saidthey were going to stick with Jesus no matter what. They believed their faithwas very strong. What they believed didn’t matter. They lost their faith. Theyquit believing that Jesus could do anything.
The reason why I am focusing on the disciples’ unbelief is becausewe can be like them. We might like to indulge in thinking about the strength ofour faith. We have our credentials just like the disciples. We’ve been membersof this church for a long time. We’ve been taught. We’ve sacrificed. We’ve sentour kids to parochial school. And it’s not like these thoughts are altogetherbad or untrue. The disciples had similar thoughts: They had left everything forJesus. They learned from him. They didn’t give up following him. Certainly suchactions are not bad or without fruit.
Where a disciple’s faith goes wrong, however, is when faithis put in anything besides Jesus. A false faith is a faith that’s in one’s ownself, in one’s own actions, in one’s own feelings in one’s own estimation offaith. For disciples of Jesus the actions or feelings that we might believe in canbe quite pious, having a lot to do with Jesus. Certainly the apostles’ thoughtsand feelings were very much tied up with Jesus. But faith must be grounded inJesus as the one who acts, as the one who saves. He can do anything. We don’thelp him with our actions or feelings or estimations of our own faith. Thesethings seem as likely to hurt as to help.
Therefore, as we see so often in the Bible, it is notuncommon for disciples to be humiliated. I know that’s a strong word. Beinghumiliated is related to being humble. Being humble is the opposite of beingproud. Pride comes before the fall, so being humiliated is by no means theworst thing that can happen to us. It’s not fun, but if we will accept it, itcan do us a world of good.
It was good for these disciples. It probably stung whenJesus asked how it was that they still didn’t have faith. I’m sure they wereashamed by how they got scared and ran away. This couldn’t have been how theyhad envisioned their faith journey. But their dreams of grandeur were not as piousas they appeared. They were a subtle replacement of Jesus being the Savior. Theircomplimenting of themselves, and their measuring of themselves as to how theywere so much better than others—all these pleasurable thoughts weren’t worth ahill of beans. They learned that by bitter experience. They were humiliated.They couldn’t trust in themselves. They hadn’t stuck with Jesus. What waswonderful, however, was how Jesus stuck by them. He stuck by them when theywere so foolish and ignoble and had so thoroughly embarrassed themselves.
This is an important lesson. What does it mean and what doesit look like to be a Christian? Having become Christians do we now soar intothe stratosphere on eagles’ wings? That would be nice! If you can pull it off,then good for you! But don’t be surprised if your experience should be like theapostles’ experience.
Your experience could be along the same lines as we heardabout in our Gospel reading. We can get worn out. The disciples had rowedagainst that miserable wind for hours on end. We’re not at our best when we aretired. I wouldn’t be surprised if the disciples well remembered who it was thatsent them on that miserable journey. Why had Jesus done this to them? Why hadhe made them so miserable? The long and short of it was that the disciples werenot looking to Jesus for their strength, for their renewal, for their comfort,for their peace. That is why they were out of their minds when he showed up.They hadn’t been thinking of him.
Can’t you sympathize with that? I sure can. I do not thinkon Jesus as much as I should. I am particularly bad at thinking of him when I’mtired, when I’m worn down, when I’m looking for comfort. I don’t really believethat Jesus can do anything.
So it goes. I am always repenting. I’ve disappointed myselfcountless times. I wish that wasn’t so, but it is, and it’s not the worstthing. It’s shown me over and over again that I am not trustworthy. I cannotsave myself. I have not graduated from God’s forgiving grace. I go crawlingback again and again: “Jesus, have mercy on me, asinner!” I’d like to believe in myself, but my weaknesses and sins teachme that this would be a very foolish thing to believe in. If I am to have anyhope of being judged as righteous before God, Jesus must do it all.
Maybe this resonates with you too. We can be friends,sharing our common love and trust in Jesus who saves disciples who are all toooften disappointing. Jesus, on the other hand, never disappoints. Trust in him,not in yourself.
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Be faithful unto death and you willreceive the crown of everlasting life.
At the end of last week’s Gospel reading Jesus sent out the12 apostles. They went out and did what Jesus told them to do. They proclaimedthat people should repent. They cast out demons and anointed people who weresick with oil and healed them. The apostles were making a name for Jesus by doingthe works Jesus had given them to do in his name.
Our Gospel reading today follows immediately after lastweek’s reading, and as you can recall, today’s reading was about the beheadingof John the Baptist. Our reading today is linked in an interesting way withlast week’s reading, even though they seem to be completely different topics.At the very beginning of our reading today it says, “KingHerod heard of it.” The “it” that Herodheard of was the work of the apostles in Jesus’s name. When Herod heard ofthis, he immediately thought of what he had done to John the Baptist. Hisconscience was bothered, and understandably so.
Mark then goes on to tell the story of what Herod and hisillegitimate wife, Herodias, had done. Theirs was a story of unbelief andunrepentance. They did not submit to the teaching that John the Baptist taughtthem. They resisted, each in their own ways. Herod might not have been quite soupset as Herodias, but he still put him in prison and was responsible forbeheading him. Herodias was much more straightforward. She hated him.
She hated him because John had said that what they weredoing was wrong. Herod and Herodias were not originally married to each other.Both of them were originally married to other spouses. Herodias was originallymarried to Herod’s brother Philip. But they wanted to be together, so theydivorced their spouses and married each other.
John the Baptist told Herod that this was adultery. The 6thcommandment says, “You shall not commit adultery.”Marriage is a lifelong promise of love and faithfulness between husband andwife. God is the one who joins the two to become one flesh, and God is the onewho ends marriages by bringing about the death of either husband or wife. Thenthe surviving spouse is free to marry another. When a person divorces theirspouse without sufficient justification that is taking the place of God. God issupposed to decide when marriages end, not us.
I’d like to pause for a moment to take stock of our ownunderstanding of these things in our time. God’s commands concerning divorceand remarriage are perhaps not well known, but they are certainly not wellheeded among us. We have a problem also with fornication, which is having sexwith someone to whom you are not married. Sexual experimentation with multiplepartners is the norm. Living together with someone to whom you are not marriedis the norm.
Whether these things are normal or not is beside the point.God is clear. You shall not commit adultery. You shall not fornicate. You shallnot have this special sexual relationship without promising lifelongfaithfulness. God’s “no” to these things are so that he may say “yes” to arelationship that is deeper, healthier, and life-giving. Whether you or I likeor dislike these commands, doesn’t change the fact that they are God’scommands. The appropriate response to God’s commands that we have not kept is tofear God and repent.
It is obvious that neither Herod nor Herodias feared God andrepented. It is quite likely, in fact, that neither of them thought much aboutGod at all. They justified themselves in their own sight, so that they could dowhat they wanted to do. When John the Baptist contradicted their justificationof themselves, they probably didn’t think that God had anything against them.They probably thought that John was against them with some outdated, misplaced zealfor sexual purity laws. Thus they directed their hatred against John, when itwas in fact God that they had a problem with. John was just the messenger. Johnwas a faithful messenger, but Herod and Herodias punished him—first byimprisoning him, then by beheading him.
Such is the experience Christians will have who want to befaithful messengers of God. Jesus doesn’t keep this a secret. He says, “If they have hated me, they will also hate you.” Ifyou want to be a disciple of Jesus, then you will take up his cross and followhim. The hatred of rebellious sinners that is really against God will be pouredout on those who remain faithful to his Word.
The anger of rebellious sinners is understandable, if youwill only consider how you yourself are. I don’t know of anyone, includingmyself, who likes to hear criticism of themselves. My first reaction is tostrike out against the one who tells me I’m wrong. Although this isunderstandable as an immediate reaction, may God grant us grace so that we cometo our senses. We should realize that we are not just dealing with flesh andblood. God is behind the faithful messenger. We should not be like Herod and Herodias,who did not come to their senses. They continued on in unbelief andunrepentance.
If we are looking for an example to follow, we should belike John the Baptist. He is an example of faithfulness. John loved God andJesus. Because John loved God, he made it his ambition to please God. John wasnot ashamed of God’s commands or God’s promises. John believed that the surestway to happiness and eternal life was by following what God teaches in theBible.
John was very brave. He condemned sin wherever it might befound regardless of the power or authority of the ones who were sinning. Hecalled the highest leaders in the church at that time a “brood of vipers,”because they were a brood of vipers. He called Herod and Herodias adulterersbecause they were adulterers. This last diagnosis, even though it was true,resulted in his death.
John could have easily avoided death and a whole bunch oftrouble if he would only have not cared about God’s commands or God’s promisesor God’s kingdom. All that John would have needed to do was to say, “Nevermind. No big deal. Let’s all just life and let live.” Immediately he would havebeen released from prison. If only John would have melted into the generalpopulation, who are quite baffled and cowardly when it comes to spiritualthings, he wouldn’t have been opposed. John could have had a much more comfortablelife.
But if John would have been like that, then he would nothave been the bright and shining light that he was, leading people out of thedevil’s kingdom into God’s kingdom. He would have left people just the way theywere, lost in sin and unbelief. God’s Word would remain unused. John wouldn’thave accomplished anything that he did accomplish. John’s faithfulness to God’sWord helped an untold number of people to escape hell by repenting of theirsins and believing in Jesus. John baptized an untold number of people for theforgiveness of their sins. He pointed to Jesus and said, “Behold, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.”John was a good and helpful man.
You can be like John too. You are fully equipped with whatJohn had. You have God’s commands. You have God’s promises. Those commands andpromises bring about repentance and faith in those whom God has chosen. You canbe a bright and shining light that helps people escape from the devil’sworthless lies and leads people to God’s truth in Jesus that saves all whobelieve in him.
But this will not necessarily be easy or painless. You willbe tempted to please people rather than trying to please God. You must be bravein the face of opposition. There are so many ways that people might want topunish you for being different from the general population, for being proud ofGod’s commands and promises, which are the path to eternal life.
It is not beyond the realm of possibility that you couldshare a similar fate as John the Baptist. You could be thrown in prison. Youcould have your head chopped off. That wouldn’t be the worst thing. If that isthe way that God would have you meet your Lord and Savior, then let that daycome speedily. You will have lost nothing and gained everything by being faithfulto Jesus.
Martin Luther says in his famous hymn, “A Might Fortress isOur God.” God is a mighty fortress fully sufficient to save us in uncertaintimes. With the troubles we heard about last night in our nation, God’scommands and promises are still our faithful guide which cannot and will notlet us down. A mighty fortress is our God, and he remains that way no matterwhat happens. Martin Luther says as much at the close of that hymn:
And take they our life,
Goods, fame, child and wife,
Though these all be gone,
Our victory has been won;
The Kingdom ours remaineth.
Be faithful unto death, and you willreceive the crown of everlasting life.
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Jesus said, “Don’t be afraid; justbelieve.”
A person might feel jealous hearing our Gospel readingtoday. There was a lot of healing. Jesus was told about Jairus’s little girlwho was extremely sick. While he was on his way to heal her, a woman who had aflow of blood was healed. By the time that Jesus got to the house the little girlhad died, and Jesus raised her from the dead. Jesus showed his great powers ofhealing. Some of you might like some healing for yourself, or for someone youknow and love. Why can’t Jesus heal some more?
In my sermon last week I spoke of fighting or wrestling withGod. Our reason is skeptical of there being any benefit for ourselves fromengaging in this. How could we ever win? God is much stronger than us. And in away our reason is correct. In the examples of the fighters and the wrestlerswith God that I spoke about with you last week, the people didn’t come out ofthe contest stronger. They came out weaker. But, as Paul says, “When I am weak, then I am strong.” The bones that Godhas broken rejoice. These fighters were humbled, but they believed that Godwould exalt them. They came into the fight with an idea of what they would likeGod to do for them, they came out the other end with God having done somethingthat was different from what they expected, but also something that was more.
What I’ve just described is what some people have called“the theology of the cross.” The cross that is being referred to is Jesus’scross as well as our cross as Christians that Jesus talks about when he says, “If you want to be my disciple, then take up your cross andfollow me.” The term “theology of the cross” is a way to summarize thestrange way that God works.
Think of how God worked when the Father sent his Son to bethe Christ. You might expect God to have sent him with great power and glory. Jesusis God after all. But you know what God does. He causes Jesus to be born in astable. Away in a manger, no crib for a bed. Those are humbler circumstandesthan you were born into. Even if you were born in a house, that’s nothingcompared to Jesus’s birth. And the humility continued. He gave and gave.
Finally the Father had his Son nailed to the cross. To alloutward appearances, from the perspective of reason, it was no longer possibleto believe in this man was God’s Christ. It looked like it was impossible thathe could be or remain king. He just became weaker and weaker until he died.
We, of course, know that God was accomplishing the mostglorious and beautiful things through the bloody, gory cross. We know that Godmade peace between himself and sinners. Although God humbled Jesus to the pointof death, even death on the cross, God has raised him from the dead. God hashighly exalted Jesus so that his name is above every name. At the name of Jesusevery knee will bow in heaven, and on earth, and those under the earth. JesusChrist is Lord!
But who’d have thought it while seeing him gasping andcrying out from the cross? Nobody! Not even his disciples could continue tobelieve in him. They thought it was all over and done with. Thomas, one of thetwelve, wouldn’t even take his fellow disciples’ word for it. He was nevergoing to believe in Jesus again unless he saw the marks and felt the wounds. Soit goes. Such is the power of reason. Reason rises up against what God says anddoes, declaring him to be unacceptable.
Reason can strike out at the cross—the very core of ourfaith. To my mind there is no more direct way to disagree with Christianitythan to say that what God did to Jesus was wrong. Perhaps you’ve heard thisreferred to as “divine child abuse.” It can have a ring of truth to it. Why didGod do it like that? Why didn’t God just snap his fingers and make everythingall better? Maybe you’ve wondered that before. If we were God we wouldn’t usethat nasty cross.
So it is that reason and faith go their separate ways. Reasonsays that the cross is crude, ugly, unnecessary. Faith accepts and loves thecross because faith trusts in the God who put Jesus on that cross. Faith waitsfor the salvation that God has promised even if that salvation may tarry for atime.
Now let’s go back to the thought with which I began. Imentioned how some of you might be jealous upon hearing how Jesus did all thishealing. You or someone you love needs healing. Our reason can be the enemy toour faith here. Our reason might ask, “Why doesn’t Jesus heal right here, rightnow, in the way that I want him to?” What’s his problem? Why doesn’t he do whatI want?
To be a human being means that we have our reason. It is notstrange that our reason should act this way. What makes a Christian a Christian,however, is believing that Jesus Christ is Lord. Jesus Christ is Lord with allhis forgiveness. Jesus Christ is Lord with all his resurrected power and glory.Jesus Christ is Lord with his cross, with his testing, with his waiting, withhis wrestling, with his humbling, with his exalting. Jesus is who Jesus is. Wecan’t pull him apart and take those things that we like best about him and dumpthe rest in the garbage.
Maybe one of the things that you don’t really like aboutJesus is that he hasn’t healed you, or that he hasn’t healed someone that youlove. If you could, you’d dump that part of him into the garbage. Well, myadvice is that if you feel that way, then you should say that to him! We talkedabout this last week as well. Your prayers don’t need to be polite. God alreadyknows how you feel, so you might as well be honest about it. More prayers arebetter, not less. Tell him what you want. God will hear your prayer.
However—and this is a big however—he might not answer yourprayers the way you want or expect. He might not answer your prayers the waythat you would want to require of him. “If I’m going to pray to you, then youbetter do what I want.”
This is true even in the cases of healing that we heardabout in our Gospel reading. I doubt very much that that woman with the flow ofblood prayed that she would suffer from her condition for twelve years, thatshe would spend all her money on doctors, that she would be the victim ofmedical malpractice. When she touched the hem of Jesus’s robe, that was whenthe time was right.
I doubt that the father and mother of that sick little girlprayed that they wouldn’t get their request to Jesus on time, that Jesuswouldn’t get there in time, and that their little girl would die. They didn’tpray that their little girl would lose all the color in her cheeks so that motherand father would cry rivers of tears. I’m sure they prayed, “O God! Save ourdaughter!” And he did—just not in the way that they were expecting.
Nevertheless, at the end of all of this, despite their tearsand sorrows, I am sure that all of these people whom Jesus blessed were betteroff than if they had been healed in the way that they were expecting. God doesbetter to us that we would ever do for ourselves. But to believe that requiresfaith. Our reason might have all kinds of things to say to the contrary.
We can easily apply this to ourselves and our desires. Allof us have things we want from God. We should make our requests known to him, firmlybelieving that he will answer our prayers. If, for no other reason, we shouldbe confident because we know that God has given us Jesus. Jesus is God’s mostprecious treasure. If God has given us Jesus, then he has to give us every goodthing.
But here’s the thing: We don’t know how he will do it. Wedon’t know if it will take twelve years. We don’t know if we will lose all ourmoney. We don’t know if we or that person you love will have to die firstbefore the healing will take place. But it will take place. And it will beglorious. You will be better off on the other end than if God would doeverything exactly the way you want him to do. But to believe that takes faith.May God grant you such faith! Amen.
Jesus said, “Don’t be afraid; justbelieve.”
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“When I am weak, then I am strong.”
“Don’t you care that we are dying?”That’s what the disciples said. The wind was too strong. The waves were toohigh. Some of them were probably trying to use anything they could find to bailout the boat. They were fighting for their lives. What was Jesus doing? Sleeping.Didn’t he care?
Our Old Testament reading is from the book of Job. Job hadbeen a very good man. He loved his family. He prayed for his kids every day.Then his life became miserable. His property was destroyed. His children werekilled. He lost his health. Most of the book of Job is made up of conversationsbetween Job and his friends. They discussed how God could do this to poor Job.Didn’t God care?
In both of these situations you can tell that there weresome pretty raw emotions. When the disciples said, “Don’tyou care that we are dying?” they were yelling so as to be heard abovethe wind and the waves. Job, also, in his discussions, said stuff like, “Why did you do this to me God?” and “I wish I had never been born.” They were fighting withGod.
Fighting with God doesn’t seem like it should be a goodidea, but this is one of many instances having to do with our relationship withGod when we should not be led by our reason. We should let our reason take thelead with many things in life, but not with our relationship with God. Ourreason has a surprising amount to say about the topic of God. We naturally haveideas about how things should be, how God should be, what he should do. Ourreason says that God should act in such a way where we don’t ever have to fightwith him. If we are fighting with him, then things must be really bad, ourreason says.
The Scriptures speak differently. The greatest figures inthe Bible struggle mightily with God. Think of Abraham. God commanded Abrahamto sacrifice his son, his only son, Isaac, whom he loved. What a fight Abraham musthave had!
Think of Abraham’s grandson, Jacob. One night Jacob was atthe lowest point in his life. He was pretty sure that at least half of hisfamily was going to be annihilated the next day by his brother Esau and his men.Then, in the middle of the night, a strange man shows up out of nowhere so thatJacob had to fight for his life. This was God. And God played kind of dirty—hepopped Jacob’s hip out of joint so that he walked with a limp the rest of hislife. Jacob, though—that wonderful man—wouldn’t let God go until God blessedhim. And God did bless him. God gave him his new name of “Israel,” which means“wrestler with God.” The people of God in the Old Testament came to be calledby this name, Israel, which means “wrestler with God.”
There are almost countless other examples I could give you.Wrestling—fighting—with God is not forbidden. In fact, it seem to be how wegrow. But it’s hard. It’s deeply unpleasant. We don’t want God to act in such away where we have to wrestle with him. We want what those disciples undoubtedlywanted. We want smooth sailing forever. Each day should be better than the onebefore. But then suddenly, out of nowhere, a great windstorm arises and you arein a fight for your life.
What are you going to say about that when that happens? Isit just bad luck? Has the wheel of fortune landed on bankrupt? Does God exist?Would a good and omnipotent God do such awful things? These are the kinds ofthoughts that our reason comes up with in order to avoid fighting with God. Wewant a nice life, and if God isn’t going to help us have a nice life, then bedone with him.
But this is the worst thing that we can do. Even with humanrelationships, the lowest point is not when there is fighting and wrestling.The lowest point is when the person despises the other, won’t have anything todo with them. There’s no fighting. There’s no heart-to-heart. The best to behoped for is polite chit-chat.
There is a way to have a kind of spiritual chit-chat withGod, too. The politeness reveals something terrible—a huge distance between theperson and God. God never commands us to be polite with him, nor do theexamples from the Scriptures bear that out. The disciples were not polite withJesus. They screamed at him: “Don’t you care that weare dying!” And Job too: “I wish that I hadnever been born. I wish I had died while I was still in my mother’s womb.”Those are ugly thoughts. They are accusatory too. “It’s your fault, God!” “Why didyou do this?”
The many examples of the greatest figures in the Bible giveus permission to open our hearts to God and let him have it. This is calledlamentation. We have a book of the Bible that’s called Lamentations. We havepsalms of lament. King David, the greatest of the psalmists, composed thesaddest songs. He said stuff like, “God, why won’t youanswer me?” and “Why have you forsaken me?”and “Turn away from your fierce anger and be mercifulto me!”
One of the benefits of using the Psalms is that they teachus a much larger vocabulary for our prayers and praises. Our vocabulary is veryoften limited because our reason tells us we need to be polite. I could imaginethat God might get sick of all this politeness, just like we get sick of thecold politeness we receive. God wants our heart. The greatest commandment isthat we should love the Lord our God with all our heart, soul, strength, andmind, and that we should love our neighbor as ourselves. We need to openourselves up to him. Tell him what you really think. And that might mean thatyou will wrestle with him and fight with him.
And what can we expect to happen when we wrestle with God?Our reason is very interested in this question. We want what’s best for us, andso will this wrestling and fighting business make us better off? The answer isthat we will be better off, but not the way we would expect. We expect that wewill become stronger, but what the examples from the Scriptures reveal is thatwe will become weaker.
Jacob, for the rest of his days, walked with a limp. Jobfinished up his conversation with God by saying, “ThereforeI despise myself, and repent in dust and ashes.” Consider the words thatJesus spoke in our Gospel reading. He said to his disciples, “Why are you so afraid? Have you still no faith?” Maybebefore this ordeal they thought that they were doing pretty well, that they hada strong faith. After wrestling with God they discover that they had no faithat all.
Why should a person enter into a contest with God if it isonly going to reveal one’s own weakness, helplessness, faithlessness, and soon? A person should do that because of this wonderful saying from St. Paul withwhich we began. He said, “When I am weak, then I amstrong.” Paul knew that when he was weak then he was strong because Godhad said to him, “Don’t worry about your failings. My graceis sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.”
It’s God’s power that we want and need, not our own power.When I feel good or strong or righteous or whatever, that doesn’t meanthat I really am those things. A windstorm could show up out of nowhere,and prove that to me. When I am weak, however, when I’m not relying uponmyself, when I’m placing all my trust and hope in Jesus, then I am strong—eveninfinitely so, because Jesus is infinitely strong.
We see this play out in a wonderful way in our Gospelreading today. The disciples’ wrestling match with God—the disciple’s wrestlingmatch with God’s wind and God’s waves—revealed that they were not as strong asthey thought they were. Their terror during the ordeal revealed that theirfaith wasn’t as resilient as they thought it was.
But what does any of that matter? We don’t save ourselves byour own strength, nor do we save ourselves by our estimation of our own faith.Jesus saves! And through this experience the disciples were turned away fromthemselves and became completely captivated with Jesus. They tinkle with fearand say, “Who is this that even the wind and the seaobey him?” That is the spot to be in.
I know that for some of you terrible windstorms have comeupon you. Out of nowhere the smooth sailing is over. Learn from the Scriptures whatto do. The Bible teaches us a different way, as we have talked about today. Openyour heart to the God who has wounded you. That takes a lot of courage! Don’tlet him go until he gives you a blessing, and you will be blessed. As Davidsays in Psalm 51, “The bones that God has broken willrejoice.”
“Cast all your anxieties on him,because he cares for you.” Amen.
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“The Pharisees went out andimmediately held counsel with the Herodians against Jesus, how to destroy him.”
Perhaps you’ve noticed before that there are some people wholike laws and rules, and there are others who don’t. Those who like laws andrules usually also like organization. They like to have their things in theirproper places. They like to be on-time. Those are nice things that can be saidabout them. There are also negative things that can generally be said aboutthem. They can be unimaginative and boring. They can be judgmental and rude.Those who don’t like laws and rules as much can be somewhat the opposite. Theyare often more flexible. They can be more fun. But they might not be as good atorganization or getting tasks done.
Between the two, I think those people are more highly valuedwho like laws and rules. They often make better employees. They do as they’retold. And if the meaning of life is to have a job or to make money, then thesefolks are better. They’re more productive.
Among many of the Jews at Jesus’s time the purpose of lifewas to follow the laws of Moses. That can be hard for us to imagine in ourmoney-soaked culture, but so it was. There were Jews whose stated ambition wasto follow God’s Law carefully and zealously. That doesn’t sound like it shouldever be a bad thing, but as we heard in our Gospel reading, these people becameJesus’s enemies. They hated him and wanted to destroy him. Why? Because hedidn’t follow their rules.
The rules that were especially at issue in our reading hadto do with the third commandment: “Remember the Sabbathday by keeping it holy.” God commanded the Israelites not to work on theseventh day of the week. The Jews were extremely careful about keeping thiscommandment. They came up with well-organized lists of things that ought not bedone because such things would be “work.” No work was to be done on theSabbath.
You heard in our reading how the disciples were walkingthrough the grainfields on the Sabbath. What were they doing? Work—according tothe Pharisees. They were plucking heads of grain, rubbing off the chaff, andpopping them into their mouths. They were harvesting and threshing.
And you might think that this is no big deal. It was just afew kernels. But you’d be wrong. Anyone who knows anything about rules knowsthat if you let them take an inch they’ll take a mile. These disciples werejust harvesting a few kernels, but what if somebody else started to takehandfuls? What’s to stop someone from getting out the sickle? Before you knowit, the whole field has been harvested on the Sabbath! No! Nip it in the bud.Not even a single kernel is to be harvested on the Sabbath.
Then, in the second half of the reading, Jesus came into asynagogue on the Sabbath. There was a man whose hand was withered. Theywondered whether Jesus might do the work of healing on the Sabbath. Lo andbehold, he did! Just as they suspected. Jesus was a Sabbath-breaker.
We might understandably be critical of these Pharisees andimmediately come to Jesus’s defense, but I think we can learn some importantthings if we look at the situation from their perspective. They were fullyconvinced that they were right. They were doing what they’d always been doing, andwhat they’d always been doing was to be extremely serious about the Sabbath.They liked to get things just right. They had read many books about it. They’dbuilt up a vast knowledge of what was allowable, what was forbidden, and whatmight be in the middle. According to this vast knowledge they knew that Jesuswas dead wrong.
This left them in a predicament—although it wasn’t really apredicament. Either they could forsake all their learning and all theirpractices and follow Jesus, or they could reject Jesus. It wasn’t a harddecision. Who was this Jesus anyway? Somebody from the sticks. Everybody knowsthat nothing good ever comes from Nazareth.
So the Pharisees were not troubled by their decision, but inpoint of fact they had made a terrible mistake. They believed that the worldneeded them and their organization. The world needed their books with all oftheir wisdom. They were wrong. The simplest Christian knows what the worldneeds. The world needs Jesus. Truth and goodness will only come through faithin him.
Jesus tried to help the Pharisees. He tried to show them thathe was the Messiah, the Christ, the King. Jesus mentioned King David. KingDavid and his disciples ate the showbread from the tabernacle that was supposedto be eaten only by the priests. The Jews had been waiting for someone likeDavid, and here he was! Jesus and his disciples could take the liberty ofplucking heads of grain just as David had taken liberty with the showbread.
Admittedly, that demonstration is a little subtle, but theother things Jesus said and did were not subtle at all. They were very direct.Jesus flat out said that he is the Son of Man—a messianic title. “The Son of Man is Lord of the Sabbath,” he said,referring to himself. And Jesus showed his power by healing the man’s witheredhand. He produced a miracle to validate what he had been saying.
But the Pharisees were blind. They weren’t literally blind,but what they should have seen they didn’t see. They should have seen thatJesus is the Christ, but they saw an enemy instead. They didn’t see a miracle;they saw a Sabbath-breaker. It’s like they were bewitched. Here Jesus was withall his grace and power, but all they care about are their stupid little rules.Their stupid little rules have never saved anyone, nor will they save anyone. Thereis only one Savior—Jesus of Nazareth. Everything else can and must be castaside for this pearl of great price. There is no organization, no institution, noproud history that can stand in the way of the One whom God has sent. They werewrong.
Let’s now consider how this might apply to us. We can learnimportant things from these Pharisees who rejected Jesus. Imagine if Jesuswould have taken a different tack with the Pharisees. Imagine if he come up to themand spoken their language, so to speak. What if he would have talked about how they,as the most fastidious Jews, were the real Jews. The other Jews were Jews-in-name-only.Those ignorant people didn’t even know what Rabbi Hillel had said about this orthat... If Jesus would have talked with them like that, then Jesus would havebeen part of their club. They would have loved him as one of their own.
So it is with us. Imagine if Jesus were to sidle up to usand say, “I’ve been paying attention, and guess what? You’re the best. Yep. Ilove everything that you’ve been doing. Those other people—they just don’t getit. But you? You know what’s what. Keep up the good work!”
I think we might respond: “Well thanks Jesus! I always didthink you were a pretty swell guy. I like how you think.”
Ridiculous! Jesus is God, not us. Jesus leads, Jesusteaches, and we follow; not the other way around. If we were to reverse thisorder it would be blindness and stupidity. If we were to reverse this order,then we would only agree with Jesus insofar as he already agrees with us. Thatis exactly what was going on with the Pharisees. They had no problem with Jesusexcept when he disagreed with them. When Jesus did disagree with them, theydidn’t repent and change their minds. They went stubbornly ahead with their ownthoughts and actions because they believed that they were right.
In our sad and decaying times the one thing that everybodyhas in common is that everybody believes they are right. The people on theright are completely convinced that they are right. The people on the left arecompletely convinced that they are right. The people in the middle arecompletely convinced that they are right. Everybody is completely right.
That isn’t surprising if you will think about yours. Nurturingthe belief that we are so right and others are so wrong feels so good! We likethat feeling. The Pharisees liked that feeling. It felt good to harrumph thatJesus was nothing but a lousy Sabbath-breaker. They enjoyed labeling Jesus asan evildoer. They enjoyed their hardness of heart.
Nobody has to force us into being blind and stupid,especially when it comes to the belief that we are right. We do that quitenaturally. What is so unnatural that it requires a miracle of the Holy Spiritis for us to turn away from ourselves and the celebration of our own rightness,and to glorify, not ourselves, but the Son of God instead. That can be quitepainful. These Pharisees would have needed to toss aside all those commentariesthat they loved so much. They would have had to toss aside what made them most proudabout themselves.
What beloved parts of your identity that you pride yourselfupon need to be tossed aside?
Paul said that he regarded the best parts of himself to be aloss—the best parts of himself were garbage. These were not shameful things.They were things that others would admire, but Paul says they are garbage. Why?Why was Paul so hard on himself? Because knowing Jesus reveals that all thatother stuff is garbage. Perhaps the things that we love best aboutourselves are the exact things that we should most deeply repent. We aren’tprone to worship ourselves for the things we don’t like about ourselves. We areprone to worship the stuff we like. That makes us blind.
Open your eyes. The celebration of yourself will end badly.Glorify Jesus instead.
Jesus Christ is Lord! Amen.
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Come, Holy Ghost, God and Lord with all your graces nowoutpoured. Amen.
Christians celebrate three major festivals. Christmas is thecelebration of Jesus’s birth. Easter is the celebration of Jesus’sresurrection. Today’s festival is Pentecost. It doesn’t get the hype that theother two get. Christians usually have a good grasp of the importance ofChristmas and Easter; less so with Pentecost. So today we will speak about theimportance of Pentecost, but before that we should speak about what happened.
We will begin with Good Friday and Easter. Jesus’s death onGood Friday and his Resurrection on Easter changed everything. Jesus died forsin and was raised with power. The Gospels describe how things were with Jesusafter the resurrection, and things were a bit strange. Oftentimes people didnot immediately recognize who Jesus was. Mary Magdalene didn’t immediatelyrecognize Jesus on Easter morning at the tomb. On Easter evening the discipleswho were traveling to the village of Emmaus didn’t immediately recognize him.
In addition to Jesus not being immediately recognized, he woulddo things with his body that he hadn’t done before. He suddenly disappearedfrom the Emmaus disciples after they recognized him. He suddenly appeared tothe disciples in the upper room, even though the doors were locked. Jesus madethese different appearances, speaking somewhat briefly—it seems—to hisdisciples, but the things he would say during these appearances were extremelyimportant.
In Matthew 28 he appeared to his disciples and told them tomake disciples of all nations. Christians should baptize, teach what Jesustaught, and Jesus would be with them until the end of the age. In John chapter20, in that upper room, Jesus breathed on the disciples and said, “Receive the Holy Spirit. Whosoever’s sins you forgive, theyare forgiven. Whosoever’s sins you retain, they are retained.” Withthose words Jesus commanded his Christians to forgive the sins of all whorepent, but to withhold forgiveness from the unrepentant so long as they do notrepent. These are extremely important instructions that continue to be carriedout in the Christian Church.
Jesus appeared and spoke with his disciples, here and there,over the course of 40 days. Then Jesus ascended into heaven to sit at the righthand of God the Father. We had a church service to commemorate that ten daysago, on a Thursday evening. Jesus ascended to the right hand of the Father toreign and rule over all things. The way that he reigns and rules in hisspiritual kingdom is through his Christian disciples. Jesus’s disciples continueto do what Jesus commanded them before he ascended into heaven. Christiansbaptize, forgive and retain sins, teach, have the Lord’s Supper together and soon. Through these things sinners who otherwise believe in false gods are turnedto the true God, which is our Lord Jesus Christ.
There is nothing more important than believing in the LordJesus Christ, and this is where Pentecost comes in with its great importance. About50 days after Easter and 10 days after Jesus’s Ascension, the Jews weregathered together for one of their Old Testament harvest festivals. While theywere gathered together there was the sound of a mighty rushing wind, tongues offlame appeared over the disciples, and the disciples spoke with their fellowJews about the mighty works of God. Some of these Jews came from far flungplaces and spoke different languages.
Our reading from Acts gives us the first part of Peter’s speakingto those who were gathered. He speaks with courage and enthusiasm about JesusChrist being Lord. He vigorously argues that Jesus is the fulfillment of whatwas prophesied in the Old Testament. Jesus is God’s Son, and they had crucifiedhim! But he concluded his message in this inclusive way: “Repent and be baptized everyone of you in the name of JesusChrist for the forgiveness of your sins, and you will receive the gift of theHoly Spirit.” He assures them that despite their murdering of God’s ownSon that the promise was for them and for their children. It was for those whowere near and for those who were far off. It was for everyone whom the Lord ourGod calls to himself. Those who believed that day were baptized, and 3,000 soulswere added.
The most important thing that happened on Pentecost was thework of the Holy Spirit. People repented of all that was false, and believed thetruth: Jesus Christ is the Savior of sinners. Faith in Jesus is what makes aperson a Christian. Faith in Jesus is the sole and indispensable requirementfor being a member of the Holy Christian Church. It doesn’t matter where aperson comes from. They could be from Mesopotamia, Judea or Cappadocia. Theycould be of any race, any skin color. They could be poor or rich, well dressedor poorly dressed. They could come from any background—they could have beenwild, inhabited by many demons, or they could be stuck-up Pharisees. Everyone whobelieves in Jesus the Christ turns away from their false and worthless ways andembraces the forgiveness, life, and salvation that come from Jesus.
Pentecost is a festival about the Holy Spirit, who createsfaith. Pentecost is also a festival about the Christian Church. It is thebeginning of the Christian Church, so to speak, because from Pentecost onwardthe Gospel, the good news about Jesus, spread. Those who heard the Gospelbelieved it by the power of the Holy Spirit. Since they believed it, they alsospoke it. Since they spoke it, still more believed it.
There is a direct line from Pentecost to us being gatheringhere today. This is not some accident of history. God the Holy Spirit has beenat work creating faith in Jesus. Faith in Jesus causes those who believe in himto speak the Gospel.
But as we consider that direct line from Pentecost to today,we might want to ask ourselves, “Are we still speaking the Gospel?” Before weanswer too quickly with a, “Well of course we are still preaching the Gospel!”we might want to consider something. Jesus tells all those who want to be hisdisciples that they must bear the cross. The cross means to suffer and to sacrifice.Speaking the Gospel will always carry with it suffering and sacrifice.
Even on Pentecost there was suffering. The Christians weremade fun of. Some bystanders laughed at them and said that they had gottendrunk on grape juice. Already at Pentecost there was sacrifice. Immediatelyafter Pentecost the book of Acts tells us that the Christians sold what theyhad so that they could provide for whoever was in need. The story of sufferingand sacrifice is repeated over and over in the book of Acts. Wherever theGospel went it caused trouble. Paul was kicked out of one town after anotheruntil he was finally carted off to Rome in chains. According to legend, elevenout of the twelve apostles were violently put to death.
So, again, we might ask, “Are we still speaking the Gospel?”It seems to me that we are in trouble, and we’ve been in trouble for a longtime. The trouble we have is that we want to come up with a Gospel that doesn’trequire suffering and sacrifice. We don’t want to live how Jesus commanded andas the book of Acts puts on display. We want a Christian life where we get tolive just like the rest of the world with all their selfishness, comfort, andease, but we like to believe that we won’t go to hell for it. We’ll get a freepass. Why will we get a free pass? Maybe because we went to church all thetime. Maybe we even gave a lot of money in offerings. That’s not a bad deal isit?
It’s also not the Gospel. It is a false Gospel that pretendsto be the true Gospel. This false Gospel was identified by the LutheranReformers. The Catholic Church is as good at this false Gospel as anybody is.They had figured out a way for Christians to have their cake and eat it too. Allthat was really necessary to be a good Catholic was to show up at church andgive them some money. Depending on how much you gave it might even make youdown right exemplary.
Luther saw through this comfortable and convenient Christianity.It was, in fact, a cheap Christianity even if millions were given in offeringsbecause it laid no claim on the person. As we all know it is not hard for thosewho are wealthy to write a check. Eventually those who are so filthy rich thatthey don’t know what to do with all of their money start to write checkswithout even being asked. They want this or that building to be named afterthem.
Christianity is much deeper than that. It requires much moresuffering and sacrifice than that. Luther learned this from Jesus and hepreached it. The very first of Luther’s 95 theses from October 31, 1517 said,“When our Lord and Master Jesus Christ said, ‘Repent,’ he willed the entirelife of believers to be one of repentance.”
Another way of saying this is that if you do not want torepent, then you do not want to be a Christian. Repentance is hard! It requireshumility. A life of repentance and faith will be one of suffering and sacrificeaccording to Jesus’s own words.
Why should anyone live this life? We naturally don’t like tosuffer or sacrifice. The answer is that loving to the point of suffering andsacrifice is beautiful and divine. Such a life is good and beautiful like Jesus’slife was good and beautiful with his suffering and his sacrificing.
Now you might think, “I can’t do that.” I’m glad that youare honest enough to admit that. I can’t do it either. So also neither you norI can raise ourselves from the dead can we? But today is Pentecost. The HolySpirit is God. When a person is converted, and reconverted, and converted yetagain to faith in Christ, the Holy Spirit is given to that person. The HolySpirit dwells in us.
Furthermore, Jesus is Lord. He reigns and rules in hiskingdom and we are following his lead. He is on the warpath, beating back thedevil, sin, death, selfishness, apathy, strife, and whatever else is evil.
Repent, believe, and you will receive the gift of the HolySpirit. This is the Gospel. It was the Gospel at Pentecost. It is the Gospel thatgives eternal life today.
Come, Holy Ghost, God and Lord, with all your graces nowoutpoured. Amen.
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If you could have anything you wanted, what would it be?Maybe some of you remember a commercial for the powerball lottery. In thecommercial different people catch the powerball, which had lightning comingfrom it if I remember correctly. With that powerball in hand they could pointto their regular looking house, and they’d have a mansion. They could point totheir regular looking car, and they’d have a Ferrari. If you won the lottery,then you could buy a lot of stuff you can’t afford now. Would that get you whatyou want?
Winning the lottery, however, is not very likely. Thatcommercial was a bit fanciful. In “real life” you have to keep your goalsreasonable.
Since we are so used to living “real life,” it is easy tomanage our expectations too thoroughly so that we don’t even begin to grasp themeaning of Christ’s ascension. We get so used thinking we can’t have everythingwe want—that’s fairy tale stuff—that we don’t believe in what the ascensionmeans. The ascension means that Jesus is Lord. All rule and authority and powerand dominion have been put under his feet. The inheritance we will receive fromGod because of Jesus is beyond our imagination. Paul says, “No eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor has it entered into theimagination of the heart of man, what God has prepared for those who love him.”
Although we can’t fully grasp what God has prepared for us,it is important to try. If we don’t try, then we won’t get it. At best ourimaginations will be limited to those powerball kinds of wishes, and thosepowerball kinds of wishes are not high enough. Eben the highest kind of wishesthat you might have with the lottery aren’t high enough.
Suppose there would be some kind of lottery that wouldenable you to suck up every last cent and every last piece of property on thisearth. All other human beings become your slaves. Nothing happens without yoursay-so. Even after winning this lottery so that you are some kind of god onthis earth—that would not be good enough.
To try to grasp our inheritance we must think higher. Wemust think about God. There are many things we could think about with God, andthey would all be good, but tonight I’ll limit myself to just a couple things:life and love. We’ll begin by talking about life.
Life comes from God. God is the creator. From the smallestthing to the largest thing—all things come from him. We might wonder at thepower of the sun, the vastness of the universe—these things come from God. On amore personal level, we all have a craving for life, because whenever we havetasted it we have so thoroughly enjoyed it.
Another word for enjoying life is fun. Fun comes indifferent shapes and forms that vary with each person. One has fun with his orher mind. Another has fun with his or her heart. Another has fun with his orher accomplishments. Romance, friends, laughter, fear, pity, weeping—these areall interesting facets of life. People want to live rather than die becauselife is good. Life comes from God.
Love, also, comes from God. John in his epistle even goes sofar as to say that “God is love.” Love drawspeople together so that they are one. Giving love is reaching out to bring inthe other. Receiving love is when you have been accepted and brought in. We allknow by experience how good this is. We also know by experience how bad theopposite of this is. We have all experienced rejection: “No, you aren’t onewith us.”
Think of how this happens with children. Second, third,fourth grade—all of a sudden there are in-groups and out-groups. The in groupis to be loved and admired. The out group is lesser and are given to know thisby being shunned or mocked. The kids get shuffled and sorted, usually on thebasis of things that they have no control over. Kids are just like us. Theywant to be recognized and admired. To be reviled and humiliated is painful.
What can be done about this? It’s unbelievable how common itis for people to believe that nothing can be done. People are just like that.There’s no other choice but to accept it. It’s along the same lines as winningthe lottery. It is very unlikely that you are going to win the lottery, and soyou must adjust your expectations accordingly. We live in the midst of so much thatnegates life and negates love, and the best that our smartest people can do isto throw up their hands and say, “So it goes.”
This defeatist, despairing philosophy is as powerful as itis unchristian. Despair is the opposite of faith and hope. To say thateverything is just going to stay the same is a denial of Easter. It is a denialof Christ’s ascension to the right hand of God the Father.
I began tonight by asking, “If you could have anything youwanted, what would it be?” We don’t take that question seriously. What if wedid? You can have anything you want. That’s actually the meaning of Easter andthe Ascension. You can have anything you want.
There’s a catch, of course, although it’s not reallycatch. You can’t wish to suck up every last cent and every last piece ofproperty so that all people are enslaved to you and you sit atop the world asthough you were some kind of god. God’s not going to feed you hog slop likethat. Hog slop like that is reserved for the hogs. Nor is God going to make itso that you are better than everyone else, so that you can be worshipped withall of your magnificence.
But if you want good things—high things that have to do withlife and love and all of the other marvelous attributes of God—if you want goodthings, then you can have anything you want. Jesus said, “I came so that you may have life and have it more abundantly.”Again Jesus said, “I have spoken these things that myjoy may be in you, and that your joy may be full.” Whatever you want isyours.
It’s just a matter of time. Maybe we will not have as muchlife and love and other divine things in this life as we would like, but thatmight be because we have not prayed for them like we should. But even in theworst case scenario, the maximum we will have to endure is probably 80 years. Mostof us are much further along than that. Then we will have whatever we want, andwhat we will want will only be the good and high things instead of the grossand ugly things. Such is the power of our Lord Jesus Christ that is put ondisplay with his resurrection from the dead and his ascension into heaven.
Jesus’s power is certainly a theme tonight with all of ourworship. We have already sung, “Look ye saint the sight is glorious.” We’ve sung, “This is the feast of victory for ourGod.” We’ll thank God for Jesus’s ascension before receiving the Lord’s Supper.We’ll sing some rousing hymns about about crowns and glory during thedistribution. These songs of praise are fitting for the Ascension of our Lord.Jesus is more powerful than everything and everyone except God the Father.
The rulers and authorities and powers and dominions wouldhave us believe life is just the way it is, and we have to accept it. They arewrong. They are dead wrong. Things don’t have to stay the way they are. Things can’tstay the way they are. Jesus is risen from the dead. Jesus reigns and rules atthe right hand of God the Father. You are on the winning team. You are baptizedinto Christ. When Jesus comes again you will be caught up into the air to livewith him. Whatever you want will be yours, and only those things that are goodwill you want.
This is good news.
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[Jesus said,] “Whoever abides in me andI in him, he it is that bears much fruit.”
There was once a man who I thought might be interested injoining the congregation. He had attended services. He had family who weremembers. So I was talking to him about how a person could join thecongregation. The first step is learning what we believe as a congregation, so Itold him about the class I do with the Small Catechism. I went on for some timeabout that until I ultimately asked him what he thought. I will always rememberhis response. He said, “What’s in it for me?” I guess that was a good question,because I didn’t have a good answer. I don’t remember what I said. All that Iremember is that I wasn’t very satisfied with my answer.
“What’s in it for me?” is a thought that is deeply seated inour human nature. Nobody has to teach us to look out for ourselves. From theday we were born we have a very keen sense for our own advantage. A good ideais an idea that’s good for me. A good deal is a deal that’s good for me.
If we are only looking for our own advantage, then church membershipcan be a pretty tough sale. To become a member we start off with maybe 12-15hours of instruction. Perhaps the most important part of being a member is thatyou come to church for about an hour a week. A lot of people find that hour tobe boring. All the while you should pay for these opportunities with yourofferings.
And then, if you prove yourself to be a faithful member bydoing all these things, and if you have the right gifts and talents, then youmight be asked to serve on a board or committee. That’s more time, more effort.If you’re lucky, you might even get to be involved in some dispute orcontroversy with all the stress and trouble that goes along with that. Soundlike a good deal?
I could answer these downsides of membership in severalways. You’ve probably already thought of some. But I’d like to take on the mainidea itself. We naturally believe that a good deal is a deal that’s good forme, but who said that that has to be the definition of a good deal? I know thatthere are many authorities who teach that everyone must look out for their owninterests. I know that big businesses follow this rule. I know that even our commonsense teaches this. It’s as simple as asking the question, “What do you want?”Do you want more or do you want less? The answer seems obvious.
However, what is left out from all these thought is that Godis the giver of our daily bread. Whatever any of us has or doesn’t have is fromGod. There are people who have worked their fingers to the bone, and they havevery little. There are lazy people and foolish people who have hit the jackpot,so to speak. By the seeming accidents of circumstances or heredity they havemuch more money than any of you will ever have. It is not enough to believe in yourself.It is not enough to ruthlessly follow your own interests. I know that we aretaught that over and over, but that doesn’t make it true. If God doesn’t crown yourefforts with success, then you won’t succeed.
But let’s suppose I’ve failed to convince you. You stillbelieve that you can bless yourself with your smarts and your hard work. Inthis supposition I’ll even grant you the best of successes. You live a charmedlife from the time you are 5 until you are 85—80 years of brilliant success! Whatthen? Psalm 49 says: “Even the wise die; the fool andthe stupid alike must perish and leave their wealth to others.”
Psalm 49 is a remarkable psalm. It is kind of the oppositeof what is so often promoted as wisdom among us. Among us it is almost likepeople believe that they won’t ever die. They think they can grab as much asthey can forever. Psalm 49 says, “No.” Man is an animal. He lives for a while,then he dies. The psalm brings up the death of sheep. Maybe you’ve seenlivestock that has died and has begun to decay. That will be our fate too. Whatgood will your living for yourself do you then? What good will your alwaysasking, “What’s in it for me?” do you then? You will decay like a farm animalthat has died.
We are taught over and over again that the way to win at thegame of life is to seek your own advantage. We are taught that so insistentlyas an unquestionable truth. It is easy to believe, then, that this is what weshould do. This is what is noble and successful. Living for yourself is not nobleor successful. Just the opposite: It’s gross. It’s animal-like. It’s Darwinian.
On the other hand, the Holy Spirit teaches another way. TheHoly Spirit has inspired the Scriptures to teach a different way to live thanwhat merely comes naturally to us. For example, Paul says that the fruit of theHoly Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness,goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control. I didn’t hear anythingin that list that talks about you being the greatest. I didn’t hear anythingthat says you must come first. On the contrary, I heard social things—thingsthat have to do with our relationship with others. The fruit of the Spiritmakes you to be a blessing to others. I like being around people who are loving, joyful, peaceful, long-suffering, kind, good, loyal,reasonable, and who keep themselves under control. I like being aroundpeople like that. I’d like to be a person like that. I’d like the fruit of theHoly Spirit to be in me.
How can I do that? There’s only one way to produce thisfruit. Jesus talks about it in our Gospel reading. He says, “I am the vine; you are the branches. Whoever abides in me andI in him, he it is that bears much fruit, for apart from me you can do nothing.”You cannot produce this fruit except by being grafted into the true vine. Evenif you were to try as hard you possibly can, you wouldn’t be able to do it. Itwould be as futile as a branch that has been cut off from the vine trying very,very hard to produce a nice cluster of grapes. Whatever grapes get produced insuch a manner won’t be very good. Only by abiding in Jesus, and Jesus abidingin us can we produce fruit. Apart from him we can do nothing.
Which means that going to church is not foolish. Going tochurch is wise. Church, understood rightly, is for the purpose of beingconnected to Jesus. Jesus is in Church according to his own promise. He says, “Wherever two or three are gathered together in my name, thereI am in the midst of them also.” We are gathered in Jesus’s name. Jesusis here in our midst.
What do we do when we have congregated together? We spend agood deal of our time with the Holy Spirit inspired Scriptures. TheseScriptures teach us things that are different. We learn what is truly good andlife-giving.
And you’ve probably already thought of how Jesus is present withus in a special way with the Lord’s Supper. By that eating and drinking Jesus’sbody and blood, Jesus abides in us and we abide in him. This communion withJesus bears fruit, as we pray about in the post-communion collect. In thatprayer we thank God for this salutary, or helpful, gift. We then implore God,that of his mercy, he would increase our faith toward him and our fervent lovefor one another. Those are some remarkably fine fruits.
Going to church is not a waste of time. It is theopportunity to be changed by God. God changes us from being selfish,self-obsessed, evil unbelievers to being believers who are being formed in theimage of his Son. Jesus is here with his power and grace.
Therefore we can put up with some labor and sacrifices tocontinue to have Jesus in our midst. Without the labor and sacrifices of usmembers, this congregation will not be able to continue to help people. We needvolunteers. We need money.
We also need to put up with annoyances and troubles tocontinue to have Jesus in our midst. Our flesh is prone to boredom, our mindsare prone to wandering. We have to discipline our flesh. We need to work atworshipping and listening. We also need to put up with the annoying flesh ofour fellow congregants. Unfortunately, our fellow congregants are just like us.They can offend. They can annoy. If we will not put up with other people’sweaknesses and sins, we’ll quit congregating; we’ll quit helping each other.
This would be a shame, because these small troubles arenothing compared to what God does through his Word and Sacraments. Jesus ishere with his answer to death and his antidote to our evil. He is the vine. Weare the branches. If we abide in him, and he abides in us, then fruit will beproduced to the glory of God the Father.
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Talking about God can be difficult. I’ve seen how talkingabout God can cause tenseness and awkwardness. People’s defenses go up. What isthis person going to require of me? What is this person going to accuse me of? AmI supposed to be converted? People usually don’t like it.
Because people don’t like it, most won’t do it. Why shouldthey? It doesn’t seem to benefit them. It makes the situation weird. Theprospects of something good coming from such an awkward situation seem low. Letthe pastors talk about God. You should hold your peace.
If this life is all there is, then such a course of actionmakes sense. If the purpose of life is to maximize pleasure and minimize painyou should not talk about God. It won’t make you richer. It might make youpoorer. It won’t make you more popular. You might, instead, be shunned. Commonsense tells you to keep your mouth shut.
But if the Gospel is true, then being silent is strange. TheGospel teaches that all things are in the process of changing. Things arechanging because Jesus is Lord and King. The old ways of how power andoppression are the most important and the most impactful are passing away. Thenew ways of faithfulness, humility, and love are how we receive blessing. Evilis in the process of being brought to nothing. Righteousness and life are ontheir way. Jesus says, “Behold, I make all things new.”
This is good news for everyone. Jesus being Lord and King isgood because he is good. The only way that this good news is ineffectual foranyone is through unbelief. Unbelief, indeed, can be powerful. When Jesusteaches about the coming of the Holy Spirit in John chapter 16 he says that whenthe Holy Spirit comes he will convict the world concerning sin because theyhave not believed in Jesus. Among all the sins that could possibly be listed,Jesus singles out this one: Sin is not believing in Jesus.
Why is this sin singled out? It’s because it’s the sinagainst the Gospel. Without Jesus’s work as Lord and King things don’t change. Lying,cheating, meanness, trickery, manipulation, abuse, anger, and so on continue tobe the best ways to get ahead. The strong will get stronger. The weak will getweaker. The first will be first and the last will be last. And the one who sitsatop this slag heap of lovelessness is the devil himself, whom Paul calls “the prince of this world.”
Unbelief in Jesus is the desire—whether that desire be consciousor unconscious—unbelief in Jesus is the desire to have the devil rule with allhis works and with all his ways. That’s why unbelief in Jesus is singled out asthe sin. It is the profoundest rejection of God.
On the other hand, faith in Jesus is everything. Faith inJesus means that you accept God’s will that his Son should reign and ruleinstead of the devil. Jesus should reign and rule instead of any other gods orany other powers or principalities. Faith in Jesus means that you believe thatyou will be blessed by him instead of being blessed in any other way.
Our Gospel reading lays these things out nicely. Our Gospelreading describes Jesus meeting his disciples after he had risen from the dead.Jesus told them how all of what had happened and all of what will happen isGod’s will as it was foretold in the Old Testament. The Old Testament spokeabout how the seed of the woman would crush the serpent’s head. When God madehis promises to Abraham he told him that he would be the father of kings, andthat all the world would be blessed through his seed. God promised King Davidthat his kingdom would endure forever.
God made his promises through the prophets. Isaiah speaksabout how this king would suffer and die, but that he would be a blessing.Jeremiah speaks about the new hearts that the king would bring. Ezekiel speaksabout this king leading his people to good grazing land. Daniel speaks abouthow this king would be greater than all the greatest kingdoms of the world.
These prophecies—and there are many, many more—are fulfilledin Jesus. Jesus is the Christ. He died and rose according to the Scriptures. Repentanceand forgiveness of sins is to be proclaimed in his name to all nations.
This last part of what Jesus is doing as king is still goingon. Jesus continues to proclaim repentance and forgiveness of sins through hisChristians who speak his word. We live now in this time when repentance andforgiveness of sins is to be proclaimed by us.
The message is simple. “To repent” means “to change yourmind.” People have all kinds of ideas about how to get ahead in life, how tohave a good time, how to maximize their pleasure and minimize their pain. WeChristians are to be helpful by advising our fellow human beings to changetheir minds. Nobody is blessed by breaking God’s commandments. Nobody isblessed by ignoring Jesus’s teachings. Jesus is king. He sets things right.Repent. Change your mind.
And, Jesus says, “You are forgiven.” There isn’t a single ofone of us who hasn’t been tricked into believing that we would be betterblessed by breaking God’s commandments instead of keeping them. None of us haveloved God the way Jesus teaches that we should. None of us have prayed the waywe should. None of us have treated our fellow human beings the way we should.Jesus’s proclamation of forgiveness tells us that he does not reject us. Heaccepts us.
Jesus tells the disciples that they are to proclaim this simplemessage, and it is amazing to think of how the Gospel has spanned time anddistance to reach our ears today. Jesus spoke. The disciples believed. Sincethey believed, they spoke to others. Those others believed, and they spoke. Soon and so forth the Gospel has gone around the world. There are people whobelieve in Jesus here in Fairmont. There are people who believe in Jesus inChina, India, and Iceland. What Jesus said is being fulfilled: “Repentance and the forgiveness of sins should be proclaimedin his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem.”
On the other hand, there are also places where the Gospelwas, but is no more. Northern Africa and the Middle East used to be predominantlyChristian. It has not been predominantly Christian for over a thousand years.Europe is largely non-Christian. America seems to be following the same trend. Howfar behind is Fairmont?
Some people believe that this decrease in the number ofpeople who believe in Jesus is inevitable. That is wrong. There is nothinginevitable about it whatsoever. The only way that it could be inevitable is ifthe Gospel is not true. If the Gospel is not true, then we are slaves to thepowers and forces that are over us and are way too powerful than us. If theGospel is not true, then evil is the way to get ahead. Oppress whomever youcan. Squeeze whomever you can. You’ve got to get to the top of that slag heap,and you’re not going to get there by being nice. If the Gospel is not true,then this dog-eat-dog world is all there is. I admit that many believe this tobe how things are, but they are wrong!
The Gospel is true. Jesus is God’s Son. He won. He sits atthe right hand of God the Father. He is bringing an end to evil, and creating righteousnessand life. The slaves are set free. The former slaves are even children of God.
These truths must be proclaimed, however, in order for themto be believed. Faith comes through hearing. In order for there to be anyhearing there has to be speaking. For God’s promises to be believed, God’spromises must be spoken. This is where we come in.
I began today by speaking about how difficult it can be to talkabout God. I don’t have a magic wand or some magic words to make it lessdifficult. It’s difficult because there are powers and principalities andprinciples that want to keep their superiority. They don’t want to hearanything about a king who sets their slaves free. They want their slaves tobelieve that there is no way out, so we should all just accept our chains asinevitable. They all preach basically the same thing: Life is the way it is, soyou better just get used to it.
No. Jesus lives! If you think you’re stuck because someevil’s got you by the throat, then change your mind! Repent! It isn’t true.Jesus reigns! All powers and authorities must give way to Jesus. When youbelieve in Jesus everything must turn out right in the end. You might have togo through some very difficult and painful stuff in the meantime, but yourfaith in Jesus will not disappoint you. You will triumph because Jesus hastriumphed. This is good news.
Do not be ashamed of the Gospel, for the Gospel is the powerof salvation for all who believe.
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“And they said nothing to anyone,for they were afraid.”
Everybody inevitably learns that there are some things youcan’t change. Things have been written into our DNA, for example. One ispredisposed for this. Another is predisposed for that. It’s disappointing, butwhat can be done? There are so many things like that. Things are the way theyare.
There’s a little bit of comfort that comes from acknowledgingthings as they are. Perhaps you’ve heard of the five stages of grief. The laststage is acceptance. That is the stage that everyone is looking for because ofthat little bit of comfort that comes with it. There’s a bit of peace. Prior toacceptance there is all kinds of fighting: denial, anger, bargaining,depression. Those are all ways of saying, “No!” Acceptance is that motherlyvoice that says, “Hush now. There there. Nothing can be done. In time you’llcome to accept it, then you’ll be at peace.”
The reason why there is peace is because you finallyacknowledge the superiority of the forces at work. They are much larger andstronger than you. If you can’t beat these forces, then you might as well quitfighting. It’s a relief to not have to fight anymore. Having settled down thechoke chain can be taken off and a regular leash put on.
The apostle Paul in several places in his letters talksabout the superior and overwhelming powers and forces that exist in life. Oneof his favorite terms for this are the orderly pillars of this world, sometimestranslated as the “principles of this world.”Paul says that we were enslaved to these things. That’s another way of sayingthat they are overwhelmingly superior to us. We have to accept things the waythey are—we have no other choice—because there’s no changing them. But Paul proclaimssomething thrilling: God, in Christ, has set us free. We don’t have to resignourselves to what is assumed to be inevitable.
Not resigning yourself to what is deemed to be inevitable isone way to look at Jesus’s work. The blind person seems to be doomed to blindness—nothingcan be done—and yet he sees. The deaf hears. The unrighteous persons—drugdealers, prostitutes, tax collectors, and such—need not be unrighteous forever.Even the dead person can have those seemingly unbreakable chains broken. Jesuspreaches good news. Good news for those who are enslaved to overwhelming forcesis the message: “You are free!”
Think about Easter. Death is that ultimate force before whosesuperiority we grieve. Fight as you may, the best option seems to be acceptance.But, as Isaiah prophesied and as Jesus fulfilled, “Deathis swallowed up forever.” The angel said, “Youseek Jesus of Nazareth who was crucified. He’s not here. He has risen.”Jesus was no longer enslaved to death. He became its master. If Jesus can breakthis seemingly unbreakable chain, what others might be broken? The answer is allof them!
This is made clear with the festival we will celebrate 40days from now, which is closely related to Easter. 40 days from now we willcelebrate Jesus’s ascension into heaven. He was raised up to the right hand ofGod the Father. This is the position of superiority over absolutely everythingexcept God the Father.
Try to think of something that you deem to be absolute andunchangeable. How about the laws of thermo-dynamics? The physicists say thatthey are unbreakable. Jesus can break them. How about the space / timecontinuum discovered by Einstein? Jesus is Lord over it.
But these concerns can seem rather remote. How about thatseemingly unchangeable law about money—namely, that those who’ve got it aregoing to keep it and those who don’t aren’t going to get it? Jesus is Lord. Hehas spoken about this. He turns things on their head. He says, “Woe to you who are rich, for you have received yourconsolation,” and, on the other hand: “Blessedare you who are poor, for yours in the kingdom of God.” Money, finance,economics and so on are certainly things that people regard as inevitable andunchangeable. Jesus is Lord.
Or what if you are one of those charmed individuals who’sgot the world by the tail? You’re so charming and dashing. Everyone loves you.In the game of life, you’re a winner. Or, on the other hand, you’re not one ofthose people. You’ve never been popular. You’re sad and lonely. The generalrule for how things go in this life is that those who are sparkling andcharming remain sparkling and charming. Those who are duds remain duds.
Jesus, again, has spoken to this. He says, “Woe to you who laugh now, for you shall mourn and weep.”And, on the other hand: “Blessed are you who weep now,for you shall laugh.” Jesus is Lord. You are not lord with all yourtalents and charm. Neither are sadness and loneliness lord. Jesus is Lord.
You can perhaps see how Easter has an edge to it. You cansee how Easter has an edge to it in our Gospel reading this morning. Did younotice the women’s reaction? When the angel told them that Jesus had risen youmight have expected them to react with a “Hurray!” What does it say? “And they went out and fled from the tomb.” Theycouldn’t get away fast enough. And it says, “Tremblingand astonishment had seized them.” They shook. That word “astonishment”literally means, “they were out of their minds.” Their world was reeling; theirheads were swimming. Finally it says, “They saidnothing to anyone, for they were afraid.”
We are all well catechized in how we are supposed to reactto Easter. We are supposed to be joyful and happy. So were these women doingwrong? I don’t think so. I think they were seeing something that we often don’tsee. They were seeing that everything is changed. The old masters are no longersupreme. Jesus is supreme. That is to say, Jesus is the Christ! Jesus is theking! They had, of course, believed this about Jesus before, but they thoughtthat he would only be an earthly king—a king of Israel. As it turns out he isking over absolutely everything. Easter changes everything.
Easter changes everything towards the good. Jesus as king isgoing to bring in everything that is good and life-giving and he is going to expeleverything that is evil and life destroying. What is good will remain. What isevil will not. The days are numbered for everything and everyone that is evil.Sin, death, the devil, evil people, evil institutions—all of these are goingunder the boot of this King.
If you’d like to get an idea of what this resurrected,ascended, supreme King is like read Psalm 2. The apostles liked to quote Psalm2, because it is so obviously about Jesus. What this Psalm says, in general, isthat the kings, the high and mighty, those who regard themselves as thegreatest, are going to have another thought coming. The Psalm says, “He who sits in the heavens laughs; the Lord holds them inderision. Then he will speak to them in his wrath, and terrify them in his fury.”Needless to say, you don’t want to be on the wrong side of this King!
And you need not be on the wrong side of this King. The goodnews went out into all the world after Easter, after the ascension, and afterPentecost. The good news proclaims freedom to those who have been enslaved.
The only ones to whom the good news is not good news arethose who want to remain enslaved—those who want to hold on to their evil.Those who say, “I am the way that I am, buzz off with your talk,” are on thewrong side of this King. Those who say, “Things are the way they are, you justhave to accept it,” are on the wrong side of this King. Psalm 2 gives us thispertinent advice, “Kiss the Son—kiss Jesus—lest he beangry, and you perish in the way, for his wrath is quickly kindled.” Butthen there is also this word of hope right after that: “Blessed are all who take refuge in him.”
That is a good way to encapsulate Easter: “Blessed are all who take refuge in Jesus.” Why arethey so blessed? Because Jesus is king. Jesus rising from the dead shows thathe is Christ the king. If you take refuge in him, then everything has to turnout for the good. Jesus is increasing what is good and making what is goodeternal. Whatever evil afflicts you, whatever evil afflicts your family, whateverevil afflicts our society, whatever evil afflicts the whole world is temporaryand passing away. Evil is not supreme. Evil is not unchangeable.
So don’t accept evil. You are not powerless before it sothat your only choice is to accept it. In Christ you are not dealing with asuperior force against who it is futile to fight. To be sure, it is easier notto fight. Giving up gives us a little bit of comfort, a little bit of peace. ThankGod that Jesus didn’t accept evil. He fought it! He fought it to the death—andprevailed.
Alleluia Christ is risen!
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People want to be the greatest because being the greatest isa lot of fun. It is fun to be the best at a sport. It is fun to be the best atan activity. Jesus’s disciples, James and John, wanted to be the greatest. Thatis what they are driving at when they say to Jesus: “Letus sit in your glory. One of us can be on your left and the other can be onyour right.” Jesus did not rebuke them. He gently says, “You do not know what you are asking.”
James and John didn’t know what they were asking because gloryin God’s kingdom is strange. It doesn’t operate by the same rules that make forgreatness in this earthly life. The rules for greatness in this life are wellknown: Work hard, practice, prepare, set goals, and so on. If you follow theserules, and if you have been given the prerequisite genetics and talents, thenyou too might achieve greatness.
Greatness in God’s kingdom operates by the rules that areseen especially in Jesus. Jesus asked James and John: “Areyou able to drink the cup that I drink, or to be baptized with the baptism withwhich I am baptized?” The cup that Jesus speaks about is the cup ofsuffering. On the night when Jesus was betrayed he prayed to his Father threetimes that he be spared the cup of suffering that was coming upon him. Thebaptism with which Jesus was about to be baptized was the baptism of blood onthe cross. Jesus would be smeared with it, dying like a criminal in disgrace.Greatness in God’s kingdom involves suffering and being regarded as the least.
Why are suffering and being regarded as the least the rules,so to speak, for greatness in God’s Kingdom? Here, again, we must think aboutJesus. Why did he suffer? Why was he regarded as the least?
There are perhaps several reasons for that. I would like to offerthree. The first reason why Jesus suffered was because of evil-doers who wantedto continue with their evil-doing. Jesus annoyed them because he would speakagainst them. They wanted everyone to think that they were fine, upstandingpeople. Jesus, however, knew the truth and spoke the truth. They weren’t fineupstanding people. They were liars, hypocrites, hungry for power, honors, and money.Like whitewashed tombs, they kept themselves looking respectable on the outsidebut inside they were full of death and uncleanness.
Jesus could have kept his mouth shut. If he would have leftthem in peace, they would have left him in peace. In fact, things would havegone much differently for Jesus. They would have given him promotions andhonors. They would have hailed him as a great preacher with a pastoral heart.But then Jesus would have become a snake just like them. He would no longer bea reliable guide, teaching people how they may attain eternal life.
Which brings us to the second reason why it was necessaryfor Jesus to suffer and be regarded as the least: He believed. He believed inthe power of the Word of God to change people’s hearts. He wasn’t a cynic. Hedidn’t assume that things are how they are and have to remain the same. If itwas impossible for sinners to repent—to change their ways, to turn from evil torighteousness—then there certainly would be no point in the Son of God sufferingand dying. If it were impossible for people to change, then people should beleft to follow whichever course suits their fancy. The Word of God should dieout, and perhaps be replaced by more modern methods of education andinspiration that help people achieve their earthly goals. But Jesus continuedto believe that the Word of God would do what God wanted to achieve when hecauses it to be spoken.
The third and final reason I’d like to offer for why Jesussuffered is love. Jesus loves us. He’s a lover who goes after his beloved. Jesuspursues us. He says, “Don’t stay off on your own, doing your own thing. Be withme. I want to be with you, and I want you to be with me.” And the amazingthing, of course, is that we are evil-doers, and yet Jesus wants to be with us.Jesus isn’t disgusted by all our disgustingness. He truly loves us, and wants usto be together with him and with God eternally.
This is where Jesus’s cross especially comes in. The cross ishow we were redeemed and separated from our sin. The cross is how we have died withChrist to sin. Paul says, “I have been crucified withChrist. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me.” Thecross makes what should be impossible to be possible. It should be impossiblefor evildoers to live happily with the holy God. However, we have beencrucified with Christ. It is no longer we who live, but Christ who lives in us.If we have died and it is Christ who lives in us, then it is no longer merelypossible to live with God, it’s the way it should be! We belong together.
These reasons show how Jesus’s suffering and cross areawesome. To be sure, it is a hidden awesomeness. When Jesus drinks the cup andis baptized with blood he looks terrible. He looks poor, weak, and utterlydefeated. What is really going on, however, is that he is rewriting the rules.
Among the rules that are rewritten are the rules forgreatness. Greatness is otherwise achieved by killing, crushing, lying,stealing, and, in general, using every resource—including human resources—totheir fullest. Chew everyone up until you’re done with them. Then spit them outand move on to the next one. There is no other way for anyone to accumulate thepowers that the greatest of this world have amassed for themselves. Theyachieve what they achieve by taking advantage of others, and making sure thatthey are never taken advantage of.
They believe that they are great because everyone tells themthey are great. They believe they will always be remembered because they’vebeen in the news. However, how small their victories really are! How fleeting theirmemories! They achieve nothing that lasts.
Contrast them with what you and I have been given. You and Ihave the Gospel, the good news that Jesus is king. The Gospel connects sad andhelpless sinners to almighty God, making them righteous by the forgiveness ofsins. You have been given this Gospel. In that way you are no different thanthe apostles James and John. James and John believed the good news. You believethe good news too. Because James and John believed the good news, they spoke itto others. You should do that too if you believe it. You don’t have to be anapostle or a pastor or a professional church worker to do that. The Gospel isno less effective coming from you than it is coming from me. The Gospel doeswhat it says.
This is an encouragement to evangelize. You’ve probablyheard about evangelism many times over the years. What you don’t hear as oftenis how you are called to suffer and to be regarded as the least while you aredoing your evangelism. Here, again, you are like James and John. You have thevery same Gospel as they. You have the very same cross. Jesus first asked themif they were able, then he flat out told them: “Youwill drink the cup that I drink. You will be baptized with the baptism that Iam baptized with.” Those words apply to all true preaching of theGospel. The cross is our banner. It is our battle standard. It is how we canrecognize true preaching from false preaching. If we preach what is true, thenwe will suffer and be regarded as the least just as it was with Jesus, James,and John.
The reasons why we will suffer and be regarded as the leastare the same reasons Jesus suffered and was regarded as the least. We haveevil-doers today who want to go on doing evil, and they don’t want anyone tosay anything about it. They don’t want to be disturbed. God’s Law, which we areto speak just as forcefully as Jesus ever spoke it, disturbs them.
We will suffer and be regarded as the least because we havefaith in the working of God’s Word. We won’t give up speaking God’s Word evenif the whole world should declare that it is no longer relevant, helpful, orpowerful. God’s Word converted us, and so we will speak it.
Finally we will suffer and be regarded as the least because oflove. We will pursue our fellow sinner whom we love, even if it makes us looklike a fool. We will talk to them even when we don’t know what to say. We’llget turned down, which hurts. We’ll be regarded as the least—like that poor,ugly, awkward guy whom the girls laugh at.
If our mission and James and John’s mission involves suchsuffering and humiliation, then why should we ever do it? The answer is glory.We should say, along with James and John: “Jesus, let us be seated with you inyour glory.” Jesus’s glory is that good! That’s why James and John wanted it.That’s why we should want it too.
The writer to the Hebrews agrees. He says: “Look to Jesus, the founder and perfector of our faith, who,for the joy that was set before him, endured the cross, despising the shame, andnow he is seated at the right hand of the throne of God.” Don’t beafraid of suffering or humiliation. These powers can look so daunting andintimidating. Jesus is victorious over all things. Whatever suffering or setbacksor hardships we experience are so very temporary. Jesus is forever.
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Our Gospel reading proclaims well-known and well-lovedpromises: Whoever believes in Jesus will have eternal life. John 3:16 isperhaps the most well-known verse in the Bible: “God soloved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whoever believes inhim should not perish but have eternal life.”These promises are nice.I’m not aware of anybody who gets upset at such promises. A person might thinkthe promises are untrue, but nobody thinks that Jesus is being rude.
The mood shifts, however, with what Jesus says next. Hesays, “Whoever believes in the Son of the God is notcondemned, but whoever does not believe is condemned already, because he hasnot believed in the name of the only Son of God.” The mood shiftsbecause faith in Jesus can no longer be understood as being optional orinconsequential: If you believe in Jesus, then you are not condemned. If you donot believe in Jesus, you are condemned already. You can’t leave Jesus to theside. Either you are with him or you are condemned by God himself. Whereas John3:16 is nice and wouldn’t upset anyone, John 3:18 makes people uncomfortable.
I think the reason why this makes people uncomfortable isbecause this is not the way we do business, and business transactions are themain way that we understand how things get promoted. The salesman sells; hedoesn’t threaten. We are used to being enticed and allured. Salesmen whocondemned their customers probably wouldn’t be in business very long.
Religion is often—or probably mainly—seen along these lines.There are lots of religions, denominations, and places of worship. They allpromote their own versions. It is reasonable, then, to imagine that you shouldmake your choice in the same way you make so many other choices. Take thereligion for a test-drive, so to speak. How do you like it? Do you like what itsays? With our Gospel reading this morning, for example, you might like what hesays at 3:16, but 3:18? Not so much.
And if Jesus fails to seal the deal, whose fault is that? Here,too, our way of doing business affects how we think. The customer is alwaysright. So when it comes to what God is promoting, if a person is not convinced,then it is God’s fault, or maybe the preacher’s fault.
Jesus, however, is not a salesman. He doesn’t share thesalesman’s goal of maximizing sales, perhaps by hook or by crook. If you haveany familiarity with the Bible whatsoever, then you know that Jesus does notflatter or seek to please his “potential customers.” Jesus doesn’t try to please anyone except hisFather.
The good news about Jesus wanting to please his Father isthat it is the Father’s will to save sinners by lifting up his Son on thecross. You heard that at the first part of the reading. But this is not somesales pitch. Either you are in the right, and, in fact, that rightness willsave you, or you are in the wrong. That is what it means to be condemned. Beingcondemned is being on the wrong side.
So we are not dealing with a sales situation here. A moreanalogous situation would be like you being stuck in a burning building. Thesituation is bad because you aren’t able to get out on your own. But, thankGod, a rescuer shows up. Believe in that rescuer and you will be rescued. Thatis to say, let the rescuer do what the rescuer does, and you will be saved.
But let’s say you’re a very silly person. Instead of beingthankful that a rescuer has showed up, you immediately start judging therescuer. His uniform isn’t ironed and he’s got bad breath. Or maybe this wouldbe more to the point: The fireman speaks bluntly: “You can’t keep doing whatyou’re doing. If you stay in this burning building you’re wrong. You’re goingto die!” What the rescuer says is just the truth, but you, being a sillyperson, would say, “I don’t like how you’re talking to me! I want to make up myown mind, and I don’t appreciate you telling me that I’m wrong!”
So also, when Jesus says, “Whoeverbelieves in me is not condemned, but whoever does not believe in me iscondemned already,” he is simply speaking the truth. He is the rescuer whohas come to rescue us from our sin, God’s condemnation, the misery of hell, andso on. In fact, there is no other way to be rescued. You can’t rescue yourself.Only God can forgive your sins or make you righteous. So when Jesus says thatwhoever does not believe in him is condemned already, he isn’t trying tomanipulate or coerce anybody. Think again of that fireman. Is he manipulatingthe trapped victim when he tells the person that he will die if he isn’trescued? That is a statement of truth, not just an opinion or one option amongmany.
But there’s another thing we should consider, because thereare a lot of people who believe it to be the case. A lot of people believe thatthere is no hell, there is no judgement, there is no sin. Being condemned byGod is an old-fashioned idea that most people do not believe in anymore.
So, to use the analogy I’ve been working with, this would belike a person who cannot see the smoke or the flames of the fire. If you putyourselves in their shoes, you can perhaps see how strange Jesus’s promiseswould be to them.
It would be like you going home today, sitting in your Lazyboy,everything’s fine. All of a sudden a fireman breaks down the door andannounces, “I’m here to rescue you!” In this situation somebody has to becrazy. Which one is it? Are you crazy or is the rescuer crazy? Is there a fireor is there not a fire? Are there such things as sin, condemnation, hell, andso on, or are these things imaginary so that you have no need to be rescued?
To try to answer whether sin, condemnation, and hell exist, manythings could be said. All that I’d like to try to do is point out the smoke andthe fire that can go unnoticed so easily. Consider what happens in homes. Lookat how husbands harm their wives, and wives harm their husbands. Look at howparents harm their children, and how children harm one another. Children, oftendeemed to be somewhat innocent, can be terrible to their fellows—a veritablelaw of the jungle.
Consider the workplace. Employers mistreat their employees.They try to squeeze as much as they can from them while paying them as littleas they can get away with. Employees mistreat their employers. They don’t workas hard as they can. They don’t respect their bosses. The workplace can bemiserable with all the backbiting and complaining.
These are our homes and our workplaces—the places we spendthe most time in. The one with whom we spend the most time with is ourselves. Somany of us are being burned with self-loathing and self-hatred.
All of these signs point to the conclusion that sin is real.Hell is real. The pain is real. These injuries, sicknesses, and cripplingeffects are not the way that things should be. We were meant to be lovingcreatures instead of destructive creatures.
What God’s enemies would like to convince you of is that thereis no alternative. Homes have to be traumatic. Workplaces have to becontentious. Self-loathing is inescapable. It is as though we have to acceptthis darkness, because lovelessness and misery are unbreakable laws of ourexistence.
To believe in Jesus means that you vehemently disagree. Wedon’t have to accept evil as impossible to overcome. Evil is destructive oflife and happiness. Jesus says that he will give “eternal life.” In fact, hehas said that he has come so that we may have life, and have it in abundance.
There are two sides that a person can be on. Either a personcan be on the side of light, or a person can be on the side of darkness. EitherJesus is supreme or the darkness is supreme. Jesus Christ is the light of theworld; the light no darkness can overcome. In Jesus you are saying, “No, thedarkness is not supreme. Jesus is the rescuer who saves us from sin,condemnation, and hell.”
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Picture in your mind’s eye the scene described in our Gospelreading. It’s Passover. Many people, like Jesus and his disciples, have come toJerusalem. It’s a busy place. The temple area has many tables and booths set up.Some were exchanging foreign money for the money that was accepted at thetemple. Others were selling animals needed for sacrifices. The oxen and thesheep would have been tied up. The pigeons would have been in cages. Jews fromfar and wide were milling about, perhaps dickering for better rates and prices.This was a normal day, full of busyness. Those familiar with how things weredone wouldn’t think anything of it.
As you heard, Jesus thought differently. He made a whip fromcords and went on a rampage. I don’t know what else to call it. He had to havebeen very forceful to make these merchants leave their stalls with all theirmoney, but he did. He drove them all out of the temple. The sheep and the oxen whereunleashed so that they were running about in the midst of the people. Jesustook the tills of money and dumped them on the ground so that coins weresplashed everywhere. He kicked over tables and pulled over booths.
That’s quite a scene! Does the thought enter your mind: “WasJesus in the right here?” It sounds like disorderly conduct. However importantthat question might be, I’d like to set that question aside. I think there is abetter, more interesting question: What must the fire have been like that wasburning in Jesus? What spurred him on to do what he did? That took courage.That took energy. Jesus cared. It was as the psalm says: “Zeal for your house has eaten me up!”
So what has gotten Jesus so upset? The answer to thatquestion is so foreign that it is almost incomprehensible to us. The reason whyJesus is so upset is because he cares about people praying. He wants people topray to his Father. The temple was to be a house of prayer for all nations. Thatpurpose was being thwarted by what these merchants were doing. He says in ourreading, “Take these things away; do not make myFather’s house into a house of trade.” The temple was the dwelling placeof God’s Name. People could call upon God’s Name in that place.
I must say, and to our shame, we have nothing of the firethat burned in Jesus. When was the last time that you were upset—really upset? Didit have anything to do with prayer? Did it have anything to do with conscience,which is closely related? Having a good conscience towards God is indispensablefor praying with confidence. Were you upset because these things were beinghampered for you or for others? Probably not.
The last time you were really upset was probably becausesomething bad happened to you. Somebody made a mistake and it created aninconvenience. Somebody hurt you. Somebody said something bad about you. Yourquality of life was hampered, and maybe you went on a rampage about that. Butprayer? Conscience? These are thought to be back-burner concerns. This is why Jesusis so incomprehensible to us. “Zeal for God’s house hadeaten him up.” When have you had zeal for being in God’s house, for praying?Maybe never!
But maybe you haven’t known any better. That wouldn’t besurprising. What most people believe is really important is their quality oflife. The stuff they get really upset about is how things are going for them inthis life. If any thought is given to God it is usually fleeting and feeble.It’s usually not much more than, “Yes, God exists. I try my best, so I shouldbe fine. That’s enough of that! Let’s get back to the business of living lifeto its fullest!”
The same thing is usually true with those who deny God’sexistence. They usually don’t put a lot of thought into it. They maybe heard ofsome stuff from the Bible that they thought was impossible or ridiculous. Thatsettles it for them. They say something different from you. They say, “Goddoesn’t exist,” but then what? The refrain is the same: “Let’s get back to thebusiness of living life to its fullest!” This life looms the largest for people.
This carries over into people’s thoughts about heaven too. Mostpeople think that heaven will just be a continuation of this life, but withoutannoyances. People will spend their time in heaven doing those things that theyliked best. The happy farmer on earth will farm in heaven, but maybe withoutany weeds. The person who loves riding horses is going to ride horseseternally.
Although these kinds of thoughts about heaven are extremelycommon, they are not thought about very deeply. People simply fail to notice,for example, that with this conception of heaven people continue to ignore Godin heaven just like they ignored God in this life. Or, again, people will beseeking their own advantage in this supposed heaven, just as they sought theirown advantage in this life.
But ignoring God andseeking one’s own advantage is probably a more accurate description of hellthan it is of heaven. God will not be ignored in heaven, nor will any of thosein heaven want to ignore him. Nobody will be seeking their own advantagein heaven—just the opposite in fact. The opposite of seeking your own advantageis love. Heaven is the place where love is. God is there, and, as the Scripturessay, “God is love.”
In fact, a great transformation must take place in us for usto be happy in this place. We must be made holy. Sin must be purged from us. Wemust be filled with love from the top of our heads to the soles of our feet.For the first time since we were born we will know what pure love is. For thefirst time we will be capable of loving with our whole heart. We will receivelove from God and from all his creatures and we will love right back. Is thereanything better than being loved and loving in return?
So how can we go on the way we have been? How can we notcare about our relationship with God? How can we not care about other people’srelationship with God?
Maybe an illustration would help get across what I’m tryingto say. I’m sure you’ve noticed how toddlers like to play with blocks. Theylike to build them up into a tower and knock them down. They do it over andover again. They are happy to spend their time that way. Maybe, to them,there’s no better way to spend one’s time. We, who are grown, however, knowthat’s not true. I’m assuming that none of you built towers today so that youcould knock them down again. You occupy yourself with higher things that morefully engage your abilities.
When Jesus drove the people out of the temple because theywere merely engaging in trade while being totally mindless towards God, it wasas though Jesus were telling them to quit playing with blocks. You’re too oldfor that. There is something higher, better, and more important. Prayer,conscience, knowing God—this is what we were made for. We weren’t made to playwith blocks our whole lives.
But people can be pretty serious about their blocks. CEOs,presidents, those who are wise according to worldly standards, those who arestrong, those who are of noble birth—they easily believe that their affairs area cut above everyone else’s. Their blocks are really important. But even if aperson were the CEO of the biggest company, even if a person were the presidentof the whole world—something that doesn’t even exist—that would still be likeplaying with blocks. Knowing God through knowing Christ is the way that webecome the creatures that we are meant to be.
In our Gospel reading Jesus is angry and upset becausepeople are being turned aside from what is truly good for stuff that isworthless and passing away. Jesus says in another place: “What does it profit a man to gain the whole world, but tolose his soul? What can a man give in exchange for his soul?” How many jetskis does it take? How many vacations will produce a sufficient quality oflife? These are building blocks that give but a little thrill.
We would do well to catch a little of the fire that was inJesus. We would do well to be zealous for the same things Jesus was zealousabout, because he wanted what was good and valuable for people. Our hearts andour neighbors’ hearts easily and naturally get captured by all kinds of thingsso that we think nothing of God, or almost nothing of God. This and thatcapture our love and devotion instead. Well, this and that are lame.
God is good. He is life-giving. Missing out on him is morethan enough to make a person upset.
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In our Gospel reading Peter confessed Jesus to be theChrist. This is important and life changing because it is by our confession ofJesus as the Christ that we are saved. However, as we also heard, Peter raninto some difficulty when Jesus spoke about the cross. Today we will talk aboutwhat happened with Peter and how this also applies to us as Jesus’s followerstoday.
We’ll begin with the story. Jesus was going to the villagesof Caesaria Philippi with his disciples. Jesus asked them, “Who do people say that I am?” The disciples told Jesuswhat they had heard. Some people said that he was John the Baptist; others,Elijah; others, one of the prophets. Jesus then asked them, “What about you? Who do you say that I am?” Peterresponded for all of them and said, “You are theChrist.”
This is a very special answer. The word, “Christ,” means“anointed one.” The way that people were made into kings in the Old Testamentwas by being anointed with oil. Peter is saying that Jesus is king—but not justany king. God made promises in the Old Testament about a great king who wouldarise. He would be a descendant of Abraham and of David. He would put an end toinjustice and wickedness. He would bring about righteousness and peace.
Peter’s answer, therefore, “You arethe Christ,” is of enormous significance. He is saying that Jesus isthis great king. Peter does well with his confession of who Jesus is.
What happens next, though, throws a wrench into Peter’sthoughts about Jesus being the Christ. Jesus began to tell them what was goingto happen to him. He was going to suffer many things. He would be rejected by theelders, chief priests, and experts in the Law. He would be killed. After threedays he would rise again.
This was not what Peter had in mind for his beloved king. Stufflike that didn’t happen to kings. What good could this suffering and dyingpossibly serve? Peter rebuked Jesus. Jesus rebuked Peter right back. He usedvery harsh language. He said, “Get behind me Satan!”I’m not aware of Jesus ever calling anyone else that terrible name. Heexplained why he called him that: “For you are notsetting your mind on the things of God, but on the things of man.”
These words are key. They identify a great divide. A personcan set his or her mind on the things of God or on the things of man. What doesit mean to set your mind on the things of God or the things of man? Let’s beginwith the things of God.
The things of God are bound up in Jesus the Christ. He isloved by God the Father. What does this king do? You already heard veryimportant things this king did. He suffered many things, was mistreated,killed, and rose again.
You are aware of the goodness that the king accomplished bydoing that because we talk about that a lot. Jesus’s suffering, death, andresurrection brought about the verdict of forgiveness for sinners. Sinners, whootherwise should die and go to hell for their sins, instead are received asbeloved children of God for Jesus’s sake.
Jesus’s work as king, however, did not end with his deathand resurrection. Forty days after he rose from the dead he ascended to theright hand of God the Father. That is where he reigns and rules as king now. Theway that he reigns and rules his spiritual kingdom is through the testimony ofGod’s Word by Christians like you and me. These Christians are scattered farand wide all over the earth. These Christians have been given the Holy Spirit. Theybelieve the Gospel. They urge others to believe in the good news of this kingand to follow him. When the last person whom God has chosen is brought tofaith, then Jesus will come again.
When Jesus comes again he will judge so that goodness andevil will be identified and separated. Evil will be confined in hell. Those whobelieved in Jesus will receive their inheritance as co-heirs with Christ. Allthings will be placed under Jesus’s feet. Then Jesus will hand over the kingdomto God the Father so that God will be all in all. These are the main points ofthe things of God, upon which we should set our minds.
What are the things of man? What Jesus means by the “thingsof man” is the way that man operates after the fall into sin. Already inGenesis you can see the things of man by the way that Adam and Eve lived afterthey disobeyed God. I don’t think they were exactly happy, but they tried tomake the best of the situation. They solved problems. They were ashamed oftheir nakedness, so they sewed together some fig leaves. Life went on.
So it was also for Cain, their son, and his descendantsafter they were rejected by God. They tried to make the best of things. Theydiscovered new things. They made instruments to improve their quality of life.
Peter, when he was setting his mind on the things of man,perhaps thought that Jesus as an earthly king would be good for life in thisworld. Instead of him suffering and dying—seemingly accomplishing nothing—he shouldget busy. He could raise an army, create a following, and if luck was on theirside they might manage to bring Israel back to its former glory.
So it is also today. We try to make the best of things. We’vediscovered lots of useful things. Like the men before us we try to push theball forward. We try to make progress.
Jesus rebuked Peter by saying that he was setting his mindon the things of man instead of the things of God. Perhaps when Jesus told hisdisciples that he was going to suffer and be killed and rise again, it soundedto Peter as though Jesus was going backwards. That’s how suffering generallysounds to us. We try to get rid of suffering. We try to fix problems. Itsounded wrong that suffering should remain—especially under the rule of thisvery special, long-promised king!
Jesus, however, knew things that we don’t know. He knew thatour fundamental problems could not be fixed by any amount of reforms or thewisest of leaders. Our problems are too deep for that. We needed to beredeemed. That was why Jesus suffered, died, and rose again. This was good, notbad! It was how sinners were set free.
But Jesus’s teaching on the cross was not just for him. Hegoes on to teach the disciples about the life that they were to live. Sufferingwould remain for them too. He said, “If anyone wouldcome after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me.”
We can understand these words according to what Jesus toldPeter. We are to set our minds on the things of God instead of on the things ofman. To set our minds on the things of God is to recognize that he is king—heis in control, not us. God’s understanding of goodness is better than ourunderstanding of goodness. We might identify something as good that is not good,and, vice versa, we might identify something as being evil which is in factvery good.
Take, for example, the problem of being a disciple of Jesus.Being a disciple of Jesus is a problem, because that means we won’t always fitin. Jesus didn’t always fit in and look what they did to him. Jesus’s apostlesdidn’t always fit in. They were severely mistreated. Disciples of Jesus willnever fit in because we believe in and testify to the Gospel. We believe thatJesus is the king who will set all things right.
The reason why this means we will never fit in is because wewill always be seen are raining on the parade of earthly dreams. Man alwaysdreams of making a paradise on this earth. By testifying that Jesus is theChrist we are also saying that all other reforms are at best half-measures, andcan never really succeed. The Gospel is always an indictment against settingyour mind on the things of man.
Although Jesus’s message was not always welcome to everyone,Jesus did not change it. People went away from him. People got angry at him. He’sgoing to remain the king that he is.
Jesus is open about the suffering that we will undergo asChristians. Suffering will remain. And if you won’t deny yourself, if you won’ttake up your cross and follow him, then you won’t be his disciple. It’s assimple as that. When the prospect of suffering rears its ugly head, you willbetray him to save your own skin.
Be prepared, therefore. Jesus says several times, “Be sober and watchful.” That means, “Be sensible. Haveunrealistic expectations. Don’t be surprised when suffering comes upon you.” Youmight be tempted to think that there is some way that you could “fix” Christianityso that you don’t have to suffer. Maybe you can make it so that it neveroffends anyone, so that nobody ever feels bad from anything you might say. Alot of Christians set this as a high priority for their life of faith.
I submit to you that they are probably doing somethingsimilar to what Peter was thinking of doing in our reading today. Peter wastrying to fit Jesus into a mold of his own making. This king would then workwell for him, solve his problems, and go a long way in creating a paradise onthis earth. So also today Christianity can be edited so as to curry favor with acertain segment of the population, or to avoid persecution from another segmentof the population. This song and dance, however, is a far cry from the bold andsimple confession of Peter: “You are the Christ.”
We do not need to play tricks with what we say. We do notneed to figure out how to be clever like we so often do with our worldlypursuits. We need the truth. The plainer and simpler the truth, the better.Then let the Holy Spirit go to work.
And if it should so happen that we then receive a cross, sobe it. God will work good through that cross, even if we don’t see it. Godwilling, and by God’s grace, we’ll keep on believing in the king, despite thecross. We’ll keep confessing that Jesus is the Christ. By that confession wewill be saved.
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Today I’d like to address something that all people mustface: Temptation. Temptation is when we are lured and enticed to do somethingthat is wrong. Where does temptation come from? It doesn’t come from God. Jamessays in our reading, “God tempts no one.” Instead,as he says, temptation is when “each person is luredand enticed by his own desires.”
This makes sense. If you don’t have a desire for something,how can you really be tempted? For example, some people don’t like sweetthings. Forgoing dessert is not difficult. They have no strong desire for it.Likewise, with more serious matters: Some have an intense desire for money.Others less so. Some have an intense desire to get their own way. Others aremore agreeable. What tempts us is closely linked to our desires.
The Bible teaches what is to be done when our desires dragus into temptation. This is seen already with Cain and Abel, Adam and Eve’ssons. Cain was stirred up with a powerful desire to kill his brother Abel. Cainis told, “Sin is crouching at the door… You must ruleover it.” The picture here is that either desires rule over us, or werule over the desires. Either we are slaves to our desires—forced to obey what ourdesires command, or we are free. If we are free, then we aren’t forced to obeywhatever our desires tell us. We can tell them we are not going to obey them.
There are a couple of passages that speak like this. Paulsays in Galatians chapter 5: “For freedom Christ hasset you free.” The goal of Jesus’s work as the Christ is to set us free.Jesus speaks this way in John chapter 8. He says, “Whoevercommits sin is a slave of sin. The slave does not remain in the house forever;the son remains forever. So if the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed.”
Jesus reveals something very important about our slavery orfreedom with regard to our desires. The only way that we can be set free is bythe Son of God setting us free. We cannot free ourselves. The chains are toostrong. If we imagine that we have freed ourselves, we are deceiving ourselves.Only the Son sets you free, but, as Jesus says, “If theSon sets you free then you are free indeed.”
That’s good news! The word “Gospel” means “good news.” Slaveswho have been kicked around by their masters are happy to hear that they arefree. They no longer have to listen to those old masters. What’s more is thatwe are not just set free now to go about our business, having to make our ownway. We have been made into sons in the only Son of God. We belong to the houseof God, which we may live in forever. We are baptized into Jesus. We havebecome one with him. Jesus, as you know, is Lord over everything. He sits atthe right hand of God the Father. He is above every power, authority, desireand demand. He is free. He is Lord. And so are we when we believe in him.
This is the Gospel that all of us Christians have beengiven. It says something new about us. “For freedomChrist has set you free.” You are free from amazing things! You are freefrom death. You are free from hell. You are free from the Law, because Christfulfilled the Law for you. You are free from the demands of your desires. Bythe Holy Spirit who is within you you can say “No.” “I’m not going to obey youas though you were my master and I were your slave.”
Faith in this Gospel is truly wonder-working. It goes waybeyond moving mountains. Moving mountains is nothing compared to the lordship thatis ours through faith in Christ. We, together with Jesus, triumph over allevil. We triumph because Jesus is king and God. He’s on your side, and, throughfaith in him, you’re on his side. Everything has to turn out well, even if youfirst must pass through fire or the valley of the shadow of death. Jesus isjust that great of a king. Your faith in him is powerful, because he ispowerful.
But although faith is so powerful, it is, at the same time,easily damaged and lost. This is always how God’s enemies attack. They attackour faith with deception and lies. God’s enemies cannot attack Christ directly.They could never overcome him. So the only power that God’s enemies have is todeceive and tell lies in the hopes that we will give up on the truth andbelieve the lies instead. This is how our faith is easily damaged and lost. We believethe lies instead of believing the truth.
I’ll give you a very straightforward example that I’m sureyou’ve all experienced. Let’s say a desire comes along and says, “Do this!” Hopefullyyou know and you remember from the Gospel that you are not a slave. You arefree. You can say to that desire, “No, I won’t obey you.” But let’s say yourdesire puts up a fight and says, “I’m stronger than you.”
You’ve probably heard the saying, “A good lie alwayscontains a bit of truth.” Goliath was stronger than David. So it may be heretoo. Your desires may very well be stronger than you! They aren’tstronger than Jesus! They aren’t stronger than the Holy Spirit. The deception hereis that you are too weak for the temptation—just look at you—so you might aswell give in.
I’ve been fooled by this simple tactic. There are countlessmore. They can be extremely subtle and convincing. The apostle Paul himselfadmits to being deceived repeatedly in Romans chapter 7 as he fought againsttemptation. There seems to be no end to God’s enemies’ lying, and,unfortunately, our flesh likes to be deceived. Being deceived is the way thatour faith is so easily damaged and lost. We put back on the chains of slaveryfrom which Christ has freed us.
What should we do if we find ourselves in this sad but verycommon situation? The most important thing is that you don’t go on believing inlies. Saying you should not go on believing lies is a lot easier than actuallydoing it, however, because continuing on in lies is the very thing that God’senemies want you to do. Lies can look much more attractive than the truth.Remember Adam and Eve. Hiding in the bushes seemed much safer and wiser thanexposing themselves with the truth.
The good thing about the truth, though, is that the truth isalso good news. If the truth were that God hates you because you’ve blown it—I’dwant to hide from that too! But that’s not the truth. The truth is the goodnews that Jesus is the Savior of sinners. The good work that Jesus has done asking isyou’re your salvation. His work does not need your cooperation andinvolvement. Jesus’s work is complete and perfect. He gives it to you as agift. He gives it to you by having it spoken to you so that you can believe it.Believe this good news and it’s yours!
And then don’t forget what we’ve talked about already today.What we’ve talked about is so easy to lose sight of in the midst of temptation.You are not a slave. You have been purchased and redeemed. You have the HolySpirit. You don’t have to obey your desires’ demands as though you were their slave.You are free. “For freedom Christ has set you free.”In Christ you are lords over all evil powers. They cannot do what they want todo to you.
Accordingly, and this is important too, we can have anassertive posture towards desires and temptations instead of having a postureof weak resignation. I know well—again, by personal experience—the whimpering prayer,“I wish these desires would go away from me. I wish they’d leave me alone.” Behindthat whimper is the fear that my desires are too strong for me. There’s despairbehind that whimper. Despair is the opposite of faith. Of course you are tooweak to conquer all your desires, but that is not what we as Christians believein. We do not believe that we are all alone and that it is all up to us. Youaren’t alone. Jesus is with you. You are weak, but he is strong.
Therefore, you can be assertive. You can see this assertiveposture towards temptation in our epistle reading from James. He says, “Blessed is the man who endures temptation.” He doesn’tsay “Cursed is the man who has been tempted.” He says, “Blessed is that man.”
A few verses earlier he speaks even more clearly about thisassertive, confident posture. He says, “Consider it alljoy, my brothers, when temptations of various kinds fall all around you.”Consider it all joy? Why? James answers: “The testingof your faith produces endurance.” The testing of that faith you have inJesus as the king produces endurance. Having been set free, we can try it out.
Refusing to do evil is the smashing of evil. It is wonderfuland glorious. We can learn by experience that we can endure temptation. Wedon’t always only have to sin. We don’t have to obey. That is when we are beginningto entering into the glorious liberty of the sons of God. That is when we areembracing the implanted word that makes us a kind of first-fruits of God’screatures. It is better to smash evil than to cower in fear against it asthough it were invincible—as though it were more powerful than Jesus. It’s not!
Now, in our fight against desires and temptations might weget bloody noses, stumble, and even fall? Perhaps. What of it? In that case wereturn to the Gospel. We return to the all-conquering truth that Jesus is kingand lord over all.
Jesus is on the march. Whatever is evil is doomed. As lightscatters the darkness, so the light of Christ obliterates the shadow of evilwherever it might be. You are on the winning side. This is good news.
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When Pastor Bertram and I were discussing what we might liketo accomplish with this series on marriage, sexuality, and so on, we boththought that it would be good to address what is known as LGBTQ concerns. LGBTQstands for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and questioning or queer. Advocacyfor LGBTQ rights has entered the mainstream. Our laws concerning marriage havechanged. Workplaces are implementing DEI, which stands for diversity, equity,and inclusion. No one can afford to ignore what is going on because the stakescan be quite high.
These issues have become politicized and are beingimplemented by force. There are some countries, such as Canada or some Europeancountries, where certain ways of speaking about these issues have beencriminalized. Criticism of LGBTQ lifestyles will likely be labeled as “hatespeech.” So it is also with workplaces. Say the wrong thing, and you might be fired.So it is also with our families. Say the wrong thing, and you might not beinvited to family functions.
These issues have become so fraught with drasticconsequences. Therefore, we might think that we are already addressing what ismost important when we deal with laws, policy, and so forth. Although beingimprisoned, or losing your job, or being shunned are very important things,they are not the most important thing.
The most important thing was what Jesus said in our Gospelreading. He said, “For God did not send his Son intothe world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be savedthrough him.” Jesus is so clear. God is not scanning the earth, lookingfor whom he might condemn. He wants everyone to be saved.
This is similar to another of Jesus’s statements. In Johnchapter 10 he says, “I came that people may have life,and have it more abundantly.” We might put that into simpler, moreeveryday language by saying, “Jesus wants everyone to be happy.” Jesus’s givingof happiness is what is more important than the temporary, earthly troubles wemight experience. The salvation of just one soul is infinitely precious.
So although there is much that we could talk about with thistopic, I’d like to focus on what is most important. Namely, how can those who experiencesame-sex attraction or gender confusion receive Jesus’s promises of salvationand abundant life? The answer is simple: “Repent andbelieve the Gospel.” That’s what Jesus always preached. Repentance forour sin and faith in Jesus the Savior is the only way to eternal life.
Let’s begin with the first part of Jesus’s statement, whichis, “Repent.” To know that same-sex attractionand gender confusion is sinful is not difficult. Many people who experiencethese desires already know in their own hearts that it is not good. They don’teven need the Scriptures to tell them so. However, the Scriptures are veryclear about these things. You heard that in our first two readings.
In our reading from Leviticus it says that a man should notlie with another man as though that other man were a woman. That is anabomination. Men and women should not lie with animals. That is perversion. Godthreatens to punish those who do these things. He threatens to punish all wholive in the land where these things are practiced. God is very clear that thisbehavior is unacceptable.
In our second reading, from Romans chapter 1, Paulidentifies same sex attraction as a symptom of a decaying society where thepeople are alienating themselves from God. Our alienation from God, ourworshipping of created things instead of the Creator, is the root cause. Improperdesires are but a symptom of the underlying condition.
Note how Paul doesn’t just speak about improper same-sexrelationships. He describes many other symptoms of this societal decay. Thethings he mentions are so common that we might not even notice them as beingsins. He speaks against coveting, being mean, being proud, being disobedient toparents, gossiping—these sins are just as much an indication of our alienationfrom God as same-sex attraction or gender confusion.
To all of this God says, “Repent!”The word, “repent,” is often taken to be a harsh, hate-filled word. It may beharsh, but it isn’t hate-filled. Repent means, “Change your ways! You’re goingthe wrong way!” Going the wrong way isn’t good for us! Lying, being mean,burning with covetousness, indulging whatever emotion or desire that comes overus—none of these things are good for us. They don’t promote life; they hamperlife. God would have you turn away from these things, be forgiven in Jesus, begiven abundant life.
A common problem, however—not just among those who experiencesame-sex attraction or gender confusion, but among all sinners—is that a persondoesn’t want to repent. They don’t want to change their ways. They’ve enjoyedthe sins they have been committing. They don’t want anyone to tell them to liveotherwise.
This is something that is eternally decisive for each one ofus. Jesus speaks to this also in our Gospel reading. He says: “And this is the judgment: the light has come into the world,and people loved the darkness rather than the light because their deeds wereevil. For everyone who does wicked things hates the light and does not come tothe light, lest his deeds should be exposed. But whoever does what is truecomes to the light, so that it may be clearly seen that his deeds have beencarried out in God.”
What is eternally decisive for each of us is the question ofwhat you are going to do when the light comes? The light of God shows us what’sright and wrong. It gives us a knowledge of our sin. What are we going to doabout that? One option is to ignore the light. Another option is to fightagainst the light as being truthful. You can reject what is said about rightand wrong. This can be done with same-sex attraction, with divorce, with livingtogether without being married. It can be done with other sins too. The angryperson might want to continue to be angry. The gossiper might want to continueto gossip.
Whenever we do this, however, we are making a decision. Thatdecision might get to be so automatic for us that it is no longer even aconscious decision, but it is a decision nevertheless. We are stating ourpreference. We prefer the darkness in which we can continue to live as we seefit instead of embracing the light—the righteousness and healing that Jesus theChrist is bringing into this world.
“God sent his Son into the world,not to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved throughhim.” The light certainly teaches us what’s right and wrong, but that isnot the only thing that Jesus does. The Son of God lays down his life for sinners.He suffers and dies. He is punished with the punishment we deserve. In him andin his sacrifice is the only way for all the wrongs that we commit to be maderight.
Many of you have long heard this Gospel preaching, and arewell aware of it. I would like to emphasize how this is true for all people andfor all kinds of sin. The good news of salvation in Jesus is for those who experiencesame-sex attraction or gender confusion. The good news of salvation is also forthose who have acted on their desires. Jesus died to pay for the sins of thosewho have lived as homosexual couples, those who have lain with animals, thosewho have fully transitioned.
The word that Jesus has for them is the same word that hehas for everyone: “Repent, and believe the Good News ofsalvation.” Jesus’s salvation is stronger than anyone’s sins. The graceof God is so powerful and abundant that all the world’s sin, taken altogether,is like a spark that falls into an ocean. That ocean has more than enough toextinguish that little spark and more. Jesus forgives those who repent of theirsinful desires, including same-sex attraction or gender confusion. He forgivesthem lavishly and completely.
Forgiveness and salvation are in Jesus. This is the mainthing. It is only natural, however, to wonder about what life is like afterhearing the word of forgiveness as we live in this world. We know that God willbring about the final healing at our death and resurrection. That is when Godwill finish his work of making us holy. In the meantime what should those whosuffer from unwanted same-sex attraction or gender confusion do?
The answer here is, again, not very original. It’s the sameas we’ve been saying all along. Those who experience same-sex attraction orgender confusion must fight against their sinful desires just as all Christiansmust fight against their sinful desires. All Christians have unwanted desires.Some are proud, some are greedy, some are unruly. Unwanted desires cannot hurtus Christians so long as we do not give ourselves over to them. Day in and dayout, week in and week out, we confess our sins and receive absolution. That’sthe life of the baptized.
Would it be easier if all our unwanted desires were takenaway from us? Seemingly so. But God very often allows these desires to remain.They keep us humble. They keep us from relying upon ourselves and our ownrighteousness. They force us to live only by faith in Jesus, who is the onlySavior. So our unwanted desires might not be taken away from us in this life. That’salright. We will one day experience the truthfulness of Jesus’s promise aboutlife, abundant life.
However, God might remove unwanted desires too. We shouldnot make hard and fast rules about these things. Don’t demand of God signs andwonders. That’s on the on hand. On the other, don’t reject his healing if heshould give it either. It might be that God makes it so that a person who atone time was afflicted by these desires can marry and have a family of his orher own. If that happens, thank God! But even with this happy outcome, it isstill not the main thing. The main thing is continuing to believe in the Son ofGod.
In summary and in conclusion, Christians who experiencesame-sex attraction or gender confusion are not different from their fellowbrothers and sisters in Christ. The way to live as Christians is the same forone and for all. We all must continually repent and believe in Jesus. The waythat unwanted, sinful desires are handled isn’t different either. May God havemercy and take these sinful desires away from all of us in this life! But God verylikely will allow many of them to remain. As Paul says, “It is only through many troubles that we may enter into thekingdom of God.” They keep us humble. They keep us hungry for the newheavens and the new earth when our abundant life will begin in earnest.
The politicization that has occurred regarding LGBTQ rightsis unlikely to go away. However difficult or frightening various changes mightbe, they remain earthly and temporary. We have something much greater—the goodnews of Jesus’s light and life. The Son of God came, not to condemn the world,but to save the world. Jesus came so that we may have life, and have it moreabundantly. Hope in him!
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Today we have begun a three week series on marriage,sexuality, and various issues that go along with these things. To do a serieslike this is a little unusual for us. We tend to follow the lectionary. Thelectionary is a list of readings from the Bible that have been assigned foreach Sunday in the Church Calendar. Pastor Bertram and I are happy to followthe lectionary. The assigned readings make sure that we hear the whole counselof God’s Word instead of only focusing on certain favorite topics. Nevertheless,we have decided to set aside the normal readings for these three weeks so thatwe could focus on the topics of marriage, sexuality, etc.
To begin our look at this area of life it is good to beginwith how God has created us. God made Adam and Eve in a very special way as we readabout in Genesis. The way that he made Adam was by taking council withinhimself, deliberating within himself, gathering some earth, breathing thebreath of life into Adam’s nostrils. Eve’s creation was also very special. Shewas not made from earth. A portion of flesh was taken from Adam. God made thatrib into the woman.
None of the other creatures are described as having beencreated in such a way. Man and woman were created with a strong connection toGod. He made them in his own image. There is also a strong connection betweenman and woman since the woman was taken from man. She was not created as anindependent being.
When God finished making Eve, he presented her to Adam. Adamwas delighted. He broke out into poetry and song, as young men are sometimesknown to do. He said, “This at last is bone of my bonesand flesh of my flesh; she shall be called woman, because she was taken out ofman.” The woman is like him, and yet not like him. The similarities and differencesbetween him and her bring about wonder and admiration.
Here we see another important thing about how God createdus. We were created to have an attraction—the male for the female, and thefemale for the male. God creates us with attractions and appetites. We haveappetites for food and drink, for example, that are satisfied with eating and drinking.So also, a man is meant to be satisfied by being with a woman; a woman is meantto be satisfied by being with a man.
It is difficult, and a little uncomfortable, to speak aboutthis attraction and appetite. None of us are ashamed to talk about hunger andthirst. It isn’t as easy to speak about the desire we feel for another person. Thisisn’t necessarily bad either. Unlike eating and drinking, what a man and womando with each other is private. It’s supposed to be private. However, weshouldn’t be so afraid to talk about these appetites that they become taboos. Weshould help, especially, our children. Children eventually grow into adults. Thisdesire awakens within them. They should not be shamed for having that God-givenappetite. They need help to know that their desire can be directed in such away that they can keep their honor.
Where their desire should be directed is toward their spouseor their future spouse. Our reading from Genesis speaks to this also. It says:“Therefore a man shall leave his father and his motherand hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.” A man isto leave his father and mother when he is ready to take a wife. The reason whyhe leaves his father and mother is because he is going to create a new family togetherwith his wife. The man clings to his wife instead of clinging to his oldfamily. The man and his wife become one flesh—they are joined together. Fromthis one-flesh union children are created. Thus you see how God makes a newfamily. Husband and wife become father and mother. The new family begins withthe marriage.
You see here in Genesis how God has made us—male and femalehe created us. He made us so that we have a desire for one another. He createdmarriage as the first and highest of all institutions. Family and society flowfrom it. Marriage is an arrangement that remains on this earth, and it will continueto remain until Christ comes. Then, as Christ teaches, the situation will bedifferent. In the life to come we will not be married or given in marriage. Wewill be like the angels, Jesus says.
But our focus today is on this life. So, very practicallyspeaking, how should a boy or a girl look at this area of their lives, and howshould they look towards the future?
First of all, every boy should thank God for making him aboy, and every girl should thank God for making her a girl. The way that Godhas made us is wonderful, and God deserves to be praised. Praising God formaking you the boy that you are or the girl that you are is important work foryou to do as God’s creatures.
Later on, when boys grow into men and girls grow into women,they should be on the lookout for that person to whom they might be joinedtogether as one flesh in holy matrimony. My advice for boys and girls is that theyare never too young to pray to God for a good wife or a good husband. Youparents and grandparents—you who love your children and grandchildren—shouldpray for good, godly spouses for them if you want what is good for them.
During the teenage and young adult years it is important toguard your body, soul, and mind from the powerful temptations to take what Godhas not yet given to you. If you have not yet been joined through marriage tosomeone, you should not pretend that you have been. Wait until God joins youtogether with that person.
A profound promise is asked of those being joined together. Youmight be familiar with this marriage vow: “I take you to be my wedded husband or wedded wife, tohave and to hold from this day forward, for better, for worse, for richer, forpoorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, till death us dopart, according to God’s holy will; and I pledge to you my faithfulness.”
What this promise means is that you are going to forsake allothers and stick with this person no matter what. That’s love! Love is not justlooking out for yourself. Love is being there for the other even when it is unpleasant,painful, and no longer to your own advantage.
By having made those promises, by having been joinedtogether, a new family is made. Within that family there is to be love, honor,service, and sacrifice. God highly approves of all of this. God loves it when aman loves his woman, and a woman loves her man. God loves it when parents lovetheir children, and children honor their father and mother. A very good and richlife is given within this marriage and family.
Finally, we should talk about the end of the marriage. Amarriage ends when death parts husband and wife. God is the one who determinesthe end of the marriage, just as God is supposed to be the one who determinesthe end of anybody’s life. If we take our own life into our own hands and endit, or if we take somebody else’s life into our own hands and end it, that’srightly called “murder.” God doesn’t want us to do that. So also God bringsabout the end of a marriage by bringing about the death of one or the other spouse.This is what it means when the marriage vow says “till death us do part.” When God determines thetime, he ends the marriage by bringing about the death of the husband or thewife.
Now, having described how things should go in this area oflife, I wouldn’t be surprised if there were lots of questions. Some of thosequestions might be addressed during the next two weeks. There is not enoughtime for me to say much more than I already have. So I’d like to conclude witha word to those who recognize that this area of their life has not been what itshould be. You haven’t done as you were supposed to do.
Remember that Jesus came to save sinners. Jesus died to setthings right that have gone wrong. The work that Jesus does as Savior is notdifferent in this area of life from the other work that we hear of him doing.Jesus went around giving sight to the blind, hearing to the deaf, mobility tothe lame. Your affliction might be with your sexuality, or the sexual sins thatyou’ve committed, or perhaps the sins that have been committed against you.
Jesus does not wish for you to be left alone in yoursadness, disappointment, or regret. Like the blind man, who could not makehimself see, or the lame man who could not make himself walk, you also cannotfix yourself. You might not be able to fix yourself for the future. Youcertainly can’t go back and undo what has been done. You can’t make right whathas gone wrong. But Jesus can. He’s the only one who can. This is the miracleof God’s blood and God’s death. That sacrifice cleanses and atones. Fully awareof your sins, therefore, Jesus says he forgives you. He teaches you. He bringslight, truth and healing in this present life. He will bring perfect healing inthe life to come.
Understand, therefore, that your real enemy is not Jesus,nor is it God, with his Law. You might be tempted to believe that God with hisLaw is your enemy, because you haven’t kept it. But your real enemy is thedevil. He is a liar. He says you don’t need those outdated, prudish laws. Livehowever you want! Lust after whomever you want! Be the lord of your ownhappiness!
That’s the enemy’s message. It sounds good. There’s a reasonwhy so many follow his advice! It sounds like it will be just what you want. Butthose who follow this liar’s advice soon find out that on the other side of thesupposed freedom and thrills misery awaits. You can’t fight against the way Godhas created us to be and expect to have no consequences.
God’s message, admittedly, is very different from the liar’smessage. God doesn’t say that you should do whatever would make you happy. He requiressome high and difficult things. He says we need to love. He says self-controlis good. Being sexually pure and decent is good. Showing honor and respect toyour wife or your husband is good. Being faithful unto death is good.
These things are good whether you have actually done thesethings or not. Who of us is without sin in this area of life? Nevertheless,what God requires is good. I think you know that. If only we would be the waythat God would have us to be in this area of life, things would be good. It’sbecause we haven’t been obedient that we have the troubles that we do.
So we’ve messed up. Jesus is the Savior of people who needhelp. Jesus is the Savior of sinners. Repent, believe in him, and be saved!
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Our Gospel reading this morning tells the story of whathappened not long after Jesus’s birth. The Law of God, given to the OldTestament people, required that eight days after Jesus’s birth he needed to becircumcised. Then, forty days after Mary gave birth, she needed to offersacrifices. This marked the end of her time of ceremonial uncleanness fromgiving birth. Our Gospel reading describes this. Mary and Joseph went up intoJerusalem. Jesus was presented to the Lord as the firstborn, and they offeredtwo pigeons in the Temple.
In a way, these activities were unremarkable. Jewish peoplehad been obeying these Laws for many hundreds of years. Since Mary and Josephwere devout Jews, they did what was expected of them according to the Law.
What was unusual about the situation was that Jesus wasn’tjust an ordinary Jewish boy. He was also God’s Son. Since Jesus was and isGod’s Son, he is the originator of the Law. He is Lord of the Law. He was free.He didn’t need to enter under those Laws. The Israelites, on the other hand,were not free either to observe the Law or not observe the Law. If the boys andmen were not circumcised, they were cut off from the people of God. If peoplewere not made clean according to the Law of Moses, they were kept apart fromthe communion of saints. The God-given laws were what gave them their standing.If they were on the right side of the Law, then all was well. If they were onthe wrong side of the Law, then they were cut off.
Although Jesus, the Son of God, was not compelled to besubservient to these laws, he freely did so. The reason why he entered intothese laws was to set people free from the Law as determining their standingbefore God. He entered into these Laws to keep them on behalf of all. Hesatisfied what was required by the Law so that his obedience may be credited tous.
Our Epistle reading is a clear and memorable passage that sumsup what Jesus accomplished. The passage reads: “In thefullness of time, God sent forth his Son, born of a woman, born under the Law,to redeem those who were under the Law, so that we might receive adoption assons.”
Let’s briefly look more closely at these words: God sent hisSon at the fullness of time, at the right time. God’s Son was born of a woman—notthe normal place to find a God. God’s Son was born under the Law—not the normalplace to find the Giver of the Law. The reason for all of this, though, is forredemption. That is the key word in the passage: God did these things to redeemthose who were under the Law.
This redemption changes the basis for our standing. Havingbeen redeemed, the basis for our relationship with God is no longer the Law.The Law required certain actions and forbade other actions. Instead of ourrelationship with God being determined by what we’ve done, we’ve been redeemedso that our relationship with God is on the basis of grace.
The language that Paul uses is that we are adopted as sons.The reason why he uses the term “sons” insteadof a more general term like “children” is because we are adopted only throughJesus, who is God’s Son. We receive Jesus’s status as God’s Son when we arebaptized into him and when we believe in him. It’s by being connected to theonly-begotten Son that we receive adoption as God’s sons—regardless of whetherwe are male or female.
So, in one sense, when we look at the happenings that Lukedescribes in our Gospel reading, they are unremarkable. Israelites had beendoing those things for a very long time. However, in another sense, and underthe surface, so to speak, the most momentous things were taking place. Fulfillmentwas taking place. Redemption was taking place. The relationship that humanbeings have with God was being revealed as being upon a different basis. Thisrelationship with God was not be on the basis of the works of the Law, but uponfaith in God’s grace. Instead of having a relationship like a slave or anemployee, who is only as valuable and esteemed as the work that he or sheperforms, we are adopted as sons of God, loved simply for the sake of who weare in Christ and for no other reasons.
There is a surprisingly practical importance of thisteaching for each one of us. It has to do with what we say about ourselves.What makes you who you are? When we think about that question, the mostimmediate and natural answers are what you manage to accomplish for yourself:You’re hardworking. You’re smart. You’re popular. You’re moral. You’regood-looking. I could go on with many other possible positive attributes.
But even with these few that I’ve listed, doubts immediatelycome to mind. Are you that good-looking? Are you that moral? Are you thatpopular? I wonder if I couldn’t find some other specimens of humanity who mightexceed the attributes and talents that you have. I bet I could.
And besides these answer to the question of what you have tosay about yourself—what makes you good—we have the more important criteria thatGod provides. Have you loved God? Have you loved your neighbor, your fellowhuman being? Have you thanked and praised, served and obeyed God? Have youhonored your parents and other authorities? Have you hurt someone by your wordsor deeds? Have you stolen, been negligent, wasted anything, or done any harm?
These commands are different. With the rat-race whereeveryone is trying to be the best—the best athlete, the best looking, therichest, and so on—there’s no divine command about these things. God doesn’tcommand you to be the best, nor does he evaluate you along these lines. Verydifferent powers and authorities are the ones demanding you to be the best. Thisdemand, this law, seems to have been cooked up by God’s enemies—the devil, theworld, and our sinful flesh. God’s enemies do not want us to be satisfied or togive thanks. God’s enemies what us always to be covetous and never to bethankful. God’s enemies want us always to be longing to be the best and alwaysbeing sorry for failing to be the best.
God isn’t like that. God won’t judge you for failing tosucceed in all the stupid contests about who is the greatest. What he says hewill judge you for is the way that you have treated him and the way that youhave treated your fellow human beings. That is God’s Law.
Now before I get into how practical and important the changeis that Jesus has brought about, I’d like to point out how little we thinkabout God’s real Law and how much we obsess about those contests. People thinka lot about how pretty or not pretty, how rich or not rich, how successful orunsuccessful they feel. These desires are much more important to us than God’sLaw. There’s a good reason why we do that. We all have this belief that if onlyI was the best at everything, then I’d be happy. And doesn’t that make sense? Itappears to be a truism according to our common sense—if only I had everythingand was the best at everything, then I would be happy!
Again, this is the common sense way that the devil keeps youcoveting. Your coveting makes you blind to the riches of God which are newevery morning because you are desiring to be the best. Your eyes cannot see hisgoodness because you are always looking at the performance of your stockportfolio, or the latest workout regiment, or the newest gadgets andfurnishings for your home. Your eyes don’t go so high as to contemplate God’sreal Laws about love. You’re too busy believing that you need the fake measuresof success that hold out the promise of happiness, but never deliver.
In any case—whether we are dealing with the fake laws forhow to be the best, or the divine laws that require love, the change that Jesusbrings about is for the better. God’s Son, born of a woman, born under the Law,has redeemed us so that we might receive adoption as sons. This changes theanswer to the question we have been considering: What do you have to say aboutyourself?
I can answer that I am the recipient of God’s grace. God hasredeemed me, a lost and condemned person, purchased and won me from all sins,from death, and from the power of the devil. Now I am his own. I have beenadopted as a child of God in Jesus. Since I am adopted as a child of God I amalso an heir. I will inherit what God has decided to give me. If I am notalready happy, then I know that I will be when the time is right.
Everything that I have just said is about God. God is doingall the actions. You are only a recipient. God is the Savior, not you. Godgives the meaning to your life, not you. God is the judge, not you. This is allto say that God is in control, not you. By faith you may get on board with thatand embrace it as your own.
It is no small thing to believe that Jesus is your redeemer.It sets you in opposition to other powers and authorities who would have youinterpret your life in very different ways. Very different ways of attaininghappiness are held out as being the sure-fire way, and their arguments can beawfully persuasive. The promise of happiness that the Scriptures make is thatyour happiness will be in Jesus because he puts you into a graciousrelationship with God. It is good to be in this relationship with God because Godis good. God is wise.
As David says in Psalm 103:
God is gracious and merciful, slowto anger, and abounding in steadfast love. … He does not deal with us accordingto our sins, nor does he repay us according to our iniquities. … As a fathershows compassion to his children, so the Lord shows compassion to those whofear him.
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He rules the world with truth and grace.
That line comes from the well-known and well-loved Christmashymn, “Joy to the world.” “He rules the world with truth and grace.” Who rulesthe world? Jesus rules the world.
Jesus being the king who reigns and rules is a theme that isfound in a lot of Christmas hymns. I’ll give you a couple examples. O Come AllYe Faithful. O come all ye faithful to Bethlehem. Why? To behold the King ofangels. Or Hark the Herald Angels Sing: What are the herald angels singing?“Glory to the newborn King!” Christmas is about the birth of the king.
This king was promised to come in the Old Testament. Thereare so many prophecies about a great king. He would be from David’s line. Hewill bring light to those who sit in darkness. He will bring righteousness,justice, and peace. His kingdom will be an eternal kingdom. I don’t think it ispossible to overstate the importance of this great, eternal king.
But another thing that almost all the Christmas carols pointout, however, is the strange scene into which this king was born. A stable isnot the normal place to give birth for any human being, much less the greatking. Consider these opening lines: “Away in a manger, no crib for a bed…”Didn’t even have a crib. Or: “Once in Royal David’s city stood a lowly cattleshed, where a mother laid her baby in a manger for his bed…” Jesus being bornin a barn instead of even just an ordinary house is so strange.
In fact, for me, this aspect of the Christmas story is alittle hard to believe. When we read the Bible we shouldn’t think the peopleabout whom we read are so completely different than us. There’s no indicationthat the people of Bethlehem were especially cruel and heartless that theywould all turn away a pregnant woman. Who among us, no matter how poor thepregnant woman might be, wouldn’t gladly give up our room or even the wholehouse if need be?
Jesus being born in a stable, it seems to me, was not becauseof any meanness of the people of Bethlehem, or a matter of chance. God wantedhis Son to be born there. He created the circumstances so that it came to pass.The net result is that God’s Son, the long-expected Savior, was born inconditions that were much worse than you or I were born into. Even if you were justborn in a house, you were born into relative luxury compared to God’s Son. Therewasn’t even a crib to lay down his sweet head.
Why did God cause his Son to be born in such lowlyconditions? One thing that God may have been indicating is that all the thingsto which we look for happiness and fulfillment are not where happiness andfulfillment are truly to be found. We so easily believe that if only we hadsome more riches, some more luxuries, then we’d be happy. Or if only we had somemore prestige. Or, even, for those of a more sentimental nature, if only I had thatNorman Rockwell Christmas, then my heart would be full.
No, happiness and fulfillment must be satisfied by somethingmuch higher than any earthly, created thing. That thirst can only be quenchedby a relationship with the uncreated Creator. And, indeed, to bring about thathappy relationship is the very reason why this great king came.
And we see that this great king continues to be a strangeking. He was not found in big fancy palaces. He didn’t have servants so that hewouldn’t have to work anymore or be troubled by anything. Just the opposite: heserved instead of being served. And his service continued all the way to theend. He didn’t sit upon a big fancy throne. He was nailed through his hands andhis feet to an instrument of torture and death.
On the cross the king suffered in our place for the sinsthat we have committed. With all our sins God didn’t just say, “Forget aboutthem. No big deal.” No, the great king came to set things right, not to ignorewrongs. He came to bring about righteousness and justice. He suffered thepunishment that was due for our sin. By the high and holy sacrifice of the kingwe have peace with God. The king has brought about righteousness, justice, andpeace, reconciling sinners to God by his death and resurrection.
The work of Jesus the king is not over, however. He sits atthe right hand of God the Father, reigning and ruling all things, butespecially his spiritual kingdom. The way that Jesus reigns and rules in hisspiritual kingdom is by sending out his Gospel, which means “good news,” sothat sinners may repent and believe in the king. So that having been justified by faith, we may have peace with Godthrough our Lord Jesus Christ.
This message that gets sent out is similar to what the angelwas sent to speak to the poor, lowly shepherds: “Do notbe afraid. I bring you glad tidings of great joy that will be for all thepeople. For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who isChrist the Lord.” The angel tells the shepherds that the great king hasbeen born. Christ the Lord will save them.
In like manner the Gospel goes out in our day. Just as withthe angel and the shepherds, not everyone hears it. The shepherds heard it;others did not. Likewise, not everyone is in a church tonight. And even thoughpeople might hear about the great king, not everyone believes it. Whether aperson believes or does not believe does not just depend on their attendance orlack of attendance. Whether a person believes or does not believe is dependentupon the reigning and ruling of Christ the king. When and where it pleases himthe Holy Spirit creates faith in those who hear the Gospel. They believe in theking. As John says, “Those who believe in Jesus’s nameare children of God—born not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor thewill of man, but of God.” Children of God
This is all to say that Jesus’s reigning and ruling rightnow at the right hand of God the Father is very special. If you believe in thisking—if you turn away from your sins and hate them, if you believe that Jesusis the king who saves you—this is God’s doing, and it is marvelous, but howmarvelous it is is only apparent to the eyes of faith. There is no outwardkingdom of Christ right now with magnificent signs and wonders. He rules by hisWord and the Holy Spirit. He converts. He brings people out of darkness and thefear of God’s punishment to the light, to forgiveness, to being confident beforeGod because of what Jesus the king has done.
Although Jesus reigns and rules as king in a hidden wayright now, it will not always be that way. There is more to come with Jesus’skingdom. He isn’t done as he sits at the right hand of God the Father. He willcome again to bring his reigning and ruling to completion. He will come againon the last day with power and great glory to judge the living and the dead. Atthat hour, when the trumpet sounds, the dead will be raised, and he will giveeternal life to all believers in Christ.
Although this day will be tremendous and awesome, some mightsay “dreadful,” it is a continuation of all that this king has been doing sincethe beginning. When he comes on the last day he will accomplish yet morerighteousness, yet more justice, yet more peace. Jesus will accomplish yet moreof the kinds of things we read about him doing in the Gospels. Jesus went aboutcasting our demons, healing diseases, giving sight to the blind, hearing to thedeaf, raised the dead, so on and so forth. Jesus was working to bring tonothing anything that was evil, sad, fearful, mean, painful, and so on. Thesewill be brought to nothing once and for all on that great and final day. Theking will see to it.
Thus we have a real parting of the ways depending on whetheryou believe in this king or not. What do we say about these evils? These evils areso easy to find, so easy to Google, so easy to do? We have evils on the outsideand evils on the inside. Even if we were to do everything relatively well timemarches on and our bodies get old. Things aren’t as fun as they used to be. Ithink we could come up with a good long list—and we wouldn’t have to work toohard to do it.
The parting of ways is with the philosophers in our midst.The philosophers throw up their hands and say, “Too bad! That’s life! There’sno changing it! Might as well just get used to it!” To which a believer inChrist should say: “The Lord rebuke you!” Because there is the king, God’s Son,things will not just go on as they always have been. There is nothing evil thatis going to endure. Whatever is evil is doomed. The king is going to see to it.A great change is in store for everyone and everything.
This is good news. It’s strange good news, in a way, becausethe evil that the king has come to destroy is surely found also in us. Youcan’t keep holding on to that evil. The king won’t allow it. The king is on themarch. The king is going to be victorious. As our epistle reading said, “He is going to purify for himself a people for his ownpossession.” Being purified is often not a very pleasant experience forthe thing or the one who is being purified.
This is where I think it is important to keep in mind who isdoing the purifying. Is God, who is purifying, good or evil? Is God for us oragainst us? Surely God is for us. That is the meaning of Christmas. God is forus. What more proof do we need than that he sent his Son to be king, being bornin a barn? In addition to all the strange things I’ve been pointing outtonight, God’s love for us sinners is strange in that he gave up Son, hisdearest treasure.
So if it is good news even that we should be purified, thatthe darkness we love by nature should be replaced by the light, then what do wehave to complain about? Anything evil is doomed. Anything evil is so utterlytemporary. God’s kingdom, on the other hand is eternal. His kingdom isunstoppable.
Behold, I bring you glad tidings ofgreat joy, for unto you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who isChrist the Lord.
Audio recording
Sermon manuscript:
I’d like to begin tonight by orienting ourselves. Last weekwe heard the first two chapters of the book of Ruth. The two most importantpeople in this book are Naomi and Ruth. Naomi used to live near Bethlehem withher husband and two sons, but they needed to leave when a famine came on theland. They had to move to Moab. As they were living in Moab, Naomi’s two sonsmarried Moabite women named Orpah and Ruth. Not long after that all threehusbands died. Naomi’s husband died. Orpah’s husband died. Ruth’s husband died.The women were left alone in their widowhood.
This was an especially vulnerable situation to be in duringancient times. Men worked to provide for the family. They also protected thefamily. Naomi, Orpah and Ruth were poor and extremely vulnerable.
What I focused on during last week’s sermon was how Naomiand Ruth, mother-in-law and daughter-in-law, loved one another. Naomi urged herdaughters-in-law to go back to their homes, to marry new husbands, and allowNaomi to fend for herself. This was sensible advice. It was their best shot athappiness. Ruth, however, refused to leave Naomi. Wherever Naomi would go Ruth wouldgo.
Where Naomi then went was back home. The famine by this timewas over. When Elimelek was still living, Naomi and he farmed some land nearBethlehem. Bethlehem was home. So Naomi and Ruth went to Bethlehem.
When Naomi and Ruth arrived, they needed to have a way tosupport themselves. Neither of them had two nickels to rub together. Naomi wasold and frail. So it fell upon Ruth to work and support them both. The job shetook was very lowly—the kind of work that beggars do. She was a gleaner of thefields. Being a gleaner meant that you would go through the field after it washarvested and pick up the leftovers. If the harvesters missed some grain at theside of the field, the gleaners could harvest that for themselves. Or if somestalks fell out of a bundle, the gleaners could take that for themselves. Thegleaners didn’t have a right to take what they wanted. They could only takewhat was left over.
The good thing, though, was that Ruth ended up being agleaner in the right field. The owner of the field ended up being a relative ofNaomi’s. His name was Boaz. He was also a redeemer, which I’ll explain in amoment. It was good that Ruth worked in Boaz’s field because Boaz treated Ruthkindly. He commanded his workers to allow Ruth to work right next to theharvesters. He even told them purposely to drop so stalks. Boaz wanted Ruth’sgleaning to be worth her time, and it was. When she came home to Ruth with whatshe had gleaned, Naomi was thrilled.
Now I mentioned that Boaz was a redeemer. Our readingtonight was very much about the redemption process that Boaz underwent for thebenefit of Naomi and Ruth. So what is this redeeming about? To understand it,you need to know that loans and the ownership of property worked differently inIsrael than how they work among us. God stipulated in his Law how theIsraelites needed to handle these things.
Basically nobody owned land in Israel, according to God’sLaw. God was the owner of all the land. The people leased the ability to liveon the land and work it from God. Now if there came a time when the people wholived on the land came into financial difficulty, they could sell their rightto work the land to somebody else, but this was always only a temporaryarrangement.
The family who sold their right to work the land could gettheir original land back in two ways. One way was by what was called thejubilee year. Every 50 years was a jubilee year. During that year all debts werecancelled. The selling of rights to the land was cancelled. Then the family whooriginally owned the land would get it back, free and clear.
The other way that a family could get their land back was bya redeemer. This is what happened with Naomi and Ruth. Naomi and her latehusband Elimelek had some land near Bethlehem years ago. When the famine came,they must have sold their rights to that land to somebody else when they movedto Moab. Naomi still had a right to that land, but the debt needed to beredeemed. More prosperous relatives were able to redeem their poorer relativesto restore them to the land.
So in our reading tonight we heard about how Boaz set aboutredeeming Naomi’s land, which also meant that these widows would come under hiswing. Ruth would become his wife. This was a big commitment. It would beexpensive for Boaz. He also would be taking on the responsibility of caring forthese women. But this was something that Boaz was happy to do, because, as youheard, he loved Ruth.
The real driver behind our story tonight is not thepeculiarities the Law that God gave to Israel about debt and property. It’s alove story. Last week I talked about the love that existed between Naomi andRuth. Tonight we heard about the marital love that Ruth had for Boaz, and Boazfor Ruth. For the love of Ruth Boaz redeemed Naomi and her.
He had to play his cards right to do that, because a closerrelative had the ability to redeem them too. Boaz had to meet with the council,and that’s where there was that strange exchange of a sandal. Long story short,Boaz did play his cards right. They married, and in this way God provided forNaomi and Ruth—lifting them out of poverty and danger. They were even blessedfor generations after them. King David would be born from this line. This alsomeans that Ruth and Boaz are Jesus’s ancestors too.
Now as we look to how we might apply what we’ve heard to ourown time and place, I’d like to talk about something that pastors don’t talkabout very much—the importance of marrying a good spouse. God’s Word actuallyspeaks about this in many places, and with many examples, both good and bad. Oneof the most important factors for people’s life of faith is the person theymarry—either for good and for ill. A godly, pious spouse is very powerful forhelping the other retain his or her faith. On the other hand, an impious spousewill be a powerful hindrance to living faithfully.
And this is not only the case for the spouses themselves. Italso has its effect on the coming generations. This is easily proven. When bothhusband and wife are pious, faithful, church-goers, they are going to raisetheir children the same way. Boys learn how to be husbands and fathers fromtheir dads. Girls learn how to be wives and mothers from their moms. As theProverb says: Train up a child in the way he should go,and when he is old he will not depart from it.
On the other hand, when moms and dads are not on the samepage when it comes to their faith and attending church, the coming generationswill have mixed signals about how to live and what to do. If mom and dad don’tattend church, the children won’t either. By the time the second or thirdgeneration is born, the children might not even be baptized and confirmed.
So we should be wise and serious about marriage. We canspeak about this negatively and positively. Negatively speaking, Christiansshould not continue in relationships where their potential spouse is notChristian, does not want to become a Christian, or doesn’t actively live aChristian life. Being a Christian is not just saying that you believe in God orin Christ. It also means that you repent of sins, believe in Jesus, and want todo better. It means that you are active in your congregation—helping yourfellow congregation members, even as they help you. If the person you aredating is not an active Christian and does not want to become one, then therelationship should end.
Positively speaking, Christians should, first of all, prayfor God to give them a godly spouse. You parents and grandparents should prayfor godly spouses for your children and grandchildren. There’s nothing more beneficialyou could ask for them. And then, second of all, when an opportunity presentsitself to marry a pious Christian, don’t just sit on your hands. Get out thereand make it happen.
We see good examples of this with Ruth and Boaz. When Naomiheard about Boaz, I bet you her wheels started turning immediately. Notice howshe encouraged Ruth to go to Boaz and to make known her affection for him. Naomiwas a matchmaker. Being a matchmaker is no sin. Making known your affection isno sin. It’s risky, of course. Hearts can be broken. But even in a situationwhere things do not turn out how we would want, it is better to try and failthan to never try at all.
If I may be so bold, I’d even like to speak personally. Iwas captivated by Jana from the moment I first laid eyes on her. The feeling,however, was not mutual. When eventually, years later, I made known to her my long-standingaffection in an email, she was not immediately on board. But, being wise, she talkedto her father about it, and I’m glad she did. He basically said to her, don’tbe too hasty. Give it a chance. Long story short, less than a year later wewere married. I hope that she hasn’t been too disappointed; I know that Ihaven’t been. If it hadn’t been for my father-in-law, who knows if we wouldhave gotten married.
So romantic relationships do not need to be only how theyget depicted in movies or sung about in songs. Movies and songs can be a lot offun, but that might not be how God would have it be for you with your spouse.
What is important to recognize are the things that wererecognized by Boaz and Ruth. Each recognized in the other that here was someonewho was loving, honorable, generous, pious, and so on. That said, neither wasprobably “perfect” in every respect. Ruth was practically a beggar. Boaz soundslike he was an older man. Maybe he didn’t have the best of looks anymore. ButGod gave them both the gift of love. God brought them together. The two becameone flesh. The blessings carried on for several generations.
So my encouragement is that we be wise and serious aboutmarriage for ourselves and for those whom we love. Being wise and serious doesnot come out of thin air. If anything, what seems to come naturally is gettingcarried away by the feelings that are stirred up by stories and songs.
God is the key factor. He is the one from whom all goodthings come. You young people, you’re never too young to pray for a godlyspouse. You older people, pray for godly spouses for your children andgrandchildren. There’s hardly anything more important you could ask for to helpthem not only in this life, but even to eternity.
Audio recording
Sermon manuscript:
The book of Ruth is about poor people. Being poor can leadto desperate actions. The book begins with a desperate action. A poor family leavestheir homeland when they can no longer make ends meet. A famine struck theland. Naomi and her husband Elimelech have to leave their land behind in searchof better conditions. They went to the land of Moab where the people worshippedother gods besides the Lord God. Naomi and Elimelech had two sons who married Moabitewomen.
But one bad thing happened after another for this family.Elimelech, Naomi’s husband died. Then both of Naomi’s sons died. The familythat was left was made up only of widows—three widows, three in-laws. Naomi wasthe mother-in-law. She had two daughters-in-law, Orpah and Ruth.
Being a widow is bad enough regardless of whether we aretalking about modern times or ancient times. Being a widow carries with itsorrow and loneliness. But in ancient times being a widow also brought aboutimpoverishment and vulnerability. Men were important for providing sustenancefor the family. There was no social security during those times. Men were alsoimportant for protecting the family. Widows could be overpowered and takenadvantage of. So with Naomi, Orpah, and Ruth all being widows we are talkingabout very weak, poor, and vulnerable people.
Normally histories do not get written about weak, poor, andvulnerable people. Wretched people live in wretchedness, die in wretchedness,and are soon forgotten. But the attentive reader is going to notice that Naomiand her daughters-in-law are not completely wretched. They have a couple ofoutstanding attributes that no amount of money can buy.
Naomi, first of all, was obviously loveable. Naomi was lovedby her daughters-in-law. The way that a person becomes loveable is by beingloving. People who love do not look out for themselves, first and foremost.They look for how they can love, serve, and sacrifice for others. Naomi musthave lived this way, as can be seen in what we heard tonight.
When Naomi’s sons died she lost everything. She had no meansfor any income that could amount to much. The only hope she had was in herdaughters-in-law, Orpah and Ruth. But Naomi thinks about their welfare insteadof her own. She tells them that they should leave her and find new husbands.Naomi was too old to marry and have children, but Orpah and Ruth were young.They could still get married to a man who could support them and whateverchildren God might give them.
And a clear sign that Naomi was loveable is shown by both ofher daughters-in-law’s reactions. Orpah and Ruth weep at the thought of leavingtheir mother-in-law. They love their mother-in-law. However, Naomi was right.If they were to have any hope for a better future they needed to marry again.With the famine and everything else that was going on, it sounds like they wereliving in desperate times. One daughter-in-law, Orpah, takes hermother-in-law’s advice. She leaves to find a husband and we do not hear abouther again.
Ruth, however, refuses to leave. She says, “Where you go I will go, where you lodge I will lodge. Yourpeople shall be my people, and your God my God. Where you die, I will die, andthere will I be buried. May the Lord do so to me and more also if anything butdeath parts me from you.” Here we see someone else besides Naomi wholoves in an extraordinary way. Ruth, also, is so very loveable because sheloves, she serves, she sacrifices. She doesn’t look out just for herself. Shelooks out for the good of her mother-in-law.
And how is it that both Naomi and Ruth are able to be soloveable, so selfless, so sacrificial? Both of them have faith in God. Godwould bless them and keep them. Because God would bless them and keep them,they didn’t need to be their own gods. They didn’t need to see to thingsthemselves, engineer their own happiness, taking whatever they could get. Godwould see them through. They believed that even though God had dealt with themin a rather bitter way up to that point. They were impoverished, after all, andGod had taken their husbands from them. Nevertheless, they could afford to love,because God would bless them and see them through.
Now if we take a step back and look at these two women wecan see how rich they are, even though they are so very poor in almost everyother respect. You can see how noble they are, even though they would have beenoutwardly clothed with the rags of poverty. They were living life with acapital L, even though they had nowhere to lay their head and to call theirhome. They were like the birds of the air. They were getting their daily bread,day by day, without barns full of provisions.
We see several of Jesus’s sayings fulfilled in Naomi’s andRuth’s lives. Jesus said, “Is not life more than food,and the body more than clothing?” Naomi and Ruth were loving and beingloved. What more can we ask for out of life than loving and being loved? Butthis love does not just come out of nowhere. Love comes from God, who, as St.John says, “is love.” And so Naomi and Ruth werefulfilling another of Jesus’s sayings when he says, “Seekfirst the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will beadded unto you.” It is by faith in God’s kingdom, in his reigning andruling, that we receive the Holy Spirit’s gift of love.
Again Jesus says in another place: “Icame that they might have life, and have it more abundantly. The thief comesonly to steal, to kill, and to destroy.” The way to have life and tohave life more abundantly is to love and to be loved. To love one another meansthat you are looking out for the other. You love, you serve, you sacrifice.This is abundant life as it reflects the nature of God.
The alternative is to steal, to kill, and to destroy. This isthe character of every ungodly life. It’s where a person looks out only forhimself or herself. Others get used for one’s own benefit instead of beingserved. Instead of trusting in God to bless you, you see to things yourself,unable to be generous, because you never know what the wheel of fortune mightgive you.
Looking at Naomi and Ruth from a distance we see that everythingthat subsequently happens with them is a working out of their faith in God, andtheir fervent love for one another. These are their riches. Outwardly they areextremely poor. Ruth is practically a beggar and a slave. I’m sure that bothNaomi and Ruth would have like it very much if their outward circumstances weredifferent. Nevertheless, they are content. They continue to believe. Theycontinue to love.
Faith and love can seem like small matters. History booksare not written about faith and love. Nevertheless, faith and love are thetruly great things. Faith and love are what prepare us for the eternal things. Heavenis the place where God is, and “God is love.”Those who do not want to love, therefore, do not belong there. Hell, on theother hand, is where everyone is an expert at not loving—that is, manipulatingand torturing. They steal, kill, and destroy eternally. They are unable to doanything else. Faith and love are by no means small things. They are the trulygreat things.
But we don’t need to wait until we get to heaven to see theeffects of faith and love. We can see the effects already in this life. What adifference Naomi made for Ruth already in this life. Ruth loved her so much!And what a difference Ruth made for Naomi. Ruth practically kept Naomi alive. And,as we’ll hear about more in the next two chapters next week, Ruth was thegreat-grandmother of King David, that truly great man of God. The heritage offaith and love can be passed down from generation to generation. Something ofDavid’s wonderful, courageous faith, and his burning, passionate love, was fromhis great-grandmother Ruth.
We can easily apply these thoughts also to our own life. Weall can probably point to someone in our life or in our lineage who believedand loved, and thereby brought that faith and love also to us. We also arepresented with a challenge and an opportunity for our own lives as well. Thechallenge is to separate ourselves from the great horde of humanity who seeksonly to steal, to kill, and to destroy—looking out only for themselves.
Or, alternatively, we can believe that God exists and thatGod blesses. We can trust in him. Then we can afford to love no matter what ourcircumstances. When we believe and love, there’s no telling what might happen.There’s no telling what can happen in the coming generations.
Think of Naomi and Ruth. Do you suppose that either of themthought that they would be the ancestors of a king while they were going fromplace to place, barely surviving? So also we do not know how our actions willaffect our families and friends and even those yet to be born—either for goodor for ill.
What we can be sure of, no matter what, is that if we fear,love, and trust in God, and if we love one another, goodness is bound to come.Naomi and Ruth are examples for how we should live and wait for God’sblessings.
Audio recording
Sermon manuscript:
One of the unusual features of the times we are living in ishow many different beliefs there are. Perhaps you had a taste of that at yourThanksgiving gathering. Your cousins, nieces, nephews, in-laws might have verydifferent understandings about what is right and wrong, the present state ofthings in the world, or what we should do about all of it. There have alwaysbeen differences of beliefs. No two human beings have ever had the exact samethoughts about everything. But in the last few years the sheer number ofbeliefs available to be believed has increased dramatically.
Sometimes you might hear of people applauding thisdevelopment. More free speech and more diversity is automatically good. But manyof the new beliefs contradict older beliefs. For example, either we have beenmade to be male and female—and that means something, or gender is just a fluidsocial construct. Either male and female is something intrinsic and natural,God-given, or what I’ve just said is judgmental and hateful. It is impossiblefor both views to be good. They contradict each other.
So despite what people might say about diversity—that itshould be welcomed, the more diverse the better—they either aren’t seeing thecontradictions or they aren’t being totally honest. If they were being honestthey would say that those who hold the older beliefs are deplorable and have nobusiness holding any power or authority in our modern life. They should be runout of the government, run out of our universities, run out of our schools.They don’t go so far as to want to kill people, but they most certainly want certainbeliefs and ideas to die. The reason why they are so passionate for theirbeliefs is because they genuinely believe that the death of these old ideaswill make the world a better place.
I wouldn’t be surprised if some of you had some vigorousdebates on Thanksgiving whether these newer ideas would make the world a betterplace. I could take up the rest of this sermon time by giving you arguments forwhy this or that belief is bad and will lead to worse conditions rather thanbetter ones. That might be an enjoyable way for us to spend our time. I suspectthat most of us are pretty much on the same page about the various issues. Butglorying in how right we are and how wrong they are would give the impressionthat we—with our debating, with our fighting—we are what is indispensable forChristianity and for the furtherance of Christ’s kingdom.
This is a very common, false assumption, which is held toparticularly in our circles. Being a Christian is assumed to be the same thingas being a “conservative.” Being a Christian means that you fight for the oldbeliefs as opposed to the new beliefs. Christianity is us versus them. We’reright; they’re wrong. And what needs to happen is that either they need toshape up so that they adopt our position, or they must be eliminated. Theirbeliefs and ideas need to be eliminated. They must be run out of thegovernment, run out of the schools, run out of the libraries. Being a Christianmeans that you are a cultural warrior.
This is not Christianity. This is one of the devil’s tricks.We know from St. Paul that the devil likes to dress himself up as an angel oflight. There’s nothing that the devil likes more than to play around inreligion. What a harvest of souls the devil can collect for himself if heconvinces people that Christianity is a matter of being either conservative orprogressive. Then people will fight with each other over whether we should beconservative or progressive, believing thereby that they are being ever so pious,ever so religious, when in fact they will be accomplishing nothing that lastsinto eternity.
There is only one way for us to last into eternity, and thatis by becoming a new creation. Paul says a couple of times in his letter to theGalatians that neither circumcision nor uncircumcision—an issue hotly debatedat the time—counts for anything. What is needed is a new creation. I don’tthink I am going wrong by modifying that statement to say, “Neitherconservatism nor progressivism is strong enough to accomplish anything. What isneeded is a new creation.”
And what is this new creation? John speaks of this at thebeginning of his Gospel. He says, “To those who receivedthe light [that is, Christ,] to those whobelieved in Jesus’s name, he gave the right to become children of God. Theywere born, not of blood, or of the desire of the flesh, or of a husband’s will.They were born of God.” That’s how you become a new creation. You areborn again through faith in Jesus’s name.
This is very much tied up with baptism. One of the simplestanswers to the question of how to become a Christian is that you should bebaptized. Jesus speaks of baptism as being “born againby the water and the Spirit.” Unless we are born again we cannot see thekingdom of God.
And why is it so necessary to become a new creation? It is becausethe change that is needed is too great. Neither conservatism nor progressivismcan save anyone from death. Neither conservatism nor progressivism canreconcile sinners with God. Neither side can exorcise evil spirits to make wayfor the Holy Spirit. Neither side can make anybody truly love. If anything itseems that the more we fight the more we hate, the more we dehumanize ouropponents. And to what end? For greater diversity, equity and inclusion on theone side? To make America great again on the other? However grand these ideasmight seem to be to people, they are far too small and temporary. Christ ourLord operates on an entirely different plane of existence.
This is something that our readings today about the end ofthe world point out so forcefully that it strikes me as being almost brutal. Wethink the stuff that we deal with is so important, so consequential. The futureof our country or the future of the world depends on us winning the culturalwar. What our readings today reveal is that it isn’t about us at all. The mostoutstanding thing is Jesus Christ being Lord and God.
In our reading from Matthew we hear about how this Kingcomes with magnificent splendor and power. All the souls born of Adam and Eveare gathered before him. Each and every one of you are one of those souls. Themost powerful person who will have ever wielded the reins of government will beone of those souls. The most lowly—the retarded, the aborted, the slave—will beone of those souls. And how are they judged? They are judged by the presence orabsence of the chief and foremost fruit of faith, which is love. Did they love?And who did they love? Did they love only their own, and to hell witheverybody else or did they love the least of these?
Our epistle reading is also supremely grand. Paul speaksabout the resurrection and what will happen at the end. Paul is correcting theCorinthians, some of whom didn’t believe that the resurrection from the deadwas likely or possible. Paul says, no, there is most certainly a resurrectionfrom the dead. If there is no resurrection from the dead then Christianity is ajoke. It’s simply not true if there is no resurrection.
But what I find so captivating is what he says towards theend of our reading. He says that at the end Christ will bring to nothing everyrule, every authority, every power. All his enemies must be put under his feet.Then he will deliver the kingdom—all those who have been raised together withChrist—he will deliver them to God the Father. Even Christ himself will besubject to God the Father. Then God will be all in all.
To be honest, I’m not sure I understand everything that Paulhas said. One thing is clear though: Christ’s kingdom is what isextraordinarily important and there is no alternative. There is no alternativeuniverse for DEIers, or for Trumpers, or for never-trumpers. “There is one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Fatherof all, who is over all, and through all, and in us all.” Thisinclusivity is extreme! It is only in Christ that there can ever be true unity,true oneness. And there will be oneness, because either you will be in him, andone with him, or you will depart from him. This inclusivity is extreme. Itseems brutal—harsh, even.
But this is where it is important to remember what kind ofLord and King Jesus was. When you are tempted to believe that this is all tooextreme, nasty, brutal, and so on, you must remember the way that Jesus was inthe Gospels. His disposition towards us has not changed.
What the Gospels reveal is that Jesus is an extremelystrange king—so different from those who have earthly power. He did not enslavethe world so that everybody would serve him. Just the opposite: He pouredhimself out for the benefit of all. He healed, he set right that which waswrong, he cast out demons, he forgave. And the works didn’t need to beextraordinary or grand. On the night when he was betrayed he got out a basin,put water in it, tied a towel around his waist, and washed the disciples feet.What kind of king does that?
And, of course, as you are well aware, Jesus was king in asupreme way when he was nailed to the cross, suffered God’s wrath for our sins,and died. Because he died, we will not die. Because he is risen, we will risetoo. This is the stuff that Paul talks about in our Epistle reading. It isgoing to happen to us. We will rise at his coming. Death will be destroyedforever. We will be caught up in this whirlwind of Christ’s kingdom where allthings will be brought to nothing and Christ will rule over everything. Then wewill be delivered to God the Father so that God will be all in all.
In light of all of this we must all repent and believe theGospel. Whatever improvement projects we might have for ourselves or for othersare futile. They can never reach deep enough. Nothing that we do can everchange the human heart. Only God, through the death and resurrection of hisSon, by the power of the Holy Spirit can make us new creatures.
This is where the extreme inclusivity, the seemingly brutaloneness, should not be seen as being as brutal as it first appears. It seemsbrutal because God does all this without asking for our permission or ourapproval. He’s going to do what he’s going to do whether we like it or not. Losingcontrol, losing our say about what we think is good or what should happen, isfrightening.
But what if none of us is good at knowing what is good andevil? What if all our hearts are evil and in need of redemption? Then it ismuch better for the King, who is wise and good, to take the reins. He continuesto set right that which is wrong, to cast out evil spirits, to forgive. Nobodycan do what he does. He does all things well.
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The steadfast love of the Lord neverceases. His mercies never come to an end. They are new every morning. Great isyour faithfulness.
Our country has been celebrating the National Day ofThanksgiving since 1863. In October of 1863 President Lincoln called upon thenation to consider its good fortune. It had been blessed with bountiful harvests,with healthful skies, with productive mines. The president declared that thesethings came from a generous God. He acknowledged that there were troubles too.The country had been in the civil war for about a year and a half. But,President Lincoln said, things could be worse. Thus he set aside the lastThursday in November as the National Day of Thanksgiving.
For our observance of Thanksgiving Day we could do somethingsimilar to what President Lincoln did in his Thanksgiving proclamation. Wecould consider how things have been with us. God has given us a bountifulharvest. This is true nationally as well as locally. President Lincoln spoke ofhealthful skies. We, too, have had good weather. The mines are still beingmined. Our grocery stores are all fully stocked. We’ve had our problems justlike President Lincoln had his problems, but things could be worse.
It is good for us to try to see what is good in life and togive thanks to God for that goodness. The inability to see what is good and ourcoldness towards God are from our fall into sin. Before the fall into sin Adamand Eve had a free and easy relationship with God. After they fell into sinthey were afraid of God. They were suspicious of what he might do to them.
We are like them. We’ve lost the ability to see what is good.Unfortunately, we very often don’t see how good something is until it’s gone.We don’t see how good health is until we are sick. Since we don’t see how goodit is, we don’t thank God for it like we should. We haven’t had a famine for wellover a hundred years. This has made many people believe that famines, foodshortages, hunger—these are all things of the past. We do not see howextraordinary the abundance we enjoy is. We don’t give thanks to God for it.
And these are just the most intimate of our needs—ourhealth, our food and drink. There are so many other good things that God heapsup on us day in and day out. He makes the sun shine. He makes the rain fall. Hegives us the precious gifts of the members of our family. He gives us ourcommunity. He gives us the opportunity to serve with good and honest work. His mercies are new every morning. Great is his faithfulness.
But maybe as I mentioned just those few blessings that Godgives you’ve wanted to raise some objections. The weather’s kind of cold. Ihear it’s only going to get colder. The precious gifts of the members of yourfamily? They’re not always easy to live with. The community? It’s not like itwas years ago. Good and honest work? Maybe you don’t like your work. Maybe youdon’t like your coworkers.
But let me remind you of what I just spoke about. It isnatural for us fallen sinners to be blind to what is good. It is always easierfor us to be dissatisfied with what we have and to want something better. Thuswe do not give thanks. Not only is this what comes naturally to us, but thedevil and his demons want to spur on these thoughts and attitudes as well.These enemies of God don’t want us to be thankful.
The devil would like it best if none of us would receive ourdaily bread at all. But, barring that, since God is the way that he is, and hegives his daily bread to everyone, the devil would then like it if we would notbe content with what we are given or to give God thanks and praise. Instead ofbeing content, he wants us always to be on the lookout for something better—maybethat something that somebody else is enjoying. If only I had what they have,then I would be happy.
This is called coveting. The ninth and tenth commandmentssay, “You shall not covet.” God gives us thesecommandments for our good, and we truly would be better off if we never coveted,but coveting comes naturally to us. Coveting is also a very powerful spiritualproblem, and so the devil wants us to covet. The first step to coveting is tobe dissatisfied with what God has given to you. This dissatisfaction can beabout all kinds of different things: Your spouse isn’t good enough. Yourparents aren’t good enough. Your job isn’t good enough. Your friends aren’tgood enough. Your personality isn’t good enough. Your body isn’t good enough.
There are two things I’d like to point out about thispoisonous spiritual fog the devil is always wafting our way. First of all, itis useful to understand that these things could be true—at least certainlytheoretically. Could you have a better body? Yep. We all even know how we coulddo it too. Could your job be better? Theoretically. If we are consideringdreams and ideals, then I suppose anything is possible.
In fact, this is just the reverse of something I’ve alreadysaid a few times tonight: “Things could always be worse.” Conversely, thingscould always be better. Both statements are truisms. Things could always beworse. Things could always, at least theoretically, be better. So that’s thefirst thing—there’s truth, theoretically at least, mixed in with thedissatisfaction and covetousness.
The second thing I’d like to point out is that this evilspiritual fog makes people miserable. Thinking about how you don’t measure upwith various aspects of your life is practically guaranteed to make anybody whodoes it sad. This, of course, is what the devil would like for all of us. Thedevil likes it when others are made sad. He’d like it if we would all be sadand miserable eternally.
So the devil will waft his nasty, poisonous fog towards usto destroy any contentment and thanksgiving towards God that we might otherwisehave. The devil would like nothing better than for all of us to hate everythingwe have in our life, and then for us to be angry at God for making our lives somiserable. But truly it is not God who has made our lives so miserable. The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases. Great is hisfaithfulness. It is not God who makes us so miserable. It is the devil.The way he does it not even so much by depriving us of what we need for thisbody and life. Instead he bewitches us so that we are dissatisfied, covetous,and thankless.
Shame on the devil for bewitching us so thoroughly. What dreadfulmisery he manages to inflict upon us. But the good news is that you can fightback. Not only can you fight back, but the real truth is on our side. That’show it always is with the devil. The truth is actually against him. He has beendefeated. It is only by lies that he holds on to any power.
So when the devil cooks up a lie that you should bemiserable and ashamed at how bad things are for you, know that he’s wrong. Thetruth that the devil will probably try to use is that things could always bebetter. But the real truth is that things are already good now. We don’t needany potentialities or idealism. Things are already good.
To say that, however, requires faith. We must believe that amidall the things that can happen and do happen in this life that Jesus is Lordand God. He reigns at the right hand of God the Father almighty. He hasredeemed us poor, fallen, covetous sinners. He sends his Holy Spirit, the Spiritof truth and gladness, to fight against all lying, evil, and sad spirits.
Things are already good now and the truth is that the futureis as bright and cheerful as we could ever hope for so long as we remainfaithful to Jesus. What we know about the future is that there is nothing thatis currently wrong that Jesus will not set right. There is nothingdissatisfactory about us or in us that will not be healed and perfected. PerhapsGod will do this to some extent for his children already in this life, but evenif he doesn’t, do not be afraid. He will surely do it when we are resurrected.
Now somebody might object: What about all those things thatI still don’t like about my life? I want those changed now. My spouse, my job,my health, my wealth, my body—these haven’t suddenly changed in these last fewmoments have they? I want my best life now!
This brings to mind the kinds of things that the devil saidto Jesus when he was tempted in the wilderness. He said, “If you are the Son of God, then change these stones intobread. Why be hungry? Fix it now.” Or, he said, “Bow down and worship me and all these kingdoms will be yours. Whygo through that cross and trouble?” The devil, it seems, is a fan of the quickfix. Don’t put up with anything. Get it changed right now.
But supposing, even, that the goods could always be delivered—supposingthat all your wants could be satisfied—what would that ultimately profit you?Jesus once asked, “What would it profit a man to gainthe whole world, but to lose his soul?” The reason why even gaining thewhole world would not ultimately profit us is because we were made in the imageof God. We were made for fellowship with God. Not even all the world’s goodsand accomplishments can satisfy what can only be satisfied with a relationshipwith God.
So do not throw away the goodness of God that is renewed foryou every morning by being dissatisfied, by chasing after some ideal. Bethankful instead. What is now, what is present, is good. And even if there issomething that isn’t good, it is without doubt passing away. That is what is somarvelous about what Jesus has accomplished for us. Anything that is evil,unfit, unworthy, sad, what-have-you, will not go on forever. It cannot go onforever. After the cross is the resurrection.
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What are you looking forward to? Is there a family gatheringcoming up? Christmas is around the corner. What gifts would you like to receive?Retirement? Weddings? Children or grandchildren? There are a lot of things tolook forward to.
What about Jesus Christ’s second coming in power and greatglory? Is that on your list? Probably not. There’s a proverbial saying: “It’snot the end of the world.” Behind that saying is a belief that the end of theworld would be a bad thing, and that’s not unreasonable. The end of the worldmeans the end of our earthly activities. This earthly life moves into the past.A somewhat unknown future rushes upon us. It is scary to think of all the thingswe are accustomed to failing and being presented with the unknown.
You, who trust in Jesus, though, should not be afraid of himcoming in power and great glory. This is not something you can do just bymustering up your nerve not to be afraid. That won’t work. There is only onereason why you should not be afraid of Jesus coming again, and that is themessage of the Gospel. The Gospel is the good news about the relationshipbetween God and us. The hostility between foul sinners on the one hand and aholy God on the other has been overcome by the sacrifice of Jesus on the cross.This means that when Jesus comes, our future with God will be different fromwhat we otherwise would expect.
What would we otherwise expect? An honest look at what we’vedone will quickly give us the answer. We haven’t done what we should have done.We’ve done what we shouldn’t have done. Meeting our Maker, face to face,immediately thrusts before us God’s judgment. The books are opened. There isnothing hidden that will not be revealed. What we otherwise expect, apart fromthe Gospel, is that we will be horrified and ashamed.
There is a stupendous truth here, not often acknowledged. Paulcalls it the “ministry of the letter.” The glory of this ministry of the letteris so magnificent that nobody can stand to look at the end of it unless he hasfirst turned to Christ. The glory of the letter of the law is in the way thatit brings death and eternal death to all who do not fulfill it. This stupendoustruth says that based upon how I have lived, with all my sin, I should bepunished by God. He should deprive me of all happiness. He should snuff out mylife. I deserve to go to hell.
But no matter how glorious this divine truth is, it isn’t evenclose to being the most glorious—at least according to Paul. Paul says thatthere is the ministry of the Spirit that is far more glorious. By the term,“ministry of the spirit,” he is referring to the Gospel. The Gospel declaresthat Jesus has taken our place. God is well pleased with all mankind because ofJesus. All who believe in him will have eternal life.
So let’s go back to how we might feel about the secondcoming of the Lord Jesus Christ. Everybody has at least a little part of themthat is afraid. To be perfectly unafraid would require a perfect faith. Thatisn’t possible in this life where we are constantly under assault from thedevil, the world, and our sinful flesh. There’s an element of fear in each ofus because the Law is true. The Law says that God should punish us for our sins,and we know that we have sinned.
But here we should recall something that happens so often inwhat has been recorded in the Bible. So often God’s people are confronted withterrible facts, terrible laws. People are surrounded by water, or by enemies,or by lions, or possessed by demons. And all these facts and laws seem to leadto one conclusion—“You’re lost! There’s no hope for you!” But into theseterrible situations God steps in and says, “Do not beafraid.” God says, “Do not be afraid,”countless times in the Scriptures. It’s as though he is saying, “I understandthat these laws are calling for your destruction, but I am the Lord of alllaws. So be still and see how I am God.”
And so on Judgement Day we will be witness to the working oflaws that are more stupendous than anything we might be familiar with from ourearthly life here. Even the laws of nature will do strange and unheard ofthings. As Amos says in our Old Testament reading, there will be nowhere toturn, nowhere to be safe. The only one to whom we can turn and in whom we canbe safe is the God who is lord over all the terrible forces. We must turn tothe one who is Lord over what will be ripping this creation apart.
How necessary, therefore, is the ministry of the Spirit, theword of the Gospel, through which God says, “Do not be afraid. This Law hascalled out for your punishment, but I have silenced all its accusations againstyou when I sent my Son to die for all the sins of the whole world—includingyours.”
So what we can see from all of this is that the Day of theLord is tremendous. Nobody will have experienced anything like it before ithappens. It should not be taken for granted—some future event that is nothingto get excited about. If ever we have been excited about anything, then thisday must provoke our greatest excitement. There’s to be joy for those of youwho believe, but, as we think of it now, there’s an element of fear too.
We see this in our Gospel reading. Our Gospel reading is aparable about the end of the world. Jesus is the groom. The bride is the HolyChristian Church. The groom is coming for his bride because he loves her. Theoverall mood of this parable is by no means sad. The ten virgins are notdreading the coming of the groom. If anything, they are sad that he has beendelayed. But then the cry comes at midnight: “He’sarrived! Come out to meet him!” Those young women must have been rousedfrom their sleep with great happiness. He’s finally here!
It’s like Christmas morning. You don’t have to prod thechildren to get out of bed. They come a-running like calves out of the stall.They can’t wait to see him.
But Jesus also has a reason for telling us about the foolishvirgins as well. Their joy quickly turns to dread. They’ve forgotten their oil.They can’t appear before the groom like that. Maybe they can get some from theothers, but it turns out, no they can’t. Each must believe for himself orherself. The borrowing of faith is not possible. While they are gone in searchof some way to be presentable to the groom, the doors are shut. That shows thatthe time of grace has ended. The time of preaching the Gospel and administeringthe sacraments has ended.
Jesus finished this parable by saying, “Watch, therefore, because you do not know the day nor thehour.” That helps us understand what happened with the foolish virgins,and it gives us our cue as well so that we do not end up in the same boat. Itis not only possible, it is easy, for people who self-identify as Christians toquit watching for Christ’s second coming. What do they look for instead? Generally,it’s all the lovely gifts our benevolent Creator gives us in this early life. Theylook forward to retirement, to vacations, to the good times ahead. There’s nowatching or waiting for the day of the Lord. The glory of the ministry of theSpirit leaves no impression, nor do the terrors of the law. Usually they say,at least to themselves: “We know all that stuff already. There’s no need to goon talking about it.” Off to sleep they go.
So how do we keep watch? How do we keep oil in our lamps? Howmay we be prepared for Christ’s second coming? You might think that fear shouldwork. However, the fear of failure or the fear of punishment will never do italone. If you prepare only by being fearful, then you are treating God as thoughhe were your enemy. Perhaps by fear you can prepare somewhat for battle againsthim, but I don’t like your chances in such a fight. Fear alone won’t do.
But, to be honest, an excessive fear of God’s judgment ishardly a problem among us. Among us, it is rather the opposite. Fear of the Dayof Judgment is shrugged off. No big deal. Or it isn’t talked about. A personmight wonder while hearing this parable how it is possible that these churchmembers, these virgins, were so foolish and unprepared. Well, might it be thatwhen they congregated as a church they never talked about Judgement Day, or itwas explained away as nothing to worry about?
Do you realize how rare it is to find a congregation thattakes God’s judgement seriously? Our land is littered with churches, but Idon’t know if a tenth of them take such things seriously. And yet they have well-meaningpeople in them who are quite sure that they are as Christian as anybody else. However,it is a Christianity on their terms instead of on God’s terms. A redefined,seemingly improved or more palatable Christianity might be successful byearthly measurements, but true Christianity prepares us for Judgement Day andfor the life to come.
So we dare not shrug this day off, nor the fear that ittends to provoke. Nevertheless, only that person is truly worthy and wellprepared who has faith in Jesus’s words. And what are Jesus’s words? Why is hecoming? You know something he says: “For God so lovedthe world that he gave his only-begotten Son, that whoever believes in him willnot perish but have eternal life. For God did not sent his Son into the worldto condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.”Is not Jesus the groom, hastening to the bride whom he loves? These are thefacts of God that overwhelm all other facts, no matter how glorious those otherfacts might appear to be. Jesus’s love is more glorious.
The Christian’s strength is never in fear. Fear can helpful.It can be a spur to wake us up or pull us out of ruts. However, fear can’t getus one inch closer to peace and to knowledge of God. For that we need God’sunfailing promises, in which we believe.
The Day of the Lord, the Day of Judgement, lies in thefuture. It could be today. It could be tomorrow. If ever we have looked forwardto anything, then we should look forward to this day. It is a thrilling cry:“Wake, up! Here he comes! Come out to meet him!”
May God bless you with faith so that that day will give youthe inexpressible joy that it deserves.
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“Jesus said to the Jews who hadbelieved in him, “If you abide in my word, you are truly my disciples, and youwill know the truth, and the truth will set you free.’”
Today we commemorate the Reformation. One of the greatestconsequences of the Reformation was that western Christendom was divided. Priorto the Reformation the Christians in Europe were united under the pope and the bishopsunder him. After the Reformation there continued to be Christians under thepope and the bishops, but there were also other Christians who no longerrecognized the legitimacy of the pope and the bishops.
As you might be aware, this division continues to thepresent day. There continue to be Roman Catholics who are under the pope andthe bishops. And then there are also Protestants, Lutherans included, who donot recognize the pope or bishops as having any divine authority over them.
Although the Reformation is a very large topic, and we couldspend many hours going through the history and the issues involved, the factthat Christendom was split is a good way to get at what is especially importantabout the Reformation. Martin Luther’s rejection of the divine authority of thepope and of the bishops is what made him so despised at the time. The pope andthe bishops would have been willing to put up with an awful lot, but they wouldnot tolerate a Christendom that was outside of their jurisdiction.
And as I mentioned, Christendom remains divided to this veryday. Therefore, at least among traditional Roman Catholics who have anunderstanding of church history, Martin Luther is the arch villain. MartinLuther broke the power of the pope over the peoples of Europe. Prior to theReformation the pope was able to keep kings, princes, and other authorities inline by the power of his excommunication. After the Reformation, vast swaths ofEurope no longer recognized his legitimacy. He never again had as much power.
And it is not like that was an unmitigated good. A vacuum ofsorts was created. What filled that vacuum was the power of kings and princes. Thechurch lost more and more power. Eventually the kings and princes were replacedby other forms of government, but, still, these governments had all the power.And today maybe it’s the corporations and hedge funds who have all the power. Whatpower does the church have? Very little. The churches, regardless of theirdenomination, are very easily ignored.
So it’s not surprising that people who care aboutChristianity, who want Christianity to succeed, would trace the church’sseeming impotence in today’s world to Martin Luther. He broke the power of thepope and the bishops. He divided Christendom. He’s the reason why we’re in themess that we’re in.
But Martin Luther is terribly mischaracterized if it isbelieved that he was some kind of revolutionary. If anything he was theopposite. He didn’t set out to destroy the power of the pope or the bishops. Hewas quite content to live under the pope and the bishops. The problem, though,was that he was not content to live under the pope and the bishops no matterwhat. If the pope and the bishops were siding against Christ and against thetruth, then that was the end of Luther’s loyalty.
This was how Luther broke the system that was in place. Therewas a system for handling disagreements, a chain of command. If a disagreementcame up that the local priest couldn’t handle, he could pass it along to thebishop. If the bishop couldn’t handle it, then he pass it along to the pope.The pope usually could handle it, but he did have the option of calling achurch council made up of all the bishops. Perhaps the most important part ofthis system was that whatever was decided by this structure needed to befollowed by the people.
And Luther was willing to go along with all of this. Again,he was no revolutionary. But if the end result of this chain of command wassomething false, then Luther wasn’t willing to deny the truth for the sake ofkeeping the peace. This is what stirred up all the trouble. Luther wouldn’tgive up on what was true.
This is where what we heard in our Gospel reading applies: “Jesus said to the Jews who had believed in him, “If you abidein my word, you are truly my disciples, and you will know the truth, and thetruth will set you free.’”
It’s Jesus’s words that matter—not the church’s word, notthe pope’s word, not even any Lutheran pastor’s word. Jesus’s words teach whatis true. And it is the truth that sets free. It’s not lies that set free. Thetruth.
And this is where we can easily find much applicability tous today. This is not just some history lesson so that you can betterunderstand the Reformation or Lutheranism. The burning issue at the time of theReformation remains the burning issue in our time too: Is the truth going toprevail among us or are we going to be content with lies?
In fact, this has always been the issue since the verybeginning, and it will remain the issue until the end. The truth that God spoketo Adam and Eve was replaced with a lie. Adam and Eve preferred the lie to thetruth. God, however, was merciful to them and restored them in the truth.
But, as we see in Adam and Eve, it is always hard to comeinto the truth. When they heard God walking through the garden in the cool ofthe day they had never been more scared or unhappy. They went and hid in thebushes to try to stay in the lie. It was painful for them to come into thelight of God’s judgment. They preferred the lie to the truth.
And at the time of the Reformation, Luther could have avoidedall kinds of trouble if he only would have left things be as they were. If hewould have left the powerful officials alone, he could have lived out his daysin peace and quiet. He would have been on the wrong side. He would have been anenemy of Christ and his truth—siding instead for those in power and forpersonal advantage. He also wouldn’t have had peace with God. He would have hada guilty conscience, but sins and lies have a way of deadening our conscienceso that it eventually doesn’t bother us too much after a while.
So it is also for each one of us. Are we on Jesus’s side orthe devil’s side? Are we fighting for the truth or are we content to live peaceablywith lies? Being on Jesus’s side is not easy. Jesus tells us that explicitly: “If you wish to be my disciple, then take up your cross andfollow me.” That doesn’t sound like a very good deal. If you want to behis disciple, then a cross and suffering are going to be there. Jesus says moreabout being a disciple in our Gospel reading today too: “If you remain in my word, then you will truly be my disciple,and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.”
So it looks like we have a choice before us. We can eitherembrace the way of lying or we can embrace the way of truth. The way of lyinghas its advantages. You can be unscrupulous. You can be extremely practical—dowhatever works for you. If you’re a good enough liar you can keep doing almostanything you might want to do as nobody will find out about it. And finally, aftera long life of wickedness and covering it up, we can hope in one final lie,that there won’t be any judgement at the end of it.
The way of truth is very different. It is uncomfortable. Itis awkward. It can be embarrassing. It can mark you as a target for those whodon’t want their lies exposed. As Paul says, “We arelike sheep being led to slaughter.” Going the way of truth looks like itwon’t work. It looks like it’s a bad deal. Jesus himself appeared to be afailure as he was hanging on the cross.
But, on the other hand, there’s nothing like the truth. It’sdivine. It sets us free. The truth of Jesus’s words speak of a hope in Christfor a better existence—a new heavens and a new earth where righteousnessdwells. We don’t have to hide. The truth of forgiveness and righteousness inJesus means we don’t have to lie. We know Jesus, and he has set us free.
A lot of people have blamed Martin Luther for dividingChristendom, weakening it, allowing other forces to rise up with nobody to keepthem in check. These forces certainly are out there living it up, with no fearof God or man. Our churches, in contrast, look weak and miserable. We have sovery little clout in the world.
But to dream of something different seems to me like the temptationwhen Jesus was shown all the kingdoms of the world. He could have them all ifonly Jesus would bow down and worship Satan. That’s not the way of truth.Salvation comes through the cross.
So we do not need to dream of something different. We arefully equipped for the kingdom of God with the truth of Jesus’s words. But wemust use of it. If we reject Jesus’s word, if we reject God’s commandments, ifwe prefer lies and power to the truth, then we would be doing no good even ifwe managed to become the biggest church in Fairmont with all the trappings ofsuccess. Even if we managed to become as powerful as the medieval popes, itwould be for naught, for that is not the way the Church of Christ goes forward.
The church of Christ goes forward by holding to the truth ofChrist, come what may. This necessarily means that we take up our cross andfollow him. When we abide in Jesus’s word we ourselves will be saved, and wewill prove to be a light to others, leading them to Christ as well.
The work goes on. Luther didn’t fix things—come up with somemagic formulas—so that there is no work, and he certainly didn’t wreck everythingeither. The words of Christ, the truth that sets free, must be presented toevery individual of every generation. We must be sure that we don’t substitute whatis false for what is true just because it is easier or looks like it will workbetter. The truth is in Jesus.
“Jesus said to the Jews who hadbelieved in him, “If you abide in my word, you are truly my disciples, and youwill know the truth, and the truth will set you free.’”
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For better understanding what is going on in our Gospelreading, it is helpful to know the context. Our reading today is during HolyWeek. Jesus entered Jerusalem a couple days before on Palm Sunday. The peoplehailed him as king. He then went to the Temple, clearing out the moneychangers, flipping over tables and such. All of this made the leaders inJerusalem very upset. They had always believed that Jesus was no good. So inthe readings for the past few weeks we’ve been hearing about the interactionbetween Jesus and these leaders in Jerusalem.
Our reading this morning is another of those interactions,but in today’s reading the Jewish leaders are trying to trap Jesus in what hemight say. So they come to him withsomething of a trick question: “Is it lawful to paytaxes to Caesar or not?”
To understand why this is a trick question, we need to knowsomething about the political situation at that time. The Jewish people had notbeen able to govern themselves for quite some time. They had been ruled over byforeigners for a few hundred years. The latest of the foreign rulers were theRomans, with the Caesar at the head of that government. “Is it lawful to pay taxes to that guy or not?”
I’m not aware of any people who enjoys having foreignrulers over them, and the Jews were no exception. They resented the presumption,arrogance, brutality, and so on of the Romans. They were hoping that they couldget their own kingdom back. One of the hopes at the time was that the Messiah,or the Christ, promised in the Old Testament, would come and restore theirkingdom. So they’d rather not pay taxes to Caesar. Plus they could add somepretty legitimate sounding excuses. The Caesar was a rank unbeliever. He evenstyled himself as something of a god. How could tax-payers give theirhard-earned money towards something like that?
So that’s one part of what is going on. The Jews didn’t likethe Romans or Caesar. The other part of what is going on with Jesus being askedthis questions was that it was dangerous for anyone to say that they didn’tlike the Romans or Caesar. If someone had rebellious thoughts, and the Romansfound out about it, they wouldn’t think twice about killing especially non-citizenslike most of the Jews. I think this is what Jesus’s opponents were hoping wouldhappen. I think they were hoping he would say that we should throw off theRoman yoke and start building a better world. And if Jesus’s opponents heardsomething like that, the first thing they would have done was to run to PontiusPilate. They’d turn Jesus in and all their problems would go away.
But Jesus disappoints them. Instead of saying “Throw off theRoman yoke,” he says, “Give Caesar’s things to Caesar,and God’s things to God.” So Jesus avoided their trap.
Now let’s think about what Jesus’s answer means. There aretwo parts to his answer: “Give Caesar’s things toCaesar, and God’s things to God.” We’ll take them in turns. With thefirst part of Jesus’s response there seems—to me, at least—to be something of adismissal of the whole issue. The saying, “Give Caesar’sthings to Caesar,” strikes me as being something like, “Let sleepingdogs lie,” or “That’s all a tempest in a teapot.” Not much to see.
To respond in such a manner is unexpected, to say the least.Maybe it would be along the lines of someone saying, “It doesn’t matter ifBiden or Trump is president,” when we all know that nothing could be moreimportant than who is president. Right? We have about a dozen cable newschannels that are dedicated to nothing else than covering every last whisperand wink that comes out of Washington. Jesus just says, “Leave Caesar alone. Give to Caesar the things that belong to Caesar.”
Perhaps what Jesus’s response identifies is a false god thatwe easily end up fearing, loving, and trusting in. There’s no denying thatthose in government have power, and so we easily believe that if only we wereable to get these things straight—if only we could get our guys or our party inthere—then we’ll be happy. Every four years, every two years, we hear the samethings over and over again. Vote for this guy and then you’ll be happy. Or,conversely, God forbid the other guy should be elected otherwise the world willfall apart. Our fear, love, and trust belong with the true God instead of inanything else. To fear, love, and trust in those who have power in earthlyaffairs is just as much idolatry as if we were bowing down and worshiping somestatue.
In order for you to see how idolatry can be present with ourthoughts about government, let me speak briefly about another kind of idolatry,the idolatry of money. Very similar things are said about money as are saidabout the government. “If only I have money, then I’ll be happy.” Or,conversely, “if I should happen to lose any money, then gloom, despair, and agonyon me.”
Now I have to admit that there’s something going on withthese things we idolize. For example, does it feel good to come into somemoney? You bet it does. Does it hurt to lose money? Yes indeed. So also withthe government. There are good governments and bad governments. We’d all liketo have a good government. Does it feel good to have your guy win on electionnight? You bet it does. But even though we can get some pleasure andsatisfaction through these things, they are not very good gods. They don’t reallydeliver the happiness or blessedness that they are always promising.
So do not put your faith in this person or party beingelected or not elected. A lot of people at Jesus’s time believed that if theycould only get rid of that awful Caesar, then happy days would return again. WhetherCaesars exist or don’t exist is not what will do the trick. What is needed is anew creation. The things of God are what is needed. We need to be born again ofwater and the Spirit. We need to enter into a new relationship with God wherethere is true righteousness, justice, peace, and so on—much purer andprofounder than any earthly ruler could ever accomplish under even the best of circumstances.
So do not obsess over who is in power or not in power. Godstill exists in heaven above regardless of who is in power. Make it your aim, instead,to please God.
This is one thought that I believe Jesus is expressing whenhe says, “Give Caesar’s things to Caesar.” Leavehim be. Another thing he is saying is actually the answer to their question: “Is it lawful to pay taxes to Caesar or not?” Jesussays, basically, “It is.” Pay the things that belong to Caesar to Caesar. Paulsays the same thing in Romans 13: “Pay taxes to whomyou owe taxes.” Why? Because government is a gift from God. They need tobe supported in the work that God has given them to do.
Now I can understand why it might not seem as thoughgovernment is a gift from God. There is always waste, corruption, nonsense, ifnot even worse things. It can seem as though government is not a gift of God atall. But just because something that is good can be abused, doesn’t destroy whatis supposed to be good. Admittedly, the government does not always do what isright. Governments never have! They’ve all been run by poor, miserable sinners.But there is a lot of goodness that God accomplishes through his gift ofgovernment that is easily overlooked.
Consider how good it is that we can pick up the phone andcall 911, and we don’t have to wonder about whether help is on the way. God’sgift of government defends us and protects us. God’s gift of government alsoprevents all kinds of evils and mischief. Because of the fact that we havelaws, police, judges, prisons, and so forth, those who want to do evil have tothink twice before harming their neighbor. They don’t want to get caught. Theydon’t want to get punished. In this way God keeps the lid on all kinds of evilthat otherwise would boil over. God’s gift of government, even if it beever-so-imperfect, allows us to live quiet and peaceable lives.
So with Jesus’s words, “GiveCaesar’s things to Caesar,” Jesus is indicating that government has a God-givenrole to play. Taxes should be paid to whom taxes are owed, because God worksthrough those who are in government to maintain peace and prosperity. However,we should keep our distance when it comes to our heart. Don’t give your heartor your soul to anyone or anything but God alone.
Which brings us to the second part of Jesus’s response: “Give God’s things to God.” What are the things of God?What we must think of first and foremost when it comes to the “things of God”is God’s Son, our Lord, Jesus Christ. Jesus did the things of God.
And what did Jesus do? Jesus became Lord over everythingthat afflicts us the worst. We might think that government or money could fix ourproblems—and maybe they could fix some of them—but these things cannot evencome close to addressing our worst and most pressing needs. What makes ussaddest and most miserable is our poor spiritual condition—our coveting, greed,anger, hatred, lust, meanness, fear, self-loathing, and so on. We could sum allthese things up with the word, “Sin.” And Sin would like to rule us like atyrant both now in this life, and eternally in the life to come. Jesus defeatssin. Sin is not Lord. Jesus is Lord.
And Jesus defeats the gloomy grave. Death and decay in allaround I see. Wave after wave of people go away and there seems to be nostopping it. But death must let go despite its terrible, seemingly invincible,grip. We shall rise as Jesus has arisen.
The glory of these things is so magnificent! Jesus gets tothe root and source. There is so much talk of happiness: “I would be happy ifonly I …” and you fill in the blank. Happiness is so much higher and holier ofa thing than people imagine. There’s no way government, or money, or any otherearthly thing can truly bring about happiness. Happiness is tied up with God.
So, as Jesus says, “Give to God’sthings to God.” The way we give God’s things to God is by believing him.Believe what God has done in his Son whom he sent, our Lord, Jesus Christ.Believe that Jesus is Lord and God. Faith, simply believing God, is the highestworship. There is no substitute for faith. Either we believe that Jesus Christis Lord—in him is my happiness. Or you will be looking somewhere else for yourhappiness. Lots of things seem like they should do the trick. None ofthem, ultimately, can, except the things of God.
Jesus’s message is therefore remarkably applicable to ustoday. The Jews at Jesus’s time were lost in the same kinds of things we get lostin—political intrigues, lying, meanness, and so on. A lot of the Jews believedthat if only they could attain some change in the government, then we’d haveour happy days. But there is finally only one way to happiness, and that is inour Lord Jesus Christ, crucified and risen for us.
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“Repent, for the kingdom of God isat hand!”
In our Gospel reading the chief priest and elders are upsetabout Jesus. The chief priests and elders had never liked Jesus. Jesus wasn’t apart of their club. He wasn’t from Jerusalem. He didn’t go to the rightschools. He wasn’t from the right families.
What’s more is that he also appeared to them to be adangerous heretic. He healed people on the Sabbath, for example. That’s work,is it not? That’s forbidden. And his disciples didn’t wash their hands beforethey ate. Every self-respecting Jew had been washing his hands a certain way fromtime immemorial! And here these cheeky disciples were flaunting the traditions oftheir people.
So the chief priest and elders already didn’t like Jesus,but what had been going on lately was over the top. The day before our readingtook place was Palm Sunday. Jesus entered Jerusalem amid shouts of joy: “Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord! Jesus is theKing like King David! Hosanna, which means, saveus we pray!” The people were joyously saying stuff like that, and itmade these people sick. Jesus was a heretic! Jesus was no good! All their besttheologians had said so.
But then Jesus did something more. He entered into theirhome turf. He entered the Temple. When he saw what was going on, it made himangry. Buying here. Selling there. And so Jesus kicked them all out. They hadset up tables with pigeons, cash registers and such, and Jesus grabbed hold oftheir tables and flipped them over. Money and pigeons went flying everywhere. Jesusquoted Scripture to them: “It is written, ‘My houseshall be called a house of prayer.’ You have made it a den of robbers!”
Our Gospel reading today is from the day after Jesus did thesethings. It’s not surprising, therefore, that the chief priests and eldersshould go up to him and say, “By what authority are youdoing these things, and who gave you this authority?” They wanted toknow: had Jesus been authorized to raise havoc? They, of course, believed thatthey already knew the answer. Of course he didn’t have the authority, becausethey were the higher ups, and they certainly had not given him any suchauthority!
But Jesus surprises them by not immediately answering theirquestion. He asks them a question. If they’ll answer his question, then he’llanswer theirs. Jesus asks, “John’s baptism: where didit come from? Was it from God or from man?” You heard how the chiefpriests and elders discussed how they should answer. If they said that thebaptism was from God, then Jesus will ask why they didn’t get baptized? But ifthey said that John’s baptism was merely human they knew the people wouldn’tstand for it. The people were sure that John the Baptist was a prophet. So theysaid, “We don’t know.” And neither did Jesustell them by what authority he did what he did.
Now let’s look a little more closely at what the chiefpriests and elders were doing. Notice how the chief priests and elders weredishonest right from the start. Already with the first question that they askJesus, they weren’t looking for an honest answer. It’s more an accusation inthe form of a question: “By what authority do you dothese things?” They don’t want to know what authority he has. Theyalready know that he has no authority—at least so far as they’re concerned.
Then, when Jesus asks them his question, Jesus subtly pointsthem towards the truth. Jesus brings up God—something that wasn’t even on thechief priests’ and elders’ radar. Jesus would have them consider: Might it bethat John the Baptist was sent from God? Might it be that if John the Baptistwas sent from God, then Jesus, also, was sent from God? Might it be that hisauthority comes from God?
This subtle suggestion is lost on them, however. It was likeseed being sown on a beaten path. They didn’t think about God. They onlythought of how they hadn’t liked John the Baptist either. He too wasn’t part oftheir club. He too said stuff and did stuff that annoyed them. No, of courseJohn’s baptism wasn’t from God, but they dare not say that out loud. The idioticpeople regarded John to be a prophet.
So notice what these church leaders are doing, or, rather,not doing. They aren’t interested in what is true. They don’t lay their cardson the table. They operate in a calculated and artificial way. Their thoughtsare not on God, their thoughts are only on how their words and actions aregoing to affect themselves negatively or positively. Since they do not careabout God or about what is true the meat and substance of what they aresupposed to be about as members and leaders of the church has been lost. Theyare only dealing with the husks, the outward appearances of faith.
This was the very thing that Jesus reacted against soviolently the day before. When he came into the temple and saw what was goingon he saw that it was mechanical and empty. There was certainly a lot of hustleand bustle, but nothing of substance, nothing of faith. People were coming andgoing. They put in their offerings. Week after week, rinse and repeat. Jesus looksupon their bored faces and exclaims: “This house is tobe a house of prayer!” That means that people are supposed to care, tothink, to wrestle and to call upon God. Wrestling with God was not on thetable. The husks were. The meat and the substance was gone.
That’s a good way to understand the contrast between thechief priests and elders on the one hand and John the Baptist and Jesus on theother. John the Baptist and Jesus called out for the meat and the substance.The Gospels summarize the preach of both as being the same. Both John theBaptist and Jesus preached: “Repent, for the kingdom ofGod draws near!”
That is a clear message. The king is coming. God is coming. Thatis a simple message that affects every last one of us. God can come suddenlyand unexpectedly. Any one of us could die today or tomorrow and that is when wewill meet our maker. That is the kingdom of God drawing near for us personally.Or today or tomorrow could be the end of this age when Christ will come withhis angels in power and glory to judge the living and the dead.
In light of the kingdom of God drawing near both John andJesus say the same thing: “Repent!” Change yourways! Let the sinner sin no longer. Paul says, “Do younot know that the unrighteous shall not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not bedeceived: neither the sexually immoral, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor menwho practice homosexuality, nor thieves, nor the greedy, nor drunkards, nor partiers,nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God!” There’s that word: “kingdom of God.” “Those who dosuch things shall not inherit the kingdom of God.”
Now I know that you’ve done such things. I’ve done suchthings, I’m sorry to say. John the Baptist and Jesus say, “Repent!” “Stop it!” To which we might very well say,“I don’t want to.” That might very well be the truth! After all, why have wedone these things to begin with? Nobody held a gun to our head and said, “Besexually immoral or else!” “Be greedy or else!” We did these things because wewanted to do. It might be against our will to stop.
I’ll give you another example: Your dad comes to you, asdads tend to do, and tells you, “Go outside and work!” I’ve never met the kidwho unfailingly responds: “Hurray! I get to go and work!” More often than not wesay, inwardly at least, “I don’t want to.”
Jesus gave the chief priests and elders a parable alongthese lines. He said, “What do you think? A man had twosons. He went to the first and said, ‘Son, go and work in the vineyard today.’He answered, ‘I don’t want to,’ but afterward he repented and went. And thefather went to the other son and said the same. He answered, ‘Yes sir. I willgo,’ but he never did. Which of the two did the will of his father?” They said,“The first.” Jesus said to them, “Truly, I say to you, the tax collectors andthe prostitutes go into the kingdom of God before you. For John the Baptistcame to you in the way of righteousness, and you did not believe him. But thetax collectors and prostitutes believed him. And even when you saw it, you didnot afterward repent and believe him.”
It is not surprising that someone doesn’t want to go work. Likewise,it is not surprising that anyone who likes to sin would want to stop. The taxcollectors and prostitutes were the open sinners. They brazenly said: “We don’twant to,” but later they changed their mind. They repented.
The other son, on the other hand, looked better. He lookedmore pious. He said, “Yes sir!” when his father told him to do something hedidn’t want to do. Although he looked different as far as outward appearancesand words was concerned, inwardly he was just like his brother. He had the sameheart.
But, as it turned out, he ended up being worse. He had lookedbetter, he had said the right words, but he was worse because he did notrepent. Even when his brother, who had said the wrong words, nevertheless wentout and worked, he still didn’t repent and go and work. He was content to have merelysaid the right words and to have had the right appearance.
This is a special danger for regular churchgoers like us. Wecan be content with appearances. We have our church machinery that runs hereweek in and week out. It is quite easy for us to believe that being minimallyinvolved in that machinery is more than enough. We don’t need to repent, unlesswe should happen to want to.
But to this we must say, “No!” The kingdom of God drawsnear. Husks and outward appearances are not enough. We might fool our fellowhuman beings with such things, but there’s no fooling God. God’s kingdom iscoming. The king is coming. How will you welcome him? See to it that you arenot ashamed! Welcome him with joy!
It is not like we need to be afraid of the real substance, thereigning and ruling of God. God’s kingdom is good! Jesus is gracious andmerciful. The people who greeted him on Palm Sunday were full of joy at the prospectof Jesus being their king. When Jesus appeared to his disciples after he rosefrom the dead, they didn’t go running in terror from him. They were glad whenthey saw the Lord, even though they knew that they had done much that neededforgiveness.
God’s kingdom is like our opening hymn:
As surely as I live God said,
I would not see the sinner dead.
I want him turned from error’s ways
Repentant, living endless days.
The Lord bless your communion with him today. May this housebe a house of prayer! Amen.
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Forgiveness can be difficult. It can be complicated. If Iaccidentally bump into you as we are passing by each other, that’s not hard toforgive. Not all forgiveness is like that. In fact, I don’t know if that reallyis forgiveness. It’s more like politeness. Forgiveness is more serious.
Being polite is easier than forgiving. Since politeness iseasier than forgiveness we often try to have politeness be considered asufficient substitute for actual forgiveness. There’s a phrase that’s common,“I will forgive, but I won’t forget.” That’s like a forewarning for how you’regoing to treat the person—coldly and fiercely politely. The recipient of thiscoldness gets the message quite clearly. He or she knows that they are notforgiven. There’s no forgiveness from the heart.
So when Jesus says at the end of our reading, “So also my heavenly Father will do to every one of you, ifyou do not forgive your brother from your heart,” we should not thinkthat our cold avoidance of the one with whom we have our beef is sufficient.That’s not forgiveness. It also isn’t fulfilling what Jesus says at thebeginning of our reading when Peter came to him with a question. Peter thoughtthat he was being quite generous when he asked Jesus, “Howmany times should my brother sin against me, and I forgive him? Up to seventimes?” “No,” Jesus says, “not seven times but seventy times seven.”
So how do we forgive? How do we forgive from the heart? Ican’t pretend that I have some secret formula. We do have Jesus’s parable,though, and that might help if we are willing to receive instruction from him. Iwon’t hold my breath, though, because being willing to receive instruction particularlyabout forgiveness is not automatic. Here’s another phrase: “blind with rage.” Aperson can go blind from anger, not literally, but in the sense that the personis so angry that he or she won’t take anything else in. Don’t talk to themabout forgiveness because they won’t have it. You have no idea how badlythey’ve been hurt. So it’s not automatic that people will listen to Jesus’sparable, but maybe today’s the day.
Jesus’s parable is pretty straightforward. There was a manwho owed a huge sum of money to the king. He couldn’t pay the debt. He wasgoing to be sold together with his family into slavery until the debt was paid.However, because the man pleaded with the king, and because the king had pityon him, the king forgave the entire debt.
Then this same man goes out and find somebody who owes himsome money. He took him by the throat and demanded repayment. This debtor saidthe very same words that the one who was forgiven had just said, but instead offorgiving the man he throws him into prison until he should pay back what wasowed.
This was highly distressing to those who heard it. Thehypocrisy of it, the cruelty of it, made them make their petitions to the king.When the king found out about it he called the man in. “You wicked servant! I forgave you all that debt, and you couldn’t havemercy on the one who owed you?” And he threw him into prison until heshould pay back the last penny.
As we consider this parable, what I’d like to convince youof is that we are all like the man whose debt was forgiven. It might seemextraordinary that he is so blind to his hypocrisy—that he can’t forgive as hehas been forgiven—but that’s not that hard if you have the perspective thatcomes so easily to us. The perspective that comes so easily to us is always to belooking out for ourselves: How can I get ahead? How can I have more? How can Iget without having to give? With this perspective the man’s debt being forgivenwas a huge boon. Here he got to spend all that money, and now he doesn’t haveto pay it back. Good for him!
When he left the king and found the fellow who owed himmoney he simply continued to be the way he always was. He continued to look outfor himself. Here were some more riches he could accumulate for himself if onlyhe could somehow get the man to pay. With the perspective we’ve beenconsidering, we have to say, “Good for him!” He was just being a goodbusinessman. As every good businessman knows, you have to pay as little as youpossibly can, and you have to get as much as you possibly can. Maybe this man’sgreed and lack of compassion was what he prided himself most on. It’s the waythat he had gotten so far ahead in life, you see.
So I don’t think this fellow who was forgiven by the kingwas even thinking about what he was doing. He was just doing what he had alwaysdone. He’d always looked out for himself. He’d always done what was best forhimself. If this fool king wants to forgive him his debt, okay. A fool and hismoney are soon parted. But this fellow was no fool. He knew how to get ahead inlife, and it wasn’t by forgiving debts!
This way of living is extremely common. It’s the default,natural way. Lots of people think there’s nothing wrong with it. Maybe youdon’t think there’s anything wrong with it. It wouldn’t be hard to find somepeople who give lectures and write books who would argue that this way ofliving is good for one’s self and it’s good for society. With every last personcompeting for every last resource we have managed to bring about our gloriousmodern world with all of its abundance. Selfishness has supposedly producedthis miracle. And, as well all know, everybody’s so happy these days too,right? So, according to them, we don’t need less self-centeredness, we needmore of it.
But if this is the way you will live your life, then youwill never forgive. You can’t forgive, you see, because forgiving is againstthe rule that you’ve made for yourself. The rule you’ve made for yourself isthat you are only going to do what is good for you, what enriches you, whatfeels good for you. Forgiveness is quite different from all that. Forgivenessis costly.
Think of this king. He lost billions of dollars when heforgave the debt. That’s what this debt would be in today’s money—literallybillions, not millions, billions. Such a debt would drag almost all ourbillionaires into the poor house. He went from being rich to poor. Think ofwhat he could have purchased with those billions of dollars.
And the same thing is true with the fellow who was forgiven,but who didn’t want to forgive his fellow servant. That forgiveness would havebeen costly too. 100 denarii is probably about $20,000 in today’s money. If aperson doesn’t collect on a debt like that, that hurts. It means you can’t buywhat you would have otherwise like to have bought. You can’t go on a trip thatyou otherwise would have liked to have gone on.
But it’s not always money that we lose with forgiveness.Sometimes it’s costlier things like our pride. We like to be right. You wereright, of course, with that person with whom you’ve had your beef. You’vealways been right. They’ve always been wrong. So how could you give up yourclaims against them? They need to give up their claims against you!
Or maybe someone has dragged you or your family down intoshame. They’ve wrecked your good name. Or maybe they’ve wrecked yourlivelihood. Or maybe they’ve wrecked your peace and happiness. These are veryserious, costly things—often irreplaceable, irreparable things.
If you live your life in such a way that you are alwaysgoing to come first, it is impossible let go of such costly things. Never,ever, in a million years will you forgive—at least not from the heart. Maybeyou’ll be polite, but you’ll never love them. You can’t love them because theybroke your #1 commandment: You shall not harm me.
One of the most surprising things that Christianity teachesus is that there are worse things than being harmed. There are worse thingsthan suffering. The fear of harm, the fear of suffering is at the root of somany evils like lying, greed, anger, and so on. But suffering is not the worstthing.
Our God suffered to bring about our redemption. How cananyone say that that suffering was bad? The suffering of God in our Lord JesusChrist was the highest and holiest thing that ever was or ever shall be.
This is reflected in the lives we are given to live asChristians. Jesus has left us with a remembrance of this suffering of God inthe Lord’s Supper. We are to do this Lord’s Supper “often,”Jesus says, “in remembrance of him.” Inremembrance of what? Of God’s suffering. Paul says in another place, “As often as you eat this bread and drink this cup youproclaim the Lord’s death until he comes.” This sacrament is to remindus of Jesus’s death, God’s suffering.
Then, also, we are called to suffer. Jesus says, “Deny yourself, take up your cross, and follow me.” Todeny yourself and take up your cross is connected to what we heard also today:We must forgive from the heart. That is a call to suffer. Forgiveness iscostly. To reach out across the pain, not counting the cost—that isforgiveness.
I do not have the ability to make a single one of youforgive anyone. You, in fact, do not have the ability to forgive anyone—atleast not really, not from the heart. These precious pearls must not be castbefore swine. Only the Holy Spirit can work this. What I can do is praise forgiveness.There is nothing nearer and dearer to our God than forgiveness. In Jesus’scostly suffering and death he forgave the whole world! Forgiveness is good.
Therefore, also, suffering is good. Suffering is good whenit is done for love of your neighbor. I understand how we all fear suffering. Idon’t like it any more than you do. But it is good. For you to forgive thosewho trespass against you is beautiful. It is more beautiful than anything thatmoney can buy.
So be courageous. To not be afraid of suffering takescourage. Dare to forgive. Dare to reach out and love. By doing so you won’tlose anything that is truly precious. You will be able to taste the truespiritual riches of our suffering, loving God.
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Jesus said, “The first shall be last, and the last shall be first.”
Let me begin by running a couple ideas by you. How about this idea for a marriage: Husband and wife get married. Like most married couples they thought it was going to be great. They had visions and plans in their heads. Not long after they tie the knot, however, they find out who it is that they really married. Who they married doesn’t match up at all with the ideas that they had in their head. What now? Have I made the biggest mistake of my life? How can I break free?
How’s that sound for a marriage? Sound like a good idea?
Or how about this idea for a livelihood: A young person goes and gets trained for a good job. The job requires skill and know-how. This young person is fully employed with benefits. This goes on for twenty or thirty years. Then that job is no longer necessary. Technology or globalization mean that somebody else can do the same job a lot cheaper. The person is permanently laid off. Now the young person is no longer young. Well paying jobs are not very available. Only the jobs that nobody really wants are available.
How’s that for a career? Sound good?
If these don’t sound like very good ideas to you, then maybe you can hear Jesus’s words a little differently when he describes how he was going to be king in our Gospel reading. Jesus told his disciples that he was going to go where all his worst enemies live. The big shots in Jerusalem were convinced that Jesus was a heretic. They believed that the only reason why Jesus could do all those miracles was because he was an agent of Satan. They were looking for an opportunity to get their hands on him, and Jesus said that he was going give them that opportunity. He would fall right into their hands. They would arrest him. They would put him on trial with false witnesses and a kangaroo court. They would blindfold him, punch him, and spit on him. They would kill him. On the third day he would rise.
There are Jesus’s ideas for how he would be king.
Peter can perhaps be excused for saying, “Oh, Jesus, let it not be so with you! May this never happen to you. That’s no way for the Christ to be king!”
How should the Christ be king? Lots of things could be done. The main thing is to get bigger. More members means more money, more resources. To get bigger we need to let people know what a great king Jesus is. We could take out some ads in the newspaper. That’s a little old fashioned, though. Maybe some TikTok videos. Instagram. Jesus kicking it with kids in skinny jeans. Seriously, though, we’ve got to grow. It’s only by growing that we can ever get strong enough. We have to get strong enough so that we can push out the Romans. Only when we’ve kicked out the Romans can we get Jesus installed as king.
What Jesus does is almost the opposite of all this. The movement doesn’t grow; it shrinks. He doesn’t get stronger; he gets weaker. He becomes so weak that he stumbles about. He can’t even carry his own cross anymore. Simon of Cyrene must carry it the remainder of the way.
The people at the cross are understandably baffled by Jesus’s claims: “Wait, so you are the Christ, the Son of the living God, and here you are nailed to a cross? Why would God allow that? Come down from that cross, then we’ll believe you. Otherwise you don’t seem to be what you claim to be.”
When Jesus finally died, everybody knew that the movement was over and done with. The corpse, green and blue and stiff, was right there for anybody to see. How can that corpse be king? Are you going to prop that corpse up on a throne? No. Obviously the disciples were wrong. They thought that Jesus was the Christ, the king, but they were mistaken. All that’s left to do is to bury that corpse, move back to Galilee, and try to get on with life.
Realize that if Jesus wouldn’t have risen from the dead, everything that I’ve been saying to you would have been the sensible way to react to all that had happened. Peter, in fact, would have been proven right when he said, “Oh no, Jesus. Not that. You can’t do it like that.” But that’s not what happened. Jesus didn’t stay dead. That changes everything. Instead of what seems sensible being vindicated, Jesus and his words are vindicated. The thoughts of man are vain and futile. God’s thoughts prevail.
What are these thoughts of man that are now vain and futile? We’ve already spoken about them today. It would be the way we think we are going to succeed. For Jesus to be an effective king he has to be grand and glorious. The bigger the movement the more power it has. This thinking is vain and false. This is proven by what happened. At the moment of Jesus’s triumph with the cross and resurrection, the movement dwindled all the way down to exactly zero. Nobody believed in him. Popularity or numbers don’t matter when God is the one who is acting. God doesn’t need numbers or popularity.
Or take the examples with which I began. We are such idealistic creatures. We get an idea in our head of how things are supposed to go. A marriage is supposed to be like this. A career is supposed to be like this. A male body is supposed to look like this. A female body is supposed to look like this. A house is supposed to be like this. Home furnishings are supposed to be like this. A good personality is supposed to be like this. All the popular and successful people look like this.
These are all just ideas. Nobody measures up to all of them. Maybe you don’t measure up to many of them. Maybe you don’t measure up to any of them. If you don’t measure up to any of them, then you are what is called a “loser.” Being a loser sounds like it is the worst of the worst, but, you know what, let’s not be too hasty.
Do you know who the first person was to whom Jesus appeared when he rose from the dead? The very first person to whom Jesus came was Mary Magdalene. There are a few things we know about this woman. She used to be a prostitute. That means that she had sex with strangers for money. She was inhabited by seven demons, whom Jesus cast out. One demon is plenty to wreak havoc on a psyche. She had seven. Let’s not romanticize Mary Magdalene. She must have been a very, very troubled person—a “loser” you might say. And she has the honor of being the first to whom Jesus came. Why? Because Jesus loved her. He wanted to comfort her in her afflictions.
Note to whom Jesus did not appear: He did not appear to those who saw themselves as righteous, as wise, as powerful, as having the world by the tail. Jesus didn’t appear to any of those at all.
And consider what people would have thought about Jesus too. They thought that he was a loser. Maybe he was something in the past, but surely he is nothing as he hung naked, bruised, bloody, on the cross. “He saved others; he cannot save himself.” That’s what they were saying about him. “He claimed to be God’s Son. I guess God must not like people saying that they are God’s son, because look at him now. God must be punishing him.” Jesus looked like scum, a criminal, a loser.
But then we have all these sayings from the Scriptures like “The first shall be last, and the last shall be first.” That is a saying that means nothing other than “the loser will be winner, and the winner will be the loser.” Or here’s a related saying, “God rejects the proud, but gives grace to the humble.” Or, again, a saying that is in our reading today: “Whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life on account of me will find it.”
Jesus teaches some strange things, which all hinge on whether Jesus rose from the dead. If Jesus rose from the dead, then all those old rules go out the window. If he did not rise from the dead, then, as Paul says in 1 Corinthians 15, “We Christians are to be pitied above all others.” Our faith is vain. We are living a lie. We would be vastly better off if we would forget everything Jesus ever said, and instead ruthlessly make our own dreams come true. Maybe, if we try hard enough and never give up, then somebody will remember us.
But if Jesus has risen from the dead, and he has, then all the world’s wisdom is foolishness. The most perfect life, the life that ticks all the boxes, is an empty and lost life, estranged from God.
On the other hand, the opposite—being humbled, being humiliated—is not the worst thing. What does it mean to be humbled but to realize that you aren’t as great as you thought you were? Isn’t that just the truth? You are a fallible creature. What you should have done, you haven’t done, and what you shouldn’t have done, that’s the very thing that you’ve done. This is the truth that’s hard to see and harder to accept.
On the other hand, it’s easy to dream about what you’d like to be. It’s the easiest thing the world! What kind of marriage would you like? The best. What kind of house do you want? The best. What kind of job do you want? The best. The ideas are not even interesting. Everybody just wants to be the best!
In contrast to all this fakery, I can say that God has loved you—the real you, not the fake, ideal you. The real you is the you as you really are with all your defects, with all your unchecked boxes. Chasing dreams is supposed to make you happy. I’m not so sure. It’s not the only way to be.
Be like Mary Magdalene, that very troubled person. She was glad when she saw the Lord. She wasn’t much to look at, but Jesus loved her. Jesus loves you too.
Scripture says, “If anyone is in Christ, then that person is a new creation. The old has passed away. Behold, the new has come!”
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“Seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added unto you.”
Let’s begin by setting the scene. Our Gospel reading today picks up where last week’s reading left off. Last week Jesus fed the 5,000 with five loaves and two fish. Immediately after that, as we heard in today’s reading, Jesus sent the disciples off in a boat on the sea of Galilee. Jesus went up on a mountain by himself to pray. He was praying by himself well into the night.
While Jesus was praying, the disciples were in the boat, but the wind was giving them trouble. The wind was making big waves. The wind was blowing against the boat. The wind was whistling in their ears. They were out there all night long, battling that wind. The fourth watch of the night finally came, which in our time would be somewhere between 3 AM and 6 AM.
It was at this time that Jesus came towards the disciples in the boat walking on the water. The disciples must have been very tired, given what time it was. They had to have been frustrated that their journey was not going well. When they see Jesus they don’t recognize him. They thought he was a ghost. And that’s understandable. People can’t walk on water.
So try to put yourselves in the disciples’ shoes. This was a very unpleasant, even dangerous situation. It’s dark. The wind’s howling. The waves are crashing. They’re probably trying to keep the bow of the boat into the wind so that the bow can cut through the oncoming waves instead of being swamped by them. Then, to top it all off, there’s a stinking ghost. What else can go wrong?
Jesus’s words then break into the darkness, the wind, the confusion. He says, “Take heart, it is I, do not be afraid.” It is good to spend a little time here on Jesus’s words. The first thing that Jesus says is, “Take heart.” That means, “Be courageous.” The disciples were in trouble. Jesus tells them to have courage.
Why should they have courage? Jesus says, “It is I.” With the words, “It is I,” certainly Jesus is telling the disciples that he is no ghost. But Jesus might also be saying something more here too. What it says in Greek is: “Ego eimi.” Maybe some of you have heard that before. “Ego” is Greek for “I.” “Eimi” is Greek for “am.” So “ego eimi” means “I am.”
What is the significance of Jesus saying, “I am”? Perhaps you recall God identifying himself to Moses at the burning bush. Moses wanted to know what name he should give to the Israelites when they ask him who sent him. God responds, “I am who I am. Tell them that ‘I am’ has sent you.” “I am” is a name for God. Here Jesus says, “I am.”
So although Jesus doesn’t say many words, the few words he does say are powerful: “Be courageous. I am. Do not be afraid.” “Be courageous because I am who I am. I am God. Do not be afraid.”
It appears that Jesus’s message hit home with Peter by his reaction, which you might say is unusual. He says to Jesus, “If it is you, Lord, then command me to come to you on the water.” Remember all the stuff that is going on around them. The wind and the waves have not stopped. The wind is howling. They were shouting just to hear one another.
Peter’s mind, however, has been taken away from what was happening around him. The cares and concerns that have kept them up all night long recede into the background of his mind. He has an audacious idea. Peter believes in the “I am.” So he has the courage to step out of that rocking and swirling boat onto the tempestuous sea.
I’d like to point out that there is an obvious alternative to Peter’s plan. The alternative would be to focus on what was going on around him. He could have said to Jesus, “Can’t you make this wind stop that’s been tormenting us all night long? Can’t you see we’re suffering!? Make it stop! We loathe this worthless sea voyage, which, by the way, you put us on.” The sensible thing would be to get the wind and the waves to stop. That’s what a responsible person would do.
The responsible person seems to be proven right, also, by what ends up happening. You know how the story goes. He ends up sinking! So a responsible person might say, “See, first things first. Get rid of the waves.” But there’s more to the story than that. Peter did end up sinking. He had to cry out: “Lord, save me!” But before that he was walking on the water and was making his way towards Jesus. Maybe if Peter had sunk like a stone the second he stepped out of the boat those responsible people would have a point, but for a time Peter believed, and it was glorious.
Now when it comes to applying what we hear in this Gospel reading to ourselves, the applications are almost innumerable. This is a very rich text and could teach us many things. But I’d like to focus just on Peter’s reaction and how we might imitate him so that something glorious might take place in our lives too.
We all, like Peter had with the wind and the waves, we all have our troubles and frustrations. If we thought hard enough we could all come up with a good long list of stuff that we’d like to have different. All of us would have minor stuff. Maybe we would have some terribly, terribly big stuff too. Maybe your life is in danger of being lost—not by wind and waves, but by disease. Perhaps more important than merely surviving, though, are all the relationships in our lives. Maybe you are estranged from someone. There’s a cold war happening in your family or in your house. We all have our cares and worries of every kind, and perhaps they are so bad we haven’t been able to make headway no matter how hard we try. It’s the fourth watch of the night. When is it ever going to end?
Then, to top it all off, Jesus can show up in a sense, similar to how he did with the disciples. What I mean is that Jesus can make himself and his will known to us, and what Jesus says is not always welcome. His thoughts on life are usually not our thoughts. How he says we should live our lives can seem impractical, impossible, otherworldly—ghostly. He tells us, for example, that we should forgive those who trespass against us. What should we do with those who have hurt us? We should do good to them and love them. Love, in general, would be Jesus’s way. Can’t go wrong with love.
To which we might sensibly respond, “Don’t you know what’s been going on with me? Don’t you know the hell I’ve been through? I’m just trying to survive. How dare you ask anything more of me?” Away with you, you ghost! You’re not here to help us. You’re just making it worse!
But Jesus doesn’t remain a ghost to the disciples, nor does he wish to remain a ghost to us. He tells us who he is so that we may believe in him. He says, “Be courageous. I am God. Do not be afraid.” Faith comes first. The life of love, especially to our enemies and to those who have hurt us, would be as impossible as walking on water if faith did not come first.
And faith in Jesus is always good and gracious. All the disciples were probably relieved to hear Jesus’s voice, but Peter did something more. He also gave up worrying about himself. You will never be harmed by believing in Jesus. But believing in Jesus will mean that the other things that are going on with you will need to be pushed to the background.
Imagine if Peter didn’t react the way he did, but responded differently. Imagine if he faintly, distantly heard Jesus say what he said, but instead of taking it to heart he would have been too busy with the boat. Look! See there. The bow is turning against the wind! The wind is going to push us sideways! Look at the wave that’s coming. It’s going to sink us! Everybody on the left row forward! Everybody on the right row backwards! Row for your lives!
Can’t you see how something like that could happen? Not only could it happen, it’s what comes naturally to us. We believe that we must solve all our own problems. How are we going to solve them? How about we start by obsessing over them? That’s what responsible people do. It’s irresponsible, in a sense, to move all thoughts to the background and focus on Jesus and his words to us. But that’s what faith does.
Faith in Christ requires us to push all kinds of important and seemingly relevant thoughts to the background. You must, for example, set aside the sins that you’ve committed. Either your sins are supreme and you should worry yourself to death about them, or Jesus is supreme.
Or how about your failures? If you’ve failed at love, failed at business, failed at life, either this is going to be the supreme thing in your life or Jesus. But maybe you’re more of an upbeat sort of person. You’ve succeeded at life. You’ve take those waves head on and sailed right through!
There’s no stopping the wind though. Death must relentlessly and ruthlessly take its prey. There’s no stopping that no matter how many waves you’ve made it through. Let’s turn that on its head, though, and say, “I’ve only got one life to live so I’m going to be glorious!” All that is still just playing around with the oars and the rigging.
By nature, with our unbelief, we can’t do anything different. We can’t help but mess around with all the things in our life. We want to decrease that long list of stuff we’d like to have different. So we pull on this and move that. Patch and mend and reinvent ourselves. Motivate, educate, reinvigorate.
Or, on the other hand—and this makes up no small number—we’re tired of all that. We sit hunched on the bench, staring at the hapless rudder and the flapping of sails.
These two ways of being seem so different from one another, but really they’re not. Whether we’re busy or whether we’ve given up—it makes no difference ultimately—the boat is doomed if Jesus is not there. “Moth and rust destroy; thieves break in and steal.” But what if there were something more important, more life-giving, outside the boat?
And there is! Jesus does not come from inside the boat, from inside this life. Jesus comes from heaven. And here’s the amazing thing: We’re safer with Jesus. Peter held on to that strange thought for quite some time as he was making his way towards Jesus. All the disciples would have been safer with Jesus than they ever were in the boat. But, boy!, is it ever hard for us to believe that. It was hard for Peter too. He looked at the wind and the waves. We’re not told this by the text, but maybe there was a huge wave coming towards him, towering way above him. He shouldn’t have doubted, but can any of us blame him? We are cut from the same cloth. “Lord, save us!”
The truth remains, though, despite how we feel: You are safer with faith in Jesus than you are in any other possible place. Jesus is the great “I am.”
“Seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added unto you.”
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Jesus said, “The things which are impossible with man are possible with God.”
In our Gospel reading today we are told about an impressive miracle. There is a very large crowd. Maybe we can use our imagination to get a mental picture of this crowd. The crowd would have been about the size of all the residents of Fairmont. Our town has about 10,000 people. At the end of our reading it says that there were about 5,000 men, not counting the women and children. So if you took every last person who lives in our town, and maybe add a little bit more, then you’d have an idea of how large this crowd was.
The occasion for Jesus’s dealings with this crowd is that they heard Jesus was able to do miracles. They heard that Jesus was able to cast out demons, give hearing to the deaf, sight to the blind, preach the good news to the poor, and so on. So although Jesus had taken a boat on the Sea of Galilee, to go to a deserted place to pray, the people had followed him, going great distances so that he could help them.
So, maybe we could get a picture of this in our mind’s eye: It would be like the whole town of Fairmont were to leave their homes and walk out to a deserted place. Just so that we have the same place in mind, let’s imagine all of Fairmont walking east of town on the highway until they got to the Fairmont airport. There you have a nice, big stretch of grass. The whole town is gathered out there. When Jesus comes and sees the crowd with all their needs he has compassion. He begins to heal and help the people gathered there.
It seems that this went on for many hours. The disciples can see that there are too many people and not enough time. Night was coming and the people needed to walk back that distance to get home. So they told Jesus that it was time for the town of Fairmont to walk back home. They had to have been hungry. Once they got to town they could stop at Arby’s or Taco John’s.
Jesus must have surprised them when he said, “They do not need to go away. You give them something to eat.” What could Jesus possibly be referring to? You’re out at the airport. There isn’t any food out there. There aren’t any stores out there. There’s just a bunch of grass. “You give them something to eat,” Jesus said. Ok. How?
In John’s Gospel the apostle Philip says, “Two hundred denarii wouldn’t buy enough bread so as to give each of them even just a little.” To put that into today’s terms, “$20,000 wouldn’t be enough to give them all just half a sandwich.” And that’s quite right. There’s not just the lack of available food. There’s also the lack of funding. Tens of thousands of dollars would need to be spent for even something meager.
As it turned out, though, they did have something meager. They had five loaves and two fish. When Jesus heard that they had this, he was satisfied: “That’ll work. Bring me the bread and the fish.”
Then Jesus ordered the crowds to sit down on the grass. They were going to have supper. The people probably were as baffled at that idea as the disciples were. Where’s the food? Then Jesus took the five loaves and the two fish and he looked up to heaven and said a blessing. We are not told the words of that blessing, but this is not something unfamiliar to us. Our table prayers are blessings. Essentially a blessing is asking for God’s goodness to be present. Jesus blessed the bread and the fish.
Then the miracle happened, and it isn’t perfectly clear to me how it happened in my mind’s eye. It says that “he broke the loaves and gave them to the disciples, and the disciples gave them to the crowds. And they all ate and were satisfied. And they took up twelve baskets full of the broken pieces left over.” It doesn’t sound like $50,000 worth of bread and fish suddenly showed up so that there was a mountain of provisions that were then distributed. It sounds like Jesus broke the loaves, giving pieces to the disciples, and that when they came back to Jesus he always was able to give them more to distribute.
In a way the miracle is quite humble. The actions involved are quite humble. A mountain of food doesn’t suddenly appear. There’s only breaking and giving, breaking and giving, until everyone has had more than enough. On the other hand, this miracle is arguably grander than anything that Jesus had done up to this point. Jesus had already done miracles for this individual and that individual. The feeding of the 5,000 was for a huge crowd, the whole town of Fairmont and more.
Having gone through what happened, what can we learn from this? This shows that Jesus has power and authority in his creation. We all know that it is not in the nature of bread or of fish to spontaneously multiply. In physics there is a law called the conservation of matter. The law says that if you start out with a certain amount of material, you are going to end up with the same amount of material no matter what you do to it. You might change it from one thing to another, but you can never make something out of nothing.
God, on the other hand, is well acquainted with making things out of nothing. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. This means that he made them out of nothing. In fact, the laws that we have in physics or thermodynamics or what have you were created by God too. The Creator of these laws is not bound by these laws like we are.
When Jesus creates more bread and fish than what was originally there, he is making use of power and authority that belong to God alone. That which is impossible with man is possible with God. There are other passages that are applicable here too.
When Jesus rose from the dead and before he ascended into heaven the apostles met him on a mountain in Galilee. Jesus said to them: “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Therefore, go and make disciples, and so on.” The part I want to emphasize is that first part: “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to Jesus.” This is also what is important with Jesus reigning and ruling at the right hand of God the Father. The right hand of God the Father is not so much a physical location. It is the position of authority, God’s right hand man, so to speak.
Paul in his letter to the Colossians talks about the extent of Jesus’s power and authority. Jesus created all things, visible and invisible. He is the creator of thrones, dominions, powers, and authorities. He is before all things and in him all things hold together. He is the first-born from the dead so that he might be preeminent over all things.
It is good that Jesus has this power and authority. It has always been good for him to have such power and authority. God already and ordinarily uses his power and authority in such a benevolent and life-giving way. Think of how he sustains life ordinarily and regularly. He’s like clockwork. He causes the seasons. He gives us our rain. He gives us our daily bread. In his ordinary way he provides for all the needs of body and soul for not just 5,000, but for billions.
What Jesus’s miracles reveal in addition, though, is that he can also circumvent the laws that he has put in place if he should so will it. It seems to us that the laws of physics are pretty well set in stone, but Jesus can alter them. Bread and fish spontaneously multiply when Jesus so wills it. He altered the laws involved in order to feed this great crowd of people.
Jesus can also do this for us, if need be. That’s something always to keep in mind. If we should be in need we can lift our eyes to heaven and ask him for help. We should especially be confident when we pray to him for the things we know he wishes us to have. If we pray the words of the Lord’s Prayer, for example, we should have no doubt that our prayers will be heard, because he himself taught us to pray in this way and promised to hear us. I can’t be as certain about being able to feed the town of Fairmont or the other things that Jesus did. If the need was there, though, that might be a different matter, as we see miracles being done by God for his people throughout the Bible. Laws can still be circumvented today if Jesus should so will it.
But we might not experience the kinds of miracles that we hear about in the Bible. Realize that the people who lived in Bible times did not always experience the miracles you hear about in the Bible. Sometimes many generations would pass, hundreds of years, when the Bible doesn’t record even a single miracle. It’s not the miracles that are important, but the relationship we have with God that’s important.
But regardless of whether we experience the kind of miracles you hear about in the Bible you should know that greater things lie in our future—especially in the end times. The Scriptures say, “No eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor has it entered into the imagination of the heart of man what God has prepared for those who love him.” Jesus has the power and authority to feed the 5,000. We can imagine that. You will experience much greater things—things beyond our imagining.
For example, you will experience Jesus breaking the law of death for you. Things that are dead are supposed to stay dead. That’s a law. Things that are dead do not have life, they have the opposite. The decompose and decay even further. Jesus, however, has the power and authority to give life to the dead. Scripture says that when he comes he will change our lowly bodies to be like his glorious body by the power that enables him to subdue all things to himself. He’s going to use his power and authority to make our worn out, crumbling, sin-infested bodies to be like his glorious, holy body.
In summary, it is right to consider Jesus’s miracle of feeding the 5,000 to be impressive. It is impressive. It was impressive to those who ate and were satisfied. They were all astounded, just as we would be too if we were gathered together with him at the airport. But better and more unusual things lie ahead for us in our relationship with Jesus. What seems to be unchangeable, inalterable, unredeemable, is not impossible with God. The dead will rise. The perishable will put on the imperishable. The mortal will put on immortality. The power that Jesus used with the 5,000 will be used in an even greater way on each of you and to your eternal benefit.
Jesus said, “The things that are impossible with man are possible with God.”
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For the past few weeks our Gospel readings have been from Matthew chapter 13. This chapter has a bunch of parables about the Kingdom of Heaven. So you heard about the kingdom of heaven being like a farmer who sows his seed so that it falls on all kinds of different soils. You heard about the kingdom of heaven being like a field that was sown with good seed, but the enemy came and sowed weed seed.
With our reading today we are at the end of this section of parables. We have three more parables about what the kingdom of heaven is like. It’s like a man who found a treasure in the field. He sells all he has so that he can buy that field. It’s like a pearl merchant who finds a pearl of great value. He sells all that he has so that he can buy the pearl. Finally the kingdom of heaven is like a dragnet that pulls in all kinds of different things. Only when it’s all brought to shore is the good separated from the bad.
I’d like to begin today by talking about the parable that seems the most straight-forward, which would be the second one. A pearl merchant, who travels hither and yon buying and selling pearls, finally comes upon one that he simply has to have. He liquidates his inventory. He sells his property. He empties his bank account. He buys it.
Jesus’s parables almost always have some kind of twist, something unexpected, and the thing that is unexpected here is that this is no way to run a jewelry business. Someone has said, “The business of business is business.” This fellow no longer is interested in making money. He couldn’t make money even if he wanted to. He doesn’t have anything left except this pearl which he presumably won’t sell at any price.
The only explanation for this merchant’s strange behavior is love. He loves that pearl. He loves it so much that he sells everything that he has so as to buy it. He is willing to live as a poor person, with all the deprivations that go along with having no money, because of his love.
This might seem like a harmless little story, but that’s not how people are with money and business. There is a rule seemingly come down from heaven above that a person or a business must always be making more and more money. If you aren’t always making more money, then you’re a loser. So for this fellow to check out of the money making business because of love sounds ridiculous. It sounds like something a Liberal Arts major might do. People like that are always poor.
Since this mentality is so strong and so widespread I’m a little nervous pointing out to you that you will not find even a hint of this seemingly heaven-sent rule in the Bible. Being money hungry is not a virtue in the Bible. It’s a vice. Other things get praised in the Bible. These other things are not talked about as often in common conversation, nor are they taken very seriously. Stuff like: Love. Wisdom. Suffering. Weakness. Righteousness. Joy. Patience. Faith. Where do these things and more all come together? In the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ. There, in the cross of Jesus, are all good things.
Just as a great many people could be disgusted with the love that this merchant has for that stupid pearl, so also a great many people could be disgusted by the love a person might have for the cross of Christ. How’s that cross going to make you any money? Plus, it’s not even pretty like a pearl. It’s bloody, gory. And it sends a bad message to kids. Jesus just takes it. He passively suffers. There’s no get up and go. What a worthless thing to throw one’s life away for.
So it goes, though, with the kingdom of heaven. Those whom God chooses love the cross of Jesus. If you sold everything that you had so as to have the cross of Christ, you would not be disappointed. There’d be a happy ending. The kingdom of heaven is like a merchant who found a pearl of great price, who sold everything that he had, and bought it.
Let’s move on to the first parable: “The kingdom of heaven is like a treasure hidden in a field, which a man found and covered up. Then in his joy he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field.” This parable is not quite as pretty, not quite as pure as the story about the pearl. The morality police know that something’s not quite right here.
First of all, what is this man doing wandering around on somebody else’s property—and with a shovel no less! This is highly improper. Then, when he finds the treasure, he doesn’t inform the landowner. He buries it someplace else so that only he knows where it is.
He’s tricky and clever in the way that he obtains the treasure. If he would have stolen the treasure as soon as he found it, people would have wondered where he got his new-found riches. But if he buys the whole field—maybe it was rumored that there was a treasure in there—if he buys the whole field he can say, “Look, here’s that treasure that everybody’s been wondering about and it’s all mine! Sure is a good thing that I had the good sense to buy it!” Then he could spend the treasure as though it were his very own even though it really was not. He cheated.
So how is this similar to the way the kingdom of heaven works? According to a certain way of thinking, there is something “dirty,” so to speak, about our salvation, about how we are judged before God. A classic definition of justice is that each should get as each deserves. So what would each deserve if each were to be judged by God?
Depends on the person, right? Some are good. Some are bad. The good ones should be rewarded. The bad ones should be punished. The guy who owns the field should get the treasure. The guy who doesn’t own the field shouldn’t get the treasure.
But what God reveals about the way he judges is that there is a righteousness available that doesn’t depend upon how you have lived, whether you own any fields, or what you have done with your thoughts, words, and deeds. This righteousness is that available is the righteousness of Jesus—the righteousness of God himself. This treasure is given, possessed, and used by those who don’t deserve it.
There’s something of a scandal with the kingdom of heaven, with the Gospel. The scandal is that people don’t get what they deserve. Real sinners are declared by God to be righteous for Jesus’s sake. Why? Because God wants to.
This is similar to other parables of Jesus’s, such as the pharisee and the tax collector. A pharisee and a tax collector go up into the temple to pray. The Pharisee is a vastly superior human being compared to the thug of the tax collector. The pharisee thanks God that he is the way that he is. The tax collector prays, “Have mercy on me, a sinner, O Lord!” The tax collector goes to his home justified, that is, regarded by God as being righteous, rather than the pharisee.
It’s With the parable of the workers in the vineyard some workers go out first thing in the morning. Some at mid-day. Some work only one measly little hour. When it comes time to pay the workers they all get the same. Why? Because that’s what the owner of the vineyard wanted to do. He wanted to be generous. The owner says, “Can’t I do what I want with what belongs to me?”
So it is that people who truly have sinned, who have not right whatsoever to have any good thing, are given the perfect righteousness of God in Jesus.
Finally, the last parable is that the kingdom of heaven is like a dragnet that pulls in everything that’s in the water no matter if it good or bad. It’s when the net is drawn on shore that the good are separated from the bad. “So it will be,” Jesus says, “at the close of the age. The angels will come out and separate the evil from the righteous and throw them into the fiery furnace. In that place there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.”
This last parable shows us the seriousness and the importance to each individual of the kingdom of heaven. It appears so often to so many that God’s Word is at best some kind of old-fashioned hobby. We sit around and come up with interpretations and applications, but it doesn’t really matter to a person’s life. What really matters about life is making money. Or feeling good about yourself. Or having a good time. People will be serious about those things, but not about the kingdom of heaven.
What this parable points out is that whether we are good or bad, righteous or unrighteous, is of the utmost importance to our continued happiness at the close of the age. Either we will be gathered together with those who are good, or we will be cast in the fiery furnace where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth.
And how is it that we will be righteous? It isn’t by making a lot of money. It isn’t by filling our life with pleasures. It isn’t even by trying our best to be a good person and never giving up. It’s by embracing the cross of Christ. It’s by believing that it is no longer you who are living, but Christ who lives within you. The life that you now live is lived by faith in the Son of God, who loved you and gave himself for you. Because he did that, you have an inexhaustible treasure. That’s how a person will be judged by God as good.
At the close of the age, apart from Christ, even the most outstanding specimen of a human being will be like a piece of trash snagged up from the murky depths. On the other hand, even the foulest sinner who believes in Jesus will be righteous with God’s own righteousness that is freely communicated to him and held to by faith.
So let us be prepared for the dragnet that will pull us all on shore. Let us take refuge in Jesus our Savior.
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In the Name of Jesus
The words that Jesus said in our Gospel reading sound strange: “Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I have not come to bring peace to the earth, but rather a sword. I have come to set a son against his father and a daughter against her mother and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law. A person’s enemies will be those of his own household.” These words sound strange. How can we understand them?
The context is important. Matthew chapter 10, which is where our reading came from, is when Jesus sent out his apostles to preach. He told them what they should preach. They should say, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has drawn near.” In last week’s sermon I talked about what that message meant. “Repent,” means that you should change your ways. “The kingdom of heaven drawing near” means that God is coming. He comes to reign and rule. There will be judgement. Let the sinner sin no more, for we shall all be accountable to God for what we have done.
Already you can maybe see how this message would be opposed so as to cause division. People don’t like to be criticized. If you had done something that you wanted to do, and if I were to say to you, “You shouldn’t have done that!” You’d resent it. Maybe you’d say within yourself, “Who are you to judge? What, are you one of those ‘holier than thou’ people? Mind your own business!”
It’s amazing how deeply seated this attitude is. You can see it in three year olds. You see it in twelve year olds. You see it in eighty year olds. Our sinful flesh has this proud trait in it, which hates to be humbled and put to shame. No matter how sanctified a Christian might be, this trait is always there, ready to lash out against anyone who might suggest that you’ve done anything wrong.
So already you can see how division could happen with the apostles’ message. We don’t want to change. But there is another way that Jesus’s message, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is near,” can cause even profounder divisions. It has to do with the way that we all construct meaning for our lives. Everybody has his or her own understanding of what life is all about. One might believe that life is for the purpose of accumulating wealth. Too much is never enough. Never give. Always only take.
Another might believe that what is most important about life is family. Family comes first. Often a certain look for the family is what is really meant. You have to have the perfect wedding. You have to have the perfect childhood. You have to be the perfect grandparents. Make the perfect memories, and make sure that you have the perfect pictures to prove it.
Another might believe that life is for the purpose of advancing mankind towards greatness. With continued investment in our sciences and technologies we can interface our brains with computers. Then, when our bodies wear out we can upload our consciousness to the cloud. We can live forever in some electronic form. This is but one of many such dreams that very talented people are working on.
Everybody has his or her own version of what life is for. Each seems to be tailored to what the person likes best, or is best at. These visions of what life is for are very serious. One’s view of what life is all about takes up that person’s money, labor, devotion, dreams of grandeur.
But then Christ the King comes. The kingdom of heaven draws near. And this kingdom of God claims absolute supremacy for itself. Every other view of life must bow before it. There is only one God, and there is only one Lord. The meaning of life is what you know from the Creed. God has made you and all creatures. God has redeemed you. The Son of God was born of the Virgin Mary. He suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died and was buried. He descended into hell. The third day he rose from the dead. He ascended into heaven where he sits at the right hand of God the Father Almighty. From thence he will come again to judge the living and the dead.
When the kingdom of God comes, when Jesus comes again to judge the living and the dead, then it won’t matter how advanced technology has become. It won’t matter if photo albums are filled with precious memories. It won’t matter how much wealth or how many computers and how many robots and how many gallons of oil we have managed to burn. Vastly more impressive things like the sun and the moon will even go wonky. There is no ruler, power, authority, or principality that will not be put under Jesus’s feet. Paul says every high and exalted thing must be torn down and be brought into submission to Christ. At the Name of Jesus every knee will bow and every tongue will confess that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God the Father.
Does this vision of what life is all about sound ruthless? It doesn’t just sound ruthless, it is ruthless. God is unbelievably serious about the 1st commandment: “You shall have no other gods.” How often do you think about that commandment? Not too often? And yet nobody escapes this commandment. God made you. He won’t share you with others. He says, “Behold, I the Lord your God am a jealous God.” That means that he won’t share you with any other meaning that might get constructed about life.
The Lord your God is a jealous God, but let us rightly understand that jealousy. This is not the jealousy of some petty tyrant. God’s jealousy is the jealousy of a lover. The book of the Bible called Song of Songs talks about God’s love for his church. Isaiah and Paul talk about God as a great lover too. God is a lover who ruthlessly seeks out his beloved. God woos, and courts, and loves his beloved. He’s downright obsessed. You are his, and he wants you.
And to have you, he sends his only begotten Son into the flesh. His perfect Son, whom he loves, who’s perfectly loveable, this perfect treasure who is worth more 10,000 worlds all heaped together, this Son comes in such a way where he becomes sin for us. He becomes a worm and no man, scorned by mankind and despised by all the people. God gives him into death, so that by his blood you may be presented before him without spot or wrinkle or any such thing.
God, this great adventurer, is not some apathetic bean-counter in the skies. God is the profoundest and activest lover there ever was. If we sold all we had so as to buy this pearl of great price, we would by no means be disappointed with what we ended up with.
But despite everything I have said to you about the greatness of God’s kingdom, there will still be those who reject this kingdom of heaven. The reasons for rejecting the kingdom of heaven vary and are as numerous as there are people. One will reject the kingdom of heaven because he wants to hold on to all of his money and property. You perhaps remember Jesus’s story of the rich man and Lazarus?
Another will reject the kingdom of heaven because she can’t stand the thought that a son or daughter is condemned through unbelief. Jesus really means it when he says, “Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me, and whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me.” To love the created thing or the creature more than you love the One who did the creating is not allowed.
And yet, when I say this, I am not speaking as though this is just somebody else’s problem. The first commandment is our greatest problem too. We love the created thing rather than the Creator. What pulls us away from our devotion to him? What pulls us away from church? Isn’t it either the fun that we might attain for ourselves elsewhere? Or maybe there’s a school event, a sporting event, or work. And these are very important for the meaning we want to construct for our lives.
We have our Creator’s commandments, but we don’t want to change. We’re not so sure that we have to, first of all. Maybe we can get by without needing to. Plus we’re not so sure that God is always right with what he says. He’s maybe a little old fashioned? So we, the creature, will believe and act according to our own lights. It’s plain to see that we know how to despise the kingdom of God as well as anybody?
So when we hear from Jesus that he has come, not to bring peace but a sword, we should not think that he is just talking about horrible villains in far away places who hunt down Christians. The villains are much closer to home. “Your enemies,” Jesus says, “will be those under your own roof.” Maybe you can recognize the villain that is in your own heart. We shouldn’t talk about the kingdom of God only needing to come for other people, because, you see, we’re fine. We need it for ourselves. So, as we pray so often, “Thy kingdom come.”
The kingdom of God is such that he does not set out to exclude people. “God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through him.” God wants all people to repent, come to a knowledge of the truth, and be saved.
But God also isn’t going to be embarrassed if people reject him because they love other inferior things more than they love him. Nobody is going to hurt God’s feelings by rejecting him. He has better things to do than to feel sorry for people who for whatever reason hate him and his love. He is the great lover. How could any great lover be derailed from pursuing his beloved by the bitter, sour faces of onlookers?
So we have this wonderful apostolic message before us today, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.” My advice to you is that you join in on this glorious romp of our Lord Jesus’s. There’s no greater adventure in the cosmos than living under him in his kingdom and serving him in everlasting righteousness, innocence, and blessedness. Lots of people can’t see this adventure. It is thoroughly hidden now, only to be more fully revealed in the last times. But it is as real and true as Jesus’s resurrection from the dead.
But if you don’t want to join in, then there’s only sad news for you. There’s no stopping this kingdom of God, even if you rage and fume like the devil so as to kill Christians left and right. It won’t do you any good! As Luther says in A Mighty Fortress, “And take they our life, goods, fame, child and wife—though these all be gone—our victory has been won. The kingdom ours remaineth.” God wins. Amen.
We stand to sing the offertory.
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“Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.”
Our Gospel reading last week, our Gospel reading this week, and the reading that you will hear next week, is all from the same section. It is from when Jesus sent out his 12 apostles. He told them what they were supposed to do. They should tell people that the kingdom of heaven had drawn near. The kingdom of heaven has at its core the word kingdom. With kingdoms there is reigning and ruling. So with the kingdom of heaven drawing near that is another way of saying that the reigning and ruling of God is near.
That could be good news or bad news depending on what you think of the reigning and ruling of God. If you want God to come and rule over everything, then that message is good news. If you don’t want God and his ways to be uppermost, then this would be like hearing that a very powerful enemy was coming to get you.
This message that the apostles were given to preach was not unprecedented. It is very similar to the message that Jesus himself preached and John the Baptist preached. Jesus said, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is near.” John the Baptist preached, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is near.” They all said, “Repent,” which means, “Change your ways.” All people everywhere must change their ways. You must change your ways because you are not holy and perfect. God is coming.
But not everybody wants to change their ways. That’s an understatement, actually. The truth is that nobody wants to change their ways. The very reason why we have the ways that we have is because we like our ways. Nobody has to hold us down with our arms tied behind our backs so that we forget to pray. Nobody has to force us to roll our eyes at our parents. Nobody has to punish us and whip us so that we are forced to look at dirty things or gladly hear and learn dirty things with the latest dirty gossip. We do these things precisely because we want to do them. Nobody forces us. We even usually know what’s right and wrong, but that doesn’t always stop us, especially if no one is looking or if nobody will ever find out. We do what’s wrong because that is exactly what we want to do.
True Christian and apostolic preaching fights against what we want to do. “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand,” is a declaration of war. The kingdom of heaven is opposed to all evil, no matter where it might be found. “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand,” is the most serious declaration of war that has ever been spoken, cosmic in its proportions.
The declaration of war is so serious that Jesus even says outrageous stuff like: “Go, sell all that you have and give it to the poor, then come, and follow me.” Or, on another occasion he says, “If your right eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away. For it is better that you lose one of your members than that your whole body be thrown into hell. And if your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away. For it is better that you lose one of your members than that your whole body go into hell.”
The extremeness of statements like these (and there are more I could give you, by the way), the extremeness of statements like these shows how dire the situation is. Take what Jesus says about money. What good can millions or billions do you if all is coming to an end? Or take what he says about your body. What good can your eye or your other members do you if you should be cast into hell? From hell you might wish from the bottom of your heart that you had torn your eye out, that you had cut your hand off. God is coming. “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.”
There were some more extreme statements that you heard in our Gospel reading. I’m sure you noticed them. “Brother will hand over brother. A father will hand over his child. Children will rise up against their parents so that they are killed.” Jesus says that this kind of thing is going to happen as a side effect of preaching the good news that Our Father who art in heaven’s kingdom is coming. Households will be divided. The closest social bonds will be broken.
Jesus says it. It’s all there black on white. But if we are being honest, I think this all sounds quite strange to us. Really? Families divided? People handed over to be killed? Isn’t this all too overheated? Isn’t the situation much more mundane?
I can understand folks thinking that way. It’s quite common. People don’t think that religion is very important. A myriad of things seems more important. Plus, even in churches—those places where you’d expect Christianity to be taken seriously—it isn’t too hard to find churches and preachers that promote an unserious Christianity. Don’t get to upset about anything.
And I’m not talking just about other church bodies. I’m also talking about our own circles. It’s not hard to find promoters of Christianity as a kind of side light to one’s life, as a hobby, as fundamentally optional. Their preaching can sound pretty good too. It might be a little boring, but it does at least have this saving grace: It sounds a lot more reasonable than Jesus’s teaching. No extreme statements. They don’t see preaching as a declaration of war against evil no matter where the evil might be found. For them, the customer is always right. You won’t have to quit doing what you want. You should do whatever would make you happy. After all, doesn’t the good book say God wants you to be happy? Sounds plausible enough.
But misleading people in spiritual things is the worst possible breaking of all of God’s commandments. It’s the worst because misleading people with spiritual things not only affects them in this life, but eternally. Any preacher can say easily enough that this or that is not a sin to make people happy. A church can just mimic whatever their chosen audience might want to hear, whether they might be targeting a liberal audience or a conservative audience. But let’s not forget what this is all about. Neither liberalism nor conservatism will do anything for you when you stand before God in the judgement. If a pastor says that this is that is not a sin, that you can do what you want, even though it is against God’s Law, that pastor’s reassurance won’t do anything to stave off God’s righteous judgement. You are responsible.
What’s helpful is Jesus’s preaching: “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.” What’s helpful is Jesus’s preaching even if his preaching sounds to you unreasonable or implausible. With Jesus’s preaching of the Gospel comes the Holy Spirit—and that’s no small matter. The Holy Spirit convinces us to believe that God is well pleased with us for Jesus’s sake. The Holy Spirit fights against our sinful flesh so that we do not always helplessly do whatever our sinful desires dictate, but we begin to live a life of righteousness. God is the one who takes hold of our will instead of being helplessly ridden by the devil from one evil to another until he rides us all the way down to his intended destination in hell.
When Jesus declares war against evil—including, especially, the evil in ourselves—this is God’s reigning and ruling. What is amazing about God’s reigning and ruling is that he doesn’t simply destroy us or obliterate us—evil though we are. He redeems us so that we may live and not die. God’s reigning and ruling is for our benefit, even as he crucifies us together with Christ. The more God takes over the better. The more that what we want is set aside, and what God wants is worked within us, the better.
God’s reigning and ruling is what is most important. It’s at the heart of the Gospel. God’s reigning and ruling is why Jesus says two times in our reading, “Do not be afraid,” even though he says stuff that probably was frightening to you if you were paying attention and believing what Jesus was saying. After all, Jesus says that divisions will take place all the way down to those who live under our own roof—and that these divisions can even be deadly. And yet Jesus says, “Do not be afraid.” The only reason why a person is able not to be afraid in otherwise very frightening situations is because God is in control.
This is of great comfort if you have the courage to accept it. When the apostles went out to preach God’s declaration of war against evil, God was in control. And when they were unjustly punished and denounced as evildoers, God was in control.
This is applicable to the preaching of the Gospel that has been given to us to do in our times too. It is enough for a disciple to be like his master. So we must simply speak the things Jesus has given us to speak. What he has given us to speak might not always sound nice. What he has given us to speak might not always appear as though it is going to work. It will work, though, because all authority in heaven and on earth has been given to Jesus. What Jesus speaks truly is helpful. If we believe him, take up our cross and follow him, then we will find that we can stand in God’s judgement. The reigning and ruling of God will make it so.
Of all possible things that could ever possibly happen, there is nothing more profound or good than this reigning and ruling of God in the souls of those who hear Jesus speak. Eternal life breaks in to this sin-sick, loveless world with the preaching of the Gospel. If it meets opposition, so what? If it is opposed even within ourselves, by our flesh, should we really be surprised? We, who are evil, are blessed by Jesus, who is good. Do you really think that this is something that should be easy?
Jesus tells us beforehand in our reading that it won’t be, but that’s alright. God will prevail.
Even the hairs of your head are all numbered. Fear not, therefore. The kingdom of heaven is at hand.
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Jesus said, “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick.”
Are you sick? It’s not easy to say “Yes, I am sick.”
Let me illustrate. Sometimes pastors get asked to visit non-members who are terminally ill. I’ve made more than a few visits like that. I usually ask someone who is dying, regardless of membership, whether he or she believes that he or she is a poor, miserable sinner. You’re familiar with that language because we say that in church: “I, a poor, miserable sinner confess unto you…” When someone has never heard those words, or been absent for a long time, those words seem to strike them as being overly harsh. More than one such person has responded to my question by saying, “Yes, okay, I’m a sinner, but I’m not so sure about that poor and miserable part.” I appreciate these folks’ honesty. They are only saying what we all would probably say if we weren’t trained to say something different.
People usually aren’t afraid to admit that they are sinners in general. I’ve never met anyone who says that he or she is perfect. Everybody makes mistakes. But everybody wants to believe the best about themselves too. “Ok, fine, I screwed up, but now I’m on the right track.”
Maybe sometimes we feel very strongly that we are poor, miserable sinners. That can happen when sin is hot and fresh and stinks to high heaven. But with the passage of time we can kind of forget about what we’ve done. Moss grows over the sin so that we can’t see it anymore.
Plus we can usually find some other poor schmucks who are worse off than we are. I haven’t murdered anyone. I haven’t smoked crack. I drag my butt out of bed so that I keep my job. Not everybody does that good. Plus, you might think, I go to church. That’s getting rarer and rarer these days. And not only have I gone to church, I go to the right church, thank you very much. My church is in the right synod. My church doesn’t do bad stuff like those other churches. So, come to think of it, I’m doing alright! I’m not perfect. Nobody’s perfect. But I can find a whole bunch of other people who are a lot poorer and more miserable than me!
This kind of reasoning doesn’t sound too bad. It doesn’t sound too bad, if, for no other reason, it is quite common. Nevertheless it reveals that we are much worse off than any mere murderer or drug addict. Justifying yourself by always being on the lookout for others whom you suppose to be worse than you is a very serious sin. It is a sin against the first commandment. You are your own justifier. You are your own God. Thus your sin is worse than the sins of those who might just be breaking the fifth, sixth, or seventh commandment. You believing in your own goodness and righteousness means you are spiritually sicker than those whom you might be judging.
You probably have a hard time believing that, and I can sympathize because I have my common sense and reasoning just like you. If I were to put one of you fine, upstanding citizens next to troubled soul and asked people to judge which is better, they would probably pick you every time.
So it was at Jesus’s time too though. One time Jesus told a group of fine, upstanding pharisees that tax collectors and prostitutes were going to enter the kingdom of God before they ever would. The pharisees were quite diligent, lawful people. If you put one of those fine upstanding church goers next to a thug or a lady of the night, which one would appear to be godlier? Common sense gives you the answer.
But Jesus means what he says when he says that tax collectors and prostitutes will enter the kingdom of heaven before the pharisees. The outside might look as good and respectable as can be, but inwardly there can be the most devilish things—spiritual sins that common sense and reason are not so good at understanding. And there is nothing more devilish than pride. There is nothing more devilish than pointing, sneering, accusing, judging.
Something that we can see from our Gospel reading today is that Jesus is very different than us. Jesus is good and kind. He doesn’t point and sneer at the sinners. He doesn’t say, “Look how sick he is! Ack! How disgusting!”
Imagine if there were a doctor doing that—going from one room to the next in a hospital, pointing at the poor sick people and laughing at them. “Oh, how sick you are! Look how sick you are compared to me! How can you sit there and be so sick when I’m so well?” We would rightly wonder if such a physician were more profoundly sick than the patients whom he is supposed to be treating.
But Jesus is a good physician. He helps people who are sick. He isn’t disgusted by them or avoid them. He goes to Matthew and says, “Follow me,” even though Matthew was a notorious sinner. Jesus stays with some tax collectors and sinners at his house. He eats with them.
When we consider Jesus’s kind actions towards these folks it is important to know why Jesus did what he did. Jesus did not associate with these notorious sinners because he loved how tax collectors abused, manipulated, and cheated people. Jesus also doesn’t love how the 5th, 6th, 7th, or any of the other commandments are broken. Jesus doesn’t like any destructive and sinful things. Jesus is the enemy of these things and wants to set them free from them. So he forgave their sin. They were sick to death with unrighteousness. They were poor and miserable. Jesus made them well, giving them his own perfect righteousness.
The pharisees were concerned that Jesus was being too nice to these people who weren’t doing right and living right. That’s understandable from a certain perspective. The pharisees were concerned about the example that Jesus seemed to be setting. It might appear to some that Jesus didn’t seem care about sins. It was like Jesus was saying that sins didn’t matter. So, the Pharisees thought, Jesus should shun them and not have anything to do with them. Otherwise everybody is going to think that sinning doesn’t matter.
As I said, the pharisees’ line of reasoning would be valid from a certain perspective. If there were no cure for what ailed these people, then Jesus should probably stay away. Imagine a doctor who can’t help. It’s impossible to help. And yet he goes and pokes and prods, slices and dices—nothing good can come from that. In like manner, if there was nothing that Jesus could do for these spiritually sick people, then all that Jesus probably would accomplish is to desensitize folks to the seriousness of sin.
But Jesus is able to help these people who are sick. Jesus can help people who are very, very sick. They can be downright poor and miserable. In fact, as Paul says in Ephesians chapter 2, your spiritual condition is so bad that you were “dead in your trespasses and sins…” Then he goes on, “But God, because he is rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in trespasses.” Death is not an obstacle too great for our great physician.
If that is so, if Jesus is such a great physician that he gives life to sinners who are so bad that they are dead, then in the midst of sinners is exactly where this physician must be. The Christian Church is a spiritual hospital. Sick sinners belong here. If you don’t want to be a sinner, then you are in the wrong place, and have no business being with Jesus.
If there is one thing that I hope you take away from our Gospel reading today it is that your spiritual sickness is not an impediment to you being saved. In a way it’s true that sin doesn’t matter. Sin or the lack of sin isn’t why a single sinner will be saved. God is the justifier of the ungodly. You are not the justifier of yourself.
We can see this in our Gospel reading: Jesus called notorious Matthew, a veritable tax collector, to be his disciple. Jesus says very plainly, “I came not to call the righteous, but sinners.” Your salvation does not depend on you making yourself well. Your salvation depends on the skill and power of the physician. He simply says, “Follow me.” That is, “Listen to me. Believe my words.” The first task, and almost only task, that the Christian Church has is to speak Jesus’s words of forgiveness to poor, miserable sinners.
So let me conclude with the question with which I began: Are you sick? Usually we like to cheer people up. Politeness almost demands that we say, “You’re doing just fine. You’re getting better and stronger.” But we all know that being polite and being truthful are often not the same thing.
Although it might not be altogether polite, I hope that you feel worse about yourself than when you came in here today. I hope you see that your are poorer and more miserable. On the other hand, I hope that you see how good of a physician Jesus is. He is so skillful and mighty that he can even raise someone who is so sick that they are even dead. Maybe you weren’t thinking you were all the poor and miserable when you came here today, but maybe you also weren’t thinking how skillful and mighty Jesus is.
Following Jesus, clinging to him, is how we will receive eternal life. Jesus is how we will stand in the judgement and be welcomed into heaven instead of going to hell, which is what we all deserve. Jesus makes us well.
Now the God of peace himself sanctify you completely. May your whole spirit, soul, and body be kept blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. The one who calls you is faithful, and he will surely do it.
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Today I would like to speak with you about why Pentecost is agreat Christian festival. Pentecost is one of the three great Christianfestivals. Christmas and Easter are the other two. Among these three, there isa tendency for Pentecost to be overshadowed. Every Christian knows the meaning andimportance of Christmas. It’s when the Son of God was born as a baby boy. EveryChristian knows the meaning and importance of Easter. It’s when the Son of Goddefeated death. Because he lives, those who believe in him will live also.Folks are probably not as aware of the meaning and importance of Pentecost.
So what is the meaning and importance of Pentecost? Youheard about the events of Pentecost in our second reading. There was a mightyrushing wind. Something like tongues of flame appeared above the heads of thedisciples. They were able to speak in such a way that people could understandthem even though they spoke a different language. What they spoke about werethe “mighty works of God.”
Then the Apostle Peter stood up before the crowd of Jews,many of whom were hostile to him and to Christ. At least some of those in thecrowd had been involved in crucifying Jesus. Prior to Pentecost the discipleshad been so afraid of these Jews that they had been hiding behind locked doors,and Peter had denied that he knew the Lord three times. After the coming of theHoly Spirit, Peter and the other disciples speak plainly and courageously. Theyno longer fear what man can do to them, because they know that God is for them.Many of these disciples are going to keep on preaching that Jesus is Christ andLord until they are eventually put to death for it.
You can see, therefore, that the Holy Spirit changes thedisciples. He gives them faith that Jesus Christ is their Lord. He gives them love,joy, peace, and his other fruits. He gives them courage to say things that are true,good, and right, even though the powers of darkness gnash their teeth and startplotting their revenge.
So the meaning of Pentecost is that the Holy Spirit is givento the disciples; he is given to the Christian Church. The importance ofPentecost is that the Holy Spirit causes people to believe in Jesus as thealmighty king who saves sinners. The Holy Spirit additionally gives Christiansspiritual gifts.
Without Pentecost, and without the coming of the HolySpirit, Jesus’s work of salvation would lie in the dust. It would not be known.It would not be believed in. It would not spring forth into life and growth. TheHoly Spirit causes life by applying what Jesus has done. The Holy Spirit bringsto completion Jesus’s work of making us holy.
Because of its great importance, Pentecost deserves itsplace as one of the three great Christian festivals. It is just as importantfor our salvation as Christmas or Easter. And yet, despite my best efforts, I wouldn’tbe surprised if I have failed to create any great love for this festival in you.There’s something about this festival that doesn’t capture the imagination likeChristmas or Easter. Maybe it’s the stories and the customs. Maybe Pentecostjust isn’t grand enough, impressive enough. After all, the main thing thatPentecost seems to accomplish is talking. Talking can be awfully boring.
So maybe if we were God we would do things differently. Whatif instead of causing the disciples to speak about Jesus as the Christ, as thegreat King, the Holy Spirit would make lightning come out of our fingertips? Ormaybe he could make our eyes be like lasers, cutting through steel and stone.Then everyone in the world would be terribly impressed with us.
Or what if we could just have some of those miracles that weread about in the Bible? What if we could heal people? What if we could raise thedead? Or if all of this is too much trouble, what if we could just speak intongues like they did on Pentecost? That sounds like it would be a lot moreinteresting than listening to a sermon like the one I am speaking to you today.It seems like these unusual things would make the church grow too. People mightcome from far and wide if we could drum up a little razzle dazzle instead ofall this talking.
But all of this “I would do it differently if I were God”talk sounds familiar. I’d like to compare it to the complaining that theIsraelites did in the wilderness. When God led them out of Egypt they eventuallyran out of food so that they grew hungry. So each day God gave them their dailybread with the manna that would come with the morning dew. At first, they werehappy enough with it. Eating manna was a lot better than starving to death. Itdidn’t taste too bad either. It was sweet and nutty. Each morning it came likeclockwork. Eventually, though, they got sick of it. They actually say, “We loathe this worthless bread. If only we could go back toEgypt. Sure, we were slaves in Egypt, but at least we’d get a cucumber or somegarlic every once in a while instead of always having this miserable manna.”
Whenever I read about the Israelites in the wilderness I amalways struck by how we are just like them. If anything, though, we Christiansare worse than them. The manna that we have as Christians is a much higher andbetter thing than what the Israelites ever had. Our manna is Jesus. Pentecostgives us Jesus.
Jesus speaks about how our bread as Christians is betterthan any manna that the Israelites ever ate. Jesus says to the Jews, “Your fathers ate the manna in the wilderness, and they died. Iam the bread which comes down out of heaven, so that one may eat of it and notdie.” Jesus then says, “I am the living breadthat came down out of heaven; if anyone eats of this bread, he shall liveforever; and the bread also which I shall give for the life of the world is myflesh.”
Some of the Jews who were listening to Jesus grumbled at histeaching. Some of you might be inwardly grumbling too: “What is this mumbojumbo? How can Jesus give his flesh for the life of the world? How does that evenwork?” But it is not hard to understand what Jesus is claiming. You might notagree with what Jesus is claiming or see how it is possible, but the words areclear. Jesus is greater, better, more life giving than the manna. Whoever eatsof him has eternal life.
What Jesus is speaking about is the Gospel, the good news. Thisis what is extraordinary about Pentecost. These words about Jesus are what wasspread abroad by the power of the Holy Spirit beginning at Pentecost. TheGospel is greater than any sign or miracle we might read about in the Bible. AsJesus says, he gives eternal life. This Gospel is among us.
And let me briefly mention the Sacraments which are alsoamong us with the power of the Holy Spirit. We are given baptism. TheScriptures tell us that this baptism unites us with Christ. By this baptism wedie with Christ and we rise with Christ. By this baptism we are born again bythe water and the Spirit so that we may see the kingdom of God. Again, youmight grumble inwardly and say, “What is this mumbo jumbo? How can water dosuch great things?” But that’s your problem. You aren’t believing his words.You aren’t appreciating what he says.
And on the night when Jesus was betrayed he gave usdisciples his body and blood. He says, “This is my bodywhich is given for you.” He says, “This cup isthe New Testament in my blood which is shed for you for the forgiveness of yoursins.” I didn’t say those words. Jesus says them. Again you mightinwardly groan and say, “I hate this worthless bread. Church is so boring. Communiononly makes it longer. Where’s the razzle dazzle?” Such a reaction doesn’tsurprise me because we are just like the Israelites. They, too, grumbled. They,too, failed to understand what God was doing. They, too, would have done thingsdifferently if they were God instead of the Lord.
Despite their faithlessness, though, God was faithful. Jesusprayed from the cross, “Father, forgive them, for theyknow not what they do.” I think we could apply those words to ourselvesif we are at all lackluster about what is given to us at Pentecost. We know notwhat we do if we think Pentecost and the works of the Holy Spirit’s church arejust words—just a bunch of talking. Sure, there is talking, but whatmagnificent talking it is if you will only believe it!
For example, Jesus says in our Gospel reading, “If anyone thirsts, let him come to me and drink! Whoeverbelieves in me, as the Scripture has said, ‘Out of his heart will flow riversof living water.’” Wow. Again, in the portion of Scripture we were referencingearlier, Jesus says: “He who eats my flesh and drinksmy blood has eternal life; and I will raise him up on the last day. For myflesh is true food, and my blood is true drink. He who eats my flesh and drinksmy blood abides in me, and I abide in him.” Magnificent.
The only way that anyone can fail to appreciate these wordsor to regard them as worthless is through unbelief. Unfortunately, there isnothing that comes easier or more naturally to us than unbelief, just as it cameso easily and naturally to the Israelites too. If I were God I’d have given upa long time ago and moved on, but God is long-suffering, slow to anger andabounding in steadfast love.
God doesn’t change either. The manna that he kept sendingdown upon the Israelites day after day was just as sweet and nutty as it everwas regardless of whether the Israelites loved it or loathed it. So it is also withthe work of the Holy Spirit, the greatness of Pentecost. It is just asforgiving, cleansing, healing, sanctifying, and eternal-life-giving as ever. Itis not God or his promises that need to change. What needs to change is ourfaith in the stupendous things that God says and does through his Holy Spiritin his church with the Gospel.
There will always be those who will say, “We loathe this worthless food.” Not everybody wasconverted even on Pentecost as you heard. There were some there who said, “These disciples have had a little too much grape juice.”So it is also among us. It is not hard to find people who have so many other thingsthat they would rather be doing than listening to a talk about Pentecost. Theyare so preoccupied with the cares, concerns and pleasures of life that the workof the Holy Spirit in his church is about the furthest thing from their minds.
May it not be so with you. Even if heaven and earth were topass away, Jesus’s words will never pass away. They will always do what theypromise. They will always bless those who believe in him.
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Being able to understand how things work is one of thespecial privileges of being a human being. We have been created differently. Wehave been created in the image of God. We understand lots of things.
And it is not just we who are living who have understood howthings work. Generations before us have understood how things work too. Forhundreds of years people have been writing down what they have learned abouthow things work. Each generation teaches the next. We’ve built up a vast amountof knowledge about how things work.
Understanding the truth about how things work has alwaysproven to be a great blessing. If you have a job, no matter what job that mightbe, you’ve probably been taught how best to do things, and that is usuallybased on how things work. Farmers have learned how plants and animals work.Doctors have been taught how the body works. Mechanics have been taught howengines work. It is very beneficial to know how things work, and then to actaccordingly.
But it is not just for our work-a-day lives that we learnhow things work. We are taught how things work in every area of life, althoughthese kinds of things might not be talked about as seriously or as carefully.So, for example, we’ve been taught how we can be happy. We’ve been taught whatis acceptable behavior and what is unacceptable. We’ve been taught what life isfor and what we should strive after.
These are, in fact, very religious topics. Let’s match up thesethings we’ve mentioned with the way that the Bible talks. We talk of beinghappy. The Bible talks about being blessed. We talk about what’s right andwrong, the Bible talks about being justified or being condemned. We talk aboutwhat life is for and what we should strive after. The Bible talks about theholiness of God.
The way that the Bible talks is often dismissed in our timesas being unimportant or unknowable. Even Christians can’t agree abouteverything. How to be happy, what’s right and wrong, and so on—there’s a lot ofdebate about all that, and maybe it’s not true, and so on and so forth. There’sa tendency to throw up one’s hands.
Instead, what is really important is understanding howthings work in those topics with which I began. It is our understanding of stufflike chemistry, hydraulics, electronics, etc., that has made our civilizationas advanced as it is. Plus, if you understand how this so-called practicalstuff works, then somebody will pay you for that. And that should make youhappy, right?
So it’s assumed that this blessedness business just isn’tvery practical. Therefore, we are prone to politely ignore anything that wedon’t already know. Life is hard enough the way it is as we are trying to doour job, be entertained, and feel good about ourselves.
I suspect, therefore, that at least many of you might haverun out of patience when you heard our Gospel reading being read. Jesus’s wordswon’t teach you how to have more money. They won’t teach you how to maketechnological advancements. “What’s the point then?” our flesh can’t help butask. “If this talk won’t advance my bottom line or create more labor-savingdevices for society, then it must be just a bunch of gobbledy-gook.”
I can understand why people might react that way if theydon’t know how things work in this realm. I would probably have a similarreaction if I were to crack open a physics textbook: “What are all theseletters and numbers doing? I can’t make heads or tails of this stuff.” But aphysicist, who knows how physics works, is going to understand something of it.
In like manner we Christians should approach Jesus’s words.Jesus himself says in our reading, “If you love me, youwill keep my commandments.” If you don’t want to hear what Jesusteaches, if you think you know everything that you need to know already, if youthink it’s all just a bunch of gobbledy-gook, guess what that’s saying aboutyour supposed love of Jesus! You love Jesus, but you can’t be bothered to learn?You don’t like it when he talks unless he only talks in a way that you want himto talk? That’s quite the love that you’ve got there. Imagine if there were aphysicist who never wanted to study physics. Or he only wanted to understandthe physics according to what he already knew and understood. He probablywouldn’t be much of a physicist.
We Christians are called disciples. Another word for“disciple” is “student.” We are students—students of Jesus. Why? Because webelieve that what he will teach us will make us happy. Some of what Jesusteaches us is easy; some of it, less so. The Bible even makes this distinction.The apostles speak about milk and about solid food. There’s a time for drinkingmilk. There’s a time for eating solid food. You can’t give solid food to ababy. On the other hand, you can’t forever keep feeding milk to people either.They would be weak and malnourished.
There has been a tendency among us to do just that, however.It is very common for people to refuse to see spiritual solid food as beingnecessary. That’s another way of saying that it is not necessary to grow. It isnot necessary to study. But you should perceive that there’s something wronghere if you compare it to who we act with the other things in life. With otherthings in life we learn how they work, and we adjust our actions accordingly. Shouldn’tthat also be true in this spiritual realm as well? When was the last time youlearned something from Jesus and adjusted your actions accordingly?
And we pastors and teachers have been at fault too. We donot always love Jesus enough to treasure what he commands or to believe what hehas promised. There is an occupational hazard for us pastors and teachers torattle off the same old tired phrases. Nobody gets upset at old tired phrases.Nobody tends to repent or change their ways with tired old phrases either.
This is not good. It’s not good for anyone. Those who refuseto learn anything more than what they’ve always known and always assumed to betrue are never going to feel at home with Jesus’s commandments. Many of thethings that Jesus commands don’t sound too good or very advantageous when wefirst hear them. How does “Love your enemies,”sound to you? How does “Take the lowest spot,”sound to you? A recipe for success? Jesus gives a grand summation at one point:“If you wish to be my disciple, then deny yourself,take up your cross, and follow me.” There’s nothing easier than ignoringor dismissing what we don’t want to understand. There’s also nothing morecommon.
But refusing to understand how things work, refusing tolearn from Jesus, doesn’t do anybody any good. On the other hand, if we do learnfrom him, it will do us good and it will do good to other people. What Jesusteaches is good and true. It works! And we are in such need of it!
Despite what seems to be agreed upon as the most importantand the sure-fire way for society to succeed, it certainly doesn’t seem likeit’s working very well. Perhaps never before in this history of the world hasthere ever been so many riches accumulated as we now enjoy with all ouradvancements, but where’s the happiness? Jesus can teach you how to be happy,but it takes guts. Try following his commandments if you dare. You will behappy. Try them out!
But before you try them out, you probably first just need tolearn what they are. I’m sure you’ve heard them before, but I’m not sure thatwe’ve actually listened to him. Which of you were listening intently to whatJesus said in our Gospel reading? I wouldn’t be surprised if, after a couplesentences, you kind of checked out. He went from one topic to another. Hetalked about asking the Father for the helper, the Spirit of truth. He said, “You know him, and he is with you and in you” and Iwouldn’t be surprised if you just figured that this was all too difficult foryou or too much work for you, and what good would it likely do you anyway?
We have been tricked. We have been tricked into thinkingthat what is really good, really beneficial, is to understand how things workso that we can make a living. This is deemed to be all-important. One’srelationship with God, one’s happiness, one’s sense of self, the meaning oflife—these and similar things have been deemed unimportant. That means the vastmajority of what the Bible teaches is unimportant. The Bible then just getsmined for inspirational sayings that fit in with how we already think aboutbeing happy.
So here is my recommendation for the next time you comeacross some Scripture that you don’t immediately understand. Don’t ignore it.Don’t let it pass through one ear and out the other.
If anything, you should have the opposite reaction. Insteadof lazily dismissing it, you should perk up your ears. Here you might belearning something about how things work when it comes to happiness, to themeaning of life, to your relationship with God and so on. These topics are notthe sidelight of your life. They are the main thing. They are the eternalthing. Be patient and attentive. Be a student of Jesus. Pray for the HolySpirit himself to teach you, which Jesus has promised to give those who askhim.
So, in closing, I’d like to do something we don’t usuallydo. Let’s ask for the Holy Spirit, and listen again to Jesus’s words. Payattention to his many promises. Listen to what he says about the Holy Spirit. Atthe end of the reading he says something very important about you, the Father, andhim. These are practical teachings about what is most important in life.
[Jesus said:] “If you love me, youwill keep my commandments. And I will ask the Father, and he will give youanother Helper, to be with you forever, even the Spirit of truth, whom theworld cannot receive, because it neither sees him nor knows him. You know him,for he dwells with you and will be in you. I will not leave you as orphans; Iwill come to you. Yet a little while and the world will see me no more, but youwill see me. Because I live, you also will live. In that day you will know thatI am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you. Whoever has my commandments andkeeps them, he it is who loves me. And he who loves me will be loved by myFather, and I will love him and manifest myself to him.”
You might not have understood everything. That’s okay. TheHoly Spirit will keep teaching you if you keep listening to Jesus’s words.
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Jesus said, “I came that they mayhave life and have it abundantly.”
What is an abundant life? This is a big question. What is anabundant life immediately brings up other questions: What is life for? Howshould we live our lives? Big questions like these have been asked and answeredin countless ways. Philosophy and religion are two enormous fields of study thatwork with questions like these. Countless lifetimes could be spent reading thebooks that have been written to answer the questions of what life is for, howwe should live it, what is an abundant life?
Jesus, though, seems to be quite certain despite all thebooks. You heard what he said: “I came that they mayhave life and have it abundantly.” Jesus knows what life is. He knowshow it is to be had abundantly. He is talking about these things when he says,for example, in our reading: “Truly, truly, I say toyou, I am the door of the sheep… if anyone enters by me, he will be saved andwill go in and out and find pasture.”
Jesus says similar things elsewhere. He says, “I am the bread of life; he who comes to me shall not hungerand he who believes in me will never thirst.” In that same place he alsosays, “My flesh is true food. My blood is true drink.He who eats my flesh and drinks my blood abides in me, and I in him.”Eating and drinking and living—this is to be had in Jesus. He says that he isthe bread of life, he is the light of the world, he is the door, he is theresurrection and the life. Jesus doesn’t mumble when he says these things. Hesays them very plainly and with authority.
Although Jesus is very confident that he brings life, andeven an abundant life, that doesn’t mean that everybody is going to believehim. We know this, if nothing else, just by reading the Gospels. That time thatI just mentioned—where Jesus talked about his flesh as true food and his bloodas true drink—that didn’t go over very well. Many thousands had been followinghim because he had fed 5,000 of them with bread, but when they heard Jesus saythat he himself is the bread, that they should eat his flesh and drink hisblood—all of a sudden they weren’t so interested anymore. “This is a hard saying,” they said, “who can accept it?” The falling away was so bad thatJesus even asked his disciples, “Are you going to goaway too?” To which Peter responded, “Lord, towhom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life.” We sing thosewords in the Alleluia before the Gospel reading.
So Jesus is clear and assertive. In him is life and abundantlife. There’s your answer for what is the abundant life—it’s in Jesus. But youshould not expect that Jesus’s words are going to be persuasive to everyone whohears them. Some are going to believe that Jesus is their Lord and the Christ—thatin him is abundant life; some are not. Jesus says, “Mysheep hear my voice and they follow me.”
But even for those of us who hear his voice and want tofollow him his words can be a little puzzling: “I amthe door; I am the bread; I am the light”—what does stuff like that meanexactly? And when he says “I have come so that they mayhave life and have it abundantly,” what does that mean? It’s hardbecause we already have our own ideas about what an abundant life should looklike. Maybe all I need to do to find out what you believe is an abundant life isto ask you: “What do you want?”
I want to be popular. I want prestige. I want money. I wantlooks. I want never to get sick, never to grow old, never to die. I want tohave the most and be the best—aren’t these and similar thoughts what we can’thelp but think when we hear about abundant life?
If that’s what we think an abundant life is (and we probablydo), then we can’t help but wonder how we can use Jesus to accomplish these plansof ours. But then, what Jesus says, doesn’t seem like it’s going to work at allfor getting what we want (“I am the door. I am thebread of life,”—how can these things help?) so our mental cogs kind ofget jammed up.
But there is an assumption here that we know what is good.We know what life is. We know how to have it abundantly. It’s not very profoundor subtle. We can easily sum it up by saying that whatever is good for me mustbe the abundant life. What Jesus has in mind is something different. We can seethat in Jesus’s cross.
In a way the cross looks like it is the very opposite oflife. Suffering. Death. Who wants that? Think of Jesus even. He doesn’t seem towant it even. In his prayer in the garden he prayed that if it were possiblethat this cup would pass from him. Think about what actually happened though.By Jesus’s death and resurrection a new life dawned. Death and decay weredefeated—something utterly unheard of. More life than we have ever known orever can know—an abundance of life—arose. Jesus fell into the earth like agrain of wheat and died, but then he sprang up and bears much fruit.
Jesus’s words, “I have come so thatthey may have life and have it abundantly,” are true, but we must learnalmost a new vocabulary to understand what he means. He doesn’t mean that weshould have everything and that everybody else should have nothing. He doesn’tmean that we should be the greatest and everybody else should be the least.Jesus turns these things on their heads.
One time the disciples were arguing with one another overwhich of them was the greatest. Jesus said to them: “Inthis world the kings and great men lord it over other people. It is not to beso among you. Those who are to be great among you should take the lowest rank,and the leader should be like a slave. Who is more important, the one who sitsat the table or the one who serves? It’s the one who sits at the table, not theone who is serving. But look at me! I am among you as one who serves.”
Or take another saying of Jesus. He said, “It is more blessed to give than to receive.” Wheneveryou see or hear that word “blessed” in the Scriptures, you should think of theword “happy.” Everybody wants to be happy right? So how can you be happy? Jesussays you will be happier when you give than when you receive. This is not justmoney. It’s also forgiveness, care, effort, and so on. You will be happier whenyou give than when you receive. Don’t we all have a lot to learn with just thatone simple statement? Jesus says this so it must be true. You’ll be happier ifyou give than if you receive. That’s a promise that Jesus give us. “Lord I believe, help Thou my unbelief!”
And that’s how it must go as we learn from the voice of theGood Shepherd what life and an abundant life is. It requires faith. Faith isrequired to believe that him being the bread of life, the door, theresurrection and the life, and so on is what we need the most. If we don’t feellike we need him to be the bread, the door, and so on, that’s because our feelingsare wrong. Our desires are not directed towards life. What comes naturally tous is to live for ourselves and for what is best for us. We don’t care too muchabout others so long as we have as much as we can get for ourselves.
Christ and the way of life that Jesus brings about is verydifferent from this. You can see this from our first two readings that we heardthis morning.
In our reading from Acts you heard about the Christiancongregation that came about right after Pentecost. The members sold theirproperty, held it in common, and gave to whomever was in need. They did this,not because they were forced to, but because they were free. They were set freefrom the compulsion to always get more and be the best. They learned that itmade them happier to give than to receive.
And notice how they received their food. It says theyreceived simply their food “with glad and generoushearts.” They didn’t need Cadillacs and Ferraris to give them a bump. Theyhad joy at the humble dinner table. The Lord opens his hand and satisfies thedesires of every living thing.
And notice the advice that Peter gives in our secondreading. He says, “This is a gracious thing, when,mindful of God, one endures sorrows while suffering unjustly.” It isgood when you suffer unjustly, when you suffer patiently and with kindness. Wheneversomeone else is suffering unjustly we must immediately come to their aid. Loverequires that we look out for our neighbor. But when it comes to us, it is agracious thing if we endure sorrows even though we don’t deserve it. This meansthat you don’t have to get back at everyone who does you wrong. You can forgivethem. “It is more blessed to give than to receive.”
So when Jesus talks the way that he does about life, and anabundant life, we should not have the expectation that we will immediatelyunderstand him perfectly. Our thoughts are not God’s thoughts, and our ways arenot his ways. What we think is good, especially what we think is good forourselves, may very well not be good, because none of us are as loving as weshould be.
Jesus’s understanding of an abundant life is full of love.It is full of God’s love toward us. We, as a consequence of God’s love towardus, are also to have love for one another.
It can be scary, it can be painful, it can be hard for us tolove, to forgive, to suffer unjustly. Therefore it is good for us to listen tothe voice of our Good Shepherd. Jesus always speaks the truth. So if he says wewill be happier if we give than if we receive, we should believe that. Weshould believe that even if our feelings tell us something totally different.
I challenge you: Try it out. Try it out, with faith in ourGood Shepherd’s words. It is the way to have life, and to have it abundantly.
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Jesus said to them again, “Peace bewith you. As the Father has sent me, even so I am sending you.” And when he hadsaid this, he breathed on the disciples and said to them, “Receive the HolySpirit. If you forgive the sins of anyone, they are forgiven; if you withholdforgiveness from anyone, it is withheld.”
These words were spoken on the evening of Easter day. In themorning the women had found the tomb empty. The angels told them that Jesus wasnot there because he had risen from the dead. Our reading tells us whathappened the evening of Easter day. The disciples were gathered together in anupper room with the doors locked. Jesus appeared before them and spoke withthem as you have heard.
The words that Jesus speaks are extremely important for usChristians. There are two things that are shown to us by his words. First, hiswords show us the meaning of what Jesus has accomplished during Holy Week.Second, his words show us what the Christian Church is for, and what it is tobe engaged in. These are very important and practical things that everyChristian should have a firm grasp of: What is the meaning of what Jesusaccomplished during Holy Week, and what is the Christian Church supposed to bedoing?
The meaning of what Jesus accomplished is shown by Jesus’swords: “Peace to you.” Maybe a more modern wayof saying what Jesus said is, “Everything’s going to be alright.” When there ischaos, when there is danger, when there is pain and uncertainty, it is a verygood thing to hear: “Everything’s going to be alright.”
It matters who says this, though. If somebody doesn’tunderstand what is going on, then them saying this isn’t very reassuring. Butif Dad says, “Everything’s going to be alright,” or the policeman says,“everything’s going to be alright,” or the doctor says, “everything’s going tobe alright”—someone with knowledge and authority—all of a sudden the troublesand fears look more manageable. Everything’s going to be alright.
In the case of Easter evening, the one who is speaking isJesus. He is true God, begotten of the Father from eternity. As he says in thelast chapter of Matthew: “All authority in heaven andon earth has been given to him.” So if he says, “Peace to you,” or “Everything’s going to be alright,” you would dowell to believe that. God is speaking.
So what is troubling you today? Has money been tight? Haverelationships been strained? Are you depressed? Are you dying? Everything’sgoing to be alright. Maybe it’s not much comfort to hear just a pastor saythat. What does a pastor know? I’ve known some pretty foolish pastors. But youshould not take these words as though any mere human being is saying them, butthat Jesus, the Son of God, is saying them—and all authority in heaven and onearth has been given to him.
And it’s clear that if I or any other Christian should sayto you, “Peace to you,” or “Everything is goingto be alright,” this is not just the Christian who is saying this. Jesus issaying this because he sent out his disciples to say this.
Listen again to what Jesus said:“Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, even so I am sending you.” Andwhen he had said this, he breathed on the disciples and said to them, “Receivethe Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of anyone, they are forgiven; if youwithhold forgiveness from anyone, it is withheld.”
Jesus says, “As the Father has sentme, even so I am sending you.” That means that a pastor’s or aChristian’s forgiveness is not just Joe Schmo’s forgiveness. They are doingwhat they’ve been told. They are but the instrument through whom Jesus speaks. Apastor’s forgiveness or a Christian’s forgiveness is not just theirforgiveness. It’s God’s forgiveness.
Perhaps you noticed, though, that Jesus does not just speakabout forgiving sins, he also speaks about not forgiving sins. He says: “If you forgive the sins of anyone, they are forgiven; if youwithhold forgiveness from anyone, it is withheld.” Who, then, should betold that they are forgiven, and who should be told that they are not forgiven?
Those who must be told that they are forgiven are those whorepent of their sins, who want to change their ways and do better. On the otherhand, those who are unrepentant, who do not want to change, must be told thatthey are not forgiven until they do repent.
This requires a good, sturdy backbone. I’ve never comeacross anyone who has gotten upset by being told that his or her sins areforgiven. I’ve experienced several people who have gotten very upset at beingtold they must repent and change their ways. This is not surprising, because weare all like that. Not a single one of us likes to be told that we are wrong,that we must change our ways.
If the goal of being a Christian was merely to have everyonelike you and always to say nice things about you, then there’d be no sense in evertelling anyone to repent. But I think I can show you the necessity of speakingboth words that Jesus gives us to speak by using an analogy.
Suppose that someone had a very bad fall and ended up with avery badly broken leg. The break is so bad that the bone is sticking out of theskin—really nasty. Where do you go when something like that happens? You go tothe hospital.
But let’s say at this hospital they had all made it a rulethat they should never, ever cause anybody any pain. You shouldn’t even hurtanyone’s feelings. So this guy comes into the hospital and the doctors andnurses take a look at him and they all say there’s nothing wrong! The patientsays, “Look! My bone is sticking out of my leg.” These doctors and nurses say,“No, that’s just how some bones are. You have perfect health! Go, be happy andhealthy!”
A person could die from medical treatment like that. Thewound could become infected and so on. Those doctors and nurses are horrible atwhat they are supposed to be doing. They don’t know what they are doing. They’recompletely confused about the mission that has been given to them.
But let’s make the analogy a little less dramatic. There’s abreak again, but not as bad. The bone isn’t sticking out, but the broken bones aren’tlined up anymore, and they need to be set. Have you ever had to get a bone set?If the bones don’t match up they can never heal, or at least they can neverheal very well. But to set the bone can be very difficult and painful. Tremendousforce needs to be applied to the limb to bring the bone back into alignment.I’ve heard stories about people howling in pain as the doctors and nurses tugand pry at them to straighten out that which is crooked.
The Christian Church is meant to be a hospital for souls.Our goal is spiritual health, that is, a good relationship with God. The toolswe have been given for this are plainly laid out for us in our Gospel reading.The newly resurrected Jesus tells his disciples that they have the Holy Spirit.Whosoever’s sins they forgive, they are forgiven; whosoever’s sins they retain,they are retained. It is by the preaching of God’s Law, of what is right andwrong, that sinners come to an awareness of their condition. Sometimes thistakes some harsh speaking and unpleasant discipline. Maybe an unrepentantmember of the congregation will no longer be able to take communion. Maybe amember could be removed from membership or excommunicated.
Actions like these are not done very often or veryenergetically these days because most people don’t believe that spiritualhealth or spiritual illness is real, or maybe such things are not seen as unimportant.Plus it takes a lot of faith in Jesus’s words. Jesus tells us how we should beChristians and act as the Christian Church, but our own ways seem like theywould work better for making the church grow. Telling someone that his or hersins are withheld does not seem like it will grow a congregation.
But I’m afraid that we Christians have become like thosesilly doctors and nurses that I talked about. We are not clear about ourmission, about what we should be doing. Our mission is to help people get toheaven. What good is a Christian congregation that doesn’t believe that sinsare serious, that sinners, without repentance, will go to hell? What help can acongregation like that provide?
We must be a congregation that actually helps sinnersinstead of a congregation that tells lies to sinners. And here’s the amazingthing: the truth is actually on the side of us sinners. It is not our sins thatbar us from heaven. Jesus has died and completely atoned for all sin. It isunrepentance and unbelief that bar us from heaven and leave us in our sins. Theonly way unrepentance and unbelief can be overcome is by the Holy Spiritworking through the Word of God with its retaining and forgiving of our sins.No project, no activity, no popularity, so special music—nothing that acongregation might try to do can substitute what Jesus gave us Christians to doon Easter evening.
Jesus said to them again, “Peace bewith you. As the Father has sent me, even so I am sending you.” And when he hadsaid this, he breathed on the disciples and said to them, “Receive the HolySpirit. If you forgive the sins of anyone, they are forgiven; if you withholdforgiveness from anyone, it is withheld.”
If we have the courage to follow Jesus’s words—if we forgivethe sins of repentant sinners and withhold forgiveness from the unrepentant aslong as they do not repent—if we have the courage to do this as a congregationthen good must come to us. It has to come to us because we will be followingJesus’s words. We will be a true spiritual hospital, helping sinners to leavetheir sins behind and to find peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.
Stand to receive a blessing:
There is a peace that the world cannot give. This peace isyours in our Lord Jesus Christ. Everything is going to be alright.
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Tonight I would like to speak briefly using just one of the manythemes found in this Easter Vigil service. We have heard many times tonightthat Jesus is the light who lightens the darkness. I’d like read some Scripture.You will no doubt be familiar with a portion of it. Our reading begins withJohn 3:16:
Jesus said:
For God so loved the world, that hegave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but haveeternal life.
Then, a couple verses later:
And this is the judgment: the lighthas come into the world, and people loved the darkness rather than the lightbecause their works were evil. For everyone who does wicked things hates thelight and does not come to the light, lest his works should be exposed. Butwhoever does what is true comes to the light, so that it may be clearly seenthat his works have been carried out in God.
Maybe you remember when you were a kid that sometimes youwanted to do things that you knew you weren’t supposed to do. You learnedfairly quickly that you couldn’t do those things out in the open. If you didthem out in the open, then you’d be told to stop. Then you wouldn’t be able todo what you wanted to do. So you learned fairly quickly that if you wanted todo the things you wanted to do you needed to go where you thought that no onecould see you.
I wish it were true that we all outgrew this, leaving itforever behind, but probably not. Hiding from prying eyes so that you get to dowhat you want to do probably didn’t go away.
But this kind of thing is much more damaging than peopleimagine. Lots of addictions start and are fed by going into the darkness. Eatingin the darkness, drinking in the darkness, using pornography in the darkness,and many other things along these lines are done in the darkness. No light. Wedo not want what we have done to be exposed.
Before I speak about Jesus as the light who has come, I feelit is necessary to trace where a love of the darkness will ultimately lead us.Hell is a place where there is nothing but darkness. It is filled with evilpeople who always and only do what they want, and what they want is perpetuallyevil. They are incapable of love. They think only of themselves.
Darkness might seem advantageous because then you get to dowhat you want, but it is unhealthy, damaging, deadening. The pleasures of thedarkness are never as good as their counterparts which are done in the light,and yet there’s this zip and excitement—is there not?—with what is done in thedarkness. I guess that must be the bait that the devil uses to sink his hooksinto his would-be victims.
Jesus, though, is the Savior. He is the light who lightensthe darkness. The light is not afraid of the darkness. It is the darkness whichmust retreat and shrink back in the presence of light. Light exposes andreveals. Light removes lies. Light brings truth. There’s no sneaking around whenthere is a bright light. Everything is revealed as it truly is. This is whatJesus as the light does.
If we are extremely willful, if we only want to do what wewant to do, then this light is going to seem hostile and unfriendly. Doesn’tthe kid who has gone into the darkness just want to be left alone? The kiddoesn’t care whether what he is doing is destructive. But it’s not just kidswho are that way. Don’t grown-ups want to be left alone with their pet-sins, don’tthey want to be able to go on with their manipulating and unloving ways?
So Jesus as the light necessarily must strike all of us, toone extent or another, as something opposed to our will, as something alien, assomething hostile. There’s at least a part of us that loves the darkness. Jesusdoesn’t love the darkness. The darkness is where the devil is with all hishorrible hooks and barbs. How could Jesus love such destructive anddeath-dealing things? Jesus doesn’t love the darkness, but Jesus does love you.
Jesus loves you even though you have been in the darkness.He loves you even though you have shunned him, shunned the light, and thoughtthat the devil was the one who really had the pleasurable goods. It is not foodcomas or drunkenness or illicit orgasms that truly satisfy. Love is the bestand highest thing. The Scriptures say, “God is love.”God, who is light and love, is who satisfies.
And God is not stingy either. He wants us to have the goodthings of life. The devil liked to paint God as some insufferable prude. No, hewants us to eat, to drink, and to have sex. But these things should not beworshipped as gods in themselves in the darkness. Let them be done honorably inthe light according to the will and ordering that God has put in place. And letus give thanks to the true God from whom they come—the giver of every goodthing.
During this Easter time learn yet again that God has lovedthe world in this way, that he sent his only begotten Son, that whoeverbelieves in him should not perish, but have eternal life. For God did not sendhis Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world might be savedthrough him. Jesus died for you, Jesus rose for you, to rescue you from eternaldarkness and bring you into the everlasting light. It’s a little scary when thelight comes. The darkness is what we’re accustomed to. But the light is good.
Stand to receive a blessing:
May Jesus the light shine on you more and more. Amen.
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King David prays to God in Psalm 38 like this:
O Lord, rebuke me not in your anger,
nor disciplineme in your wrath!
For your arrows have sunk into me,
and your handhas come down on me.
There is no soundness in my flesh
because of yourindignation;
there is no health in my bones
because of mysin.
What you have just heard KingDavid say in Psalm 38 is uncommon. He is afraid of God: “O Lord, rebuke me not in your anger, nor discipline me inyour wrath!” This is uncommon because we do not like being afraid. We donot like being afraid of being caught when we’ve done wrong. We do not likebeing afraid of punishment. If your secrets and my secrets were revealed, who couldcover our shame? As it turns out, though, the Bible says that this will happen.
In the book of Revelation it saysthis about the last day: “Then the kings of the earth,the princes, the generals, the rich, the mighty, and everyone else, both slaveand free, will hide in caves and among the rocks of the mountains. They willcall to the mountains and rocks, ‘Fall on us and hide us from the face of himwho sits on the throne and from the wrath of the Lamb!’”
Jesus says something similar aboutour secrets: “For there is nothing hidden that will notbe revealed, and nothing concealed that will not be known or brought out intothe open.”
If that is for real, then we havegood reason to fear. There are some things that I have done in my life that Iwould rather die than have them made known publicly. Maybe you feel the sameway about things that you have done in your life.
What we’ve heard from the Bible,though, tells us that death is no escape. It’s actually the other way around. Whilewe live in this life we might be able to hide things. We can lie to ourselves.Other people can’t know everything that has been going on in our minds andhearts. We can easily imagine that everything has been kept in the dark. Nobodyknows. Nobody will ever know.
Death is when this comfortingillusion must come to an end. Then, when the light has come at our death or onthe last day, we might wish more than we’ve wished for anything ever to be ableto stay in the dark. That’s why the people in Revelation are begging themountains and rocks: “Fall on us and hide us from God.”But that won’t work. Now is the hour of darkness. The light is coming fromwhich no one can hide.
So let me read for you againDavid’s words in Psalm 38:
O Lord, rebuke me not in your anger,
nor disciplineme in your wrath!
For your arrows have sunk into me,
and your handhas come down on me.
There is no soundness in my flesh
because of yourindignation;
there is no health in my bones
because of mysin.
Again, to feel like David feels isdeeply unpleasant. We don’t want to be afraid. We don’t want to be punished byGod. Lots of people, therefore, don’t see the point in feeling the way thatDavid feels. To feel like David feels towards God won’t make anyone rich orpopular. To feel that way won’t help you make friends and influence people. Idon’t think there is much of any tangible or earthly benefit to being afraid ofGod because of one’s sins. Since that is the case, most people are not interestedin entertaining such thoughts. What good can it serve?
The only redeeming quality feelingthis way towards God can have is that it is the truth, and that’s no smallthing. The relationship that you have with God must be true, because God willnever, ever have it any other way. For now we can survive for a while, hidingour sins, ignoring God, but that is ultimately foolish. Jesus says, “What does it profit a man to gain the whole world, but tolose his soul? Or what will a man give in exchange for his soul?”
When we are dealing with God wemust be dealing with the truth. When we are dealing with Good Friday, the truthabout ourselves and about God should make itself known. In order to understandGood Friday properly it is necessary to know the truth along the lines of the38th Psalm: “O Lord, rebuke menot in your anger, nor discipline me in your wrath.” Thecross is not just a gory, blood spectacle about somebody else. The cross isabout you and God. In order to know how things stand with you and God the truthis to be found in the cross.
And what does the cross reveal? Are things simply splendidbetween God and you? Is God just so proud of you? I can honestly say that Iwish that that were the case! I wish that there was nothing for you to beashamed of. There would be nothing better than if you were so good, loved Godso much, loved your fellow human beings so much, maintained your self-control, hadonly pure thoughts, and so on. The truth, however, is that this is not how youhave been in your thoughts, words, and deeds.
The fact that you have been sinful and unclean is extremelyserious. The cross of Christ involves an infinite fear, dread, sorrow, pain,and so on for Jesus. This was not because the Son of God was deserving of hisFather’s blast furnace of wrath. As Paul says, “Jesusknew no sin, but even though he knew no sin, he became sin for us.”Having become sin, Jesus suffered all the way to death and all the torments ofhell. The impossible happened. God, who cannot die, died. And what caused this?It was your sin. The cross reveals that you are a sinner without any hope. IfJesus couldn’t survive, what chance do you have?
What does the cross reveal about God? It is obvious that Goddoes not just say about our sin, “Oh, it’s fine. Don’t mention it. No problem.”Violations of God’s Law desecrate God’s holiness. The sacrifice needed to beinfinitely precious, and it was. What is the whole world compared to one dropof the Son of God’s blood? It is this infinitely precious, pure, and good thingthat God wounded him for our transgressions, that God crushed him for ouriniquities.
God didn’t just snap his fingers to make our sins go away.Maybe someone might want to make up some god in their own heads whom the thinkshould make sins go away by snapping his fingers, but that would not be the one,true God who died on Good Friday for our sins. This God is extremely serious aboutsins. They must be atoned for. As we heard in one of the readings last night, “There is no forgiveness of sins without the shedding of blood.”
And that is what God did on Good Friday. You heard in ourGospel reading that Jesus cried out: “It is finished!”What was finished is the rebuking, the disciplining, the punishing. The prophetIsaiah foresaw this suffering of Christ: “He waswounded for our transgressions; he was crushed for our iniquities; upon him wasthe chastisement that brought us peace, and with his stripes we are healed. Allwe like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way; andthe Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all.”
This is what is finished by God through Jesus on GoodFriday. God worked reconciliation between himself and sinners by punishingJesus in our place for the sins we have committed. God has reconciled us to himself,and he has given us the message of reconciliation. We urge everyone to believethe truth that every sin and every sinner has been redeemed and reconciled onGood Friday. Jesus died for everyone. It is through faith in Jesus the Savior,who saves on Good Friday, that we may be justified before God.
Being justified before God is what we’ve been talking abouttoday. When David prays, “Rebuke me not in your anger,nor discipline me in your wrath,” he is asking God to love him in spiteof his sins. We have talked about the last day when everything will berevealed, and how there is no hope if we are left to our own devices and ourown excuses. All things will be revealed. But here is where justification comesin. For those who believe in Jesus, they have a stronger thing that they maybelieve in. Yes, we have sinned. The shame is unbearable. But it was preciselyfor those shameful and awful sins that Jesus suffered so infinitely. Jesus’sredemption is stronger than your sins. Jesus’s righteousness is stronger thanyour shame. Though your sins be like scarlet, theyshall be whiter than snow.
If the thought of judgement and having your sins revealedmakes you afraid, then I say, “Good for you.” Lots of people never even make itthat far in the truth. But know also that God’s almighty and invincible love broughtJesus to the cross to remove those sins. Instead of feeling guilty or ashamedabout yourself on the one hand, or, on the other hand, feeling pretty goodabout yourself, that you’ve done a pretty good job—these are stupid, fleshlythoughts—turn away from yourself. Give thanks and praise to God the Father,Son, and Holy Spirit. He has brought about this infinitely precious redemption,so that you may not fear death, nor hell, nor God’s judgement. God saves you inour Lord Jesus Christ.
God forgives you all your sins for Jesus’s sake. Go inpeace. Amen.
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Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion!
Shoutaloud, O daughter of Jerusalem!
behold, your king is coming to you;
righteousand having salvation is he.
“Behold, your king is coming to you.” This prophecywas made hundreds of years before Palm Sunday. The fulfillment of this prophecyexplains all the rejoicing, the shouting aloud, that we hear about on PalmSunday. Behold, your king is coming to you. If you asked the people gathered atthe city gates of Jerusalem on Palm Sunday what they were doing, they wouldhave told you that the King was coming to them.
You can tell that this is what the people were looking forby the words the evangelists have recorded from that day. In our reading from JohnJesus is called the King of Israel. Luke records the people saying, “Blessedis the King who comes in the Name of the Lord.” Mark says, “Blessed isthe coming kingdom of our father David.” Matthew says, “Hosanna to theSon of David.”
All these folks believe that Jesus is the king. He is restoringkingship, instituted by God about 1000 years before this with King David. Theykeep saying that Jesus is king in the Name of the Lord. This means that theybelieve this is God’s doing. God wants Jesus to be the Davidic king. And peopleare singing “Hosanna,” which means, “Save us now” or “Save us please!”
The evangelist Luke tells us that these people were disciplesand why they were convinced that Jesus is the king. He says, “As Jesus wasdrawing near to Jerusalem, already on the way down the Mount of Olives, thewhole multitude of Jesus’s disciples began to rejoice and praise God with aloud voice for all the mighty works that they had seen.” The people wereconvinced that Jesus was the king because of the miracles that he had done.
They believed this for good reason. Jesus fulfilled the OldTestament prophecies about the coming Christ. Isaiah prophesied, for example,that the Christ would open the eyes of the blind, the ears of the deaf would beunstopped. The lame would leap like a dear that the tongue of the mute wouldsing for joy. Jesus did all these things. So Jesus must be the king that theyhad been waiting for. Having discovered that Jesus is this king is why they areso happy on Palm Sunday. “Behold, your king is coming to you,” so “rejoicegreatly, O daughter of Zion! Shout aloud, O daughter of Jerusalem!”
But let us fast-forward a few days after Palm Sunday. A fewdays later Jesus is there. The word “king” is there. But the mood is altogetherdifferent on Good Friday. Jesus was nailed to a cross. Above him a billboardwas commissioned by Pontius Pilate. The billboard said, “Here is Jesus ofNazareth, the King of the Jews,” intending to mock him.
And Jesus, after crying out in a loud voice, after havingbreathed his last, had the color drained from his face and body. Instead ofbeing a healthy and vibrant pink, his skin became greenish gray. His chest nolonger rose and fell with his breaths. He hung there limply and utterlylifeless.
This was a horrible tragedy for those who believed in theJesus as King movement that seemed to have been going so well on Palm Sunday. Agreat crowd of people had sung: “Hosanna! Blessed is he who comes in theName of the Lord.” Now their hopes were dashed. The man who was hangingdead on the cross did not look like he was going to be making anymore peopleleap like a dear or anymore mute people sign for joy. The writers of theGospels are clear about even the closest disciples, the apostles, losing theirfaith. There is such a discordant note between the praises of Palm Sunday andthe sadness of Good Friday.
In a way the Jesus as king movement that had looked sopopular and up and coming on Palm Sunday never recovered. Even after theresurrection and Jesus’s appearances to various disciples, we are told thatthere were only about 120 disciples left. Only about 120 were meeting togetherafter Jesus’s ascension and before the pouring out of the Holy Spirit onPentecost. Where were the 5,000 who had been fed with the five loaves and thetwo fish? Where were the 4,000? Where was the multitude rejoicing and shouting,“Hosanna!” on Palm Sunday?
What happened is that they all came to the quite logicalconclusion that although they had hoped and believed that Jesus was the king, theymust have been wrong. That man they had believed in was crucified and died.Dead kings can’t do much for anybody. These folks were probably resilient. Theyprobably just moved on to the next hope, the next dream for happiness andfulfillment.
We can be a lot like those people too. Maybe we oncebelieved and hoped. Maybe we used to say from the bottom of our heart: “Save usnow, we pray!” but maybe it’s been a while since we prayed that. Or perhapswe’ve moved on to other hopes and other dreams. It’s easy for Christians to putinto their back pocket: “Yes, yes, Jesus is king. That’s all well and good.Everybody know that.” But now let’s get serious about what I really want out oflife: I want money, I want toys, I want popularity. Life is meant for beinghappy—otherwise what good is life?
Thousands of one-time disciples of Jesus thought the sameway. They thought that Jesus was their meal ticket for bread, for independence,for happiness. When Jesus died it appeared impossible that Jesus could continueon in this way. What good is such a king then? Who needs him? What I need issome more miracles. I could use some more of that bread. I could use a healingor two. If he can’t do that, then what good is he? The assumption is thatbecause Jesus died, he can’t be a miracle worker anymore.
But Jesus didn’t stay dead, and he most certainly continuesto be as much of a miracle worker as he ever was. There is not a single promiseof God that has ever fallen to the ground. God keeps them all.
We must look at what happened to the king on Good Fridaydifferently than the great multitude who lost their faith in him. Jesus did notcease to be the king when he was nailed to the cross and died. The billboardthat Pilate had fastened above his cross spoke the truth, even when Jesus wasstone-cold dead. Jesus the crucified is the king who died for you.
Jesus the king’s death is of the greatest possiblesignificance. By his death he destroyed the power of death. By the redemptionthat Jesus wrought all of mankind is reconciled to God and put onto a newfooting. Through Adam sin entered into the world, and through sin, death. InJesus the grace of God, the righteousness of God is brought about for allpeople. Jesus pulled out the roots of disease, decay, and death so that we mayattain final, perfect, and eternal healing.
We think we know what seeing is, but the only seeing we’ve seenis this fallen and incomplete seeing. We think we know what hearing is.Sometimes we hear beautiful, wonderful things! We haven’t heard nothing yet. Ingeneral the only life that we have known is this fallen life. This fallenearthly life is full of defects and diseases. We are in need of profoundhealing!
By the death and resurrection of Jesus he has not become alesser miracle worker, but a greater miracle worker. His miracles are not a matterof the past, locked away thousands of years ago, only to be known from books.Jesus’s miracles are done now and will be done in the future.
Jesus forgives all of your sins now. Think of what atremendous thing that is! We talk about it so much that we forget howextraordinary it is. Jesus forgives your sins. That means that God is not angrywith you. God is well pleased with you. Why? Because you’re such a greatperson? No. If anything, you’ve probably not been all that different from thedisciples that we’ve been talking about who lost their faith in Jesus. God iswell pleased with you not because of anything that you’ve done, but because ofwhat Jesus has done as the great King. He died for you. He rose for you. Youare forgiven because of him. You may enjoy the miracle of having a goodconscience before God. The ruler of the universe is pleased with you for Jesus’ssake. What are any of the miracles we hear about in the Bible compared to that?
There are more miracles that await us in the future. When wedie in Jesus, and when we are raised in Jesus, then we will know how Jesus doesall things well because great things will be done to us. No miracle and nowonder that is recorded in Scripture compares to the healing, the cleansing,the vitalization that is in store for you. The adventures of this life pale incomparison to the adventures of those who live and die with faith in Jesustheir king. Paul says, “No eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor has it evenentered into the imagination of the heart of man what God has prepared forthose who love him.” That means that no matter how hard we try to pictureheaven, we’re not even close. The eye, the ear, and the legs must becomeinfinitely stronger for the weight of glory that awaits us.
So if there’s something that I’d like you to remember fromthis Palm Sunday sermon it is that Jesus, your king, is coming to you. The kingonce entered Jerusalem with hosannas, loud hosannas. Behold, your king iscoming also to you. He comes to you not to do lesser miracles for you, butgreater miracles for you.
For good reason our ancient Christian liturgy has had usChristians sing before the Lord’s Supper: “Hosanna, Hosanna, Hosanna in thehighest. Blessed is he who comes in the Name of the Lord!” We sing thisancient song in preparation for our King coming to serve us with his body andhis blood in the Lord’s Supper. Jesus the king is coming to give us the food ofimmortality, to forgive us —again, a much higher and profounder miracle thanany we ever hear about in the Gospels.
Behold, your king is coming to you. This is what the peopleon Palm Sunday were so excited about. Jesus the king was coming to them. NowJesus, your king, is coming to you. Let us then rise and pray like the peopleof old:
Hosanna! Save us now we pray! Amen!
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I’d like to begin today by talking about how important our Old Testament reading is for understanding the Bible. Then I’d like to relate what we learn about Abraham to the relationship we have had as congregation and pastor.
Our Old Testament reading is from Genesis chapter 12. That’s not too far into the book. We meet a couple name Abram and Sarai who are later given the names Abraham and Sarah. Since we know their latter names better than their former names I’m just going to call them Abraham and Sarah. One day the Lord said to Abraham, “Get out of your country and away from your relatives and from your father’s house and go to the land that I will show you. I will make you a great nation. I will bless you,” and so on.
What is going on here is that the Lord is making a promise to Abraham and Sarah. Sometimes this promise is called a covenant or a testament. The Lord is telling them that he will be their God and they will be his people. Abraham and Sarah are going to leave the places with which they are familiar. They are going to leave the safety and comfort of their homeland, but they are going to be alright because God is for them and not against them.
Allow me to pause for a moment to point out to you how important this is. God tells Abraham and Sarah that he is for them. He’s on their side. If God is for you, who cares who or what might be against you! And the fact that God tells them this is very good. They are not left wondering about the inscrutable mysteries of God. Who can know the mind of God or who has been his counselor? But a person can know the mind of God when God reveals his mind and his will. Here in Genesis chapter 12 God reveals that he is for Abraham and Sarah. He will bless them, and through them and their seed the whole world will be blessed.
Realize that although God has chosen Abraham and Sarah, although God has made a covenant with them to be their God and bless them, this didn’t mean that their life would be painless and whatsoever they might desire would come true. That is a false assumption. When someone hears that God is for them, he or she might immediately think, “Oh good. Now everything is going to go exactly how I want.” God, they imagine, is kind of like a genie in a bottle. God’s going to do whatever I tell him. This is obviously not the case as anyone knows who has even a passing familiarity with the stories of the Bible. This wasn’t true with Abraham.
In the chapters that follow our reading from Genesis chapter 12 we hear about all kinds of difficulties that Abraham and Sarah encountered. However, even though they went through painful, stressful, and harrowing adventures God was nevertheless for them. His covenant remained true. I’ll just mention one extreme test, which is horrifying to anyone who takes it seriously—the time that God commanded Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac. As you know, God provided a ram as a substitute for Isaac, but that whole experience was terribly trying and awful. If Moses hadn’t recorded it, I wouldn’t think it would be possible that the Lord God would do that. But even in the midst of that great struggle, God was for Abraham and not against him.
Abraham, for his part, believed God, and this was credited to him as righteousness. You shouldn’t misunderstand that statement to mean that Abraham’s faith was some great accomplishment on Abraham’s part. It wasn’t like Abraham tried his hardest, never gave up, and voila! he believed. No, it was the Holy Spirit in God’s Word of promise that caused him to believe. God said, “I will be your God. I’m for you,” and Abraham believed that God was telling him the truth and not lying. If God wouldn’t have told him what he told him Abraham never would have believed. By God telling him, by God giving Abraham the gift of faith, Abraham believed, and this was credited to him as righteousness. He was justified by faith in God’s promise.
Now I mentioned at the beginning that our Old Testament reading is important for understanding the rest of the Bible. It’s important because it is the beginning of the story that is going to subsequently play out over the course of thousands of years, even up to the present day. In our reading you heard God’s promise that he would bless Abraham and Sarah. He would make a great nation of them. All the families of the earth would be blessed in them. And so it went. Abraham and Sarah had a son named Isaac. Isaac and his wife Rebecca had a son named Jacob. Jacob, like his grandfather, would eventually get a new name from God. He was given the name Israel. And Israel had 12 sons. Those twelve sons would eventually become the 12 tribes of Israel.
The Old Testament, with all its history, with its dozens upon dozens of generations, is about the descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, whose God was the Lord God. All of this traces back to the reading we heard this morning. It all starts with God talking to a man named Abram who was 75 years old at the time. He promised him that he would be his God, and that he and his descendants would be his people. They believed this promise and their faith was credited to them as righteousness.
This carries over also into the New Testament. In our Epistle reading from Romans Paul is making a wonderful and persuasive argument for why the real descendants of Abraham are not those who are descendants according to the flesh, but are those who follow Abraham’s example. Abraham’s descendants are those who believe God’s promise and are justified by faith.
This is how Genesis chapter 12 is important and applicable also to us, all the way down to our current time and place. Unlike Genesis 12, the Lord God has not appeared to us or spoken to us in the same way that he spoke to Abraham, but that was never what was really important about what happened. What was important was the content of God’s message to Abraham. What was important was the promise God made to Abram and his descendants. Abraham came to know the mind of the Lord towards him.
We, too, have come to know of the Lord God’s promises to us. We learn that God is for us and not against us when the good news of Jesus’s full and complete redemption is made known to us. Whenever you hear the good news that Jesus has died for your sins and that you are therefore forgiven, you are hearing something very similar to what God told Abraham—except, if anything, the message you hear is an even higher and better message.
And when you were baptized, God said to you essentially: “I am yours and you are mine. I’m baptizing you into the death of my beloved Son. You are now born again by the water and the Holy Spirit so that through the forgiveness of sins you are welcome to enter the kingdom of God.” God most assuredly has said this to you in your baptism, for that is the meaning of your baptism. There’s no doubt about God having said this because we know that you have been baptized. You might not believe it, but that doesn’t change what God has said or done. Blessed are you if you do believe it. Blessed are you if you believe that God is for you and not against you, come what may. You are his and he is yours.
And we have been given another promise, another statement of God’s loving care towards us, in the Lord’s Supper. Jesus says of the bread: “This is my body which is given for you.” And of the wine he says: “This cup is the new testament—that is, new covenant or promise, the very kind of thing that God did with Abraham—this cup is the new testament in my blood, which is shed for you, for the forgiveness of sins. As often as you drink of it, do so in remembrance of me.” The Lord’s Supper is nothing other than Jesus saying to you that he is for you, God is for you, your sins are forgiven. God is for you and not against you. Blessed are you if you believe this. Through faith in this promise you are justified.
So now let’s move to the relationship that you and I have had these past 12 years. God has given me the job of telling you what God has promised. The Gospel, baptism, the Lord’s Supper—these are never-failing promises from God about his forgiveness and loving care for sinners. When you believe that God is for you and not against you because God has told this to you, and you believe that he is not a liar, but speaking the truth, then you are just like Abraham of old. He believed that God was for him and not against him.
So my job as pastor has not been anything original or anything that came from me—at least when it comes to anything that is truly worthwhile. I only repeat to you what I myself have heard from others. The Gospel and the Sacraments do what they do because God makes them work, because God who says them is truthful.
The one thing I will say about a pastor’s effectiveness is that a pastor needs to be faithful to what he has been given to do. A pastor needs to baptize. A pastor needs to not mess around with the Lord’s Supper or the Creed. A pastor needs to actually talk about these things and not waste people’s time with any number of other things—even if those other things might be more entertaining, more attractive to new-comers, or in some other way might seem to promise success for himself or the congregation.
If a pastor does not faithfully give out what he is supposed to, such a pastor would be like Abraham if Abraham were to squander God’s promise by not telling others about it. Suppose that he didn’t tell his children and grandchildren about God’s promise, but instead liked to entertain them with jokes or stories. Or maybe even he liked to tell them about how to be good citizens or some other serious things. If Abraham wouldn’t have told his descendants about God’s promise, then God’s promise would not be known and believed. Abraham needed to be faithful to what was given to him. How can anyone know God’s will towards them unless it be told them?
And so the most essential thing about a pastor is that he be faithful to what he has been commanded to give. What the pastor has been commanded to give is what also already belongs to all of you. When I speak of God’s promises, when I administer the sacraments—none of that comes from me, none of that is secret, none of that comes from my genius. All of that is common property in Christendom. You all know that just as well as I do.
And now this job that I have been doing is going to be passed along to somebody else. You are going to have a vacancy pastor. And then, God willing, God will give you another pastor to serve you full time. These other pastors will inevitably be different from me. No two pastors are ever the same. God gives different gifts to all his Christians, pastors included. But although your pastors in the future will be different from me in terms of their gifts and personality, they will be giving you the same things I’ve been giving you— at least when it comes to the important things, the saving things. These pastors have taken the same solemn oath that I’ve taken—to do the job of preaching the Gospel and administering the sacraments. It is God’s promise that is so essential and important. It is by faith in this promise—faith that God is for me and not against me—that makes anyone a Christian. It is by faith in Christ that we are justified.
So as my time with you draws to a close, what is good, important, and saving about the work that I have done is going to continue on among you. I am sure that you are going to continue to hear that you are sinners. I am sure that you are going to continue to hear that you are sinners who have been justified, made righteous, by God in Jesus.
God has worked these good things in this congregation before I ever came, he has worked through my service, and he will continue to work in this congregation after I have gone. If you hold to these promises that God has spoken to you, then we will most certainly see each other again. We might not see each other again in this life—although I’d like that very much—but we will certainly see each other again at the marriage feast of the Lamb in his kingdom which has no end. There we will be with a multitude that comes from the east and the west to sit at the feast of salvation. With Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob the blessed obeying the Lord’s invitation. Have mercy upon us O Jesus!
I’m thankful for the time that we have spent together. May God continue to bless us with faith in his love toward us for Jesus’s sake. Amen!
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We hear quite a bit about temptations in our readings this morning. The first one ever was “Did God really say?” “Did God really say you shouldn’t eat from that tree? Why that tree? Just that tree?” And Jesus was tempted in different ways. Maybe he could satiate his hunger by turning stones to bread. He could show his glory by plunging from the temple. He could acquire the earth by worshipping the prince of this world rather than purchasing the world with his suffering and death.
These temptations can seem rather distant and inapplicable. Not a single one of us has been tempted with the exact particulars of any of these temptations. None of us have had to choose whether to eat from a certain tree, put on display our miraculous powers by changing stones to bread, and so on. And yet there is something that draws these temptations together. All temptations seem to strike out against the goodness and faithfulness of God. That seems to be the lie that is beneath the temptations—God isn’t good. God isn’t trustworthy. So you better see to it yourself regardless of his wishes.
Let’s briefly see if this is so with the temptations we’ve heard about today. Adam and Eve weren’t originally concerned about whether God was good to them or faithful to them until the idea was introduced to them that God just might be holding out on them. Adam and Eve didn’t really have anything to complain about when they were created. They were creatures. God was God. They lived as the creatures God created them to be. They had but one command: “Don’t eat from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.”
The serpent got them thinking, “Why shouldn’t we?” There must be some reason. The command, the serpent figured, couldn’t have been for Adam and Eve’s good. It must be because God is stingy and jealous of his prerogatives. He’s a tyrant who wants to keep humanity as his slaves. Keep them stupid. If only Adam and Eve were to eat from the tree they would become like God. They would know good and evil. And so the real meat and substance of Adam and Eve’s sin is what they came to believe about God. God wasn’t good. God wasn’t for them, but against them.
The same thing is true with Jesus’s temptations. He had been kicked out into the wilderness to be miserable and perhaps eventually starve. “Turn these stones into bread.” But Jesus answered, “Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.” If Jesus threw himself off the temple, he could test whether God’s Word was true, for then the angels would catch him. He could know if God loved him. “You shall not put the Lord your God to the test.” The final temptation can only be understood with the awfulness of Jesus’s passion kept firmly in mind. “Bow down and worship me,” is the most direct, blatant, almost ridiculous sounding temptation, but that had to have sounded a lot easier than the difficult, basically impossible, road that Jesus knew lay ahead of him. Beneath these temptations lay the questions: “Is God for you or against you? Can he be trusted or should you see to things yourself? Are you happy or not?”
Perhaps you’ve learned in your Catechism instruction that a sin against any of the other of the Ten Commandments is also a sin against the first commandment. The first commandment is that we should have no other gods. That means that we should fear, love, and trust in God no matter what. Temptations to break any of the other commandments strike out also against this first commandment.
For example, the second commandment requires us to use God’s Name rightly. A temptation here is to wonder what good that will do me. I don’t need to pray; I need to work. I don’t need to praise or give thanks to God. What good is that going to do me? I need to plan and train. I don’t need to gather with other believers for praying, praising, and giving thanks. I have better things to do. God won’t help me through these things, even though he has promised to do so. I can better help myself.
Or take the fourth commandment, “honor your father and your mother.” I don’t need to do that. I won’t be blessed by God for doing that. Plus I don’t want to. They command me to do things I don’t want to do.
Or take the sixth commandment, “you shall not commit adultery.” There’s an old country and western song that croons, “Heaven’s just a sin away. Heaven’s just a sin away.” Commit adultery and you’ll have heavenly pleasure. God won’t help me find a spouse. God won’t give me a spouse. Or the spouse he gave me is no good. Another one is what would make me happy.
Behind every temptation, and the most awful thing about every subsequent sin, is the judgement against God. God’s no good. God’s commands are no good. They destroy happiness or they keep me from happiness. They’re not what I want to do. They are impossible to actually keep—so that’s kind of stupid on God’s part. Common sense tells us that good laws are laws one can actually keep!
There are also judgements against God’s promises. God promises to bless all those who keep his commands, but temptation says that that’s not true. You won’t be blessed. You’ll be miserable. Plus you’ll never make it. You’ll have to give in eventually to temptation.
And then think of the life that Jesus tells us we should live. Do you want to deny yourself, take up your cross and follow him? Does that sound like fun? Does it look like Jesus was having fun? Why do it then?
Plus there’s that rather common, and even academically respectable opinion: Maybe God’s not even real. Did God really say? Maybe there’s not even a God who can say! Temptations abound!
And there is only one thing that is able to help in all the temptations. It’s a simple answer, a Sunday School answer, and thus easily despised: The only thing that can help is God’s Word. Adam and Eve notably failed to return to the simple, not hard to understand, Word of the Lord. Jesus, perhaps you noticed, answered all three temptations with: “It is written…” The Word of God is the indispensable thing for knowing what is going on. The Word of God is indispensable for correctly understanding what your life is for and what it is all about.
What I am saying to you about your life is that it is a battle against temptation and the devil. You are constantly being tempted to sin against the Ten Commandments and to abandon the station in life that God has called you into. I know without a shadow of a doubt that it is by being obedient and faithful that you will be blessed. I know without a shadow of a doubt that you will be blessed by being obedient and faithful even if God’s heavy hand were to crush you, send all kinds of pain and sadness upon you. You will be blessed; I know it! But I can only know that from what God says in his Word.
Without God’s Word our life must inevitably be understood in different terms than as being a battle against temptation and the devil. Without God’s Word life might be understood, for example, as the pursuit of happiness. What makes me happy? Surely not following God’s commands. What makes me happy is fulfilling my own desires: More money, more sex, more honor, more dopamine, more stimulants. Plus we don’t want any pain and we don’t want any sweat on our brow. So let’s get rid of anything that might cause that.
What can be easier than to fall into thinking about one’s life along such lines? This is even how we preferto envision life. We want to be deceived. We want to believe that it doesn’t matter if we keep God’s commands or believe his promises. We want to believe that we know what good is and evil is—that’s an easy one. Good is what is good for me. Evil is whatever is bad for me. With that knowledge firmly in hand, it follows that one should never forgive, never give in, never serve, never sacrifice, never suffer. Live each day as if you mattered most and everybody else should just fend for themselves. Again, nobody has to teach us to live this way. This is the way that we want to live!
It is only God’s Word that can tell us anything different. Life is a battle against temptation and the devil, and our sinful flesh always thinks the devil sounds quite reasonable. It is a battle to believe that God is for us and not against us. God is good, even if the earth should give way and the mountains be carried into the midst of the sea.
One of the most important passages of the Bible says, “Abraham believed God, and it was credited to him as righteousness.” We are justified by faith in God’s promises, in God’s goodness. God’s promise is that because of Jesus, goodness and mercy shall follow you all the days of your life and you shall dwell in the house of the Lord forever. Yea, though you walk through the valley of the shadow of death, you should fear no evil, for the Lord, your Shepherd, is with you. His rod and his staff, they comfort you. God is for you.
It is inevitable that you be tempted. You are tempted every day. And you have fallen into that temptation and you have sinned. Understand that according to what we have talked about today your falling for temptation and sin is not just a sin against this or that commandment, it is also a sin against the first commandment. Whenever you give in to any temptation you are also making horrendous judgements against God even though those judgements are usually made unwittingly. You are saying that he is foolish, or nonexistent, or untrustworthy, or any number of other evil things. Sins against commandments, such as the second or third, might not even bother your conscience, but that only shows how leprous and unfeeling your soul has become.
But my answer to your sin is not that you had better get busy fixing yourself. How I’d like to respond strikes at the root of all temptation. Instead of your stupid judgements and thoughts about God I can tell you quite plainly that God is good. I can even say that God is for you and not against you. You might not believe that, but I don’t care. Your unbelief doesn’t have the power to change who God is. God is good. God is for you, even. God justifies you. God forgives you.
I wouldn’t dare say these things on my own. To say something like that is admittedly extreme—especially when you consider all those temptations that you've heeded and thereby made horrendous judgements against God. Nevertheless, I can say these things because of God’s Word. This is laid out so very nicely in our epistle reading that I think a child could grasp Paul’s arguments.
Paul talks about two great historical figures, compares and contrasts them. The one figure is Adam. The other is Jesus Christ. Paul says, through Adam sin came into the world, and through sin came death. And that death has spread over all mankind. If ever we should doubt the power of Adam’s fall, we only need to consider the pall of death that hangs over all people, together with the decay and disintegration that leads up to our death. Adam brought disaster.
In like manner Jesus is one whose effect extends to all. In that way he is like Adam. Adam changed everything. Paul says, likewise, Jesus has changed everything. But instead of Adam’s sin and death, Jesus brings justification before God and eternal life. So, Paul says, “just as one trespass led to a verdict of condemnation for all people, so also one righteous verdict led to life-giving justification for all people.” Condemnation came upon all people in Adam. By the righteous verdict rendered in the sacrificial death of Jesus, life-giving justification—rightness before God—is bestowed upon all people. Being justified means that you are right and good. That is to say, when you are justified God is for you and not against you. No one ever needs to doubt what is going on with God’s will toward them because of Jesus and what he has done. Jesus’s good work of redemption and justification stands as solid as a rock even if your sins be like scarlet.
Knowing this truth about God, knowing that God has forgiven you and justified you, that he is for you and not against you, you can now turn away from what is always behind the devil’s temptations. The devil would have you believe that God is not for you. You have to do it yourself by hook or by crook. You dare not ever give up your claims. Nobody will ever give you anything, you have to take it. God probably doesn’t even exist so why be bothered about his commandments, and so on and so forth. These are all lies.
The truth is that God does exist. His commands and promises never fail. And the most outstanding and almost unbelievable thing—taught only by God’s Word—is that God is for you. God forgives you. Just as in Adam’s fall all mankind fell, so in Jesus Christ, righteousness and justification extends to all people. If it extends to all people, then it must also extend to you, O Sinner.
God is good. God has done this. God is for you.
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I’d like to begin today by speaking about a detail that could be easy to overlook. At the beginning of our reading it says, “Six days later Jesus took Peter, James, and John to a high mountain.” The transfiguration took place about six days later. Six days after what?
It took place about six days after Peter’s confession that Jesus is the Christ. I’d like to go through that history since I think it sheds light on what is going on with the transfiguration.
Jesus was with his disciples and he asked them, “Who do people say that I am?” The disciples answered by telling him what they had heard: “Some say that you are John the Baptist, some say that you are Elijah, others say that you are Jeremiah or one of the prophets.” We won’t get into the specifics of why the people might have given these answers for who Jesus was. Suffice it to say, though, that the people recognized Jesus as being highly unusual. They thought that he was one of the great prophets.
Then Jesus asked his disciples, “But you, who do you say that I am?” And Simon Peter answered, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.”
The word, “Christ,” means “anointed one.” It also has connotations of kingship. The way that the kings became kings in the Old Testament was by being anointed with oil. So there’s kingship here. Plus, throughout the Old Testament God gave his people prophecies about a coming, chosen servant of the Lord. The servant of the Lord would set things right. He would establish justice and righteousness. He would open the eyes of the blind, and the ears of the deaf would be unstopped. Ultimately these prophecies go all the way back to the Garden of Eden when Adam and Eve are told that the seed of the woman would crush the serpent’s head. God’s people had been looking for the Christ who was to come.
So when Peter answered Jesus’s question about who the disciples thought that he was by saying that Jesus is the Christ, this was no ordinary, everyday answer. There is no more important confession on earth. In fact, this is the shortest creed, or statement of faith, in Christendom: “I believe that Jesus Christ is my Lord.” And Peter even adds: “the Son of the living God.” So Peter is identifying this man Jesus as the most important ever. He is also saying, “You are God.”
Jesus responded to Peter’s confession by saying, “Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah, for flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father who is in heaven. And I tell you that you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of hell will not overpower it. I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven. Whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.”
There’s quite a bit that I wouldn’t mind saying about these words too. To keep it short, let me just point out a couple things. Jesus says that his church is going to be built on the rock of Peter’s confession. What is Peter’s confession? That Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God. So if you want to be a Christian, there you have your creed. The other thing is the activity of the church is also laid out. Christians, those who confess what Peter confessed, are given the keys of the kingdom of heaven. Christians forgive and retain sins. When Christians forgive the sins of repentant sinners, their sins are forgiven. When Christians retain the sins of unrepentant sinners, their sins are retained so long as they do not repent. These are eternal, stupendous things! Heaven and hell, to which each individual must go—to one or the other—are put into the hands of Peter and all the others as well who make his confession.
So this was all well and good. Peter got it right. Good for Peter. Then, not too long after this, Peter will end up getting it wrong. After Peter’s confession the Gospels tell us that Jesus began to teach Peter and the other disciples what was going to happen to him. He was going to go to Jerusalem, suffer many things at the hands of the elders, chief priests, and experts in the law. He was going to be killed, and on the third day rise again.
When Peter heard this he took Jesus aside and began to rebuke him: “May you receive mercy, Lord! This will never happen to you.” But Jesus turned and said to Peter, “Get behind me, Satan! For you are a snare to me because you are not thinking the things of God, but the things of men.”
Note how, in quick succession, Peter is called the rock and Satan by Jesus. He is called the rock for his confession that Jesus is the Christ. He is called Satan for opposing the way that Jesus was going to be the Christ. Jesus the Christ, Jesus the King, was going to accomplish his work of redemption for sinners. He was going to attain eternal life for those who are under the wrath of God, by being subject to that wrath and swallowing it up. By his death he would destroy the power of death. In the process he would look weak, horrible, a worm and no man, and the furthest thing from being a king, but even that had been foretold in the Psalms and the prophets.
After rebuking Peter Jesus goes on to tell the disciples that this is not something that is just applicable to him. The cross applies to anyone who wants to be his disciple. Let me read in full what Jesus says here: “If anyone wants to follow me, let him deny himself, take up his cross, and follow me. In fact, whoever wants to save his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it. After all, what will it benefit a person if he gains the whole world, but forfeits his soul? Or what can a person give in exchange for his soul? For the Son of Man will come in the glory of his Father together with his angels, and then he will repay everyone according to his actions. Amen I tell you: Some who are standing here will certainly not taste death until they see the Son of Man coming in his kingdom.”
What I have just read is immediately prior to where our Gospel reading picks up today. Six days after this Jesus took Peter, James, and John to a high mountain and was transfigured before them so that he shined like the sun. I think it is important to pay attention to the link that the Gospel writers make between Jesus’s transfiguration and what came before. Peter and the disciples confess Jesus to be the Christ, but they have a hard time accepting the work of the Christ. That is to say, they have a hard time accepting the cross.
It seems to me that you can see this somewhat on the Mount of Transfiguration. Think of the frame of mind that Peter, James, and John were probably in. Jesus confirmed their long held suspicions about his real identity. They had long suspected, perhaps even from the very beginning, that Jesus wasn’t even just one of the greatest ones come back to life. Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the living God. He is the most important man ever. And they are his friends and his disciples. They’d been living with that confirmed and certain knowledge about who Jesus is for about a week. Of course Jesus had rebuked Peter in the meantime. He said a bunch of stuff they didn’t really understand, but the important thing is that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the living God.
And then on the Mount of Transfiguration, Jesus appearance started to change. And I think the disciples maybe were thinking, “Oh, here we go! This is it! Here comes the Son of Man in his kingdom. We’re about to be whisked up into his glory! He is who he said he is! Heis the Son of God!” How thrilling this must have been for them, and they were kind of anticipating this very thing too. And there are Moses and Elijah—the greatest of the greats from the Old Testament. I wonder what will happen next.
And this was all wonderful and exciting and evidently thoroughly enjoyable for the disciples. Peter says, “Lord, it is good for us to be here. If you want, I will make three shelters—one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah.”
But even before he was done speaking things became even brighter. A bright cloud overshadowed them and a voice came out of the cloud: “This is my Son, whom I love, with him I am well pleased. Listen to him.” Perhaps those words sound familiar to you and they should. When Jesus was baptized he was anointed by water and the Holy Spirit. At that time a voice came from heaven: “This is my beloved Son with whom I am well pleased.” What is added here at the Transfiguration, though, are the words, “Listen to him.” “Listen to Jesus.”
We, like Peter, need to listen to Jesus. Our thoughts are not God’s thoughts. Peter thought that it would be horrible for Jesus to suffer, die, and rise again. God the Father, on the other hand, loves Jesus and is well pleased with everything that he did.
This is true also for us with our lives as disciples, denying ourselves, taking up our cross, and following Jesus. Whose life is free from misfortune, pain, loss and sadness? It is always possible for us to react to such things by passing along the pain, make somebody else bear the burden, never allow ourselves to be shamed, and instead shaming others. Living that way, living only to make your life better, tends to make sense to our fallen, sinful, selfish, common sense. Jesus, on the other hand, teaches us many things that are contrary to a selfish common sense. We should not look for what is pleasant or beneficial for ourselves, but what is beneficial for others. And not only should we look after what is beneficial for our friends, but what is beneficial even for our enemies—the ones who have hurt us.
So we are in as much need as anyone of that admonition from God the Father: “Listen to Jesus.” Jesus is his beloved Son, with whom he is well pleased. Listen to him. To follow Jesus’s words might not seem like it’s a sensible course. Certainly Jesus’s words to Peter about his upcoming suffering, death, and resurrection sounded like a horrible plan to Peter. “Never should such things happen to you, Lord,” Peter said. But those very things that Jesus did were the best things that have ever been done. It is by that cross and resurrection that Jesus has brought about the renewal of mankind.
So it is also, but on a much smaller scale, and with many imperfections, when we live the sanctified life that we have been given to live. When we live with faith in Jesus our Redeemer, and when we listen to him and live has he teaches us, this is pleasing to God our Father. It might not appear impressive or honorable to those who do not have the eyes to see or the ears to hear. Living how Jesus teaches us might not even be pleasant to our own selves. Maybe we would wish that things would go differently. But God know best, and those who follow him will be blessed—that’s a 100% guarantee—even if it doesn’t appear so at the time.
One final aspect I’d like to comment on briefly. God the Father said, “Listen to Jesus,” and note what Jesus said to the terrified Peter, James, and John. He said to them, “Get up, and do not be afraid.” When God the Father says, “Listen to him,” that includes Jesus’s instructions and commands. However, it is not just those words that we should listen to. What is most certainly included are kind and tender words like, “Do not be afraid.” Jesus is not just some law-giver. He also is a friend, a Savior, a Shepherd to the sheep.
We are an awful lot like Peter. We have our own ideas of how things should go. Maybe we are not the best listener. Jesus did not reject Peter on that account, but forgave, corrected, led, and loved him. So it is also today with us and Jesus. Listen to him when he says, “Do not be afraid.” He will help you on the way that you are to go as his disciple no matter where that road might go.
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Thank you for indulging me with all the sermons that I’ve been preaching on 1 Corinthians. This will be the last sermon on 1 Corinthians, at least for now, since the readings will move on to other things next week with the Transfiguration. Today I’ll preach on 1 Corinthians one more time though.
I really like the two Corinthians letters. I find them to be very instructive for our times. We have struggled, and struggles continue over what the Christian church should be. We have been living through a time when churches have generally gotten smaller rather than larger. How do we fix that? How can we attain success?
Very often, both back in Paul’s time and in our times, one of the ways that people want to answer that question is through the leaders, through the pastors, who have been put in place. How can we hope to be successful? We need to have the right leader. Then these leaders might end up with a following around themselves. In Corinth they had split up into different parties. There was a Paul party, a Peter party, an Apollos party, and probably some other parties too. If there are parties, it’s only natural to also have party spirits.
Party spirit is when people gather themselves together, think that their party is the best, and that everybody else is sub-par or perhaps even down-right evil. To have such an attitude is definitely of the flesh, as Paul says in our reading today. He says, “Insofar as jealousy, strife, and factions have a place among you, are you not people who are following the flesh? Are you not behaving in a merely human way?”
This does seem to be the human way. Gather together enough people to get a coalition. Say nice things about yourselves and attack the other side. We’re handsome, regal, majestic, lovable. They are terrible, horrible, no good, very bad. The goal is to win, win, win, and defeat the other party. Then we can feel good about being the winners. We can also feel good about them losing, because they are losers, and they’re maybe even evil to boot.
It is possible for us Christians to do this kind of thing with our Christianity too. We can create a party spirit that is not from the Holy Spirit, but of the flesh. This party spirit might manifest itself in the way that we live. We can pride ourselves on our clean living, perhaps, and be disgusted by the way that somebody else lives. How can they live like that?
It might manifest itself in a kind of pride where we are the ones who are right—thank God we’ve always been right—and everybody else is wrong. Because we are right and they are wrong, we will go to heaven and they will go to hell. Whenever anyone focuses on how good he or she is, and how bad somebody else is, you can be sure that you are dealing with something that is purely natural, merely human—something that comes from the flesh.
“But,” you might be wondering, “don’t we live better than unbelievers? If we don’t live correctly we could end up under church discipline.” And furthermore, “Don’t we know what is right? Aren’t others terribly mistaken with false beliefs?” And I have to admit that these objections are valid. Christians do and must live differently than unbelievers. Christians must hold to what is true, otherwise they are not really Christians. But these things should be done and held to in such a way where there is not a party spirit. It should not be an “us vs. them” kind of thing.
What it should be instead is that we urge all people to repent under the mighty hand of God—ourselves included. We are not separated from others but are also under the mighty hand of God. This is the unusual way that Paul takes with these Corinthians. Party spirit is so natural to us that it can seem unavoidable. Whenever anybody says something or wants to make a change, it can seem like there is just one more party being formed. What Paul says in his letter to the Corinthians can seem like just one more faction—oh, yep, that’s just what Paul thinks.
But Paul doesn’t want the hearers of his letter to think, “Oh, yeah, that’s just Paul doing his schtick.” He wants all people everywhere to become obedient to God’s Gospel. He doesn’t want to gather anybody to himself. He wants people to repent, to fear God, and to believe in Jesus. And Paul doesn’t care whether that happens through his speaking, through Apollos’s speaking, through Peter’s speaking, or through any man’s, woman’s or child’s speaking. Whoever is doing the speaking is just the instrument through whom God is doing his work. What matters is God doing his work.
These are the lines along which Paul is speaking when he says, “What then is Apollos? And what is Paul? They are ministers through whom you believed, and each served as the Lord gave him his role. I planted, Apollos watered, but God was causing the growth. So then, neither the one who plants nor the one who waters is anything, but it is God who causes the growth.”
Note how Paul is praising God, and not himself. One telltale sign of a party spirit is when goodness and righteousness can only come from those who are on one’s own team, from one’s own party. But Paul is different. God is the one who caused the growth.
Let’s apply this to a difficult issue in our own times and something that has been divisive in our own church body. Party spirit might manifest itself by people saying that only those with their very special kind of worship are any good. If anybody does worship differently from them then that church is in deep trouble. They are probably going to die. That has been such a commonly expressed thought during my lifetime. It’s unbelievable if you think about it! One group of Christians tells another group of Christians that they are going to die! And it kind of sounds like they want them to die too! They’re too old fashioned. Their worship doesn’t work anymore.
Or, perhaps, from the other side it might be said that if certain modern instruments end up getting used, then that church isn’t any church at all. That too is an amazing thing to say to someone. You’re not the church. The issue of worship is one of those hot-button issues that has caused deep rifts in our church body, and much of it has been carried on with a party spirit. My side is the best, and the other side is horrible, terrible, no good, and very bad.
Now don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that it doesn’t matter how Christians worship. I don’t believe that there should just be a free-for-all, and let the floodgates be opened to anything and everything. What a lazy, thoughtless position! What I am saying is that there is something deeper and more important. And perhaps someone might just say, “oh, yep, let’s now hear what Michael Holmen has to say,” but I’d like it if people wouldn’t think that way. I think I’m speaking the truth. What I believe to be deeper, more fundamental, is the fear of God, the abhorring of one’s own sins, and believing in Jesus. Wherever there is this attitude, which I say is from the preaching of the Holy Spirit instead of any party spirit, you are going to have people with whom you can profitably discuss things—serious Christians who care about the damnation or salvation of their fellow man.
This also is not just my own personal opinion, it is also the confession of our Lutheran Church. The Augsburg Confession says, “It is enough for the true unity of the church to agree concerning the teaching of the Gospel and the administration of the sacraments. It is not necessary that human traditions, rites, or ceremonies, instituted by human beings be alike everywhere.”
That is very similar to what Paul has been saying in these first three chapters of Corinthians. Paul has been saying, “We preach Christ, and him crucified… I was determined to know nothing among you except Christ and him crucified.” What is the gospel that we should all agree about? Isn’t it the message of Christ and him crucified—the good news that Christ has died for all sinners? And what are the sacraments if they are not the preaching and application of Christ crucified for you. Baptism, for example, is being united with Christ in his death, so that we may also be united with him in his resurrection. The Lord’s Supper, as Paul says in this same letter, is the proclamation of Christ’s death until he comes again.
Wherever you have the preaching of Christ and him crucified, and wherever you have people who are given the gift of faith in that preaching by the Holy Spirit—that Christ died for you—there you have Christians. We don’t need Apollos. We don’t even need Paul. You don’t need any particular human being or any particular human party. What we need is the revelation from God. What we need is the fear, love, and trust in God that is worked by the Gospel of Christ and him crucified. That is not just one more party spirit. That fear, love, and trust in God is worked by the one Holy Spirit, who is true God.
Wherever you have that, you have Christians. And, on the other hand, wherever you don’t have that you don’t have Christians. It doesn’t matter how beautiful, eloquent, reasonable, entertaining, popular or righteous any group might appear to be. The indispensable thing is the preaching of Christ and him crucified.
So we should be thankful that we have enjoyed the preaching of Christ and him crucified for each one of us. That each one of us has received Christ the crucified and continue to receive Christ the crucified is not from any merit or worthiness in us. Nor has it been by the graces or faithfulness or merits of any human being or human party or human church body. Anytime we hear the pure preaching of the Gospel and the sacraments are administered according to Jesus’s institution, you can know with 100% certainty that this has come from God. It is his gift to you for you to believe in.
But this has, at the same time, come through instruments that God has used. There’s no sense in denying that. God didn’t speak directly from heaven to each one us. He used believing Christians, but this came from God, was worked by God, and is made effective by God. Paul says, “I planted, Apollos watered, but God caused the growth.”
So it has been and so it is with each one of us. Each of us was baptized by some other Christian. Each of us has received instruction from fellow Christians. Sometimes that instruction, guidance, and correction has been through formal and public channels in institutions, through pastors, teachers, or professors. Sometimes that has been less formal, but certainly not less important. Sometimes it is through family members. Sometimes it is through fellow congregation members. Sometimes it is through friends.
In whatever way our faith has been planted, watered, perhaps replanted, and so on, this has been God working through his means to create and sustain our faith. And this has not been done through one person or one party, unless you want to identify that person as Christ. Christ has been faithful in taking care of us, his sheep, and he will continue to be faithful. The instruments through whom Christ speaks his Scriptural Word will inevitably change. Quite possibly the person who baptized you is long dead. But Christ is faithful. He keeps bringing his Word to you so that you may be his disciple, so that you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.
Therefore we must not attach our love and trust to a human being or the party or group in which we happen to be. We couldn’t and shouldn’t do that even if the apostle Paul were here standing among us. He wouldn’t want us to attach ourselves to him. To be faithful to Paul is to be faithful to his preaching and teaching, and he is always pointing beyond himself to Christ and him crucified.
Jesus alone is Lord. He is Lord of his church. He is your Lord and Savior. It is the pleasure of us Christians to declare the praises of him who has called us out of darkness and into his marvelous light.
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The word “spiritual” brings to mind a lot of things. For me it brings to mind a lot of things that aren’t good. What one person regards as spiritual, another person regards as a delusion. For some there seems to be no limits for what is acceptable when it comes to spirituality. Folks might talk about energies, crystals, disciplines, psychedelic drugs, and many other things. I don’t understand these things, and they make me nervous. But this is not just some personal problem. This comes from my training as a Lutheran. The Lutheran Church has a very guarded attitude towards anybody who shows up and wants to start talking about spirits, energies, and stuff. There is a reason for this guarded attitude from our history.
As you perhaps remember, Martin Luther posted his 95 theses against the Catholic church’s sale of indulgences on October 31, 1517. Not long after this Luther was forced to conclude that it was possible for the pope to err and that church councils could err. The church was not infallible. What led Luther to that conclusion was not some rebellious, independent spirit within him. Luther wasn’t like that; just the opposite actually. What led him to believe that the church could err was that popes and councils have contradicted one another. And, more importantly for Luther, they contradicted the Scriptures. The Scriptures became for Luther, and later the Lutheran church, the only infallible, pure source for what we believe and teach.
This brought about a profound change in society. The way that things had been handled spiritually speaking up until the Reformation was that the Catholic church officials would decide what was right and what was wrong instead of individuals reading the Scriptures for themselves. Once the Catholic church had decided what was right or wrong they would go on to enforce those decisions, up to and including death.
John Hus, for example, was a Bohemian reformer who lived about 100 years before Luther. Even though he was promised safe passage, he was burned at the stake at the Council of Constance in 1415. Luther, also, was convicted of heresy by the Catholic church and would have been put to death if he has fallen into the wrong hands. Obviously, then, folks didn’t just mess around with spiritual teachings under the Catholic church. To do so was deadly serious.
But perhaps you can anticipate what happened in Germany after the Reformation started to break the power of the Roman church officials. No longer was it the church officials who decided what was right and wrong. Everybody could decide for himself or herself what he or she wanted to believe. This was a bit like taking the lid off of a pressure cooker. Spiritual teachers started to come out of the woodwork.
Some said they had visions. Some said they had the Holy Spirit. Some said that the end of the world had come. Some said your baptism didn’t count; you needed to do it again. Some said you should live in communes. Some said not only the church officials needed to go, but all those in authority—the lords and princes needed to go too. Less than a decade after Luther posted the 95 theses it appeared that all hell had broken loose. And you can be sure that the Roman church officials were quite happy to blame all that on Luther.
So, what was to be done? Should we get the stake back out again to start burning heretics? That is what the Roman church wanted to do. When it was politically feasible for them, that is what they did do. Should we embrace tolerance? Live and let live? That would be how our modern world would handle it. Luther had a different way of handling it. He and the Lutheran Church didn’t always live up to what Luther said, but by and large they did, and what Luther said was right. Luther said that heresies need to be rooted out by the preaching of the Word from the Scriptures. Hard work must be done with the Scriptures to refute errors. Only by going more thoroughly into what the Scriptures say can errors be revealed for what they are so that people can be led away from them. And hard work should be done, because it is important that we not err in spiritual matters.
This is where Luther’s attitude, and, God-willing, our own church’s attitude as well, is very different from the modern world’s attitude. The modern world thinks that spiritual matters are outdated and have no real effect. Don’t get too upset about whatever anybody might teach in that realm. None of that stuff really matters. What matters is STEM education, finance, making and saving money. This, of course, is a spiritual teaching all its own, but most people don’t see it that way. What is spiritual to most people is that that kind of thing is like a hobby. Some people believe in crystals. Other people believe in Christ the crucified. For the modern mind this is all gobbledy-gook anyway, so who cares what anybody believes or teaches. What really matters instead of any spiritual nonsense is whatever is going on at the universities, or in Washington, or on Wall Street. If the Catholic church was what ruled over people’s minds and souls at Luther’s time, this modern mentality is what rules over the minds and souls of our own time.
This does not mean, however, that anybody who is against the materialist, corporatist, unbelieving, pleasure and power seeking of our own times is somebody who should be trusted. This, too, is very similar to Reformation times. When the lid came off the pot and the spiritual teachers were coming out of the woodwork, you can be sure that these teachers were very anti-Catholic. They had to be! If they were under the Catholic church they would have been burned at the stake as heretics. But this doesn’t mean that just because they were against the Catholic church that they were good spiritual guides.
So it is also today. It appears that we are living in a time of upheaval. Some people are learning that life is more than food, more than clothing, more than mere scientific or economic advancement. These days there are lots of ways people can learn with the internet. We aren’t all watching the same advertisements on the same three TV networks anymore. So what can a person do in the midst of so many different voices?
What Luther advised still holds true. Not every spirit is the Holy Spirit. In fact, there is only one spirit who is the Holy Spirit, and that Holy Spirit is always going to be leading us to Christ the crucified, as Paul says in our epistle reading today. Be very careful with visions or dreams. Visions and dreams can come from evil spirits. Be even more careful about people who brag not in the Lord, not in their weakness, but in themselves. It’s not hard to say you have the Holy Spirit, and therefore are empowered to lead others to supposedly higher and better things. Don’t take drugs, psychedelic or otherwise. Don’t engage in spiritual exercises. Be very skeptical about energies, crystals, modern versions of clean and unclean foods, and so on.
If you’re bored, if you want to get busy with something, try getting busy with the Ten Commandments. There you have an inexhaustible guide for good works. Or turn to Jesus’s words, for example, in the Sermon on the Mount. And learn about Jesus’s saving work from Jesus’s own words in John’s Gospel, or from Romans, or from Galatians. Or you can go to the first two chief parts of our catechism, the Ten Commandment and the Creed, which summarize these things.
This, I would argue, is very much akin to what Paul has been saying in our epistle readings these past few weeks. He tells these Corinthians—who, by the way, are very much like us, very much itching for power, for enlightenment, for excellence—Paul tells these Corinthians: “We preach Christ and him crucified.” Or, as he says in today’s reading, “When I came among you I didn’t come with high-powered, secret teachings. I came with the ABCs of Christ crucified for you. In fact, I didn’t want to know anything else among you except these ABCs, that you are a sinner for whom Christ died to save.” And where can you learn that you are a sinner? You learn that from the Ten Commandments. And where do you learn that God is the justifier of sinners in Christ the crucified? You learn that from the Creed.
A trait that seems to be common among false spiritual guides is that they are dissatisfied with these ABCs. The ABCs aren’t good enough. That’s baby stuff. They want to move on to secret teachings, secret political conspiracies. They like the book of Revelation. They often have peculiar notions about food. They hate the idea of just being common and run of the mill. They don’t want to be just sinners who are saved by Christ the crucified. They want to be powerful and great, saving this current generation and the generations to come by their ever-so-important discoveries and abilities.
I hope that you can see from the readings we’ve had from 1 Corinthians that Paul is not like that: “Who is Paul?” “Who is Apollos?” They are nothing—and worse than nothing—if they are not leading poor, miserable sinners to the forgiveness of sins in Christ the crucified. This is no extraordinary, secret teaching. It is common teaching. There are, in fact, no secret teachings in Christianity. Anybody and everybody can know absolutely everything that Christians believe and teach in the perfectly public Bible.
This is why we must immediately be suspicious or perhaps even immediately flat-out reject any teachings that come from visions or drugs or so-called Holy Spirit filled people. Such things are not out in the open and common. Who can see the Holy Spirit in another person? Whatever is not out in the open and common—openly taught in the Scriptures—seems to contradict Paul’s statement: “I had no intention of knowing anything among you except Jesus Christ, and him crucified.”
Knowing your spiritual ABCs, never ceasing to learn them, never graduating from them, that is, repenting and believing, seems to me to be the main thrust of what Paul has been saying in these first two chapters of 1 Corinthians. Why is this so important? Because the devil’s favorite activity is to dress up like an angel of light and start teaching religion. And he is one tricky shyster. As soon as you think you’ve avoided his errors on the left, you will find that he has already been at work with errors on the right. It is not grand and sophisticated campaigns that prove to be the devil’s undoing, but, as Luther’s hymn famously puts it: “One little word can fell him.”
“Though devils all the world should fill, all eager to devour us. We tremble not, we fear no ill. They shall not overpower us. This world’s prince may still scowl fierce as he will. He can harm us none. He’s judged; the deed is done. One little word can fell him.” Maybe that one little word is “Jesus crucified for me.”
We modern people might not believe that the world is filled with devils, but even those who have a hard time believing in demons should be able to recognize that the world is filled to the brim with teachers. All these different teachers teach us different things about what is good, what is important, what is useful. They all want your allegiance for their program. Our times are exceedingly dangerous spiritually speaking. There are million ways to go wrong. There is only one way to be saved.
It is as Paul says in Ephesians chapter 4: “There is one body and one Spirit, just as also you were called in the one hope of your calling. There is one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is over all, and through all, and in us all.”
So when you are dealing with spiritual things, make sure you are only dealing with the one Holy Spirit, who makes known to us in the Scriptures the mind of God. What is in the mind of God? His saving will towards us in Christ Jesus. There are many other spirits and these other spirits will even and especially show up in the churches—including our own churches, seeking to lead people astray. Don’t be led astray, but rather follow the voice of the Good Shepherd, Jesus, who lays down his life for the sheep. Don’t despise such simple teachings, but have the faith of a child. It is this faith, and this faith alone, which overcomes the world.
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You’ve noticed, I’m sure, graffiti etched into the walls or etched into the stalls of bathrooms. The grafitti might say, “So and so was here.” Often, at least in the men’s bathroom, they are off-color. Sometimes they can be about other people. So and so likes to do this or that, and the this or that is usually not flattering.
I’d like to begin today by speaking about some ancient graffiti that scholars believe is from around 200 A.D. in the city of Rome. Somebody drew a picture of a cross with a man’s body hanging on that cross. But instead of that body having a man’s head drawn atop it, this fellow drew the picture of a donkey’s head. So there’s the body of a man with a donkey’s head being crucified. Then, to the side there’s a figure of a man drawn next to that cross. Finally, there is a caption to help the viewer understand what is being depicted. This caption is of the kind you might find etched into a bathroom stall. It says, “Here is Alexamenos worshipping his God.”
Evidently Alexamenos was a Christian, and this associate or friend or whatever of Alexamenos was making fun of him. This friend of Alexamenos believes that it is absolutely ridiculous to worship a dead man hanging on a cross. Just to make sure you wouldn’t miss his point he drew Christ with an ass’s head. Probably something else that’s going on here is the contempt that Roman people had for those who were crucified. Only losers, white trash, and slaves were crucified. So the whole thing is contemptable and embarrassing. Maybe to put yourself better into the mindset of this friend of Alexamenos you should think of a turd. Here’s Alexamenos worshipping his God. Here’s Alexamenos worshipping a turd.
Because we hear the word “cross” so often, and because we even hear Paul’s words in our epistle reading fairly often—that we preach Christ crucified, we can easily lose sight of the offensiveness of our God being crucified and dead. We, of course, are eager to add: “and resurrected.” I don’t worship a crucified, dead man. Jesus rose with power.
But note that Paul does not have those words added on to what he says. He says, “We preach Christ crucified.” He doesn’t say, “We preach Christ crucified and resurrected.” This does not mean that Paul doesn’t believe that Jesus was resurrected. Paul obviously believes that Jesus was resurrected. He gives a powerful and extended defense for the resurrection later in this very same letter, in chapter 15. But even though Paul obviously believes that Jesus was also risen from the dead, he purposely only says, “We preach Christ crucified,” instead of “crucified and resurrected.” And, in fact, as you’ll hear in the reading next week he says, “I had no intention of knowing anything among you except Jesus Christ, and him crucified.”
So why is Paul so focused on this turd-like thing that is so offensive and foolish? This seems to be what was in the back of the minds of the Corinthians too. When you become familiar with 1 and 2 Corinthians it becomes plain that the Corinthians are a little fed up with Paul. Why does he always have to talk the way he does? Why can’t he be more like Apollos? It’s always gloom and doom and weakness and humility with Paul. We don’t want weakness. We want power! I have the power! That’s a message that will sell; not this turd-like cross stuff.
But, as you will also hear next week, Paul by no means came to sell them anything, much less the cross. That’s not how Christianity works. Nobody gets sold on Christianity. Nobody is converted by the persuasiveness of the message or the charisma of the preacher. That is, nobody is truly converted by such things. Preachers, certainly, can gain a following by doing any number of different things. But Christians are created and sustained only by the Holy Spirit doing a miracle in them. The Holy Spirit makes them like Alexamenos. They worship that crucified and dead ass, that turd-like cross.
What does such worship look like? How can we picture it? Let’s apply it to the end of our lives by looking at a couple of well-known hymns. Maybe one day I will sing this at your graveside: “Hold Thou Thy cross before my closing eyes. Shine through the gloom and point me to the skies. Heav’n’s morning breaks, and earth’s vain shadows flee. In life, in death, O Lord, abide with me.” “Hold Thou Thy cross before my dying eyes.”
Another hymn, “O Sacred Head, now Wounded,” prays this prayer to Jesus: “Be Thou my consolation, my shield, when I must die; Remind me of Thy passion When my last hour draws nigh. Mine eyes shall then behold Thee, Upon Thy cross shall dwell, My heart by faith enfold Thee, Who dieth thus dies well.”
This hymn verse is saying that when my last hour has come, and I’m gurgling away on that deathbed, let me think of Jesus, bloody, gory. Grim death with cruel rigor has robbed him of his life. This very old hymn says that that’s the way to die: “Remind me of Thy passion When my last hour draws nigh.” The one who dies that way, this hymn says, “dies well.”
I feel that we all have something to learn from these hymn verses, do we not? It’s so easy to dismiss such a suggestion for the deathbed: “Uh! Yuck! Gross! The last thing that I want to be thinking about on my deathbed is the pain and misery, the gasping, gurgling death of Jesus on the cross.” Why would anyone want such a turd wafted under their nose at such a stressful time?
The answer, of course, is that this is no turd. True, as Paul says later to the Corinthians, the knowledge of Christ the crucified is the smell of death to those who are perishing, but to those who are being saved it is the smell of life leading to yet more life. For what is the cross of Christ? It is the Son of God saving you. He is being punished for your sins. Jesus didn’t cry out, “Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani?” “My God, my God, why have your forsaken me?” because of sins that he committed. Those were your sins. And the forsakenness of God is what should happen to you at your death if it weren’t for Jesus’s cross. Jesus’s death reconciles you to God, for the punishment that you deserve was instead poured out upon him.
So if we are not supposed to think about the cross of Jesus when we are dying, then when should we think about it? When is the appropriate time to be reminded of Christ’s passion? There is, in fact, no more appropriate time than when our own turd-like nature is being made manifest. What is death but the conclusive proof that we are not God, we are not strong, we can’t fix this. We are stuck! But there is hope.
However, there is only onehope. The doctors can’t do anything. Trying harder can’t do anything. But Jesus died on the cross to set me free from death. He defeated death so that it can’t hold on to us forever. The hope of the Christian who is dying is that because Jesus died on the cross I will be resurrected just like Jesus was resurrected. The one who dies with faith in Jesus’s cross dies well. Such a death isn’t hardly a death at all. It would better be understood as merely a sleep, the lightest of naps, from which we will so easily awaken to everlasting life.
So instead of being ashamed of Jesus the crucified being our God we should proudly embrace him, particularly at his death, as our very own. He died for us to set us free. We are too weak and sinful to do anything, so he takes our place. Thus we are saved by the foolishness of such a preached message.
And make no mistake, this message is still regarded today as foolish. Consult the self-help gurus. I guarantee you that they will not say you are blessed if you do what Jesus says—if, for example, we are poor, or weak, or merciful. Or consult our experts on dying well. I guarantee you again that they will say nothing about bringing to mind how Jesus was tortured and killed. If the world would only be honest, they’d have to admit that they hate what is said in the Bible. It all looks like terrible advice designed to make people miserable.
But let us hear again from our reading. These words are as applicable to our times as they were to the Corinthians’: “But God chose the foolish things of the world to put to shame those who are wise. God chose the weak things of the world to put to shame the things that are strong, and God chose the lowly things of the world and the despised things, and the things that are not, to do away with the things that are, so that no one may boast before God.”
Paul is actually being quite bold and if people will pay attention to him here they will be offended. You think you’re wise? You think you’re strong? You think you’re a good person? You think that you’ve lived a good life? God pulls down all these things with the cross. No one may boast before God.
If we want to boast, then we can boast in the Lord. If we want to boast, then let’s boast in the cross. The message of the cross has this ever recurring refrain: “I am weak, but he is strong; yes, Jesus loves me.”
To go back to the graffiti with which we began, we don’t know how Alexamenos reacted to that graffiti which was designed to mock him. The fellow who drew and wrote those things wanted to shame Alexamenos for worshipping such an obviously worthless God. But if Alexamenos understood what Paul teaches in our reading today, he shouldn’t have been phased by it. So also we should not be surprised if the word of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, as Paul says. The works of God have always been thought of as bizarre, offensive, unlikely to succeed. That was even what Jesus’s disciples thought when they saw Jesus die. Their hopes of Jesus being the Messiah were dashed.
But what we think, what people think, doesn’t matter nearly so much as what God thinks. Lots of people look for power. Christians say, “Christ the crucified is power.” Lots of people look for wisdom. Christians say, “Christ the crucified is wisdom.” Thus, as Paul says, “We preach Christ crucified, because the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men.”
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In our epistle reading we learn that there were divisions in the congregation at Corinth. Paul tells the congregation what he has been hearing: “Each of you says, ‘I belong to Paul,’ or ‘I belong to Apollos,’ or I belong to Cephas,’ or ‘I belong to Christ.’” We know who Paul is. He is the one writing this letter. Apollos was one of the preachers that spent some time in Corinth. Cephas is the Apostle Peter. “Cephas” is Aramaic for “rock.” So what Paul has heard is that some are saying, “I’m one of Paul’s disciples.” Others are saying, “I’m one of Apollos’s disciples.” Others: “I’m one of Peter’s disciples.” As you heard, Paul is not pleased. They are all to be Christ’s disciples.
This gives us the opportunity to take up a difficult topic when it comes to our own church. We have divisions too. Congregations can be divided into factions. For example, some might be for the pastor; others, against the pastor. Some might think we should do one thing with Communion. Others might think we should do something else. Some might be satisfied with the worship. Others might want something else.
We might have some divisions and factions in our own congregation, but, by God’s grace, I don’t think they are too bad. However, you probably know that other congregations in the Missouri Synod are much more divided. It wouldn’t be hard to come up with a list of hot-button issue: Open vs. closed communion, women in positions of leadership vs. women being submissive, so-called “traditional worship” vs. so-called “contemporary worship.”
Often the highly politicizing words of “liberal” and “conservative” get used in the way these things are talked about. The liberal platform solves the problems one way. The conservative platform solves them another way. So then one congregation is “liberal,” and another congregation is “conservative.” Paul had heard that in Corinth each individual was saying, “I belong to Paul,” or “I belong to Cephas.” That sounds a lot like what you could hear among us in the Missouri Synod: “I belong to the liberal wing,” or “I belong to the conservative wing.”
What do conservatives and liberals do when they get together? They fight. Or, perhaps, if they are sick of fighting, they despise one another. One congregation goes one way. Another congregation goes the opposite way. The hostility can be tremendous, as some of us who have spent some time in synod activities have experienced over the years. Ruthless, mean-spirited tactics have been used by one side as well as the other. In my opinion the conservatives have probably been meaner and more ruthless, but such words would be a sure-fire way to pick yet another fight.
So how should we think about this? Paul sums up what is going on with these factions fighting one another in chapter three. We’ll hear this three weeks from now in our Epistle reading. Paul says: “Brothers, I could not speak to you as spiritual people, but as people who are led by the flesh. … You are still people who are following the flesh. Indeed, insofar as jealousy, strife, and factions have a place among you, are you not people who are following the flesh? Are you not behaving in a merely human way? When one says, ‘I belong to Paul,’ and another, ‘I belong to Apollos,’ are you not being merely human?”
Paul says that jealousy, rivalry, and division are of the flesh. When Paul uses the word “flesh,” he means how we naturally are—the fallen, sinful nature that we have inherited from Adam and Eve. And isn’t what Paul says the truth? We’ve all experienced the truth of what he says. Take, as just one poignant example, what is so common in middle school and high school. The kids divide up against one another. They form groups. They hate each other. They’re mean to each other. One wants to be better than the other. Jeering, mocking, sarcasm, and so on get used as weapons in the fight. The goal is to make the other person feel horrible, to defeat them—perhaps even to make them hate themselves.
This rivalry and harassment can get so bad that in the past 20 years or so several of these kids have decided to come back to school armed with guns to get revenge. Every single one of the shooters in these school shootings have been kids who were picked on. Let that be just one proof of the truthfulness of Paul’s words: “Jealousy, rivalry, and division are of the flesh.” They are from that loveless, murderous, evil spirit that we have all inherited from our parents. Jealousy, rivalry, and division in the church are of the flesh too.
But perhaps some of you are thinking, and understandably so, that some divisions in the church are good. And that’s true. Some divisions are good. Paul in this very letter says later, “You cannot drink the cup of the Lord and the cup of demons. You cannot share in the table of the Lord and of the table of demons.” This means that there is to be a division when it comes to the Lords Supper. Those who are believing and behaving wrongly and unrepentantly are not to share in the cup and the table of the Lord. He also says in this same letter that there must be divisions among them so that those who are approved may become evident.
So on the one hand Paul says that divisions are of the flesh, and then, on the other, in the very same letter, he says that divisions are good and necessary. Why does Paul seem to be saying one thing at the beginning of the letter, and then later in the letter something that sounds like it is the opposite?
There actually is no contradiction here, because Paul is talking about two different kinds of division. When Paul speaks about jealousy, rivalry, and division being bad he is talking about how these Corinthians were attaching themselves to certain teachers. The other kind of division is from being divided from Christ. Divisions in the church are not to be made because of persons and factions and rivalry. However, there should be division when people are not being faithful to Christ.
Let’s look more closely at how we should not have jealousy, rivalry and division. Jesus lambasts the scribes and Pharisees in Matthew 23. What Jesus says of them is easily applicable to what commonly happens among us. Jesus says of the scribes and Pharisees: “They love to be seen. They love having power. They love being called, ‘Rabbi,’ by people. But you are not to be called ‘Rabbi,’ for you have one Teacher and you are all brothers. Also do not call anyone on earth you ‘Father,’ for you have one Father, and he is in heaven. And you are not to be called ‘leaders,’ for you have one Leader, the Christ. But the greatest among you will be your servant.”
You can tell that what Jesus says is of a different spirit than the evil spirit we have in our flesh. I, also, have an evil spirit that whispers in my ear: “Michael Holmen is just the best pastor ever. The best teacher. Always right; never wrong. If only others would acknowledge my greatness I could achieve great things!” How stupid and evil! We all have only one Teacher. We are all equals.
And if you want to be great, Jesus says, then serve and suffer more than all the rest of them. Be more truthful, more open, more long-suffering. That certainly is of a different spirit than that of the flesh. Jesus says greatness is in serving and suffering. How it works among us is that the conservatives want to get rid of the liberals, because then we’ll be done with our work and have a pure church. The liberals want the same. Once the one side has vanquished the other, once the mastery of the one over the other is acknowledged, then all our problems will be solved. I’m right. Everyone else is wrong.
But notice how Paul includes himself in what he says. He says that there were some in Corinth who said that they belonged to Paul. They were on Paul’s team. This seems to disgust him more than anything else. In our reading he says, “Was Paul crucified for you? Were you baptized in the Name of Paul?” Then he seems to even say that he is glad that he didn’t have that much more to do with them. He only baptized Crispis and Gaius. And, oh yeah, he also baptized Stephanas’s family. But that’s it—and thank God! Otherwise their devotion to Paul might have been even worse! Their devotion doesn’t belong to Paul but to Christ.
The same thing is true with me. If I were to cease to be your pastor because I died or was called to some other place, there is a part of me that would like you all to say, “Pastor Holmen was the best pastor ever.” And there’s a part of me that would like it if you’d compare the next pastor to me and say, “Our new pastor isn’t nearly as good as Pastor Holmen was.” But this is evil. To act that way is to act like those evil, cool kids in school. They think they’re the best. And why are they the best? Is it because they love so much, because they serve so much? No. It’s because they’re so cool, so smart—if only everyone were like them as though they were little gods. That is obviously of the flesh.
The Holy Spirit, on the other hand, convinces us that we have one Teacher, and one Father, and one Leader, and that leader is Jesus Christ. Paul speaks very passionately at the beginning of our reading: “Brothers, I am making an appeal to you using the Name of our Lord Jesus Christ. I ask that you all express the same view and have not any divisions among you, but that you be joined together in the same mind and in the same judgment.” How does Paul want them to be joined together with the same mind and the same judgment? Does he want them all to be following him? No! He explicitly rejects that. Who is Paul? Who is Michael Holmen? They are nothing unless they are pointing away from themselves. They are nothing unless they are helping people to trust more and more in Jesus. In fact, Paul and Michael Holmen would be enemies of Jesus if they would seek for themselves partisans and disciples, instead of pointing people to Jesus.
And, supposing something like that were to happen and go on unchecked, it would be necessary for there to be a division. Division is good and necessary when people are not following Christ, but are following someone or something else instead. “What has darkness to do with light?” Paul says. Jesus says, “Whoever is not with me is against me, and whoever does not gather with me, scatters.”
Now let’s think again about the divisions that exist among us. It is very easy and convenient to divide into groups: “I belong to Ft. Wayne.” “I belong to St. Louis.” “I’m a liberal.” “I’m a conservative.” Behind these labels is the belief that if only we can rally our forces, get the right people elected, politicking meanly and ruthlessly, then we will stride gloriously into a golden age. Against such silly but powerful persuasive dreams we must sober up with Paul’s statement: “I came to preach Christ crucified.”
Christ the crucified doesn’t seem like it will work. It has never seemed like it will work. Jesus’s disciples lost their faith in him as the Christ when he was crucified. But Christ crucified is the power of God unto salvation.
With Jesus as our Savior instead of ourselves or our own party as the Savior that means that we can be open, loving, accepting, merciful, kind, cheerful, optimistic, and so on. This can be a real challenge for people like me who can be defensive or suspicious. It is very helpful to others to get to know Christ when we are open, kind, and gracious. Paul, I believe, was like that.
But we also know what’s true and not true. Our goal should not be just to impress people with how nice we are. Is niceness the Savior? No. Our loyalty is to Christ the crucified. It is only in Christ the crucified that there is wisdom and power. It is only in him that there is true unity and goodness. And so if there are people who don’t want to submit to Christ and his Gospel, and if they won’t repent, then division from them is not only necessary, it is good. But we must be careful that this is because they are not following Christ, and not because they don’t belong to our own little club. The closer and more faithful we are to Jesus, the better.
To critique and correct the Corinthians is a large part of why Paul writes this letter. If you are al all familiar with 1 and 2 Corinthians, then you know that he is not just telling them what a great job they are all doing! No, he has many struggles with these people. He even writes a letter to them in tears. He strives mightily. He suffers much. But this was not so that he could create a Pauline appreciation society. It was so that they would believe more and more in Christ the crucified.
So also with us. We would do very poorly if we were striving to create a Missouri Synod appreciation society, or be a conservative congregation, or a traditional congregation. None of these things are our Savior. Jesus alone is our Savior.
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Today I’d like to look closely at our epistle reading. We heard the opening verses of St. Paul’s letter to the Corinthians. These words address what is fundamental about being a Christian. It is helpful to know what is fundamental. When we lose sight of what is fundamental we get confused. What are we really about? What is going on? How should I see myself and my future? These are fundamental questions that Paul answers in our reading this morning.
Before we get into the particulars, I’d like to give you an overall statement that I’d like you to remember. The shortest, most fundamental Christian creed, or statement of faith, is: “I believe that Jesus Christ is my Lord.” Everything that we will be talking about is an elaboration of that statement: Jesus Christ is my Lord.
Let’s look at Paul’s words more closely. I’d like to begin with his “to” statement. The very beginning of the letter says, “From Paul.” Then he says, “to the gathering of God which exists in the town of Corinth.” Then he goes on to describe them: “sanctified, that is, made holy in Christ Jesus, called ‘holy ones.’”
Let’s talk about what it means to be holy. The word “holy” often is misused. People will talk about having sacred or holy experiences—during a concert or while seeing a beautiful landscape. This makes holiness almost a synonym for special, serious, or very beautiful things. The main this I’d like you to understand about holiness is that it is something that is 100% God’s own property. We sing in the Gloria: “Thou only art holy, Thou only art the Lord.” God alone is holy, and then those things are holy to which God communicates his own holiness. When God communicates his holiness to other things, then those things become holy. Since God is the only source for holiness, without that connection to God, nothing can be holy.
So if we go back to Paul’s words he says, “to the gathering of God in Corinth, to those who are sanctified, that is, made holy in Christ Jesus, called saints, that is, called holy ones.” These people, Paul says, are holy in Christ Jesus. God has communicated to them his own holiness. Then he goes on: “Along with everyone in every place who call on the Name of our Lord Jesus Christ, who is both their Lord and our Lord.” The Corinthians are holy, but it is not just them. Whoever calls on the Name of the Lord will be saved.
This is important for correctly understanding what the Holy Christian Church is. We say in the Creed, “I believe in the Holy Christian Church.” The Holy Christian Church is made up of all those who have faith in Jesus—all those who call upon his Name as their Lord. Each individual who hears the Gospel, hears the voice of the Good Shepherd, and follows him, such an individual is a member of the Body of Christ, the Holy Christian Church.
So Paul is connecting these Corinthians to all the others who believe that Jesus Christ is their Lord. He is also connecting us to all these others as well. It doesn’t matter who the other people might be. They could be rich or poor, on different continents, of different races and skin colors, we are all one in Jesus. We are all made holy in Jesus.
It is even the case that people from different church bodies and denominations make up the Holy Christian Church. There are so many different church bodies with so many different teachings and emphases. Nevertheless, if the Gospel, the good news that Jesus is the Savior of sinners, is present in these places, then, by the power of the Holy Spirit in that Word there will be believers in Jesus as their Lord.
This does not mean that it doesn’t matter what church a person might attend and belong to. It is a grave and unbelievably destructive sin when the Word of God is falsified in any way by anybody or any church body. It is breaking the second commandment. The very first petition of the Lord’s Prayer is for God to bless us with his Word in its truth and purity, and that we, as children of God, may lead holy lives according to it. One of the reasons why Paul writes to the Corinthians is so that they may be corrected concerning a whole host of false practices and errors that are present in their congregation.
So when I say that wherever the Gospel is, there are Christians, don’t misunderstand me to be saying that this is some easy prerequisite. Almost every church has the Gospel, so no need to worry or talk about anything else. What I’d like you to understand is that the Gospel is so extraordinary and powerful that it brings about salvation even where there are many and grievous sins. And the worst sins are spiritual sins, the sins against the first table of the Law, but those who call on the Name of Jesus, as Paul says, wherever they might be, are saved, are made holy. If we have been made holy, If we actually believe, then we certainly don’t want to make friends with stuff that perverts and destroys that which is true and saving. The Gospel, when it is correctly understood and believed, will not make us apathetic, lazy, and indifferent. It will make us zealous for what is good—good for us and good for others.
So Paul opens his letter by tying together these Corinthians and also us with everybody else who calls on Jesus as their Lord. Then he gives them a blessing: “Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ!” As Christians we live by being blessed like this. We live by God saying, “I forgive you. My grace and my peace, I give to you.”
Paul goes on to speak about how they’ve been blessed: “I always thank my God for you because of the grace of God given to you in Christ Jesus.” Paul gives thanks, not for himself or some boon that has come to him, but for them. Paul is always giving thanks. It would be good for us if we would follow his example generally, but especially when it comes to our fellow Christians. Whenever anyone has been called out of darkness and alienation from God to receive eternal life in Jesus, this is best possible thing that can ever happen. We should keep this eternal greatness in mind with our fellow congregation members also. Instead of grumbling and complaining about the shortcomings of your fellow congregation members, be thankful that the grace of God has been given to them.
This grace is effective, as Paul goes on to say: “You were enriched in Jesus in every way, in all your speaking and all your knowledge, because the testimony about Christ was confirmed in you. As a result you do not lack any gift as you eagerly wait for the revelation of our Lord Jesus Christ on the last day.”
Here we get to the Christian’s way of life. Paul says that you were made rich in Jesus in every way. We all want to be rich, don’t we? If we could choose between being rich or poor, wouldn’t we choose to be rich? And in this quest to become rich—whether that be rich in money, rich in prestige, rich in good looks, what-have-you—to try to get rich we put in a lot of thinking and effort. But Paul says you are made rich in Jesus in every way.
How so? Jesus makes you holy. God’s holiness is communicated to you. God, who is love, pours into you his love. Instead of becoming rich by exploiting other people, you have the opportunity to make other people happy instead of just yourself by loving them. You could become rich in many different ways by dedicating your life to any number of different pursuits. No matter what your ambitions might be, though, they are destined to decay and pass away in the grave. Not so with Jesus. Jesus makes you rich in that which is eternal, in love.
You’re familiar with one of Jesus’s sayings in this regard. He says, “Do not lay up treasures for yourselves on earth, where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal. But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where moth and rust do not destroy, and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.”
That saying from Jesus is the kind of thing that Paul is talking about when he says that you have been enriched in Christ in every way. You no longer have to be a slave to your own desires and your own ambitions. You can live for others in love, in suffering, and in sacrifice.
And Paul says that the Corinthians have been enriched in their speaking and their knowledge. To be rich in speaking and in knowledge is to say and believe the kind of thing that we just quoted from Jesus. If you want eternal knowledge, I don’t recommend that you read the Wall Street Journal or self-help books. You already know the way to blessedness, that is, to happiness. The one who loves the most wins. The one who loves the most is like Jesus.
And Jesus is coming again. Paul says, “You do not lack any gift as you eagerly wait for the revealing of our Lord Jesus Christ.” Eagerly waiting for Jesus our Lord to be revealed—“When is he coming? Is he here yet?—this is not foolish, but wise. Whenever we eagerly await something, we are quite active. When Grandma and Grandpa are coming we get ready for their visit. We greet them at the door. So it is with the waiting for Jesus too. You don’t want to be in the basement playing video games. You don’t want to be caught naked. You don’t want to be embarrassed when Jesus comes. Jesus has enriched you so that you are not embarrassed when he comes.
Finally Paul says, “And God will also keep you strong until the end, so that you will be blameless on the day of our Lord Jesus Christ. God is faithful, who called you into fellowship with his Son, Jesus Christ, our Lord.”
The Gospel is powerful. It has called you out of darkness and foolishness into light and everlasting life. It has caused you to believe that Jesus Christ is your Lord. When Paul says that God will keep you strong until the end, so that you are blameless on the day of our Lord Jesus Christ, he does not mean that you are done now. You know the secret knowledge. Now you can live your life however you want because you will be kept strong until the end no matter what.
No, he says, “God is faithful, who called you into fellowship with his Son.” The faithfulness of God is in the way that he has brought his Gospel to you, bringing you into fellowship with Jesus. God is faithful in baptizing you, in bringing you the Lord’s Supper, which is fellowship and communion. God will keep bringing his Word to you so that your faith may live off that word. By faith in Jesus you will, as Paul says, be blameless on the day of our Lord Jesus Christ.
To conclude, in these verses Paul lays out what is fundamental about being a Christian: Jesus Christ is your Lord. In him you are rich. In him you are wise. In him you know how to live. In him you are prepared for the future when Jesus will come to judge the living and the dead. In him you will be blameless and perfected in love.
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It is fairly well known that in order to be saved from what we deserve for our sins we must have faith in our Lord Jesus Christ. There are many passages that could be cited as proof for this. I’ll give you just one. Christ our Lord says in the last chapter of Mark: “Whoever believes and is baptized shall be saved, but whoever does not believe will be condemned.” Faith and baptism make for salvation. Unbelief brings condemnation.
Since faith in Jesus is so important, it shouldn’t be surprising that the devil should want to mess around in this area. The devil’s specialty is theology. When Adam and Eve fell into sin, it was through the devil’s false theology. They weren’t brought into temptation by their lower passions. It was by means of their higher, spiritual abilities that the devil convinced them that the rule God had given them was rather arbitrary. Maybe God was holding out on them. Do not think that the devil only deals with filth and blood. He dresses up as an angel of light, puts on his preaching gown, and teaches religion.
So it is also, then, when it comes to what I’d like to talk about today—deceiving people about faith. But before we get into how we can be deceived, we should first know what it means to have true faith. The main thing that you should always remember about true faith is that it is absolutely mandatory that it be connected with the Word of God.
Adam and Eve’s first sin was despising the clear words that God had spoken to them and preferring something else that seemed better and wiser. Faith must stick with what God has said and refuse to be moved from what God has said. Adam and Eve should have told that snake to take a hike, but unfortunately they were charmed by it.
Faith must absolutely be tied up with the Word of God. But what, then, does that mean? Beware the devil here too. It’s easy for us to fall into a chain of logic that goes like this: Faith must only rely upon the Word of God. The Word of God is recorded for us in the Bible. The Bible is an awfully big book. I’m not a very good reader, and even when I try to read the Bible I often find it confusing. So I guess I won’t ever know the Word of God because I’m not going to master the entirety of the Scriptures.
Now the more honest and direct conclusion that should be drawn from this chain of logic is that I guess I don’t and I won’t have a true faith. But since people know that unbelief means hell for them, that’s not the conclusion that most people draw. Instead most people just kind of throw up their hands and say, “I guess I’ll just have to hope that I have faith. I’m sure not going to read the Bible. That’s way too much work and I’m not smart enough.” So what that means is that you won’t do anything seriously when it comes to God’s Word, and you’ll just have to hope that that’s good enough.
This is dreadful and unnecessary. It is dreadful because it is the very opposite of faith. Everything is left in doubt. If you can’t master all of the Scriptures, then you’ll have none of it—even though no human being has ever mastered the Scriptures. This is also unnecessary. Nowhere in the Scriptures does it say that we have to memorize or master everything that has been revealed.
The Scriptures do say about themselves that they are inspired by the Holy Spirit, and that therefore they are profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness. So you should never believe that it is not worthwhile to learn more and more from the Scriptures. But there are some things that God has said which are more essential and upon which our faith is necessarily dependent.
Getting to know these essential teachings has been the primary task of the Christian Church from the very beginning. Christ our Lord says in the last chapter of Matthew, “Therefore, go, and make disciples.” A disciple is a follower or a student. And so Christians from the very beginning have been teaching others the very things that they themselves have been taught. And what did the Apostles and Christians teach? They didn’t just sit down with the Bible and start at Genesis chapter 1 verse 1. They could have. That wouldn’t necessarily have been bad. But probably those ancient people weren’t too different from us today. And so they collected the most essential teachings and taught that to those who might become Christians.
We have a very handy and time-tested tool from that tradition in the Christian church with the little pamphlet called “Luther’s Small Catechism.” I’m not talking about the book called Luther’s Small Catechism with the explanation. The explanation greatly expands the content so that we end up dealing with a pretty big book again, and then we end up with all those same complaints and laziness that people have with the Bible. No, I’m only talking about the original Small Catechism, but a little pamphlet. It is simple and small enough to be read by a child; profound enough to never be mastered—even by Luther himself, who says as much.
And I can even make the material smaller yet. In the Catechism the first two chief parts, the Ten Commandments and the Creed, are what is quintessential—the essential of the essential. These two first parts of the Catechism answer two utterly and absolutely fundamental questions: Who am I? and Who is God?
The Ten Commandments answer the question of who I am. I am a sinner. Why? Just because I say so? No. I am a sinner because I have broken all ten of the commandments. So next time someone asks who you are, if you really wanted to get down to the fundamental and nitty-gritty about yourself, you could answer: “I’m a sinner.”
And who is God? God is the justifier of sinners. God created me. God sent his Son to be my Lord and to redeem me. God sanctifies me by the Holy Spirit giving me faith in Jesus Christ as my Lord. God justifies sinners. God has tied himself up in his very nature with justifying us sinners by the Christ’s holy, precious blood, and his innocent suffering and death.
So when it comes to having a true faith, which absolutely and mandatorily must be tied up with the Word the comes from God, these two fundamental questions tower above everything else: Who am I? I’m a sinner. Who is God? He is the justifier of sinners. If you don’t have these two fundamental things straight it is impossible to do anything true or beneficial with anything else that the Word of God might say.
So if you want to go to heaven, that is, if you want to have a true faith, I can give you no better advice than to diligently read your Catechism—again, the pamphlet, not the book. We give these catechisms out for free. If we run out I’ll print some more. And even within the Catechism itself, the Ten Commandments and the Creed are the essential of the essential. They are tremendous guides if you will take them seriously. Examine your life and your faith by them and you will be able to avoid countless errors and tricks of the devil.
Now let’s get into some of those tricks just a little bit. In a way there’s no end to the devil’s tricks. What I’d like to talk about today is one that commonly afflicts folks in our circles. It is very common for our people to pretty much follow the rules, and go with the flow, but we certainly don’t want to go overboard when it comes to how we are supposed to live. This is a kind of Christianity we can develop for ourselves where we are choosing for ourselves which commandments we might want to keep.
Maybe we don’t like to pray all that much, and so we break the second commandment. Or maybe we’re just really independent and forceful characters—leaders, you might say—so of course we don’t want to honor our parents or the other authorities God has placed over us. Or maybe we have a thriving business, but the successfulness of that business depends upon lying, cheating, and abusing our customers or our workers. Or maybe we have a hot head, and we can’t help it, and anger burns within us. Or maybe we twitter about what is going on with everybody else and can’t keep our mouths shut. Or maybe we don’t like hearing God’s Word, we don’t like the pastor of the church service, or we had a fight with someone at church.
Now realize that all the while, and in the midst of all these sins and more, it is not uncommon at all for us to believe that we just totally believe in Jesus. Boy oh boy do we ever believe in Jesus. We just believe in him so much! Start playing Amazing Grace, and don’t be surprised if you see a tear come into our eye.
Our society and especially our churches would be much better off if there were less bragging about a faith that just might be imaginary and hypocritical, and instead paying more attention to the Word of God. And not even to the whole Bible, which, of course, would be fine, but just the Ten Commandments and the Creed. If we payed attention to the Word of God, we’d then know that we are sinners, and we’re in the wrong. We might repent and change our ways. The Word of God says that the sacrifices of God are a broken and contrite spirit. A broken and contrite spirit God will not despise.
But not a lot of people are going to do that because it’s awfully convenient to ignore God’s commandments while relying on the belief that you are a believer. This is very convenient, because then you get to do all the things that you want to do. You can basically be the god of your own life. You have the knowledge and you determine what is good and what is evil. Pity the fool who might tell you otherwise. And then, after you’ve lived your life just the way that you want to live your life you get to go to heaven. Because the Scriptures say, do they not, that “Whoever believes and is baptized shall be saved. Whoever does not believe will be condemned.” And there’s one thing you know for sure about yourself, and that is that you are a believer in Jesus! Boy oh boy are you a believer in Jesus.
But what if your fake, made-up faith is just that? And, frankly, how could it be anything but fake? Any so-called faith that allows and basically encourages you to go deeper and deeper into lawlessness and sin can’t come from the Holy Spirit. It comes from an evil spirit.
So how should we handle all those breakings of the Ten Commandments, that even Christians with a true faith find themselves doing? Again, remember that true faith is utterly bound up with the Word of God. So may God bless you by having the Word of God come to you so that you may repent. May God’s Name be hallowed among us and may God’s kingdom come among us so that you may repent.
Having the Ten Commandments around, having a true interpretation of them, is a gift from God. Those who despise and ignore those commandments also usually end up having God take away his Word from them. Realize that you are not in control of your own faith. True faith is worked only by the Holy Spirit through the Word of God, so those who make themselves deaf to God’s commandments can end up having God make them totally and irrevocably deaf. He scatters the proud in the imagination of their hearts.
So do not despise and neglect the Ten Commandments which reveal your sin. When God reveals your sin to you, that’s never fun, and you shouldn’t expect it to be fun or easy, but you should understand that it is good and that it is a gift. Thank God that he reveals afresh, once again, who you are. Who are you? You are a sinner. So turn away from your self-justifying and believe what God reveals about himself. Who is God? He is the justifier of sinners.
This true faith, which lives on the Word of God, is kind of like a bird. Birds don’t sow, nor reap, nor gather into barns. They are dependent upon their heavenly Father feeding them their daily bread, day by day. So it is also with the true faith of a Christian. Our faith is in need of constantly being fed, day by day, bringing us to repentance and faith over and over again until we finally die with faith in Jesus.
Whenever anybody talks about faith in a different way from this humble and needy kind of process, I’m immediately skeptical. Maybe I might give some credence to someone saying that he or she has gobs and gobs of faith if they scrupulously keep the Ten Commandments, if they are gathering with and encouraging their fellow sinners, and are giving their all in a life that is lived in God. But that’s not what’s usually going on. Instead, they talk about how much faith they have for the very purpose of you leaving them alone. They don’t want to hear God’s commandments. They don’t want to repent or change. They’ve been tricked.
Instead of boasting about how strong your faith is, I think it is much closer to the truth to boast about how good God has been to you by faithfully bringing his Word to you. This is what is behind Paul’s advice that if we are going to boast, we should boast about our weaknesses. Christians are thankful when they realize how God has pulled them out of the pit of unrepentance and unbelief again and again. And we should believe that God will continue to be faithful to us, bringing his Word to us. We shouldn’t live in terror of God withdrawing himself from us. On the other hand, when God speaks to us we should listen. Don’t make yourself deaf to it or remove yourself from it, lest God should remove himself from you.
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It is customary for the family to provide input as to the hymns and Scripture readings that are used during the funeral service. So it is also today. The hymns were chosen by the family. The readings, also, were from their input, especially the second reading from Ephesians about marriage. That was because Larry and Jeanette were married for 57 years. The Gospel reading, John 3:36, was chosen because Lance saw this reference on a billboard when he learned that his father had died.
I’m grateful for the input. These are all fine selections, teaching us much. And that, I believe, is one of the most important opportunities that a funeral is to provide. We can learn from God’s Word stuff that will help us poor sinners escape God’s judgement by believing in Jesus. But I’ve had to put a lot of thought into what I should say this morning. Sometimes we pastors have to work harder at some sermons compared to other sermons, and this is a sermon that I’ve thought a lot about.
I’d like to speak with you especially about one thing that has been on my mind. I really wanted to do justice to what is said in John 3:35-36: “The Father loves the Son and has put everything into his hands. The one who believes in the Son has eternal life, but the one who rejects the Son will not see life; instead the wrath of God remains on him.” Those are very strong words, full of truth. They are blunt words, you might even say: “The one who believes in the Son has eternal life, but the one who rejects the Son will not see life; instead the wrath of God remains on him.”
So what are we to make of these words? And what are we to make of these words even when it comes to Larry? Larry grew up Catholic, but then he wasn’t a church-goer for almost all of his adult life. Forgive me for being a little blunt, but that wasn’t right. It’s not hard for a person to say that he or she believes in Jesus, but I’m not sure I know what that means if that person at the same time doesn’t ever want to hear what Jesus has said, doesn’t want to gather with fellow believers, and doesn’t want to receive the Lord’s Supper. A disciple, a follower of Jesus, receives Jesus’s words and puts his or her trust in him.
But about a year and a half ago things changed in this regard with Larry. I won’t go into all the details about how it all came about, but Larry and Jeanette agreed to receive Catechism instruction from me. We spent many hours together. We thoroughly went through the Ten Commandments, the Creed, the Lord’s Prayer, and the sacraments. These are the essential teachings of Christianity. At the end of the instruction Larry was free to continue on as he had before. Nobody forced Larry to do anything. But he voluntarily and solemnly declared that he believed. What the Catechism teaches is true, he solemnly said. He became a member of this congregation. From that point on he regularly confessed his sins, was absolved, and received the Lord’s Supper. He received the Lord’s Supper, in fact, just about a week before he died.
Now what is important about everything that I have just said is not that he has accomplished something. What’s important is not even him becoming a member of this congregation. What was important behind all of that activity was that God’s truth from the Scriptures was being delivered to Larry. God, in his providence, caused this truth of the Scriptures to be taught to him. I was just but one instrument that God used for that process. And God gave Larry the gift of faith to make this truth his own.
And what is the content of this truth? You heard the heart of that truth in our Gospel reading: “The Father loves the Son and has put everything into his hands. The one who believes in the Son has eternal life, but the one who rejects the Son will not see life; instead the wrath of God remains on him.” Or, there is an excellent description of God’s truth a little bit earlier in John chapter 3: “God loved the world in this way that he gave his only-begotten Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through him.”
Knowing that God has wrath, that is, anger, because of our sins is not something that is commonly known and commonly believed. You have to be taught that. And understanding the love that God has for sinners so that we do not perish eternally as we deserve is especially not common. In fact none of us, including myself, truly understand that love of God. Only now is Larry gaining a fuller understanding of that love. He understands the love of God now better than any of us because he now sees God, and sin and doubt no longer stand in the way.
Now maybe everything I’ve said so far might strike some of you as strange, as not really being Larry. You didn’t know Larry as a church-goer. Isn’t this pastor blathering on about his own stuff, and not giving a fitting tribute to Larry? Just this last week, for example, I heard from a former co-worker that Larry was a very good electrician. Shouldn’t we be saying more about that kind of stuff?
I can understand someone thinking that I’m not really getting at who Larry is, but let me perhaps give you another way of thinking about it. Do any of us really know one another? We know ourselves somewhat, but that’s not really what other people know. We show a certain side of ourselves to others, but we all know that there are things about ourselves that nobody else knows. Nobody else, that is, beside God. God, in fact, knows each of us better than we know ourselves.
God knowing us better than we know ourselves can actually be a very frightening thought. There are things that we have done that nobody else knows about. We’d be deeply ashamed if anybody else found out. All the while, of course, God knows full well what we’ve done. What does God think about us, knowing all this?
But listen to what the angel said on Christmas night. I talked to Larry about this the last time I saw him, just a day after Christmas. Jesus was just born and the angel came to announce that fact to the shepherds. When the shepherds saw they angel they were terrified. But the angel said, “Do not be afraid, for I bring you glad tidings of great joy which shall be for all people. For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is Christ the Lord.”
Do not be afraid. A Savior has been born for you. God knows us better than we know ourselves. Nothing is secret to him. And yet God has a strange love for us sinners. The glad tidings of great joy which is for all people is that Jesus is the Savior of sinners. Jesus took on himself our sins, suffering and dying in our place, being crushed by the wrath of God for the sins that we have committed. In this way reconciliation has taken place between us sinners and God. Therefore, even though we are sinners, when we believe in Jesus, we may even enjoy the thought of God knowing everything about us. Yes, God knows our sins, but for those who believe and are baptized, the wrath of God is not upon them. Those sins have been forgiven.
All the relationships that you all have had with Larry are important and good. They are gifts from our generous God. But Larry’s relationship with God is even more important, just as your relationship with God is the most important. The truth of God that Larry heard, received, and confessed as his own is also available to you. Imagine God knowing everything about you, absolutely everything—more than anyone can possibly know about you including yourself—and yet God receiving you and welcoming you when you repent and believe in Jesus. And this is not just something that must be left to the imagination. It is the truth. Jesus has made it so by his death and his resurrection.
There is no higher, better, or profounder thing that I can say about Larry than that God has taken Larry to himself in peace. Larry is someone for whom Christ died, and Christ has died for all of you as well. He did this to set you free from death and hell. And so we will commit Larry’s body to the ground today in the sure and certain hope of the resurrection of that body on the last day. God’s goodness and mercy has overflowed to Larry, and the way that Larry received that goodness and mercy is through the truthfulness of God’s Word in his Scriptures and Sacraments. May you also receive that truth so that you may be reunited with Larry, and, even more importantly, that you may see God.
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The relationship that we human beings have with God is of the greatest possible concern. Even though how we stand with God is so important, it seems that our fallen, sinful nature makes us very sleepy about this standing. There is nothing more common and natural than for people not to think about God or to think about how God is regarding them. All manner of different things capture and hold our attention instead. It’s not hard for hours, days, maybe even weeks to go by without giving a thought to God, his commandments, or his promises. Instead our minds and souls might be focused on all sorts of things—maybe they are high, prestigious, and important things. Maybe they are dumb things. The net result is the same: these things keep us occupied and distracted.
To wake us up from our almost dream-like state God speaks to us. We are not meant to be like cattle or any other dumb animal. We were not meant to just go to the trough, eat, sleep, breed, rinse and repeat until we are slaughtered. We human beings are different from the animals. We are made in the image of God. We have the ability to know God, to fear him, love him, and trust in him. We are able to hear his Word. We can pray, praise, and give him thanks. We are responsible to God, who has created us.
Because we are capable of believing and worshipping not just the true God, but other things that are not God, the first of the Ten Commandments says, “You shall have no other gods.” That means we should only worship the Lord as God. We shouldn’t be using our food or drink or recreation as our gods. Nor should we have our own personal ambitions as our god—as the thing we are constantly thinking about and wanting to further. Nor, even, should we have what appears to be much less selfish things as the ultimate ambitions of our life—world peace, or ending hunger, or what have you. The commandment, “You shall have no other gods,” is the same as what is said elsewhere: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your strength, and with all your mind.” This is because, as God also says when he gives that first commandment: “I the Lord your God am a jealous God.”
It’s understandable for a person to react to just this first commandment from God by saying, “I don’t want a God like that. I don’t want a jealous God. I don’t want to love the Lord my God with all my heart, soul, and mind. I just want God to leave me alone so that I can pursue my own things.”
This is, in fact, perfectly reasonable. We’re all born that way, born of flesh, descendants of Adam and Eve. We are born selfish and covetous. Maybe if God can just be my sidekick, my good luck charm, then I’ll let him come along so long as he behaves himself, but we want to do what we want to do.
To have anyone thwart our will is very unpleasant. We don’t want to be told “no.” And so when God tells us “no” we resent that terribly. It’s like when your parents or other authorities told you you couldn’t do something you wanted to do. Wrath and rage well up within us. This is what Paul talks about in our epistle reading when he says that before faith came, we were held in custody under the Law. The Law was our chaperone, our eagle-eyed inspector, until Christ. The Law makes us rage and fume.
That raging and fuming might sound something like this: how can God command us to love him with all our heart, with all our soul, with all our strength, and with all our mind? Doesn’t that idiot God know that that’s impossible? He must be a pretty bad law-giver if he gives out laws that we can never keep. If I were God, I would come up with a lot better laws than his laws.
But most people never even get to the point where they take any God’s commandments seriously enough to have such thoughts. Most people, including most of those who self-identify as Christians, sleepwalk through life. They are perfectly happy to remain ignorant of God’s commands. In their ignorance they figure that God is probably on their side—after all, God is love, right? And God probably thinks pretty much along the same lines as they think. They haven’t done stuff that’s too outside the norm of what everybody else is doing, so they’re probably alright.
This is their made up religion. It is made up in purposeful ignorance of what God actually says. Since this religion is just the foolish thoughts and hopes of sinful humans, this religion is very shallow. But it does have one saving grace: it is extremely convenient. You never have to be troubled a day in your life if you are your own lawgiver and judge. Everything that you do is understandable and justifiable. You’re not bad. If anything you’re the victim.
God’s Law—with him as the lawgiver instead of you—God’s Law, in contrast, is always and relentlessly saying you’re not okay. If, of course, you actually kept God’s Law that would be a different matter. It would testify about you that you are good. But you haven’t kept God’s Law. You haven’t kept the first commandment, to say nothing about all the rest. So you’re not good and fine. And this is like being imprisoned. It’s like being handcuffed and put into confinement against your will. We don’t want that. We don’t want to be guilty. One way to get what we want, then, is to ignore the Law.
So it is with the murderer, the thief, the cheat, what-have-you. Before they are caught they go along on their happy way, as though they were in a dream, as though they were just fine. When the Law comes, throws them against the wall, frisks them, puts handcuffs on them, and throws them in prison, they don’t like this one bit—even though they are 100% guilty! Oh, how they rage and fume! They hate the policeman. They hate the judge. They hate the prosecuting attorney. If they had their way they’d like to be free and throw all those against them in prison.
That is how we all are too when it comes to God’s Law. We want to sleepwalk our way through life with our fake sense of our own respectability, our fake relationship with God, which is always on our terms. When God’s real Law shows up we hate it. We hate God for making the commandment. We even more so hate the one speaking God’s commandment to us, so that we now are feeling guilty. We want everybody else to ignore God’s Law, just like we’ve been ignoring God’s Law. We’ve been doing fine, you see, and everybody should just leave us alone to live how we want.
But, of course, this is all just perverse fantasy. It’s like the criminal who wants to get revenge on the proper authorities who are only doing their job. God is not going to cease being God just because you want to ignore him. The inmates are not going to run the asylum. Maybe the inmates can believe that they are running the asylum in this life. Maybe they believe they can get away with all their wickedness. But heaven and hell are real. The reason why people go to hell is because that is where they are supposed to go. The Law says so. Just the first commandment is more than enough to merit hell.
And if you don’t like that, that’s too bad. I’m not making this up. Read it for yourself, or are you too lazy? You’re not too lazy to cash those checks and take those vacations, but maybe your relationship with your Creator isn’t that important.
Contrary to what you might think, becoming a Christian, being converted, remaining a Christian by having to be converted again and again, is not the most peaceful thing ever. What’s peaceful is to continue on with the sleepwalking, ignoring God’s Law, hoping that you will be blessed nevertheless with your made-up religion.
We see this already with Adam and Eve. After they disobeyed God and started to obey the devil they weren’t exactly happy or at peace. Their countenance was fallen. Their trust in God was shattered. But they weren’t dead either, which is what the devil had promised them. What they feared was God possibly carrying out his sentence of death. While they were in that state, before God came to them in the cool of the day, they much preferred to go on with their sleepwalking through life rather than face the living God.
So it is also with us their descendants. We don’t want to get caught. We don’t want to go before the judge. Let’s all just pretend that everything is fine. To keep up this charade we have to keep God and his Law away. If the Law shows up we hate it like a criminal hates going to jail. Becoming a Christian, being converted, being continually converted as a Christian, is not peaceful and serene. It’s like getting arrested! It is not until we get arrested, so to speak, that we begin to fear God.
And let me mention one more thing. God’s Law is wonderfully stimulating. God has other ways of waking us up too. He can prove to us that he is still God with some rough handling. Instead of God being your good luck charm, your handy-dandy sidekick who is always affirming you, God can be a real monster, so to speak. He can dish out pain and horror. You thought, and you planned, and you slaved so that you could have your life one way. God can make it so that it is totally another.
Again, if you’ll allow yourself to be honest about this, this makes you feel some horribly strong things about God. You can, of course, avoid such feelings if you explain stuff away with unluckiness or a whole bunch of coping mechanisms and philosophies that have been invented to dull the pain. And those can be some powerful narcotics. But it is better to rage and fume at God than to plod along like tranquilized cattle. But to be awake means that you are in the wrong, and God’s Law is bearing down on you like a 300 pound cop who cackles at how you’ve gotten caught and are going to hell. That’s how God’s Law works as Paul describes it in our epistle reading.
But as horribly as we hate God’s good and holy Law, let us also note that Paul places a limit on the Law. He says, “before this faith came,” the Law was like a horrible, hateful, overbearing cop. And he says, “Now that this faith has come, we are no longer under that big, fat cop.” Now when Paul says this, it is not just some wishful thinking—some more self-made religion. It is because of Jesus Christ.
Paul says in another place, “But now a righteousness apart from the Law has been revealed… This righteousness is given through faith in Jesus Christ.” Thank God there is a righteousness available to us apart from the Law. You’ve blown it according to the Law. I think I see that cop lumbering down the street to your house. But there is a righteousness that is apart from the Law, that isn’t dependent upon the Law. It isn’t based on your actions, but instead on God’s actions. It is the righteousness of Jesus Christ. This righteousness is given through faith in Jesus Christ.
This is the very heart of what it means to be a Christian. Yes, you are guilty. You have broken the Law. But you do not have to ignore God on that account. Maybe if there were no alternative it would be better to ignore God. I’m sure the murderer, the thief, and the criminal are happier by ignoring their crimes and whatever possible punishment might be coming to them. But that is not the only option. There is a righteousness apart from the Law that has been revealed, the righteousness of Jesus Christ, which is given freely to any and to all who believe in him.
Paul speaks this way in our epistle reading: “In fact, you are all sons of God through faith in Christ Jesus. Indeed, as many of you as were baptized into Christ have been clothed with Christ. There is not Jew or Greek, slave or free, male or female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”
There is quite a bit that we could unpack from that statement, but let me just zero in on the main thing. You are flatly declared to be sons of God through the one and only Son of God, Jesus Christ. How? By keeping the Law? No, it is by faith in Christ Jesus. That is your standing before God: You are children of God!
Furthermore, are you naked and ashamed of your nakedness? Have you done things that are awful and disgusting—things that are deserving of death? Is that 300 pound cop on you like stink, having almost concluded his investigation? Paul says, “Be assured of this, as many of you as were baptized into Christ have been clothed with Christ.” I know that that’s kind of a strange way of speaking, but here’s the point: If you are clothed with Christ, then you are not naked. If Christ covers you all over, then that cop is the one who is actually in the wrong. He has no business investigating you. You’re not guilty. You’re forgiven. You’re righteous.
So do not sleepwalk through life like the great herd of humanity. They are all hoping that God doesn’t exist, or that they won’t get caught, or that there won’t be punishment. These dreamy delusions are not the only hope available. You have a much surer and certain hope in Christ who was crucified for you.
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I’d like to show you some purposeful similarities between what John said in our Gospel reading and the beginning of Genesis. I’m going to be kind of flipping back and forth between the two.
We can begin by how they share opening lines: “In the beginning…” John says in the beginning was the Word, the Logos, the second person of the Trinity. The Word was with God and the Word was God. Genesis says, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” John actually fills us in about that creating we hear about in Genesis. He says, “Through him, that is, through the Word, everything was made. Without the Word, not one thing was made, which was made.” Everything that is spoken about in Genesis chapter 1 comes about through the Son, the Word.
And, in fact, this corresponds with how Moses describes God’s creation. God speaks it into creation with words. It says in Genesis: God said, “Let there be light, and there was light…” “Let the earth produce plants—vegetation that bears seed, and tress that bear fruit with its seed in it” and so on. There is all manner of Words. God said, “Let there be,” and there was. So, as John says, all things were created through the Word and there wasn’t anything created apart from the Word who became flesh, the one we know of as Jesus.
There is a strong focus on the light in our reading from John. It says, “The light is shining in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it… The true light that shines on everyone was coming into the world.” This is not accidental.
No listen to the words of Genesis 1: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was undeveloped and empty. Darkness covered the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the surface of the waters. God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light. God saw that the light was good. He separated the light from the darkness. God called the light ‘day,’ and the darkness he called ‘night.’ There was evening and there was morning—the first day.”
When God created the heavens and the earth it says that the earth was undeveloped and empty. Another way of saying this is that things were chaotic and disordered. And so in creation, God, through the Word, the Son, set about creating order as the Holy Spirit hovered over the surface of the waters. The first thing that God does to put the earth into order is to create light. Then he separated the light from the darkness, organizing things. He called the light day and the darkness he called night.
And this was before he created the sun, moon, stars, and so on, which were not created until the fourth day. God separated and organized the light from the darkness without the aid of what we believe gives us our light, what we believe are the sources of light.
Thus and so God organized in the beginning. Light came so that there was not just darkness, and God separated the light from the darkness, thereby bringing about order.
Listen now to what John says: “In the Word was life, and the life was the light of mankind. The light is shining in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it. … The real light that shines on everyone was coming into the world. He, that is, Jesus, was in the world, and the world was made through him, yet the world did not recognize him. He came to what was his own, yet his own people did not accept him.”
You can hear from what John was inspired to say the same kind of thing that was going on in Genesis, but on a different level. In Genesis we hear about created light and how God then puts things in order. In John we hear about the uncreated light, the true light, the life of mankind. Genesis has a kind of darkness. The darkness in John is the spiritual darkness of unbelief and alienation from the life of God. Jesus came as the light, to bring light, to put in order that which is disordered.
This is precisely what we see Jesus doing in the Gospels. Jesus puts in order that which is disordered in the body so that the deaf hear, the blind see, the lame walk, and so on. More deeply and fundamentally Jesus heals that which is disordered in the soul. He casts out demons. He binds up the devil and plunders him of his spoil. He redeems sinners from the devil, purchasing us from the devil with his death.
When John speaks of the Son of God being the true light who shines on everyone, this is what he is talking about. The darkness is not just physical darkness. This darkness is much more sinister. It is the darkness that brought about the death of Christ. God sent his Son to rescue us from the darkness by plunging him into darkness. This separates us from the darkness, putting in order that which is disordered.
The way that God does this recreating, ordering, life-giving work in Christ is unusual. That is to say, it was not by normal means. The normal way for disorders to be healed is to study the laws and principles involved for how things are supposed to work. Through normal, natural means doctors, for example, have come a long way in helping the deaf hear, the blind see, and so on. They’ve figured out how these things work and acted accordingly. The normal means for making someone better morally is by laws and principles too. Teach them so that they learn what is good and bad, right and wrong, and then get busy implementing those things.
There is a lot of power in the use of these normal means for setting things right. Doctors help a lot of people with the problems they have with their bodies. Psychologists help a lot of people with problems they are experiencing. We always have to manage our expectations with these normal means. Doctors can only do so much. There comes a point in time when they can’t prevent a person from dying. Psychologists and psychiatrists have their limits too. In a way, even the very best and most advanced healthcare is only something of a band-aid.
The recreating, ordering, life-giving work of Jesus is different. Listen to how John describes it: “He came to his own, yet his own people did not accept him. But to all who did receive him, to those who believe in his Name, he gave the authority to become children of God. They were born, not of blood, or of the desire of the flesh, or of a husband’s will, but born of God.”
The highpoint of what is said here is that we may become children of God. We’ve maybe heard this often enough so that it doesn’t sound too strange to us, but it is strange. How can anybody be God’s child? How can anybody be born as a child of God? We can’t even become a different person. Even if we were to enter our mother’s womb a second time to be born, that still wouldn’t make us a different person. That which is born of flesh is flesh, that which is born of the Spirit is Spirit. As Jesus says in John chapter 3, in order for anyone to see the kingdom of God we need to be born again by the water and the Spirit.
That means that children of God are born through baptism which is then held to by faith. Christ our Lord says in the last chapter of Mark: “Whoever believes and is baptized shall be saved, but whoever does not believe will be condemned.” Paul in Titus chapter 3 calls baptism the washing of rebirth and renewal by the Holy Spirit. This is very deliberate “birth” language that corresponds to what we heard from John. Those who receive Jesus, who believe in his Name, have the authority to become children of God. Such children of God are born not by natural human seed, nor by any human striving, nor by any father’s determination to create a child. We are born of God by baptism and faith, which he must do and create.
Such siring and birthing may sound strange, and, frankly, it better sound strange otherwise you are not paying attention. Literal children of God are born through baptism? Entering into our mother’s womb a second time is at least something we can somewhat visualize even if it is ridiculous. There’s no visualization of this birth that Jesus talks about except a childlike acceptance of faith: Jesus says I am born again. Jesus says it is a second birth by water and the Spirit. Jesus says whoever believes and is baptized shall be saved, but whoever does not believe will be condemned. Jesus makes it so that I die together with Christ in baptism, and therefore I will also be raised as Christ was raised.
Although this be strange, it is God’s prerogative to do things the way he wants to do things. We might want God only to work in ways that we preapprove and understand, but what would that makes us in relation to God? Wouldn’t we really be the ones who are God, telling him how he has to do things? If we don’t understand something as well as we would like, it’s as though we can then just dismiss it, reject it, or ignore it.
Let me mention something else in this regard that’s already come up. God created light on the first day. He separated the light from the darkness. The light he called day. The darkness he called night. There was evening and there was morning the first day. And yet the only sources we know of for light weren’t created, weren’t further organized by God, until the fourth day. How could there be light without the sun, without the moon, without the normal means? I can’t fully visualize what that first day must have been like. I can’t visualize a day without the sun as the source of light for it. But that’s okay.
What so often happens, though, is that pseudo-intellectuals—whether those pseudo-intellectuals have advanced degrees or didn’t even graduate high school—pseudo-intellectuals will rise up and declare Moses an idiot, the Genesis account a myth, and the only so-called proof they really have is that if they were God, they wouldn’t have done it that way. They wouldn't have made light on day one and not make the sun until day 4. It’s as though Moses should have caught that error while he was proof-reading.
Unfortunately the same pseudo-intellectualism happens with Christmas too. People reject the Word becoming flesh and dwelling among us. Why? Because they have some proof? What proof could they possibly produce one way or another? There is no proof possible; there’s only belief and unbelief. All that’s going on is that they are using that big brain of theirs, and they figure that if they were God, they wouldn’t go about things the way that it is described. They’d make it understandable and accessible. They wouldn’t talk about being born again or death and resurrection. They’d be a better writer than the Holy Spirit.
Set aside your shallow judgements and petty criteria. Your thoughts aren’t nearly as infallible as you think they are. Listen, instead, to what the Holy Spirit says through the apostle John. In Jesus is a re-creation, higher and profounder than the creation of Genesis. The light is not created light. The Light is the Son of God, through whom everything was made. He came to bring order out of chaos, life out of death, light out of darkness. He promises you grace upon grace, a new life, and the ability to see God.
The Word becoming flesh and dwelling among us is what we consider at Christmas, and it is profounder than what is talked about in Genesis.
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Tonight I’d like to focus on the angels’ song: “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward mankind.”
Before I get into the actual words themselves, I’d like to first speak a little bit about the setting. The shepherds were keeping watch over their flocks by night when suddenly one angel of the Lord appeared to them. Real angels are quite different from how they are pictured in popular imagination. They are warriors, for one thing, the Lord’s army. They are holy, that is, perfect, without sin. They reflect the glory of God like a mirror. So just as people fall on their faces whenever God shows a little glimpse of his glory in the Bible, so it happened here too. The shepherds were terrified.
The lone angel then says some of the loveliest words in the whole Bible: “Do not be afraid. For behold, I bring you glad tidings of great joy which shall be for all the people. For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, which is Christ the Lord.” I’m tempted to speak with you some more about these wonderful words, but maybe you can reflect later, by yourself, what these words mean. I want to get to the angel song.
Right when that lone angel was done speaking, suddenly there was a multitude of angels. There was a heavenly army. They were praising God and saying, “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward mankind.”
The context helps us properly appreciate the words. In a way this scene is terrifying for the shepherds. Something of heaven dropped down upon the hills and valleys around Bethlehem. The shepherds weren’t prepared for that holiness. You and I wouldn’t be prepared for that holiness either. So it was terrifying, but at the same time it was the most beautiful thing they had ever seen or heard.
It’s probably a good thing that the lone angel came first to help them with their faith. The shepherds were given something to hang on to when the wildness of heaven descended upon them. “Do not be afraid,” the angel had said. God was not coming to crush them. Surely they needed to drop whatever wicked thoughts or plans they might have been harboring before the angels came. Evil won’t work here. They knew that. But God was not coming to destroy them. They were going to be whisked up into something glorious.
Now let’s turn to the words themselves. The first thing that this countless army of angels was singing was “Glory to God in the highest.” Why are they singing that? Because Jesus Christ is born. The eternal plan is finally playing out. Jesus the baby was precious and so highly anticipated by the angels. Now he has come. Hurray!
Anytime anything remotely like what is going on with these angels happens among us, we love it. Unfortunately such joy and thanksgiving is a rather seldom visitor. Children, it seems, are the most easily visited. The possibility for this experience is one of the reasons why Christmas is so beloved. The anticipation and then the joy and thanksgiving of children opening presents is absolutely delightful.
So maybe thinking of children might help you understand this first part of the angels’ song, Glory to God in the highest. Have you ever seen children kind of form a circle and march / dance while chanting something that they’re happy about over and over? Their faces are beaming. They want the adults to see them and smile. Often their chant or song can be a little ridiculous, a little over the top. They can’t help it. That’s just what has to come out because of the joy within. So it seems, also, to me with these angels. Glory to God in the highest! Go, tell it on the mountain that Jesus Christ is born!
The second part of this song goes like this: “And on earth peace, good will toward mankind.” Here you see that the angels are not envious. They are not receiving presents, and yet they are joyful. The Son of God did not become an angel. He was made man, and born of the virgin Mary. The angels rejoice that this goodness is coming to us human beings.
Therefore I have to revise, a little bit, what I’ve already said. Kids know anticipation and joy and thanksgiving, but what if the goodness that was coming was not for them? There were no presents for them. We even wax proverbially about this. The lump of coal would certainly dampen the holiday spirit.
There was no dampening of the angels’ spirit. They are not evil, selfish, and envious like us. They are not benefited by God becoming man, and yet they dance like children. They are happy that God’s goodness is being poured out for all those who would make use of it and be benefited by it. Jesus mentions something similar about the angels on a separate occasion. He says that the angels rejoice when just one sinner repents. These truly are good and salutary creatures who reflect the nature of the one who created them.
But let’s move on from the nature of the angels who sang the words to the meaning of the words themselves. “On earth peace, good will toward mankind.” These words are simple and plain. Jesus himself is your peace, O earth. God is not angry with mankind, but intends to save it.
I’d like to link these words from the angels to some words from Jesus with which you are familiar. “Peace on earth, good will toward mankind,” is very similar to what Jesus says in John 3:16 and 17. “Peace on earth,” is very similar to these words: “God loved the world in this way, that he sent his only begotten Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.” What can be more peace-giving than this promise which Jesus speaks: “Whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.”
And “Good will toward mankind” is very similar to what Jesus says in the following verse, John 3:17: “For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through him.” He sent his Son to die for you. God’s good will is toward mankind so that, as it says in another place, all may be saved and come to a knowledge of the truth.
These words about how God regards us sound gracious and loving. Indeed, they are gracious and loving, but we must not draw false conclusions from them. Peace is promised to us, but God’s peace is different from what people might think peace means. There is a kind of peace where everything is going your way. You’re getting richer, smarter and healthier with every passing day. This is how the world understands peace. Peace is the absence of everything annoying, distressing, or perplexing, and the presence of everything that is pleasing.
That’s not Christian peace. Christian peace comes through faith that God is for me and loves me even if not everything is going the way I’d like at the moment. Christian peace is peace with God even if the winds are howling and the waves are swamping the boat. Christian peace is patient and loving in the midst of scarcity, pain, and sadness.
Consider the holy family in this regard. It is astounding that Jesus was born where cattle might have their babies. I got this shiner trying to shut my cows up in the barn so that they couldn’t have their calves in the cold and the wind, and yet the birth of the Son of God wasn’t hardly more comfortable than the birth a cow might have. Husbands, do you suppose that Joseph wanted Mary to give birth in such a place? Mothers, how would you be feeling if you were in such a place giving birth?
But the holy family was given peace in the midst of much coldness, sadness, loneliness, and even danger. God was for them, who could be against them? And it wasn’t like when they grasped the peace of God, which surpasses understanding, that their negative circumstances were taken away. And yet we must say that through faith there was peace in the midst of perplexity, happiness in the midst of scarcity, joy in the midst of sorrow, life in the midst of death.
The angels flatly proclaim: “There is peace on earth; there is good will toward mankind.” Just because the angels say there is peace on earth, doesn’t mean that everybody is going to perceive such peace. The angels are making a statement: There is peace on earth. There is good will toward mankind. That is how things are. But I don’t think it would be hard to find somebody who would say, “What peace? I don’t see no peace. Where are my presents?”
If you are looking for a peace that the world understands, you aren’t going to find that peace in Jesus. The world doesn’t want the peace that Jesus gives. The world does not want to live under God as his creatures, accepting his will, being thankful. The world wants to be God, dictating how everything must go according to one’s own thoughts and pleasures, never being joyful unless good things are happening to one’s own self. Their desire is not for the truth. It is not enough to have peace with God through faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. They want a room at the Hilton, not a stall in the barn.
Some of you might be looking around, and your life might seem more like the barn than the Hilton. And let’s not romanticize the barn. You know what a barn smells like, don’t you? And so, in your life, there might be some things that stink. Things aren’t how you would do things if you were God. But don’t allow those circumstances to rob you of the angels’ song: “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward mankind.” The angels’ song was true in the stable of Bethlehem. The song is true for you in whatever circumstances you might find yourself in.
And, know this: for those who believe in Jesus the barn cannot go on. You won’t be in the stable forever. Already in this life maybe God will give you some earthly relief, and if he does, thank and praise him from whom all blessing flow. He does that much oftener than people realize, you know. But even if God doesn’t remove difficult circumstances from you, that doesn’t change what’s true. That doesn’t change what God has done in Christ. Your circumstances, no matter how bad they possibly can be, don’t change the love of God, manifested at Christmas, sung about by the angels.
And eventually your circumstances must change. You won’t stay in the stable. Jesus says in another place: “Do not let your hearts be troubled. Believe in God; believe also in me. In my Father’s house are many mansions. If it were not so, I would have told you. I am going to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and take you to be with me, so that you may also be where I am.”
Mary and Joseph aren’t in that stable anymore. They are in those mansions, together with Jesus. They are hearing the angels’ songs, that we just get a tiny, thrilling glimpse of on Christmas night. You remain faithful and believing, and that will be true for you too. What the angels said is true: “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward mankind.”
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Shame is very powerful. Being ashamed, being under the power of shame, is so unpleasant we all try to escape it if that is at all possible. So we try not to let anyone see. If some evidence of wrong-doing comes to light, it is awfully tempting to lie: “No, I didn’t do that.” And since our fellow human beings are not God, those lies work, maybe even most of the time—especially if you get good at telling lies.
But sometimes the proof for the shameful deed is overwhelming. There’s no denying it. The perpetrator was caught in the act. Or, in light of what we heard this morning, the woman got pregnant. How are you going to explain that? There’s only one way for a woman to become pregnant. And if Joseph knew that he couldn’t be the father of Mary’s baby, then some other man must have been.
Mary’s pregnancy appeared to be incontrovertible proof that something shameful occurred. From Joseph’s perspective Mary must have had an affair even though she was engaged to be married to him. From any other on-looker’s perspective either Mary had an affair or Joseph and Mary came together for the marital union before they were married. Either way something shameful has happened here.
The truth of what actually happened sounds a little far-fetched, in fact. It sounds like one of those lies kids might use before they learn to be more sophisticated and believable: “The child was conceived by the Holy Spirit.” “Yeah, right,” the worldly wise would say. If the goal were merely to avoid shame, Mary and Joseph could probably come up with some lies that would have seemed more probable. They could claim, for example, that Mary was raped. Then, at least, she could have gotten some sympathy.
But Mary and Joseph were different. They didn’t handle shame the way most people do. That is to say that they weren’t ashamed. They had to have known what most people were thinking about them, but they were not ashamed. They believed what they had been told: the child which was conceived was by the Holy Spirit. They did nothing wrong, so they had nothing to be ashamed of. This is special and unusual. Mary and Joseph did not live in such a way where they were trying to impress everyone around them. They were living in the sight of God. They were not slaves of the judgment of their fellow human beings.
This is something special and important for living as a Christian. I’ll give you another example of this. Paul says to the Corinthians that he does not care whether he is judged by them as adequate or inadequate. Paul does not go by what other human beings regard as good or useful. That wasn’t going to change how he did things, because he was doing what God wanted him to do. The Corinthians weren’t his judges. It is the Lord who judges him. “Thus,” he says, “do not judge anything ahead of time, until the Lord comes. He will bring to light whatever is hidden in darkness and also reveal the intentions of hearts. Then there will be praise for each person from God.”
Let’s apply this to Mary and Joseph. They were told by God and they believed that the child was conceived by the Holy Spirit. Probably most of their neighbors and friends were like: “Yeah, right.” But when the Lord comes he will bring everything to light. The neighbors and friends probably thought that they were very knowing and very discerning. They were wrong, so who cares what wrong things they might say. What matters is what God has said.
So the right thing for Mary and Joseph to do was not to hang their head in shame. So many tsking people around them had to have thought that they should hang their heads in shame, but they wouldn’t and they didn’t. They had nothing to be ashamed of. They didn’t do anything wrong. The ones who were doing something wrong were the ones who were judging them. According to reason and common sense it is understandable why people should make such judgements against Mary and Joseph, but that just goes to show that sometimes reason and common sense are dead wrong.
Now let’s apply this to you. If you’ve done nothing wrong, you shouldn’t hang your head in shame either. That is to say, if you’ve done what God tells you to do in his Ten Commandments, if you’ve acted uprightly in God’s sight, you shouldn’t be ashamed when other people judge you.
For example, let’s take an issue that is brought to mind by our reading. Now, in our times, it is against our society’s norms to remain chaste until you are married. Remaining chaste until God gives us a spouse is what God requires of us in the 6th commandment, but in people’s popular understanding you are expected to sexually experiment. If you don’t, then there’s probably something wrong with you. Maybe you’re not sexually attractive enough to get laid. A great many evil people in our society might like to shame you, to mock you, for doing what is right. Don’t be ashamed for doing what is right.
Or, another example: Your boss wants you to do something that is unethical but probably highly profitable. Maybe you are just supposed to lie or merely withhold some vital information. The other party won’t know, and even if they suspect it, there’s no way for them to prove it. This kind of thing is incredibly common, so that nobody thinks twice about it. If you don’t go along with what is expected of you, you might be fired. That might not be the end of it either. Maybe they’ll go around town spreading the word that you are some kind of religious freak.
In such a situation don’t panic. God still exists. Evil doers won’t get away with their evil-doing forever. Even if they throw you into a fiery furnace or a lion’s den, if God so wills it, you’ll come out fine on the other end. What you must not do is act as though these fellow human beings are God, as though whatever wicked things they think or do determines what is right and wrong. If you are doing right according to what God has said, then you must not be ashamed. Hold your head up high, like Mary and Joseph, even if everybody else is saying, “Yeah, right.”
But we should deal with how we should handle the other side of shame too. Unfortunately very few, or probably none of us are like Mary and Joseph. We are not blameless according to what God has said. We should be ashamed. How should we handle shame when we are deserving of shame?
The proper way to act when we are guilty is also very strange in the eyes of unbelievers. If we are guilty, then we should plead guilty. If punishment is due, then let the punishment come. Let us confess our sins, and receive absolution, that is, forgiveness from God. What is best is to put yourselves into God’s hands and let his will be done.
Here we have to unlearn something we learned in very early childhood. As just a tiny tike you learned that if you lied you might be able to get away with stuff. You could simply say, “I didn’t do it,” and if you had siblings, and if there wasn’t incontrovertible proof saying that you did it, you probably didn’t get punished. You were rewarded for lying. Judgment and punishment are terribly frightening things. In order to avoid these frightening things we can lie so as to avoid them. If you lie at least you have the chance of escaping punishment. If you admit what you have done punishment is guaranteed. Plus there’s the shame that you then have to admit and fully own: Yes, I did this shameful thing.
The devil would like you to keep you being afraid of shame and punishment your whole life through. The devil would like you to stay in the dark so that nobody knows what you have done. The devil says, “You’ll be safe here in the dark where no one can see you.” The one thing that you can’t do, so far as the devil is concerned, is to say the truth. If you say the truth the game is up. Lies are your best friend. Lies keep you safe. Lies keep you unpunished. And the devil wants to keep you in this state your whole life long until the time of grace is over. And he is remarkably successful in this endeavor because it is the very thing we also want to do. It is what comes naturally to us. It’s easy and appears to be the safer option. But it is not the safer option because then you will never be free of the darkness. You will never be free of the shame. And you will never be free of the punishment.
Pluck up your courage to defy that old lord of ours, the devil. Courage has been in the background of everything I’ve been talking about today. It takes courage for a kid to say: “I did it.” It takes courage for someone who has committed a crime to plead: “Guilty.” It takes courage for any of us to admit: “Yes, I did wrong,” when through lies and hiding we could keep things in the dark until Christ comes. All of this takes courage because thereby you are giving up control over what happens to you. You are then at the mercy of the authority that God has put in place for punishment. That’s scary. It is scary to leave the darkness and to come into the light of God’s truth.
But here’s the thing: God’s light is good. It always has been good. It is good now. It will forever be good. Now, during this time of grace, God’s light is also healing and life giving. We still have time to repent. The devil wants us scared to death of the shame, and scared to death of any punishment, so by all means lie your head off. He will say you’re better off dead than having the wrong that you have done come to light. But know this: he is a foul, stinking, and especially pathetic liar. He is so pathetic. The devil does not have the power you think he has. The only power the devil has is in his lies. He has to have people believe his lies, otherwise he has no power. He can’t keep you safe. He ultimately can’t even keep you in the dark. He’s not God.
And the truth is that God is not some ogre who hates you. What more does God need to do in order to show you what his intentions are toward you? He sent his Son, his dearest treasure, to become incarnate in the womb of the virgin Mary by the power of the Holy Spirit. Jesus is “Immanuel,” that is, “God with us.” His name is Jesus, which means, “the Lord saves,” because he saves us from our sins. Jesus was humiliated, Jesus was shamed, Jesus was punished for your sins and in your place. He rose from the dead, thereby showing us that this veil of tears, this world of darkness, is by no means the only life we have. There is a new life where there is no darkness, no shame, but only God’s love. That love of God is already present here and now among us sinners, beaconing us from the darkness to live in the light.
It is telling the truth that breaks the power of shame. If you don’t tell the truth shame is always going to be hanging around at your elbow, ushering you back into the darkness. Telling the truth breaks the power of shame. Telling the truth has two parts. First, that we confess our sins. (Yuck, that seems only to amplify the shame.) But then, second, that we receive absolution, that is, forgiveness, from God himself. We all know that our sins are real. Understand this also: Jesus’s suffering and death are real too. The forgiveness is real. It’s God’s forgiveness. That’s just as true as your sins. No, the work of Jesus is truer than your sins.
So if God forgives you, who cares what other people might think, or what the devil thinks. They want you to stay guilty and ashamed. It is God who judges you. And in Christ he has forgiven you. That’s the truth. This light of truth doesn’t hurt you. It heals you. You may have a good conscience before God even though you have been and are a sinner. Jesus is your righteousness.
God’s light is always good, even if it’s a little scary. Don’t be so afraid of the true and good Lord God that you go running for cover in the bushes with the pathetic loser, the devil. Pluck up your courage to put your life in God’s hands, for him to do what is best. You can’t know and you won’t know exactly how that will all turn out, but you may rest assured that it will be for the best. God is for you in our Lord Jesus Christ, not against you.
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Joy is one of the finest things in life. Joy from receiving a gift, joy from receiving praise, joy from amusements—joy can come from so many different things. Can we ever have too much joy? It certainly doesn’t seem so. Perhaps, then, a natural question would be: “How do I get some more joy?”
That, in fact, is one of those big questions in life. If we could put joy in a bottle and sell it for just a nickel we would soon be very wealthy. Lots of books, lots of blogs, lots of YouTube videos promise joy. You always have to do your part. You have to follow their rules. You have to buy your products. But then you’ll be happy.
And, you know what? This stuff can work somewhat. Some stuff can really give you a thrill. Some of the better stuff might be very wise and beneficial rules for living well. Often living well is not as thrilling or as easy as some of the other stuff, but it is also more stable and reliable too. There are lots of things that can give joy or might give joy, but you also know that none of this stuff is perfectly fulfilling either.
The best drugs, even, with the least side effects won’t go on being effective. Illegal drug use can be very thrilling and very satisfying, but it carries with it some dreadful consequences. Even a life that is lived according to the rules is going to have its drawbacks. The most stable, well-lived lives can get some horrible monkey wrenches thrown into them so that joy can be lost. This can be so much so that joy can be thought of as a thing of the past, never to come back. Then it seems like the question, “How do I get some more joy?” is vain because it is impossible.
But that question, “How do I get some more joy?” isn’t a very good question for us creatures to ask. You’re a creature. You’re created. You’re not God. You do not create yourself. Whatever you have or don’t have is because that’s what God has given you.
But what if you don’t like what God has given you? That’s very common. You might not like your body. You might not like your spouse. You might not like your standard of living. Some advice-givers might then say, “Well, fix it! Don’t just sit there. Go get yourself some joy.” And so our joy gets tied up with what we want to accomplish for ourselves. More money = joy. Hotter body = joy. Better amusements = joy. And insofar as we are able to attain such things we do experience some kind of positive emotion. It’s very agreeable to be on the way up. Wouldn’t it be nice to always be on the way up? However, on the other hand, when we don’t get these accomplishments, we are not happy at all.
So, again, that question: “How do I get some more joy?” isn’t a very good question for us creatures to ask. We are not gods, or, at least, we aren’t very good gods. We are creatures. We are much closer to being like the birds of the air and the flowers of the field than we are to being like God. How do the birds live? They do not sow or reap or gather into barns. Their heavenly Father feeds them. One day they find a meal one place; another day they find a meal some place else.
Or consider the grass. It grows up supple and green. It flowers and is beautiful. Then it dries up and withers. It has its day, then its day is over. No amount of wishing or planning is able to make the dried up and withered plant like the plant in bloom. For a plant to wish that it was something other than it actually is at that moment is ridiculous. The creature is created how the Creator wants. The creatures does not create itself. The creature is totally dependent upon what the Creator does.
But this is a little too harsh of a picture of God for us as Christians. We Christians do not have a Creator that operates as though by chance or fate. We do not just resign ourselves to spinning the wheel of fortune. Our God speaks to us. Our God even became one of us in our Lord Jesus Christ. Jesus, when he talks about the birds of the air and the flowers of the field, says, “Aren’t you much more valuable than they are?”
Indeed, you are. You are much more valuable than birds or grass. The Son of God became man for you and died on the cross for you. His love for you is such that even just for you, even if just you were the only human being, he would still die for you. And for what purpose does Jesus do what he does? It is so that we may have life, and have it to the full. Sounds like joy to me.
Maybe another way of saying all this may be similar to what we heard last week. Last week, in Ephesians 2, Paul says: “Jesus himself is your peace.” I think we could say the same thing this week about joy. “Jesus himself is your joy.” And we can reverse that statement too: “You yourself are his joy.” I’m not making that up either. At the end of Ephesians chapter 5 Paul speaks of the relationship between Christ and us, his Church, as being like the relationship between husband and wife. Paul says that the two becoming one flesh is about Christ and his church. We are his joy. He is our joy. We are one. We are members of his body, one flesh. This is not something sad. This is joy.
And let us not forget that whatever peace or joy we have now in our believing is but the first taste of that which is to come. Now we only know by faith. We might have any number of pictures in our head of what awaits us. The actual experiencing of Jesus our peace and Jesus our joy will be beyond our understanding and imagining.
So, again, there’s that question: “How do I get some more joy?” Jesus himself is your joy. You have been given God’s own Son. He is even one flesh with you. This joy is good and stable. It is life-giving and never-ending.
But what if we were to say: “I don’t want that joy?” Contrary to what you might think, that is not at all uncommon. How else can unfaithfulness be explained? Why do people quit wanting to receive the Lord’s Supper? Why do people quit hearing Jesus’s Word? Why do people quit praying? Why do they quit thanking and praising? They don’t want to. They don’t want that joy. They want some other joy. That joy might be a hotter body. It might be success. It might be a better job. It might be amusements. It might be a stupor from one addiction or another to keep you comfortably numb.
There are high and prestigious ways to get yourself some more joy, and there are low, dirty, and looked down upon ways to get yourself some more joy. Pick your poison. No matter what path is taken, no matter how pleasurable it might be, no life lived poorly or lived wisely can get to true joy. Jesus said, “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one goes to the Father except through me.” No one is getting to true joy, no one is getting to the Father, except through Jesus. All the other gods, all the other potential sources for blessing yourself, can never give you the real stuff. Joy is being with the Father through Jesus.
Because our joy is Jesus we may be different than others. Having our joy waiting for us means that we can forego pleasure. We can be patient when it comes to joy. We do not need to be living our best life now. We do not need to be having all our joy all the time. We can be satisfied with our present life being less than perfect. We can be satisfied with our present life even being quite awful, or a waste, or whatever other bad things a person might say. Jesus himself is our joy. We are one with him. If we are one with him won’t be left behind.
How things usually go, though, is not nearly so bleak. Our kind and merciful God fills us up with many good things. He gives us many more good things than we realize. He certainly gives us many more good things than we deserve. All this he does only out of his fatherly, divine, goodness and mercy without any merit or worthiness in us.
But there is no guarantee—to say the least—that we will have unmitigated joy all the days of our life. In fact, there is pretty much a guarantee the other way. You won’t have unmitigated joy. How could you? You aren’t home yet. You are but a stranger here. Heaven is your home. So quit believing that you can make a heaven out of this earth if only you are clever enough or work hard enough. Every attempt to make a heaven out of this earth reeks of chemicals and artificiality. Nevertheless, many fall for the deception. They are led to believe that the pleasures of this life are good enough to sell your soul for them.
May you not be so fooled. Jesus himself is your joy. You yourself are his joy. So that you may be together forever is why Jesus suffered and died. This means, then, that you, too, can do some suffering and sacrificing. You can do what is good, not always having to maximize your own pleasure. Your joy is not in the fleeting pleasures or recognitions of this life. Your life is eternal life. Doing what is pleasing to Jesus is good enough justification for living the way you should live.
Then, when the time is right, when it is God’s will to bring you home, your joy will be full, and no one will take your joy away from you.
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John the Baptist was a great man. You don’t have to take my word for it. Jesus said so. “None born of women has arisen who is greater,” Jesus said. What made John so great was his trust in the Word of God. John said God’s Word. He wasn’t ashamed of it. He didn’t change it. He didn’t improve upon it. He just said it and let God do whatever he wanted to do through it.
So, as we heard last week, John said to the Pharisees and Sadducees that they were a brood of vipers. He told the tax collectors that they shouldn’t extort money from people. He told that soldiers that they should be content with their wages. All of this, and there would have been a lot of other things John said, was so that people could know what was right and wrong. Then they could repent and be baptized for the forgiveness of their sins. It’s not possible for anybody to repent if they don’t know what’s right, and that what they have been doing isn’t right. So this was no small task and no small accomplishment that John told people what was right and wrong so that they could repent.
And to those who did repent, John was very kind and gentle. He pointed them to Christ, the one who was coming after him. He testified: “That one, Jesus, is the Christ. That one is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. Trust in him.” This made John into the best and most needed of all guides. He turned people away from whatever foolish and sinful paths they were getting lost on in the dark. He told them, “That won’t work.” And then he pointed them to what does work. Jesus Christ himself is our peace. Jesus is our Good Shepherd. He lays down his life for the sheep. He leads his sheep with his voice. Follow him and you’re going to be alright, come what may.
And let’s not kid ourselves about that “come what may.” Just think of poor John. He ended up in prison. Why? Not because he did something wrong, but because he did what was right. John told king Herod that it was adultery for him to divorce his wife and to marry his brother’s wife. “Shame on you,” he said. If only Herod and his adulterous wife would have owned that shame, but they refused. They would have been greatly helped if they had. Admittedly, it is never fun to say that you were wrong, but it’s awfully good for the soul. But instead of repenting they got even. They put John in prison. That was John’s “come what may.” Follow Jesus and you’re going to be alright, come what may.
But John’s “come what may” wasn’t over with either. Eventually these calloused and wicked people, who hated the light of God’s truth so badly, would conspire so that John’s head would be chopped off his shoulders and served on a silver platter. But Jesus says in another place: “Amen, I tell you: When all things are made new, … everyone who has left homes or brothers or sisters of father or mother or children or fields because of my Name will receive a hundred times as much and will inherit eternal life.”
John the Baptist continued to be alright because his Good Shepherd laid down his life to redeem him. John didn’t do badly by sticking with the Word of God that made evil people hate him. He did well. The Word of God guided him to that which is good and truthful and life-giving, just as he helped others by that same Word. God was faithful to John, whom he loved, even as he went through his “come what may.”
But although John the Baptist was an extraordinary man, he was still flesh and blood, the same as us. You heard in our reading how he sent messengers to Jesus when he was stuck in that foul and uncomfortable prison. He asked Jesus: “Are you the Coming One or should we wait for someone else?” I don’t think things were panning out the way that John the Baptist had envisioned. He needed to be encouraged.
And Jesus did encourage him. He said, “Go, report to John what you hear and see: The blind receive sight, the lame walk, those who have leprosy are cured, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the Gospel is preached to the poor. Blessed is the one who does not take offense at me.”
The reason why this message back to John would be encouraging to him is because Jesus is saying that he is the fulfillment of what was prophesied in the Old Testament. We heard one of those prophecies in our reading from Isaiah where it says, “Then the eyes of the blind will be opened, and the ears of the deaf will be unplugged. The crippled will leap like a deer, and the tongue of the mute will sing for joy.” These are signs and wonders that were unheard of in the Old Testament. We do not hear of the blind, the deaf, the lame, or the mute being healed in the Old Testament, but we hear of a great deal of that with Jesus. Jesus is the Christ who turns back the curses and ailments and brokenness that came with sin. Jesus’s miracles testify to the sorting out and life-giving power that the Christ has. Jesus’s message pointed to himself and his work. It is as though Jesus was saying to John: “Don’t lose hope. I’m still here and at work for you.”
It is a great thing to have our faith and our hope refreshed by realizing anew that Jesus is our Lord, Jesus is the Christ, Jesus is the Savior. None of the Gospels report how John received this message to him, but, surely, that message was a light in that dark prison. Everything was going to be alright, come what may.
None of us, unfortunately, have been as faithful as John the Baptist. Therefore our own “come what may” might not be a noble, crying injustice like it was for John. He didn’t deserve to have what happened to him happen. If anything he should have been thanked for his faithful service instead of thrown in prison. Our bed, unfortunately, is much more likely to be the one that we have made for ourselves. We are much more likely to be in the dark prisons of our own making. But, as Paul says, “This is a faithful saying: Jesus Christ came into this world to save sinners, of whom I am chief.” And so we just might dare to send our own message to Jesus today from our prison: Encourage us, Jesus, we who are in the dark. Let your light scatter the darkness, and illumine your church.
And Jesus’s words are applicable to us, just as they were to John the Baptist in at least a couple of ways. We might think that they do not apply because we do not see the exact same kinds of miracles that Jesus did 2,000 years ago. But what Jesus is doing among us is no less than what he did then. If anything what he does now is actually greater.
First of all, there is a spiritual healing that Jesus does now. He opens the eyes of the spiritually blind. He opens the ears of the spiritually deaf, and so on. This is no small feat. The world is full of people who do not see the evil, godless times that we are living in. You see and know that Jesus is coming. The world is full of people who are deaf to God’s Word. God’s Word is so good for leading us rightly and truly so that we make our way through this valley of sorrow to God in heaven. You have heard this Word. God has opened your ears.
But let’s not be content with just a spiritual understanding of these things. We are also at the beginning of the literal fulfillment of the more profound healing and restoration that Jesus talks about with John the Baptist. We have already begun to live our eternal life. That started when we were baptized. The working of God is upon us which will finally culminate in the resurrection from the dead and the perfect healing of every ill of body and soul.
In this way the working of Jesus upon us is not less than the miracles that the apostles witnessed, but much greater, by many orders of magnitude. Those people whom Jesus healed were made well in this fallen body of ours, but our fallen bodies are nothing compared to the bodies we will have when we are raised on the last day. Lazarus was raised from the dead after four days, but that, too, was only a restoration to this present life that is still so thoroughly contaminated with our own sin and the sins of others. The work that Jesus is doing and will complete is altogether more and better. If you want to catch just a tiny glimpse of what that will be like, you can read for yourself the Old Testament reading. Isaiah is prophesying what things will be like in the end times.
And so we have encouragement from Jesus to help us in our times of darkness. Our encouragement is Jesus. Jesus himself is your peace. He will see you through, come what may. Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God. He is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. He has chosen you and given you his grace. He has baptized you and will continue to work on you so that you may enter into the making of all things to be new.
Finally, note that Jesus said to John the Baptist: “Blessed is the one who does not take offense at me.” I wonder if John thought of that message when things got still darker for him. I wonder if he thought of that when the door to his cell was opened and the executioner came in. “Blessed is the one who does not take offense at me.” That is another way of saying, “Not my will, but your will be done.”
We can certainly learn from that too. The way God does things is not always the way that we would have chosen if it were up to us. But God has his reasons. What Jesus says to Paul can also be applied to us. Paul tells us of how he bitterly complained to God about a thorn in his side, a messenger from Satan. Jesus said to him, “My grace is sufficient for you, because my power is made perfect in weakness.” It’s like how the old song goes: “I am weak, but he is strong. Yes, Jesus loves me.”
So stay the path. Remember that God’s Word is what is right and true. Don’t be led astray by bad guides and bad advice. Let the commandments be your guide for how you should live. And remember that Jesus is your Lord. Cast all your cares upon him, because he cares for you. Live from one moment to the next knowing that God is in control of your life. You know the Good Shepherd, and, more importantly, the Good Shepherd knows you. You know his voice. Follow him, and, come what may, you’ll be alright. In fact, you’ll be more than alright.
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Today we are taking up the topic of peace. It is kind of hard to grasp perfectly the meaning of this word. The dictionary says that peace is the absence of disturbance. So a synonym would be “tranquility.” Another meaning that the dictionary gives is that peace is the opposite of war or conflict. I don’t have a problem with these definitions—they are getting at the meaning, but I think they are missing quite a lot.
We have drugs, for example, that are called tranquilizers. They make people calm. The make people sleepy. They take away anxiety. But those who have been tranquilized aren’t living life to the full. The fullness of life is, in fact, too much for them, so life has purposely been turned down. If tranquilizers were peace, all that we would need to achieve peace would be pills and injections.
The absence of war, also, isn’t a good enough definition. Our country has engaged in many wars for the last 75 years, followed by so-called peace, but that has not brought about too much goodness either here at home or those lands that we have invaded and bombed.
I doubt that any dictionary definition of peace is going to be good enough, because peace is a very broad thing, touching on the stuff of life itself. Therefore it is a very religious thing. Peace is only going to come together with God, and without God no peace is ever going to be truly complete. This is not to say that we haven’t tried that very thing—to achieve peace without God.
Think about where people’s minds have been for at least the length of my lifetime, probably longer. We’ve heard, have we not, that “it’s the economy, stupid.” Politicians are to blame for the economy not working right. If we elect somebody else the economy’s going to change. Then we’ll all be at peace.
Or maybe it’s not the economy. Maybe it’s fixing people’s backwards morals, or, on the other hand, fixing people’s progressive morals.
Think of how many billions of dollars get spent every election cycle—ostensibly for peace, but really for people to scream at each other. And then, when everything is said and done, the same kinds of people to get elected over and over again regardless of party. Lately I think a lot of people have started to think that this hasn’t been working.
Yes, it hasn’t been working. It can’t work. Peace cannot be had without God. Every attempt to manufacture peace without him is doomed to fail. The Bible bears this out with countless examples of failing to achieve peace: The fig leaves didn’t take away the shame. The bushes didn’t keep you hidden from God. The wandering murderer, Cain, and his descendants built their cities and discovered their inventions. That didn’t give them peace. That’s not to say it didn’t given them anything. These things and all our other endeavors give us something of a high. Tax rebates and stimulus checks give us something. Political victories give us something. But not peace.
This is even true of that which can bring us the closest to peace, but cannot quite get there. This is even true of the endeavor to keep God’s Laws and regulations. God’s laws and regulations are good ideas—really good! I can guarantee anyone and everyone who would keep God’s Ten Commandments that they will always, without fail, be better blessed by keeping them. They will always, without fail, be worse off by breaking them. This is always true 100% of the time. There should be no doubt about that whatsoever.
In fact, before I tell you how this cannot bring peace, let me just mention that God’s commands are 100% despised by the worldly wise. Everybody complains about our problems, everybody offers his or her solutions to the problems—which usually involve somebody else having to change or suffer, and never one’s self. And yet nobody believes that our misery is because we break God’s commandments. Nobody believes that we are suffering so intensely because we are not honoring our fathers and our mothers and other authorities. Nobody believes that we should love our enemy or that we should not love money. Nobody believes that we need to be faithful to the one man or one woman that God has given. And we could go on with the Ten Commandments. Neither Democrats nor Republicans nor anybody else in the upper echelons of power talk about these things because they would be laughed at as being beyond foolish, beyond impractical.
But even if we dared to strive to keep God’s Ten Commandments despite all the warnings about how outdated and impractical they are, we still couldn’t arrive at peace thereby. We know this from history too. Occasionally, very occasionally, God blessed his Israelites so that they kept his Laws and Commandments pretty well. Even then, however, that was not yet peace.
So what is peace? If none of these efforts bring peace, if God’s own commandments can’t bring peace, then where is peace to be found? The answer is a pretty profound statement in our second reading tonight that is easy to pass over. Paul says, “Jesus himself is our peace.” There you have the true answer. All efforts towards peace apart from God are always fake and always leave us craving the next high. Even keeping the Law and the Ten Commandments can’t do it. Jesus, though, is different. Jesus himself is our peace.
How is Jesus our peace? Paul makes it clear that this was through Jesus’s death. He says: “The Law of commandments and regulations were abolished in his flesh.” We are reconciled to God and to one another through the cross. Hostility was put to death on the cross.
You know how we are reconciled to God through the cross. I often speak to you about that. Tonight I’d like to highlight something that doesn’t get talked about as much: Jesus’s cross is also the way that we as people may have peace with one another. Jesus’s cross makes peace with God; Jesus cross also makes peace with one another. The rationale for how that happens goes like this: When Christ died, all died. Since all died, all were guilty. Since all were guilty, we are all in the same boat.
In our reading it is clear that what Paul has in mind is the Jews and Gentiles. It is highly offensive for Jews to be tossed into the same bucket as Gentiles. Jews, at least somewhat, knew God. Jews, at least somewhat, kept the Law. They tried, at least, not to do the obviously horrible, blatant sins of the Gentiles.
They were different, you see, so they wanted to build a wall between themselves and those who were not like them. Walling themselves off gave them some peace. They got something of a high when they thought about how they were better.
Against this we must say, however, that “Jesus himself is our peace.” History shows that every walled off compound deceives itself with hypocrisy and imaginary superiority. No organization, no matter how high they build the walls, can truly attain peace. Not even the God-given laws and regulations of the Old Testament could give peace.
There’s only one option for peace: Jesus himself is our peace. We are all tossed into the same bucket by Jesus’s death. Jesus died for all, therefore all have sinned. Jesus rose from the dead, therefore we all have the same standing, the same justification before God, which is Jesus’s righteousness.
So it is quite silly for us to make distinctions between one another. We’ve all been tossed into the same bucket. We are all dead and lost in our trespasses and sins—that’s the bucket we’re in. But we have been made alive together in Christ. All people are brought together in perfect unity both by the death as well as the resurrection of Christ. We are all brought together in who we are. Jesus’s death shows that we are all sinners. Jesus’s resurrection shows us that we are all forgiven sinners. Our condemnation is all the same, carried out on the cross. Our hope is all the same—that hope being: because Jesus lives, we will live also.
It is so common for people to believe that they are superior to others. They have the right job, the right food, the right skin color, the right education program, the right politics, what have you. But then there are others who also believe that they have the right this, the right that, and the right everything. So, then, what do you have to do? You have to fight to see who’s right. Maybe you even need to do a little ethnic cleansing or some cancel culture to make sure that your team stays on top.
What you don’t often find is people racing for the bottom. You don’t find people arguing for why they should be seen as worse than others. Even among us Christians who should know better it is almost as though Christ didn’t need to die for everything about us. It’s as though there are some good parts of us that didn’t need Jesus’s blood, that didn’t need the cross.
However, in fact, thoughts and feelings like that are worse sins than murder or adultery. They are sins against grace. They are sins against the Holy Spirit, the preacher of grace. If you don’t want to take your place together with the other sinners in that one and common bucket of sinners, then you don’t want to have anything to do with Jesus. Jesus, then, is not your peace. Your own way of life evidently is your peace. You’ll do it your way. Time will tell, of course, whether such a hypocritical, selective, and shoddy peace will manage to hold up.
As for you, if you will be sensible, “Jesus himself is your peace.” Jesus came to preach peace to you who were far away and peace to those who were near. Through Jesus we all have the same access to the same Father by the same Holy Spirit. Your peace is with God. He has made peace. And so you may be at peace with others, because we are made of the same stuff. We are all alike, and we are all redeemed the same way in our Lord Jesus Christ.
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Today I’d like to speak with you about broadening our understanding of the end times. When the end times come to mind we often think of Christ’s second coming to judge the living and the dead. We think of heaven and hell, the life everlasting and the death everlasting. These are, indeed, end times things, which haven’t happened yet. What I’d like to do today is to pan out a little bit. Instead of focusing in only on things that are going to happen in the future, I’d like you to see how we have been living in the end times for quite some time already. In fact, with Christ’s first coming the end times were already ushered in. In order to show how this is so, I’ll be referring to all three of our readings this morning.
Our first reading from Isaiah is a prophecy about the coming Christ and the coming end times. The prophet Isaiah lived 700 years before Jesus was born. He foresaw how the kings descended from Jesse, King David’s father, would be cut down. They’d become a stump. But from the royal line of David a king would be born. A branch growing out of a stump is nothing much to look at, and so it was with Jesus. He had no attractiveness and no majesty. He was born in a stable. Most people laughed at the idea him being king.
But, as Isaiah says in our reading, the Spirit of the Lord rested upon Jesus. This happened at the Jordan River, when Jesus was baptized by John. This is when Jesus was anointed. He wasn’t just anointed by oil or by water, but by the Holy Spirit. Isaiah describes what Jesus the anointed, Jesus the Christ would be like. He would be wise. He would judge well. He would be righteous and faithful.
Isaiah also says some strange thing about incompatible animals being compatible with one another: wolves and sheep, bears and cattle. We’ll come back to that later. That is the end times work that Jesus brings about. But let’s move on to what our Gospel reading talks about.
Our Gospel reading describes John the Baptist’s preaching. He says, “Repent, because the kingdom of heaven is near!” That is a very end times kind of message. John was the forerunner, the one who prepared the way for the coming of the Lord. When John speaks about the Christ in our reading, he talks about judgement, about heaven and hell: “His winnowing shovel is in his hand.”
A winnowing shovel was the way that they used to thresh grain. When the grain was harvested it was with the husks and the thrash. To separate the kernels, which they wanted, from the husks, which they did not want, they’d toss the mixture into the air on a breezy day. The wind would blow the lighter husks away. The denser, heavier grain would fall to the earth much more quickly. Then they’d gather the grain.
John says: “Christ’s winnowing shovel is in his hand, and he will thoroughly clean out his threshing floor. He will gather his wheat into the barn, but he will burn up the chaff with unquenchable fire.” Here you see that the work of the Christ is to thresh. The good is to be separated from the bad. That is why we must repent, because the kingdom of God is near. Toward that end, as John the Baptist says, Jesus baptizes with the Holy Spirit and with fire.
There are a lot of things I might want to say about this, but I’ll limit myself to just a couple points. Notice how the Holy Spirit is given to those who are baptized, just as the Holy Spirit came upon Jesus according to Isaiah’s prophecy. The Christ has the Holy Spirit. Those whom Christ baptizes are given the Holy Spirit. It is so very easy for us to despise baptism and think that it is nothing. It’s a splash of water. It’s a photo op with the new baby. What John the Baptist says is that it is real and effective like fire, giving the Holy Spirit.
The other thing I’d like to point out is how having the Holy Spirit is of the end times, and the Holy Spirit is how it all comes about. How do we repent? It is only by the Holy Spirit if it is a genuine repentance and not a fake one. The Holy Spirit gives wisdom so that we know the times, so we know that the kingdom of God is near. The Holy Spirit alone makes anyone believe in Jesus as the Christ. The Holy Spirit fights against and will ultimately conquer evil spirits, including our own evil spirit, so that we are not like the chaff that is burned up in the unquenchable fire. The Christ has the Holy Spirit and the Christ gives the Holy Spirit to those he baptizes.
Finally I’d like to say something about the end times our epistle reading. Paul is marveling over the Gentiles who have been converted by the Holy Spirit to believe in Jesus as the Christ. The first Christians were all Jews, blood descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Even at Pentecost, when 3,000 repented and were baptized—those, also, were Jews. It wasn’t until a little time later that uncircumcised Gentiles received the Holy Spirit so that they could say, “Jesus Christ is my Lord.” Gentiles receiving the Holy Spirit blew those first Christians away. It took some getting used to. But it was a fulfillment of what was prophesied beforehand in the Old Testament.
Throughout the Old Testament it is said that during the end times the Gentiles will come streaming into Zion, the mountain of the Lord, the Temple. At the time those prophecies were made, Gentiles would have had nothing to do with the true God. Gentiles worship devils and money. Gentiles do not know the words and promises of God. According to God’s own laws in the Old Testament, only those who are circumcised and follow the Laws of Moses should be allowed near the Temple, and, even then, only the descendants of Aaron should be allowed to enter it.
But at the death of Jesus the curtain in the temple was torn in two. The dividing wall between Jews and Gentiles was broken down. Jesus is the fulfillment and culmination of the Old Testament. His body is temple, the dwelling place of God. His body was put to death, and three days later it was rebuilt. All who believe and are baptized shall be saved. Whoever does not believe will be condemned. The Holy Spirit is poured out on all the nations so that whoever calls on the Name of the Lord shall be saved. Gentiles believing in Jesus fulfills the Old Testament prophecies that during the end times the Gentiles will come streaming to the temple. Gentiles who believe in Jesus are streaming into the dwelling place of God.
So in our epistle reading Paul quotes one Old Testament passage after another that talk about this end times event: “For this reason I will praise you among the Gentiles, and I will sing to your Name.” And again it says: “Rejoice, you Gentiles, with his people.” And again: “Praise the Lord, all you Gentiles, and let all the peoples give him praise.” And again Isaiah says: “There will be a Root of Jesse, and he is the one who will rise up to rule the Gentiles; on him the Gentiles will place their hope.” You can tell that Paul is in something of ecstasy. It is thrilling to him to see the end times playing out before his very eyes.
Paul could see this clearly with the eyes of faith, however, this would not have been recognized with the eyes of reason. Believing in a crucified man who supposedly is risen from the dead is not very impressive to our reason. The Gentiles who were being converted were not the big shots. Slaves, widows, soldiers, poor people were the Gentiles whom Paul knew. That’s not all that impressive. Plus they weren’t even making impressive pilgrimages to the Temple in Jerusalem. Instead they confessed with their mouths that Jesus is Lord. They were baptized in the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Such things have never been impressive to the eyes of reason, and therefore get despised all the way down to today.
But this in itself is also fulfillment of prophecy. Mary says in the Magnificat: “The Lord has scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts. He has cast down the mighty from their thrones and has exalted the lowly. He has filled the hungry with good things, but the rich he has sent empty away.”
Paul says in 1 Corinthians chapter 1: “The message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved, it is the power of God. In fact, it is written in the Old Testament: ‘I will destroy the wisdom of the wise; the intelligence of the intelligent I will bring to nothing.’” God’s continual working among us in his Word and sacraments is an article of faith. It will by no means be seen by everyone. That, however, does not mean that it is real.
So as you look at our readings today, I’d like you to see how they are about the end times. A part of the end times has to do with things that will happen in the future—judgement, heaven and hell. The larger part of the end times, however, has already happened and is ongoing.
The end times were begun with the woman’s seed, Mary’s seed, coming to life in her womb, even though she was a virgin. The end times were underway when the branch from the stump of Jesse was anointed with the Holy Spirit in the Jordan River. The end times were coming to a fulfillment when Jesus was judged and condemned on the cross. End times kinds of things happened on Good Friday. Darkness, earthquakes, rocks were split, the temple curtain was torn from top to bottom. And what can be more end times-y than the rising of the dead? He is risen. He is risen indeed. Jesus is the firstfruits of those who sleep. He is the firstborn of the dead. Jesus then ascended into heaven and now reigns and rules during these end times from the right hand of God the Father by his Word and sacraments.
We are now living in the millennium that is mentioned in Revelation—the time of Jesus’s ruling. That began at Pentecost when the Holy Spirit was poured out on all people—man and woman, child and elderly. Jesus is reigning by the preaching of the Gospel. Jesus is now baptizing, giving his Holy Spirit, causing people to be born again so that they can see the kingdom of God. Jesus is now giving his end times banquet at his Supper, giving his own body and blood for the forgiveness of sins. All of this is so that we may be saved. Saved from whom? Saved from ourselves—our loveless, selfish ways, so that we may become like God. By God’s power we are being renewed in love, which will be brought to completion in the life to come.
That life to come will be strange because we will be completely changed. Here I’d like to go back to what Isaiah says in our Old Testament reading. Incompatible creatures are made to be compatible: “The wolf will dwell with the lamb, and the leopard will lie down with the young goat, the calf, the young lion, and the fattened calf together, and a little child will lead them. The cow and the bear will graze together, and their young ones will lie down together. The lion will eat straw like the cattle. The nursing child will play near the cobra’s hole, and the weaned child will put his hand into a viper’s den. They will not hurt or destroy anywhere on my holy mountain, for the earth will be full of the knowledge of the Lord, as the waters cover the sea.”
“They will not hurt or destroy anywhere on my holy mountain.” That is the hope laid up for us. The Holy Spirit works life and love through Christ. Hurt and destruction are so common. The number of people who have been abused, sexually assaulted, bullied, and so on is unbelievable. Hardly anybody can make it through unscathed. Tragically, flesh and blood can’t learn from this. So many of those who were abused, then go on to be abusers themselves. Like begets like.
Not so in the end times, however. The bear, the lion, the cobra—they should be a certain way, but their natures are changed by the knowledge of the Lord. That which used to hurt, hurts no more. There is hope, then, even for us who have sinned, who have hurt, who have destroyed. Repent, for the kingdom of God is near.
So the end times are not just about the dramatic, obvious signs and wonders in the future. We are already living in the end times. Jesus already is risen from the dead. Jesus already is reigning and ruling at the right hand of God the Father. The Holy Spirit is being poured out, and the Gentiles are streaming into Zion. People are being baptized, and receiving the Lord’s Supper. People are believing that Jesus is their Lord, and are being changed by the power of the Holy Spirit. These current things are the main course—so to speak—of the end times. Dessert, you might say, is that which is to come.
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When I give Christian instruction with the Catechism I warn against using the phrase: “I swear to God.” Very often this phrase becomes a kind of verbal tick. It is similar to how people can fall into the habit of saying, “Oh my God,” or “Jesus,” when they are not in fact calling upon God for help in their trouble. They are taking God’s Name in vain, that is, to no purpose. It is a misuse of God’s Name when we say his Name and don’t really mean it. God says in his Ten Commandments that he will not hold the person guiltless who misuses his Name. So if you say, “I swear to God,” you better be serious, saying something serious and very solemn, such as you would if you were giving testimony in court after having sworn to God. That is the purpose for swearing. It is to say something very serious and truthful.
So what would it mean for God to swear? That is what you heard God do in our first reading from Genesis. We say, “I swear to God,” because by doing so we are calling upon someone much greater than ourselves. There is nothing greater than God, and so God swore by himself. Our reading says, “I have sworn by myself, declares the Lord, because you have done this thing and have not withheld your son, your only son, I will bless you greatly,” and so on. Swearing means we are to be very serious and very truthful. God already is always and only truthful. Then he swears on top of that. Then he makes his promises to Abraham.
What would be the right way for Abraham to receive what God had said? Abraham should believe it. And, in fact, Abraham did believe God, and this was credited to him as righteousness. When God swears, you should believe it. God wanted Abraham to believe his promises. That is why God swore by himself. God wanted Abraham to have complete and unshakeable hope that God would do what he has promised. And, of course, since he is God, God can and will keep his promises.
Likewise, you should believe what God has said to you. God has baptized you into his own holy Name. You were baptized in the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Recall what Jesus and the Scriptures say about that baptism. It is a new birth, whereby you can see the Kingdom of God. Flesh and blood cannot see the Kingdom of God. Only those born by the water and the Holy Spirit may see the Kingdom of God. Your baptism is a union with Christ. By baptism you are united with Christ in a death like his, so you will be united with him in a resurrection like his. By being united with Christ through baptism you receive everything that is his—you receive Jesus’s victory over the devil and death, Jesus’s righteousness, Jesus’s eternal life. All of this and more—in fact, everything—has been communicated to you in baptism. You know God did this to you. God joined his promise to water, so that it was not just words. It was an event. You know it happened. You need not have any doubt.
I could speak more about baptism. I could speak very similarly about the other sacrament of the Lord’s Supper. What tremendous promises are given through the body and the blood! I could speak of promises and declarations of Jesus and the Apostles that do not have the outward, physical element of a sacrament.
So you should not foolishly think, “Wouldn’t it be nice to be like Abraham? Wouldn’t it be nice for God to swear by himself, and then promise to bless me?” That’s foolish because what has been communicated to you isn’t in any way inferior to what was communicated to Abraham. If anything, you have promises and signs that are more profound. What can be more profound than being joined together with God’s Son or eating his body and drinking his blood? God has made his promises to you. He has an inheritance for you that is infinitely greater than the land of Canaan, which he promised to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. God solemnly and truthfully wants you to believe in this hope.
May you be like Abraham. He believed God and it was credited to him as righteousness. May you be like Abraham, but it is harder than it sounds. Believing sounds like it should be easy, but, in fact, it must be worked by the Holy Spirit if it is to be genuine. For some reason we don’t tend to think, first and foremost, of God’s promises to us when we think about being Christians. When, for example, was the last time that you thought about all those riches of baptism that I laid out for you a minute ago? When was the last time you thought about you personally being united to Christ, united in his death, united in his resurrection, everything that Christ has is yours? Has it been a while?
What, perhaps, have you been thinking about instead? Maybe you’ve been saying to yourself or to God, “Well, you see, I’ve been working on this self-improvement project, and that self-improvement project. I’ve almost licked this bad habit, and that bad habit is next on my list.” So on and so forth. By the way we talk to ourselves about ourselves, about our Christianity, you might be led to believe that our hope is not in what God can do for us, but in what we can do for ourselves—as though, first and foremost, we must be trying harder. That is ridiculous, however, if you’ll only think about it.
Imagine if Abraham had done that. God swears by himself, solemnly and truthfully: “I am going to bless you. I’m going to bless you like crazy.” And then Abraham responds by saying, “Well, you see, I’ve got this little project I’m working on for myself. I’ve made myself a list and every morning…” If Abraham were to respond to God in such a way, we’d have to say, “Uh, Abraham, I don’t think you’re paying attention. Didn’t you just hear what God said? Why are you talking about yourself?”
Abraham’s strength and our strength is not and never will be in ourselves. The strength of God’s people is and always will be in the promises of God. God says, “I have done this and that for you. I am doing this and that for you. I will do this and that for you.” God’s actions—past, present, and future—are our hope as Christians. God’s actions, promised to us in his Word, are what will make good things happen for us, and not our own actions.
Christians, first and foremost, are receivers instead of doers. You see this in Abraham. God chose Abraham. God made his promises to Abraham. It was all up to God. So it is also with you. God chose you. God has made his promises to you. Why? Because God loves the unloveable. God loves you. God loves his Son, Jesus, who has joined himself to us sinners. God, then, accordingly, speaks lovingly to us.
You are receivers of God’s love through his promises. I’d like to remind you to enjoy that. God’s enemies, including our own sinful flesh, do not want us to meditate on such things. God’s enemies want us to think about almost anything else besides God’s solemn and truthful promises of grace and salvation. God’s enemies would rather us think about our self-improvement projects, if they can’t get us to think of anything nastier—anything that will keep us from meditating on God’s message of love to us sinners. I’m quite sure that God’s enemies are to blame for why we don’t think often on God’s promises. But we should. And it’s good.
We will meditate on mere human words of love or human promises. I’m sure there’s been times when someone you respect or love has said something nice to you. We like to mull those words over in our mind. We look at them from this angle, and from that angle. Or they’ve promised you something. With human promises, we don’t even know if they can be delivered, and yet we mull them over. How will it be? What will it look like?
That is what you should do with God’s promises to you. Not only can you do this, it is, in fact, your strength as a Christian. The more you think about God’s promises to you, the better off you’ll be. The hope you have in God’s promises is like an anchor for the soul, as our reading from Hebrews says. That anchor of hope holds firm and sure in God, who does not lie. The anchor holds no matter how hard the cold winds blow. This is what we see in Abraham and in all the examples of faith in the Bible. Their hope held firm in God’s promise of grace to them. God was for them, they believed. Many and various things happened to them—even horrifying and tragic things occasionally happened to them—but God remains faithful.
So do not imagine that it is indulgent or a waste of time to mull over and savor the goodness of God’s promises to you. The more you think about what God has done to you and will do to you in baptism, the better. The more you believe that the body and the blood of Christ is effectual, beneficial, and salutary, the better. That is your strength. Hope is your strength. God will not disappoint you when you hope in him.
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St. Paul in our epistle reading says that we should set the deeds of darkness, and put on the armor of light. Deeds of darkness, unfortunately, are woven into the warp and woof of us fallen, sinful creatures. That is to say, we like to sneak around.
Sneaking around is for when you don’t want to be found out. You don’t want prying eyes to see what you are doing, so you hide.
What do you not want people to see? You might not want people to see what you are eating. Maybe Mom or Dad wouldn’t want you to eat that. The only way you’re going to get to is if you sneak it. Maybe if people knew what or the amount that you were eating they would judge and condemn you.
Same thing is true with what you drink. Maybe you are too young to drink. If you drank, you’d be condemned. Or people would judge you for the amount that you drank.
The desire to scratch the itch of lust can result in several hidden activities. We want to see what someone looks like under all those clothes. Adultery is committed in secret. Pornography and self-abuse is committed in secret. The easy access we have to pornography with our phones and computers is unprecedented. There has never been in this history of the world the ability to pour into our minds and souls such unheard of things. They call it streaming, and, indeed, it is like a river.
There are signs that this river is changing the mental landscape of our people. Romance and courtship are dying because desires are being satisfied with pornography. Young people aren’t seeking each other out. They aren’t seeking each other out for marriage—which is what God wants us to do. But not only that, they aren’t even seeking each other out for fornication like in the good old days. What is wanted is satisfied with a few swipes and clicks.
But, to be more accurate, I should instead say, “What we think we want” is satisfied. There is a certain kind of thrill that comes from doing things in secret. That which is drunk in secret is exciting. That which is eaten in secret tastes good. But there is a heavy price to pay. The conscience is defiled. We are disgusted by what we have done. Plus even the thrill itself has something missing from it.
Allow me to speak some more about how we are to be with our sexual desires. I probably haven’t given as much guidance on this issue has I should as a pastor. It’s such a terrible problem, and there is hardly any good advice out there. I’d like to share something with you that a wise man once shared with me. He said that romance is like playing a game. Like all games, romance has rules. So how is this game of romance supposed to be played?
First of all, boys and girls are supposed to remain chaste until they marry their wife or husband. Being chaste means that you don’t gratify your sexual desires either by yourself or with anybody else who is not your lawfully wedded wife or husband. An honorable marriage is the goal, so to speak, of this game. And this game, by the way, is then going to result in children and a new family—not an insignificant point, but we will not go any more into that today. A virgin boy and a virgin girl coming together in the marital union is beautiful, high, and practically holy. It is very near the apple of God’s eye, the great procreator.
Towards this end of coming together is a great game of romance that, may God grant it, continues on within the marriage, but I’d like to speak about beforehand. The wonderful thing about this game is that so long as the rule of remaining chaste until being married is followed, our natural desires are going to put us our way. It’s similar to how our natural desire for food makes us ready dinner. The game of the romance of boys and girls, men and women, is so wonderful that it has been written about and sung about for thousands of years.
In every game there are triumphs and set-backs, and so it is with romance as well. Not all courtship will result in marriage. That’s painful. Experiencing love is exhilarating. There will be highs, and there will be lows. That is what makes the whole enterprise so interesting and captivating.
But you can avoid these highs and lows can all be avoided by cheating. This is something that we can all remember from childhood. If you cheat at a board game, say, you greatly increase your chances of winning. You might even just win automatically with the cheating. But there is quite a difference in the feeling that you have after winning a game fair and square and winning after knowing that you have cheated.
This is what I remember so well from that man who talked to me about romance being like a game. We all know that there is a world of difference between man and wife romancing each other—maybe not always successfully, highs, lows, fights and making up again—there’s a world of difference between that and pornography. Or hooking up. Or moving in with each other. The rules of the game are not being followed. Sure, there’s something of a win, but we all know that’s cheating. There is shame. To one extent or another it is therefore in the dark.
Ultimately, operating in the darkness is always bad for us, even if it appears to hold out possibilities of pleasure. Eating in the dark creates food addictions. Drinking in the dark creates alcohol addictions. Pornography creates pornography addictions. All of these things have good and natural—God-given—desires behind them. What happens to us is that we get deceived. Temptation deceives. Through temptations God’s enemies deceive us and mislead us into false belief, despair, and other great shame and vice.
The worst, but oh-so-common, deception is that we have no other choice but to live in the dark. This is the worst deception, because, like all good lies, it has truth to it. If you only want to eat the way you want to eat, then you might have to do that in the dark. If you only want to drink the way you want to drink, then you might have to do that in the dark. If you want to gratify your lusts the way you want to gratify your lusts, then you might have to do that in the dark.
Let me add some plausible sounding arguments to that last one, because that is especially powerful in our day. You have no choice but to break the rules and live in the dark because everybody knows that the church is prudish. But that’s not true. Didn’t I tell you that there is nothing more beautiful or wonderful than a virgin boy and a virgin girl coming together? There is even a book of the Bible that talks about that called the Song of Songs. Such a union is even how God makes children. Or it’s said that the requirement of getting married is too difficult, and, therefore, impractical. Or that marriage can be hard, and so you need to try it out first by living together to make sure that you are compatible.
That’s like saying you only ever want to play a game so long as you will always win. That’s not how marriage is. Marriage always is a leap of faith. Promising to have someone for better or worse, for richer or poorer, in sickness and in health is no joke. But you as Christians are not setting out on this adventure all alone. God is there to see you through—even when it doesn’t seem like it. It’s not at all uncommon for newly married couples to go through some severe challenges. I personally know of more than a couple who found that the darkness was deepest just before the dawn. And what’s the alternative to this adventure? The alternative is to not go on the adventure at all, waiting to see how God will make things turn out. The alternative is to break the rules and live in the dark.
Realize that that is always the deceiver’s goal. The devil wants you to believe that you have no other choice except to live in the dark. Darkness, sadness, a bad conscience—supposedly that just life. The darkness is not strange. The darkness is where you belong. It’s the only place you’ll ever be happy. God’s rules will always make you unhappy, so never think of them. You shouldn’t even attempt to play the game, because you’ll only always lose. The sooner you accept how hopeless Christianity is, the more at peace you will be. Embrace your own thoughts, your own desires, and coast into the ever-increasing darkness. Such is the sad, sad song whereby poor souls get serenaded until they drift off into the sleep of unbelief.
This season of the Church Year, Advent, speaks differently. In Advent we speak of Jesus’s coming. In Jesus is hope and light. During our Wednesday Advent services we sing: “Jesus Christ is the light of the world. The light no darkness can overcome. Stay with us Lord, for it is evening. And the day is almost over. Let your light scatter the darkness. And illumine your church.”
Make use of these Wednesday services. They are purposely offered to help you, not to hurt you, not to bore you. If you feel as though you have been deceived, and are being deceived about the darkness, what better way to alleviate that than by praying to Jesus, the light of the world, the light no darkness can overcome?
Paul tells us in our reading that we should understand the times. Understand the situation. Believe me, this darkened world is full of voices that want to keep you in the dark. Even if you want to leave, they will try to pull you back. Paul says, “The hour has come for you to wake up from sleep, because our salvation, that is, Christ’s second coming, is nearer now than when you first believe in Jesus. The night is almost over, and the day is drawing near. So let us put away the deeds of darkness and put on the weapons of light. Let us walk without shame, as one would walk in the daytime, not in stuffing ourselves and drinking ourselves into a stupor, not in sexual sin and with partying, not in ambition and jealousy. Instead, clothe yourselves with the Lord Jesus Christ, and do not give any thought to how you can satisfy the desires of your sinful flesh.”
The light is coming. He already has come. Jesus has shown that the deceiver is a liar when he says you have no other choice but to live in darkness, hiding your shame, hoping that what you have done in darkness will never come to light. It is also a blatant lie that you can have no fun unless you are living in darkness. Fine. I suppose there must be something fun about cheating, otherwise nobody would do it, but everybody knows that it is far better to win when you have been playing by the rules.
Jesus has redeemed you, purchased you, from the deceiver, from the devil. His is not the only game in town. His is not the only way a person can live. The darkness of hell is by no means inevitable for anyone, no matter how many deeds he or she has done in darkness. Jesus became darkness for us, so that we should be made light in him.
So maybe you have been sneaking around. Understand that you cannot keep doing that without consequences. If you continue to love the darkness you won’t be fit for the light. You won’t like the light. And the darkness is lame and boring. The adventure of a life that is lived in God is better than the cheap thrills that are had by cheating.
So let us put off the deeds of darkness and put on the armor of light. When you get hungry, thirsty, or lusty, may you look to the source and satisfier of those things—look to God—instead of sneaking around in the dark. He will give you better, healthier, more life giving things. Jesus Christ is the light of the world, the light no darkness can overcome.
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Thanksgiving seems like it should be easy enough. Many parents teach their children this skill early with the words: “What do you say?” “Thank you.” Giving thanks is polite. Failing to give thanks is impolite. But being polite is one thing. Being sincere is another. What if you don’t feel like giving thanks?
Not feeling like giving thanks is very common. Sometimes things don’t go the way we wish they would go. Why do things go the way they go? Is it a matter of luck? The Bible says nothing about luck. The Bible makes it clear that God is the one who does everything. So if something bad happens to you, if someone is taken away from you, if something is withheld from you, then this is not because you were unlucky. God being God means that he does all things.
You can see that in the readings tonight. In our first reading from Deuteronomy Moses is talking to the people about what had happened for the last 40 years. The Israelites were supposed to go directly from Egypt into the promised land, but they were prevented from doing so. Who is responsible for that? God is. Moses said, “Remember the whole journey on which the Lord your God led you these forty years in the wilderness, in order to humble you and to test you.” God humbled them. God made them hungry until he fed them with manna.
Paul in our second reading spoke about his varying circumstances. Sometimes he had very little. Sometimes he had more than he needed. Sometimes he was full. Sometimes he was hungry. Who is responsible for that? Paul was a tent maker. It sounds like he worked hard doing that when he could in order to pay the bills along with the preaching and teaching that he did as an apostle. So you might think Paul is responsible for whether he had enough.
But things happen. Walmart moves into town, selling a whole bunch of tents that were made in China. There are accidents, thefts, riots, and so on. A person could get sick. Well, then, maybe he could get some insurance, or maybe the government could give him a bailout. Maybe he could go to the doctor. Maybe he could go to the psychiatrist or psychologist. And God likes to work through ordinary means, so God can work through things like that in order to provide some relief, but you’ve probably experienced at some point, or are experiencing it tonight, that you don’t feel like giving thanks. Things aren’t going the way that I want them to.
At this point I could respond with “What do you say?” If I wanted to be insistent I could make a case too. That’s not too hard. All I have to say is, “It could always be worse.” Yes, indeed, it could always be worse. And look at all this nice stuff you have. You know there are starving children in Africa who would just love to have what you have. There. You see? Now be polite.
But this, again, is avoiding what is really going on. This is just a variation of that lucky, unlucky theme. You’re not unlucky. You’re lucky. Just look at how lucky you. You’re so lucky. And, you know what? Chances are you’ll stay lucky too. You just have to look on the bright side of life.
So be polite. Say thank you. And we’ll all have a wonderful Thanksgiving.
It will be a wonderful Thanksgiving because we won’t have to bother our heads about God being in control of all things. We won’t have to worry about anybody not feeling like giving thanks. They’re not following the rules. They’re being impolite. We should all just keep it light. Keep it fun. And then the next day we can shop until we drop.
Christian thanksgiving, as opposed to what we’d maybe call “American thanksgiving,” is deeper, more intense. Christian thanksgiving is going to have to wrestle with God working all things. Sometimes he makes us happy. Sometimes he makes us sad. Sometimes he gives. Sometimes he takes away. Luck has nothing to do with it. Neither does having lots of stuff. Shopping is a very poor substitute for a relationship with God.
The one thing the Israelites couldn’t do while they were in the desert wilderness with Moses was shop. There was nothing to buy. That was very hard on those Israelites. They wanted to shop very badly. They wanted to shop so badly that they wished they could go back to Egypt. True, they were slaves there, but every now and then they could afford to buy a melon or some garlic. Not so in the wilderness. The way they survived in that desert was by gathering manna every day. They couldn’t store it up. If they tried, it would spoil. And Moses in our reading tells us why God did this to them. He says that God fed them manna “to teach them that man does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord.”
Does that sound familiar to you? It should. This was the Scripture that Jesus quoted to the devil when he was tested in the wilderness. Jesus fasted for 40 days, and he was hungry. The devil told him he should use his divine power to turn stones into bread. Jesus said, “Man does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord.”
The devil was basically saying to Jesus that he could have it all. He could have his best life now. All he had to do was make use of the resources at his disposal, develop his potential, and then, simple as that, no more sadness. Jesus is basically telling the devil that happiness, that is, the state of being blessed, is much more than the pursuit of property.
Paul also says something very similar in our second reading. He says, “I have learned to be content in any circumstances in which I find myself. I know what it is to live in humble circumstances, and I know what it is to have more than enough. I have learned the secret of being content in any and every situation, while being full or hungry, while having plenty or not enough. I can do all things through Christ, who strengthens me.”
Perhaps that last little bit there sounds familiar to you too. It’s not uncommon for folks to snip that verse out of its context and put it on their walls or on decorations: “I can do all things through Christ, who strengthens me.” Although I have seen that verse many times on decorations, I have never seen a decoration that says I will be content while being hungry, or I will be content while having not enough. I have a feeling that such a decoration wouldn’t sell very well.
But snipping out that verse from its context really changes the meaning. “I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.” That makes it sound as though I can change stones to bread. I can make things just so for myself, however I want them, if I develop my potential—with Christ’s help of course. I can do miracles.
But the actual meaning of Paul’s words is that if there is a miracle here, it’s that he is content in much less than perfect circumstances. Even if he should be hungry or at a lack, he is content. This is not because he is some stoic or because he likes pain. It’s because he knows God in our Lord Jesus Christ. He does not live on bread alone, but from every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord.
Being content and giving thanks in sad and uncomfortable situations is supposed to be part of our experience as Christians. The God who reveals himself in the Scriptures tells us that he is a Father who disciplines his children. Moses in our reading says: “So know in your heart that just as a man disciplines his son, so the Lord your God disciplines you. Therefore you are to keep the commandments of the Lord your God by walking in his ways and by revering him.”
Now suppose that we were at the Thanksgiving table. We go around the table and everybody says what he or she is thankful for. Then it comes to you and you say: “I’m thankful for God disciplining me. I’m thankful for God causing me pain, for humbling me. Thereby he has brought me back to faithfulness and the keeping of his commandments.” That would be breaking the rules for how you are supposed to be thankful as an American holiday. However, it would also be refreshing as something that is true, instead of being merely polite.
When the Scriptures are taken seriously there’s no escaping the fact that God deals with those he loves like a Father who disciplines his son. Life is not a matter of luckiness and unluckiness. Stuff doesn’t just happen. Nor is it the case that so long as we have enough resources at our disposal we can keep ourselves happy.
It is instead the case that God makes us hungry so that we may be fed. He makes us sad so that we may be glad. The bones that he breaks eventually make us rejoice. Through all of this it is so that we may learn that we do not live by bread alone, but from every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord. Knowing God is so much more important than going shopping.
Know God, therefore, and give him thanks. Don’t just be polite. Thank him also for his discipline, for humbling you. Sad, humble times are the times when things get corrected spiritually speaking. That is when we grow in knowing our God. Good and easy times are when people forget God. Hard times are when we almost have no other choice than to be knocking at his door. And since we aren’t that great of human beings, that is almost always exactly what the doctor orders.
Paul, in the same chapter from which we read tonight, says another well-known verse: “Rejoice in the Lord always, again, I say, ‘Rejoice.’” The key word is “always,” or “at all times.” Rejoice at all times, in trouble and when trouble is passed, knowing that we do not live by bread alone, but by the word that comes from the mouth of our God. Knowing him, and knowing his good and gracious will towards you in our Lord Jesus Christ, gives you the power to be content. That is doing all things through Christ, who strengthens us.
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Jesus was arrested for being disruptive by the chief priests, elders, and other leaders of the church. Jesus was being disruptive because he was bringing to bear on people’s lives the Word of God. The Word of God is disruptive. It doesn’t just affirm everything we already think and do. So they hated Jesus—they would say for being disruptive, but really for exposing their evil. In Jesus the light came into the world, but they preferred the darkness instead of the light so that they could carry on doing what they were doing. They had to get rid of that light.
As it turned out, this was a whole lot easier than they were expecting. They were prepared to go to great lengths—securing a spy, arresting him at night, in a secluded space. These were folks who knew how to turn a screw. But they didn’t need to go to all that trouble, because Jesus wasn’t a liar. If Jesus were shrewd like we pride ourselves as being, they wouldn’t have been able to nail him so easily. But Jesus told them exactly what they wanted to hear.
They asked him, “Are you the Son of God?” Jesus said, “Yes, it is as you say.” Case closed. “What need have we for further witnesses? You heard it from his own lips! That is blasphemy if I’ve ever heard blasphemy. How can someone claim to be God’s Son?” So ended that trial.
Then, when Jesus was brought before Pontius Pilate, they had to change tactics a little bit. Pilate couldn’t care less about what is orthodox and what is unorthodox. Politics is how Jesus could be nailed here. He’s been letting himself be called a king. They had a parade for him just the other day. They were singing, “Hosanna, blessed is he who comes in the Name of the Lord, even the king of Israel!”
Of all the things that Jesus could have been charged with, this was, in fact, something that always did prick up the ears of the Romans. The Romans were very practical people, dollars and cents kinds of people. Believe whatever you want so long as you keep working, keep paying your taxes, and aren’t disruptive to the status quo. Rival kings would not be tolerated.
Of course, Pilate thought Jesus was no rival. He thought he was nuts. Pilate tried to get him off the hook. But Jesus didn’t help him in this regard. When Pilate asked him, “Are you a king?” he didn’t lie. “I am as you say.” So be it. Pilate sent along a special sign for Jesus’s cross: “Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews.”
The idea of Jesus being king provided all kinds of comedic material for everybody involved. The soldiers at the chief priest’s house blindfolded Jesus, punched him, and then said, “Prophecy, O Son of God. Who struck you?” Later a purple robe was draped upon him, a crown of thorns was put on his head. They broke off a stalk of reed for him to carry as a scepter. “Hail, king of the Jews.” Then they took the scepter out of his hand and bopped him on the head with it. What an idiot!
You heard some of this kind of thing in our reading: “He saved others. Stands to reason, then, that he should be able to save himself! Come down from that cross, O Christ of God, then we’ll believe you. Oh, you can’t come down from that cross? Have some nails got you stuck there? I guess you aren’t much of a God, then, are you?”
Even the two criminals, who, themselves, were fastened tightly to their own crosses by nails joined in on the reviling. They were as guilty as guilty can be, but at least they weren’t naïve idiots like this Jesus. How common that is in the minds of evil people: “At least I’m not like that person. I might be mean, and I might be greedy, but at least I’m not like him.” Maybe that’s the devil’s motivations for all his temptations. He can point at us poor sinners and say, “At least I’m not like that.” I wonder if that thought still gives any comfort in the dark halls of hell: “At least I’m not like that!”
But Luke gives us a gift when it comes to these two criminals. As you heard in our reading, one of these two criminals comes to his senses. The other Gospels don’t get into that. But Luke does, and it’s quite something to hear. May we all become like this thief on the cross. He gives the Christian confession. In fact, there is no other kind of confession that is Christian.
As you know, confession has two parts: first, that we confess our sins, and second, that we receive absolution, that is, forgiveness. This is what this man does. He chastises the other thief with tremendous words: “Don’t you fear God?” That is the question, is it not? Do you fear God? Or do you keep him safely out of mind so that nothing disrupts your practicing of evil? Do you console yourself with the thought: “It will probably be fine”?
Then the thief says, “We deserve the punishment we are receiving. We’ve done wrong. This man between us has done nothing wrong.” This, also, is an amazing thing for anyone to say, and so incredibly rare.
I’m always picking on you guys and how you live your lives, so I’ll pick on some strangers for a change, to illustrate how rare this is.
In 2008 the financial sector collapsed. Why did it collapse? Because bankers and investors and a whole bunch of other already filthy rich people were making ridiculous bets, raking it in, never able to make enough for sitting there and doing nothing. Plus all kinds of people were lying their heads off. The ratings agencies, for example, were lying to beat the band. Why? Because if they didn’t lie they’d have to go out of business. If they didn’t lie, their clients would just go elsewhere. They didn’t have a choice, you see. The house of cards had to collapse because it was built on lies. Then, when it did collapse, the richest ones who should have lost everything ended up making even more money.
This fraud changed everything. We’re still living in the shadow of it, and we will continue to live in the shadow of it until our current house of cards gets blown over. This was the biggest fraud in history. But not a single one of these greedy, lying, lazy cheats spent a single day in jail. They weren’t even charged and put on trial. They didn’t have to go through that stress.
Every day tiny little sneak thieves and embezzlers get the book thrown at them and they get locked away for 10 or 20 years for stealing infinitesimally small fractions of what these giants stole. The two men crucified with Jesus were thieves, but in our society we name buildings after our thieves. They are held in high esteem. And, of course, the last thing they would ever do is say that they were sorry. Because, of course, it’s not their fault.
Or take this insane virus that has made our life miserable and killed a huge number of people. This virus was almost certainly cooked up in some lab somewhere. Even if this particular one wasn’t, there’s no disputing the fact that scientists are doing “gain of function” research on viruses, bacteria, and funguses. “Gain of function” means that they’re purposely making the diseases deadlier, more contagious, and so on.
Even though perhaps millions of people have been essentially murdered by these scientists and the governments who pay them, nobody’s said they’re sorry. If there were ever a time for sackcloth and ashes, wouldn’t it for those involved in this conflagration that was unleashed upon the earth? But not only is there no sackcloth and ashes, you can’t even ask the question of where it came from. The powers that be have wanted everybody to assume that it came from a pangolin, whatever that is, and let’s just leave it at that. What bigger investigation could be possible than this one—what news story, even? You’d think just the love of money or the love of fame would propel people to ferret out the truth.
But we’re not living in a time of truth. And that’s not surprising, if only we consult our own ways of doing things. We don’t want to take responsibility for what we’ve done either. It’s not our fault, you see. We don’t want the light anywhere near those portions of our life that we want to keep hidden in the dark so that we can keep doing what we want. We, like the bank executives, don’t want to say we’re sorry. And why should we? Here’s a bit of truth actually: They’re not sorry and neither are we. Maybe we won’t be sorry until we land ourselves in hell. Then, boy oh boy, will we be sorry. We are so proud and tight-lipped in this life. We won’t say we’re sorry. We’re probably fine. Nobody will know because we’ve kept it in the dark. Why confess or change your ways?
But here’s the question: Do you not fear God?
There is one last thing that is extraordinary about this thief’s confession. There’s one more true thing that he says: “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.” Remember how all the big wigs and the powers that be have been amusing themselves: “He fancies himself a king! How droll!” and they carry on with their wicked lives. Meanwhile this guilty, punished, humiliated thief actually believes that Jesus is king.
And so he is. Jesus always spoke the truth. “Are you the Son of God?” “Yes,” even though it meant death. “Are you the king of the Jews?” “Yes,” even though it meant mockery and death. Jesus, unlike us, never lies. He is truth and light and life, instead of lies and darkness and death.
So Jesus says another true thing to this poor man: “Amen. Today you will be with me in paradise.” Jesus would remember him in his kingdom. And what is Jesus’s kingdom? It is truth and light and life.
Jesus says in another place: “This is the basis for the judgment—this is how people are judged: The light has come into the world, yet the people loved the darkness rather than the light because their deeds were evil. In fact, everyone who practices wicked things hates the light and does not come toward the light, or else his deeds would be exposed. But the one who does what is true comes toward the light, in order that his deeds may be seen as having been done in connection with God.”
Since this is the basis for judgement, come toward the light. Sure, that light is going to expose your evil deeds. That’s no fun, I know. There’s a good reason why tears so often accompany confessions of guilt. But the only other alternative is to shun the light for the next 10 or 20 or 80 or however many more years you have left to live, and then your wicked deeds will then be exposed.
The books are opened then to all, a record truly telling, what each has done both great and small, while he on earth was dwelling.
Learn from this wise criminal. He is so much wiser than our titans of finance and our oh-so-clever scientists. His wisdom did not come from flesh and blood. It had to have come from God because he is simply bursting with truth. By God’s truth he was transferred out of the domain of darkness into the kingdom of Jesus.
So it was for him, so it is now, and so it will be for all those who follow his example: “Jesus, remember me in your kingdom.” Then, when the time is right, you will be with him in paradise.
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Our Gospel reading today is Jesus’s prophecy about the destruction of Jerusalem and its temple. Jesus said these things about 40 years before it actually took place. This prophecy is also, at the same time, about the end times and the last day. At the end of our reading Jesus says that he will come with great power and glory. What I would like to focus on today, then, is how we should prepare for the end times according to what Jesus says in our reading.
However, before we speak more positively about how we should be, it is helpful, I think, to point out two very common false beliefs about the end times. First of all, there are many Christians who do not believe that there will be any end times at all, or at least they never wish to talk about them. We confess in our creeds that Jesus sits at the right hand of God the Father almighty. From thence he will come to judge the living and the dead. You heard Jesus say that there will be signs and wonders in the sky and tribulations on earth. Peter says in his second epistle that the elements will melt as they burn.
For many people these kinds of things are just too unusual. We want life to go on as it always has. It is unsettling to think that the existence of the universe could be so devastatingly altered. Plus, probably in the back of our mind, we think it is just mythical make-believe anyway. You know those ancient people. They weren’t too smart. If they knew what we know they wouldn’t have made such wild and impossible prophecies.
This false belief is common among us Lutherans. We are pretty staid and steady people. We don’t like to get too worked up about anything, and, in general, that’s a positive thing. The teaching in the Bible is clear. If it’s alright to disbelieve in the wrath of God at the end of days, why should we believe anything that we don’t like?
The other false belief seems like it is almost the opposite. Instead of despising the end times, never talking of them, there is an obsession with end times things. This is understandable. The signs and wonders are stupendous if you are willing to take them seriously. It can be thrilling to know things that others don’t know.
I remember as a kid sometimes seeing on TV a man named Jack Van Impe and his wife, Rexella. They would have a stack of newspapers on their set and they’d go from one to the next, citing bible passage after bible passage: “This news story fulfills this passage, and this news story fulfills that passage.” The take-away was always the same: “The end is near. There is going to be widespread collapse.”
And there was always a kind of glee in the prospect of the widespread collapse. The TV prophet was quite happy to tell you about it. You can be happy too if you believe him, because you can prepare accordingly. Make sure you’ve got food and water in the basement. Maybe these days you need to make sure that you’ve got some crypto-currency. Be one of the smart ones so that you can ride out the end of days in style. You can be comfortably sitting in your bunker, armed to the teeth.
Although these folks seem to be highly believing because they only want to talk about these conspiracies and prophecies, they, too, are unbelieving and unprepared. How may anyone escape the wrath that is about to be revealed? The true and infallible preparations are being baptized, feeding one’s faith with the Word of God, receiving the Lord’s Supper, praying, praising, and giving thanks. Repentant faith in Jesus, who has turned away God’s wrath, is the only way to make it through any terrors or difficulties. As for what we should eat and drink, or what we should wear, Jesus tells us that we should not worry about these things. Your heavenly Father knows that you have need of them.
These two false beliefs look like they are practically opposites. Some Christians never think or speak of the end times. Other Christians never stop thinking or speaking of the end times. Neither approach avails anything. Baptism is our spiritual ark. Faith in Christ is the only preparation. Flesh and blood cannot see the kingdom of God, but only a new creation. We must be born again by the water and the Spirit.
As we now turn to Jesus’s words in our Gospel reading, I would argue that this is Jesus’s concern as well. He wants us to guard our faith. He forthrightly says that terrors and convulsions are coming. How we are to be prepared, however, has to do with our faith and the confession of our faith. So that is what we will turn to now.
Jesus’s talk is begun by the disciples commenting on the massive and impressive temple. The temple truly was a sight to behold. If anything seemed permanent, it was this temple, but Jesus said one stone would not be allowed to remain sitting upon another. Then the disciples asked Jesus to tell them more about that.
I’d like to you pay attention to how Jesus does not tell them to form militias or shadow governments. He doesn’t tell them to make any kind of physical preparations. The wrath of God is coming and there isn’t anything anybody can do to stop that. Instead Jesus wants to guard their faith.
Jesus said, “Watch out so that you are not deceived! For many will come in my name, saying, ‘I am he,’ and ‘The time is near.’ Do not follow them. Whenever you hear of wars and revolutions, do not be terrified, for these things must happen first, but the end will not be right then.”
As you know there are many people who rise up all the time, saying that they have their finger on what is going on. They know the secrets. They know what is going to happen. Follow them because the end is near. Their exciting messages of doom and deliverance through prudent preparations stir up those who believe in them so that they gain their cliques and cadres of people in the know.
Jesus says to beware people like that. Why? Because they are worthless. You already have all that you need in the true Jesus. If you have Jesus you don’t need some guru to read the tea leaves or the newspapers. Gurus might tell you all kinds of secret and exciting things, but their wisdom is nothing compared to the wisdom even of our humble little Catechism. If you want to know what you are to do, turn to the Ten Commandments—and you won’t find anything about crypto-currency or bunkers in there. If you want to know what you are to believe, consult the Creed. These truly make you wise for salvation.
Let us turn again to Jesus’s words, and he goes on for some time: “Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom. There will be great earthquakes, famines, and diseases in various places. There will be horrifying sights and great signs from heaven. But before all these things, they will lay their hands on you and will persecute you, handing you over to synagogues and prisons, bringing you before kings and governors for my name’s sake. It will turn out to be your opportunity to testify. So make up your minds not to prepare beforehand how to defend yourselves, for I will give you words and wisdom that none of your adversaries will be able to withstand or contradict. You will be betrayed even by parents, brothers, relatives, and friends. They will put some of you to death. You will be hated by all people for my name’s sake. But not a hair of your head will perish. By patient endurance you will gain your lives.”
Jesus lays out frightening things: wars, earthquakes, famines, and diseases. Perhaps the most frightening things, though, are the personal betrayals and tests of one’s confession of faith. It’s like it was with Peter on the night when Jesus was betrayed: “Are you one of them? Are you one of Jesus’s disciples? Are you an enemy of enlightened progress or an enemy of the state?”
But, again, notice where Jesus directs us—not to swords or guns. We are to maintain our faith in him. If we have faith in him, then we can even rest assured that we will say what he would have us say before those who persecute us. The one thing that Jesus tells us we should make our mind up about beforehand is that we are not going to defend ourselves. The kingdom of God is not the product of human cunning, logic, or political manipulations. The kingdom of God is the testimony of Jesus, the one who has overcome this world. And if you have him, then not even a hair of your head will perish. Even if you are put to death for our faith, not one hair of your head will perish. By patient endurance in your faith you will be saved.
One outward action that Jesus does recommend is the fleeing from Jerusalem. He told his disciples that when they see the armies coming upon Jerusalem that they should get out. Forty years later it appears that the Christians remembered Jesus’s prophecy. They fled before Jerusalem was surrounded and hemmed in on every side.
So also we Christians may flee from danger. You see this in the book of Acts. When Jerusalem was thrown into an uproar with the stoning of St. Stephen the Christians fled to other lands and cities. This was, in fact, how the Gospel came to the Gentiles. The Christians who fled Jerusalem preached the Gospel to their Gentile neighbors and by the power of the Holy Spirit they were converted to faith in Christ.
You also see in Acts that St. Paul did not purposely hand himself over to those who were wanting to put him to death. Once he escaped under cover of night, being lowered down from the city wall in a basket. When he was arraigned in Jerusalem he appealed to Caesar, which was his right as a Roman citizen. So we do not need to go looking for trouble and martyrdom. However, if we are called upon to make the good confession, then we must do so regardless of the consequences.
I can give you a contemporary example. Years ago a militant Islamic group called ISIS rose to power in the Middle East. They conquered some territory in Syria and Iraq. There are some towns in that area that have Christians in them. When ISIS would come to a town they would round up the people and ask them if they were Christians. If they said they were, their heads would be chopped off. They would do this even with Christian children.
If you were one of those Christians, you would need to continue to confess Christ, come what may. If you confessed Christ and your head was chopped off, ultimately not even a hair of your head would be harmed, for you will live again. It is not optional for us to confess Christ. If we deny him we would be like faithless Simon Peter. As the Scriptures say, “If we deny him, he will deny us.”
However, on the other hand, if you know that ISIS is heading towards your village, you do not need to stay there. You do not need to hand your children over to be slaughtered. You should try to go where you will be safe. However, if you end up before the executioner for your Christian faith, or if you should be fired from your job for your Christian faith, or some other persecution comes upon you, then you should know that this is God’s will. He will keep you safe even if your head gets chopped off. It is your opportunity to testify of this hope that is within you.
So, to sum up: The only true way to be prepared for the end times is always internal. Being prepared for the end times is a matter of repentance and faith. If we fear God’s wrath for our sins and believe in Jesus Christ who has saved us from our sins, then we are in good stead. With such a faith we are in good stead even if the earth gives way and the mountains go crashing into the sea. Jesus has reconciled you to God. All things, then, must turn out for the best for those who trust in him.
So when you see Jesus coming on the clouds with power and great glory, do not curl up into a ball or put your tail between your legs. Straighten up and lift up your heads, for your redemption draws near.
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Several years ago I ordered a print of a painting to hang in my office. When I was considering that, I had some qualms. It wasn’t the usual kind of painting that hangs in pastors’ offices.
The painting depicts the final judgment. In the middle of the painting there is a grave yard. It shows the resurrection from the dead, so the people are stepping out of their graves. Then they are being separated to the right and to the left. The angels are guiding the people on the right. Demons are prodding and grabbing and dragging people on the left. The people on the right get clothed with white robes to enter into the light that radiates from Jesus. The people on the left tumble down into the chaos and the flames of hell.
This painting hangs immediately in front of my desk. When I look up from my computer this rather large print is what I see. I got this painting for me, for my benefit, but I was a little concerned about what people might think when they visit my office.
What can be offensive to people is that this picture is saying, “This is how it is, and this is how it will be.” All people, and every individual, either goes to the right or to the left. Each individual either goes to heaven or to hell. The natural question is “what about me?” “Which way will I go?” And “what about those I love?”
This painting brings to the fore something that most people don’t think about—at least not seriously. When someone is dying or when someone has died the automatic answer for their ultimate destination is heaven. It’s always heaven. If in doubt, they’re in heaven. If I chopped off the left side of that painting, that would maybe be more in accord with the way people think.
Of course, the way that we think is one thing, the truth is another. I, in fact, noticed yet another detail about this painting that I’ve looked at for years while I was working on this sermon: there are more people who are being driven into hell than there are people who are being escorted into heaven. This is in accord with Jesus’s words. There will be more who take the broad and easy way into hell rather than the hard and narrow way that leads into heaven.
I don’t enjoy thinking about people possibly going to hell any more than anybody else does. Frankly, it frightens me and horrifies me—especially when I think of specific people. I see the reason why people say that hell doesn’t exist or that it’s practically impossible to end up there. If that’s the case, we don’t have to worry about anything. We can all live our lives however we want—to hell with God’s commandments. You do what you want, what you think is good enough. Then, at the end of it all, we can have a nice celebration of life service.
And, to be sure, nobody’s the wiser. You can’t tell the difference. When an unbeliever dies the corpse looks just the same as a believer’s corpse. We don’t see demon’s pulling on it, dragging it into hell against the person’s will. The slight smile that the undertaker puts on it is the same as everybody else’s. If their corpse is smiling just like everybody else’s, then why not live how you want? Why not follow your thoughts? They’re probably wiser than that dusty old Bible’s thoughts anyway—lots of smart people say that the Bible is hopelessly outdated.
These arguments, evidently, are extremely persuasive. Very few worry about going to hell themselves even though they live in rebellion against God. They habitually, purposely live against God’s commandments. Even very few Christians can stand the thought of loved ones going to hell. Even very few pastors can bear the scorn and the hatred if they refuse to give an honorable funeral, full of sweet nothings, for someone who did not live as a Christian. So, of course, our congregations do not have the strength to discipline or eventually remove those who are living unrepentantly, and, therefore, are living in such a way where they are preparing themselves for hell.
It is very common for Christians to complain about the decline of the church. All the congregations are getting smaller. Shame on the younger generations. Tsk. tsk. tsk. They should come back to church after they’ve sowed their wild oats just like we used to do. We sowed our wild oats, but then we settled down with the kids. But maybe the younger generations are just more honest and clear-headed. Why should they participate in an organization that acts like it doesn’t believe in heaven and hell? What purpose does Jesus serve if we can just ignore the possibility of hell, wish it out of existence, and thereby no longer fear it? What kind of Savior would that be? Jesus saves us from something that we never needed to fear in the first place?
Grandpa Jones, that old blasphemer, had just as nice of a smile and just as honorable of a funeral as anybody who is faithful, who suffered, who fought, and barely held on. Actions speak louder than words. Giving funerals for everyone and anyone powerfully teaches that the church doesn’t care about what is true and not true. The church only cares about being polite. The truth is that the church is supposed to teach us to fight against our sinful flesh. If we stumble and fall, may we be forgiven and lifted up, but then we fight some more.
The assumption of forgiveness, the assumption of going to heaven—this has to be one of the manifestations of the anti-christ. The assumption that you’re forgiven no matter what, you’re going to heaven no matter what—anybody with half a brain draws the conclusion that repentance, faithfulness, sacrificing, suffering, bearing the cross—all these things are stupid, because they are totally worthless. Live as selfishly as you want, of, if you’re a little wiser, as selfishly as you can get away with—that’s how you play the game. It might seem that the assumption of everybody going to heaven is tolerant and loving, but underneath it is the promotion of evil, the encouragement not to fear God.
We have a difficult challenge before us as a Christian people and as a congregation. We must be willing to be different. We must renounce this assuming that everybody is going to heaven regardless of their lives, regardless of whether they have made use of the means of grace. We must begin being serious with one another when we have fallen into sin. Unrepentant sin is what brings people to hell. We must help one another. Is this fun? No. Is it helpful? Absolutely!
Imagine someone who has gotten an infection in their leg. It’s swollen, nasty and full of pus so that it gives off an awful smell. To clean it out will hurt like the dickens for the patient. It will be very unpleasant for the doctor too. But what’s the alternative? Just let it go? Hope for the best?
That’s what we’ve been doing for a long time as congregations. We haven’t cared enough to get our hands dirty in the muck and the pus. We don’t help people who need help. The goal, it seems, is to get them just to come on Sunday mornings and give their offering. That will keep the lights on for another year.
Is it any wonder, then, that God has punished our land, emptying our churches? What purpose can these churches serve if they will not lift a finger to help in the very thing that God cares about most? What does God care about most? There’s no mystery about that. All four of the Gospels are emphatic about it. After Jesus rose from the dead he gave his Christians what they were to be about. Repentance and forgiveness in Jesus’s Name is to be preached to all people, because Jesus is the Savior of sinners from the hell that they deserve. Repent and be baptized. Whoever believes and is baptized shall be saved, whoever does not believe will be condemned. Whosoever’s sins we forgive, they are forgiven them. Whosoever’s sins we retain, they are retained.
By essentially, practically, denying the possibility of anybody going to hell, we’ve lost the reason for our existence. Why repent or be forgiven? There’s no need to clean out wounds, bandage people up, and return them to health, because supposedly they will survive regardless.
Think again of that patient I made up. Let’s say that we all pretend it’s impossible for such a patient to die. Why, then, would the doctor go to the trouble of cleaning it out when it’s all messy, nasty and smelly? The patient would be happy too, because cleaning it out hurts like the dickens. Of course the patient still has the infection, nasty as ever, but everybody just lives and let’s live.
So also our people and we ourselves have horrible spiritual infections. Here’s a list from Paul’s letter to the Romans, and see if it doesn’t fit perfectly: We are full of all unrighteousness, having sex with all sorts of things that are not our spouse, having no qualms, never satisfied with what we have but always wanting more, mean, full of envy, murder, unable to get along with others, dishonest, ornery, gossiping, condemning, haters of God, proud, haughty, boastful, inventing ways to be evil, disobedient to parents, devoid of understanding, untrustworthy, unaffectionate, unmerciful. All of these infections make the patient miserable, but they go unaddressed. The infections get worse and worse. Maybe we hope that they’ll heal themselves, but there is only one physician who can heal these infections, and that’s Jesus.
The way that Jesus works as the physician is by means of Christians who are believing enough to speak his word. May we be such Christians in this congregation! Christians help others as they themselves have been helped. Christians comfort others in their afflictions the way that they themselves have been comforted.
We have been given God’s commandments to diagnose our spiritual maladies. We have been given the forgiveness of sins as the remedy. We have been given the new birth in baptism. We have been given the body and blood of Jesus to eat and to drink the forgiveness of our sins, the strengthening of our faith, and for the fervency of our love. These work the cure. These forgive sins now and going forward. At the end, at the resurrection from the dead, there is the promise of complete and total healing.
That complete spiritual healing will be tremendous and beyond anything that we can imagine. We all were born into this world diseased. We all have our latent pockets of spiritual infection. That is why Jesus says that no flesh can see the kingdom of God. We must be born again by the water and the Spirit to see the kingdom of God. Even whatever spiritual healing God works on us Christians in this life is going to be incomplete. God helps us, but we will continue to have our flesh, and so we will stumble, fall, and may God lift us back up again so that we may fight yet another day. But with heaven and with the resurrection from the dead it is finished. Our sinful flesh dies. The resurrected flesh will not have sin in it. Since we have never experienced anything like it in this life, we will experience it for the first time in the life to come.
Popular notions of the life to come do not really have any healing that goes with it. Sure, aches and pains get taken away, but heaven is supposedly for doing hobbies, a better version of this life.
As it turns out, then, in a way, with the painting that I began with, it’s not just hell that gets chopped off. The true heaven gets chopped off too. No spiritual healing is even on the radar. Heaven is just a lame continuation of this life without any spiritual transformation. But things cannot keep going on like they have been. Good things must get better and bad things must get worse.
We now live in the time of grace when good and bad are all mixed together. The goal we should have for ourselves is to sort out the good from the bad. The good is not sin or deceitful desires. The good comes from God. The bad is the infections. We need to be students, disciples, to learn what is good and what is bad. We need to learn to love the good and hate the bad. It is by loving God and what is good that we fight the fight of faith. It is by faith in Jesus that we may look forward to the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come.
Audio recording
Sermon manuscript:
Today I’d like to follow the progression of Jesus’s thought when he says to those Jews who believed in him, “If you remain in my word, then you really are my disciples. You will also know the truth, and the truth will set you free.”
Let’s begin by talking about remaining in Jesus’s Word. It is not uncommon for people to pledge allegiance to Jesus. Lots of people are willing to be identified as Christians or see themselves as Christians. Their reasons for seeing themselves as Christians are many and varied. Perhaps they were baptized. Perhaps they were raised going to church. There are some who go to church all the time, so of course they have to be Christians, don’t they? And there are those who have just made that choice for themselves. They choose to be Christians. Who are you, then, to say that they are not?
Jesus himself, however, identifies the reason why anyone may identify himself or herself as a Christian: “If you remain in my word, then you really are my disciple.” The opposite of that, then, must mean that someone is not his disciple. If you do not remain in his Word, then you really aren’t his disciple.
This makes perfect sense if you think about it. Being a disciple means being a follower. A good substitute for the word disciple, which carries with it all kinds of baggage, is the more neutral word, “student.” If you remain in Jesus’s Word, then you are his student. If you don’t remain in his word, then, of course, you cannot be his student.
Anybody can say that they are a student of whatever they might want. I can say that I’m a student of astro-physics. Although I can say that, it doesn’t mean that I am. Someone could say to me, “But you don’t know anything about astro-physics.” True. “You don’t read anything about astro-physics.” That’s true too. “You don’t even think about astro-physics. It’s been days, months, or years since you’ve given it any thought.” The assumption’s one thing; reality’s another.
So also it is very silly for people to claim to be students of Jesus when they never think of him, never pray to him, never hear what he says, or if they do hear what he says, never act on what he says. I’m not the church-attendance police. We live in a free country where everyone can listen to and learn from whomever he or she wants, but I don’t see how people who never hear, never pray, never worship, or never receive the sacraments of Jesus can claim to be his followers or students. You know, though, that there are many who claim just that, and they might be you or the people you know and love.
We also should not think that mere attendance at the divine service makes anyone a disciple of Jesus. Having Jesus’s words go in one ear and out the other doesn’t help anyone. There are many people who attend church week after week who hate some of the things that Jesus teaches. They think he has terrible advice for how to live one’s life or how to be successful. The only reason why they will tolerate hearing Jesus speak at all is because they think it will give them salvation.
Thus there will be many surprises on Judgement Day. Many are called; few are chosen. There will be some very angry people who will scream at Jesus, “Didn’t we come week in and week out? Didn’t we sit there bored out of our mind? Couldn’t we have been doing things that we liked?” But it will not be difficult to prove how such people were not his disciples. Although they were in the presence of God’s Word, they did not love it. Although they honored God with their lips, their hearts were far from him. Let’s not kid ourselves. If you don’t remain in Jesus’s Words, you aren’t his disciple. You don’t love the truth. You aren’t free. You are still a slave of sin.
This is a good way to get at what we consider today with the Lutheran Reformation. The Christian Church at the time of the Reformation said a lot of stuff that people wanted to hear. In fact, the Roman Catholic Church continues to say stuff that sounds pretty good if we all just get to make stuff up for ourselves to believe.
They basically said, if you stick with them, with their church organization, then you’ll be alright. Make sure you follow their rules. Never disobey the pope, the church councils, the bishops or the pastors. Make sure that you maintain your membership. Make sure you don’t get excommunicated. Make sure you have a priest there for confession and last rights. If you followed these rules (and really these rules aren’t too onerous), then you are pretty much guaranteed that you’ll be fine. Eventually you’ll end up in heaven. Not a bad deal.
This was handy in all kinds of ways. Ordinary Christians didn’t have to follow Jesus’s commands. The monks and nuns could do that for you. No need to worry too much about sins, because the church had a whole medicine cabinet full of remedies, many of which have no biblical basis. Jesus did not make any promises about bells, incense, candles, being shaved, pouches, not eating meat, celibacy, indulgences, and a whole bunch of other things. And yet these remedies were so old and they looked so pious, that everybody though that they just had to do the trick. Plus, of course, the teachers and officials swore up and down that these things worked. Holy Mother Church had said so. They were so entangled in so many lies, so many good lies, and so many old lies, that it took a tremendous amount of sorting out.
Something that is good to remember about Martin Luther and the Reformation is that it was a process that went on for years. It wasn’t like Martin Luther woke up one day and suddenly had it all figured out. What really got the ball rolling for the reformation was his 95 theses or statements against the Church’s sale of indulgences. He posted that on October 31, 1517. That is why we observe the Reformation on that day. Luther was pretty sure that there was something very wrong with just this one church practice. There was a whole bunch of other stuff that wasn’t even on his radar yet. But what was of utmost importance for his sorting out the truth from the lies was that he differentiated between Jesus’s word and other words.
It is remaining in Jesus’s words that makes a person his disciple. The Christian Church is not a building or a whole bunch of buildings. It’s not a government. It’s not an organization with the pope at the head of it. Jesus, in fact, doesn’t say one word about the so-called pope ever. There isn’t even a single syllable about a Roman pontiff or being obedient to him. The Christian Church is not even about me as a pastor, as though I’m someone who bosses people around. The Christian Church consists of lambs who hear the voice of the Good Shepherd. Jesus, the Good Shepherd, lays down his life for the sheep. He knows them, and his sheep know his voice. His sheep hear his voice and follow him.
It is the following of the voice or the words of Jesus that makes anyone a Christian. If you remain in his words, you truly are his disciple. If you do not remain in his words, then you are not his disciple no matter how many ceremonies or robes or ancient decrees might seem to indicate otherwise.
Luther and the other reformers distinguishing between Jesus’s words, his apostles’ words, and everybody else’s words was what made all the difference. To this day the Catholic Church claims that it can add to God’s Word so long as it’s done with the proper pomp and circumstance. And there are many others who do the same thing in their own way. The Pentecostals, for example, think they can receive new revelations and tongues and miraculous powers so long as it is done with the proper pomp and circumstance. Or the ELCA, which believes that they can decide for themselves what is a sin and what isn’t a sin, so long as it’s done with the proper pomp and circumstance.
The whole world, in fact, is filled to the brim and overflowing with people who never stop telling you what to believe, how to act, even all the way down to what you should eat and drink. They certainly can’t be all telling you the truth because they contradict one another. How do we sort out this cacophony of messages, all wanting to teach us?
It’s as simple as what Jesus says: “If you remain in my words, you are truly my disciples. You will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” Jesus’s words are true.
I’d like to mention a very useful tool in this regard—Luther’s Small Catechism. The Catechism isn’t the same thing as Scripture, but, without a shadow of a doubt, what is in the Catechism is drawn from the Scriptures. This tool is extremely useful in the midst of all the different voices so that we can know what Scripture says about how we are to act, in whom we are to believe, how we are to pray, and where we should turn for grace, the forgiveness of sins.
Think of the tremendous truths that this little pamphlet: The Ten Commandments teach us what is truly good, truly pleasing to God. Everybody else’s ideas about what is good or life-promoting or life-giving are just that—their own ideas. Everyone just does what is good in his or her own eyes, but the Ten Commandments are God’s communication to us of his standards.
Anyone who takes seriously God’s standards for how we are supposed to be will also learn how we are slaves to sin. Our desires are contrary to God’s desires. Our desires say, “Do this!” and we can’t help but say, “Yes, sir! On the double! On the double!” We are especially slaves to those things that don’t look like sins—our own ambitions, our own honor, our own pleasure. We lack what we should have. We do not want to love or sacrifice. We do not love even though God is love. We do not sacrifice even though God showed his love to us in the sacrifice of his own Son. How silly and shallow every other standard for conduct is compared to the Ten Commandments as Jesus explains them in his Sermon on the Mount!
But, as Jesus says in our reading, if you remain in his Word, you are his disciple. You will know the truth, and the truth will set you free. Then he goes on to say, “Amen, amen I tell you: Everyone who keeps on committing sin is a slave to sin. The slave will not remain in the house forever.” That is to say, heaven is not a place of evil and sin. The name for a place like that is hell. So how do we slaves free ourselves? We can’t! A slave’s a slave. If a slave were free it would no longer be a slave. But, as Jesus says, “If the Son sets you free, you will really be free.”
We have been redeemed, that is, purchased and won, by the holy precious blood and the innocent suffering and death of the Son of God, our Lord Jesus Christ. We slaves of sin, slaves of the devil, have been set free, not by God snapping his fingers, but the Son of God becoming sin for us, suffering in our place, being punished in our place, and thereby bringing about perfect atonement.
You remember this Bible verse, I’m sure: “God loved the world in this way, that he sent his only begotten Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish, but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through him.” Jesussaid those words. You remember what Jesus said in our reading today: “If you remain in my words, you are truly my disciples.” Those aren’t hard words to be a student of.
Jesus is the teacher. Jesus is the Good Shepherd. Holy Mother Church isn’t the Good Shepherd. Speaking in tongues isn’t the Good Shepherd. Every Tom, Dick, and Harry who has their own thoughts about right and wrong, life and death, and what we are doing here on this earth are not the Good Shepherd. Jesus is the Good Shepherd who has laid down his life for the sheep. He calls out with his voice, “Come unto me all you who are weak and weary, and I will give you rest.” Jesus alone is the Savior. To him be all glory, now and forever. Amen!
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The name “James” was common among the Jews during New Testament times. This means that there is more than one “James” in the New Testament. In fact, there are three “Jameses.” Let us briefly go through them so that we know which James we are talking about today.
The James we know the least about is sometimes referred to as “James the less.” This James was one of the 12 apostles. He is the son of Alpheus. That is about all that we know about him.
There was another man named James who was also one of the 12 apostles. He is sometimes called “James the greater.” We know quite a bit more about this James. This James was the brother of the apostle John. He was part of what some people have called “the inner circle” of the apostles. On some occasions Jesus took along only Peter, James, and John. For example, these were the only three apostles at the mount of transfiguration. This James was the first of the 12 apostles to die. He was killed by King Herod Agrippa I. When the Gospels speak of James, they are almost always referring to this James, the brother of John, the son of Zebedee.
The James whose feast day we are observing today is only mentioned in the Gospels. In fact, you heard his name mentioned in our Gospel reading today. The people of Jesus’s hometown ask, “Isn’t this Jesus the carpenter’s son? Isn’t his mother named Mary? Aren’t his brothers named James, Joseph,” and so on? This third James in the New Testament is called the brother of our Lord Jesus. From our Gospel reading today we can gather that Jesus had a somewhat large family. Four brothers are named, and there must have been at least two sisters.
What does it mean that Jesus has brothers and sisters? Matthew and Luke tell us in their Gospels that Mary conceived and became pregnant by the Holy Spirit before Joseph and she ever came together. Mary was a virgin. So one explanation for these brothers and sisters would be that they were born after Jesus in the natural way through the union of Mary and Joseph. In a sense they would be half-siblings—the same mother, but not having God as their father in the same way that Jesus has God as his Father.
There are a couple other possible explanations. Some have hypothesized (without any real evidence) that Joseph was a widower before he married Mary. From this previous marriage he had children. Then the siblings that are mentioned would be step-siblings, no blood relation at all. They would be born of Joseph and some unnamed woman who died before Joseph and Mary were married.
Another possible explanation is that these siblings are actually cousins. Supposedly sometimes the words, brother and sister in Greek, can mean “cousin.” Both of these possibilities seem more speculative than the explanation that they were Jesus’s half-siblings.
Let’s get back to who James was. When James and Jesus’s other brothers are mentioned those couple times in the Gospels it is not in a very flattering way. On one occasion Mary and Jesus’s brothers seem embarrassed by Jesus. They think he has lost his mind and they want to take him away. On another occasion Jesus’s brothers seem impatient with how he is doing things. If Jesus is who he says he is, then they want him to get on with it. Notably, there is no mention of Jesus’s siblings being at his cross, although Mary is there. But maybe we shouldn’t be too hard on them for that, since none of the 12 apostles were there either except for the apostle John. The impression that the Gospels give with its couple of references makes James seem somewhat unfriendly and somewhat unimportant.
This, however, changes quite dramatically with Jesus’s resurrection from the dead. After Jesus rose from the dead he appeared to James. Paul tells us this. Evidently when Jesus came to his brother, James, this brought about his conversion. It also must have inspired great zeal in him. He ends up being the bishop, or overseer, of the Christian congregation in Jerusalem. This is a position of great significance and influence. Paul calls James a pillar of the church along with Peter and John. Our first reading today from the book of Acts tells of how James’s words carried the day at the council of Jerusalem. Our second reading was from the epistle of James. The author of that book of the Bible is this same James, the brother of Jesus.
So it is good for you to remember that there are three Jameses in the New Testament, two of whom are more prominent. James, the apostle, the brother of the apostle John, the son of Zebedee, is one of them. The Gospels mention him quite frequently. But then there is James, the brother of Jesus, whom we are considering today. He is only mentioned a couple times in the Gospels, and that not very flatteringly. But then, after Jesus rose from the dead, he was converted. He became very influential and important in the early church as the bishop of Jerusalem.
James eventually was martyred. That means that he died for being a Christian. It is thought that this took place about 62 A.D. The Jewish historian, Josephus, says that the Jewish leaders took advantage of a time when there was no Roman governor in Judea. They had a quick trial, found James guilty, and sentenced him to death. The exact manner of death is not known with complete certainty. He might have been stoned—rocks being thrown at him until he died from the injuries. He might have been thrown off the top of the temple. It’s possible that he was thrown from the top of the temple, did not die from that, and then was stoned until he died.
So what can we learn from the example of James, the brother of our Lord? The most important lesson comes from observing God’s grace in his life. It appears that James did not believe in his brother until Jesus appeared to him after he rose from the dead. Let us remember that the apostles and the women, also, did not believe in him until they saw him after he rose. But James seems not to have been a follower of Jesus before he was crucified. He grew up in the same house as Jesus with the same parents, yet he did not believe until, finally, he did.
There is a lesson for us here. Christians cannot be manufactured. There is no sure-fire way to make your children Christians. We should always try to foster the Word of God and prayer and be examples of faithfulness in our homes. While we cannot manufacture Christians, we certainly can manufacture unbelief. Unbelief comes naturally, and so all that is needed for that is hypocrisy and neglect. But even in good homes with good spiritual conditions (like Joseph and Mary’s home must have been), faith can fail to take root, or it can be scorched by the sun, or it can be crowded out by other cares and concerns.
But then, like James, people can also be converted again. I’m sure Mary and Jesus would have preferred it if James had remained believing. Unbelief is the breaking of the first commandment, the greatest commandment. But the time wasn’t right it seems. The right time in the divine story of God’s dealing with the man James, was that he shouldn’t come to faith in Jesus until later.
Each one of us has a similar divine story of God’s dealing with us when it comes to faith. We are all fighting against the old Adam and the devil. We grow weak and weary. May God make it so that we are strong—that is always best—but it also happens that we stumble and fall, and may God pick us back up again to fight another day. God be praised for doing so! But sometimes people don’t get back up. Or they don’t get back up for a long time. The example of James, the brother of our Lord, the eventual bishop of Jerusalem, shows us that God converts unbelievers who have been unbelievers for quite some time. It is not as though people who have been unbelieving cannot be converted.
This does not happen by random chance, though. It always happens through God’s own means. James, Jesus’s brother, was not converted by chance. He was converted the same way that any of us are converted: The Word of God came to him. He was brought to repentance for his sins, and he believed that the crucified and risen Lord Jesus was his Savior. Of course the messenger in James’s case was the Word himself, our Lord Jesus Christ, but that same Lord Jesus Christ is at work in the Word of God that speaks to us as well as the Word of God that we speak to others.
Last week we heard how the Scriptures are God-breathed. Since God breathed them out they also powerful and effective. That same passage says that we should be ready with the Word of God when it is convenient and when it is inconvenient. We should be patient. We should teach. That Word of God works as God wants it to work. It is the Word of God alone that creates faith. The Holy Spirit in the inspired Word creates faith.
So let us take stock of ourselves and be honest with ourselves. How many of us have people in our lives whose unbelief troubles us? Wouldn’t Mary have been troubled by the unbelief of her children? So also there are bound to be several people here today who are troubled by their children’s unbelief. Many of these same people might believe that they did everything they could for their children’s spiritual wellbeing. The kids were dropped off for Sunday School. The kids were dropped off for Vacation Bible School. The kids were dropped off for Confirmation. The kids were dropped off for youth group. Who could ask for anything more?
But let us take stock of ourselves and be honest with ourselves. Was our home full of hypocrisy? Was our home devoid of the Word of God, the Catechism, and prayer? Did we work against the truthfulness of God’s Word by not following it, pursuing every other goal imaginable, making sure our kids were fully vested in activities—in sports and school and so on so that they would get a good job? And we were pretty successful in that, were we not? The kids, by and large, have good jobs. According to how most people think, that’s what really matters.
I know lots of people who are troubled by their children’s unbelief, but I don’t know many people who are willing to go to their children and confess their sins. There is a hope that people will somehow, someway get converted by chance. We don’t want to help. We don’t want to change. We don’t want to admit that we’ve done wrong. But answer me this: If we can’t admit that we’ve done wrong, how can we expect anybody else—including our children—to admit that they’ve done wrong?
The example of James shows us that it is never too late so long as we are still alive on this earth. If we are still alive, then we are still in the time of grace. Jesus says, “As long as it is day, we must do the works of him who sent Jesus. Night is coming when no one can work.” Jesus is the light of the world.
You know that. You are therefore equipped. Jesus is in the Word of God that you have heard, which works faith. You can bring that Word of God also to others. But this should be done in humility—one sinner to another. Then there is hope because the Scriptures are inspired and powerful.
James was converted. You may be converted. The people you love may be converted. But this is always done the same way. It is by hearing the Word, taking it to heart, and believing in Jesus.
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Paul says in our Epistle reading: “From infancy, Timothy, you have known the Holy Scriptures, which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. All Scripture is God breathed and is useful for teaching, for rebuking, for correcting, and for training in righteousness, so that the man of God may be complete, well equipped for every good work.”
This statement about the Scriptures is especially important and relevant to us in our time. At other times in history this statement wasn’t controversial among Christians. In our time, though, the question of whether the Scriptures are God-breathed, that is, divinely inspired, as Paul says, is not accepted by all Christians or all Christian churches.
Those who hold to this passage, that the Scriptures are inspired, will go about being Christians one way. Those who do not believe this will do what they do in a very different way. If the Scriptures are inspired and truthful, then the Scriptures will determine your beliefs and actions. If they are uninspired or untruthful or unuseful, then there’s no reason to feel bound by what they say. Of all the controversies that divide churches, the inspiration and truthfulness of the Scriptures has to be one of the most important.
So today let us first deal with how we should think about the Scriptures being inspired. Whether the Scriptures are inspired and truthful is an article of faith. It is not something that can be tested with experiments or proved with rational or mathematical formulas. As an article of faith, either what the Scriptures say is from God and truthful or it is not.
Let’s consider a few examples from the Scriptures: Either God sent the flood to destroy the earth or he did not. Either God commanded Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac or he did not. Either God caused the iron ax-head to float in the Jordan River or he did not.
We could, of course, go on. Anything and everything that the Scriptures say could be doubted. I’ve purposely picked these because lots of people have problems believing them. Physicists and meteorologists might have big problems with a world-wide flood. Ethicists, philosophers, and theologians might have a big problem with God demanding that Abraham sacrifice his son. And God causing an ax-head to float in the water so that the worker who lost it could keep working just seems silly—a waste of a miracle.
So what we can see from these few examples is that doubting what the Bible says is not unusual. You do not have to be super sophisticated to doubt what the Bible says. In fact, what is unusual is when people simply believe the Bible says. Doubt and unbelief, in fact, are the default and normal conditions for mankind after the fall into sin.
The Bible itself says this. Jesus says that no one can believe in him unless he or she is drawn by the Father. Believing in Jesus as the Christ cannot be naturally known. God the Father must cause a person to believe it. Paul says that the natural man is hostile to God and his revelation. The only way anyone can truly believe is by the power of the Holy Spirit. Our Catechism sums up these passages nicely when it says concerning the third article of the Creed: “I believe that I cannot by my own reason or strength believe in Jesus Christ my Lord or come to him, but the Holy Spirit [works and causes me to believe.]”
So if the Bible says stuff that you find hard to believe you shouldn’t be surprised. And you certainly shouldn’t regard your doubt or unbelief as a sign of greater intelligence or sophistication. Doubting is about the easiest thing in the world. We’ve been doing it almost from the very beginning. The serpent asked Eve: “Did God really say? Isn’t it possible that you human beings have misunderstood that?” Believing that God’s Word is uninspired and untruthful and unuseful is an old accomplishment. It was done way back then. Ever since then there has been no shortage of unbelievers. The majority, in fact, has always been unbelievers instead of believers. Thus you should not believe that you are doing anything cool or unusual when you doubt what the Scriptures say.
Nor should you believe that you are on the right side of history. This, also, is very commonly believed by those who think the Scriptures are uninspired and untruthful. We are given the impression by the way history is taught that folks used to believe in all kinds of childish, ridiculous things. Now, thank our lucky stars, we’ve gotten much wiser. Science and technology are used as a kind of proof for our superiority. Hundreds of years ago people didn’t burn nearly as much fuel as we burn, and they didn’t accumulate nearly as much stuff as we have, so we must be much smarter today. There is an assumption, then, that whatever the old Bible might say has been disproven.
This is not true. None of the words or actions or events of the Scriptures have been disproven. How could they be? How can anyone prove or disprove anything that has happened in the past? That will always remain an article of faith. Either what has happened can be believed or it can be disbelieved, but there is no incontrovertible proof one way or the other. To claim otherwise is dishonest.
Even the very idea that we are superior to the people of the past is vastly overstated. If you read the Bible you will find that we’re not that different from Adam and Eve. We’re not that different from the people at the time of Moses. At all times in history there have been people who have believed in what God revealed and people who have disbelieved. The Bible itself reports, for example, how the people with Moses simply couldn’t believe that God would take care of them. When Christians or Christian churches do that today, when they quit believing in the inspiration and truthfulness of the Scriptures, they are basically doing the same thing.
People not believing should never be surprising. What should be surprising is when those who claim to be God’s people allow this unbelief to go unchallenged, or even to allow this unbelief to be promoted. This is the strange thing about our times. There are groups of people who want to be known as Christians, but who do not want the Scriptures to be determinative. They believe that other sources of knowledge are more reliable and can trump whatever the Scriptures might say. Even though these folks believe in other things besides the God who has spoken in the Scriptures, they are allowed to remain in their churches and have even taken them over. These churches that allow unbelief in the Scriptures to be taught and defended end up being very different than those churches that still believe in the Scriptures.
Our church body, The Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod, requires its pastors and teachers and members to believe in the Scriptures. We had something of a civil war over this issue in the 1970s called “Seminex.” Our St. Louis seminary was split in two. This was a difficult and painful fight. It divided congregations, schools, and families, but it ended up being a great blessing. Professors, pastors, and teachers who no longer believed in the Scriptures were, by and large, forced out. Then they went and got together with some other Lutherans. They formed in 1988 the ELCA, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America.
The ELCA does not require belief in the Scriptures. It shares our name of being “Lutheran,” but we are very different from one another. They cannot give any firm answer to the question of whether the Scriptures are inspired and inerrant. I do not believe that they even require a firm answer to whether Jesus rose from the dead. Since the Scriptures do not need to be believed or regarded as a reliable guide, you can be sure that they will never fight for those things in Scripture that contradict our modern sensibilities. What the Bible says about men being pastors and leaders in the church and heads of their families is an abomination to them. They will not allow themselves to be bound by anything in the Scriptures, but will go whichever way the cultural winds blow.
In fact at their 2019 church-wide assembly they passed a resolution by over 97% that faith in Jesus Christ is no longer required. They rejected and shamed a delegate who offered an amendment that stated Jesus’s own words—that he is the way, the truth, and the life, and no one comes to the Father except through him. What the tragic history of the ELCA shows is that unbelievers are not content just to deny the flood or the making of iron float in water. Previous generations in the ELCA would probably be horrified by the actions of the 2019 church-wide assembly. But, as Paul says, a little leaven leavens the whole lump. Once the principle that the Scriptures are inspired and truthful, as Paul says, is given up, then any and every statement of Scripture is open to doubt.
Paul speaks rather directly to all of this in our Epistle reading this morning. First of all, he answers the question about whether salvation is through faith in Jesus Christ. He says to Timothy: “From infancy you have known the Holy Scriptures, which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus.” Paul says that Scripture is what taught Timothy. Those Holy Scriptures say that salvation is through faith in Jesus Christ and not in any other religions.
We must not despise what Paul says next either: “All Scripture is God breathed and is useful for teaching, for rebuking, for correcting, and for training in righteousness, so that the man of God may be complete, well equipped for every good work.” Scripture is breathed out by God. It is inspired. It is breathed into by God. That means that it is the communication of God’s will to us. Furthermore, it is useful. It works. It rebukes, corrects, and trains us in righteousness. The Holy Spirit in that Word creates faith in Jesus the Savior.
Unbelief in Jesus, unbelief in the Scriptures, has always been common, ever since the very beginning. Don’t be taken in by story that the Bible has been somehow disproved. All that has happened is what has always been happening from the beginning. God’s enemies sow doubt with the question, “Did God really say? If you were God, would you do it that way?” It is always wisdom that is promised. Alienation from the only true God of the Scriptures is what ends up getting delivered. Don’t buy it.
The Scriptures testify of Jesus, the one who overcame the serpent. He is the Savior of sinners. This you will see, as Paul also says in our reading, “when Christ comes to judge the living and the dead.” Then you will know that Jesus’s rising from the dead is your salvation.
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A book called The Great Divorce by C. S. Lewis has an impossible plot, but it is interesting nonetheless. The story is about a bus-trip from hell to the edge of heaven. The author admits that no such thing could possibly happen. There is an impassible chasm between the two places. But I enjoy reading this book from time to time because in it the author does what he does best. C. S. Lewis, a Christian author, is very good at depicting temptation and sin, how these things so easily get ahold of us, and what it is like to repent. With characters both from hell and from heaven, he is allowed ample opportunity to put his talents to work.
So what are the people in hell like, and what are the people in heaven like? Generally speaking, we could say that the people in hell are unloving, whereas the people in heaven are loving. Although this book is imaginary, this is something that actually is true. Heaven is a place of love. God is love. The most outstanding feature in heaven is that God is there. No flesh has seen God. Sinful flesh cannot see God and live. But in heaven that bright, shining, burning fire of love sheds his light upon all the inhabitants, who have been strengthened so as to bear it.
What about hell, then? Jesus calls it a burning place of weeping and gnashing of teeth. I think it’s safe to say that it must be about the opposite of heaven. Thus maybe itsmost outstanding feature is that there is no love there.
So in this book a busload of sinners makes a journey to the edge of heaven. These folks are not the kind of people that most people think of when they think of people who are in hell. That is to say, these people in hell are like us. They are vain, petty, mean, impatient, selfish, and so on. Such things can become second nature to us. This is what makes so-called “ordinary people” go to hell. We don’t have to sacrifice cats on a homemade altar or do other extraordinary, extravagant sins to go to hell. The ordinary, everyday lovelessness is sufficient for any and all of us.
What are the people of heaven like in this book? C. S. Lewis, in his own special, masterful way, makes it clear that the people of heaven, just like the people in hell, are also just like us. There isn’t a single person in heaven who was not a sinner while he or she lived on this earth. But somehow these sinners were saved. They were turned away from their selfish, unloving lives. The Word of God hit home. They repented of their sins, and were forgiven, and were thereby brought into the kingdom of love.
This can create some strange scenarios. There is one exchange in the book, for example, between a murderer and a hard-nosed, hard-working man. You’d think that the murderer should be in hell and the hard-working man should be in heaven. But the murderer was blessed by hearing the Word of God. He repents and believes in Jesus. The hard, proud man worked his tail off. Nobody ever gave him anything. He earned it all for himself. But he was also mean. So in the exchange between them the forgiven murderer tries to get the proud man to see that he wasn’t as righteous as he imagined himself to be and the proud man is indignant, to say the least. How could a murderer end up in heaven while he, being far more “decent,” was passed over?
There are a lot of other interesting things in this book, and you might profit from reading it, so long as you keep in mind that it is a work of fiction. It is fiction, but it has very serious truths in it too. One of those truths is that greatness is being like God. Greatness is loving. Here’s another truth: In a way each person is being prepared for their eternal dwellings. If we cultivate and nourish our vanity, our manipulating, the feathering of our own nests, then we are preparing ourselves for living in hell where there is no love. On the other hand, if we love, serve, sacrifice, and suffer for the goodness and happiness of others, then we are getting ready for that place where love is in all and through all and over all.
With this in mind, then, I’d like to turn to what we heard about in our Old Testament reading. The way that some people look at the world, this isn’t much of a story. A woman’s husband dies. She’s got two sons who are married. Then those two sons die. Three widows. The mother-in-law tells her daughters-in-law that they should go and find husbands for themselves. One of them takes her mother-in-law’s advice. Ruth, however, does not. She stays with her mother-in-law, Naomi.
The story of Ruth goes on in the following chapters to describe how Ruth remains faithful to Naomi. She’s the bread-winner because Naomi is too old and frail. Eventually a man named Boaz notices that Ruth is a very fine woman. Ruth wasn’t necessarily extraordinarily beautiful. She wouldn’t have been able to afford any spa treatments. Ruth and Naomi were extremely poor. But what Ruth did have was love. Her love caused her to suffer, sacrifice, and serve for her mother-in-law. She would continue to live in love with her eventual husband Boaz.
This story can be very easily despised by the world because Ruth was very far from being a queen. She didn’t lead armies to victory. She didn’t have an advanced degree. She didn’t have photo albums full of pictures from exotic places. If we were to put it into today’s terms she worked at [Dollar General] for minimum wage. This story is easy to despise if the standard measurements of greatness are applied to Ruth. One of the reasons why this story has been included in the Bible, though, is because she is an example of the only true greatness, which the Bible teaches us.
Paul says, “Love is long-suffering and friendly. It is not ambitious. It does not boast. Love is not puffed up or rude. It does not seek its own advantage. It does not respond sharply. It does not think evil. Love does not rejoice over unrighteousness, but rejoices together with the truth. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends.”
The reason why love never ends is because God is love. Since God is love there is nothing higher or better than love. Genghis Khan and Napoleon Bonaparte almost succeeded in conquering the world. Now they have their own rival territories in hell that they can never enjoy. Ruth, on the other hand, this slave-worker almost, is one of the great ones in heaven. She hungered and thirsted after righteousness. Now she has been filled.
So we make a great mistake when measure our life according to the standard earthly measures. Money, power, fame—these are hard to attain because everybody wants them. You can’t hardly get them without stepping on others. Plus when they are attained they are notoriously difficult to keep. Somebody else always wants to bump you off, just as you wanted to bump off others and your way to the top.
It also isn’t sufficient to have as your goal in life to be enjoyment or relaxation. Even the goal of making memories isn’t good enough. Folks suppose that our memories are eternal. They’re not. A lifetime or two after the funeral and all the rememberers will be gone too. And so very often the act of making the memories can be vain and selfish.
Practicing loving kindness is the way of God. Being loving and kind is open and available to absolutely everyone. Rich, poor, it doesn’t matter who you are. You might have a blue collar job, a pink collar job, or a white collar job. You might not have any job at all—at least not in the usual sense of that word. You can still love the people whom God has placed into your life for you to love. You can make other people’s lives better and happier by the way you conduct yourself.
It seems to me that in order to do this you probably need to think of life as something of an adventure. This especially seems true to me if you have been in something of a rut. We poor sinners so easily fall into ruts. These are ruts of mutual abuse. We get abused and taken advantage of, so when it’s our turn to do the abusing, well, why not indulge? There’s so much abuse that we depressingly think that that is how it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be. Cycles of abuse are eternal and can never be broken. I suspect that this is one of the sad thoughts that people think in hell, and, unfortunately, there it is actually true.
But what if, while there is still time, we took up our sword to slay the dragon within us? If we think of love being how Paul described it, if we think of love being long-suffering, kind, and so on—neverending. If we think of love as an adventure, then we will be better prepared for some hard knocks. That’s what happens on adventures!
When we love and are rewarded by ungratefulness or even outright meanness, we shouldn’t let that make us give up. We have an adventure in front of us. As Paul says in another place, we will reap what we have sown if we do not give up. Therefore it is very important that we not sow to our flesh, from which we will reap eternal death, but sow to the Spirit, from whom we will reap eternal life.
The reason why the Son of God came down to earth was, as Jesus said, “So that we may have life and that we may have it more abundantly.” Everyone recognizes that those who are privileged enough to engage in adventures are living life more abundantly. That’s why folks envy people who can afford to travel the world, buy amusements, and eat luxuriously.
But living the adventure of love doesn’t cost anything. Well, in a way at least. It doesn’t cost you money. In another way it costs everything. Jesus said, “Whoever would be my disciple must take up his cross and follow me.” Again, he said, “Whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake, this is the one who will save it.”
From the moment each of us was baptized we have been put on an adventure that continues on even into heaven. Death cannot stop it. In a way, when we die, that’s when the adventure begins in earnest. Which one of us, though, has lived up to the high and holy calling given to us in baptism? When we were baptized, we were baptized into Jesus’s death, so that the life of Jesus, the life of love, may be manifest in us also. Thus we ask God to forgive us. We have fallen. May Jesus raise us. May we be cured of false and silly and futile ambitions for our life so that we may chase after true greatness.
[And so we pray especially for Charlotte today, who was baptized. She has been put on an adventure. We do not know where this adventure will go, nor do we know how long it will last. It is an adventure that is begun in love, God’s love for her. May she be like Ruth. May her life be full of love.]
And so may we all live the adventures God gives to us. May those adventures continue on into heaven, where love never ends. Amen.
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What should the Christian life look like? That’s a pretty fundamental and important question. Here are some options for how the Christian life could be pictured: We could think of being a Christian as a matter getting better and better. Maybe you start out bad, inexperienced, what-have-you, but you keep working at it until you become a master.
Or being a Christian could be a matter of staying the same. Usually the Word of God isn’t taken very seriously when the Christian life is just a matter of staying the same. It’s as though Christianity is just a matter of identity—you were baptized Lutheran, just as you were born in Iowa. Or it’s a habit or a hobby. Something that you do on Sundays that runs alongside your real life. Your real life, Monday through Saturday, is where your treasure is. Your business, your family, your recreation, your memory making—that’s the good stuff.
Finally the Christian life could be understood as fighting against your sinful flesh—sometimes more strongly, sometimes less. Stumbling, falling, getting back up again. To the extent that your first love dies down your Old Adam gets stronger. You get tired of the fight. The conscience gets calloused, less sensitive to sin. The fire is going out if it hasn’t already.
Hopefully—God be gracious and make it so—hopefully the Word of God is brought to you to make you repent of your sins and to renew your belief in the forgiveness of your sins. Hopefully, I say, because without this there is no possibility of true goodness, growth or eternal life. With the Word of God continuing to correct, admonish and encourage you, you can go on fighting, stumbling, falling, getting back up again.
It is this last understanding of the Christian life which is the true Biblical understanding. This is borne out by our Gospel reading today, which we will get into. But before we do that I’d like to address what you might be thinking. This fighting, stumbling, falling, getting back up again Christian life might not sound all that appealing. The alternative understandings I mentioned before might sound better, and, I have to admit, why shouldn’t they? Both of them are vastly easier.
Both the triumphant Christian life and the Christian life as a hobby models basically do away with temptation, suffering, sadness and trouble. With the Christian life being a meteoric, inevitable rise to glory you can get good enough to the point where you can essentially retire, resting on your laurels. When you look at Christianity as being a sidelight of your life, you don’t have to fight or repent. Why put any energy into that at all? It’s not important enough. You just coast along. Put in your time at church, however little that time might be, and go on caring about what you really care about.
It is only with the true understanding of the Christian life as fighting, stumbling, getting back up again, where temptation is taken seriously for what it is and engaged. This is not fun or glorious. There’s no mastering of it so that you can be done with it. We remain beggars, as Luther supposedly said as his last words. He said, “We are beggars, this is true.” I don’t know of anybody who wants to be a beggar. But life isn’t a choose-your-own-adventure book. The devil’s real. Temptations are deadly. But the death and resurrection of Jesus is real too.
Now let’s turn to Jesus’s altogether realistic view of the Christian life in our Gospel reading.
We see what has been described as the Christian life right away. Jesus says, “Temptations to sin are sure to come.” Allow me render the Greek a little more literally: “It is impossible for deadly temptations not to come.” It is impossible for there not to be deadly temptations.
These deadly temptations cannot be ignored or brushed aside. You cannot assume that you are such an advanced Christian that you’re immune. You cannot assume that temptations are no big deal because you still have your job, and that’s what’s really important. You’ll always be a Christian because that’s what you choose to be. No, temptation is deadly. Temptations can bring about sin through which faith may be lost. When faith is lost it is not within your own power to come back to faith. If God doesn’t go out searching for you with his Word, you will remain lost, even if you should physically attend church week after week.
Temptation is so serious that Jesus gives us a vivid picture to turn us away from ever helping temptation along: If, by our words or actions, somebody else is turned to the devil, then it would be better if a huge millstone weighing hundreds of pounds were hung around our neck and for us to be dumped into the sea. If temptation or sin or faith were no big deal then such a drastic terrifying action would be out of place and unneeded. This shows that the Christian life is not a steady march of progress—onward and upward Christian soldiers—or something that can be shunted off to the side of your life.
Next Jesus says, “If your brother sins, rebuke him. If he repents, forgive him. Even if he sins against you seven times in a day, and seven times returns to you and says, ‘I repent,’ forgive him.” These words are the way you should understand this congregation. The reason why we are a congregation is to help one another get to heaven. We are not a social club or even a bunch of do-gooders who are trying to make the world a better place. Instead, we watch over one another’s souls. If one of us falls into sin, please, let us love one another enough to rebuke the sin.
Love is needed very badly, because without love we won’t care enough to open our mouths. We’ll just let the poor, dumb sinner sink under the weight of his sin. It’s his or her problem. To hell with them. Or, on the other hand, if we open our mouths without love it may be for the purpose of harming the sinner even more. Maybe we want to embarrass the person or hurt the person.
It is very different to rebuke a person in a Christian way, as you can see from Jesus’s own words. Christian rebukes are aiming towards the forgiveness of sins. In fact, Jesus seems to be going a little over the top with his forgiveness. We are to forgive even seven times in a single day. Seven is a number of completion in the Bible. So the meaning is that we should forgive our neighbor over and over, whenever he or she repents. Living in forgiveness is the goal.
Again, this is very important for our understanding of ourselves as a Christian congregation. The ultimate goal is never for people to be shamed or even for anyone to hate himself or herself. Now, it may well be, and it is probably inevitable, that before folks get to the ultimate goal they end up being ashamed or hating themselves. Such are the terrible fruits of sin! But what we want for people is for them to be at peace in the forgiveness of sins for Jesus’s sake.
We are not a bunch of warriors, spiritual big shots, who are looking for weaklings we can beat up. Each and every one of us is a forgiven sinner. It is only as a forgiven sinner that we may properly rebuke other sinners. We should know from personal experience how deadly and seductive temptation and sin is when we call somebody else to account. And the hope is never for anybody, no matter what their sin might be, to continue to abide in shame and despair. That is the devil’s goal. That’s how things are in hell. The devil wants people to be ashamed and miserable eternally. Jesus, on the other hand, is the physician who heals those who are diseased. Jesus, through the word that Christians speak to others, searches out the lost, binds up the injured, lifts those who have fallen.
To get back to the text, perhaps in response to what Jesus said about forgiving seven times, the apostles ask Jesus: “Increase our faith.” Amen to that. That’s what we need.
Jesus responded: “If you had faith like a mustard seed, you could tell this mulberry tree, ‘Be uprooted and planted in the sea,’ and it would obey you.’” There is no record in the New Testament of any of the apostles uprooting or planting any vegetation with their faith. I guess their faith wasn’t even as big as a mustard seed. And that’s alright. It is not the strength of our faith that saves, but whether we believe in Christ.
I’m not fond of hearing Christians brag about how much faith they have. I don’t like hearing people say that they could never fall. They’re super strong. They’re a prayer warrior. Such talk reminds me of Peter telling Jesus on the night when he was betrayed: “Even if everybody else falls away, I will never fall away. Even if I have to die for you, I’ll do it.” And you know what happened to Peter just a few hours later. He fell.
The Christian life is lived in weakness, Christ says to Paul, “when we are weak, then we are strong.” When we are weak and beggarly we won’t be admiring ourselves or our faith or the miracles we can perform as though in a mirror. We’ll be looking to Jesus, the source of our faith.
Finally Jesus says, “Which one of you who has a servant plowing or taking care of sheep will say to him when he comes in from the field, ‘Come at once and recline at the table’? Won’t the master tell him instead, ‘Prepare my supper, and after you are properly dressed, serve me while I eat and drink. After that you may eat and drink’? He does not thank the servant because he did what he was commanded to do, does he? So also you, when you have done all that you were commanded, say, ‘We are unworthy servants. We have only done what we were supposed to do.’”
Perhaps more than anything else we’ve talked about today, this last part of our reading shows that we can be so easily mistaken about what the Christian life is supposed to look like. You do not see any talk of being a master here, a virtuoso, who has harnessed and cultivated mighty spiritual powers. The talk is the opposite—a slave whose work never seems to be finished.
You also don’t hear about people sitting in an air-conditioned building one hour a week, not knowing what they are saying while they are singing and praying, not paying attention and repenting, but nevertheless are fine Christians.
This slave doesn’t have the luxury of making Christianity into a hobby or a sidelight for his life. This slave’s Christianity is his life, and it entails fighting, stumbling, falling, and getting back up again to fight another day. Because the Christian life is this way Jesus has taught us to pray, “Hallowed be Thy Name, Thy Kingdom Come, Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” We need help in this pilgrim life. We are beggars; this is true.
And some might say, “If Christianity is like that, then I don’t want to have anything to do with it.” I can understand that. I’m not going to twist your arm. There are a lot of preachers who fill the world with their preaching. I’m sure you can find one that suits your fancies. But remember this: Life is not a choose-your-own-adventure book. Just because you like the sound of some lie doesn’t make the lie true.
Here’s the truth: The devil’s real. Your sins are real. Judgement is coming.
But know this too: Jesus said, “I have not come into the world to judge the world, but that the world might be saved through me.” The Christian life is not easy, but it is good. We will not be a slave forever. We will not have to fight forever. One day we will happily be delivered from this sinful flesh.
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I’d like to begin today by talking about something that Paul mentions in our Epistle reading. Paul mentions that Jesus made the good confession before Pontius Pilate. So what was Jesus’s good confession?
When Jesus was brought before Pilate, Pilate asked him, “Are you the king of the Jews?” Jesus’s answer, his good confession, was, “Yes. It is as you say.” Jesus’s good confession was that he is the king of the Jews.
John’s Gospel tells us more of Jesus’s good confession. Jesus also said to Pilate: “My kingdom is not of this world. If my kingdom were of this world, my servants would fight so that I would not be handed over to the Jews. But now my kingdom is not from here.”
Pilate responded, “You are a king then?”
Jesus answered, “I am, as you say a king. For this reason I was born and for this reason I came into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice.”
Pilate said to him, “What is truth.”
You can tell that Pilate is not impressed, which is not surprising. Jesus was already bruised and bloodied by this point from his treatment at the hands of the chief priests and scribes. Pilate knew that Jesus did not move in high society, because he himself was from high society. Jesus had no entourage with him, no supporters. The crowd that was there seemed only able to cry out, “Crucify him! Crucify him!” Pilate took pity on what he imagined to be a delusional man. Many times over Pilate went out to the Jews and said, “I find him not guilty. He doesn’t deserve death. We’ll give him a slap on the wrist and call it good.”
It’s easy for us, also, to think like Pilate. Just look at him in your mind’s eye. Jesus couldn’t have been serious. He’s helpless and powerless. He can’t be the king of the Jews. Caesar is king of the Jews. Caesar is the one who conquered them, and he would come and conquer them again. Jesus doesn’t even have an army.
So it goes. We have our own ideas of what works and what doesn’t work. What works is money, power, politics, guns, and so on. Jesus had no money. He seemingly had no power. He was horrible at politics and coalition building. He didn’t even own a gun. Looks like this won’t work. But Jesus’s claim that he is the king of the Jews is the very thing that Paul identifies as his good confession. Jesus, despite appearances, is the king of the Jews.
Jesus being king of the Jews means that Jesus is the king of the people of God. Jesus is the true Son of David. He is the one who fulfills the Old Testament prophecies for a Savior. He is the suffering servant who was crushed for our iniquities, wounded for our transgressions. By his stripes we are healed. The placard above Jesus’s cross is true. Pilate had a sign made for Jesus’s cross written in all the major languages of that region so that everyone could read it. It said, “Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews.” There, on the cross, the king was reigning and ruling. Admittedly, it is a strange way to reign and rule. He’s not bossing anybody else around. He gasps, gurgles, and cries out. But this is how he is the good King, laying down his life for the sheep. By his death all sinners are redeemed.
The truthfulness of Jesus’s good confession continues on. He remains king. Paul says in our reading that he will come again when the time is right. Paul calls Jesus “the blessed and only ruler, the King of kings and Lord of lords, who alone has immortality, who lives in unapproachable light, whom no one has seen or is able to see. To him be honor and power forever! Amen.” Jesus reigns and rules at the right hand of God the Father in majesty unapproachable, in power unequaled. We sing about this almost every Sunday, a hymn to Jesus: “Thou only art holy; Thou only art the Lord. Thou only, O Christ, with the Holy Ghost, art most high in the glory of God the Father. Amen.” Jesus is the greatest! This is the good confession.
The reason why I wanted to start today with the good confession that Jesus is the king of the Jews is because it helps us get a correct frame of mind for the other things that Paul says. We have our own ideas of what works and what doesn’t work when it comes to being king. So also, what Paul says concerning our happiness contradicts what we think. More money has to be right there at the top of the list for what would make us happier.
But Paul says: “Godliness with contentment is great gain. For we brought nothing into the world, and we certainly cannot take anything out. But if we have food and clothing, with these we will be satisfied. Those who want to get rich fall into temptation and a trap and many foolish and harmful desires, which plunge them into complete destruction and utter ruin. For the love of money is a root of all sorts of evils. By striving for money, some have wandered away from the faith and have pierced themselves with many pains.”
Then, at the end of the reading he says, “Instruct those who are rich in this present age not to be arrogant or to put their hope in the uncertainty of riches, but rather in God, who richly supplies us with all things for our enjoyment. Instruct them to do good, to be rich in good works, to be generous and willing to share. In this way they are storing up for themselves the treasure of a good foundation for the future, so that they may take hold of that which is truly life.”
According to a very practical, common-sense mindset Paul’s words about riches can look improbable, to say the least. He says we’ll be satisfied if we have food and clothing. He says the desire to be rich is a trap. He says it produces many harms that pierce us straight through. He says that riches are uncertain! That’s quite the whopper. If we take anything as being certain it’s riches. Instead he says that we should put our hope in God, who richly supplies us with all things for our enjoyment.
All of these sayings of Paul can look poor and weak. They can look as shabby as Jesus looked before Pontius Pilate. Pilate asked him, “You are king of the Jews?” So also these instructions concerning money can appear to be the opposite of happiness, goodness, and so on.
But the good confession is that Jesus is the king of the Jews despite appearances or expectations. So also your happiness will be fulfilled contrary to expectations. It will be not by desiring to be rich. That is a foolish and harmful desire. That will plunge you into complete destruction and utter ruin. Do you not believe that? I wouldn’t be surprised if you didn’t.
How many people believed that Jesus was the king of the Jews? How many people now believe that he reigns and rules from the right hand of God the Father, and at the proper time will come to judge the living and the dead? Then what good will all your riches do you? Riches, which seem so stable and dependable now, provide no benefit then.
Therefore, Paul says, “flee from these thoughts and desires.” Run away from them like you would some dreadful beast or monster who wants to pierce you through with many pains. Notice how energetic activity is directed away from things that we otherwise like to put a lot of our energy into. When we believe that our happiness is tied up with riches, we will go the extra mile to get a little extra for ourselves. Run away from your love of money because it’s dangerous.
Instead, Paul says, chase other things: “Pursue righteousness, godliness, faith, love, endurance, and kindness. Fight the good fight of faith. Take hold of eternal life, to which you were called, and about which you made your good confession.” Note how chasing after being righteous, godly, believing, loving, patient, and kind is wise. It’s foolish to chase riches, because we didn’t bring anything into this world when we were born, and we won’t take anything with us when we die. But by chasing after these other things we are taking hold of eternal life.
Maybe you could say that chasing money, power, politics, and guns is taking hold of this present life. If you want to be king or queen of the world, you can’t afford to ignore such things. But if you are striving to enter into that unapproachable light, whom no one has seen or is able to see, if you want to take hold of eternal life, then you must pursue those thing of which eternal life consists.
Be righteous. Righteousness is God’s gift to you in Jesus. You are righteous for Jesus’s sake. You also, therefore, love what is right and just.
Be godly. Be reverent towards God rather than being reverent toward your own life, your own ambitions, your own achievements.
Be believing. Trust in God in any and every circumstance instead of in money or any other gods.
Be loving. Love, because God first loved you.
Be patient. Persevere. Don’t give up. You will reap what you sow if you do not give up.
Be kind. God has been kind to you, you be kind to others.
The place where all these things come to completion and fulfillment is heaven. By pursuing these things you are taking hold of eternal life. You are entering into what Jesus has purchased for you when he reigned and ruled as the king of the Jews, whose kingdom is not of this world.
So do not be afraid to put into practice the instructions that Paul gives us. If Jesus is not king, if he is not resurrected from the dead, then Paul’s instructions are horrible. I don’t know if worse advice could be possible! But if Jesus is king, if he is risen from the dead, if he is coming again, then there is no more sensible and wise thing to do than to take hold of the eternal life that has been given to you. Happiness and fulfillment does not come from chasing riches. It comes from following the ways of God.
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We have choices when it comes to what we love and what we pursue. We can’t love everything equally the same. There are tradeoffs. If you love one thing, it means that you are going to love something else a little less.
This is true when it comes to money. Usually the tradeoff when it comes to money is relationships. You can love and pursue money—milk it, squeeze it—but that might very well mean that a relationship suffers. In order to get more money out of a person, you kind of have to abuse them. Or, at least, there’s no good deal for them. A good deal for them is a bad deal for you if your goal is to get as much money as you can.
This is why people often prefer to make deals with strangers. You can treat strangers however you want. You probably won’t see them again or have to deal with them again. If they end up dissatisfied, oh well, buyer beware. A deal’s a deal, etc. If you rip off somebody you know, then you might to be confronted by that over and over again. The other party might be angry or disappointed. So if you want to maximize your profits it’s best to deal with strangers so you can squeeze as much out of them as you can.
Getting as much as you can for yourself is one of those things that is hard-wired into us. We want it. Getting the most for as little as possible is good business sense. So that’s good. More than that: it’s the correct thing to do, even the moral thing to do.
This is similar to another thing that is hard-wired into us: love your friends and hate your enemies. If somebody treats you badly, then give them hell. If they punch you, then you punch them right back and punch them harder than they punched you.
But you know that Jesus tells us to love our enemies: “If someone strikes you on the one cheek, then turn so that they might strike you on the other.” Do not return evil for evil, but overcome evil with good. Jesus overturns the morality that seems to be hard-wired in us to hate our enemies.
The same thing is true with our dealings with money. It’s hard-wired in us to get as much as we can for ourselves. There’s nothing wrong with raking it in so long as it’s legal. Everyone has to fend for themselves, and if you happen to fend better than others, then so be it. You are probably just a superior human being. That’s a common assumption, you know. The more money you have, the more superior of a human being you must be.
To that assumption we might respond with what Jesus says in our Gospel reading: “What is highly regarded among people is an abomination in God’s sight.” An abomination is something that is totally disgusting. People highly regard power, pride, wealth, self-sufficiency. People believe that the more money and resources they have, the better off they are. This kind of thinking is disgusting in God’s sight. True greatness is not being rich or famous or powerful. True greatness is following after God’s Son, our Lord, Jesus Christ.
Isn’t greatness what everybody ultimately wants? Isn’t greatness what the world highly regards? This is why you have to smack down your enemies and cheat whomever you can. That’s how you get ahead. Less for others means more for you. But this, too, Jesus turns on its head.
One time Jesus overheard his disciples arguing. He asked them, “What were you arguing about?” But they wouldn’t answer him because they were embarrassed. They had been arguing with one another over who was the greatest. So Jesus called them all together and said, “If anyone wants to be first, he will be last of all and the servant of all.” Then Jesus took a little child and placed the child in the midst of them. Taking the child in his arms Jesus said to them, “Whoever welcomes one of these little children in my name welcomes me. And whoever welcomes me, welcomes not just me but also him who sent me—the Father.”
This is so contrary to the way that we think that it is very easy for people to scoff at Jesus as though he were the greatest of all possible fools. Note that this is what the Pharisees did to Jesus in our Gospel reading today after he was done talking about money. The ways of Jesus are so contrary to how we normally think. Who is the greatest? Folks might answer: Mohammed Ali, Bill Gates, Donald Trump, Michael Phelps. How do you get to be the greatest? By ruthlessly, relentlessly serving yourself—cultivating your talents, honing your strengths, burning out your weaknesses.
How different is Jesus’s answer: “If anyone wants to be first, he will be last of all and the servant of all.” Then, so that they wouldn’t miss the point, he picked out some random kid. You should serve this random, powerless, favorless kid. This kid can’t do anything for you. He can’t pay you. He can’t make you rich or famous. The uncouth kid might not even have the manners to say “Thank you.” But if you want to be great, if you want to be first, then you must become last and the servant of all.
Who ever heard of a servant or a slave being great? That’s the opposite of what we think of as being great. But, as Jesus said, “What is highly regarded in people’s sight is an abomination in God’s sight.” Being a servant or a slave is worst in our books, but think of what Jesus is like. He did not come to lord it over everybody else, even though he is Lord of lords and King of kings. He certainly had that right and ability. Instead he came “not to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.”
Those who would be great will follow after this Greatest One. The way that Jesus was great was with his love. Jesus loved. God is love. Heaven is love. Hell is absent of love. Hell has plenty of greatness in it. So many of this world’s greatest end up there. Lots of rich people go there. Lots of powerful people go there. Those folks knew how to get ahead, and you can be sure that they haven’t changed a bit. You can be sure that the inhabitants of hell will guard their own interests down to the very last penny. They’ll slit your throat while you are looking. You might very well find a lot of greatness in hell. What you won’t find there is love.
So we need to promote love as Christians. Nobody else is going to do it, I assure you. Everybody else thinks that love won’t work. For example: Loving your enemies. They say loving your enemies is psychologically damaging. Or being generous: Being generous with your buying and selling will make you poor. Poor people are the worst. They are so miserable. Or serving others: Serving others is the surest way to be miserable and unhappy. Sounds like suffering to me. These contradictions of Jesus’s teachings can sound right and quite plausible. It sounds like love, service, sacrifice, and suffering are the problem and not the solution. Isn’t that just like the devil? Make what God has said sound hateful, bad, sinister, no good. That’s how his speech sounded way back when to Adam and Eve too.
Love is not the problem. Love is what saves the world. God is love. Jesus’s life was love by which he justified sinners by taking our place. His life continues to be love. The healing that we all need so badly is not going to come from more money or goods. It’s not going to come from a battle between the sexes. It’s not going to come from loosening all limits and letting everybody go wild with whatever trips their triggers. Healing comes with love—service, sacrifice and suffering for one another.
Think of that wild jungle that is called our schools. Kids are so unbelievably mean to each other that the scars of being picked on can be life-long. What if kids would love the least in their midst? That takes courage, because standing up for the least can make you a target. How beneficial and Christ-like would it be for young Christians to step in and not let somebody get absolutely thrashed in their soul? And let’s not be Pollyannaish about this. There will be a cost. Standing up and helping the least will make the bullies come after you. They will come after you like Goliath the giant. But if you put your trust in the Lord, you’ll be alright—even if you end up with some bruises.
Or what if we loved more in the workplace? Workers won’t work unless they are compelled to work. They won’t go the extra mile. Employers don’t care about their workers. They try to pay them as little as they can get away with. Everybody, bosses and workers, look only to their own interests as they each in their own way are trying to be the greatest. What a difference it would make to love your boss, and for the boss to love you. Satisfaction in the workplace does not come from how much money you get paid. Satisfaction is from the love that is there.
And what of love in the home? What if you set aside your pride and made it your goal to do what is pleasing to God, serving the others who share your home? Jesus says that we should serve a little child. How much more, then, should you serve the one who is not a child, but with whom you are one flesh? You know those little tricks and snide comments and backhanded ways that you can drive each other up the wall. These barbs and punches give you some kind of evil satisfaction, because, after all, they hit you, so you should hit them back. What if you didn’t hit them back?
In all these most important areas of life you always have a choice. You can serve yourself or you can serve God. You can’t serve both, because you are always going to prefer one over the other. And the easier way is always serving yourself rather than serving God. We do not, by nature, like to serve or sacrifice or suffer. That is to say, we do not, by nature, love.
But you have been brought out of the realm of darkness and into God’s marvelous light. You have learned what is truly great, what is truly beneficial. You even know the amazing secret by which evil has been conquered. It has been defeated by love. God is love. We love because he first loved us.
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There are two main teachings that we have from God. He has given us his Law and his Gospel.
God’s Law spells out everything that we must do in order to be judged as good, righteous, and just. The Ten Commandments are God’s Law. The great summation of God’s Law is that we should love him with our whole heart, soul, strength and mind, and that we should love our neighbor as ourselves. So the Law is always saying, “Do this, and don’t do that.”
God’s Gospel is his message of good news. The word “Gospel” means “good news.” The good news is that God has acted on our behalf. He has not abandoned us to our slavery to sin and our slavery to the devil, but he has redeemed us in the death of Jesus Christ. The good news, the Gospel, is God’s gift of forgiveness and salvation in Jesus.
Our Gospel reading today is especially illustrative of God’s good news. A sheep that has gotten lost is as good as dead. It’s just a matter of time. But the shepherd goes and looks for the sheep. When the sheep is found it is placed on the shepherd’s shoulders, and he goes back to the flock rejoicing. The sheep didn’t do anything to bring about its own salvation. The sheep didn’t follow commands like “Do this, and don’t do that.” In fact, if anything, the sheep didn’t do what it was supposed to do. It wandered off. The shepherd saves the sheep despite the sheep’s behavior.
The parable of the lost coin is similar. The coin’s contribution to what happened is that it got lost. It fell. It couldn’t jump back up into the woman’s purse. The woman goes to work, takes the trouble. So it is with our salvation. Having fallen into sin we cannot work our way back into God’s favor. God goes out searching for us to find us.
He does this by the preaching of his Word. He does this through Christians speaking the Gospel. The only way that anyone can know about the Gospel, can know of God’s will to save sinners in Jesus is by being told it. There are no experiments or math problems that will ever bring about this knowledge.
So we have two teachings that we are stewards of as Christians. We have the Law, which tells us how to live well and be good, and the Gospel, which tells us what God has done for us. These are the two things that we have to share with the world. God’s Law diagnoses our abominable condition. It tells us who we are. Who are we? We are sinners. The Gospel tells us about God. Who is he? His most outstanding feature is that he is the justifier of sinners. He makes sinners right and good by the holy life, death, and resurrection of Jesus.
Keeping this in mind, let’s turn to a surprising detail that has been recorded at the beginning of our Gospel reading. It says: “All the tax collectors and sinners were coming to Jesus to hear him.” Tax collectors were mean and greedy. They would threaten and extort to obtain whatever they could get away with. The Roman officials didn’t care so long as they got their cut.
It mentions that sinners were coming to Jesus. There’s a pretty admirable list of sinners in our Epistle reading: Sinners are “lawless and rebellious people, godless people, unholy and worldly people, those who kill their fathers and those who kill their mothers, murderers, sexually immoral people, homosexuals, kidnappers, liars, perjurers, and so on.” More concretely you might think of people who are unacceptable according to our moral, social code. You can think of people who have done things that you consider shameful. But you also might remember things that you’ve done in secret. So far as other people know you are respectable, but you probably know something different.
Tax collectors and sinners were coming to Jesus. They were not just coming to watch him perform miracles, but, as it says, “to hear him.” What would Jesus be telling them? We are not told exactly, but, generally speaking, he would be telling them God’s Law and God’s Gospel. God’s Law would have identified them as sinners. God’s Gospel would have announced that they are forgiven sinners. These are not teachings that came out of somebody’s cracked brain. These are teachings that come from God. They are as true as true can be. These tax collectors and sinners were getting hooked on the truth. They wanted to hear it.
This is a wonderful thing whenever it happens. Jesus says that the angels rejoice when just one sinner repents. It doesn’t always happen. In fact, we are quite accustomed to and feel more comfortable with lies and deception to the truth.
We prefer lies to the truth when it comes to the Law because we do not want to be humbled. We want to believe that every bad thing we do is understandable, comprehensible, not a bit reprehensible, but perfectly defensible. This, of course, is ridiculously untrue, but it’s what we want to believe. When the truth of God’s Law comes along, it exposes our justifications of ourselves as the fig leaves that they really are.
Or we might lie to ourselves like this: We’ve done our fair share of wandering, of course, just like everybody else, but we can always come back to the flock if we want to. We’re not lost. We’re not damned. We can stop whenever we want to. We can get better—just like we can always theoretically get in shape. Let’s not start today, of course. We’ve already blown it for today. Tomorrow we’ll be motivated. Always tomorrow. Tomorrow we’ll whip ourselves into shape. The truth, however, that we should gain from this is that we are liars. Oh, how we lie! We lie to others and we lie to ourselves. The Bible says that all men are liars.
The truth is that you have no hope of ever wandering back into the fold. Your wandering will only take you further and further away, even if you look like you’re getting into shape. The further and further you wander away the closer you are to death. The purpose and end of the Law is to reveal this approaching inevitable death. The Law has not been given for self-improvement. The Law is ferocious and untamable. It ruthlessly points out the inevitability of our death and damnation for those who do not keep it.
The only way that God’s Law can be made somewhat palatable for people is when it is not used correctly, when lies are told about it, when people pick and choose which laws they feel they would like to keep and which laws they can safely ignore as if they had this right. Of course, we can lie and pretend about God’s Law until we die and until Judgement Day, but that will be the end of the lying and pretending.
So the thing that we need the most is being saved from God’s Law. God’s Law speaks the truth. It tosses us altogether into the one bucket called “sinners.” This isn’t God’s fault and it isn’t the Law’s fault. It’s our fault. Sinners and tax collectors can rage against that verdict all they want, but the truth is still the truth.
There is another truth, however, that swallows up, you might say, this truth of the Law. God’s truth according to the Law is that you are a sinner and unrighteous. But, as Paul says in Romans 3, “a righteousness apart from the Law has been revealed. It is God’s own righteousness. So it’s not a fake or pretend righteousness. It is the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe.” This is the righteousness of the Gospel.
If it weren’t for this righteousness of God in Jesus Christ that is freely given apart from the Law, if it weren’t from this Gospel righteousness that swallows up the lack of righteousness that the Law reveals, then people would be better off if they never heard the Law at all. They’d be better off pretending that they are not lost, they’re fine, they can stop whenever they want, they can get better if only the try better, they’ve lived a decent enough life when compared to other people—these truly give people comfort.
The only problem is that they are lies. They aren’t perfectly comfortable—people can sense that they are lies in their heart of hearts. They sense the horror of the truth that the Law reveals—how evil we are, our death and damnation—this is what overcame Judas Iscariot so that he went and hung himself.
This horrible truth of the Law must be followed by the truth of the Gospel, which is superior in a sense. Both God’s Law and God’s Gospel are as true and true can be. But God sent his Son in order to save us from his Law. God sent his Son to find the lost sheep and the lost coin. Once the sheep has been found and the coin has been put back in the purse the wandering and the getting lost lose all the power it ever had. The sinner who is forgiven isn’t reckoned as a sinner anymore. Christians do not hold on to and love the Law with their whole heart. Christians love Jesus who suffered and died to set them free from the Law. The ferocious and divine beast of the Law is precisely what brought about Jesus’s deepest suffering on our behalf when he became sin for us.
So the reason why the tax collectors and sinners were coming to Jesus in order to hear him was because they had tasted the truth. The truth is scary, but it is also wonderful. They got hooked on the truth. This ironically put them much further along than the Pharisees who otherwise lived very respectable lives.
In fact, the Pharisees’ lies about themselves were perhaps more persuasive than the sinners’ and tax collectors’ lies to themselves. The Pharisees could more easily convince themselves that they were not lost. They certainly weren’t as lost as those losers whom Jesus was eating with. This also meant that they felt very little need for a shepherd to take them upon his shoulders and bring them back to the flock.
Often the Christian Church gets depicted as being pharisaical. A lot of times that depiction is accurate, because not everybody understands the two great teachings of Christianity very well and how they relate. This depiction of the Christian Church is that Christians love to judge other people—homosexuals, for example, to take a hot button issue today. No, that is not our endpoint, just as it was not Jesus’ endpoint either. God’s Law, indeed, condemns homosexual lust and activities just as it condemns other evil things. It does no good to tell lies about God’s Law.
But the endpoint is to live in the righteousness of God that is apart from the Law—the righteousness of God that comes through faith in Jesus Christ. No matter what sins anybody might be afflicted with, the endpoint is confidence, comfort, joy, and thankfulness to Jesus for suffering and atoning for all those sins. The goal is not that everyone should be sad and sullen, being tortured by the ferocious Law and by their own guilt. That’s a surefire way to end up like Judas either physically or spiritually. The goal is a good conscience coming from God’s own powerful divine truth in the Gospel.
Live in Jesus and his righteousness. He takes away all shame and guilt. He destroys death. He closes hell. He opens heaven. He does all of these things for sinners like you. He wants to be with you and to eat with you.
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When the introductions are made on Wheel of Fortune, the contestants almost always talk about two things. They talk about their family, and they talk about their job. One’s family and one’s livelihood are very important parts of who we are.
In our Gospel reading Jesus seems to attack both of these sources for our identity. Our identity is precious to us. Jesus makes us choose between being his disciple or holding on to our identity.
Jesus says, “If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, even his own life, he cannot be my disciple.” There’s Pat’s question about our families. Jesus also has something to say about our livelihoods: “Any one of you who does not say farewell to all his own possessions cannot be my disciple.” Let me add that the word for “possessions” here is much larger than just money and property. A more literal translation would go something like this: “Any one of you who does not say farewell to his own being or existence cannot be my disciple.” Jesus is laying claim to all of us, our entire being. Another thing he says in our reading is: “Whoever does not carry his own cross and follow me cannot be my disciple.”
This strikes us as being very negative. There are some very negative words like “hate,” “say farewell,” and “carry your cross.” The other side of it, of course, is the possibility of being Jesus’s disciple. We hardly ever think of that. The goodness of being a disciple of Jesus must be such that these very important and precious things in our life are not the highest good. The one thing that cannot be dispensed with is being Jesus’s disciple. Everything else can go.
A rock-solid conclusion that we must draw from Jesus words is that there is no such thing as being a casual Christian. A casual Christian will never put up with such demands. If there is a conflict between family and faith, family comes first. But what Jesus is saying is that such a one is not his disciple. Or what if a person’s job makes demands upon a Christian that the Christian cannot agree to with a good conscience? If you will not say farewell to your livelihood you cannot be his disciple.
This is very useful to know in our day because you certainly aren’t going to hear anything like this from anywhere else. The widespread assumption is that being a casual Christian is perfectly acceptable. If ever a conflict arises between being a Christian and familial obligations, or in order to get a good grade, or to keep your job, or even recreation commitments, all these other things not only can come first, but probably should come first. We tend not to think anything of this, but if we were to think about it we’d realize that a very powerful confession of faith is made by our actions. When everything else in the world comes first and being a faithful disciple is only when it is convenient, you are making your confession before the world and before God where your loyalties lie.
On the other hand, so-called fanaticism or so-called extremism in popular understanding is when your commitments towards God are allowed to have an impact on your life. This is very strange, very bad. Over the past 20 years or so a lot of the villains in TV crime shows have been screwy Christians who aren’t like the rest of the population. They can’t be trusted because who knows how they will act. The rest of the population knows what life is for. Life is for making money and spending money. Anybody who doesn’t have that as the purpose for their life is strange and dangerous. I could almost imagine one of those TV villains quoting Jesus after doing something dastardly to his family: “If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, even his own life, he cannot be my disciple.”
This reading, therefore, is very useful in the sense that it can teach us something we don’t already know or already believe. Our people are so much more thoroughly catechized by what they learn from TV than from anything they might learn from the Bible or from church. Everybody already believes that family has to come first, then the job, then the cabin, then, if there’s time and out of the goodness of our heart, we’ll offer the leftovers of our life to Jesus. And he should be grateful that we are such good people that we offer him even that! That, I would say, is the widespread mentality.
So when Jesus says you must hate your family and say farewell to the life you imagine you’ve created for yourself if you want to be his disciple, this totally blows out of the water the thinking that we otherwise might have. Discipleship to Jesus is higher and holier and we must not toss it aside for even the best and most wholesome that this life can offer. Wherever Jesus leads, we will follow. That’s what it means to be a disciple. A disciple follows the master.
Therefore we should count the cost. Jesus says:
For which of you, if he wants to build a tower, does not first sit down and count the cost to see if he has enough to complete it? Otherwise, when he has laid a foundation and is not able to finish, everyone who sees it will begin to ridicule him, saying, ‘This fellow began to build, but was not able to finish.’ Or what king, as he goes out to confront another king in war, will not first sit down and consider if he is able with ten thousand to oppose the one who comes against him with twenty thousand? And if he is not able, he sends out a delegation and asks for terms of peace while his opponent is still far away.
If you are only going to give the leftovers of your life to God, then you might as well not even give him that. If you were going to build a tower with what you have laying around at your house or in your garage, that’s going to be a pretty pathetic and ugly tower. You might as well not even build it because it probably isn’t going to be worth anything anyway.
So also casual discipleship isn’t worth anything either. In the life to come casual disciples of Jesus will look stupid. “Look, they thought they were Christians even though they never followed Jesus.” Either you are his disciple or you are not. There’s no half way. Either you are looking for Jesus to take you to himself or you are making the most of this life. If you are making the most of this life, then you will never be willing to sacrifice anything that you really care about because that will decrease your quality of life. The best that can ever be hoped for are the leftovers. Maybe you’ll use the stuff that you have lying around, but you certainly aren’t going to go out and buy building materials with the money that you could otherwise use to increase your standard of living.
The way it is now is the way it was then and vice versa. At the beginning of our reading it says “large crowds were traveling together with Jesus.” The fact that there was a large crowd seems to be what prompts Jesus to say that the cost of being his disciple is very high. And true to Jesus’s words, this crowd ended up being unfaithful. In each one of the individual lives of this crowd something happened where they quit following Jesus. We don’t know what those things were. For one person it was this. For another person it was that. Maybe some of them followed him all the way to the cross, but then they couldn’t believe in the resurrection.
So it goes also with us. One person never even learns that being a disciple of Jesus requires anything more than possessing a tiny nugget of knowledge about him. A better informed person tries to be his disciple by learning from him, receiving his sacrament, attending church, but the cares and pleasures of this life draws him away. There are other things he’d rather do with his time than hear Jesus say stuff like he says to us in our reading today. Another person continues on as a Christian until he is forced to choose between doing what is right and doing what is easy or appears to be loving or what seems profitable.
Like the three kinds of soil in Jesus’s parable about the sowing of the seed, the call to be Jesus’s disciple comes to nothing. But it might not seem that way to the persons that I’ve described. Maybe, in their mind, their tower is fine. Maybe they even still come to church. But all they are doing is honoring God with their lips, while their hearts are far from him.
This is where Jesus’s words can be very helpful to you. Don’t deceive yourself about the nature of being Christ’s disciple. If you aren’t willing to be faithful to Jesus rather than be pleasing to your family, then don’t pretend that you are Jesus’s disciple. If you won’t say farewell to your quality of life so that you can be a disciple of Jesus, then you better keep all of that for yourself and enjoy it before your life ends.
But if you have tasted and seen that the Lord is good, then dedicate yourself to him anew today. Jesus says in another place, “Truly I tell you that no one who has left home or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or fields for me and the Gospel will fail to receive a hundred times as much in this present age: homes, brothers, sisters, mothers, children and fields—along with persecutions—and in the age to come eternal life.”
Note how Jesus says that when we have left behind things for the Gospel that we already receive in this life a hundred times as much. We have brothers, sisters, mothers, and children with our fellow believers. We have a home in God. We have a field in which we may work. Jesus does say that there are also persecutions—this is not some unrealistic fantasy. But persecutions are never as bad as the devil would have us believe. And then, in the age to come, we will receive eternal life.
Jesus’s words in our Gospel reading today can sound horribly negative, and they always and forever will sound horribly negative to every scoffing unbeliever. But Jesus is not stingy. He has not come to take good things away from us. He comes to take bad things away—idolatry, impiety, covetousness. These things hamper life more than we realize. Instead, as Jesus says, “I have come so that they may have life, and that they may have it more abundantly.”
With the new life in Jesus, with the forgiveness of all your sins, you are entering ever more fully into life if you continue as his disciple. As he burns off the dross, purifying you, he makes you strong to enter eternal life where love is all in all. This is something that never can happen casually. It involves heat and pressure, bringing about a transformation. Jesus never means evil for us disciples—only good—but we have to trust him.
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There are a couple places in the Bible where there is so much you can learn that they almost seem inexhaustible. One of those places is the Garden of Eden with the fall into sin and the promise. You know how I bring that up all the time in my preaching and teaching. The other place is what we’ll look at especially today—the example of the Israelites when they leave Egypt and are in wilderness with Moses.
The main thing going on with the Israelites is that God is at work with them. Everything that happened was God’s idea. Sometimes we might think that the stuff that happened was Moses’s ideas, but that is very much not the case. From the beginning at the burning bush to the end at Mt. Nebo God was making the plans and doing the actions. God did the plagues. God manifested himself as a sign to be followed with the pillar of cloud by day and pillar of fire by night. God opened up the Red Sea and dried it out so that the people could walk through it as on dry ground. God brought the manna at dawn and the quail at evening. God made the water flow from the rock. God did it all.
But, as you know, the Israelites had a very hard time with everything God did. They didn’t enjoy how God was doing things. God wasn’t doing things the way that they would have done things.
So, for example, they didn’t like it when Pharaoh got mad at Moses and punished the Israelites by making their work harder. They didn’t like being led helplessly to the shores of the Red Sea, looking like they were going to be slaughtered by the Egyptian army. They didn’t like running out of the food and water that they had brought with them from Egypt, and then looking around and seeing nothing but a barren desert. If it were up to them, they would have done all these things very differently than the way God did things.
If it were up to them, they probably would have liked it best if they would have been the masters and the Egyptians were their slaves. They would have liked riding across the desert in air-conditioned limousines. They would have liked to have enough provisions in their convoy to last forever and a day. They would have liked all the circumstances and conditions to be pointing to their awesomeness and successfulness so that they would always be soothed and never ever have a negative thought.
What I’ve said might sound silly, a little over the top, but we can be serious about what the Israelites were thinking and wishing. If there were a physicist at the shores of the Red Sea that physicist would be very serious about his objections to what was about to take place. If there were an economist in the wilderness, that economist would be very worried about limited resources and how they could ever be properly allocated among so many people.
One of the rules for properly engaging in economics is that God is not going to intervene. How could an economist properly predict the price of bread if bread just shows up out of nowhere with the dew? There’s no way for a physicist to describe the physical characteristics of water if all of a sudden it stands up in a heap and removes itself from the mucky sea floor. That’s not how things normally work.
We all understand how things normally work. We all understand how we normally get bread. We all understand how water normally acts. Moses, the writer of Exodus, would have us believe that a bread-like substance came to them every morning. The water of the Red Sea didn’t act like water normally acts. The reason why these things acted the way they did is because God made it so. Either God made it so or Moses is lying about what he saw and experienced.
What happened with Moses, however, is not something that is applicable only to him. Jesus, our teacher, says similar things to us. For example, Jesus tells us not to worry about our life, what we will eat, what we will drink, or what we will put on. Why? Because your heavenly Father knows that you need them. Jesus does not tell us that we should not worry only if we have tons and tons of provisions. He evidently means that we will be fine no matter what the economist might say.
Or, for example, Jesus says that he is the resurrection and the life. Even if we should die, yet shall we live. Whoever lives and believes in him will never die. Here we have a problem for the physicist or the medical doctor. From dust we are and to dust we shall return. How can these bones live? They shall live by the life-giving sacrifice of the Son of God, no matter what the physicist might say.
So when we think of the Israelites and Moses we should understand that we have the same struggles of faith as they had. We are cut from the same cloth. We know how things normally work. God has promised them and us that we will be blessed. But then how things normally work comes along and it doesn’t look at all like we will be blessed. Then they figured that there’s no way that they could be blessed because that’s not how things normally work. God’s promises were thrown out the window because how could God’s promises come true when that’s not how things normally work?
So we need encouragement to believe. It can be hard to be at peace and thankful if our net worth is decreasing rather than increasing. It can be hard to be at peace and thankful when death draws near. What about when our sins be like scarlet? It can be hard to believe that God will make them white as snow. But such are the promises of God.
We can’t know exactly how God will be faithful to his promises to the very last detail. There’s no way that the Israelites could have known that they would be walking on a dried out seabed or have water sweetened by a chunk of wood. But regardless of not being able to see how everything was going to work, God was faithful to his promise of being their God and they being his people, even when they were not faithful to him. The people’s faithfulness was quite awful actually.
And we need to talk about that. As Psalm 95 says, and as our reading from Hebrews says, the Israelites hardened their hearts. Their unfaithfulness was made permanent. It is not as though God can be tested and tested and tested and that’s okay. God eventually slammed the door on these people, and once it was closed, no one could open it. No amount of crying or gnashing of teeth made God relent once God hardened their hearts. They could not believe, even if they had wanted to.
There is nothing worse than God hardening hearts. Other curses and calamities have to do with the body and the mind. The hardening of heart is God’s punishment of finality upon the soul. The way that it happens is as it was with Pharaoh and the Israelites. Moses tells us how Pharaoh hardened his own heart. He heard God’s Word, knew that it was God Word, but he didn’t want to do it. He hardened his own heart. Eventually Moses tells us that not only did Pharaoh harden his own heart, but God hardened it.
So it was also with the Israelites. They revolted over and over and over again. They rejected God. They rejected Moses who spoke God’s Word. It is amazing how long-suffering God is with them. But eventually enough was enough. They no longer could be anything but unbelieving, which is what they and we naturally are in the first place. God gave them what they wanted; he withdrew his Holy Spirit from them.
When this happens, it happens quietly. The hardening of hearts goes unnoticed. The Israelites carry on. There is no scene in the books of Moses after their hearts are hardened where they tear their clothes and say, “My God! What have I done!” Such a reaction is impossible with a hardened heart. Their hardened heart is what kept them plodding alone, still going to church, assuming that they were fine when they were not fine.
This, also, just like everything else we can learn from the Israelites, is very instructive for us. Where are the torn clothes, the “My God! What have we done?” among us? Instead we plod along. The younger generations just don’t care it seems for God’s Word, and we shrug our shoulders. I guess we’re just old fashioned. These whipper-snappers just don’t do things the way we do. Oh well, times change I guess. We can’t be bothered to care or to change or to act. We’ll just keep plodding along.
How did this happen? We have been hypocrites. We, like Pharaoh, have known God’s Word, but not wanted to do it. We, like the Israelites, have had God’s promises, but have not been thankful or believing. Instead we’ve been just like the rest of the unbelieving world. We know how to get ahead. We know how to have a good time. Screw whatever God has to say. We’ve done what we wanted to do and not let God’s will have his way with us.
If God rejected these Israelites, why can’t he also reject us? That is the bracing thought that the writer of the Hebrews puts before us today. It says in our reading: “Watch out, brothers, so that there is not an evil, unbelieving heart in any of you that turns away from the living God. But encourage one another each and every day, as long as it is called “today,” so that none of you are hardened by the deceitfulness of sin.”
Note how it says that an evil, unbelieving heart can come upon any one of us. None of us is immune. I am not immune. How does this happen? It’s by being hardened by the deceitfulness of sin. Sin is deceitful. It deceives. It tricks. It lures. It rewards. It hardens.
How can we be helped? First, we must not be deceived. Sin always wants to masquerade as the thing that is “normal.” It’s what everybody else is doing. It’s what is inevitable anyway. So we might as well just embrace it and act accordingly. We must not allow such deceitful thinking to go unchallenged.
But that’s only the beginning. The main thing, and really the only way that we can be helped, is the only way that the Israelites could have been helped. We must take in hand firmly and ever more firmly and always and forever the promises of God. The strength of the Israelites was always and only in their God who promised and acted. They were strong when they believed that God was for them despite what they saw, despite what the worldly-wise might tell them. Economists and physicists still think that it’s nuts to believe that such things could ever happen.
Our reading says: “Encourage one another each and every day, as long as it is called “today,” … Encourage with what? This: “For we have become people who share in Christ, if indeed we hold our original confidence firmly until the end. As Psalm 95 says: Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts as in the rebellion.”
We are to encourage one another each and every day. What is to be our encouragement? It is that we are people who share in Christ. The Israelites were baptized in the Red Sea. You’ve been baptized into Christ’s death. The Israelites inherited the Promised Land. Your inheritance is eternal in the heavens. Don’t be deceived by the passing pleasures of sin. The deceitfulness of sin says that you need your pleasure now. You can’t wait for heaven. You can’t wait for God to feed you what you need. You need to take it in hand and take it for yourself now.
Against this deceit we must fight with faith and thankfulness. Christ’s promises will come true, no matter how you feel, how sinful you are, or how things look. Thus you can be thankful. That’s your strength. God is for you, come what may.
And in the meantime he gives you wonderful and beautiful things if you will only just open your eyes to see them. Don’t be deceived by longing for God to do things the way you want him to do things—air-conditioned limousines and such. Embrace what God has given—even if that doesn’t look very impressive to others.
God’s voice, against which you should not harden yourself, is his promises to you. Therefore, if you hear his voice today, harden not your heart. Believe his promises and it will be so.
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A fellow asked Jesus whether there would only be a few who are saved. Jesus does not answer yes or no. He instead gives an admonition with some rather severe warnings:
“Strive to enter through the narrow door. Many will try to enter, but won’t have the strength. Once the door is shut, it’s shut for good. No amount of crying or weeping will be able to change it. Inside will be the feast of salvation with Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and the rest of the blessed from the north, south, east, and west.”
On first hearing Jesus’s words it can sound as though he is intending to dash everyone’s hopes. And maybe, in a way, he is. Think of how people regard what happens with death. The assumption is that everyone who dies is fine. The only cases where there might be a shred of doubt is when the person is notoriously a scoundrel, and we are pretty good at hiding how bad we are from other people so there aren’t too many notorious scoundrels around. The assumption, otherwise, is that everyone is saved just the way they are.
Jesus, in fact, is quite an unwelcome messenger among us. Compare what Jesus says to what is commonly assumed. Which sounds nicer to you? Jesus says that there is weeping and gnashing of teeth. No amount of begging can make the door open once it has been shut. That’s included in Jesus’s view.
Then, on the other hand, folks assume that heaven is a place for anyone and everyone, come as you are. Play your favorite games or engage in your favorite activities. Only the most horrible criminal might be left out.
If we only consult our feeling and our reason we are of course going to pick the second option. Why on earth would we strive to enter the narrow door when all of this can be had for free?
But there’s something important to realize about popular notions concerning salvation. They are basically in the realm of fantasy. Anyone can believe whatever he or she sees fit about such things. It’s assumed that there’s no hard and fast truth—whatever one needs to believe in order to get by. The Christians have their views, but who’s to say whether they’re right? So everyone believes whatever he or she wants to believe.
We do not do this kind of thing, however, with anything that is taken seriously. There is no believe-whatever-you-want-to-believe electricity book. If you believe wrong things about electricity this can have some very stimulating results! So it is with basically every endeavor that is worthwhile. You can’t just make believe whatever you want and expect to be blessed.
We have a hard time seeing this, however, when it comes to salvation because the results of false beliefs are not yet evident to us in this life. Nobody’s burned to a crisp for believing fantasies about such things. A basic tenet of our reason is that if there’s no harm, then there’s no foul. Fantastic beliefs about the afterlife do not seem to negatively affect anyone in this life, so let everyone believe as he or she wishes. To say anything contrary to this makes you sound cranky, like Jesus, who speaks of weeping and gnashing of teeth.
But, as they say, the proof is in the pudding. Faulty wiring might work for a while until it doesn’t. Jesus says in another place: “Everyone who hears these words of mine and does them will be like a wise man who built his house on bedrock. The rain came down, the rivers rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house. But it did not fall, because it was founded on bedrock.
Everyone who hears these words of mine but does not do them will be like a foolish man who built his house on sand. The rain came down, the rivers rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell—and great was the fall of it!”
The house that is built on sand can look just as sturdy and comfortable as the one that is built on bedrock until the judgement. Then the difference is completely apparent. We don’t want a house to fall down upon us. We don’t want an afterlife where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth. How quickly and easily such a possibility is wished away by the vast majority of people. They simply don’t believe in the existence of hell. They have built their house on sand, but it will be fine because the judgement will never come.
Instead of salvation or the afterlife being in the realm of fantasy or completely unimportant, you, as Christians, must understand that this is actually what is the most important. Another way of saying the same thing is that your life in this created world is one thing. Your relationship with the Creator is the most important.
In order for your relationship to be good with the Creator, you must be justified before him. So how may a person be justified? There are only two ways. A person may be justified according to the Law or a person may be justified according to grace. Being justified according to the Law is when the Law is kept.
What does God’s Law say? We should believe in him and in nothing else. We should use his Name rightly. We should call upon him in every trouble, pray, praise, and give thanks. We should gladly hear his Word and receive his sacraments. We should honor our parents and others in authority. We should do good to our enemies. We should not commit fornication, adultery, or divorce. We should not lust after anyone, but our desire should be for the spouse whom God will give to us or has given to us. We should not steal or rip people off. Instead we should be generous. We should not lie or gossip. We should not covet, but be thankful.
I hope you can see even in this brief sketch I’ve given the beauty and the goodness of the Ten Commandments. God’s Law is not bad or ugly or evil. What kind of a wonderful human being would a person be if he or she only partly fulfilled the Ten Commandments? Such a person would be pious, loving, forgiving, truthful, and so on. Such a person would not live for himself or herself. Such a person would live to serve others in love. But, alas, no such person exists.
The Bible somewhat surprisingly says, “No one is righteous. No, not even one!” If we kept the Ten Commandments, then the Ten Commandments would justify us before God. The Ten Commandments would testify on our behalf and say that we are good. We are justified. However, on the other hand, if we have not kept the Ten Commandments—and no one has—then those same Ten Commandments testify against us. Those Ten Commandments point to us and say, “This one is an unbeliever. This one hates God’s Word. This one hates his or her parents. This one is perverted.” And so on.
So theoretically we could be justified before God according to the Law, but in reality, after the fall into sin, only Jesus has kept the Law. If we are judged according to the Law we will be utterly rejected because the truth demands that we should and must be rejected. But there is another justification that avails before God. This is justification by grace.
Galatians 4 says: “In the fullness of time God sent forth his Son, born of a woman, born under the Law, to redeem those under the Law, so that we would be adopted as sons.” God’s Law condemns us, so God sent his Son so that he would be condemned in our place. In him, in Christ crucified, then, we may be justified with a righteousness that is not our own. 2 Corinthians 5 says: “God was in Christ, reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them. … God made him, [that is, Jesus,] who knew no sin, to become sin for us, so that we might become the righteousness of God in him.”
God is the great justifier of sinners in our crucified and risen Lord Jesus Christ. Jesus died for everyone’s sins so that they are forgiven. Jesus’s righteousness, the very righteousness of God, is given to you by the Gospel, by baptism, by the Lord’s Supper. This message from God to you is to be received and believed. Thereby, although you are a sinner according to the Ten Commandments, you are righteous according to grace. Jesus has reconciled you, a sinner, to God together with everyone else. You are justified in Jesus before God. He even says that you have been adopted as his own child. Of course you must recline at the feast of salvation with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob the blessed.
So when Jesus speaks of salvation in our Gospel reading and says, “Strive to enter through the narrow door,” we must understand that he is saying, “Strive to live by faith in God’s promises.” Live by faith that you are justified before God for Jesus’s sake. Live by faith that even if you should die, yet shall you live, for Jesus says: “I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever lives and believes in me will never die.” In the midst of sin, even when it is hot and fresh, live by faith in the suffering and death that Jesus has already finished in agony on account of those sins. Although you are foul in light of your sins, you are as righteous as God himself because Jesus’s righteousness has been given to you in your baptism. Strive to believe that.
It is very important that we understand Jesus to be speaking of faith here and not about our own thoughts, words, and deeds. When we hear a word like “strive” we can’t help but immediately think of hard work. That can make it sound as though Jesus says that we better get to work. We better get our act together. And in a sense that’s true. We better get our act together.
Contrary to the popular fantasies about the afterlife, where being judged by God is the furthest thing from folks’ minds, people would be better off even if that’s all they would think of with death. Of course, being judged according to the Law will only work horror and terror if anyone is being honest. God, to them, will seem like a policeman who’s come to punish them for the sins they’ve committed by throwing them in hell. But this is a lot closer to the truth than believing that each of us can just make up some fantasy for ourselves about what it will be like when we die.
It’s a lot better, for example, for someone to realize that electricity can kill them than to go on believing fantasies. Electricity is no joke. How much more is it the case, then, that justification before God is no joke! God judging you is no joke! You dying and appearing before God is no joke!
But no amount of striving according to the Law will ever make us righteous. We must strive to live by faith in Jesus, the forgiver of sinners. Faith in Jesus is the narrow door. There is no other door available to sinners. And Jesus’s words ring true: There are few who strive to live by faith in God’s justification of us in Jesus.
Many within the Church believe that they are justified before God because they’ve followed the rules. They belong to the right church. They’ve taken the right actions. Thus they can live however they want in every other aspect of their lives (within reason of course).
Those outside of the church think that Jesus, God’s Son, is a myth or ineffectual. Even if they do believe that Jesus is true, they don’t want to hear what he said or receive his sacraments.
For all unbelievers within and without the church, what really matters about life are the accumulation of riches and pleasures and the avoidance of pain. Their hopes for the afterlife end up being totally devoid of God and his holy presence. The highest their hopes can reach is that the good times will keep rolling.
So when Jesus admonishes us to strive, he really means it. Few strive to live by faith. The door is narrow to eternal life. The only way that we may enter it is through the blood of the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world. Therefore do not be deceived into thinking like most people think—that what happens at death is no big deal; everyone can believe their own fantasies. The Scriptures define death and life for us: “The wages of sin is death, but the undeserved gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
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Jesus says in our Gospel reading “Do you think that I came to bring peace on the earth?” The answer is unexpected: “No, I tell you, but rather division.” Jesus did not come to bring peace. He came to bring division.
In order to properly understand Jesus we must understand that he is not talking about being divisive about all things. Being divisive about all things would be ridiculous. For example, every time someone says one thing, you have to say the opposite. To every yes, you would say no. By necessity we would repel one another, unable to agree about anything. No, this certainly isn’t what Jesus is saying when he says that he has come to bring division. Elsewhere he clearly says that we should be agreeable.
But the one thing that we as Jesus’s disciples must not give ground on is God’s Word. This is where there has always been division and will continue to be division. The division has existed right from the beginning. God said “Don’t eat from this certain tree.” That was his Word. Adam and Eve should have kept it. Neither one of them should have been moved from it. As it turned out, they both fell. But that was worth maintaining division over.
After the fall into sin God gave his promise of redemption and forgiveness through the Seed of the woman. That was God’s Word. The descendants of Adam and Eve need to hold to that Word no matter what. The first human being born in the natural way, Adam and Eve’s son Cain, was a murderer. He murdered his believing brother Abel. That was a tremendous division over God’s Word.
If Abel would have sided with Cain, even if Abel had said that Cain was fine, that God’s Word didn’t really matter, then there wouldn’t have been any division or any murder. But there also wouldn’t be any Gospel, or any Kingdom of God. All that would be left would be the devil’s kingdom and his lies. That first family in the garden already experienced division. Jesus’s words in our Gospel reading where already true then.
Subsequent history has continued to bear this out. Last week and this week in our Epistle reading we have been hearing this refrain: “By faith.” By faith Abel offered his sacrifice. By faith Enoch was taken up. By faith Noah built an ark. By faith Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob lived in the promised land as strangers. What all of these people had in common was faith in God’s Word, in God’s promises. God’s Word cannot be given up by us Christians if we want to continue to be Christians. Otherwise we will no longer be living “by faith.” We will be living by unbelief in what God has said and belief in something else.
So what is meant and what is included in God’s Word that we must not give ground over? The answer is the Scriptures. The Scriptures are God’s inspired Word. Nobody has the right to change or ignore what has been revealed by God to the inspired writers. We are bound to what God has said in the Scriptures.
As you know, there are many things that can be discussed and disputed when it comes to the Scriptures. We often get the idea that it’s mainly the fine points that cause divisions—obscure teachings. No, in fact there are divisions over the most essential teachings.
The Ten Commandments teach us how we are to behave. The Ten Commandments are just as serious as that first commandment God gave in the garden concerning the tree with just as far-reaching of consequences. The Ten Commandments teach us to believe only in God, to use his Name correctly, to hear his Word, to obey your parents and other authorities, do not murder, do not commit adultery, do not steal, do not lie, do not covet.
Think of the division that takes place over this Word from God. How common it is for people to think they can believe in whatever or whomever they choose. They do not feel as though they are required to pray from the heart. They do not think they have to hear God’s Word or receive Christ’s sacraments. They do not feel as though they need to honor their parents, their boss, or whomever is in authority. With all ten of the commandments there will be people—and we, ourselves, frankly—who will deny that these need to be kept.
However, it is our duty—faith demands—that we do not run away from these commandments so as to please those who want to ignore them or break them. That will create division. But that’s alright. God’s commandments are good, right, and holy. Those who argue otherwise are no different than the serpent who got Adam and Eve to believe that this commandment wasn’t given to them for their good. They argue that we would be happier if we broke the commandment and followed our own will.
There is division over how we should live according to the commandments God has given. There is also severe disagreement about who God is. We confess in the Creed that God has made me and all creatures. You know full well that there are tons of people who disagree very strongly on that point. The popular myth these days is that we are the product of chance and the selection of the fittest.
The Creed confesses that Jesus Christ is Lord. He was born of the virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died, and was buried. He descended into hell. The third day he rose again from the dead, ascended into heaven, and sits at the right hand of God the Father Almighty. From thence he will come to judge the living and the dead.
Here is the very heart of our faith as Christians. Jesus is the Seed of the woman who crushed the serpent’s head. He has redeemed us by his holy, precious blood and by his innocent suffering and death. Jesus is the great revelation of God’s will towards sinners—that he does not wish for us to be left in our sins, estranged from him, but adopted through baptism into his only-begotten Son. When Jesus says in our reading that he has come to cast fire on the earth and that he has a baptism to undergo, he is talking about this work of salvation that he will go on to do.
His salvation is also what brings about the division that he speaks about—division that goes all the way down into the home: three against two and two against three; father against son, son against father; mother against daughter, daughter against mother; and so on.
This division is very serious. It is between good and evil. That can sound pompous when it is understood incorrectly. It can sound as though we are naturally good and unbelievers are evil. No, we are not good. We are all evil, without exception. Only Jesus with his kingdom is good. It is also not the case that we had the good sense to choose Jesus. Jesus chose us to lift us out of our otherwise helpless and evil condition. Without Jesus we are enslaved to sin just as much as anybody else. Jesus, who is the truth, sets us free. By his Holy Spirit he begins to work on us now to fight against our flesh, and he promises complete healing in heaven.
Division comes about because we cannot deny Jesus. We cannot deny this saving truth. He is sinners’ only hope. If we give up on Jesus, then we are necessarily siding with Jesus’s enemies. The fire that Jesus has come to cast upon the earth, the baptism with which he was baptized—this was to fight against and conquer our corrupted bodies and souls, to redeem us, to set us free from the devil’s lies. If we give up, then there won’t be division anymore, but there won’t be God’s Kingdom anymore either. God, with his Word and Holy Spirit, wrestles mightily with us to bring us continually to repentance and faith. This is a fight, a war. There will be pain, and even casualties. That’s how it’s supposed to be.
Please take note of that point. We haven’t taught this point very well for a long time, and that has caused us great harm. Jesus says that he has come to bring division. Paul says that there must be divisions even within the church. Strife will be present even within the household—the very worst kind of strife. This is what the Kingdom of God looks like. People are going to get upset.
This is what the Scriptures tell us will happen. We also see it in the history that the Bible records. Think of how Paul was treated by both Jews and Gentiles. It is only by many afflictions that we may enter the kingdom of heaven. That’s how it is always going to be because Jesus’s enemies haven’t given up. These enemies want us to give up.
Since this is the way the Christian life necessarily has to go—not a bed of roses, but a fight to the death with our flesh, the world, and the devil—isn’t it terribly harmful when Christians are led to believe that the Christian life is easy and peaceful and inoffensive? What if soldiers were trained in such a way where they were led to believe that they would receive flowers and chocolates on the battlefield instead of a hail of bullets? That would be some very poor training indeed. So also we Christians must understand that living the Christian life creates division.
This is why it isn’t necessarily a bad thing when you find strife and conflict in a congregation or school. A congregation can be as peaceful as a graveyard, but you don’t find much life in a graveyard. A congregation can be peaceful because nobody cares or everybody’s just given up. There’s no fight going on between the Holy Spirit and the flesh that we all have. Instead in such a congregation it’s like everybody’s just boxing the air. No blows are being landed, which hurt. A pretend fight is going on instead of one where real folks are brought to real repentance because of real sins that they would rather not have to give up. But that’s where real forgiveness happens too.
Fighting probably doesn’t sound like much fun, but realize that it is also by fighting that progress is made. Hopefully you have discovered some of this progress in your own life of faith.
I hope that you have already had the experience where God’s Word comes to you and you really dislike it. It makes you angry. It makes you angry at the one who said it. That’s very often where our fury gets directed: “How dare he say that?” “How dare she judge me?” We’re not that different than Cain. He didn’t murder God. He murdered Abel. So it is also with God’s Word. We don’t storm heaven and fight God. We fight the messenger whom he has sent. We figure that the messenger is at fault for how we are feeling.
I hope, I say, that you’ve had this experience, but that you have not been a casualty—that you haven’t gone off like Cain, alienated from God, but that you have instead eventually come to your senses. This experience is very educational. It’s good training.
If you’ve had that experience, then you won’t be surprised when others do it to you. You’ll be thankful for that messenger who told you what you didn’t want to hear. Then you will open your mouth and confess God’s Word, and you won’t be surprised when a hail of bullets come screaming back at you in the form of angry words, angry faces or coldness. We all have evil in us that doesn’t want to be kicked out by the finger of God. We all tend to howl when the blow hits home, when the painful splinter is being extracted. That’s how it goes. That’s what we should expect. Those are the Christian growing pains.
So we must not get distracted by schemes for quick and easy growth without any division. Such schemes can hardly be preaching the Gospel that Jesus is talking about in our Gospel reading. Instead we must recognize that growth in faith has always happened the same way from the very beginning. It has happened against our will, so to speak. We get assaulted—or, rather, the evil in us gets assaulted. We have to be pulled out from the bushes and confronted by God. Only then are we truly terrified for our sins. Only then do we understand that the Seed of the woman is our only hope. His goodness is the only way to escape our evilness.
If it weren’t for Jesus we would all be left in the devil’s kingdom with his lies. As it is, though, Jesus fights for us to save us from ourselves and the devil’s lies with his truth and the Holy Spirit. Thus we must not be ashamed of the division Jesus causes and his words. To be ashamed of that would mean that we are ashamed of salvation itself.
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The first article of the Creed says, “I believe in God the Father almighty, maker of heaven and earth.” One of the most important parts of my job is to teach this. What does it mean that God is the maker of heaven and earth?
A couple years ago I started to change the way that I teach this. For the first 10 years or so of being a pastor I really focused on what happened long ago. For all of us, I think, when we hear the word “creation” we think of stuff that happened a long time ago. Bible believing Christians then think about how creation is different from evolution. God created the world. Existence is not the product of chance or the survival of the fittest. I used to focus mainly combatting this alternate understanding of evolution, which is so powerful and persuasive in today’s world.
But, a couple years ago, I started to shift my energy and focus towards a different aspect of God being the maker of heaven and earth. My teacher for this was our humble little catechism. You might recall what it says when it explains this first article of the Creed: “I believe that God has made me.” There you have something that is not in the past It is right now. How often do you think of that? God has made you. Probably not that often. We are very thoroughly trained to think of ourselves as being the result of an egg and a sperm and a whole bunch of natural processes. We just kind of show up. How different it is to think of God the Father almighty wanting you to exist, and, therefore, deliberately bringing that about.
Our catechism goes on: “He has given me my body and soul, eyes, ears, and all my members, my reason and all my senses, and still takes care of them.” God made you; God gave you your body. That’s a great gift. So often we think of our bodies with a tremendous harshness. Our bodies don’t measure up to other bodies that we see. Our bodies are ugly compared to others. Many of us then come to hate our bodies. That’s a shame. “Oh, what peace we often forfeit; Oh, what needless pain we bear.” Your body is a gift from God. It’s wonderful. Even if your body were to become severely disabled with many parts ceasing to function, it would still be wonderful. It’s God’s gift to you and your body is even a gift to us.
God gives you the gift of your soul, your reason, your senses, your personality. What a gift this is too! You can see and understand. You can laugh and cry. You can be a blessing and make the others around you happy by virtue of the way that you are. Unfortunately, here, too, it is common for people to trash this part of themselves. They wish they were smarter. They wish they were funnier. They wish that they were more outgoing.
It is as though we are taught that there is one right way to be. There is one right body that everyone is supposed to have. There is one right personality. We are all supposed to be smart, charming, funny, talkative, cool, popular, and so on. When we’re not all these things, (and, frankly, nobody can be all these things), we suck.
The spirit that causes us to run ourselves down like this is not a good spirit. It is an evil spirit. Evil spirits do not want us to be joyful. They most especially do not want us to be thankful. How long has it been since you praised your Creator for making you, for giving you your body, for giving you your soul? These are tremendous expressions of love from God to you. We should thank and praise him—it’s good and right so to do.
But the evil spirits do not want us to be thankful. What they want is for us to be covetous. Coveting is when you are dissatisfied with what God has given to you, and so you want what you see in others. Your body sucks because others have better ones. Your mind sucks because others are smarter. Your personality sucks because you are not popular.
Supposedly this coveting, this dissatisfaction, can bring about something positive if you do it right. I’m not so sure. Maybe the best case scenario is that you work up such a hatred of yourself, of how bad you are, that you embark on a ruthless self-improvement campaign. You diet. You study. You read books about how to be charming.
But even this best case scenario isn’t very good. There’s no end to coveting. You might think you’d be happy if only you were such and such a weight. You might think you’d be satisfied if you got such and such an award or recognition. Nope. You’ll keep coveting. You’ll keep hating yourself for not being as good as you-name-it.
But this is not so much self-hatred as it is a hating of your Creator. You might think you’re hating yourself, but really you’re hating the one who made you the way that you are. You’ve become blind to his goodness. You’re deaf to his messages of love. The gifts he gives you with your wonderful body and with your wonderful soul are messages of his love.
There are more messages of love. Our catechism goes on: “He also gives me clothing and shoes, food and drink, house and home, wife and children, land, animals, and all I have. He richly and daily provides me with all that I need to support this body and life.”
I mentioned already how we are prone to think of ourselves as the uniting of sperm and egg and a whole bunch of natural processes so that we just kind of show up by accident. We do the same kind of thing with this list of things that have to do with sustaining this body and life. We don’t think of our clothing and shoes, food and drink, house and home coming from God as messages of his love to us. We think we have these things because of our money.
We have money because we work hard and we’re smart. If we worked harder and were smarter we’d have even more money. Maybe if we just worried more, if we could just get to the bottom of things for why we don’t have more money, then we’d have a lot more money. With more money we’d have even better clothing and shoes, tastier food and drink, a more comfortable house and home. What we need is more money. We don’t need God; we need more money.
The same evil spirits that are behind our abusive talk with our bodies and our souls are at work here. That evil spirit said, “You don’t need God. You need a smoking hot body.” “You don’t need God. You need to be smarter or more charming.” So also here: “You don’t need God; you need more money.”
What is the action plan behind all these things? We’ve already mentioned it. You need to be hard on yourself. You need to worry more. You need to worry more about your lousy body so that you finally work up the self-hatred to make yourself a better one. You need to worry more about your lousy personality. You need to worry more about your lousy shameful house, and your ugly junky car, and your miserable dead-end job that isn’t getting you nearly the amount of money that you should be getting. “Then you’ll be happy,” these depressing, evil spirits say. “The more you worry, the harder you’ll try, the happier you’ll be!”
What incredibly different advice we are given by our Lord and Master, Jesus, this morning! Over and over and over he says “Don’t worry.” The opposite. Don’t worry about clothing and shoes, food and drink, house and home. That’s the opposite of what we are otherwise supposed to do. We’re taught to never be satisfied, always to be worried, always to be chasing more.
There’s another thing that’s the opposite too, and this also, I think, is highly significant. Jesus says that you are valuable. “Consider the ravens,” he says. “God feeds them. How much more valuable are you than birds!” And again, “Consider the flowers. You’re more valuable than they are.” It is because you are valuable to God that you should not worry. What do you do with the things that you treasure, with what you think is valuable? You protect them and care for them. “You are valuable,” Jesus says, so won’t God, who values you, also take care of you, “O you of little faith?!”
“But,” you might be saying to yourself, “I’m not valuable.” How powerful this thought is! The evil spirit certainly want you to believe that with your whole heart. They want you to believe that you suck; end of story. But it’s not just the evil spirits. The thought that you are not valuable is powerful because there are some very powerful arguments that seem to prove just that.
We’ve done some terrible things. We’ve perhaps stretched our bodies with poor eating so that it will never come back into shape. We’ve perhaps pickled our bodies with drink, but our drinking has had an even worse effect on our souls. These sins and others like them are obvious to anyone and everyone as being bad. The damage is obvious.
But there’s more: there’s also God’s commandments that we’ve broken. The problem that is created by not keeping God’s commandments is less obvious to folks, but our breaking of his commandments is an even more powerful reason for us to say to ourselves that we are not valuable.
But how you value yourself is one thing. How God values you is another. You might not see value in yourself, but you’re not the only one who gets a say. There’s somebody who’s better at appraising than you. That someone is God. He valued us even when we were dead and lost in our trespasses and sins. His value, his love of us, prompted him from eternity to send his Son to suffer and die to redeem our poor bodies and souls. There is no one for whom Christ didn’t die, so there is no one who isn’t redeemed. All are valued by God. Since all are valued by God, you are valued too.
Because God values you, you should not worry. God will give you your clothing and shoes, food and drink, house and home, and all that is needed to support this body and life. We could even go one step further, perhaps, following Jesus’s advice if we dare. He says we should sell our possessions and give them to those who have need. But that might be a little too advanced for us right now. We’ll get there eventually, but we have some re-wiring to do.
We need to think differently in our daily life. We are prone to keep God far, far away. We don’t need God; we need a smoking hot body. We don’t need God; we need more money. What we need, in fact, is God, then all these other things will come as well.
So, very practically speaking, what should you think about? The first thing I want you to bring to mind this week is that you are valuable to God. Set aside any self-hatred. What you think of yourself is really beside the point. Who cares what you think? What matters is what God thinks. And God says you’re valuable to him. You’re so valuable to him that he sent his Son to redeem you. You are valuable to him so he will take care of you. Jesus very emphatically teaches this in our Gospel reading today.
The other thing I want you to think about is that God is sending you messages of love all the time, every day. Let the sun shine and nourishing rains speak to you that God loves you. Think of this with all the pleasures of life. He gives you this little pleasure or that. Let the pleasure of food be God’s gift to you. Let the pleasure of drink, even, or perhaps, especially, alcoholic drink, be God’s gift to you. Remember that the goal of the evil spirits is to banish God from your thinking. Open your eyes to the wonders of everyday life and be thankful to your Creator.
Thankfulness is the antidote to coveting. Coveting is when you look at what God has given to you and you are so dissatisfied with it. You look at what he has given to others and you wish that that had been given to you. The antidote to this extremely powerful spiritual poison is thankfulness. Thankfulness comes from correctly understanding God’s message to you first and foremost and unmistakably in the Gospel. Then also in all the other gifts that he gives you.
Finally, to sum up again so that you don’t forget: 1) You are valuable to God. You, with your body and soul, are valuable, regardless of how you might appraise yourself. 2) God gives you messages of his love everyday with all the good things he gives you. Hear that message and be glad.
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Everyone wants a good life. Everyone wants health, wealth, entertainment, a fullness of meaning, love, peace, and many other things like these. Over the centuries there have been many traditions that have promised to further this endeavor towards life and having life to the full. The Greeks had their traditions. The Romans had theirs. The Chinese, the Japanese, all people everywhere have had their traditions that have promised to give the good things of life if the rules of their tradition were followed.
There is one more tradition that we must also talk about. It is not very old. It’s only about 300 years old. It is by far and away the most important and relevant tradition for all of us and for the entire world because it is the dominant one right now. Unlike the religions of other times and places the tradition that we are living in doesn’t really have a name. Sometimes it’s called modernism. Its main beliefs are in the study of science and economics. What this tradition has been teaching for a long time is that our greatest hope for happiness is in producing more and more. The way we produce more and more is by discovering things about nature and manipulating nature to get what we want out of it. Then there’s just the matter of how all the wealth should be managed and distributed. How does a person get the most wealth? That is where the study of economics comes in.
There’s certainly no denying that huge strides have been made in the last 300 years. We have learned so much about the laws and principles that govern the natural world, and how these can be turned towards our own advantage. What was especially impactful was learning how to use the seemingly limitless sources of power provided by coal, oil, natural gas, and so on. That was when we started to practically swim in merchandise. If a good life consists of wealth, health, entertainment, and so on, then it is as though this modern way of thinking as brought us to the endpoint of history.
That makes us believe that up until now, or about 300 years ago, people were poor and stupid. We modern people are of a different sort. We know better, and we have the technology to prove it. The only branches of learning that are taken seriously in the university have to do with science or economics. That is because these are the sacred subjects. If you want to have any hope of being blessed then master these hard sciences.
The belief that happiness comes from mastering the powers of nature or mastering the forces of the economy has taken the world by storm. This belief claims absolute supremacy for itself. Every other way of thinking about happiness is pre-modern and stupid and irrelevant. People can believe in God as a hobby, perhaps, but everybody knows that that’s like being a Liberal Arts major. You’ll end up working at McDonalds because praying, for example, won’t do you any good. In order to get ahead in life you have to drop all those old, disproven things. Get the right degree, start the right company, buy the hottest stocks. Then you’d be able to afford the newest and best. Then you’ll be happy, that is to say, blessed.
The power and popularity of this way of thinking is so pervasive that I’ve wondered if it is the fulfillment of Jesus’s end-times prophecy. He said that in the end-times the signs and wonders that are performed will be so powerful and persuasive that they should deceive the elect, if that were possible. Toilets and hydraulics and computers are so life changing that they are almost magical. Because they are so life changing, people take them as being proof that what ancient people used to believe in must be foolish. It is widely believed that the non-existence of God has been proven and that his revelation in the Bible has been proven to be false.
But this is a lie, a trick. Never, ever has the non-existence of God been proven. Not even close. There have never been any experiments or discoveries that have made God cease to exist or discredited his revelation in the Bible. You could look into such things for yourselves, if you were so inclined, but hardly anybody does, because it’s hard and it’s a lot of work. There’s almost no end to it. It’s much easier to just take other peoples’ word for it—professors and celebrities and YouTube videos and such. These other people will just give you their conclusions, and they want you to believe in them because of their clout and prestige. Generally speaking these other people have much more clout and fame than I ever will. Their popularity or power doesn’t necessarily mean that they are telling you the truth, however.
Consider poor, old, St. Paul. He didn’t have much clout or fame. He worked with his hands for a living, making tents—not a very prestigious job. He wasn’t the pastor of a mega church. His congregations were so small that they met in people’s houses. He was by no means popular. Neither the Jews nor the Greeks liked him. He was made fun of, beaten, whipped, stoned, thrown in prison, kicked out of one city after another, and finally he had his head chopped off as though he were an awful and dangerous criminal.
Why was he hated so much? Because he told people that the things that they were trusting in weren’t going to work. The Greeks, with their traditions, weren’t going to work. The Romans, with their traditions, weren’t going to work. So we must speak also today if we are going to be followers of Christ like Paul was. Our modern way of life isn’t going to work. The things that we are believing in are going to let us down. What won’t let us down is our faith in Christ, who has worked, who is working, and who will work to bring to completion his plan of salvation.
If you think about it, there are two ways a person can live. A person can go along with all the thoughts and rules and beliefs of the people around us or a person can live in Christ. A person can believe that happiness or blessedness will come from taking the advice of the world around us, or a person can believe that blessedness is theirs already in their Lord Jesus Christ who has purchased them and given them an incorruptible inheritance. You can’t really choose both, because no man can be a servant of two masters. One or the other will always be preferred over the other.
And so Paul’s words in our Epistle reading are directly applicable to us and to our times, even though he wrote these words nearly 2,000 years ago. He says, “See to it that no one takes you captive through philosophy and empty deceit, which are in accord with human tradition, namely, the basic principles of the world, but not in accord with Christ.” Now, a lot of people get thrown off by that word “philosophy.” Paul says, “Do not be taken captive through philosophy,” and folks think, “I’ve never cracked open a philosophy book in my entire life. I don’t have any philosophy.”
Oh, but you do! If you have any thoughts whatsoever about life, then you have a philosophy. If you have thoughts about what will make you happy, then you have a philosophy. Everybody is a philosopher, it’s just a matter of whether their philosophy is any good, whether it accords with the truth, whether the philosophy will actually be effective.
Paul says, “Do not be taken captive through philosophy and empty deceit. Such philosophies are in accord with human tradition. Such philosophies may even be in accord with the basic principles of the world. But they are not in accord with Christ.” These words are perfectly applicable to us. Why do we have the philosophies we do? It is because of tradition. We are taught by our teachers what we are supposed to believe about life. What is life all about? How do we get ahead in life? These are the things that our teachers teach us. The modern times in which we live have just as much of a tradition as any other time and place has had. We are taught our tradition for how to look at the world.
Furthermore Paul says that these philosophies that might take us captive can be in accord with the basic principles of the world. That is to say those philosophies might be true in some sense. They might match up with the how things are, the basic principles of the world. This, also, is extremely applicable to us. We pride ourselves on having a very fine understanding of how the world works, especially the natural world—and for good reason. Our civilization has looked into the tiniest of tiny things. Our newly launched telescopes have looked into the biggest of big things. We know many things about many things, and these may even fully accord with the truth.
However, as Paul says, our understanding is not in accord with Christ. That is to say, our understanding is not in accord with the greatest event in history that changes absolutely everything else. It is not in accord with Son of God becoming man, suffering, dying, and rising; ascending, and coming again to judge the living and the dead.
What would it profit a man to gain a perfect understanding of all things, to have that understanding be true to how things really are, but to fail to understand Christ? Christ is the great gem, the absolute centerpiece of everything. Jesus is the bread of life, the light of the world, the resurrection and the life, the way, the truth, and the life. Jesus is the greatest revelation of God, of who he is, and what his will is. What can it profit a man to understand creation perfectly, but to have no understanding of the Creator, because he has no understanding of Jesus? Paul says, “All the fullness of God’s being dwells bodily in Christ.” If you do not understand Jesus, then you cannot know God.
On the other hand, if you know Christ, then you know God. The wisest philosopher is foolish compared to the baptized child. The baptized child has been buried with Christ, and raised with Christ, and knows where true blessing and happiness is to be found, namely, in our Father who art in heaven.
The wisest philosopher may know many things about many things, but it is all vanity and a chasing after the wind. Their heart will remain polluted with self-interest and sin. There’s no way for us to purge ourselves of the guilt that we incur upon ourselves or to make our hearts pure and good. Wealth and prestige and power might anesthetize us so that we do not think about this. We might tell ourselves that it doesn’t matter and that we need not worry about it—that’s what those old people used to worry about, but they were poor and stupid. But does all this thinking really get rid of such glaring personal failings and flaws?
In contrast, note what Paul says that God has done in Christ. He says: “Even when you were dead in your trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made you alive with Christ by forgiving us all our trespasses.” How did God do this? He goes on: “God erased the record of our debt brought against us by his legal demands. There was a record of our debts, our failings, our shameful wrong-doings according to God’s own Law. But God took this record of our sins away by nailing it to the cross.” Jesus was punished in our place, thereby bringing about reconciliation for the whole world with the Creator. Jesus has reconciled you. This is the greatest gem of knowledge: You are a forgiven sinner for Jesus’s sake, loved by God.
Since you have this bright, shining sun of truth in Jesus, you must not give yourselves over to philosophies or human traditions or even things that are in accord with how things work on this earth, but that are in the process of passing away. You might know all natural knowledge and all economic laws so that you may purchase a mountain and move it from here to there. One day that mountain will be no more, but the word of the Lord endures forever. You must understand your life in such a way where Christ is all in all, and everything else is but the small stuff that we can sweat if need be.
You know: Sweat the small stuff like the devil, like your own death, like your own damnation for the awful sins that you’ve committed. You can sweat stuff like that as being small because of the overwhelming power of Christ’s blood. Then, of course, we can sweat the even much smaller stuff like world peace, the progress of civilization, whomever it is that happens to be seated in the halls of power. And then, finally, we might mention the small stuff like what you will eat or drink or wear, or what you are supposed to do to be blessed and happy in this earthly life.
Christ is king. Christ is risen. Christ will triumph. He is your philosophy and way of life. Paul says, “Continue to walk in him. Be rooted in him. Be built up in him. Be strengthened in your belief that you will be blessed in him so that you will overflow with thanksgiving to God.” Among all the traditions, among all the philosophies, Jesus is the only way to almighty and everlasting life. Amen.
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Do you want to be a Christian or do you want to appear that you are a Christian? That’s a valid question. A lot of people want to appear to be a Christian. They want the status. They want the self-satisfaction that they are one of the good ones. They want the assurance that their life after death is going to be positive. On the other hand they don’t want the shame that might come upon from them from family or friends if they ceased to live as a Christian.
But those who only want to appear to be Christian are not going to be interested in living according to God’s or Jesus’s commandments. They want to appear to be a Christian, but they don’t want to live as a Christian.
Another way of saying this is that they want to be hypocrites. A hypocrite is someone who outwardly presents himself as being a certain way, but it is merely a façade. So a Christian hypocrite can come to church, receive the sacrament, fold their hands, and so on, but in everything else they live as they please. Of course, when I say they live as they please, realize that they have to stay within reason. You can’t be outside the norm, so you can’t murder or molest anyone or do something egregious like that. You can’t go wild, or, more to the point, you can’t get caught being wild. But otherwise if everybody else is doing it, the hypocrite figures it must be alright.
God says the opposite of this. You can’t live like everybody else if you want to be a Christian. God says in our Old Testament reading that his people, the Israelites, need to be different. They can’t be like the people of Egypt, the land that they had left. They can’t be like the people of Canaan, the land to which they were going. How were they to be? They were to be different than others by keeping the regulations and ordinances of the Lord their God. The will of God, expressed in his Law, is different from the way that folks normally live.
Our Old Testament reading then goes on to give some of these regulations and ordinances. We won’t go deeply into all of them. We will only look closely at one of them. You can consider the rest of them on your own.
The regulation that I’d like to spend our time on this morning might sound a little antiquated and agricultural, but it can easily be made applicable also for us. It says, “When you reap the harvest from your land, you are not to finish reaping all the way to the edge of the field. Do not gather up the gleanings of your harvest. Do not strip your vineyard clean, and do not pick up the fallen grapes from your vineyard, but leave them for the poor and the alien who live with you. I am the Lord your God.”
Now in our times we do not harvest the same way they did, and grapes don’t grow too well here in Iowa. But the general principle is applicable nevertheless. The principle is this: Although you might have the right and the ability to take as much as you possibly can, you shouldn’t. You should let others have some too.
You should let others have some too. So let’s talk about what it means to get a “good deal.” When someone says that they’ve gotten a good deal that usually means that they’ve paid little but gotten much in return. The common understanding is that a good deal is only a good deal for the person saying it. Maybe even the other party has lostmoney on the deal. That’s maybe the best deal of all good deals. Too bad for them, but good for you!
A sign that this kind of activity should be recognized by everyone as not being quite kosher is that we wouldn’t do this kind of thing with people that we love. Generally speaking parents do not try to rip off their children, nor vice versa. Close friends do not try to rip each other off, otherwise that might be kind of hard on the friendship. Oftentimes people like doing business with strangers because then they can treat the other party as shrewdly as they want with minimal negative consequences for themselves.
This greediness is taken to be normal among our people and no real shame is attached to it. If anything praise and admiration are given to those who do well for themselves. They are imagined to be superior human beings. But God speaks differently. If you want to be one of his people, then you should not live like those around you. You should not take as much as you possibly can. You should let others have some too. A good deal is one where somebody else benefits; the other party is enriched—and not just yourself.
“But,” you say, “that means I’m going to have less!” Yes, I can see why you would say that. But maybe your thinking is a little short-sighted. In the short-term you might have a little less cash, but who is the one who is in control of the money that you have? Isn’t it God? Think of what you are saying about God when you believe that you have to get everything you possibly can for yourself. Aren’t you saying that you can’t be generous, because God is so stingy that unless you stuff yourself with everything you can possibly get your hands on that you will have a horrible life, poor, miserable and so on? Think of what you are saying about yourself when you are saying you have to get everything you possibly can for yourself. Aren’t you saying that you have the power to bless yourself? God is not to be trusted. You and your shrewdness, or, rather, your greediness, is what is to be trusted.
It is important that you take stock of what God is expecting of us. It is indeed true that you will have less in the short-term if you are generous in your dealings with others. Having less always feels worse than having more. We would feel happy and secure if we had a mountain of money in the bank. We don’t want daily bread. We want years’ and decades’ worth of bread stored up. It feels good to count our money. It hurts to have no money to count.
Consider those poor Israelites when they were wandering around in the desert. They used up and ate up all they had. They literally were given daily bread in the form of manna. How they would torture themselves because they would get hungry and thirsty from time to time. But think about what else was going on. Meanwhile the Creator of the universe was right there with them in the pillar of cloud and fire. This was kind of silly, at least from faith’s perspective. So it is also with our dealings. If you have to choose between being shrewd and thereby getting more for yourself, but disobeying God, on the one hand; and being generous, having a little less, but pleasing and honoring God on the other; you should always go with what is in accord with God’s will. This will be better for you.
How will it be better for you? This, also, is important to take stock of, so that your expectations are not inappropriate. When we hear that things will be better for us we often think in terms of money. And that very well may be too. If you are generous with others, then who’s to say that God won’t make people also be generous with you? In my experience I’ve always found it much more enjoyable to do business with people who aren’t trying to flay me alive, so your generosity might even be blessed with more business and financial success.
But money’s not the only way a person can be blessed. It’s not even the most important. This world is full of people who have huge amounts of money and property, but they love no one and are loved by no one. Always putting yourself first has even earthly consequences. So what is a loving family worth? What is a good conscience worth? What is peace worth?
You are not as rich as Jeff Bezos or Bill Gates or Elon Musk, and you never will be as rich as them if you want to live like a Christian, but all three of these men are divorced, hated by their children, and are enslaved to their riches. Like dragons they can only sleep when they are sure that their mountain of gold is safe and secure. Why do you want that mountain of wealth that poisons the one who sits atop it? The answer is our flesh. Our flesh believes more in what we have accumulated for ourselves than in the daily bread that God will provide for us tomorrow.
When God made this regulation for the Israelites, that they should not take for themselves every last thing they possibly could, but that they should leave some for others, realize that this would have hurt their flesh too. It was basically like they were leaving cash sitting out there in field, and who knows who might come along to pick it up? So how could they leave behind what was rightfully theirs in peace? The only way to explain it is that they believed that the Lord who had provided them with the crop that they were given would provide them with a blessing tomorrow too. They were better off putting their trust in the Creator, than they were in putting their trust in the accumulation of created things.
Idolatry is the belief in created things, instead of belief in the Creator. Idolatry has by no means gone away. It is just as common of a thing today as it was at the time of the Israelites. The Lord God told the Israelites that they were to live differently from the people of Egypt (who were idolaters), and that they were to live differently from the people of Canaan (who were idolaters).
The same thing is true for us. We live among people who believe in created things instead of the Creator. We are to live differently from them. It always has been tempting for God’s people to live as hypocrites. That’s where God’s people honor him with their lips, but their hearts, their faith, is far from him. They go through the religious motions that are expected of them, but they live how they see fit. When it comes right down to it, they believe more in blessing themselves by doing what they think, rather than in God blessing them for being obedient to his Word.
The reason why Christians choose to be hypocrites is because they believe that they will be better off that way. They don’t want to keep God’s commandments. Keeping them sounds painful or boring or ineffective. This, however, is a lie. The Israelite who left some behind in the field was better blessed than the Israelite who took everything that he could lay claim to. The Israelite who left some behind might not have been as rich as the Israelite who took everything. So what? Should we shovel all your cash into your casket when it’s time to go? What good will all your cash do you then? Being generous now puts that cash to work for blessing and enriching others.
So don’t believe the lie that you will be better off as a hypocrite than you will be by obeying God’s commands. Realize, also, that it will take some courage to live as a genuine Christian. It is super easy to live just like everybody else. It requires no effort whatsoever. To live differently, however, takes some backbone. People will call you a fool. They will say that you’ll never make it. You’ll be cursed. You’ll be poor. You’ll be miserable. That is to say, they will be your enemies, mocking you for putting your trust in the Lord.
So be it. You are better off having mere human beings as your enemies than having God as your enemy. With God as your friend, you will be blessed. I 100% guarantee that. The blessing might not look how you expect it to look. You might look like our Lord Jesus Christ, whose life was not a bed of roses. But it will be good, just as Jesus’s life was good, because our Father who is in heaven is good.
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Our goal as Christians is to inherit heaven. Since this is our goal, we should be heavenly minded people. We should not seek to please ourselves or our fellow human beings. If we or others are pleased, then that is all well and good, but it is not what we are to be after. We seek to be pleasing to God. What is pleasing to him is his commandments. God’s commandments are good, and they are always for the good.
However, it does not always seem that God’s commandments are for the good. Take, for example, “Honor your father and your mother.” We don’t always agree with our parents and other authorities. Honoring father and mother often means that we can’t do what we want to do. Or, on the other hand, we have to do what we don’t want to do. That’s no fun. So even though God’s commandments are for our good, they often don’t seem that way to us. That disconnect is maybe the primary reason why we don’t do what God’s commands us to do.
Since our flesh often doesn’t see the value of God’s commandments, and since every human being has this sinful flesh, it isn’t surprising that the same kind of thing that happens with us as individuals also ends up happening with groups of people, such as with states or with nations.
Let’s consider our own nation. God commands us not to steal. Folks know this because he has written this truth on everyone’s heart. But there is no end to the swindling, corruption, fraud, and so on that happens on a daily basis.
This has gotten quite sophisticated, in fact. The worst criminals among us are not the petty thieves or embezzlers that make it into the papers. They end up getting 10 year prison sentences. The worst thieves are the ones that never get prosecuted. The real big shots, throwing around billions, take whatever they can get while accomplishing nothing productive or helpful to others. They are basically a bunch of gamblers. When they win with their rigged bets in stocks and trades they are happy to take the profits. When they lose they get the government to bail them out.
These thieves do not go to jail. They are highly exalted. They are hailed as great philanthropists. After their life of crime, screwing over whomever they possibly could, they hand out a small portion of their ill-gotten gains as charity. They get buildings named after them.
To summon a nation to take up such fraud and corruption is a huge ask. Only the most youthful and vigorous of nations—nations that still have a sense for right and wrong—will dare to do it. Fighting wealthy and powerful people who can bribe and appoint and finagle, with the best lawyers helping them all along the way—that is dangerous and thankless. It is much easier to let things slide. So that’s what we’ve done. That is what we will continue to do. We’ll let things continue to decompose.
That’s how it is with so many other matters of right and wrong too. When it comes to marriage and family our nation has almost completely checked out of its responsibility to regulate that area of life. Judges used to be involved in keeping marriages together. There used to be no such thing as a no-fault divorce. People were not allowed to publicly present themselves as sexual partners with whomever they wanted.
But, you know what? That’s a lot of work! Getting involved in such matters is messy. It’s dangerous and thankless. For several generations now parents, as God-given authorities, have also not wanted to touch the issue of their children fornicating or living together with someone to whom they are not married. God’s commandment, “You shall not commit adultery,” is for our good, but it often does not seem that way. It often seems much more sensible to say, “Live, and let live.” There’s no question that “Live, and let live,” is vastly easier.
This laziness and apathy are also what is most important when it comes to the fifth commandment: “You shall not murder.” It seems much easier to terminate the life of an unwanted, unborn child than to be saddled with the burden of raising such a child. Unborn children who suffer from diseases are especially prone to being unwanted, and therefore murdered. A horrifying statistic that I learned when Edith was still in the womb is that 90% or more of the children who are identified as possibly to having Downs Syndrome are aborted. Caring for a child who has that condition is certainly daunting, but that is no excuse for strangling them or poisoning them.
The same thing is true also at the other end of life. Several states in our nation already have laws legalizing physician-assisted suicide. Physician assisted suicide is when physicians prescribe poison to people who no longer want to live. When a disease is terminal it can seem easiest for everyone involved to just “get it over with” when it comes to a person dying. Why should family or friends waste their time keeping vigil at the death bed when they could be making money?
The commandment stands: “You shall not murder.” But it doesn’t seem like it is for our good. Ending lives quickly, easily, painlessly, and privately seems to be better for everyone involved.
This nation has grown old and tired. The nation, of course, hasn’t grown tired of making money, but that is how it is with people, too, in their old age. Greed is a vice that afflicts the elderly. We as a nation are zealous for money, but care very little about what is right and wrong. This makes us very utilitarian about moral issues. If it doesn’t appear as though some activity is harmful to others, then, by all means, indulge. Anybody who would dare to make judgments about such things is unhelpful, because we all know that what is really important is the economy. So long as we continue to be the richest, most powerful, first-in-the-world nation, then we must have our priorities straight.
This, however, is a very earth-bound judgment, purposely neglecting the one who is in heaven. God does not care if a person lives in America or if a person lives in Haiti. Neither being an American nor a Haitian matters. What matters is being a new creation, created by the Holy Spirit. Greatness is not defined by the amount of money or influence a person has. Greatness is a matter of keeping God’s commandments. We should love the Lord our God with all our heart, soul, strength, and mind, and our neighbor as ourselves.
To make America great again we do not need this politician or that politician, but a deep change of heart. We need to learn, perhaps for the first time, what true greatness is. True greatness is not democracy or earthly peace. True greatness is following after our Lord Jesus Christ. We are to deny ourselves, study God’s commandments and keep them, and bear the cross that will inevitably come as a result of keeping God’s commands.
There’s no way of accomplishing this with some political movement. There’s no way to compel anyone to live as a Christian. This is only dealing with individuals. We all, as individuals, must repent of our cold, lazy, apathy towards God’s commandments—the cold, lazy apathy that I hope you have seen in yourself even with the few commandments that have been pointed out today. We as individuals are guilty in such matters. We must leave behind our old, selfish attitudes and seek anew the kingdom of God and his righteousness.
Let’s finally get to the topic I promised you I’d speak about today: Since we have such deeply entrenched spiritual problems in our country, I can’t get overly excited about the overturning of Roe vs. Wade. Overturning Roe vs. Wade was a very good thing. Roe vs. Wade was wrong. There is no such thing as a constitutional right to end another person’s life. Now states are allowed to decide for themselves whether abortion is legal and under what circumstances. That might save some babies’ lives. That’s good. But this ruling hasn’t done much to change the overall downhill direction our country has been going, spiritually speaking.
I’ve included in your bulletin a letter from our Synod’s president, Matthew Harrison. It seems to me that he struck the right tone that we should have as Christians regarding this ruling. He says we should rejoice that something which has done so much to bolster the unjust killing of innocent people has been torn down.
He says we should also not be intimidated by those who gnash their teeth and will be working hard to make the murdering of the unwanted easier. Some people will never be convinced that God alone has the right to determine who lives and who dies, and that we should not take that into our own hands.
Finally, president Harrison’s letter tells us that we should repent. In a way, very little has changed with the overturning of Roe vs. Wade. Our lovelessness and spiritual bankruptcy has not been altered. Our failure to care for troubled and helpless women is just as egregious as it ever was. He ended his letter with: “Lord, have mercy.”
This is the way it is with Christianity. We must stay the course that we have been given as Christians. We fight against evil, not just by looking for evil people over there, but by seeing that same evil within ourselves. We repent, believe the Gospel of forgiveness for Jesus’s sake, and, God willing, walk by the Spirit.
The source of true blessing and happiness has been the same ever since the beginning of creation. That source has always been the Lord our God. He is the one from whom all blessings flow. Adam and Eve were harmed by breaking his commandments, just as anyone and everyone inevitably and always will be harmed by breaking his commandments, even if it doesn’t seem so. Adam and Eve were saved through faith in the Lord’s promise of a Savior, our Lord Jesus Christ.
As it was then, so it is now, and so it ever shall be for each one of us individually, as well as collectively as a state or a nation. A nation, however, cannot repent. Only individuals can repent and believe. If you really want to be helpful and patriotic on this holiday weekend, you would do better to examine your life according to the Ten Commandments than to read the Declaration of Independence. The Declaration of Independence was written by mere men. The commands and promises by which we live as Christians were given to us by God.
God’s Word is a sure and certain path for us Christians. It is impossible for us not to be blessed if we follow God’s commandments and believe his promises. God is God. He will bring it about. No such promise can be made concerning politics or even our fine American system of government. No human measures can ever get deep enough to strangle the evil at its source.
God’s working is quite different. He makes a new creation. You, as Christians, are new creations. You have been raised with Christ. You are the salt of the earth. See to it that you don’t lose your saltiness. Continue on loving and forgiving your family and your friends. Continue with your work, not working for money or for praise, but for the good of those whom God puts into your life.
As a summary we might close with these words from Paul: “Set your mind on things above, not on earthly things. For you died, and your life is now hidden with Christ in God. When Christ, who is your life, appears, then you also will appear with him in glory.”
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One of the worst feelings in the world is to know that something bad is going to happen and there isn’t anything you can do about it. The diagnosis has been made; it’s terminal. The loan did not get reapproved; you’re bankrupt. The affair has been made known; the marriage is over. Such circumstances enslave a person. Nothing can be done. If only we could be set free!
But maybe we can be set free. That slavery is so awful. We shouldn’t submit to it. If we stand up and fight, maybe we can get out of it. So the terminal disease is fought against. Try this, try that, maybe, just maybe! Maybe we can get another mortgage on the house. Maybe I can lie about the affair. We want so badly to be back in control. We do not want to be at the beck and call of our circumstances. We want everything to be at our beck and call. We want to be in charge.
But, as Solomon says, this is all vanity. It is all chasing after the wind. Maybe we can defeat one disease, but another is sure to come that we won’t be able to defeat. Maybe we can keep our money for now, but eventually somebody else is going to get it. There isn’t anything that we can do to make our plans permanent.
Paul says in Romans chapter 8 that creation has been subjected to vanity, to futility. That is to say that creation has been subjected to an inevitable nothingness. He says, furthermore, that creation is enslaved to corruption. Corruption is a pretty flexible word. Lots of things can be corrupt. The thought that lies behind it is rotting and rottenness. Dead things rot. We are enslaved to this, and there isn’t anything that you can do about it.
The key word is “you.” There isn’t anything you can do about it. You are enslaved by forces much more powerful than you. God, however, is free. Paul, in this portion of Romans 8 that I’ve just referenced, says that God is the one who has subjected creation to futility in hope. He says that creation has been enslaved to corruption in order to be set free. He says that there is such a thing as the glorious freedom of the children of God. That means that there is such a thing as being a child of God. The children of God have a glorious freedom. This is the same thing that Paul says in our reading, Galatians 5:1: “It is for freedom that Christ has set us free.”
Everybody knows that being free is better than being a slave. Being free means that you are not bound and shackled. Could there be any greater and more grievous shackles than those inevitable ones whereby our bodies will decompose with death? The best than anybody dares to hope for is to push back the inevitability of death—forestall those shackles. Nobody dares to break those bonds because it is believed to be impossible. This is precisely what Paul is talking about, however, in Romans 8. Creation has been enslaved to corruption in order to be set free with the glorious freedom of the children of God, who will be raised incorruptible.
The children of God are those who have been baptized into Christ, clothed with Christ, as we heard last week. Christ’s status as the Son of God is given to those who have been baptized. Christ’s victory over death is given to those who have been baptized. Christ’s resurrection is promised to everyone who dies in Christ. The inevitability of death is no longer inevitable. Death is swallowed up in victory. This is a glorious, unheard-of freedom. The chains of death cannot bind us.
Speaking of chains, though, you are maybe familiar with how Paul speaks in his letters written closer to the end of his life. He refers to himself as “being in chains.” Paul ends up being a prisoner for Christ. He is arrested and goes to Rome to stand trial. Eventually he is sentenced to death. How can Paul speak of freedom when Paul ends up in chains, is imprisoned, and sentenced to death? When this happened did Paul change his mind about his Gospel? In our reading today he says, “It is for freedom that Christ has set us free.” But Paul ends up in chains.
Paul did not change his mind. You don’t have to take my word for it. You can read him for yourself with his little letter to the Philippians—often called the epistle of joy. It was written in chains. He did not see his freedom as being restricted by those chains. He could see that his more complete and glorious freedom was drawing near with his impending death. He is not sad, but encourages us to rejoice in the Lord always. Again, he says, “Rejoice!” Paul is looking forward to being with the Lord, which is better than anything this life might offer—no matter how good this life might be. So Paul’s freedom is not taken away by chains or death. Paul’s circumstances made it so that he could not do whatever he wanted, but Paul’s freedom was not a matter of being able to do whatever he might like.
That’s important. Understanding that Christian freedom is not a matter of doing whatever a person might like is very important for us to grasp, otherwise we won’t understand what Paul means by freedom. The way that we understand the word “freedom” is different than the way that the Bible understands “freedom.”
For us freedom is understood as the ability to do whatever we want. If we want to work at one job we can do that. If we want to change and do another job, we can do that. If there’s something that we don’t like about our life, we might have the freedom to change it. The thing that usually restricts our freedom for changing our life for the better is lacking power. We might not have the resources to compel other people to do things for us. If we ain’t got the money, honey, they ain’t got the time. Everybody understands that the more money a person has, the more freedom he or she has to do whatever he or she wants. More money means more willfulness.
According to the Bible’s way of thinking, however, doing whatever you want is not freedom but slavery. It’s basically the opposite of how we naturally think of such things. Doing whatever you want is slavery to one’s own passions and desires. Your desires are like a slave-driver, like a master. Your desires say to you, “Do this!” As a slave to those desires, you obey your master. You yourselves know full well that it is quite different when it comes to doing good. We all have experienced knowing that we are supposed to do something that’s good and right, but don’t do it. That shows that we are not as free as we imagine. If we would spontaneously, gladly and joyously do good for others, including our enemies, then I would admit that we are free. However, since we are obedient to evil and incapable of freely doing good, we are slaves when we are doing what we want.
In our epistle reading, Paul says that the Spirit keeps us from doing the things that we want. The desires of the flesh are opposed to the Spirit, and the Spirit is against the flesh. They are opposed to each other, so that we do not do what we want. Paul’s list of the works of the flesh—sexual immorality, impurity, hatred, anger, jealousy, drunkenness, and so on—are all things voluntarily done. We want pleasure, power, entertainment, and so on, and we are willing to do what needs to be done in order to attain such things. People imagine that doing what you want is freedom. It is actually slavery.
The Holy Spirit, on the other hand, leads us into a very different kind of freedom with very different fruit. The freedom given by the Holy Spirit is not an absolute freedom—beholden to no one but one’s self. The glorious freedom of the children of God is not an absolute freedom. Absolute freedom is what the serpent offered to Adam and Eve in the Garden, and it turned out to be a lie. The devil said that they would know the difference between good and evil and would be like God. That is to say, Adam and Eve were offered the freedom to do whatever they wanted. That turned out not to be a freedom, but a horrible bondage. From that point onward they and their descendants were slaves to their desires, incapable of denying themselves and freely doing what is good.
So the freedom that the Holy Spirit works is not the freedom to do whatever we want. It is the freedom of being a child of God. God is the one who is known to be in control rather than us Christians. God being in control means that goodness is bound to come for his beloved children, even if we are in very bad circumstances. The circumstances might look so bad that it looks like there’s nothing that we can do about it.
I began today by saying that it’s about the worst feeling in the world when something bad is going to happen and there isn’t anything we can do about it. Jesus knows what that feels like. Think of how Jesus prayed in the garden just before he was arrested. Three times he prayed, “Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from me.” Jesus could see that something bad—something worse than bad—was coming at him. Could it possibly be changed? But he also added, “Not my will, but yours be done.”
This should help us understand the kind of freedom that we have as the children of God. God’s own beloved Son, Jesus Christ, was put through the wringer. It is not as though the Christian life is an amusement park ride. Nor is it the case that we determine for ourselves what should happen in our lives as though we knew perfectly well what is good and what is evil. Instead it is the case that God is the one who is in control. The freedom that we have is to embrace this will of God, knowing that all things have to work together for the good of those who love him.
God being in control is very, very good. We know the will of God towards us sinners in Jesus Christ. God sent his Son to redeem, to forgive, to reconcile all people to himself. The Scriptures say that it is God’s will that all people should come to the knowledge of the truth and to be saved. God is for us in Jesus Christ. God being for us is so extensive that we are even called his beloved children. What greater words or ideas could possibly be used to describe God’s loving will towards us? He did not spare his own perfectly lovable Son, but gave him up for us all. How can he not also graciously give us all things? The glorious freedom of the children of God is knowing that God is for us. He who has begun a good work in us will bring it to completion on the day of our Lord Jesus Christ.
On the other hand, however, this also means that we are not God. Folks assume that they know this already. Nobody goes around saying he or she is God, but within us all is our flesh. There is no more deeply felt desire of our flesh than that we should be God. We want to be in control of our own lives. We want to be able to decide for ourselves everything that might happen to us. We want to believe that we can do anything if only we try hard enough, and, especially, if we are rich enough.
This is no good, though, which we should be able to see if we are only honest enough with ourselves to admit it. We are not free in and of ourselves. No amount of effort can set us free from the inevitability of death. There’s a good chance that eventually something is going to come along which we won’t be able to do anything about: the diagnosis, the bank statement, the angry letter. Then what? Try harder? Give me a break! That’s like saying to the slave: “Work harder.” Working harder won’t set the person free.
Paul, on the other hand, has a very different message. He says at the beginning of our reading, “It is for freedom that Christ has set us free.” Christ has set you free. He has defeated every power that is greater than yourself that you can never in a million years conquer. The reason why Christ has set you free is for freedom. Christ wants you to enjoy the peace of knowing that God is for you. God forgives you. You are a child of God. God will eventually bring you to himself.
Since you are not God, you certainly cannot dictate to him how you want everything to go. You are foolish; God is wise. He knows best how to bring you to himself. He knows how to keep you from unbelief and despair. That probably means that life isn’t going to be one big amusement park ride. Our enemies—sin, death, demons, the devil, our own flesh, and so on—our enemies are so dreadful and powerful that life can’t be one big amusement park ride.
But God is in control, and God is for you in Jesus Christ.
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Laws, regulations are powerful tools. Laws and regulations can change people’s behavior. As powerful tools, laws and regulations have been used for good and for ill.
For examples of how laws and regulations have been used for good, you only need to think about how almost every area of modern life has developed best practices. Practically every industry and every service has been shaped by regulations so that things today are much safer and more efficient than 100 years ago. Licensing, accreditation, and other regulatory measures have raised standards so as to prevent incompetence and malpractice. We have become an ever increasingly regulated society because folks continue trying to solve problems.
On the other hand, laws and regulations have not always been used to do good. It is always possible to make laws and regulations that are unjust, prejudiced, and self-serving. The really wealthy people of this country have a keen interest in state and national politics because they know how laws and regulations can affect their bottom line. Laws and regulations can make them a lot of money, or laws and regulations can make it impossible for them to do business. Tax laws can make some people a lot of money or they can take a lot of money away from others. A great deal of what happens in state and national government is not for the public good. It’s for private interest. That is why there is always going to be corruption involved in the making of laws.
This does not change the fact that laws and regulations are powerful tools. To the contrary. The fact that laws and regulations are effectively used for good or for ill proves how powerful they can be. If you want to change things on this earth, there might not be any more powerful tool. It’s a way to change not only the behavior of one individual but to make other people act a certain way too. Mass movements are what history is made of. History couldn’t care less about this or that individual. History is interested in the big movements. That’s how things are in this old world.
The Gospel, however, teaches us differently when it comes to such matters. The Gospel gives us quite a different view of history: God has made me and all creatures. God gives me my clothing, shoes, food, drink, and so on. God has purchased and won me with the holy precious blood and innocent suffering and death of his beloved Son. God has called me by the Gospel, enlightened me with his gifts, sanctified and kept me in the true faith. On the last day he will raise me and all the dead and give eternal life to me and all believers in Christ. This is most certainly true.
Note that what is important in this history is not mass movements. It is the individual who is important, and, more important still, what God does for individuals. God has made me. God has redeemed me. God has sanctified me. There is no higher activity that we could be engaged in than thanking God. Thank you, God, for making me and all creatures. Thank you, God, for purchasing and winning me from sin, death, and from the power of the devil. Thank you, God, for calling me out of darkness and giving me your Holy Spirit. God’s gracious actions towards me are the highest and best things in life.
If God’s gracious actions towards me are the highest and best things in life, then that means that other things can’t be the highest and best. Other things in life are somewhat glorious as well. The way that people have been steered this way or that way, wealth, progress, power, and the other kinds of things that get written into history books are great. Laws and regulations are usually the drivers behind these forces.
Laws and regulations, although they are somewhat great, do not alter or even relate to God’s gracious actions towards us. There is no law or regulation that has had any impact on what God has decided to do with us human beings in Jesus Christ. It was God’s grace alone that made him do what he has done.
This means that those things that are somewhat glorious have lost their glory. The exploits of history, the mass movements, the laws and regulations by which things get done on this earth—these are taken for granted as being the highest and the best. However, there is a higher glory in God’s actions towards us in Christ. We are created, redeemed and sanctified. We are made into children of God. This is a greater glory.
This greater glory is such that the old glory—the best that can be accomplished on this earth—comes to have no glory at all. The old, earthly-accomplishments-glory is like the moon shining. A full moon certainly has a wonderful glory. The new glory of the Gospel—God’s gracious actions toward us—however, is like the sun. The glory of the sun is such that once the sun has risen the old glory of the moon is no longer visible.
Not everyone is going to see the greater glory of being a child of God. Most people, in fact, are going to believe that the Gospel is a myth, a fairy tale. The only things that matter, so they believe, are dollars and cents, laws and regulations, getting what’s mine. The best that we can hope for in our lives is that we be healthy, wealthy, and wise. While this stuff is fine and good, it isn’t nearly glorious enough.
Something that is already more serious and real than these things has already happened to you. You have been baptized. Paul says in our epistle reading that as many of you as have been baptized have been clothed with Christ. You have been clothed with Christ. Through faith all of you have become sons of God.
That admittedly might sound strange to those of you who are women or girls. It is certainly not the case that Paul is some kind of sexist bigot as some foolish and lazy people judge him as being. Paul is very deliberately saying that all people—men and women, boys and girls—become sons of God by baptism in Christ. They all become sons of God because Jesus Christ is the only Son of God. Jesus Christ’s sonship is given to those who are baptized, and who hold to what is given to them in baptism by faith.
This is our history. This is our salvation and our glory. The way that we are saved is by God becoming one of us in Jesus. Jesus makes us one with him by baptism and thus we become one with God. Despite our sins, despite being male or female, Jewish or Greek, slave or free, we are altogether and all alike drawn near to God. We are drawn so near to God that the Holy Spirit in us can cry out, “Abba, Father.” We can pray, “Our Father who art in heaven,” having been tenderly invited to believe that he is our true Father and that we are his true children, so that we may ask him with all boldness and confidence as dear children ask their dear father.
This is a heavenly glory. We are raised up beyond this earth to our Creator. This earth will not go on forever. Jesus says, “Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will never pass away.” It is widely assumed that the history books will go on with their validity and importance forever. That’s why ambitious people are so eager to be included in them—it’s a kind of immortality. On the other hand, it is widely assumed that an individual being baptized is of little importance and believing in Christ is nothing more than a quirky hobby. What is really important, however, is not whether you have managed to be wealthy or not, powerful or not, slave or free, male or female. In Christ we are all made one. This oneness in Christ, brought about by God’s gracious actions towards us, is eternal.
This greater, heavenly, eternal glory has one downside, so to speak. It’s not really a downside, but it seems like it’s a downside to us. And that is that this glory is only known by faith. We haven’t died yet. Christ has not yet come to judge the living and the dead. If either of these things should happen the glory that we have known by faith will be replaced by sight. In the meantime we have to be content with God’s promise. The Christian Church is built on God’s promises, but since this is so contrary to our nature, we are prone to turn towards things of this earth and therefore to laws and regulations.
This seems to be what happened to the Christians in Galatia to whom Paul was writing in our epistle reading. Some new teachers had come and had told these Christians that what is really important is the changing of people’s behavior by laws and regulations. It seems as though they took the truths of the Gospel somewhat for granted. The advanced stuff, the glorious stuff, is going to come about by laws and regulations.
Paul speaks against that throughout the whole letter to the Galatians, including the portion that was read for today. Paul argues the opposite of these other teachers. The Law does not have the glory that they were claiming. The Law is like a guardian or a chaperone. Chaperones are adults who accompany young people, and why? Chaperones are there to lay down the law. Young people are not allowed to do what they otherwise might do because the chaperone is there.
And what are the attitudes of the young people towards those chaperones? Do they like chaperones? If there are young people who are good, then they probably don’t care if the chaperone is there or not, because the chaperone is not changing their behavior. In that case, though, the chaperone is really nothing and extraneous—pointless.
If the young people are bad, then they have no love for that chaperone. If they had their way the chaperone would go away so that they could do what they want. Again, the chaperone isn’t able to do that much. The chaperone doesn’t change them internally. The chaperone doesn’t actually make them good. The chaperone just makes them behave outwardly, while inwardly they are filled with lawlessness.
Although laws and regulations are powerful, they cannot make anyone good. They do not have the power to make anyone acceptable to God. A church that is filled with laws and regulations for every last facet of life is not going to make anyone better. True goodness comes only from God’s gracious actions. Being clothed in God’s Son by baptism, believing God’s promises more fully, is the way that people are set free internally from their evil compulsions. The best that laws can ever accomplish is to create people who are whitewashed tombs. Outwardly they might look alright. Inwardly they are filled with death and uncleanness. No law has the ability to make anyone truly love. Love must come from God.
God makes a beginning in us with his love by our baptism into Christ, making us one in Christ, and giving us his Holy Spirit. This is only a beginning because we still carry with us our sinful flesh that the Holy Spirit fights against in Christians. The Holy Spirit fights against our sinful flesh, sanctifying us throughout our earthly life, until our sinful flesh is killed with death. Then, when we are resurrected on the last day, we will have bodies that have been purified from sin. While we live this earthly Christian life we continue to have both our sinful flesh and the Holy Spirit.
Since we have our sinful flesh we will always need that old chaperone in this life. Christians throwing themselves into situations where they know that they will be tempted is like putting fire and straw together and expecting them not to burn. The old chaperone is going to say, “Don’t do that!” The old chaperone won’t have any thanks for it. Our sinful flesh resents being told what to do.
But our true substance as Christians is not in laws and regulations. Laws and regulations have their place in this old world, but they are not that great. What is truly great is God’s gracious, saving actions toward us. Our Christian hope is not that we have or will be able to reform ourselves. Our Christian hope is that God has chosen us for salvation in Jesus Christ. In order to set us free from the Law’s condemnation God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the Law, to redeem us who are under the Law, so that we would receive adoption as sons. This is what we set our heart upon. This is what gives us hope—God’s gracious actions toward us.
True progress as a Christian can come only from this Gospel. Changes in our behavior might be impressive to other people, but what really matters is a change of heart, which only God can really see. Our change of heart comes from embracing God’s forgiveness, embracing his accepting of us for Jesus’s sake, of his promising to be with us no matter how dark things might get. We are simply to be glad at God’s promises. He is faithful. He will surely do what he has promised.
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Today I’d like to talk about “extremism.” We often hear of extremism and extremists. Extremism is never a good thing. Extremists go too far; they go to the extreme. That’s always going to create conflict, because not everyone is on the same page. Extremists are destructive to relationships. The conflict between the extremist and the supposed non-extremist creates violence without fail. That violence might be with words. Some extremists are even physically violent.
It would be foolish, and even insane, to want to endorse all extremism. Endorsing all extremism would involve irreconcilable contradictions. Being extreme in one direction means that you can’t be extreme in the opposite direction. For example, a so-called far right extremist cannot at the same time be a so-called far left extremist. That would be a house divided against itself. And many kinds of extremism are evil, destructive, hate-filled, unjust, altogether horrible. So extremism as extremism cannot be endorsed.
But here is something that we as Christians have to wrestle with: Jesus was and is an extremist. Jesus held extreme views and said extreme things. The Gospels are full of these extreme statements.
Jesus says: “Love your enemies, and do good to them.” “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your strength, and with all your mind.” “I say to you whoever is angry with his brother is liable to judgement.” “I say to you that anyone who is divorced, except on the ground of sexual immorality, commits adultery if married again.” “I say to you that it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God.” “If your hand causes you to sin, cut it off. If your eye causes you to sin, pluck it out.” And there are many, many more. These statements are extreme because they go way beyond what ordinary folks think.
But maybe what ordinary folks think is an extremism all its own. Jesus is an extremist for the glory of the Father, for God’s commandments, and for God’s will. The great herd has its own commitments too.
A while back I spoke to you about the training in covetousness that the ungodly go to the gym in order to exercise. Too much is never enough. More for myself is always better than less. In the pursuit of happiness all that matters is that you don’t get caught. You hide, so no prying eyes may see. You lie, so that you won’t be held responsible. You’re mean, so that nobody messes with you. You manipulate, so that you only have to do what you want. Here, again, I could go on and on.
We might sum it all up by saying that it is all selfishness and and self-aggrandizement and self-worship. We can never have too much money or too much power. Nobody can give us too much honor, too many congratulations. Is not this going to extremes?
“But,” a person might justifiably say, “everybody’s like that. If everybody’s like that, then it can’t be extremism.” True enough. We are like that. The reason why everybody’s like that is because we were all born this way. If we’re all born this way then there’s nothing we can do about it. Fine, we’re extreme in our selfishness, ambition, love of glory, and so on, but it’s fine. We’re fine. We’re just like everybody else, and we’re all fine. This is an extremely powerful line of reasoning.
It’s been powerful ever since the beginning. When Adam and Eve were tempted they ended up getting convinced that they would be fine. God said, “In the day that you eat of it you will surely die,” but the devil said, “you won’t surely die,” so who’s to say? We’ll probably be fine. We’re fine.
They weren’t fine, of course. How can anyone be fine who is living in rebellion against his or her Creator? Adam and Eve sensed this after they sinned, but they couldn’t bring themselves to admit it. They just went right on ahead convincing themselves that they were fine. They tried to forget about God, and got busy living. They stitched together some clothes and set about increasing their quality of life. So long as God stayed away they could keep up this fiction that they were fine.
And that was quite a fiction, and a deliberate blindness! With the fall into sin Adam and Eve were corrupted in all the ways that we are corrupted. Lusts and greed and perversions were poured into their soul from their new master. Regardless, despite this extremism of theirs, they kept telling themselves that they were fine.
The last thing that they wanted to hear was God coming towards them in the cool of the day. That was when the lies collapsed. They weren’t fine. They looked for someplace to hide. If there was a mountain available, I’m sure they would have liked to have been covered by it. This was an extremely unpleasant experience for them. It’s like when a kid has to get a splinter removed. All that the kid knows is that getting the splinter removed means more pain than what is already being experienced, and so keep that pin or those tweezers away!
But that is actually a pretty paltry example. Paul says that it’s not just painful. A death takes place. The Old Adam in us must be drowned and die together with all sins and evil desires. You are not fine. It does not matter one bit whether other people are just like you. It doesn’t matter whether everybody validates you and celebrates you. No amount of celebrating can stand up against the truth, just as no amount of clothing was able to take away Adam and Eve’s shame.
As you Christians know, of course, God was not coming just to kill them. In a sense, God really did kill them. That is to say, God killed their hopes and dreams. Realize that before they heard God coming toward them they had been hoping that the devil was right. The devil had said that they wouldn’t surely die. “Pretty, pretty please, let’s not ever, ever think that we less than perfect.” This had to die. It’s not true.
But, as you Christians know, God also told them another truth: The Seed of the woman is going to crush the serpent’s head. That truth is just as true as the truth that you are not fine. They will be redeemed.
Realize, however, that this is not a Hallmark movie. Our sin, our debt, has not just been pretended away. Our salvation is shocking. The Son of God became a curse. The Holy One became sin and died on a cross. God goes to extremes in order to set us free from our slavery to vanity and death and the rotting of our corpse. The world is full of people who find this extremism on God’s part to be distasteful. Some feel as though God couldn’t die. It’s against the rules. Some feel that God shouldn’t die. Everybody can see that it’s violent. It’s bloody. It’s dirty. It’s extreme.
But what is this extremism all in service to? To what extreme is all of this directed? It is directed toward love. God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son… God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through him. Jesus says, “I have come that people may have life, and that they may have it more abundantly.” God’s extremism is all for our good, and, at the same time, against all that is evil.
So let’s acknowledge the truth that the Gospel is extreme. Jesus is an extremist. So also our sinful Old Adam is an extremist. We are extreme about very different things. This contrasting extremism is going to make for some tense conversations. Again, do you suppose the conversation between God and Adam and Eve was intense? That’s how it is for every sinner who is saved. We don’t just have a splinter that needs to be pulled out of our otherwise healthy flesh. Admitting that you are not fine, having your shameful nakedness exposed, blushing at your extremism for ugly and harmful things—this is not the funnest thing in the world.
But it is good. It sets us free from lies. And God does not leave us naked and ashamed just as he didn’t leave Adam and Eve naked and ashamed. He forgives us with a perfect forgiveness. He replaces our fig leaves with the righteousness of Jesus. Jesus’s righteousness is your righteousness. You have been baptized into Christ. God receives us and welcomes us. He is healing us with our sanctification. One day that healing will be complete. When that happens, and when we see God, for the first time we will begin to understand what Jesus means when he says that he has come so that we may have life, and that we may have it more abundantly. This is good extremism.
But, as a message that is extreme, it is going to strike us as being extreme. In our Gospel reading there is an intense conversation between Jesus and some Jews. These Jews thought that they were fine. They had Abraham as their father. They had never been enslaved to anyone. As for this Jesus, they weren’t so sure who his father was, and he was from Galilee. They figured that anyone who would dare to say that they were not fine must be a hater or have a demon.
Let me pause to note how this rings true in all times, including ours. Anybody who dares to point out the sins of another is at best socially inept, and at worst vile and evil. Hardly anybody believes in demons anymore, but if they did, they would say the same thing these Jews said to Jesus: You must have a demon!
When Jesus responds to the Jews, it is with some heat of its own. He does not have a demon. He is glorifying the Father, while they are dishonoring him. They do not know the Father. He knows the Father. If he were to say that he didn’t know the Father, then he would be a liar… Then he tosses in: “a liar like them.”
With those last few words, “…then I would be a liar like you,” the referee blows the whistle and throws a flag: “Unnecessary roughness.” Jesus is being inflammatory. He didn’t need to call them liars. Violence like that should be condemned. It’s totally uncalled for. Otherwise how can we just go on ignoring him so that we go back to making money, watching TV, and buying stuff?
Maybe that’s why we’ve all been so thoroughly catechized that extremism is bad. The powers that be only want us to believe that money, winning at sportys, and so on are important. Everything else is unimportant ,and so nobody should ever get too excited about such things.
Think about it: if something is unimportant, why would anybody ever get upset about it? Wouldn’t it be the height of foolishness for me to get upset about what flavor of ice cream you like? Raking you over the coals for not liking double fudge brownie? That would be ridiculous! That’s what folks want to do to religion too. First of all, we’re already all fine. Everybody knows that. Second of all religion is just a hobby. Anybody who says it’s anything more than that is some kind of dangerous extremist.
So be it. Jesus is an extremist. He is extreme about everything that is good, right, and true. It’s only natural, then, that he is going to conflict with us who are extreme about selfishness, lying and getting our own way. Jesus’s extremism is good. Our extremism is evil. If anybody gets offended at Jesus’s extremism, then I say that’s a good sign. At least they are paying attention.
I, together with the rest of the human race, do not want my nakedness exposed. I want to believe that I’m fine. What God teaches me, however, is that I am not fine. I’m a liar, I’m a thief, I’m a pervert, I’m no good at praying, I’m bored by God’s Word. The good that I want to do I don’t end up doing. The evil that I don’t want to do, that’s what I end up doing. I’m not fine.
And here is what sets Christians apart from the rest of the human race: We don’t, or rather, we shouldn’t be offended when we are identified as sinners. It’s the truth! We are. But Jesus is the Savior of sinners. That’s the truth too.
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The greatest possibilities exist wherever the Word of God is heard. The Word of God has the ability to bring about righteousness where there is otherwise only sin. It can bring life where there is only otherwise death. It teaches us who we are and who God isWe may learn what is truly good and holy and God-pleasing for our lives—the way that we should live. The truths of God’s Word are not just for this life, but carry on into eternal life. These are the most important things anyone could want to know.
There’s one more thing worth mentioning about God’s Word especially on this day of Pentecost. The Word of God is the way that the Holy Spirit works. Don’t look for the Holy Spirit apart from the Word of God. The Holy Spirit does not work in us apart from the Word of God. But in the Word of God the Holy Spirit is our paraklete.
Paraklete is the Greek word that Jesus uses to describe the Holy Spirit. This Greek word can be accurately translated with many different English words. The translation we heard this morning used the word “counselor.” This would be akin to being a lawyer. Lawyers are called counselors. Lawyers represent and speak for their clients. Most importantly, lawyers are on the side of their clients. Another word that gets across the meaning of paraklete is “advocate.” An advocate is on your side. Older translations opted for the word “comforter.” Someone on your side speaks words of comfort. The main thing with the word paraklete is that the Holy Spirit sidles up to you. Let’s say you’re walking down the street. He sidles up to you and walks right along with you. And he is your friend. He’s on your side. He helps. He speaks for you.
The Word of God is rich and full of all kinds of blessings. It teaches wisdom and the way of salvation. But to my mind the greatest of all the things that God does through the Word of God is the giving of the paraklete, the Holy Spirit, who is himself God. This friend, this comforter, sidles up to you to bring you a message of victory and peace. God is for you in our Lord Jesus Christ. This is not dependent upon you in even the tiniest little bit. This is an objective, real, and universally applicable message: God is for you.
This message is completely and entirely dependent upon the facts of God’s saving work. God so loved the world that he gave his eternally begotten Son. God redeemed sinners through his Son, who became man in the womb of the virgin Mary. God did all that he did in Jesus for the benefit of sinners. Although sinners are hateful and disgusting, enemies of God, and seemingly irredeemable, Jesus suffered in their place, and there was not a single sin which was not redeemed by this great God-man, Jesus Christ. Although he is God, the crushing weight of our sin killed him. God did all of this because he is on our side. Jesus is the first-fruits of those who rise from the dead. Through his death and resurrection we are purified to live new lives together with God.
The Holy Spirit, the paraklete, sidles up to those who hear the Word of God and testifies to you that this is for you. God has done this all for you. God is on your side. You might want to object: “But what about this or that? What about all the sins I’ve committed?” Your salvation is not dependent upon you. Your sins are not more powerful than God. God’s power and grace are such that they be like an ocean and your sins are but a spark. Do you suppose that the ocean is able to put out a spark? Rest assured. Although your sins are awful, disgusting, and embarrassing, they are no match for Jesus’s blood.
So the work of the Holy Spirit is much better than that of a lawyer, a counselor, an advocate. Lawyers and advocates are great. They are on your side, and they fight for you. But there is no guarantee whatsoever that they are going to be able to win for you. Despite the best of intentions and the hardest work they lose cases all the time. This is not how it is with the Holy Spirit.
The Holy Spirit in the Word of God announces God’s completed salvation in Jesus Christ and says that it is for you. The verdict has already been rendered by God. You just might not know it yet or believe it fully. The verdict is that you are not guilty because Jesus, who knew no sin, became sin for us, that we might become the righteousness of God in him.
This is what makes the sending of the Holy Spirit such a monumental event. The Holy Spirit announces what has already been done and accomplished. How different the message would be if only the possibility of salvation were announced: “If you play your cards right, if you don’t screw it up, then you have a good shot at winning.”
That would offer hope and despair to exactly the wrong people. It would offer some hope to those who are wrong about their own goodness and righteousness, but it would exclude hope for anyone who is honest about themselves. Those who know the truth, those who know their sinful condition, would have to believe that they are going to lose. They haven’t played their cards right.
The Gospel, however, announces that everyone wins. All have been forgiven by what Jesus has done. Therefore God will live in those who believe in Jesus, and we will live in God. We have been reconciled to him.
But what about those who do not believe? One of the reasons why folks don’t see Pentecost and the coming of the Holy Spirit as being that great is because so many people don’t believe. Our reason thinks that the way the story should go is that Jesus works our salvation, then the Holy Spirit should make everyone who hears the Gospel be saved. That, however, is not how things go. Some believe. Some don’t. Some believe, are baptized, and saved. Some do not believe and are condemned. Why do some believe and some don’t? Why is this one saved, but that one is condemned?
This is the kind of question that is getting very close to God’s majesty, which is far above us. Does a toddler need to understand the whys and how-comes of its parents? What would even this world come to if adults were constricted in their actions by what was understandable to toddlers? How, then, can God be constricted in his actions by what is understandable or acceptable to us? Toddlers might think that they are geniuses. Does that, in fact, make them geniuses? We might think that we know the difference between good and evil. We might think we know how God should act and what he should do, but is this actually the case? Do we know better than God?
Indeed, thinking you are wiser than God’s Word is the reason why people do not believe. They are blinded by the god of this age, the devil, who is an exceedingly proud spirit. Unbelievers, following the lead of their master, are so proud of their wisdom and reasoning that if anything should ever contradict their reasoning, then it has to go. If they can’t understand anything and everything about God and his will, then that must be some kind of myth or fable.
What matters, however, is not what I think is true, or what you think is true. We could both be mistaken. What matters is what is actually true. The truth of things is true totally independent of what I or you might think.
For example, let’s say I have a 100 dollar bill. It’s perfectly authentic and legal tender. But for some reason I don’t believe that it is true. Since I don’t believe that it is true, I flush it down the toilet. That 100 dollar bill used to be mine. It was completely authentic and true. It would have bought whatever I would have wanted to buy with it. However, since I didn’t believe that it was true, it came to be of no use to me.
Now did my unbelief change the nature of the 100 dollar bill? Did my unbelief make the 100 dollar bill cease to be a 100 dollar bill? No. The 100 dollar bill continued to be as authentic and true as it ever was as it passed through the sewer pipes. However, my unbelief made that 100 dollar bill to be of no use to me.
Let’s use another example, this one from the Bible. God commanded Noah to build an ark in order to escape his waters of judgment upon the overwhelming sin of the earth. Noah and his family had God’s promise. God said the ark would work. It would carry them through and save them. But let’s suppose that one of those 8 individuals came to believe that the ark was worthless. The ark wouldn’t save them. So they jump off the ark and perish in the water. Now whose fault would that be? Is that the ark’s fault? Did it become somehow less salvific? No. The ark remained what it always was—God’s salvation.
So it is with God’s salvation in Christ. God has completely and fully saved and forgiven all people through the wonderfully rich and effective blood of his own Son. God’s grace and power is such that it is like an ocean, whereas the sin of the entire world is but a spark. God completely and totally triumphed over sin, death, and the devil so that the objective proclamation of reconciliation with God and eternal life in heaven may be made by the Holy Spirit. This proclamation is authentic and true.
Nobody’s belief or unbelief can change what God has done. However, a person’s unbelief makes it so that this objectively true salvation is flushed down the toilet so to speak, or a person jumps off the ark into the waters of damnation. Why does a person do that? Because they believed lies. Who is the great liar? That liar and murderer, the devil, who particularly specializes in spiritual things.
So how do we thwart the devil? This is a very important and practical question. The devil is our enemy. How can we not be taken in by his lies? The answer is by believing that the parakelet, the Comforter, speaks the objective truth about the forgiveness Jesus worked for all people. We must set aside our proud, toddler-ish thoughts, and believe that God knows what he is doing when he announces our salvation in Jesus Christ. Let God be true and every man a liar. Trust God more than you even trust yourself.
It is an astounding thing that you have been given the message of God’s sure and certain salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ. It is astounding that the Holy Spirit sidles up to you and testifies that this is yours. Though you are a sinner, you are not a sinner. Though you are mortal, you are immortal. Though you are God’s enemy, you are God’s beloved child. There is no doubt or chance in your salvation because God has done it all for you. This is a message that is of cosmic importance. It lasts eternally. No greater message could ever be given to any person.
But how easily despised and disbelieved this message can be too. So it goes. A countless multitude lived at the time of Noah, but only eight souls in all were saved. Abraham pleaded for Sodom to be saved for the sake of 50, then 45, then 40, then 30, then 20, then 10. If ten could be found who believed, then Sodom and Gomorrah would have been saved. But only Lot and his daughters were saved. Jesus says that at the end of the world it will be like it was at the time of Noah and at the time of Sodom. People will be busy. They will be buying and selling, eating and drinking, making memories, but caring nothing for God and his Word. If this doesn’t accurately describe the times that we are living in, then I don’t know what could.
That is why it is important that you do not despise God’s proclamation of salvation or put God to the test. God has done this for you. It is true, even though none of us toddlers can completely understand it. Although our salvation is so profound that no one can completely understand it—not even the angels—nevertheless, even children and handicapped people can grasp it. The simplest and least clever people can understand that Jesus is their Savior.
The spreading abroad of the Gospel that began at Pentecost and continues to this very day is wonderful. Do not be taken in by thoughts of your own cleverness or by demanding that everything is supposed to go how you think it should. What a wonderful thing it is that you have been baptized. What a wonderful thing it is to eat Christ’s body and drink his blood. What a true and objective salvation is given to you by these things! Be at peace. It is for you.
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In our Gospel reading Jesus prays for unity. He prays that we should be one. Jesus says, “May they all be one, as you, Father, are in me, and I am in you. May they also be one in us, so that the world may believe that you sent me.” The unity that Jesus is praying for is of a peculiar sort. He is praying for a unity that is by faith, which is unseen. The unity that we naturally think of is one that we can see. This unity that we can see however, has never existed from the beginning. From the beginning there has not been unity when it comes to God, but rather division.
Adam and Eve became disunited with God. Their sons were disunited. Cain went one way, Abel and Seth went another. When God brought together a people at the time of Moses, they weren’t very united. Even in the leadership there was division. Moses was on top of Mt. Sinai, but what was Aaron doing down below? Fashioning a golden calf. Later Miriam and Korah rebelled against Moses.
Even after Jesus says this prayer, it can seem as though Jesus’s prayer was not heard whatsoever because there does not appear to be unity. Already at the time of the apostles there was division over what to do about the Gentiles and the Law. For several centuries after that there were divisions among the Christians about the two natures of Christ and the Trinity. The eastern church and the western church split in 1054. The Reformation, starting in 1517, brought with it more division. Today the church has been splintered into tiny pieces. It is even the doctrine and practice of our church to recognize these differences and practice closed communion. We do not join in communion with those we disagree with.
It seems as though we have failed horribly. Where’s the oneness? We are supposed to be one. So how do we fix this? One way that appears to solve the problem is just to drop whatever disputes we might have with one another and other churches and join together. Jesus prays that we should be one, so we should make ourselves be one.
There was, in fact, a very powerful movement in the 1900s that took up this very idea. It was called the ecumenical movement. At the beginning of the 1900s some churchmen started to call for greater unity. We have to get past our petty differences. If we Christians would join together we would become more powerful. This idea was immediately attractive because the more people you have the stronger you feel. Given the choice, everyone prefers to feel stronger rather than weaker. So this ecumenical movement really caught on. In the 1900s churches merged and merged and merged yet again. Church organizations got bigger and bigger.
There is nothing wrong, per se, with church mergers. It is not wrong for Christians to join together. In fact, we are duty-bound to recognize fellowship and unity whenever the Holy Spirit creates this oneness by his Word. But that is not how the ecumenical movement went about things. It takes time and a lot of teaching and hard work to bring about true unity in the Word of God. What happened with the ecumenical movement is that they ended up setting aside differences and disagreements. It doesn’t matter if one group teaches one thing and another group teaches something else. What should unite us is more important than whatever should divide us. So instead of getting to the bottom of things, discovering the truth of things, the opposite happened. Church bodies just agreed to disagree.
This may certainly sound like a good idea. We do this kind of thing all the time in life in order to create and maintain unity in other things. Here, though, we are dealing with something that is different. The unity that Jesus is praying for is not of an outward sort, but a unity of faith in him. Christians having their oneness in one another is one thing. Christians having their oneness in Jesus is another. Jesus is not praying that there be one outward group. (There never as been one, perfectly united outward group.) Jesus prays that Christians would be one in him. He says, “May they all be one, as you, Father, are in me, and I am in you. May they also be one in us.” The unity is oneness in God. May we be one with him. May we be one with his will, just as the Son’s will is the same as the Father’s will. The only way that Christians may know the will of God is by his Word. The way we may be joined with that will of God is by the Holy Spirit working in that Word.
What happened with the ecumenical movement, however, is actually the opposite of this. God’s Word got pushed to the side. Folks might disagree about baptism, so let’s not talk about baptism. Folks might disagree about the Lord’s Supper, so let’s not talk about that. The agreeing to disagree meant that anything that was disagreed about not discussed, or was watered down. The goal of outward unity was more important than true and honest agreement in the Word of God. What God actually says was pushed further and further away.
Let me pause to point out how there is a part of each and every one of us that really likes having God’s Word pushed to the side. Our flesh, our Old Adam, never has liked God’s Word, does not like it now, and never will like it. All the way to the grave our flesh hates the third commandment. God’s Word is either extremely boring to our flesh, or, if the Word hits home and condemns us, we hate that too and say that it is meddlesome and trouble-making. It is not improving our quality of life. Which one of you likes to be condemned and shown to be a sinner?
So when the ecumenical movement comes along and says that we don’t need to study God’s Word, studying God’s Word only creates disagreements, and I’m fine, you’re fine, and everybody’s fine, let everyone believe and do as he or she wishes, and let’s all take communion together, our flesh is totally on board with all that. Who wants to tell others that they are wrong? They won’t like that! Who wants to turn people away from communion? I assure you, that’s no fun! So let’s all just agree to disagree and get busy with the things that really matter in life.
Again, however, this is not the oneness that Jesus is talking about. It is not a oneness with him, but with our own false ideas of what is good enough for being a Christian. It is not a oneness with God’s will, which can only be known by God’s Word. In fact, God’s Word has purposely been watered down and set aside so that we can pretend that we are all one. Honest discussions of God’s Word would show that we are in fact and in truth not one, so to keep up the pretense honestly looking into God’s Word must be discouraged or even condemned as unloving.
Here I hope you can see the hoof-prints of the devil. What could possibly be better for him than that the Word of God be silenced and to have churches be places where people talk about how good and loving and nice and modern they all are? Show me where God’s Word says that we are good people. You aren’t going to find it. What God’s Word does say is that we are dead and lost in our trespasses and sins. It says that we have no hope whatsoever in anything except the one Savior Jesus Christ. God’s Word is meant to make us feel uncomfortable with ourselves and with anything that we might believe in so that we become one with Jesus. He alone will not disappoint us.
When Jesus prays that we Christians would all be one, he is praying that we would all be one through faith in him. The oneness that he is talking about is not an outward political or group unity. There has never been true outward unity from the time of Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, all the way through the whole Bible, up to the present day.
On the other hand, at the same time, there always has been the unity that Jesus is praying for in our Gospel reading. From the time of Adam and Eve until now there have been souls who have been converted. The Holy Spirit through the Word of God has rather impolitely convicted them of their sin and unbelief and shown them the death and hell that will be the inevitable result if they continue in their ways, but the Word of God also announces God’s saving will in Jesus. He is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. He is the Lamb of God who makes peace, who becomes one with us. We are one with him, and through Jesus, we are one with God. This is a unity that is not just for this life, but one that is eternal.
This is what the Holy Christian Church is. The Holy Christian Church is those who believe in Jesus. The Holy Christian Church consists of the sheep who hear the voice of the Good Shepherd and follow him. The Holy Christian Church is not this outward group of people or that outward group of people. It was not even the nation of Israel in the Bible. The apostle Paul says that not all the physical descendants of Abraham were real descendants of Abraham. The real descendants of Abraham lived by faith and were counted as righteous.
The same thing is true with our congregation. Not everyone who is a member of a congregation is a member of the Holy Christian Church. There are hypocrites and unbelievers in congregations. A person who relies upon their membership in a congregation for their salvation is terribly deceived. No congregation has that power. The only thing that is saving about any congregation is that, God willing, God has put his means of grace there. God willing, a congregation has true baptism. God willing, a congregation has the true Lord’s Supper. God willing, God has his Word in a congregation through which the Holy Spirit converts those whom he has chosen so that they put their trust in the Lord Jesus Christ.
As members of this congregation it is the duty and responsibility of all of us to keep the Word of God pure and true no matter how offensive that might be to unbelievers, and that we administer the sacraments as Jesus instituted them. This is our highest and most important responsibility because it is by the Word of God alone that anybody can be turned away from false gods to the one true God to enjoy eternal unity with him. If this Word of God is present, then salvation remains possible. If the Word of God is watered down and taken away, then such a congregation is dead even if outwardly it looks vibrant and powerful.
Realize that as we carry out this high and holy duty that we are going to have trouble. Do you think that the devil wants a congregation to exist that takes away his power? Enemies from within and from without will want God’s Word to be silenced. The world, also, will not want such a congregation to exist because the world does not want to be condemned for their unbelief in Jesus. And even our own flesh will not want us to live up to our high and holy calling. Our flesh is lazy. Our flesh is either bored by God’s Word or deeply insulted by it. Our flesh does not want to suffer the troubles or scorn or condemnations of those offended by the truth. If we silence or set aside God’s Word we can avoid all of that. But, having gained some worldly peace, we will have forfeited our eternal peace.
Therefore we pray that God’s will should be done on earth as it is in heaven! In this petition we pray that the God would break and hinder every evil plan and purpose of the devil, the world, and our sinful nature, which do not want us to hallow God’s Name or let his kingdom come, and that he strengthen and keep us firm in his Word and faith until we die.
God’s Word must wrestle with us, offending us sometimes, making us mad sometimes, but hopefully making us change our ways. When people are offended by the Word of God we should not be surprised. Hopefully the Word of God has offended you from time to time, otherwise perhaps your heart has been hardened! When the Word of God offends us the Holy Spirit is attacking our faith in lies, so that we may become one with the truth, who is Jesus.
Jesus’s prayer is quite needful for us, therefore. Jesus’s prayer is not that we would become one by ignoring God’s Word. Jesus’s prayer is that we would become one in him. The way we become one in him is by the Holy Spirit working through his Word. This is eternal. It is more important than anything and everything else.
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Faith is expecting something, hoping in something, relying on something. It is not just the one true God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit who is believed in. We have faith in all kinds of things. We have faith in our car, for example, that it will work. We have the expectation that when we go out to the car we will be able to get in it, turn it on, and go where we want. But sometimes our expectations turn out to be wrong. We come outside and see that there’s a flat tire. We turn the key and it doesn’t turn on. It is nice when what we believe in turns out to be reliable. It is painful when what we believe in fails us.
Cars are just one example. The fact is that we believe in so many things. If we were to conduct a poll, I suspect that most people would say that the last several years have not been too nice. Why is that? Is it because COVID has killed so many of our family and friends? I don’t think that’s the true source of our pain. What hurts is that the stuff we used to believe in hasn’t been working. We used to believe in the news. Now there’s this camp’s news and that camp’s news, and the news sources say totally different things. We used to believe that we could get along with each other. But one person believes that this and that is true, while another person believes that those very same things are literally lies or conspiracy theories. It’s like the tower of Babel all over again. We can’t understand someone from a different camp. We don’t want to work together. We are being driven apart. Our faith in the reasonability of one another has been broken.
Other things are failing too. We used to believe that we could afford to buy gas. We used to believe that the grocery stores would always be fully stocked. We used to believe that our elections would always be fair and free. It is painful, and perhaps frightening, when the things that we used to believe were so reliable that you could set your watch by them are going wonky. It is as though the sun, the moon, and the stars are no longer following their normal courses. People are about to be fainting in fear and foreboding of what is coming upon the earth.
Although it is painful to have our faith shattered in the things that we used to believe in, it certainly need not be the worst thing that could ever happen to us. Folks can use this loss of confidence for their eternal good if they quit believing in the things of this world and come to believe in the one true God, but not everybody is going to do that. The break-down of things that we believe in can serve as a wake-up call. It can serve as a call to repentance. But it is certainly possible for people to hit the snooze button and go back to sleep.
Although it is painful and disheartening and inconvenient and scary to have the things that we believe in break, this is by no means the worst of God’s wrath. The Bible is full of examples of God sending painful, disturbing things even on his own people. These things can serve to turn people away from believing in created things toward the Creator. That is not bad. That is good.
The worst of God’s wrath is when he gives us what we want. What we want is to push the snooze button. What we want is for everything we believe in always to work. But all this other stuff that we believe in is not God. All this other stuff dies and decays and disintegrates. Even we ourselves—it feels good to believe in ourselves—but what is to become of us? We get old. The time we have on this earth grows shorter and shorter. All it takes is one disease or another and we are gone. In the very midst of life snares of death surround us.
Nobody wants to believe that. The faith we have in ourselves and in other created things has to be broken against our will. That is always painful. So it is always tempting to turn away from the harsh reality, to take a narcotic and slip off back to sleep.
But there is another option available to those whom the Lord God reveals himself. Those who are blessed to hear the good news, the Gospel, know the only true God. Not only do they know who the true God is, but they also know the will of this true God. It is God’s will to redeem us poor, mortal sinners by Jesus Christ, who has risen from the dead. It is the will of this true God that all be saved and come to a knowledge of the truth. We are redeemed from death and we will live in the new heavens and the new earth, the heavenly Jerusalem, that was described in our second reading. We are to see God. Everything else falters and fails. The one true God, and Jesus Christ whom he has sent, will not let down the one who trusts in him. Eternal rest and perpetual light is what is given to the faithful departed.
Knowing the true God, his revealed will, and the end-point that is in store for those who believe in him is important for understanding what Jesus says about prayer in our Gospel reading. If we place our hopes and dreams in earthly things, then we will hear his words one way. If we learn to look for the things of the life to come, then we will start to hear them another way. What we are hoping for matters. Jesus says in our Gospel reading, “Whatever you ask the Father in my Name he will give it to you… Ask and receive that you joy may be complete.”
As soon as we hear that many things can come to mind. Immediately we probably believe that it can’t be true. I’ll prove it. I’ll ask the Father to turn stones to bread, tacking on the magic words, “in Jesus’s Name.” When the stones don’t turn to bread we can all see that this doesn’t work. Immediately we are prone to put the Lord our God to the test.
Interestingly the kinds of things that come to mind when we hear that anything we ask for in Jesus’s Name will be given to us is the kinds of things that we hear about in fairy tales or comic book heroes. We think this is like the genie from the lamp. Rub the lamp, make your request, and voila. Or we might think of superheroes with super-human abilities. We can zap this or that. We can change this or that. It’s easy to think of Jesus’s Name as being magical. Just say, “Abracadabra,” and let your will be done.
But perhaps you remember that Jesus resisted the devil’s temptations in the wilderness to engage in magic. The devil said to Jesus, “You’re hungry. If you are the Son of God command these stones to become bread.” But Jesus said, “It is written, Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.”
The devil took Jesus to the top of the temple and said, “Throw yourself down, for it is written that he will command the angels to prevent you from striking your foot against a stone.” But Jesus said, “You shall not put the Lord your God to the test.”
The devil took him to a place where Jesus could see all the kingdoms with all their wealth and power. “Just bow down and worship me and they shall all be yours.” Jesus said, “It is written, ‘You shall worship the Lord your God, and him only shall you serve.’”
When we hear that the Father will give us whatever we should ask in Jesus’s Name we very quickly and easily slip into wanting to perform magic. It’s in our bones. We believe that we know what is good and what is evil. What is good is whatever I desire. What is evil is whatever is against my will. So gimme what I want, and let whatever I don’t want be gone! The way that the devil tempted Adam and Eve was by telling them that God was holding out on them. God didn’t want them to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil because then they would be like God. If only they would take in hand the magical power offered in the fruit, then their joy would be complete. Then all things would be subject to their will. Ever since then we have been infected with the desire to practice magic.
Ever since then, by nature, we have no desire to know the only true God and Jesus Christ whom he has sent. By nature we have wanted to make a paradise for ourselves by discovering and manipulating the things of this world. We want to believe in the things of this world. We want them all to work for us and to work like clock-work. When we hear Jesus say that whatever we ask in his Name the Father will give us, it is very easy to want to test that out by asking for things that would restore our faith in the broken things of this world. We want to be gods. We want to bend everything to our own will. We want to zip and zap, harnessing the power of prayer, and putting it to work for us.
It is not God’s will, however, that we should replace him as God. It is not God’s will that we should believe in ourselves, or in our spiritual powers, or in our faith, or in the power of our praying. Those are idols. How could God want us to believe in created things—impotent, rusting, and rotting idols—even very spiritual looking idols such my power of praying? We are to believe in him and his good and gracious will.
To pray in Jesus’s Name means that we are praying according to what Jesus has done and accomplished. Jesus did not die and rise and ascend into heaven in order to alienate us from God, in order to make us not believe in him, but to believe in ourselves instead. He did not do what he did to restore our faith in the things and the experiences of this world. Jesus did what he did to show us God’s will, that we should believe that God is for us, that we should believe that there is a place that is prepared for us with many rooms, and that Jesus will come to us to bring us there.
By nature we believe that it would be quite something if, by the power of our prayer, we could, without fail, remove someone’s illness or move a mountain into the sea. There are much greater things than these. Much greater things have already been given to you. It is much greater to be raised together with Jesus. It is much greater that we have been justified so that the Law, which otherwise cries out for justice to be done against us, is silenced. You have Christ’s own righteousness. Paul says of the heaven that is to come that no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor has it entered into the imagination of the heart of man what God has prepared for those who love him. In Jesus’s Name these greater things are yours.
So we must not let magical thinking deceive us or mislead us into false belief or despair concerning Jesus’s words. Jesus really means it when he says that whatever we ask in Jesus’s Name the Father will give us. We are not thereby turned into gods or superheroes. We have already been made children of God. We have conquered death and every sadness. Neither death nor sadness can forever maintain their grip on us. We have an incredible future in store for us in this life as the Holy Spirit sanctifies us, and in the life to come when we will be completely holy. Asking God to forgive you for but one sin is of greater and more eternal consequences than possessing the entire earth with all its kingdoms. Although that is so great a thing, you know full well that God hears you and grants your prayer when you pray, “Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.”
It seems to be standard operating procedure for the devil to tempt us with what is lesser so that we give up on what is greater and better. The knowledge he promised to Adam and Eve was much less and turned out to be a lie compared to what they had prior to that. Often the devil tempts us to reach out and grab what has not been given to us. Ill-gotten gains in terms of money or sex are supposed to make our joy complete. The truth is that God has better things laid up for those who live according to his will—even in these areas of life that prove to otherwise be so tempting to us. God will purify and fulfill whatever kernel of good there be in the lusts that harass us, so the devil is lying when he says that obeying him is the only way to be happy. When it comes to prayer we are misled to believe that what is truly great is manipulating the things of this world. What is greater, however, by far, is the eternal rest and perpetual light enjoyed by the faithful departed.
Jesus means what he says. Believe him. Believe in the Father. Do not believe in yourself or your own magical powers. Ask the Father in Jesus’s Name and he will give it to you—the things that are good for you in this life and for the life that is to come.
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A common temptation for those who have little patience with puzzles is to make pieces fit by jamming them together. The pieces don’t quite match up, but close enough. The goal of finishing is more important than understanding each part of the puzzle for what it is. When the pieces of the puzzle are not understood for what they are, the puzzle will never be completed correctly. (That’s something that’s kind of odd about jamming pieces together—it never ends up working out anyway.)
There are other possible actions with a puzzle. Perhaps some strange person could just take each piece by itself and look at each piece endlessly. The pieces of the puzzle are then understood for what each one is, but the pieces are never put together. Or, (and I can sympathize with this), a person takes a look at a thousand puzzle pieces and simply walks away from it. “No thank you. I don’t feel like sorting all of that out.”
To say that God’s revelation to us is like a puzzle would be incorrect. Saying such a thing implies many incorrect things. It implies that all I have to do is sort through all the pieces and connect them. It implies that I’m capable of knowing how everything fits together. It implies that all that’s needed is a bunch of sorting, brain-work and logic. However, loosely speaking, there might be some value in comparing what God reveals in his Word to putting together a puzzle.
We could say that a statement or a passage is one piece. The individual passages have something to say. How does each individual passage connect with other passages? I can well imagine folks looking at all the passages and statements of the bible like a 5,000 piece puzzle dumped onto the table and wanting to have nothing to do with it. I can also imagine someone wanting to finish the puzzle very quickly. Hammer in hand they put together pieces that don’t actually fit, but perhaps are close enough, so as to say that they are done. Not many people, it seems, are very interested in looking at the pieces endlessly, not concerned about connecting them together. We are too impatient for that.
If I might say something from my personal experience, I think I’ve done all three things over the course of my life. At times I’ve walked away, not interested. Then I’ve also hammered stuff together, but, just as you would with a real puzzle, I’ve noticed that things might not fit correctly. I’ve had to take apart what I used to think fit together because I’ve looked more closely at the individual passages. I still have to work on having the patience to look at pieces as they are instead of immediately trying to hammer them together. What’s bad about hammering together passages is that you end up having to change what one, or the other, or both say because the desire is to pretend that they fit together.
The reason why I have brought this extended analogy up is because of something that Jesus says in our Gospel reading. He says, “My sheep hear my voice. I know them, and they follow me. I give them eternal life, and they will never perish. No one will snatch them out of my hand. My Father, who has given them to me, is greater than all. No one can snatch them out of my Father’s hand. I and the Father are one.”
There is quite a bit of familiar stuff in this statement. Jesus’s sheep hear his voice. Jesus gives them eternal life. Even the fact that Jesus is God is quite familiar. What has bothered me for a long time is this part: “No one will snatch them out of my hand… No one can snatch them out of my Father’s hand.”
This statement immediately brings to my mind lots of questions. If no one can snatch these sheep away, does that mean that these sheep can never fall away? What if these sheep end up being really bad and doing very bad things? No one can snatch them away?
A related issue also comes up. Jesus obviously is saying that he, the Good Shepherd, is in complete control. The sheep are his. No one can take them away. If he is in complete control, then why aren’t all people saved? Or why are some people saved, but not others? Right here in this very reading Jesus says that these Jews who have gathered around him are not his sheep. Why not? What did they do that they are not Jesus’s sheep? Or why didn’t Jesus make them his sheep?
Here it’s like I’ve taken the cover off the box and dumped all the pieces of the puzzle onto the table. Don’t worry. I’m not going to just leave you with a big jumble of questions. I’ve had a little experience with puzzles of this kind. But let me say this before we begin: Don’t have too high of expectations. Don’t expect that all the pieces are going to come together perfectly. I’ve already noted how God’s revelation is not a big puzzle. We are not going to fit everything together—not because the pieces don’t fit, or because God is holding out on us, but because we are not capable of it.
The Apostle Paul discusses the magnificent kinds of thoughts that I’ve just brought up today with these questions. He discusses these things in Romans chapters 9, 10, and 11. He concludes that discussion by saying, “Oh, the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable his ways! For who has known the mind of the Lord, or who has been his counselor? Or who has given a gift to him that he might be repaid? For from him and through him and to him are all things. To him be glory forever. Amen.” We’re not going to see everything at one, as though we were looking at a completed puzzle, as though we were God.
But let’s go back to that jumble of questions. They were brought up by Jesus saying that no one snatches the sheep out of his hand. So does that mean that his sheep can live however they want, sin all the more so that grace may abound? And it is the Shepherd who is in control. So why doesn’t he save everyone? Or why is this one not Jesus’s sheep, while a different one is? Is there something that this one did, or didn’t do, that makes him or her different than another one?
So we’ve got this big pile of questions. How are we going to go about sorting them out? There’s this helpful tip that those who are familiar with putting together puzzles know. The first thing to look for are the corners and the edge pieces of the puzzle. They are easy to identify compared to the others because they have one or more straight sides. There are analogously clear and simple teachings in God’s revelation too. This is why our Catechism is valuable. It teaches us these clear and simple things.
So when it comes to the questions that have to do with how we should act we must go to the Ten Commandments. These commandments give us God’s will for what is right and how we should live our lives. Generally speaking, we are to love God and love our neighbor. Those are the two tables of the Law. And what does God say about all these commandments? He says, “I the Lord your God am a jealous God, punishing the children for the sins of the fathers to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me, but showing love to a thousand generations of those who love me and keep my commandments.” What does this mean? God threatens to punish all who break these commandments, therefore we should fear his wrath and not do anything against them. But he promises grace and every blessing to all who keep these commandments. Therefore we should also love and trust in him and gladly do what he commands.
This corner piece of God’s revelation goes a long way in sorting out our jumble of questions. What about the sheep who want to wander, counting on not being snatched away regardless? God threatens to punish all who break his commandments. Therefore we should fear his wrath. God promises grace and every blessing. So why would we forego that promised grace and blessing? Do we believe that the devil, the prince of this world will bless us better? God’s commandments, and the threats and promises that God attaches to these commandments, explain a lot. These are the things that have to do with us and our behavior and God’s reaction to that.
There is another corner piece we must pick out. It corresponds to the second chief part of the Catechism, the Creed. This has to do with God’s action instead of my actions. God created me and still sustains me. God has redeemed me. God has sanctifies me. What Jesus says in our Gospel reading is all about God’s action, specifically his Gospel. The Gospel is the good news that God has saved us in the death and resurrection of Jesus.
The specific aspect of the Gospel that is being addressed by Jesus’s words is its tremendous scope and power. Jesus is the Good Shepherd. He knows his sheep. No one is going to take those sheep away from him. Jesus says that God his Father has chosen these sheep and no one can take those sheep away from him because he is God. It is actually the limitless scope and power of God’s gracious action that has prompted the questions I’ve brought up today. A person can wonder, “How does not being able to be snatched away fit in with God’s threats? How does that fit in with myactions for good or for ill?”
These two corner pieces don’t fit together—at least not with our limited thinking. God reveals two things in these two corner pieces emphatically and clearly. We often sum up these two very different revelations with the words “Law” and “Gospel.” God reveals in his Law that he is the righteous judge. He judges people for their actions and rewards them as he sees fit. Whoever does not measure up is his enemy. This revelation is that our actions are the basis for God’s reaction.
The Gospel is another revelation from God that is altogether different. This revelation is all about God’s actions, without any merit or worthiness in me. God sent his only begotten Son that whoever believes in him will not perish but have eternal life. Even where we think our actions might fit in, the little work that we think we have to do, isn’t so. It is not our work that we choose to believe in him. Jesus says, “You did not choose me, but I chose you.” Or think of the actions of a shepherd and his sheep. Is it the sheep who go and get a shepherd for themselves, or is it the shepherd who goes and finds his sheep?
It is with this second teaching, with God’s Gospel, that we must include those rather extreme words in our reading: “No one will snatch my sheep out of my hand. My Father, who has given the sheep to me, is greater than all. No one can snatch the sheep out of my Father’s hand.” This is a clear statement. A very simple person can understand what Jesus is saying. Jesus is the shepherd. No one takes the sheep away from him. No one can take the sheep away. Who cares what questions this might bring to your mind? Jesus obviously has good reason for saying it. The Holy Spirit has good reason for inspiring John to include it in his Gospel. We are to hear and believe what Jesus says. That means that we are to be joyful and confident in Jesus being our shepherd. He is more powerful than our sin or any of our other enemies.
Now when we try to put this piece of revelation together with other pieces of revelation, we are going to have trouble putting everything together. That’s not God’s fault. “Who has known the mind of the Lord or been his counselor?” But we can’t then take a hammer in hand and smash it together with other things and think that we’ve accomplished anything good. It always seems to me that when people are trying to fit what Jesus says in our reading together with other thoughts that it is always the scope and power of Jesus’s grace that ends up getting clipped off. Folks assume that the Gospel can’t be that far-reaching. There has to be something dependent upon us. There has to be some catch.
Where’s the catch in Jesus’s words though? Jesus is the Good Shepherd. He searches out the lost sheep. He lays down his life for the sheep. He calls them and gathers them together. No one is going to take the sheep away from him. There’s no catch.
And so you have to leave this piece of the puzzle be. You have to leave this statement as it is and do not modify it—even if you can’t figure out how it fits with everything else. Jesus says he is the Good Shepherd. You are his sheep. You are hearing his voice. His voice says that he has saved you completely. No one can change that because he is God.
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Our Gospel reading today is most of the last chapter of John’s Gospel. We are picking up today where the Gospel reading from last week left off. Last week we heard how Jesus appeared to the disciples on Easter evening. Then he appeared to Thomas a week later. So the events that we heard about this morning would have had to have happened sometime between this week after Easter and Jesus ascension, which is forty days after Easter. According to last week’s reading the disciples were in Jerusalem. Now they have left Jerusalem. They have gone back to Galilee, to the Sea of Galilee.
You heard Peter say, “I’m going fishing.” This does not seem to be a leisurely fishing expedition. Peter and at least a few other of the apostles fished for a living before Jesus called them to be apostles. The text mentions that they were out fishing all night long. Kids might gladly stay up all night long to catch fish for fun, but these grown-ups probably had other plans. They wanted to sell the fish they caught. Their plans, however, came to nothing. They were empty handed come dawn.
Then their fortunes turned. A fellow was there on the shore in the gray misty morning. He’s about 100 yards away. He asks them if they have any fish. No? “Well, then, throw your nets on the right side of the boat and you will find some.” Lo and behold, that’s exactly what happened. Not only did they find some fish, they caught a whole bunch of them. They had so many fish that they couldn’t lift the net into the boat.
This almost certainly would have brought to these men’s mind another bonanza that happened a few years before this. Perhaps almost like a flashback. A few year before this Peter and his associates still fished for a living. There was another night when they hadn’t caught anything. The next day they were on the shore working on their nets when Jesus showed up with a large crowd of people. In order that Jesus should be heard by them all Jesus got into Peter’s boat and went out from shore a ways. As he spoke from the boat his voice reflected off the water and all the people could hear.
When Jesus was done speaking he told Peter to go out where it was deep and let down his nets for a catch. That didn’t seem like a good idea to Peter, but since Jesus told him to, he agreed. As soon as the nets plopped into the water so many fish came into his nets that they started to strain and pop under the weight. His boat and James’ and John’s boat quickly filled up so that they were starting to sink. Then Peter fell on his knees before Jesus and said, “Depart from me Lord, for I am a sinful man.” Jesus said, “Do not be afraid. From now on you will be catching men.” Then, when they got to shore, they left everything behind and began to follow Jesus. This was the way that Peter was called to be an apostle.
As you can see, something similar happened again on this early morning after Jesus rose from the dead. The seven apostles had caught nothing all night. Then, at Jesus’s word, the net was filled completely.
When Peter and the rest get to shore Jesus already has breakfast prepared for them. There’s already a fire that has been burning so that it is now hot coals. Fish has already been prepared as well as bread. Jesus, though, tells Peter to also take from the fish that he had caught. So Peter goes and hauls in the huge catch of fish that you would think would make the net burst. It is not said whether or how this fish was added to the meal. The next thing that Jesus says is, “Come and have breakfast.”
Then we have something, again, that might cause a flashback: Jesus took bread and gave it to them as well as the fish. This might have brought to the disciples’ minds yet another thing from the past. There were at least two prior occasions when Jesus fed a great multitude with a few loaves of bread and a few fish. I’m referring to the feeding of the 4,000 and the 5,000. It seems to me that by this breakfast Jesus is communicating something to these disciples. It’s true: Things had radically changed for them. Their day-to-day activities were different than from before Jesus was crucified. It looks like Peter and the rest were thinking about going back to their old livelihoods. But Jesus is showing them that while they worked hard all night and caught nothing, he has a meal already prepared. Jesus, who can feed multitudes, can also feed them.
Then Jesus asks Peter if he loves him more than these, and by “these,” he presumably is referring to the other disciples. Does Peter love Jesus more than the other disciples? There are several things to point out about this exchange, but let’s begin by noting how this also brings up something from the past—the very recent past, in fact. On the night when Jesus was betrayed a couple things happened.
The thing you can probably easily remember is that Jesus instituted the Lord’s Supper. There was also on that night a discussion among the disciples over which of them was the greatest. When Jesus put his 2 cents in, he threw them altogether in the same pot. He said that they were all going to forsake him as the Scriptures foretold. Peter disagreed with Jesus. He didn’t know about the other disciples, but as for him, he would never forsake Jesus. Even if he had to die he wouldn’t leave Jesus. He loved Jesus more than all the rest of them.
Perhaps you recall Jesus’s response: “Before the rooster crows, you, Peter, will betray me three times.” And so it came to pass. While Jesus was being interrogated and abused in the chief priest’s house Peter was outside by a charcoal fire. He was asked three times whether he was one of Jesus’s disciples. All three times he said he wasn’t. The last time he said it even with cursing and swearing. Then the rooster crowed.
So when Jesus asked Peter at this shore-side breakfast whether he loved him more than the others I have to believe that this painful and embarrassing episode was brought to Peter’s mind. Now there’s no bombast. You can see that Peter is humbled. Peter no longer believed in himself and in the power of his own faith like he did on the night Jesus was betrayed. He had learned by experience how weak he was, how he failed to watch and pray, and how susceptible to temptation he was. Jesus asks three times whether Peter loves him, and there is no bragging on Peter’s part.
Let me say something about the different words that Jesus and Peter use in these questions and responses. Perhaps you noticed how the translation had Jesus say, “Peter, do you love me?” and Peter responded, “Yes, Lord, you know I care for you.” Most translations do not do it this way because this sounds kind of harsh in English. Most translations have Jesus say, “Peter, do you love me?” and Peter responds, “Yes, Lord, you know that I love you.” In English, when one says, “love,” and the other responds, “Yes, I care for you.” This sounds like a much bigger difference than how it sounds with the Greek.
The advantage, however, of the way our translation did this is that it points out that there are two different words that are being used. Jesus asks if Peter has agape love for him. Peter responds that he has filial love for him. The difference between agape love and filial love is not so huge. They can almost be used interchangeably. But notice how Jesus changes the word he uses.
Jesus asks Peter, “Do you have agape love for me?” Peter says, “Yes, I have filial love for you.” This happens two times. Then, after Peter has said that he has filial love for Jesus two times, Jesus changes his word to the word that Peter has been using: “Do you have filial love for me?” Peter is hurt. He has said he cares for Jesus two times. Then Jesus asks him, “Do you care for me?”
There’s one more part of this exchange that we need to consider. After Jesus asks and Peter responds Jesus follows that up with three very similar sayings. Jesus: “Do you love me?” Peter: “Yes, Lord.” Jesus: “Feed my lambs.” Again, “Do you love me?” “Yes, Lord.” “Be a shepherd for my sheep.” Finally, “Do you care for me?” “You know all things. You know that I care about you.” Jesus says, “Feed my sheep.” So if we put all these together Jesus says, “Feed my lambs,” “Be a shepherd for my sheep,” and “Feed my sheep.”
The lambs or sheep that Jesus is referring to is those who would believe the apostles’ testimony about Jesus. The way that these lambs or sheep are fed is with the Word of God. Jesus is telling Peter to care for the Jesus’s sheep by feeding them Jesus’s word.
As you know, this is what Peter would go on to do. Beginning at Pentecost Peter would preach fearlessly and with great boldness that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, even to those who put Jesus to death and had the authority to do the same to Peter too.
So what are we to make of this whole exchange? Let me just say that I do not think I understand everything going on here as well as I’d like. There are other details that we haven’t even gotten into. But I’d like to point out one thing: Note how different this morning has been compared to the night when Jesus was betrayed.
Peter is low here whereas before he was very confident. Peter, it seems, is thinking about going back to his old profession. Jesus encourages him with friendly reminders of Jesus’s faithfulness. When Jesus asks him if he loves him, Peter doesn’t charge ahead with great boldness like he did on the night when Jesus was betrayed. He doesn’t say that even if he needs to die for Jesus that he will always be faithful and true. How could he? Peter has been humbled; his responses are humble. Nevertheless, note where Jesus directs his attention: “Feed my lambs, shepherd my sheep, feed my sheep.”
Peter is to go about doing what Jesus has always intended for him to do. Peter will preach and teach Jesus to the salvation of those who will believe. The way that this will be carried out, however, is not how Peter was thinking previously. It will be carried out humbly and with great weakness. On the night Jesus was betrayed Peter felt great. He had never felt more powerful spiritually. He felt that he could take on a whole army single-handedly with his trusty sword. This was a false faith. What ended up happening is that he was afraid of even a little servant girl.
Peter does not feel nearly so good about himself on this early morning sometime after Easter but before Christ’s ascension. It never feels good to anyone to be humbled. But throughout Peter’s faith is being directed to things that will not let him down. Jesus gently encouraged him by bringing to mind Jesus’s faithfulness. Jesus sets him on his way. He will feed the sheep of the Good Shepherd. However, it won’t be with bravado and harshness. One sinner will be telling another sinner where they can have forgiveness, life, and peace—in Jesus.
This will turn out much better than what Peter was thinking previously. The Gospel and the Sacraments are Jesus’s Gospel and Sacraments. It is his ministry. Whenever any Christian starts to rely upon his or her own gifts like Peter did, then he or she is getting ready to fall. The Christian who relies on his or her own gifts isn’t very effective either. Such a one looks out at the world and wonders why everyone else can’t be as spectacular as he or she is. Christians are not in the business of making other people to be just like them. Christians are in the business of urging others to believe in the same Jesus that the one speaking believes in. That is the true and saving message.
One last thing from our reading: Jesus tells Peter that one day what he so feared on the night when Jesus was betrayed is actually going to happen. Peter had been afraid to suffer and die for Jesus. That’s why he denied him. Another opportunity to confess Jesus’s name was going to come, but this time Peter wasn’t going to fail. Peter wasn’t going to deny his Lord. He would be faithful unto death and receive the crown of glory.
We are cut from the same cloth as Peter. We need to learn the same lessons. We also have the same Jesus upon whom we can learn to rely.
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It is very common for Christians to conceive of their Christianity merely as a way to avert disaster. The key word for why this is not a correct view is that word “merely.” The statement is true without the “merely.” Christianity is, in fact, the onlyway to avert disaster. Disaster is the devil, death, evil, and hell. There is no way to overcome these things except through Christ who is given to those who believe the Gospel. So what is the problem, then, if we have that word “merely” in there? What’s wrong with saying that Christianity is merely a way to avert disaster?
The answer is that it betrays an entirely wrong attitude and focus. The mind and the heart remain firmly fixed on the things of the flesh. God’s ways, God’s commandments, what pleases God, is not what is front and center. The desire is to get around God—not having to obey him, or, perhaps, minimally obeying him—in order to forestall disaster.
The focus, the loving attitude is towards the things of this earthly life. A Christian can end up having the very same goals for life as an unbeliever. The goals might be merely to enjoy creature comforts, to make a name for one’s self, to have a painless death, and so on. Perhaps we could sum this all up as a desire to maximize our pleasure and minimize any suffering. That is where Jesus can fit in and do his part. Jesus is just kind of an insurance policy that things won’t go south after you die. He is merely a way to avoid disaster.
With this mindset it is not possible to give up anything of this life unless it is pried out of our cold, dead hands, so to speak. Jesus’s requirement that we take up his cross is either ignored, or one goes in search of the lightest, most comfortable cross one can find. We want full coverage, but for the cheapest premium possible. Then we can invest our time, talents, and treasures in the things that we actually love instead of God whom we merely fear.
This mentality is always going to produce a cheap, hap-hazard, pathetic, and infertile Christianity. More robust examples of Christianity won’t make sense to those who live in weak times. The exploits of the apostles, such as we heard in our first reading from the Acts of the Apostles, is going to seem very far away from us indeed.
In our first reading today you see Christians who are eager to live their new life in Jesus, which operates by different rules. Just before our reading something very dramatic happened—something that you would think would discourage people from becoming Christians. A husband and wife, named Ananias and Sapphira, sold some property in order to make an offering. Nobody forced them to sell this property or to make this offering. However, when they made the offering, they pretended that they were giving the full proceeds from the sale when in actual fact they had kept back a portion for themselves. Peter asked them why they had lied to the Holy Spirit. Then God killed them. They were buried side by side for giving an offering.
This deeply impressed upon the people at that time that membership in Christ’s church is no laughing matter. The Jerusalem congregation amazingly was not ashamed, fearing that they had gotten wrapped up in some kind of cult. Instead they feared God. This incident also kept people away who were merely shopping for insurance. This premium for this policy was way too steep. Only those who were daring enough to want to meet God retained any interest. And so in the wake of this incident the life of the Christian congregation had never been more vigorous. People were being baptized. The faithful wanted to learn, to worship, to pray. The blessings of Pentecost were very evident among them. Something that we think would be very, very bad for evangelism—namely, the death of a couple of their members—only served to heighten their piety and to keep the luke-warm away.
The vigor of this Christian congregation did not go unnoticed. The Christians kept testifying to Jesus as the fulfillment of the Old Testament prophecies of the Christ who would save his people. The same people who nailed Jesus to the cross because he said that he is Christ were now hearing about his disciples saying the same thing. Here they had thought that they had solved that problem—they killed the leader and figured that the disciples would be too intimidated to carry on—but the Holy Spirit had other plans. Instead of just one man preaching, Jesus, now there were dozens of preachers preaching salvation in Jesus’s Name. They had to be dealt with. So, again, they try to decapitate the movement. They arrest the apostles.
Now let’s think about what’s going on here. In a sense the apostles weren’t doing anything wrong, and yet, in another sense, they were inflicting the most serious of injuries. The apostles weren’t harming anyone’s body. They weren’t taking other people’s property. (In fact, they were giving away and sharing what they had.) But on the other hand, they were assaulting people where people cannot stand being assaulted. They were attacking people’s religion. We must understand how serious this is.
Everyone has a religion because everyone believes in something. Everyone has a god, or, more likely, many gods. Everybody has his or her own beliefs about what will make a person happy, that is to say, blessed. Everybody has his or her own ideas of what makes a person cursed. We are not accustomed to talking in terms of “blessed” or “cursed” because we have been thoroughly taught that the only religions that exist are formal religions. If you aren’t Christian or Muslim or Hindu, etc., then you are someone who doesn’t have a religion.
This, however, is not true. Everyone believes in stuff. Everyone believes that certain things will make them happy or blessed. Everybody has things that they fear. These things that people put their fear, love, and trust in are those people’s gods. When you start attacking the things that provide meaning in in people’s lives, what people believe in, what they worship, what they sacrifice for—and when these attacks hit home—you are going to get an exceedingly strong reaction.
Some might turn away from their worthless gods that have no power to save them from death and rottenness. Some will get exceedingly angry that these things they have held so dear are pointed out as being impotent and that only the Lord is God. He alone can truly save.
When we think about what is going on with these early Christians we must understand that they were not just handing out candy and “Jesus loves you” stickers. They weren’t selling insurance policies. They were going for the jugular, spiritually speaking, so that those who heard them might die to themselves and their worthless, stupid idols, and be raised incorruptible in Jesus.
So, again, the apostles weren’t harming anybody. And yet, in another sense, they were inflicting the worst wounds as they were tearing people away from their idols. This activity is why the prophets were put to death in the Old Testament. This is the most common reason for Christians to be put to death in the New Testament. It was for the witness to Jesus that John was exiled to the island of Patmos. It was for the witness to Jesus that the apostles were put in prison in Jerusalem.
But then, as we heard, the most extraordinary thing happened. During the night an angel of the Lord opened the doors of the prison. He told the apostles to go preach in the temple. The apostles gladly obeyed.
I’d like to you notice how daring and unusual this is. If the apostles were like us, if they were only interested in maximizing pleasure and minimizing pain, then the last thing they would do would be to comply with the angel’s instructions. Maybe they would make a break for it after the doors were opened for them. They could flee to where they assumed they would be safe.
Or they could have stayed in prison. The Jewish authorities are already so angry with them that they have thrown them into prison. A Sanhedrin had been called—the very same kind of Sanhedrin that had sentenced Jesus to death in the middle of the night not long before this. Maybe if the apostles would show themselves to be obedient, to be easily cowed, and if they would tone down the rhetoric a little bit, they could be released after just a slap on the wrist. The sure-fire way to make these angry, dangerous people even angrier is to go to the most public place in Jerusalem and carry on with what got them thrown into prison in the first place.
Love and joy and peace is what prompted the apostles to do what they did. The Holy Spirit gave them their boldness. They are lively. They are making in-roads. Like a soldier they are on the move. They are not playing it safe. They are not selling some pre-packaged spiritual product that is supposed to occupy some little piece of the people’s lives who would believe their message, while the rest of their lives can remain untouched.
No. The work of Jesus is victorious and vigorous. It is like leaven. If leaven is added to just one little part of a lump of dough it is going to work its way through the whole thing. So also Jesus’s victory over sin, death, and the devil is going to work its way through our whole life. All the parts of our life are to be infused with divine love. The great guide in this endeavor is the 10 commandments, which require of us love towards God and love towards our neighbor. The work that Jesus has done is such that it overturns the old order. He has given us a new life. There is an adventure in store for us where we can be daring and loving—not playing it safe, not being a coward—but going on the offense against God’s enemies.
Realize, of course, that when you go on offense, you are going to stir up some trouble. We all get awfully comfortable with the evil in our life. We don’t want it taken away from us. When the boat gets rocked, we want things to go back to what is normal and comfortable. Folks can get violent with this resistance to change. To the kingdom of God’s action there is going to be a reaction. This is why the apostles were put in prison again and again.
As we live our life as Christians we must be prepared with appropriate expectations. If we are expecting that we are going to be loved and thanked and praised for attacking what is evil, then we better have a second thought coming. But we must understand this for what it is. It is not bad. To suffer for doing good is not a bad thing. It is a good thing. It is following the lead of our master Jesus. It is taking up our cross and following him. So don’t be scared off by that.
Realize, also, that you will be attacked by fear and dread. The apostles experienced the same thing. Paul plainly tells us that he did his work in weakness. He did it with fear and trembling. God likes to do his work through imperfect and weak vessels. Therefore you must not think that since you feel inadequate or frightened to attack evil in your own life or in the lives of the people you love, that this means it’s something you should not do. You need to wait until you are stronger. As the Lord said to Paul, “My grace is made perfect in weakness.”
The easiest thing in the world is to do nothing. But then the kingdom of God is also inactive in us. During this season of Easter, and Christ’s ascension, and Pentecost we must grasp that Christ’s kingdom is a living and active thing. Christianity is not merely a way to avert disaster. Christianity is a new life fighting against the forces of death. You are privileged to take your place in that fight according to the opportunities that God puts into your life. This is how Jesus reigns and rules in his spiritual kingdom.
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Have you ever said to yourself: “What am I going to do now?” Usually that is not a very happy situation. I have my plans set. I have my expectations set accordingly. Maybe I have a best case scenario and a worst case scenario. Then, all of a sudden, out of the blue comes something I wasn’t expecting. The forecast I made for my life is not going to turn out. “What am I going to do now?”
The lady in our Gospel reading today, Mary Magdalene, probably was asking herself this question. The biggest blow came for her on Friday. Mary Magdalene was one of the very few disciples who were present when Jesus was crucified. The rest of them ran away. They didn’t want to get in trouble. If the governing authorities had done this to Jesus, then guess who is going to be next? His disciples. So Mary Magdalene, a couple other women, and the apostle John are the only disciples mentioned as witnesses to Jesus’s death.
Jesus’s death was a tremendous blow for Mary Magdalene. Jesus had cast out seven demons from her. Anyone who is possessed or oppressed by demons suffers greatly, is unstable, and is tempted towards despair. Jesus had cast these out and set her free. Then he had taught her the way of justice and truth. He taught her who God was and his commandments. The Word of God became a lamp unto her feet and a light unto her path. Most importantly, I’m sure that Mary Magdalene believed that Jesus was the Christ. She believed that Jesus was the king who was going to change everything for his people. Like King David of old, he would gather the people of God together in God’s righteousness and salvation.
This Jesus, whom Mary had been following ever since he cast out those seven demons, died before her very eyes. There was no mistaking it. She knew Jesus was dead. She had helped with the hasty preparations for his burial before the Sabbath came at sundown on Friday. She saw his color. His corpse had cooled. The soldiers had stuck a spear into Jesus’s side after he died, just to make sure that he was dead. He didn’t move. Blood and water came out. Mary knew all this, and Mary loved Jesus.
Since she loved Jesus she wanted to be doubly sure that he should receive a proper burial instead of the hasty one that they were forced to do on Friday afternoon. It was forbidden to work on Saturday, however, because that was the Sabbath. The first opportunity she had to come back to the tomb was sunrise on Easter morning. It was an unpleasant shock. The stone was rolled away; the body of Jesus was nowhere to be seen.
Imagine what that would have been like for her. They had safely put Jesus into the tomb. She saw the stone rolled in front of the entrance. Now he is gone. That would be like us going to the funeral home after someone we loved had died, but the people at the funeral home tell us that the body is gone. We don’t know what happened to it.
The main thing that is on Mary’s mind is “where is his body?” That’s what she tells Peter and John. “We don’t know where they put him.” The two angels she sees in the tomb ask her why she is weeping. She says, “Because they have taken away my Lord, and I don’t know where they have laid him.” When Jesus speaks to her, and she figures that he is the gardener, she says, “Sir, if you carried him off, tell me where you laid him, and I will get him.”
Throughout this whole awful ordeal Mary Magdalene might have asked herself many times: “What am I going to do now?” The reason why we say, “What am I going to do now?” is that we are bewildered and at a loss. What is going on? How am I going to survive? What is going to happen to me?
Something that we should learn from Easter is that the most fundamental and important issues—the things that matter the most for what I am going to do now—have been settled for us by God. It is not a question of how I am going to survive or manage. It is a matter of God settling what is otherwise impossible to overcome—the worst sorts of things that make us ask ourselves, “What am I going to do now?”
Some of you have faced the possibility of dying. Maybe you’ve had a dread disease. Maybe you were in an accident. Perhaps the thought has gone through your head: “I might be dying.” Maybe some of you are facing that question right now today: “I might be dying.” “What am I going to do now?”
Dying and death is pretty bad. Most people don’t think of anything worse than death. But there is something worse than death: hell. What is going on with hell? Our sins and evilness is what make us deserving of hell. The Bible teaches us a truth about this that we certainly aren’t going to get anywhere else—and that is that each and every one of us should go to hell. We are guilty. We have broken God’s commandments. Everyone wants to poo-poo this away as being just part of our human condition. We figure—or perhaps more accurately, we hope—that it is just the really notoriously bad people, the monsters, who go to hell.
With all the sins that you have committed, and with all the consequences of those sins that have attached themselves to you, you could very well wonder, “What am I going to do now?” Precious few entertain this bracing thought: “God is going to judge me. What am I going to do now?” What this feels like is when we’ve done something wrong, and we know that we’ve been found out, and we’re just waiting for the hammer to fall.
However, that dread and condemnation of yours was voluntarily taken up by Jesus when he suffered and died in our place. Justice had to be done for your sins, and it was done on the God-man, Jesus Christ, and it killed him. Justice was satisfied thereby.
So in these greatest and most horrifying ways that we could possibly ask ourselves, “What am I going to do now?” We conclude that God has settled them for us. He didn’t snap his fingers or wish such a change into existence. He sent his only begotten Son into human flesh, to suffer, die, and rise from the dead on our behalf.
I’m sure you’ve heard of John 3:16, which tells us of God’s will towards us: Jesus said, “God loved the world in this way, that he gave his only-begotten Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish, but have eternal life. For God did not sent his Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through him.”
God has sorted out and settled things so that you don’t have to figure out for yourself how you are going to survive or manage. God is well pleased with you for Jesus’s sake. Death has been defeated. You may be at peace in Jesus. This is a peace that the world cannot give and it is beyond our understanding.
Think again of Mary. What a change must have come over Mary when she had been wondering about and looking for Jesus’s body, but then she recognized him when he said her name. He said her name in love. This is not just an experience that is locked in the past and could never happen to you.
There’s no reason to think that our Lord Jesus will not also say your name to you one day too. Perhaps when it is time to rise out of our grave our Lord Jesus might use our name to bring our body back to life. Perhaps when we close our eyes in death we might open them to Jesus saying our name. Jesus saying our name, knowing that he loves us and is well pleased with us, is about the best thing that I can imagine happening. All our doubts and worries should pass away like they did with Mary.
With Jesus as our Savior I’d also like to consider this question we sometimes ask ourselves from a different angle. We ask ourselves, “What am I going to do now?” at sad and shocking times. We also can ask that question at very happy times.
Who can forget that feeling when the long-awaited summer vacation from school finally arrived? The first day of summer vacation you could wake up, knowing that you could do anything you wanted. You had the whole summer ahead of you. “What am I going to do now?” Far from being trapped by your circumstances, the circumstances set you free.
Or the way it is with young love. A young man and a young woman want to spend all their time together. They have their whole life before them. “What are we going to do now?”
These are times of life and joy. They come from the Source of life and joy. That Source of life and joy is well pleased with you. He has justified you in Jesus. Jesus is risen from the dead. God, with all of his riches, is for you. “What are you going to do now?”
You have been put on a great adventure. While you live in this life you may set your mind on the things that are above, as Paul says in our Epistle reading, because you have been raised with Christ. You are no longer enslaved to the desires of your flesh. When Jesus died, your flesh died too. Being defeated by sin is no longer simply inevitable. When Jesus was raised, you were raised too. You are set free from what we suppose to be our need to have everything for ourselves. You are free to grow in the image of Christ by daily dying to sin and being raised to live before God in righteousness and purity forever.
But even with the very best Christian life, taking full advantage of the spiritual gifts God gives you, this earthly life is awfully like school. Our sinful flesh never stops fighting against the Holy Spirit. The devil never stops tempting us. We do a lot of things that we do not enjoy doing, just like getting up in the morning, being bored in class, and then having to do it all over again the next day. We have not yet entered into the fullness of our inheritance and the devil and evil are still on the loose. They have not yet been forever confined in hell.
But the day is coming when school’s out—not just for the summer, but for eternity. How’s that for a different way of looking at our death day. Every kid has an intense awareness of that last day of school. It can’t come quick enough. In the meantime school grinds on. In like manner God has a death day for each of us (unless Jesus comes back first). We don’t know when that day will be, but it is as certain and irrevocable as if it were chiseled in granite. Our flesh looks to that day with dread, because our flesh doesn’t want to die. The last thing our Old Adam wants is to die. But Jesus has defeated death for you. At your death you will not lose, but gain. The struggle, the crosses, the disappointments, even merely the boredom of this present life will be done. It’s like getting out of school.
Then you might ask yourself: “What am I going to do now?”
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The apostle Peter says that it is better to suffer for doing good than for doing evil. That is not the way that we are accustomed to thinking. What we learn from a very young age is that if you do good you will be rewarded. If you do bad, then you will be suffer. If you do what Mom and Dad want you to do, then they will be happy with you. If you do what they don’t want you to do, then they will be unhappy with you. They might also punish you.
But we all know that sometimes you want to do things that are bad. Sometimes you want to do things that you know your Mom and Dad either wouldn’t let you do or have specifically told you not to do. Although you’d like to do these things, you’d prefer not to get punished for them. What you need to do, then, is hide or lie or in some other way cover up the bad thing. It is amazing how early in life we learn how to do this. Nobody has to teach it to us. It comes naturally.
Something that is kind of interesting is that if you do what is right, you will almost certainly suffer. What I mean is this is that if you’ve done something wrong, and then you go and tell mom or dad what you’ve done (which is good and right), they are going to be angry, or disappointed, or what-have-you. They might punish you. We’d like to avoid that, so there is a very strong compulsion to hide, or lie, or try to figure out a way to make what we did not sound so bad. But then we would just be adding evil to the bad that we have already done. It is better to suffer for doing good, for doing the right thing, than for doing evil.
But in order to believe this, we have to believe in God. The lying and the hiding and the what-not that is done is only because we don’t believe in God. If we believed in God, then we’d understand that we are always walking in his sight. Our most sophisticated adult efforts at covering our tracks to him look like a toddler who goes into the corner to poop in his diaper, thinking that nobody knows what he’s doing. If we believed in God we wouldn’t think that our lying and hiding are going to work, because, of course, God knows.
Positively speaking, we have to believe in God in order to know that we will be blessed with our suffering for doing what is good. This requires a lot of faith. Think again of that child who has done wrong. To go tell Mom and Dad is going to hurt. The child is going to suffer. Seemingly all that can be dispensed with if only the child is clever enough to cover his tracks. To go to Mom and Dad and tell them what you have done seems like a terrible idea. You have to believe in God in order to believe that you will be better off doing such a thing. Kids, without much life experience, are just going to have to take God’s Word for it that they will be blessed.
You who have some experience under your belt might be able to see things a little more clearly. We adults have no doubt done our fair share of crime. We’ve thought that we will be better off if we lie and hide. We still very often think that way. But even if we’ve never taken the right path, I think we can sense that there is a price to pay for not doing what is right. What if we would be one of those good people who own up to what they have done, who tell the truth? I think we can sense that this is a better way to live.
If only we would think more about things, I think we can see that this is how it has to be. Lying and hiding only delay the inevitable. The best possible outcome is that the grass grows over the offense, and we forget about it, (and here’s what’s really important:) that we quit lying and hiding. That is not what happens though. What inevitably happens when we have “success” with our lying and hiding is that we grow more and more in our wickedness. And why shouldn’t we? If it worked once, it might work again. If we get better at our wickedness we might get more of what we want.
But whom are we learning from? Who is our master and teacher? Is it not the father of lie, that murderer the devil? Like the pied piper all he is doing is leading us off to our destruction, giving us little treats along the way where we thing we are getting away with things.
How different it is to learn for our Lord Jesus Christ. He suffered for doing what is good rather than for doing what is evil. This is even a step beyond what I’ve been talking about thus far. What I’ve been talking about is the way that we will suffer for stepping out of our evil ways and doing the right thing by fessing up. But Jesus did not do anything wrong, and yet he willingly suffered. He suffered for people who are no good, for us, who have lied and hid, gladly being trained by the devil. And tremendous good has come out of this suffering because God exists. He brought about the salvation of mankind by his suffering and attained everlasting glory for himself.
At the time of Jesus’s suffering—when he was actually suffering—it did not look this way. What it looked like is that a mere man died unjustly. It looked like the lying and hiding Jewish authorities got their way—they got rid of that annoying Jesus. Today, on Holy Saturday, Jesus lies dead in a cool tomb, cut into a hill side. On Holy Saturday no good seemed to have come from what he did, and certainly no power or glory.
But you know Christian doctrine well enough to know that it will not stay this way. Jesus rose from the dead. He descended into hell and proclaimed his victory. He left the cold dark tomb. He appeared to his bewildered disciples. He proclaimed peace and salvation to them. He ascended to the right hand of God the Father and reigns and rules there in glory.
This is very instructive for our lives as Christians. Just before where our reading starts the apostle Peter encourages us Christians to do good to those who are in our life. Each of us have been given roles and responsibilities by God. Are you a father, mother, son, daughter, husband, wife or worker? In all these callings and stations in life we have the opportunity to suffer for doing what is good.
What that means is that you do what is right. You do what God wants you to do. You work hard. You don’t antagonize. You forgive when others hurt you. So much as it depends on you, you live peaceably with everyone. You suffer for doing is what is good, following your Lord and master Jesus Christ, believing that God will bless you.
Chances are you will not be exalted in this life for following Jesus. You might! There are examples of that in the Bible. Daniel, whom we heard about, was such a one. He was a great man in Babylon and Persia for doing what was good. Another example is Joseph in Egypt. Already in this lifetime they were exalted although he suffered. What is much more likely, however, is that you will be like our Lord Jesus Christ. His glory was hidden while he lived this life. His glory appeared to be completely nonexistent on Holy Saturday. Now he is highly exalted.
So it will be also in heaven. There will be lots of surprises in heaven. The great and glorious ones in heaven will probably not be the preachers and church leaders. They often already have their reward. The great ones are going to be those who lived quiet Christian lives. They believed in Jesus. They followed him. They suffered for doing what was good. They were honest, kind, and helpful. Their works were never spectacular or unusual to human beings, but they were precious in God’s sight. For all intents and purposes they looked as powerless and ineffectual as our Lord and Savior looked while he lay dead in the tomb on Holy Saturday. But in the life to come they will receive their reward.
So here’s another thing that you can think about. We do well to strive after this heavenly glory. People are striving after earthly glory all the time. Everyone wants to be known as the best. Nobody thinks about the glory that will never fade away in heaven. How can we obtain this glory? By seeking first the kingdom of God and his righteousness. We can gladly suffer for doing good. We can forgive as we have been forgiven. We can seek to serve rather than being served. We can take the lowest spot, trusting in God, that he will raise us higher when the time is right.
The good life is not the one where we use and abuse everybody else towards our own ends. That seems like it should be the best life, but it is not. The best life is the life of our Lord Jesus Christ. By his suffering for doing what is good he set free all creation from its bondage to the devil and corruption. Our best life, therefore, is following after him. You will be blessed. You should not have a shadow of a doubt about that.
In fact, there should be no doubt either way. If you follow the arts and practices of the devil you will most certainly not be blessed. I don’t care if you manage to accumulate the whole world and eat it as dessert. Nothing good can come from our hating, lying and hiding, even though it seems like it works like a charm, because God exists.
Then, on the other hand, there is no doubt whatsoever that the good that we do will be blessed. Jesus is blessed. Jesus is glorified. We will be too if we follow after him. Do not shy away, therefore, from those times when you are called upon to suffer for doing good. You are going to have to fight against your flesh, because your flesh is going to tell you that you will fail and be miserable for suffering for good. The Bible tells you that you will be blessed. You are following the pattern set by your Master.
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The Good Friday service is probably the most unusual service we do all year. The candles get snuffed out. The lights get lowered. The book gets slammed. A person might come to this service just to have an experience.
I’ve been to a few Good Friday services in my life. More often than not I keep an eye out for something in myself—an experience, a reaction. On this day we recall how our Lord suffered, was crucified, and died. I must confess that I’ve often held up a mirror to myself: Am I sad? Am I stirred? Maybe what I’m really looking for behind those questions is: Do I believe? If I’m really moved, then I must have a really strong faith. I’m pleased with myself when I’m saddened.
It’s hard to imagine a more narcissistic thing a person could do. It’s like a person being happy that something bad has happened, because then he or she can get some attention—even if that attention be from one’s own self. It’s like being moved to tears, and then immediately running to the bathroom mirror to see what you look like. Here today we are talking about the Son of God dying because of our sin. And what am I looking for? How I’m feeling. How disgusting.
But now I might say to myself, “That’s it Preacher! Keep it up. You’re disgusting! You’ve manage to squeeze some kind of experience out of that cold dead soul. Let’em have it! Then we can go home feeling good about how bad we felt.” How shallow and disgusting.
There’s a line from the service of Corporate Confession and Absolution that we used last night that I quite like. In that lengthy exhortation that I read to you it says, “It is proper that we diligently examine ourselves.” But then it goes on to say, “But when we examine our hearts and consciences, we find nothing in us but sin and death, from which we are incapable of delivering ourselves.”
No kidding. When we examine ourselves on this Good Friday we aren’t going to find anything good. Maybe we are sufficiently pleased with ourselves for how sad we feel. Maybe we were hoping for more of an experience. Regardless, however we feel is beside the point. If we are digging around within ourselves the best conclusion we can come up with is that we are sinners—narcissistic liars. Our feelings, even at their very best, are going to be tainted. We aren’t going to find any assurance of salvation in here.
What on this day must be pointed out, in fact, is that Jesus does everything himself for our salvation. He didn’t ask for our permission. He didn’t ask for our cooperation. You can see this already at that time. His disciples at the time were certainly saved by their Lord and Savior. Jesus says so. What, however, did they contribute towards that salvation? Nothing good. On that Good Friday, they were not dependable or helpful. The closest disciples, the eleven, ran away, except for John. Peter ran away after cursing and swearing that he didn’t know anything about this Jesus of Nazareth.
Some folks might point to the women as cutting a better figure. Mary, the mother of our Lord, Mary Magdalene, and a couple other women were at the cross. As respectable as that might have been, their faith didn’t hold out. None of them believed what Jesus had told them beforehand—that he was going to rise from the dead. The reason why the women were coming to the tomb on Easter was not to welcome the resurrected Lord, but to finish the hasty job of preparing his body for burial that they didn’t have time to do properly before the onset of the Sabbath on Friday afternoon. If we want to talk about any contribution of the disciples it’s going to be nothing but sin and death from which we are incapable of delivering ourselves.
But Jesus knew all this. Our salvation is not at all dependent upon us. If it weredependent upon us we could never be sure that we’ve done well enough. If you put your trust in yourself and your tender Christian feelings, then this just might come back to haunt you on your deathbed. Even if you’ve managed to live a somewhat, outwardly respectable life, you might remember there on our deathbed how bored we were at all those Good Friday services. Or, what’s probably worse, how pleased we were with ourselves at all those Good Friday services. “All glory, laud, and honor be to me. Look at me. Look how well I’ve done.” This would be dreadful because you’re not good enough, no matter what you might tell yourself.
Our salvation was worked completely by Jesus the Christ. From beginning to end it is all him. He became man so that he could fulfill all righteousness, so that he could suffer and die. He took upon himself the sin of the entire world. He became the propitiating sacrifice—that means the atoning sacrifice for all sin. The punishment that the Law requires for our transgressions was placed upon him. The Law, therefore, is completely fulfilled. Jesus lived a perfect life in our place, which the Law requires, which is credited to us. Jesus was punished in our place, which the Law demands for our breaking of the Law. The Law has no claim on us anymore because Jesus has fulfilled it.
We must go one step further: All people have been forgiven by what Jesus did for us. This is what Paul teaches in Romans chapter 5. He compares Jesus to Adam. Through one man, Adam, sin entered the world and through sin death entered the world. There’s no exempting yourself from that. If you are mortal, then you are descendant of Adam no matter how you might feel about that.
The same thing is true with Jesus. Paul says that we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son. This is something that God did, entirely apart from you. All people have been reconciled to God by the death of Jesus. All people have been justified by his blood. Just as by one man all people sinned and are going to die, so also through the one man, Jesus Christ, God’s Son, our Lord—through him justification, righteousness, and life is an accomplished fact for all people. Adam’s action had its effect, whether you like it or not. Jesus’s action had its effect, whether you like it or not.
Now our Old Adam, our reason, immediately howls in protest: “Wait just a minute,” it says. “If Jesus had justified all people completely and perfectly, then why aren’t all people saved? How can the Bible talk about anybody going to hell if all people are justified and forgiven by Jesus’s death?” We have a Bible verse for that. Jesus said, “Whoever believes and is baptized shall be saved, whoever does not believe will be condemned.” The reason why not all people are going to go to heaven is because not all people believe that they are justified for Jesus’s sake.
“Aha!” our reason pops up again. “So we do have to do our part! We do have to believe!” Our reason is really inept when it comes to spiritual things! Even just an earthly example can show how stupid it is to say that we have to do our part in order to be saved.
Let’s say that our house has caught on fire. We are unconscious in our bed. The fireman comes in, picks us up, carries us out to safety, and revives us. What credit is this to you that you have been saved? What part did you play? None. It was all the fireman’s doing.
The Bible, however, does not just describe us human beings as unconscious. It describes us as being dead. Ephesians 2 says that we all were dead and lost in our trespasses and sins. What can a dead person do? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. But, as that passage goes on to say, “even when we were dead in our trespasses, God made us alive together with Christ.” This was not our own doing. It was God’s doing.
This shows us precisely the thing that we must come away with tonight: All people are forgiven in Christ. All people are reconciled to God by Christ’s death. Not all people are going to believe that, and so it won’t be of benefit to them, but that is a different matter. Their unbelief doesn’t undo what God has done. What God has done is he has worked forgiveness and justification for all people in Jesus’s death.
If all people are forgiven and justified by what Jesus has done, then that means that you have been forgiven and justified. But what about your sins? Doesn’t matter. What about how you are feeling? Doesn’t matter. There is literally nothing that you can do to undo what God has done. All people are forgiven and justified by what Jesus has done. Therefore you are forgiven and justified.
This is why Good Friday and Easter are such a devastating defeat for the devil. Jesus has completely demolished him and taken away all his power. It’s not like Jesus found some little loophole or some crazy way that we are to be saved. All sin is atoned for. The truth is on our side. We are saved by Jesus’s death. No doubt this is why the devil has to lie and lie and lie some more to keep people from embracing the truth.
Lies can make the truth hard to believe, because we’re constantly being hounded by the thought that it is too good to be true. There has to be some catch. Our reason wants to master how all of this can be, but our reason can’t master it. We’re not God. We can’t understand all things. Plus our reason is fallen and sinful. How can you expect such a defective instrument to work well at all?
It is much better for us to stick with the plain and simple truth. Our faith is to be like that of a child’s. What we are to believe is that Jesus saved us completely and totally on Good Friday. As God’s Word says, “God reconciled us to himself by Jesus’s death.” Period. That’s what God did. You are his workmanship. You are in his hands.
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Have you ever had the experience of dreading a day that was coming? Maybe you have dreaded the day when you have to go to the dentist or the day of surgery. Maybe you have dreaded the day when your child is going to leave home. The date is right there on the calendar and only gets closer. Each passing day increases the anxiety.
This was Jesus’s experience this Holy Week. Did you notice this past Sunday how Jesus was troubled on Palm Sunday? There were some Greeks who wanted to see Jesus. Greeks wanting to see Jesus is different than Jews wanting to see Jesus. Greeks weren’t the blood descendants of Abraham. And yet, here they are, wanting to see the Christ. Jesus knew that the hour had come for the Son of Man to be glorified.
Jesus said in our Gospel reading on Sunday, “Now is my soul troubled. And what shall I say? ‘Father, save me from this hour’? No, this is the reason I came to this hour.” Jesus knew that he had to drink the cup that the Father gave him to drink. He was going to save all people by being crushed with their iniquities. He isn’t looking forward to doing it. He knows he needs to be done. His soul is troubled.
On an almost infinitely smaller scale we can understand that. That is how it can be for us when we are dreading that thing in the future. We know we need the surgery. There’s no other choice. Sometimes we manage to forget about it, but then, all of a sudden, it hits us again. The soul is troubled.
Our reading tonight is from the Thursday of Holy Week. At the beginning of the reading it says, “Jesus was troubled in his spirit.” Yet another thing was falling into place for the dreadful thing that was coming. Jesus was to be betrayed by one of the twelve. Judas sold his soul for a mere thirty pieces of silver. Satan entered him when he took the bread from Jesus. Although he sold his soul so cheaply, he would come to loathe even that paltry sum. When he saw how Jesus was condemned to die he despaired. A horrible, black, pit of despair overtook him. He threw that money back to the Jewish officials and went and hung himself. God save us from despair in this life and in the next!
With Judas gone, on his way to the officials who would arrest him, Jesus knew it was just a matter of time. Maybe it’s a tiny bit like arriving at the hospital and entering a room where you have to change out of your clothes and into a hospital gown. There’s no stopping it now.
When Judas left the upper room where Jesus and his disciples celebrated the Passover, it was already dark. Evening had come on that Thursday of Holy Week. Jesus and his disciples left that upper room that evening, walked across the Kidron valley, and up on to the Mount of Olives. There was a garden there name Gethsemane. Jesus liked to go there with his disciples. Now he wanted to go there in order to pray.
He asked Peter, James, and John to please stay up and watch and pray with him. He said his soul was sorrowful, even unto death. Then he went on a stone’s throw to pray by himself. He said, “Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from me. But not my will, but your will be done.”
This is holy ground. We have to take the shoes off of our understanding. We won’t be able to grasp it completely. Jesus, who is God, asks that the cup should pass from him. Jesus, unlike us, is perfect and remains perfect. Jesus, unlike us, is delighted to fulfill the will of God. Here he asks that the cup might pass from him. How the Son of God could say something like that is beyond our comprehension, but that is what he said. What we can know for certain is that his soul was troubled. His sweat fell to the ground like great drops of blood. The weight which was going to crush Jesus was coming. Our sin was going to kill God.
Three times Jesus came back to his apostles, but he found them asleep. Jesus’s sorrow had rubbed off on them and they were overcome by sleepiness. The third time Jesus returned to the apostles he could see Judas coming with a whole bunch of people. The Jewish authorities were there. They had brought along a whole bunch of soldiers. They had their torches and weapons. Jesus was being sucked down into the Maelstrom. From here he would go to the chief priest’s house, from the chief priest’s house he would be brought to Pilate’s house, and from Pilate’s house he would be nailed to a cross. By 9 o’clock, Friday morning, the Son of God would be lifted up, and, to use Jesus’s expression, “glorified.”
In the midst of all of this, in the midst of Jesus’s soul being troubled, on this Thursday, Jesus instituted the Lord’s Supper which we continue to observe to this very day as Jesus’s disciples. We very easily take this sacrament for granted and think nothing of it. What a shame. This sacrament came at the last possible moment for Jesus. Twice Jesus says, with both the body and the blood, “Do this in remembrance of me.”
What we can remember of Jesus is how his soul was troubled. In addition to everything that we have talked about tonight, Jesus knew that he was going to be all alone. Even his heavenly Father would turn his back on his Son, for Jesus cries out from the cross: “Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani,” “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Jesus was troubled. The burden that Jesus bore was absolutely unique. Nobody has experienced anything like it, and nobody will ever experience anything like it again. This Jesus did for our redemption.
As we do this in remembrance of Jesus we might also remember that Jesus wanted to do all of this for us. Jesus said to his disciples when he instituted the Lord’s Supper that he passionately desired to have this Pascha with them. If we were to put that into more colloquial language he said that he “really, really wanted to have this meal with them.” The day of dread was drawing near and was on his mind, but something else was also on his mind. Jesus was really looking forward to the Lord’s Supper with his disciples.
The reason why Jesus desired to have this sacrament with the disciples must be learned from the Words of Institution. Jesus himself defines this sacrament. He is very specific about it. “This bread is my body which is given for you.” “This cup is the New Testament, the new arrangement between God and man, in my blood, which is shed for you for the forgiveness of sins.”
This sacrament is the sacrament of Jesus’s death for you. It was instituted at the last hour before the processes that would lead to his death were put into motion. Paul said in our Epistle reading that the sacrament is a proclamation of Christ’s death until he comes again in glory. And it is for you. Jesus wants you to have this. Why? So that you may know that you have been reconciled to God by Jesus’s death. So that you may have peace on account of Jesus being troubled, chastised and crushed.
By this sacrament, by faith in Jesus’s words, we may therefore rise above whatever day or event we could possibly be dreading. No matter how dreadful that thing might be, we can rise above it through faith in Jesus, because he has overcome it. – Jesus wasn’t able to do that. Jesus wasn’t able to transcend his troubles. He bore the full brunt of everything. He drank the cup to its last dregs. We, however, can rise above whatever comes our way.
It does not matter if it is disappointment, or sadness, or shame, or death or anything else in all creation. In Jesus God is for us. Who can be against us? Jesus wants us to know this. He really, really wants to have this sacrament with us in order that we may be at peace through faith in him.
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Gymnasiums have been around for a long time. They are older than Jesus and the apostles. They come from ancient Greece. Gymnasiums were for training men to compete in athletic games. The word, “gymnasium,” comes from the Greek word, “Gymnazdo,” which means to train, to practice, to drill. The young men would train to become faster and stronger and more skilled. Good training increased the chances of success on the field or the mat.
The apostle Peter uses this Greek word, “Gymnazdo,” in an interesting way. When he is describing the characteristics of the ungodly he says that they have “hearts which have been trained [gymnazdo] in covetousness.” But let me say a little bit about that word “covetousness” too. At its root it means having an abundance, and, especially, “getting more.” So Peter says that the ungodly have a heart which has gone to the gym in order to be trained at getting more.
Since I am a child of the 80s I can’t help but think of the training that takes place in Rocky or Karate Kid. “The eye of the tiger” is playing in the background. But instead of running through a train yard or catching flies with chop sticks different drills are being run. This is a training in getting more. So the exercises are like this: $5 or $20, which one are you going to pick? $20, good! A candy bar is split in two, which part are you going to take, the bigger part or the smaller part? The bigger part, good! I’m going to try to trip you up now: 4 quarters or 9 dimes? 4 quarters? Bam! Got it! I can tell you’ve been working out.
Of course we do not really need training in this regard. It is in the nature of training that we learn to do things that we otherwise wouldn’t naturally do. We might not automatically know to plant our feet, or square up, or keep our eye on the ball. We naturally aren’t fond of having muscles ache or our hands get blistered. When it comes to getting more for ourselves, that does come naturally. If we have to choose between having lots of what we enjoy or having little or none of what we enjoy, we naturally are going to pick the one over the other.
Although the concept is simple and natural so that no training is required, there is a complicating factor that makes training in covetousness advantageous. Other people, your competitors, are being trained in covetousness as well. So what do you do when you both want the larger part of the candy bar? Here some training can be useful. There are different tools you can use. You can manipulate the other person. You can deceive the other person. Grand productions can be put on in order to get more for yourself. The true virtuosos are the ones who take what others have, but the other person smiles and thanks them for the favor.
At the root of all of this activity is the lie. Those who want to learn how to get more for themselves need to learn how to become good liars. It would be more honest to just club the other person over the head and take it all for yourself. But then you might not get away with it. Part of our training in covetousness is that you have to get what you want without negative consequences for yourself. Siblings are often very good for training in this regard. You learn to take advantage of your sibling, but you have to make sure that you don’t go so far that they’ll tell mom or dad.
Now let’s go to the end of how this story goes, to the end of one’s life. You work out at the gym. You learn how to cut costs and maximize profits—to hell with whomever it might affect. Slowly but surely you accumulate a mountain of advantages for yourself. The one with the most wins. Maybe, if you are really good and perfectly trained, you can accumulate enough for yourself that you don’t care about money anymore because there’s no way you’ll ever run out of it. Then you can give away a few spare millions and you can get your name on some building.
While it seems like such a one is a big winner, ultimately it will turn out that he or she will be the biggest loser. While we live on this earth we can all deceive ourselves into thinking that what we think must be true. We can think that we set the game, and the name of the game is: Who can get the most? The way the game is played is that you cheat and manipulate and seek your own advantage until you get to the top of the heap.
If the devil were god, he would probably say to such a one at the end of his or her life: “Well done, my good and faithful servant. Enter into the joy of your master.” Then maybe you’ll get to club and rape and cheat for all eternity. Of course, you’ll be clubbed and raped and cheated too, but business is business.
However, the devil is not God. God is God. He is the one who sets the terms. He says how the game is to be played. Ever since the Garden of Eden human beings have thought that they can safely ignore God, play their own game, and everything will be just fine. But this evil time in which we are living—this evil time where there is so much lying that it can be impossible to know what is true—this evil time will not go on forever. Maybe that’s how things will be in hell, but Jesus did not come to inaugurate a deeper and darker hell.
Jesus came to reveal God to us. His eternal life is different. Forgive me for saying this yet again. (I’ve said it several times the last two times I’ve preached already.) Jesus says in John 17: “This is eternal life: to know the only true God and Jesus Christ whom he has sent.” There you have the definition of eternal life: Knowing the only true God.
So what is this God like? There is no finer week to learn what God is like than this one we are entering into—Holy Week. Let me encourage you to come to all the services this week, unless you don’t care what God is like. Then you might as well not come. But if you want to know what God is like there’s no avoiding especially Good Friday and Easter. On Good Friday and Easter we learn that God is not interested in accumulating as much as he possibly can for himself. It’s exactly the opposite. How much can he give?
Here we have quite a different game with quite different rules. Listen to what Jesus says in our Gospel reading: “Amen, Amen, I tell you: Unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it continues to be one kernel. But if it dies, it produces much grain. Anyone who loves his life destroys it. And the one who hates his life in this world will hold on to it for eternal life. If anyone serves me, let him follow me. And where I am, there my servant will be also. If anyone serves me, the Father will honor him.”
In a way, Jesus’s words can sound rather gloomy. He talks about dying and being buried in the ground. He says that whoever loves his life destroys it; whoever hates his life in this world will keep it. But Jesus’s words can remain sounding gloomy only if we think his cross is bad. It is only gloomy if we think Jesus’s cross is pure tragedy. Then it will sound to you as though Jesus is telling you to die, to hate life, and if you should happen to love life, then you’re in for a world of hurt.
But Jesus’s cross is good. We do not call this Friday Bad Friday or Sad Friday. We call it Good Friday, and for very good reason. Jesus poured out everything that he had until there was nothing left. He gave and gave and gave. Then he gave some more. He was not dealing with dollars and cents, or other, similar, created things. His giving had to do with guilt, with responsibility, with divine justice. There was a huge yawning hell of evil that we collectively and individually are responsible for. It was God’s good pleasure to fill that void by the suffering and death of his beloved Son. Like a grain of wheat he died. He hated his life in this world to the point where he screams out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
But, having hated his life in this world, he keeps it for eternal life—not just for himself, but for everyone. He sets us free. He breaks the curse. We are not consigned to an eternity where the stronger preys on the weaker, where there are so many lies that we can never be certain of what’s true. Jesus’s death and resurrection opens up the ability to live a different and new life—a new adventure. A life that is not hostile to God, but a life in Jesus where we may know the only true God without fear.
Jesus died like a grain of wheat that fell into the earth. Had he not done that, he would have remained alone. However, by doing so, he created much fruit. Good Friday is followed by Easter. Jesus did not stay dead. He gloriously rose from the dead.
From the accounts of the witnesses to his resurrection, you can tell that things have changed. His appearance was different. He did not want Mary Magdalene to touch him yet, because, he says, “I have not yet ascended to the Father.” Jesus does not just give us a mulligan, a do-over, or a pardon so that we may live our life of crime. He gives us eternal life. And eternal life is to know the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom he has sent.
And so, as the Bible says, you are new creatures. Paul says, “If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, behold, the new has come. All this is from God, who, through Christ, reconciled us to himself and give us the ministry of reconciliation.” Paul really means it when he says that we are new creations in Christ. The old is gone. The new has come. The game has changed, and so have the rules.
According to these new rules greatness is no longer the ability to accumulate as much as you possibly can for yourself while telling the most sophisticated lies you can come up with. That was greatness according to our old lord, the devil. We have a new Lord. Greatness is defined by him. He fell like a grain of wheat into the ground and produced much fruit. He gave. He was willing to lose, and thereby he won.
You, as new creatures, are invited into this life of your God. Do not seek your own advantage, but the advantage of others. If someone wants to win against you, let them win. That is what Jesus means when he says that if someone strikes you on the one cheek, turn so that he may strike you on the other. This is also what Paul means he says that we are to be living sacrifices. We should not avenge ourselves. If your enemy is hungry, feed him. If he is thirsty, give him something to drink. Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.
These are not the rules for life that come naturally to us. To play according to these rules it requires faith. We have to believe that God will protect us. God will bless us. If our coat or our shirt are taken away, then God, who feeds the birds of the air and clothes the lilies of the field, will take care of us.
And not only do we need to believe that we will survive, we must believe that we will thrive. Jesus said that the grain of wheat the fell into the earth was all by itself. When it died, it produced much fruit. So also your new life in Christ: it is going to produce much fruit.
The possible examples of this are countless, but let me give you just one so that you can see what I mean. Why is there such strife and hatred between certain individuals? Isn’t it because they both refuse to budge? They both have been hurt. They both demand apologies and reparations. What if the Christian involved allowed himself or herself to “lose”? What if the Christian allowed himself or herself to be humbled and take the form of a servant? What if the Christian sought out reconciliation? This, of course, would be a miracle, worked by the Holy Spirit, but this is also what it means to be new creatures. And if a Christian were to risk that, what might happen?
Who’s to say? I certainly can’t guarantee that the other person would be broken and love in return. But I think you can see with merely human logic that love is a whole lot more likely to materialize if the other party is no longer demanding apologies and reparations. Regardless of what we might anticipate happening, however, we have Jesus’s promise: our sacrifice will produce fruit. Maybe that fruit won’t come to maturity as quickly as we think it should. Maybe our peace and reconciliation won’t come until eternal life. But Jesus promises fruit.
How different this is from the old life. The training in covetousness that we naturally believe in can only produce sour fruit that is no good for anyone, including ourselves, for very long. It is destined to be thrown out and trampled. The training that we have with our new Lord and Savior will produce fruit that abides.
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Pontius Pilate is often viewed in a positive light, especially in comparison to the Jewish leaders. The Jewish leaders were blood thirsty. They were going to get their crucifixion one way or another. Pilate is much cooler in all his interactions. He tries to get Jesus released. Thus he can appear to be better and kinder to Jesus than the Jewish authorities. I, however, do not think that Pilate is better than the Jewish authorities. If I were to judge, I would say that he is worse.
In my opinion, there is hardly anything worse than despising. To despise means that you simply can’t be bothered enough to get worked up. The matter is so unimportant that there is no reason to care. It seems to me that Pilate despises Jesus. He thinks Jesus is nuts. He thinks Jesus is wasting his life. The types of things that were important to Pilate were roads, armies, money, and the welfare of the empire. He was the Roman governor. He was an important man with important things to do. He’s annoyed that these Jews are making him decide about something that he doesn’t even begin to care about.
You can see this in his interactions with Jesus and with the Jews. Let me bring to your attention again something that we heard last week. Jesus was in an exchange with Pilate over whether he is the king of the Jews. Jesus says, “I am, as you say, a king. For this reason I was born, and for this reason I came into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice.” Why was Jesus born? Why did he come into the world? It was to testify to the truth. How could Jesus more strongly amplify the importance of the truth? I don’t know what other words he could have used. But then Pilate sneeringly responds, “What is truth?”
Pilate might have just as well rolled his eyes. He might as well have said, “What a waste of my time. I have better things to do.” To me this has to be about the worst reaction a person could possibly have.
I think it is far more respectful to listen to Jesus and get angry at him like the Jewish authorities were angry at him, than to sweep him aside the way that Pilate did. Jesus either is the best thing that has ever happened to this world or he is among the worst things that have ever happened. To believe that he is indifferent is to refuse to listen to what he says. Jesus says that he is the truth. If he is the truth, then blessed are those who believe in him. If he is not the truth, then he is a charlatan, a misleader, a distraction, a truly evil and parasitic force that has been unnecessarily holding back the human race.
It seems to me that it is better to be a disciple of Jesus or an enemy of Jesus. Those who sit on the fence cannot be bothered to investigate whether Jesus is the Son of God. Although they see themselves as neutral, there is no neutrality when it comes to Jesus. He himself says, “Whoever is not with me is against me; whoever does not gather with me, scatters.” This puts all those people, including Pontius Pilate, who want to be more or less polite concerning Jesus, but do not want to believe in him, against him.
This is how it has to be if Jesus is, in fact, the truth. Jesus being the truth involves the biggest and most important questions of life. If Jesus is the truth, then our greatest problem as human beings is sin. Our greatest problem is not that we haven’t accumulated enough money, know-how, or will power. Our greatest problem is that we are rebels against God and his commandments. The greatest of God’s commandments is that we should love him with our whole being, and that we should love our neighbor as we love ourselves. But we are revolutionaries. We don’t submit to him. We only want to do what we want to do.
Furthermore, contrary to what is popularly believed, we are corrupt and rotten. Everything we touch decays. Nothing we build can last. The great pyramids of Egypt might be about the best we’ve ever done, but even they are wearing down, year after year. Every generation that gets born is sinful. We’ve never been able to get rid of meanness, of lust, of greed. The strong oppress the weak. Everyone only seeks his or her own advantage. Everyone lies. Our souls have leprosy. We’re rotten all the way down to the core.
But if Jesus is the truth, then this changes everything. If Jesus is the truth, then the very reason why he was born, the very reason why he came into this world, was to set us free from our slavery to sin, our slavery to death and rottenness, and our slavery from the devil and all the other powerful forces who do not want us to be free to love and being like God. Jesus came to die on the cross and rise from the dead to make a new beginning.
The new beginning is brought about by wiping the slate clean. Jesus brings about atonement, forgiveness, the justification of all people by his one great sacrifice on the cross. Paul says in Romans chapter 3: “All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God and all are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus.” Again Paul says, “God shows his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.”
The great truth that is above all other truths is that God has made a new beginning in Jesus. By death and by resurrection, the human race is to be brought into something different. We are to be given a new heart and a new spirit. Instead of ignoring God, we are to know him. Jesus says, “This is eternal life: that we should know the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom he has sent.” The best and most important thing in life is not that we should be healthy, wealthy, and wise. The best and most important thing is that we should know the only true God and Jesus Christ whom God has sent.
The glory of Jesus is like the sun. At night you can see the moon and the stars. These glories of the night are like all the many and otherwise glorious truths that we can know and discover about life. These are beautiful in their own right. They should not be despised. But when the sun rises, the glory of the sun is such that these things that otherwise have glory end up having no glory at all. The truth of Jesus outstrips all other truth. Those who are in Jesus are new creations.
I suppose a person can love the sun or hate the sun. A person can love the day or a person can love the night. What a person cannot do is make the sun into just another star. Jesus cannot be just one more truth alongside other truths. If someone wants to make Jesus into just another truth alongside other truths, like one star alongside other stars, then that person is not actually dealing with Jesus. They are not taking Jesus seriously. If a person listens to Jesus, it is clear that he himself says that he necessarily changes everything. It’s like going from night to day. To pretend that he is just one isolated part of our lives is to say that he is a liar, even if we are able to maintain the appearance of politeness and reasonability.
There is no more fundamental and important question than this one: “What do you think of Jesus?” You can love him or you can hate him. To be indifferent to him is the worst. It is to despise him utterly, because his own words won’t allow anyone who listens to him to be neutral toward him. Either he changes everything or he is a charlatan who is wasting people’s valuable time and resources.
It is frightful to think of how much Jesus is despised, even by those who see themselves as Christians. Pilate was annoyed that he had to deal with this ridiculous matter because he had better things he could be doing with this time. Isn’t it frightful to consider how we act toward Jesus? We do not think of him as the one who changes everything. We do not treat him as the sun, whose glory blots out the glory of everything else.
We must therefore take in hand the truth. God’s salvation is not of those who are righteous, but of those who are sinners. I can’t understand why God should put up with human beings, when even those who want to be good end up doing so poorly. But the truth is that God wants to save sinners. He isn’t waiting around for our permission or our cooperation. He just went and did it by the atonement, by the redemption, that is in Jesus Christ. God would have sinful human beings enter into the glorious sunshine of eternal life that outstrips everything else. I cannot understand this, why God should want to do such a thing, but it’s his truth not mine. This is the truth whether you like it or not.
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Unfortunately, the apostle Paul did not write dates on the letters that he wrote. That would have saved some people a lot of trouble. Big books have been written to defend one person or another’s dating and ordering of his letters. Although he didn’t write dates on his letters, sometimes there are statements or clues within the letter that make it clear when Paul wrote it.
Paul’s letter to the Philippians is one of those letters that we can be sure about when it was written. Paul mentions in this letter that he is chains. The reason why he is in chains is because he has been taken prisoner by the Roman government. We know about that from the book of Acts. Since Paul is a prisoner who is in chains while he writes this letter we can be sure that he wrote this during the last years of his life. Eventually Paul would be put to death after having been a prisoner and after having been shipped to Rome.
Knowing the times and circumstances of Paul’s writing of this letter throws a different light on many of the things that he writes. For example, he says, “Rejoice in the Lord always! I will say it again, rejoice!” Rejoice always; not rejoice occasionally. And when Paul says this he is not sipping piña coladas on the beach in Acapulco. No. He is in chains. He is on his way to his death.
That’s another thing that’s helpful to keep in mind. Death is coming for Paul. He can see it. What, then, is on his mind? Is he thinking back on all the good memories? Is he wishing that he had taken a little more time for himself? Does he wish that he had taken that trip to Acapulco? No, it’s just the opposite. He is not looking backwards and admiring himself as though he were looking in a mirror. He is looking forward to the things that are ahead.
The portion of his letter that was read for our Epistle reading today speaks about this. He is not looking back. He is looking forward. There are dark clouds on the horizon for him, but he is not deterred. It is almost as though the dark clouds don’t affect him, or perhaps that the anticipated trouble makes him even bolder.
Thus Paul has something to teach us. Some of you have somewhat of an idea of what those dark clouds might be for you. Others can’t be sure what dark clouds might be in store for them. One thing we can be certain of, is that the dark clouds are bound to come eventually, even if we don’t like thinking about that. In light of this prospect are we going to look backward to earthly things or are we going to look forward to heavenly things? Paul would have us look forward.
Although Paul would have us look forward, it was not as though he was ignorant of what can be achieved with earthly things. At the beginning of our reading Paul says, “But even more than that, I consider everything to be a loss because of what is worth far more: knowing Christ Jesus, my Lord.” We are jumping into the middle of an argument that Paul is making. What is Paul referring to when he says, “I consider everything to be a loss”?
Paul had just gotten done talking about how his former life was, frankly speaking, excellent. Paul had excellent credentials. He was a man who was going places. He could have risen high in the ranks of Judaism. He had the right education. He knew the right people. He was a go-getter. Whatever he might have wanted to achieve, he had the talent and the energy to accomplish it. This is what people want. But these are the things that he is referring to when he says, “I consider everything to be a loss for the sake of knowing Christ.”
Let’s put what Paul says into more modern day terms. Paul possessed and was in the process of possessing the best Jewish life of his times. What Paul had, other people really wanted. We live in quite different times, and so people’s idea of what makes for a good life is also different. Just so we can understand the significance of what he means when he says that he considers everything to be loss, let’s put it into today’s terms.
Sometimes folks’ idea of a good life gets put onto decorations. I’ve seen decorations that say, “Faith, Family, Fun.” If we can check those boxes, then it is quite probable that our life is quite nice. Advertisements are always trying to sell us things that are supposed to make us happy. So in order to sell things advertisements will paint an idyllic picture of life for us. Good looking people having good times with good families and good friends. You can paint as idyllic of a picture as you might want. This is what Paul says he considers to be loss.
Why and for what? He considers all these excellencies to be loss because of what is worth far more: Knowing Christ Jesus, his Lord. His answer for why and for what he considers other things to be a loss contains few words, but the words are very important: “Knowing Christ Jesus, our Lord.”
We might think that knowing isn’t that big of a deal. We know lots of things about lots of things. But it’s different when you know someone with power, resources, and authority. When people say that they know the owner, or the governor, or the president, the implication is that such a one can give special treatment. Knowing someone carries with it the connotation that the one saying it is known and (this is important) liked by that person in charge.
There’s something similar with knowing Christ Jesus our Lord. Along with Paul’s knowing of Christ is also his belief in being justified in him, of being right and approved in him. Paul goes on to say that being in Christ means that he does not have a righteousness of his own (which would be rather flabby, hit and miss). He doesn’t have a righteousness that comes from him, which comes from the Law, but that in Christ he has a righteousness that comes through faith in Christ. This is not his own righteousness, but through faith he is given the very righteousness of God. (God’s righteousness is not flabby, but perfect.) So not only does Paul know the One who sits at the right hand of God the Father, with all power and authority, but he also knows according to God’s promises that he is known and liked by that powerful one. That is of great advantage. If we know the president or the governor, that’s one thing. Knowing Christ is more advantageous by orders of magnitude.
But this is where this analogy of knowing someone in the halls of power falls a little flat. When you know powerful people, that might be of great advantage to you, but you might not actually care that much about the person in power. Knowing the governor or the president might just be for the purpose of squeezing something out of that relationship. Knowing the powers that be is for the purpose of getting beyond them—using them—perhaps for wealth or prestige or some other advantage for yourself. That is not how it is with knowing Christ.
With knowing Christ there is nothing beyond him. When you know Christ, you know God. There is no wealth or advantage that is beyond God. Jesus says in John 17: “This is eternal life, knowing the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom God has sent.” Knowing God by knowing Jesus is the end point and the goal. It is eternal life. Knowing God is beyond our comprehension and imagination, but it is the reason why Jesus was sent. It was so that we sinners, having attained a righteousness that is not our own, may know God.
Here we should address a common defect in the way that people look at Jesus. A lot of Christians do not think about knowing Jesus as the goal or the endpoint of their life as a Christian. They consider Jesus to be a means to an end. It’s like he’s someone in high places that you can use toward your own advantage. And so their thinking is like this: All their love, all their energy is in accumulating and enjoying the earthly pleasures of life. Jesus, for them, is just a handy way to have the slate wiped clean when they die. They get their sins forgiven and they don’t end up in hell. This makes Jesus of great advantage to them according to their way of thinking. However, all their love, all their zest, all their interest has nothing to do with God. They love the things of this earth. They want to suck all the marrow out of life so that they are left with nothing but a dry bone when they are through with it.
Knowing Jesus, believing in Jesus, just for the sake of staying out of hell is a very deficient way of thinking. It paints God as being only a judge, only someone who needs to be appeased, so that the good times can keep rolling. What is loved is what has come before—what is loved are the things of this earth. There is no striving and straining for the future. There is no desire to know God, the Creator. What is loved are all the created things. There is no love or very little love for the Fountain and Source of all goodness. “Eternal life is knowing the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom he has sent.”
Bring to mind, again, the times and circumstances in which Paul finds himself. He is writing in chains. Death looms on the horizon. And yet this man writes in this letter, “Rejoice in the Lord always; I will say it again, rejoice.” Paul has his sights set on what lies before him. He is not looking back on his life. Although his life was none too shabby, he considers it to be loss and garbage and even dung compared to the surpassing greatness of knowing Christ. He is on his way forward. He is on his greatest adventure. He is on his way to meet God.
The slight bumps and hiccups that might happen on the way, such as having your head chopped off, are just that—slight bumps and hiccups. As far as you are concerned, it does not seem likely that you will have your head chopped off. The slight bumps and hiccups on your way to meet God might be chemotherapy or paralysis or the inability to breathe. These and many other things are dark clouds. They are going to cause some turbulence. But you are on your way. They are not going to stop you. You are going to reach your destination because God is going to see to it.
Paul says, “There is one thing I do: Forgetting the things that are behind and straining toward the things that are ahead, I press on toward the goal, for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus.” I’d like to point out how different this is from how we normally operate, which is a shame, and what peace we often forfeit thereby.
The normal way that we operate is that we are always looking forward to the prospect of good earthly things happening. We look forward to having bad things go away, and for our future to be filled with pleasant experiences. Even when folks become terminally ill, they often desperately hold on to whatever earthly hopes they can scrape together for themselves. Then, when they are on their deathbed, or after they have died, all of a sudden everybody changes gears. Instead of looking forward to better days (which are no longer possible) they look back on the good days that have been had.
Notice how pretty much the opposite of the way that Paul is thinking. He is not desperate for a change in his fortunes. He’s in chains. He’s on his way to the executioner. If his situation would change and improve, undoubtedly he would thank God for that, but that is not where his sights are set. If it happens, fine. If not, he’ll be fine that way too. This is not of ultimate concern. Instead, his sights are set on what lies ahead. He’s going to meet God. He knows Jesus, therefore he knows God who sent Jesus. He knows that God forgives him and approves of him for Jesus’s sake. He’s on his way to him.
So we might all learn something from Paul today. It’s very different from what is common in general, and even in our own circles. We put too much value on earthly things and hardly consider the greatness of knowing Jesus and knowing God. As someone who knows Christ, and is known by him, you may look forward to your approaching death, not as some kind of screeching halt, but the door to eternal life. Again, as Jesus said, “Eternal life is knowing the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom he has sent.” Death is like turbulence you might experience on an airplane. Maybe the turbulence will be quite rough, distressing and painful. But we get on airplanes to go somewhere. Despite whatever turbulence God will have you experience, there is 100% metaphysical certainty that your plane is going to arrive safely. You are going to meet God.
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We are continuing our series tonight on the witnesses of Christ with the person of Barabbas. There is not much more known about Barabbas than what you heard tonight. The crowd asked Pilate to release Barabbas instead of Jesus.
Barabbas is called a robber. We tend to use the word “robber” and “thief” somewhat interchangeably. There is a difference, however. A robber uses violence to take away your stuff whereas a thief uses stealth.
The only other thing we know about him is that he was involved in a revolt, and that he had committed murder during that revolt. The word for “robber” in Greek can also be used to describe a “revolutionary.” That is why the translation we heard tonight called Barabbas a “rebel.” He was probably part of a group of Jews who resented the foreign occupation of the Romans. They wanted to be free to have their own Jewish state like they used to have back in the days of David and Solomon.
This brings up something that is in the background of the New Testament that we don’t often talk about, but is nevertheless important. It is important in Jesus’s trial before Pontius Pilate. And that is that the Jews really hated the Romans.
They had some good reasons to hate the Romans. The Romans were the big bullies of the ancient world. They acted as though they owned the planet. The Romans thought that they and their culture were better than everybody else’s. They would set up places to worship the Roman state and the Roman gods all over the place. They even tried to do this with the Temple in Jerusalem. A couple Sundays ago you heard about how Pilate had killed some Jewish worshippers in their very act of worship. Unless you were on the Roman government’s payroll, if you were a Jew, you probably didn’t have any time for the Romans.
With all this dissatisfaction in the air, it isn’t surprising that there would be movements afoot to throw off the hated Roman yoke. This is an important force at work during the time of Jesus. It’s even important for how people saw Jesus and the hopes they might have placed in him. Some placed earthly hopes in him. It was earthly hopes that made people most interested in Jesus. The only thing that worries Pontius Pilate is that Jesus claims to be some kind of king. Jesus being king is what was written over Christ’s cross: “Jesus of Nazareth, king of the Jews.”
There was a lot of interest in revolution at that time. Barabbas was a revolutionary. He is a true believer in the Jewish state. He believes in it so much that he is happy to be violent and hard about it. He had taken life in his quest for a free Jewish state.
Ultimately the Jewish thirst for independence is going to be the means by which God brings down his heavy hand upon the Jews who rejected the Christ. About 20-30 years after Jesus was crucified, died, rose from the dead, and ascended into heaven, the political agitators were finally able to get a powerful enough movement together. The Jews pushed the Romans out and took over in that territory. However, soon the Romans came back and they absolutely destroyed the place. Not one stone was left upon another. The slaughter and misery was unprecedented. The temple was destroyed in 70 A. D. like Jesus said it would. It has never been rebuilt to this very day. The Jew’s hatred of the Romans would have dramatic repercussions.
So during Pilate’s examination, he is especially interested in understanding what kind of man he is dealing with. Pilate was the Roman governor. What is this Jew, Jesus, really about? Is he a political threat? Is he one of the insurrectionists?
Our reading tonight clearly shows that Pilate did not think much of Jesus. Pilate asked Jesus, “Are you the king of the Jews?” (a very important question to him).
Jesus responded, “My kingdom is not of this world. If my kingdom were of this world, my servants would fight so that I would not be handed over to the Jews. But now my kingdom is not from here.”
“You are a king then?” Pilate asked.
Jesus answered, “I am, as you say, a king. For this reason I was born, and for this reason I came into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice.”
Pilate responded, “What is truth?”
Immediately after that Pilate goes out to the Jews and tells them that Jesus is not guilty. The implication, as far as Pilate is concerned, is that Jesus is not guilty, he’s just crazy.
Jesus, to Pilate, is a nobody. He doesn’t even have the Jewish officials on his side. His disciples are a bunch of poor fishermen. He comes from the sticks of Galilee. He imagines that he can command an army of angels if he were so inclined. If there was one thing that was certain to Pilate, it was that Jesus was no king, regardless of what he might say.
He has lots of fun at Jesus’s expense in this regard. He dresses him up kind of like a king. He has the title written on Jesus’s cross, “Jesus of Nazareth, king of the Jews.” The soldiers at the cross make fun of him, “How’s it going up there king? How’s that throne feeling?” They think that Jesus’s kingdom is nothing other than a figment of his own imagination.
The shortest creed, or statement of faith, for us Christians is that Jesus is the Christ. That is to say, “Jesus is the king.” The very heart of our faith is that Jesus is the king. However, it is very easy for us to act as though Jesus’s kingdom is imaginary so far as we are concerned too. Other things in life can seem to be vastly more important. Politics, economics, progress—these are the hard and fast, truly important subjects. What does Jesus’s kingdom have to do with such things? Seemingly nothing. And so maybe we shouldn’t be so hard on those folks who were crying out for Barabbas. Maybe we would do the same thing.
Think about it. If you were interested in the welfare of your nation, if you were interested in independence and freedom, if you wanted to take a chunk out of the evil-doers of the human race, which of these two, Jesus or Barabbas, would appear to be the more effective superficially speaking? Barabbas was a Jewish patriot. He had shed blood in defense of his country. Jesus appears to be nothing other than a distraction. He’s getting the people to think about other things besides the Jewish independence movement. He’s pointed out the hypocrisy of the Jewish leaders. He is not making the nation stronger. He’s making it weaker. These are things that could be said about Christ and his Christians up to this very day, and there is an element of truth to it.
As Christians it is important for you to understand that you already have a king. You already have a God. There are many high and noble things that might want you to follow them with your whole heart, but you have already given your heart to another. Christ is king of an eternal kingdom that is not of this world. You are members of this kingdom. Jesus reigns and rules in the hearts of his people by his Holy Spirit from the right hand of God the Father. This kingdom takes precedence over everything else.
Jesus says, “Seek first, the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these other things will be added unto you as well.” People understandably have earthly concerns. We are concerned about our government, our society, our family, our job, what have you. We do not do well when we make these things our gods. They were never meant to be gods. They are created things that are here today and gone tomorrow, even though they are very important. To our flesh they appear to be the most important things.
The most important thing to us, however, is Jesus of Nazareth, king of Jews. The most important thing to us is the cross upon which that title was placed. God the Father sent his Son on a mission which culminated in this cross. It is at the cross, and the battle that was fought there by our king, that we were won for his kingdom. We think politics, economics, and so on are the big and important things. That is only because we are so near-sighted that we are almost blind. We care about the things that are passing away. The bigger and more important things are the eternal things—our relationship with God, whether we are holy or unholy, whether we know the truth, or whether we sneeringly say with Pilate: “What is truth?”
Jesus truly is king. He came. He conquered. He reigns and rules in the hearts of his people from the right hand of God the Father. He will come again to judge the living and the dead. Jesus is at his most glorious when he is suffering in our place at the cross. God suffered for his creatures. God suffered for you. Let the world have its Barabbases. You put your trust in the king whose kingdom is not of this world.
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There is a very old Christian saying: “Pride is the queen of sins.” Pride is at the top. It is unimaginably damaging and sinister. Pride is worse than other sins. It is worse than visiting prostitutes. It is worse than wasting all your money. It is the biggest factor in people failing to fear, love, and trust in God. Pride is a hardening and contributing factor to other sins. I suspect that 99% of the people who go to hell are proud. Only 1% are broken and in despair like poor Judas. There is no greater hindrance to saving faith. It is therefore useful for Christians to learn about pride.
We will consider how pride fights against the keeping of the Ten Commandments with its two tables of the Law. Then we will see how God breaking our pride is a God-sent. There is no better preparation he can give us for believing in the Gospel.
We will begin with pride and the commandments. Pride fights against the first three commandments, the first table of the Law, the commandments that have to do with God. At its root, pride is worship of one’s self. The first commandment says that we are only to worship the Lord our God. Worshipping the Lord our God is unnatural for us. It is natural for us to worship ourselves.
Pride and self-worship afflicts all human beings—young and old, good and bad, those in high places and those in prisons. Smart, beautiful, rich, charming, honorable—glittering specimens of the human race—these people can’t help but gaze in the mirror and be happy with what they see. You might think that these supermen and superwomen have good reason to be proud. We are even taught that we are supposed to strive to be like them, then we can worship ourselves too. But you should know better than that.
What does anybody have that has not been given to him or her? There is nothing that anybody has which has not been given by the Creator. Just to prove that point, when God is gracious, he will sometimes take away those gifts. Until he does that, though, we believe in ourselves. We believe in our smarts, our hard work, our savings, our respectable life, and so on. We believe that we are entitled to blessings and happiness because of what we have and how we have acted. Believing in yourself is very different than believing in the Lord your God. It is a contradiction of the first commandment.
Very quickly I’d like to mention how pride fights against the second and third commandments. Pride causes us to not make use of the Name of the Lord our God. When things are going swimmingly, when we are super-duper awesome, what use have we for prayer?
It is a similar story with the third commandment. What use has a person for God’s Word when they are doing fine on their own, thank you very much? God’s Word is boring. Plus it doesn’t appear to increase wealth, physical fitness, or make anybody get ahead in life. For that the proper books of study are self-help books. Those are the kinds of books that will make you fabulously wealthy or healthy, that is to say, blessed.
Pride is also very destructive for keeping the second table of the law, the commandments that have to do with our fellow human beings. Pride makes us worship ourselves, and we would like it if everyone else would join in on that worship of us too. We’d like to be recognized as the glittering specimens of humanity that we are. Everyone wants to be the smartest, the prettiest, the wealthiest, the strongest, and so on.
Thus we must make our case accordingly. Everybody else has to be degraded, while we have to be promoted. I am not primarily talking about how we speak out loud to one another. We were all taught that this kind of thing is impolite. It will hamper you on your way to the top. I’m talking about how we converse within ourselves in our soul.
If you think about it (normally we do not think about it), but if you think about it, it is appalling what we say within ourselves. We render the harshest judgments. Nobody is spared. Everybody else is doing it wrong. You, and you only, are doing it right. You’ve made judgements about me, and I’ve made judgements about you. If we were to make all the horrible internal dialogue that we engage in public—if we actually told other people what we have thought of them—we wouldn’t have any friends!
We render harsh judgments internally even with those we like and love the best—our best friends, our brothers and our sisters. Think of this even: We do this with our spouse—the one with whom we are one flesh! If we didn’t hold back and keep private the judgments that we make the divorce courts would be even busier than they already are.
Understand that I am not advocating that we should make our private, evil judgments public. They are already more public than they should be. As we grow up sin grows up too. We learn how to make our evil judgments public, but in a subtle way. That way we can continue on with our evil, but won’t get called out for it. Thus we learn how to make public our judgments with raised eyebrows, with snubbing actions, with double-weighted words. If only we could shut up these more subtle things like we’ve learned how to keep our mouths from speaking plain judgements! We would have a pleasanter place to live. So I’m not advocating that we should make our evil internal dialogue public. What I’m pointing out is that we are evil.
Our pride makes us evil. We are easy on ourselves and hard on others. The way it should be is the other way around. We should be hard on ourselves and easy on others. We hate—and I mean hate—it when anything negative is pointed out about us. We secretly love it when negative things are pointed out about others. We love to hear good things about us. We get bored when we hear good things about others.
The world thinks that we have made so much progress. We know so many things about so many things. We have made zero progress, however, when it comes to the most important thing that makes us all miserable. We’ve made zero progress in combating pride. In fact, all our progress in other areas has only made us prouder. Not only do most people consider pride not to be a sin, they consider it to be a virtue. Books get written, curricula in schools get formulated, for the very purpose of making us prouder. And this is some teaching that we can all really get behind, because it is the very thing that our flesh can’t get enough of.
Pride is the queen of sins.
In order to slaughter this queen God has been known to take some drastic actions. If God is gracious he will humble us. If we are wise we will use this for our benefit.
Consider what we heard in our Gospel reading today. The worst thing that could have happened to that younger, prodigal son would be that somehow, some way, the money kept flowing in. Maybe he made some good investments or something so that he could continue on with his enjoyable lifestyle. He would have continued with his spiritual slumber while having a good time.
For him God’s wrath was God’s mercy. God stripped him to the bone. God broke his pride. He was ready and willing to accept a whole different arrangement with his father than he had before. Before he proudly asked his father for his inheritance so that he could be done with him. After God broke his pride he was willing to work as one of his father’s hired hands. In this way he was prepared to receive the grace and mercy of his father and appreciate it.
The older brother, on the other hand, did not have his pride broken. Furthermore, this older brother went further. He wrapped up his pride with pious looking clothes and pious sounding phrases. Thereby he doubly insulated himself from actually being converted like his little brother was. He doesn’t think he has done anything wrong. He can’t think of any sin. And perhaps we can grant him that in a very limited sense. Perhaps we can grant that he hasn’t done too much wrong—outwardly.
Outwardly he has followed the rules somewhat. Outwardly he has obeyed his father somewhat. But how are things inwardly? We actually catch a glimpse of that at the end of the reading. The older brother hates everybody. He hates his father. He hates his brother. He thinks his father is stingy and mean—not even giving him a goat, to say nothing about a rich and tender grain-fed calf! And then, who does he give such nice gifts to? His good-for-nothing brother. He probably wasted all his money on prostitutes! I’ve never wasted my money on prostitutes. I deserve everything I have and more.
The example of this older brother is of special concern to us who gather around God’s Word and Sacraments. People who live to pursue pleasure will go to hell. I’m sure this makes the devil happy. But I wonder if it doesn’t make him even happier if he is able to take people to hell who are life-long members of congregations who come to church every Sunday. I have to believe this gives him more pleasure. We are people who are surrounded by the riches of the Father. “Everything that is mine is yours,” he says. And yet by our pride and judgments of others, while neglecting judgment of ourselves, reveal our true colors. We show to whom we belong.
If you cannot empathize with any and every sinner, then you are no Christian. If you believe that you are above other people, then you are no Christian. You must understand yourself to be a full member of the common class of “sinner.” I’m not urging you just to pretend that you are a sinner, or that you should just say it so as to please me. Pretending or faking won’t cut it. You must understand and believe that you are not better than anybody else.
Supposing that you were better, supposing that you did manage to keep every other commandment, pride is still the queen of sins. This finely dressed lady will drag you down into hell just as surely as any other sin that doesn’t wear as nice of clothes. That’s what makes her so tricky. She doesn’t look half as bad as more grotesque things. However, there is no worse commandment to break than the first one. Whenever we compare ourselves to others and sing our own praises, we are worshipping ourselves.
May God be gracious to us and continue to break our pride until we have safely made it into the grave. Pride attacks everyone. Old people do not outgrow it. In fact, old people only grow more prone to pride. There is no other sin that is so destructive to faith. This is why it rightly has been said to be the queen of sins.
I’d like to close with yet another Christian saying that I have gotten from somebody else, who said that he got it from yet another. He said, “The task of evangelism is one beggar telling another beggar where to get bread.” Beggars can’t be too proud. Christians are beggars. The only difference between a Christian and a non-Christian is that the Christian has been told where there is a heavenly Father who will run out to greet us, throw his arms around our neck, kiss us, put a robe on us, a ring on our finger, and will celebrate and make merry. He who was lost is found. He who was dead is alive again.
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God is in control of all things. Day by day he gives us our body and soul, eyes, ears, and all our members, our reason and all our senses. Day by day he gives us our clothing and shoes, food and drink, house and home, wife and children. Day by day he gives all that we need to support this body and life. What is more fundamental to being God than this activity? God being God means that he gives and works everything.
This extends to things that can make us nervous, to say the least. God is not evil. The devil is evil. God tempts no one. And yet God is the one who keeps this world going. If God didn’t sustain the devil, the devil would be no more. If God didn’t sustain evil-doers, the evil-doers would be no more. If God didn’t sustain viruses, they would be no more. And so God is involved in whatsoever should happen on this earth. If God wasn’t behind everything that happened on this earth, then he actually would either not be God, or there would have to be other gods besides him who are working these things.
Most people do not enjoy thinking about how God is the one who works everything. Cancer, for example, is bad enough. The thought that somehow God is behind it can be terrifying. Perhaps you were nervous about what Jesus said in the Gospel reading this past Sunday. He made it seem that God was behind Pilate’s mixing of the worshippers’ blood with the sacrifices. He made it seem that God had made the tower fall. Jesus concluded both of these things by saying, “Repent, otherwise you will perish too.”
Unfortunately this truth, that God is in control of everything, that God works everything, has been withheld from you and me even though it is not hard to find in the Bible. It has been withheld because it has been thought that God needs some better public relations. God needs to be sold to people, otherwise they won’t extend the curtesy of believing in him.
That is totally backwards, however. It’s as though we are gods, and we get to pick whether or not God should be recognized. That is utterly stupid and so unbelievably unbiblical. The only way people have gotten away with thinking such things is because they never read the Bible.
God exists. God is in control of all things. Not one sparrow falls to the ground apart from him. The hairs on your head are numbered. It’s not like God goes on vacation when bad things happen. He works all in all. Whether you like this fact or not is beside the point. Whether you like God or not doesn’t change the fact that he exists and works all things. He is going to continue existing. You not liking him just means that you are his enemy and not his friend.
If this frightens you, then that’s good. It means that you are paying attention and taking this seriously. The Bible says dozens of times that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.
Now it might sound as though I’ve been trying to unload on you all kinds of bad news. It might sound as though I want you to think negatively about God. That is not my intention. God is good. My intention is to show you that you are not God. There are no other gods besides the one true God. It is neither safe nor right to ignore God, or the fact that he is in control of all things. You are not in control. Your money is not in control. America is not in control. We and all things are under God’s control.
When you accept that God is in control of all things it is going to change your perception of what is going on. When God sends you good things, and you recognize that they come from him, you can give him thanks. Our fallen, sinful flesh makes this very hard for us. (We are much more prone to be blind to God’s goodness, to grumble, or even to attribute good things to our own powers and abilities.) Nonetheless, when good things happen, you can thank God.
When bad things happen, you can know that God is in control of them. He will place a boundary on them. We do not know how everything will go, but it will go how God wants it to go. And we know by the good news of God, by the Gospel, that we are justified before God for Jesus’s sake. By baptism and through faith in Jesus we have a loving Father. The difficulties and troubles he sends our way is his discipline. We don't know the way it will go, when it will end, or how much it will hurt, but God, who loves us, is the one who does it. He will remain faithful to his promises to us. Therefore, we should also love and trust in him and gladly do what he commands.
Let us now apply this to Peter. A bit of knowledge that is helpful to know about Peter is that before this he had sworn up and down that he would never leave Jesus. He would die, if need be. Jesus could count on him. Jesus responded, “Peter, before the rooster crows, you will deny me three times. The Shepherd will be struck and the sheep will be scattered.”
In whom did Peter believe? He believed in himself. We like believing in ourselves. It makes us feel strong and good. Unfortunately, the truth is that we are neither strong nor good.
Did you notice what Paul said in our Epistle reading? God gave him a thorn in the flesh, a messenger of Satan, to prevent him from believing in himself. Paul didn’t like this thorn. He wanted to be rid of it. But the Lord said, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” Paul goes on to say that he will gladly, with pleasure, take delight or boast about his weaknesses. Do people boast about their weaknesses? I should say not. They boast about their powers. Paul, however, boasts about his weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may rest upon him. For when he is weak, then he is strong.
What happened with Peter was that when he was questioned about being Jesus’s disciple, he was not content to be weak. He was afraid of letting God direct him wherever that might be. He took the matter into his own hands, he denied Christ, because he did not want to be arrested. After all, he had cut off Malchus’s ear, right? Attempted murder. Assault and battery at the very least. And so Peter lies. “I don’t know Jesus.” Jesus is the very linchpin of our relationship with God who works all things, and here Peter throws him away.
What would be the alternative? Peter could have kept the commandments of God, entrusting himself to God, and let what happens happen. Maybe he would have been arrested. Would that have made God cease to exist? Maybe he would have been beaten to a pulp. Would that make God not be in control any more?
Ultimately, many years later, at the end of Peter’s life, this kind of thing happened again, except the outcome was very different. After Peter sinned, Jesus forgave, restored, and strengthened Peter before he ascended into heaven. The Holy Spirit empowered Peter to preach a very dangerous sermon about Jesus to the people of Jerusalem at Pentecost. Ultimately Peter would be crucified for preaching the good news, the Gospel, that God is well pleased with sinners for the sake of Jesus. What Peter was afraid of happening to him on this night when Jesus was betrayed, actually happened to him many years later, except this second time he confessed Jesus rather than denying him. He, according to church legend, was crucified upside down.
There is something extremely practical and applicable here for you. You probably don’t remember the first time that you lied, but you can probably figure out why you did. Why did you lie? It was because you were afraid of what would happen to you. You wanted to avoid it. And guess what? It probably appeared to work like a charm. What you were afraid of happening didn’t happen.
However, at the same time that you lied, what you were not afraid of happening—what you probably didn’t even think about—did happen. By your lying you were alienated from God. You managed things how you wanted them to go, but at the same time you were disbelieving in God and you broke his commandments. You cozied up, not to the heavenly Father, but to the father of lies.
What more practical thing can I say to you than that you shouldn’t lie? If you’ve done wrong don’t lie about it. Not lying about it may very well mean that you will be punished. You will have some negative experiences that you’d rather avoid. Do not let the fear of negative experiences run your life. Will negative experiences somehow make God cease to exist? Of course not! Will negative experiences make God cease to be in control of everything, including your life, including your punishment? Of course not! God will continue to exist. You will be much better off commending yourself to him, putting your trust in him, believing that he accepts you and loves you for the sake of Christ, than cozying up to the devil for your comfort by making use of lies.
It is truly the case that we know not what we do. By nature we are so utterly stupid and blind when it comes to spiritual matters. We think that the truth is bad and the lies are good. God is bad and mean. The devil is nice and lenient.
It is much better, much safer, much richer for you to believe and acknowledge the truth. God is in control of all things. If this makes you afraid, that’s okay. It’s a lot better to be afraid of God than to think he is some stupid stooge of yours or that he doesn’t exist. But, in truth, we shouldn’t be afraid. We have God’s promise of love to us in Jesus. God loves us and is approving of us because of Jesus. Therefore, whatever should happen to us, will be for our good—even if we don’t enjoy it for the moment. As Paul says, “All things work together for the good of those who love God.”
Peter was glorified, being loved by God, when he was crucified upside down. I don’t know what is in your future. Know this: God is in control. God is for you in Jesus, even if it doesn’t look like he is for you. We know that God is for you because that is what he says, and God is not a liar.
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I’m a little frightened to do what I’m about to do. I’m going to put the scenario in our Gospel reading into a hypothetical, contemporary situation. I’m afraid that you’re not going to like it, because Jesus thinks and speaks differently than we do. But I’m going to do it anyway, because what’s the point of being a Christian if you don’t listen to Christ? So here goes.
Did you hear what Vladimir Putin did the other day? He had his soldiers waiting in ambush at a Ukrainian church. There were some old ladies who made their way into church to pray. So Putin had their tongues cut out and hung on the altar.
Let me be clear, this is not what Vladimir Putin did. I made it up. But it is actually mild compared to what some people told Jesus in our Gospel reading today. They gave a news report: Pilate killed some Galileans (Galilee is where Jesus and the apostles were from). Pilate the pagan, Roman governor killed them in church. They were making sacrifices. The blood of these men ended up being mixed with the blood of the animals that they were sacrificing. They didn’t just have their tongues cut out, like in my hypothetical story. They were killed.
Now if you had heard my fake story about Vladimir Putin and believed it to be true, what would you be thinking about? Especially if you personally knew the victims, like perhaps Jesus and the apostles knew the victims under Pilate, what would you being thinking about? You’d be thinking: What a monster! How cruel! Shame on him! How can we get pay-back? How can he cut people’s tongues out? Your thoughts would paint him black as coal with horn and fangs.
If your thoughts turned to the victims you’d probably paint them as white as doves. Those poor old ladies—how scared they must have been! Those poor Galileans—just trying to go to church in Jerusalem.
The people in Bible times were made of the same flesh and blood that we have. Those people who turned on the news for Jesus, letting him know about the dastardly deeds of Pilate, were expecting Jesus to be outraged at that pagan, Pontius Pilate, and feel sorry for those victims. Where did Jesus send their thoughts? Not where you’d expect. First he sent their thoughts to whether the victims deserved it or not. Then he had them examine themselves.
He said, “Do you think that these Galileans were worse sinners than all the other Galileans because they suffered these things? I tell you, no. But unless you repent, you will all perish too.”
Again, I don’t want to do this, but let me put it into my fake scenario: “Do you think those old Ukrainian women were worse sinners than the rest of the Ukrainians? I tell you, no. But unless you repent, you will have your tongues cut out too.”
I am not going to waste my breath trying to make what Jesus says here palatable to unbelievers. Unbelievers will think he is monstrous. There were plenty of people who didn’t like Jesus back then too. The flesh and blood that they had is the same flesh and blood that we have. Those who hate Jesus cannot learn anything from him. And Jesus is teaching something. What is he teaching?
First of all, Jesus is taking away two forms of justification that we find palatable and handy. We figure that a person is justified either by shifting the blame to someone else—where they are the bad ones, or we figure we are justified if we have gone through a nasty bit of suffering. You can use one of the other, but we like it best when we have a combination of both. Let me explain each of these justifications.
We figure that we are justified if someone else is nastier than us. We are always on the lookout for someone nastier than us. I think this is why we like gossip so much. It’s why we like hearing about dastardly deeds of others. If other people are horrible, then we don’t look so bad in comparison.
Note that this is what happens with God’s questioning in the Garden. Adam blames Eve and says to God. “If it wasn’t for the woman that you, God, put here with me, I never would have eaten.” Eve blames the serpent. The serpent’s a lot worse than she is. But they are not thereby justified. Each of us is responsible for his or her sins. Pointing to someone nastier than us doesn’t make those sins go away.
We also want to justify ourselves by the suffering that we have gone through. We had a rough childhood. We’ve been mistreated by this person and that person and the other person. Our tongues were cut out. Our blood was splashed on the sacrifices. Surely someone who has had a miserable life has to have a better one in the next! Justice demands it. Whoever doesn’t think so must be a monster.
The fact is our suffering never atones for a single sin. Our suffering isn’t at all redeeming. If anything it is nothing other than what we simply deserve. “I, a poor, miserable sinner, deserve present and eternal punishment.”
Even unbelievers should be able to see that our suffering isn’t that noble or commendable. We immediately resent the suffering as soon as it comes upon us. We hardly ever are cheerful while we are going through it. We look for someone to blame for what we have suffered—it’s the doctor’s fault; it’s the tobacco company’s fault.
Probably the worst thing that we do with our suffering is we use it as an excuse to do bad things. I had a rough life, so I’m entitled to drown my sorrows. I was treated like garbage by my parents, so I can treat my children like garbage. My spouse hurt me, so I’m entitled to hurt right back.
I mentioned that we like it best when we can use both of these things to justify ourselves. We like it when there’s some villain out there. We figure we can never be tossed into the same basket as a Hitler or a Stalin. We’re not that bad. Look at their sins, not my sins. If we do have to look at me, then look how sad we are. Poor, poor me! Look what I’ve gone through! Everybody should feel so sorry for me.
The reason why Jesus sounds like such a jerk is that he cuts straight through these justifications that we like to rely upon. They’re no good, though. You will never be justified by the badness of other people. You will never be justified by your sad story. You are responsible to God for your life. God is not swayed by popular opinion. He does not accept these justifications as being valid. This is what Jesus points out with his words.
Jesus says, “Do you think that these Galileans were worse sinners than all the other Galileans?” Jesus brings to mind that the victims of this crime were sinners. That’s a big no-no. Very insensitive. Then he says that they were just like everybody else. They weren’t worse sinners. Oh good. Notice what he is doing there. He is tossing everyone into the same basket. He’s tossing you into the same basket as the Hitlers and the Stalins. Then he says, “Unless you all repent, you likewise will perish.”
Here we had all been enjoying ourselves, listening to the news, appalled at the villains and having oh-so-tender of a heart for the victims, (we really do have a heart of gold, you know,) and then Jesus has to come along and ruin it! He very rudely redirects our attention away from others onto ourselves: “Unless you repent, you likewise will perish!”
It is the easiest thing in the world for us to go through life without giving a second thought to our own responsibility. We can live our entire life feeling sorry for ourselves. We can blame this person and that person. We alternate between the thoughts, “Shame on them!” and “Poor, poor me.” If there is anything wrong with me, then it must be somebody else’s fault. If there is anything wrong with me, surely it can’t be as bad as what others have done. We love this stuff. You know why? Because it excuses us and gives us license to live however we might want—within bounds of course. We can’t go cutting old ladies’ tongues out or anything.
But, you know what? Sometimes those who do such awful things end up getting ahead. Maybe there are more Christians in prisons who have done horrible things than there are in some of our congregations. (Assuming there are preachers of the Gospel in those places.) You know why? Because some of them have had their favorite justifications taken away. They don’t play the stupid games that the rest of us do. They can’t pretend that they are not evil. That is to say, they repent. They know that it is their own fault. That is something that is extremely rare.
Wide is the gate and easy is the way that leads to destruction. Narrow is the gate and hard is the way that leads to eternal life. There is nothing more common in this world than for people to justify themselves. While they justify themselves they feel entitled to do whatever they please—again, within reason, of course. There is hardly anything rarer than those who confess they are without excuse. They have no justification. “God, be merciful to me, a sinner.” That is the hard way that leads to eternal life, because we have to admit that God is right when he judges me. Of course God is also right when he says that he justifies me in Jesus Christ.
Jesus’s words are always going to sound impolite. He is taking away the ways that we prefer to deal with life. We prefer to live our life in such a way where we don’t really have to think about God. It goes without saying, then, that we don’t want to think of God being involved in our life in such a way where he would cause a tower to fall on us. We prefer our own justifications of ourselves to God’s justification of us in Jesus Christ. With our own justifications of ourselves we believe that we are sitting in the driver’s seat of our lives. We retain our dignity by looking down on others. Whatever is wrong is mostly somebody else’s fault.
What’s wrong is not Putin’s fault, it’s not the Ukrainians’ fault, it’s not Biden’s fault, it’s not Trump’s fault, it’s not the Democrats’ fault, it’s not the Republicans’ fault. Our nation is filled to the brim with smug, self-righteous people, who are all too eager to condemn each other and, while they’re at it, fleece each other out of house and home if that is at all possible. We pay attention to everything everybody else is doing wrong while we live however we want. We never consider that it is our own fault.
Think about that. Everybody knows we’re in a terrible mess. That’s about the only thing we all agree on. The proper way that we, as Christ’s disciples, should think about this is that it’s our fault. God is punishing us for our sins. We should repent lest we likewise perish. Those so-called “little sins” that we do—they are hardly worth mentioning compared cutting out tongues and other such things—what if it is our daily, run-of-the-mill unrighteousness that has brought upon us our calamities?
It is never that beneficial to focus on other people’s sins. If God has given you the authority and task of watching over others, then, by all means, do the job God has given you to do with fearlessness and gusto. But focusing on other people’s sins never, ever brings about an improvement in ourselves. We always come away from such activity feeling superior, feeling justified. That, however, is a fake, sin-producing, flimsy justification.
It is only Jesus’s justification, Jesus’s atonement, that has stomped down evil and will ultimately stomp it down completely. Jesus’s justification makes justice roll down as waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.
We cannot justify ourselves. We cannot fix ourselves. But God forgives those who repent. He heals those who are wounded. God does such a better job at being God than we ever will. Let God be God. You strive to be his faithful creature. Repent, and believe in Jesus.
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Today I’d like to speak about how we, as Christians, are to act towards the authorities that have been placed over us. Our Gospel reading today affords us that opportunity because Jesus is teaching the Pharisees how they should deal with Herod. This is applicable also to us, even though our authorities are quite different than Herod.
Before we get into that, however, let’s say a little bit about these Pharisees. Pharisees were Jews who were especially committed to the idea of being the people of God. They were very serious about their Judaism. They were a reform movement. They wanted people to change for the better. Changing for the better meant paying more attention to the Bible. That’s all well and good. Changing for the better also meant paying attention to all the commentators on the Bible. That was not always as good. The commentators sometimes went above and beyond what the Bible said. This brought the Pharisees into conflict with Jesus.
For example, God commanded the Old Testament believers to do no work on Saturday. God never intended that all activity without exception should cease. The Pharisees didn’t want to break this commandment, though, so they added some prohibitions to make sure they didn’t. When Jesus or his disciples didn’t follow these man-made rules, it made the Pharisees very upset. Some concluded that despite whatever else Jesus might say or do, he must be evil.
The Pharisees are a mixed bag, so to speak. It was good that they wanted to be very serious about the Bible. Through their devotion to the Bible many of them were very serious about the Lord God. Others were more devoted to sounding smart, attaining a high position in the church, and bossing everyone else around. At best the Pharisees were suspicious of Jesus because he didn’t accept all their man-made rules. At worst they regarded him as an agent of Satan.
Therefore I’m not sure what to make of the advice they give to Jesus at the beginning of our Gospel reading. They say to Jesus, “You better go away and never come back because Herod, the ruler of Galilee, wants to kill you.” Do they care for Jesus’s safety? Or do they want him just to go away? In a way Jesus and the Pharisees are on the same side as compared to Herod. Jesus and the Pharisees are serious about God’s Word and living faithfully. Herod lived for pleasure. Whatever the Pharisee’s motives might have been, Jesus’s response is remarkable.
The Pharisees had said to Jesus, “You better go away and never come back because Herod wants to kill you.” Jesus responded with some advice of his own: “You better go and tell that fox, Herod, that I’m busy. I’m going to be driving out demons and healing people today and tomorrow and on the third day I will reach my goal, on so on.”
Jesus could have just told the Pharisees that he wasn’t worried about Herod. He’d be fine. Instead he returns their imperative with an imperative of his own. They said, “You better go away and never come back.” Jesus said, “You better go and tell Herod what I’m doing.” If the Pharisees went and told Herod about Jesus, and if Herod really did want to kill Jesus, then Herod would put a target not only on Jesus’s back, but also on these Pharisees. If the Pharisees went to talk to Herod they might be killed, or, at the very least, they would be inviting trouble upon themselves.
Here we should talk about something that is quite important and quite clear in the New Testament: How we should relate to those in authority over us. How should we act towards those placed over us, like Herod was placed over the people who lived in Galilee? Jesus and the apostles teach us two things. On the one hand we are to submit to whoever the authorities might be. On the other hand we are boldly to testify the truth. We are to confess Jesus and his saving deeds, just as Jesus was urging these Pharisees to do with Herod. Whether the Herods of this world then would like to chop off our heads like Herod did to John the Baptist—so be it. We Christians are not living for pleasure and worldly gain. We’re strangers here. Heaven is our home.
Let’s talk some more about these two things that Christians are taught to do. We’ll begin with how we are to submit to whoever the authorities might be. The fourth commandment says that we are to honor our father and our mother. What does this mean? We should fear and love God so that we do not despise or anger our parents and other authorities. The obedience that we are to have towards our father and our mother is to extend also to those placed in authority in the other realms of life besides the family. We are to honor the authorities placed over us in school, at work, or in government.
Paul says in Romans 13: “Everyone must submit to the governing authorities. This is because no authority exists except by God, and the authorities that do exist have been established by God.” Paul teaches us something very important here. Whoever it is that has attained authority has done so by God putting them there. God does not just put the good rulers into place. He also puts the bad rulers into place, quite likely as punishment for our sins.
For example, Herod was not a good man, neither was Herod’s father, Herod the great. Herod of Galilee chopped off John the Baptist’s head. Herod the great, his father, sent troops to murder the baby boys of Bethlehem, hoping to kill the baby Jesus before he could grow up and become a threat. Regardless of all this evil, by the connections that Herod and his family had with Rome, they were the rulers in this area. God is the one who put them there. God can also take them out. But it’s not up to us to do that. Jesus does not say to the Pharisees: “You better go and assassinate Herod.” He says, “You better go and testify to me.”
Let us also take note of what Jesus says to Pontius Pilate. Pontius Pilate was the Roman governor of that region. The Jews grudgingly brought Jesus before Pontius Pilate because they could no longer execute whomever they wished. They needed the Roman governor’s approval for that. At one point during Pilate’s questioning of Jesus, Jesus did not answer. Pilate responded: “Are you not talking to me? Don’t you know that I have the authority to release you or to crucify you?” Jesus answered (and this is where I’d like to pay close attention): “You would have no authority over me at all if it had not been given to you from above.”
Jesus does not deny that Pilate has authority. Jesus does not say, “You are a wicked man so I am not bound to you.” Jesus does not seek to overthrow the government. Jesus also informs Pilate that his authority is not just his own. This is probably the way that Pilate felt about his position. He probably thought that he was his own man, he had made his own way, all that he had was because of him and his actions. But Jesus says that the authority Pilate has was given to him “from above,” that is, “from God.” Pilate is not God. He doesn’t have this authority of himself or because of himself. God gave him this authority and therefore Pilate is answerable to God for how he uses that authority.
There is more that we could say about this. There are other important passages that we could look at. We’ve established, though, that we are to submit to whoever the authorities might be, because God is the one who has put them there. If God wants to remove or replace someone, he can do that as easily as simply ending their life.
The second thing that we are taught by Jesus and the apostles, which is likewise crystal clear, is that we are to speak the truth and to testify to Jesus.
We see this also with the example of Jesus before Pilate. Jesus did not beg Pilate to save his life. He did not submit to Pilate in any way where he would give up the truth. Jesus could have very easily gotten out of trouble if only he would have said, “I am not a king.” That’s the charge that is placed at the top of his cross: “Jesus of Nazareth, king of the Jews.” Pilate would have let him go if only he would have submitted to Pilate and the Caesar—if he would have let them determine what was true and not true.
But submitting to the authorities who are governing has limits. We must submit to them when it comes to the things of this world. We have to pay our taxes and obey the laws. However, if the government begins to want to teach what is right and wrong, if it wants to teach things that are contrary to what God teaches, if the government wants to stop the proclamation of the Gospel, then Christians must not submit on pains of losing their salvation. Governments can rule our bodies, our earthly life. They absolutely cannot rule our souls. No man and no created thing is to rule our souls. Our souls are to be ruled by God alone, by the Holy Spirit alone. We can testify before Pilate or before Herod or before the supreme ruler of the earth what God has taught us.
In fact, not only canwe testify, but we are to be aggressive with our testimony. Peter and John were once commanded by the authorities in Jerusalem to quit preaching that Jesus is the Christ. Peter and John said that they would not do that. They had to obey God rather than men. When Peter and John didn’t quit with their testifying, the Jerusalem authorities beat them to a pulp. What did Peter and John do then? They rejoiced that they had been counted worthy of suffering for the Name of Jesus. Peter and John didn’t keep their Christianity secret so as to avoid being punished.
You see the same thing with Jesus in our Gospel reading today. The Pharisees tell Jesus that he should flee. Jesus tells them that they should testify before that murderous Herod. Not only can we testify to the truth and to the Gospel of Jesus before those in high places, we must testify regardless of the consequences. If we suffer on account of that, then we should rejoice like Peter and John. If we should die on account of that testimony, then we can hear those precious words spoken by God himself: “Well done, my good and faithful servant! Enter into the joy of your master.”
By nature we cannot like either of these two things that Jesus and the apostles teach us. By nature we do not want to submit to the authorities who are governing. We don’t want to acknowledge that God is the one who has put them in that position for the time being. This is similar and this is related to the way that we don’t like submitting to our father and our mother. It’s fine if mom and dad want the same things I want, but if they tell us to do something we don’t like, then we are thoroughly annoyed. The same thing is true with the government.
The same thing is true with the other point. We don’t like it. We don’t want to embrace the freedom that we have been given to testify to the truth and testify to Jesus. Testifying might cause us trouble. Put yourself in the shoes of those Pharisees, assuming that there was a real threat and they weren’t just trying to get rid of Jesus. Do you want to let a hostile power know that you are on the other side? What might that hostile power do to you?
Fear is a powerful weapon that the devil uses to great effect to stop the most important and life-giving function on earth. Fear prevents us from challenging lies and speaking the truth. Fear prevents us from testifying about Jesus—not just before hostile authorities, but even with friends and family. But Jesus has a word for us concerning this fear. He says, “Do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather, fear the One (that is, fear God) who is able to destroy both soul and body in hell.”
In a way it’s a little ridiculous that we are afraid at all. The devil’s lies are very flimsy if only we would look at them rightly. God is in charge of all things. What good can it do anyone to curry all the favor in the world—even to have the powers that be shower gifts and honor down upon us, but to anger God or be ashamed of Jesus?
On the other hand, since God is in control of all things, we should be bold with the truth God has taught us and the proclamation that Jesus has risen from the dead at sits at God’s right hand. God is on our side. He will not leave us nor forsake us. This does mean that we will suffer. Evil powers will see to that. But they are on the losing side. With Jesus you are on the winning side. Suffering is not the worst thing. Being cut off from God is the worst thing. Whatever troubles God lays upon us he will also give us the strength to go through them.
Luther’s hymn says: A mighty fortress is our God, a trusty shield and weapon. He helps us free from every need that hath us now o’ertaken.
And again it says: And take they our life, goods, fame, child, and wife, though these all be gone, our vict’ry has been won; The Kingdom ours remaineth.
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Nobody had to teach us to have an unbelieving attitude towards life. What I mean by an unbelieving attitude is that we ignore God. He is the one from whom all things come. As we are by nature our thoughts do not rise up that high. We get up, make breakfast, and start in on whatever it is that we do. Little thought, or, more likely, no thought at all is given to the one who gave us a comfortable bed, who made the sun shine, who gives us good things to eat. Every day is filled to the brim with wonderful gifts from our Creator. We pay him no attention, though, or, at best, very little.
Our thoughts are occupied with all sorts of other things—how to get ahead, how well or poorly we are doing, what’s going on in Washington. How we conduct our affairs and what is going on in the country are taken to be the very serious and very important things. Thinking of God giving us all kinds of gifts is not going to add to the bottom line. It’s not going to promote progress. It’s taken to be almost something bad—like daydreaming. Work is the god who is going to bless us. Wasting time thinking about the true God is a sin.
Here we are getting closer to understanding why we naturally act the way that we do. People aren’t stupid, particularly when it comes to the things that have to do with the bottom line. So why should a person waste his or her time with the Lord God when there are other ways to be much more productive? That is to say, the reason why we don’t thank and praise the Lord God is because it doesn’t work. Since when did this help anybody?
The way to get ahead in life is to work harder than everybody else, be smarter than everybody else, be more charming than everybody else, be prettier than everybody else. It’s all up to you. God’s not going to take care of you. You have to take care of yourself. If you don’t take care of yourself, then you are screwed. So why would you waste time on anything that doesn’t have the possibility of making you more competitive? You wouldn’t. You’re not stupid. You know what works.
Here we have perhaps the root of all sinfulness. The root of all sinfulness is that the Lord God can’t help me, or, perhaps, the Lord God won’t help me. The first temptation was that Adam and Eve would be better off on their own. They could be like God if they believed in themselves and never gave up. Afterwards, when they heard God walking through the Garden in the cool of the day, it didn’t even occur to them to ask for or expect help from God. They thought it much wiser to pretend that nothing had happened. Then they thought it much wiser to lie about what happened. It was someone else’s fault, you see.
This stupidity has been passed down from one generation to the next. The worthlessness of God on the one hand, and the much better results that can be expected by relying upon other things on the other hand—this is the thread that runs through all subsequent sin. This is true of the out-and-out unbelievers, such as the descendants of Cain, who relied upon their industry and technology for their blessings, as well as those who should have known better such as the Israelites. The Israelites in the wilderness were constantly saying, “We’re going to die. We’re going to die.” They constantly were desiring to go back to Egypt. Several times they rebelled in order to go back. Either the Lord God can’t help or he won’t help. We will be much better blessed in some other way.
This thread, which runs through all sinfulness, can be seen in why we break the Ten Commandments.
1st commandment: We do not fear, love, and trust in God because other things will work better.
2nd commandment: We do not call upon his name because it won’t do us any good.
3rd commandment: We do not gladly hear and learn his Word because there are better things we can do with our time.
4th commandment: We do not honor our parents and other authorities because we know better how to be happy.
5th commandment: We get angry and seek revenge because if we don’t do it, nobody else will.
6th commandment: We pursue sexual gratification in other people and other things besides the spouse God has given us or will give to us because what God has given or will give is not good enough.
7th commandment: We take what doesn’t belong to us or cheat to get more than we should because God won’t give us what we want.
8th commandment: We lie so as to avoid punishment and to make ourselves look better than what we really are.
9th and 10th commandments: We don’t think that the Lord God will take care of us, so we look for our blessing in those things that he hasn’t given to us.
The reigning and ruling assumption in our sin-darkened minds is that God can’t help us or God won’t help us. Or, with those who know him, such as the Israelites and us Christians, he is thought to be rather stingy. He doesn’t always give us all that we might want, or he might not give it to us as quickly as we want. So we better take it into our own hands to make sure that we get what we want.
On the other hand, sometimes God sends things our way that we don’t like such as sickness, the loss of wealth, or other troubles. A god that would be more to our own liking would only think like we think and act how we would act. That is to say, we think that we would be better gods than the one who actually exists. And so, like the Israelites, we grumble. If only God would do everything we think he should do.
One of the most important questions in life is whether God is actually good. This can sound like a Philosophy 101 kind of question, and we don’t care much for philosophy majors. It can also sound like a question that we already obviously know the answer to. The Sunday School answer is that of course God is good. How could it be otherwise? But I would present to you that this is a very personal question. Is God good to you?
One clue that this question is important is how little we think about it. Our spiritual enemies have a way of preventing us from asking the right questions. We don’t think about whether God is good. We just wake up, make our breakfast, and go about our day. The routines, the cares, and the concerns of this world, run our life as we go from one task to the next. The question of whether God is good to you rarely (if ever) occurs. Maybe we assume that we already know the answer, and, of course, the correct answer is “yes.” We go to church, don’t we? Obviously the answer must be “yes.”
Although our mouth might say, “yes,” our heart might be elsewhere. We might say “yes” with our mouth, but our heart is not interested in thanking and praising God. We’ll say “yes” but what about all those dark and ugly things? Then we might not even want to say yes with our mouths anymore. What about childhood cancer? What about all the cruelty, suffering, grief, and death? Think of poor Job. God allowed Job to be stripped to the bone. Is a God like that still good? That’s the very question that Job kept on asking. It takes up most of text in that rather lengthy book.
Job remained confounded and perplexed until God finally spoke to him from the whirlwind. That doesn’t come until chapter 38. Basically God says to hurting Job, “Who do you think you are? Are you God? Can you do what I can do?” This is what made the fever break for Job. He quit trying to be God’s teacher, praising God when God did something to his liking, frowning at God when he sent something unpleasant. Job quit competing with God as a rival, wiser God. He embraced his role of being a creature. The bones that God had broken rejoiced.
It is good to be a creature. When we think we are gods we are not very happy. We aren’t meant to be in control of all things. We aren’t meant to understand all things. We aren’t meant to judge all things. Our lives as creatures is such where we see what our Creator has in store for us. These are things that God does.
The Psalm says, “The eyes of all look to you, O Lord, and you give them their food at the proper time. You open your hand and satisfy the desires of every living thing.” As creatures who believe in the Creator we can be certain that he can help us and he will help us. I won’t always know how. Sometimes it might appear as though he can’t or he won’t, but that’s not up to me as a creature to know. That’s God’s job. Leave it to him and be at peace.
In our Gospel reading today we heard about Jesus being tempted. Jesus is a man, a human being, just like every one of us. As the Scriptures say, “He was tempted in every way just as we are, but without sin.” So in our Gospel reading Jesus overcomes temptation.
Notice how the devil tempts him just as he tempts us. The thread is the same. The devil would have him be dissatisfied with the state that he was in. He was hungry. How could God have put him in this miserable state? God was probably going to keep him there too. So Jesus should take things into his own hands. But Jesus says, “It is written: Man shall not live by bread alone, by improving his own lot, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.”
The devil shows Jesus all the kingdoms of the world. Jesus could have mastery over all of them. All Jesus needs to do is not put all his eggs in one basket—not put all his eggs in the basket of God’s promises. If he splits his allegiance between God and the devil then he can have his cake and eat it too. But Jesus says, “It is written: You shall worship the Lord your God and serve him only.”
Then the devil seems like he changes tactics. Jesus won’t quit trusting in the Lord his God. Let’s see if he will go to what seems to be the other extreme. So he takes Jesus to the top of the temple and tells him to trust God—throw himself off. The Scriptures say that the angels will catch him. He won’t even bang his foot against a stone.”
It might seem as though the devil has changed tactics here, but he really hasn’t. It might seem as though the devil is trying to get him to trust in the Lord his God too much, but that’s impossible. It is impossible for anybody to trust in God too much. It is always the case that the more we trust the better.
What the devil is really trying to do is what he’s been trying to do all along: He wants Jesus to be dissatisfied with what God has given to him. God has given him a perfectly good set of stairs. The ordinary means of a perfectly good set of stairs is boring. He could really put on display his spiritual powers if he would throw himself off to the glory of God. But Jesus says, “It is written: You shall not test the Lord your God.”
Jesus, a human being just like us, withstood temptation. He continued to believe that God would put things in order. He continued to believe that God could and would help him. He believed that our Father in heaven is good.
God would feed him when the time was right. God would exalt him when the time was right. Whether the circumstances appear good or bad, boring or not, he waited for the Lord to open his hand and satisfy the desires of every living thing.
Where the first Adam failed, this second Adam, Jesus, prevailed. By the first Adam we inherited unbelief, sin, and death. By the second Adam we learn that God is good and gracious. Whoever puts their trust in him will not be disappointed. By the second Adam we are righteous, having been credited with Jesus’s own righteousness. We inherit life, for Jesus has risen from the dead. And we can embrace our creatureliness instead of being unhappy, pretend gods.
God is good, come what may. Even death cannot prevent us from counting on God to give us every good thing. All things work for the good of those who love him. Good things will come for those who trust in him. This is inevitable and certain. Good things will come to those who trust him. It’s just a question of whether it will be today, tomorrow, or in the resurrection from the dead. That’s up to him. However he arranges it, we can be sure that it is good because he loves us. Jesus, our Savior and Redeemer, is proof of God’s love for us.
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Sermon manuscript:
John the Baptist testifies: “Look, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.” We are beginning our Lent series tonight with this witness’s testimony: “Jesus is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.”
The main thing here is the action. Sin is being removed. The way that it is removed is by the sacrifice of the Lamb of God, who is Jesus. The only way that sin can be taken away or removed is by the sacrifice of Jesus. This is not to say, however, that there are no other ways of dealing with sin—not removing sin, but dealing with it.
There are a lot of ways we can try to cope with sin. The most common and perhaps most effective way is to forget about it. In each of our lives we have a whole basement full of things that we have done. We all have done things that we would be deeply ashamed of if they were brought into the light of day. We’ve seen things we should not have seen. We’ve said things we shouldn’t have said. We’ve fantasized about things altogether too much. Why? Because we thought that such things can never be found out by others. Whenever we’ve thought that there would be no consequences to our actions, we have been much more likely to do bad things. After the fact all this stuff gets put into the basement of our subconscious. Like garbage, if it’s out of sight, it’s out of mind.
In addition to the things that we have done, we’ve also had things done to us. A lot of people don’t know that being on the receiving end of sin does damage. We sense that us sinning does damage. But being sinned against does damage too. Children are damaged by their parents’ sins. Those who are slandered are damaged by those who make fun of them. Victims of scams and theft are often deeply ashamed. Being a victim of sexual sin leaves tremendous scars.
This stuff as well can get stuffed into the basement: Out of sight, out of mind. Maybe the main floors of our conscious life are kept clean enough, respectable enough. But, for heaven’s sakes, you don’t want anybody to go into the basement. Or maybe there’s so much stuff that is crammed into the basement it starts to fill up the rest of your life. Then there’s no denying it. There’s no pretense that’s left. Despair takes hold. You could pretend when you were more or less successful at forgetting your sins and forgetting your being sinned against, but it can get to the point where you can’t keep the garbage at bay.
Although it is very unpleasant to run out of room in the basement so that your sins start to clog up your life, it’s not a bad thing to have happen to us. We can cope with sin by forgetting about it and thereby go on with our life so as to have contentment and happiness. But when sin crowds into our life we can start to understand how bad sin is. The better we are at forgetting our sin, or coping with our sin, the worse off we are at understanding it. What needs to be understood is that sin is terrible and death dealing. The sins we commit are like this. The sins that are committed against us are like this. Sin has power.
It is highly significant that Jesus is the Lamb of God who takes away our sin, as John the Baptist testifies. A person might think that since God is God he can do anything he wants. Since God can do anything he wants he can just snap his fingers and make sin go away. That’s not how it is, though. The Son of God is sacrificed. Blood is shed. Punishment is carried out. Death happens. The burden is so heavy upon this Son of God that he fervently prays that he not have to drink the cup. He sweats blood. He cries out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” This is how sin is taken away. This is how sin is removed.
How can we think, then, that forgetting about our sin will work? How can we image that it is a sufficient way to cope with the things that we have done and the things that have been done to us? God died to set us free from our sin. We can’t truly handle sin in any other way than through the God who died for that sin. Every other way of trying to cope with our sin is always going to be some variation of what the serpent said to Eve. Eve told the serpent that they would die if they even touched the fruit. The serpent responded, “You won’t surely die. It will be fine. Don’t worry about it.”
To use the analogy that we’ve been working with tonight: “Your basement’s full of stuff. But it’s fine. Nobody will know. No problem. Just make sure that you keep it hidden.” But do you know, then, who you will never want to have over for supper? God can see your mess, even if your fellow flesh and blood human being cannot. You won’t want to have God over to your house just as you wouldn’t want to have company see things that would make you ashamed.
The devil’s lie is bad enough. What’s worse is that those who believe it can never be comfortable with God. For comfort to remain the sins have to stay hidden. For stuff to stay hidden you can’t have anybody know. To keep from anybody knowing, you better stay away from God. So the logic goes. And the devil can achieve his ends this way. If you want to stay at arm’s length from God forever, then you will be granted your wish. God doesn’t drag anybody into heaven by their hair.
On the other hand, God loves you. That’s strange, you might think, and you’d be right. God knows what’s in the basement. God knows what you managed to hide from yourself. And yet God wants to be with you. To his supper he calls us all. Therefore he takes away the sin of the world. Sin loses its power because Jesus took all that sin can do upon himself. “Look, the Lamb of God who removes the sin of the world.” This statement is true.
Although this statement is true, we are left with something important to do. We must believe that it is true. Of course, our believing that it is true has absolutely nothing to do with what God has already done. Jesus removing the sin of the whole world is over and done with. Him rising from the dead is proof of it. But if we do not believe that it is true for us, and for our own basement, then we are still going to keep God at arm’s length. God wants us to come to supper. He has removed all our sin. But if we insist that we are still not clean, (which is a horrible lie, by the way), then we’ll keep our distance.
Here’s something strange that we all naturally do. We go from one extreme to the other. First of all we assume that we are fine. We’ve got plenty of room in the basement. We can carry on and enjoy life. Our sins aren’t that bad. Plus we’ve got things to look forward to in life. We resist the truth of being sinners. We minimize the importance and consequences of our sins.
If we somehow have our minds changed about this, then we go to the other extreme. We hate the garbage. We hate ourselves. We get engulfed by guilt and shame and assume that there’s no way out. We think it is Christian to punish ourselves until we feel that we have punished ourselves enough.
This is no good. It’s very presumptuous if nothing else. Who are you compared to Jesus? Your punishments are supposed to work better than Jesus’s? God doesn’t want us to stay in a frame of mind where we hate ourselves. Hate yourself, hate your sin. Fine. Then move on.
God wants us to know that we are sinners. He also want us to believe that are sins are forgiven. He wants us to believe this simply because it is true. “Jesus is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.” Believe it or not, God wants to be with you, and he wants you to be with him. That is why he sent his Son to remove the sin of the world. If sin is removed, then there is no garbage on the main floor, neither is there anything in the basement. Sin has lost its power.
Audio recording
God did many important things through Moses. God did many “new” things through Moses. We are not accustomed to thinking about things being “new” when it comes to God, and that is not a bad attitude to have. When it comes to God, new things are probably lies, coming from the father of lies, who loves to deal in all things spiritual. Nevertheless, with Moses God did all kinds of new things.
First of all, the number and power of miracles that are done through Moses is a definite difference from the time of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. God did miracles for them too, but they were much more connected to their family life. God caused Abraham and Sarah to conceive and bear Isaac even though they were both extremely old. God gave Isaac his wife at the well. God caused Jacob to flourish with his flock of sheep when he lived with his father-in-law Laban.
These signs and wonders should not be poo-pooed. Every time the sun rises and gives its warmth, every time a flower blooms, God’s wonder-working power is what is behind it. Every day we are the beneficiaries of God working and working. We would have a better sense of what is going on if we understood that miracles happen every day and every moment as God does his work, but that is not how we normally understand the word “miracle.” We take the word “miracle” to mean that God does something unusual. He doesn’t use the ways and means that we are accustomed to him using.
With Moses God does things that are very unusual. God called him to be his servant at the burning bush. From that time forward there is practically one unusual thing after another. God does signs through him before Pharaoh. God pours out one bowl of wrath after another on the nation of Egypt until Pharaoh decides to let his slaves go. God opens up the Red Sea for his people to pass through on dry ground, but Pharaoh and his army and destroyed by those same waters. He rains down bread from heaven and makes quail fly into camp with the wind. He causes water to flow out of the rock. God manifests his glory with the pillar of cloud and fire. When he takes up residency at Mt. Sinai it is with fire, smoke, thunder, earthquakes, and all manner unusual things. God sends fiery serpents. He opens up the ground to swallow his enemies. There is just one thing after another that God does.
How can we explain this? One explanation might be that it was necessary. Pharaoh had to have his stubborn will broken. The Israelites needed to be gathered together as a nation numbering many hundreds of thousands. (God wasn’t just dealing with a family anymore.) Plus the Israelites themselves were stiff-necked and hard-hearted. They had to have their own will broken over and over again, and this was done by God’s miracles.
So the number and power of miracles that God does through Moses is something that was unprecedented. These sorts of miracles have not been done since that time, as our reading from Deuteronomy said.
The other thing that is new with Moses is all manner of religious things. God reveals his name to Moses at the burning bush. God gives his people their first festival, which is Passover. God gave his people a succinct statement of his Law with the Ten Commandments. God instituted worship for the Israelites down to the smallest details. He gave them the tabernacle, sacrifices, blessings, and the Aaronic priesthood to carry this all out.
From the time of Moses onward God blessed his people and they returned their prayers and praises according to the way God set things up through Moses. The Old Testament is dominated by what God did through Moses. The word “testament” or “covenant” is about an arrangement between two or more parties. God made an arrangement with his people whom he had chosen. The most extensive covenant was set in place through Moses. Even at the time of the New Testament, all the people we hear about—including Jesus—are still doing things that God set in place with Moses.
With the coming of Jesus, however, we have someone who is greater than Moses. Hebrews says, “Jesus is worthy of greater glory than Moses, in the same way that the builder of a house has more honor than the house.” The apostle John says, “The Law was given through Moses; grace and truth were put into place through Jesus Christ.”
Jesus performed miracles. Jesus’s miracles were different than Moses’s. Moses did not have power within himself to bring about miracles. The source of that power was God. Moses was the means through which God worked. With Jesus we are dealing with God himself. He is true man, born of the virgin Mary, and true God, begotten of the Father from eternity. Jesus performed miracles because he is God. This is hugely different than how it was with Moses.
Jesus’s miracles lack no power, but Jesus’s miracles are at the same time deeper and more homespun. Jesus deals with the most fundamental aspects of our lives as human beings. He casts out countless demons. Our willingness to submit to the devil goes all the way back to the first disobedience in the Garden. There is no more fundamental problem for us than that we are born in subjection to the devil until and unless Christ sets us free.
Jesus’s miracles also tend to have to do with people’s domestic lives. He raises the dead on account of the grieving members of the family. He restores sight, hearing, and speaking so that life may be lived to the full. Most of Jesus’s miracles are kind of like the miraculous things that God did at the time of the patriarchs, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob—things connected with daily life.
And, of course, Jesus does things that are of supreme importance religiously speaking. It is in Jesus that we have been given the authority to become children of God. Jesus became one of us. Thereby we are given the gift to become like him. The Son took on our flesh and blood. Having joined himself to us we are given what he has. This is fully and completely communicated to everyone who is baptized. It is by baptism that we are born again by the water and the Holy Spirit to be a child of God—not figuratively speaking, but literally. “Whoever believes and is baptized shall be saved,” Jesus said. “Whoever does not believe will be condemned.”
Jesus does not institute a whole raft of statutes and regulations like God did at Mt. Sinai. The statutes and regulations at Mt. Sinai take up well over a dozen chapters in Exodus and the whole book of Leviticus. Instead Jesus leaves behind a simple ceremony, the Lord’s Supper. Although this ceremony is extremely simple—so simple that a seven year old understands perfectly what is going on—it is also extremely profound. It is so profound that most people, and even most Christians, can’t bring themselves to believe it.
Jesus took bread, gave thanks, and distributed it to the disciples. He said, “This is my body, which is given for you. Do this in remembrance of me.” A seven year old understands that Jesus is speaking about his flesh which was crucified on the cross. Then Jesus gave them a cup of wine. He said, “This cup is the new testament—the new arrangement between God and you. This cup is the new testament in my blood, which is shed for you, for the forgiveness of sins. As often as you drink it, do so in remembrance of me.”
A seven year old who was unfamiliar with the Christian church came to a service not too long ago and asked his grandma, “Are they drinking blood?” The correct answer is, “Yes. That is Jesus’s blood, in, with, and under the wine. It is the blood that was shed as the atonement for our sins.”
Jesus leaves behind this simple ceremony. He says that we should do it often. When we do it we should remember him. In remembering Jesus we remember how he fulfilled God’s Law for us—the Law that otherwise cries out for our condemnation and punishment. By Jesus fulfilling the Law for us we are freed from death.
Paul says, “As often as we eat this bread and drink this cup we proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes.” When Christ comes again we will enter into the fullness of our promised land. Our promised land is not the land of Canaan, as it was for Moses and the Israelites. Our promised land is the place that Jesus has prepared for us.
Jesus says in John 14: “Believe in God. Believe also in me. In my Father’s house are many rooms. If it were not so, would I have said to you, ‘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 along to myself, so that where I am, you may be also.”
Moses was a great man. God hammered together a people into a nation through him. Jesus is beyond orders of magnitude greater. He makes poor miserable sinners into holy children of God. How does he do this? By the sacrifice of his body and his blood on the cross. This is obviously at the very heart of the sacrament that he has left behind for us. He, in this sacrament, comforts us with the forgiveness of our sins. When we believe what he says in this sacrament, we may be sure that we have exactly what he says.
The cross also looms large in Jesus’s transfiguration that we heard about this morning. However, it is mentioned so unassumingly that it is easy to overlook. When Peter, James, and John see Jesus transfigured he is with two men, Moses and Elijah. Luke says that he is speaking to them about his “departure which he was going to bring to fulfillment in Jerusalem.” What Luke literally says is that Jesus is speaking with them about his “exodus” that he is about to fulfill in Jerusalem.
The term “exodus” is loaded, particularly when Moses is involved as he is here at the mount of transfiguration. Moses led the exodus of God’s people from their slavery under Pharaoh. All the signs and wonders that we have been talking about were connected with that whole exodus process.
Jesus has the greater and more fundamental exodus in mind. The exodus Jesus brings about is the exit from slavery under the devil. Through Jesus we become not only God’s people, but even his children. We do not just enter a promised bit of geography, but the eternal dwelling God has prepared for us. We will not have our interactions with God through a tent or a temple. We will see him face to face. Without a shadow of a doubt, Jesus’s exodus is greater than Moses’s exodus.
To say the least, however, not everyone would agree with me about this. If we put the grand and magnificent miracles that God did through Moses on one side of the scale, and Jesus’s exodus—his mistreatment, suffering, death, and resurrection—on the other, our reason would go with the miracles done through Moses every time. Our reason is impressed with the manipulation of earthly forces. But our reason is very foolish when it comes to the things of God. The biblical record bears this out even with the events that we have been talking about.
God shook the earth and all the powers thereof at the time of Moses. Our reason says that this should work like a charm for making people believers and obedient. But what were the Israelites like? Over and over and over they disbelieve. They want to return to their slavery. Despite the power and the glory they are constantly breaking the first and most important commandment. God many times over says that they are a stiff-necked people. This is not the greater exodus.
The greater exodus is through Jesus. Grace and truth are established through him. The gift of the Holy Spirit, who creates faith and softens our stony heart, is a greater miracle than what God did at the time of Moses. You are beneficiaries of Jesus’s exodus. You have been made into God’s children, having been born again by the water and the Word. Embrace this life of fellowship that Jesus has established between God and you. Believe the promises. Wait for their fulfillment.
Audio recording
Sermon manuscript:
The shortest creed in Christendom is this: I believe that Jesus Christ is my Lord. Jesus being our Lord is a wonderful thing. He is King of kings and Lord of lords, but he is so different than all these other lords. All these other lords are very eager to “lord it over us.” That is to say, they’d like to sit at the head of the table. They’d like tributes and praises brought to them. They’d like to skim as much cream off the top as they can get away with.
When we come to learn about Christ being our Lord we somewhat have to unlearn what we otherwise know about the word “Lord,” because Jesus is so different. As he himself says, “I did not come to be served, but to serve, and give my life as a ransom for many.” Luther, in his Small Catechism, penned perhaps the most beautiful words he ever wrote as he spoke about Jesus being our Lord in the second article of the Creed:
I believe that Jesus Christ is my Lord, who has redeemed me, a lost and condemned person, purchased and won me from all sin, from death, and from the power of the devil; not with gold or silver, but with his holy, precious blood and his innocent suffering and death. Why did Jesus do this? So that I may be his own. He purchased and won me so that I may be his own.
“No greater love has any man than this: that he lay down his life for his friends.” “God demonstrates his own love for us in this, that while we were still sinners, Christ died for the ungodly.” In order to lift us out of all our futile idolatry, in order to save us from the corruption and rottenness that must come for every person, Christ redeemed us. Christ purchased us so that we may be his own.
By Christ making us his own we are lifted above all the things of this world. When Jesus is your Lord you can sweat the small stuff. Simply being able to identify the things of this world as being “small stuff” shows that a person has made a lot of progress in their understanding as a Christian. What we are to understand as being “small stuff” is what other people would take to be “big stuff”—“huge stuff” even—where you can hardly get any huger.
Take, for example, Joseph, that wonderful man. Joseph was his father’s favorite son. That wasn’t Joseph’s fault. Nonetheless, that didn’t prevent his other brothers from being jealous of him. One day, when his brothers see him coming to check up on them according to their father’s wishes, their hatred for him burns white hot. They hate him so much that they start to plan to murder him. Joseph’s oldest brother, Rueben, barely saved his life, but the end result was nothing to write home about. The brothers sold Joseph to some passing traders. He ended up being a slave in Egypt.
We’ll fast forward through all the twists and turns that happened to Joseph while he was in Egypt. You can read about that for yourself. Let’s talk about our reading this morning. This is many years later. Joseph is with his brothers again, but, my, how the tables have turned! Joseph has come to be second in command in Egypt. He is rich and powerful. His brothers are poor and destitute. How does Joseph treat them? Unbelievably graciously. Joseph had every option available to him for payback. If nothing else he could have thrown them into prison to rot there for the rest of their days. And they would have deserved that.
But instead of hurting them like they had hurt him Joseph comforts them. His brothers brought about unimaginable misery to him, but this wonderful man says, “Don’t be upset or angry with yourselves.” Note what has been made into “small stuff” for Joseph: attempted murder, kidnapping, false imprisonment. Joseph doesn’t wait for his brothers to be sorry. He doesn’t wait for them to ask for forgiveness. He is lord. He is the one who is working. He’s working at comforting his brothers: “Don’t be upset or angry with yourselves. God sent me ahead of you in order to preserve life. You weren’t the ones who sent me down here. God sent me down here so that good may come.”
This is so unusual that Joseph’s brothers never seem to have been completely convinced that he was being genuine. It sounded too good to be true. Nobody’s that gracious. Nobody’s that forgiving. They were prepared for the hammer to drop after their father died. But Joseph meant every word he said.
He let go of a grudge that you would think he had every right to nurse and grow until it became fully grown into a fit of wrath. That grudge ended up starving to death because Joseph didn’t nurse it. The result is that God’s love had its way. It is extremely beautiful. Joseph, like Christ, does not give people what they deserve. He gives and gives like a limitless fountain.
Here you should notice another aspect to Jesus Christ being your Lord. We’ve already talked about how this strange Lord Jesus slaves away and serves. He does this so that you may be his own. He just wants you to be with him. He wants to be with you. But there’s more to this gift. He doesn’t redeem you so that you can go right back to serving the devil. He doesn’t die for you so that you can nurse grudges and let people “have it” whenever the opportunity arises to do so. He has redeemed you so that you may become like him.
Luther’s explanation that I referred to earlier goes on: Jesus Christ is my Lord who has redeemed me so that I may be his own. Then it continues: “so that I may be his own and live under him in his kingdom and serve him in everlasting righteousness, innocence, and blessedness; just as he is risen from the dead and lives and reigns to all eternity.”
We are Jesus’s own. He wants us to live in his kingdom and serve him in everlasting righteousness, innocence and blessedness. Why does he want this? Simply because it is good. It is so unbelievably, surpassingly good! Look at the goodness in Joseph’s actions towards his brothers. How can he treat them that way? It is, without a shadow of a doubt, the Holy Spirit’s working. It is a miracle. It is no less of a miracle than splitting the Red Sea in two or the feeding of the 5,000. Flesh and blood wants payback. The Holy Spirit makes us sweat the “small stuff,” which, in the eyes of the world is anything but “small.”
This is how Jesus’s words in our Gospel reading must be understood also. Jesus says: “Love your enemies. Do good to those who hate you. Bless those who curse you. Pray for those who mistreat you. If someone strikes you on the one cheek, offer the other too. If someone takes away your coat, do not withhold your shirt. Give to everyone who asks you, and if anyone takes away your things, do not demand them back.”
When we hear these words we pretty much think, “Uh oh. What am I in for now? What am I being asked to do? What’s going to happen to me and to all my stuff?” There’s a part of us—it’s our Old Adam, the way we were born by nature—that thinks this all sounds perfectly dreadful. We don’t want to be troubled. We want to be comfortable. Jesus’s words simply can’t be understood as anything but irrational and impossible with this frame of mind.
How you should think about these things, however, is that they are opportunities for goodness to flow down from God, through us, to others. You must see how what happened with Joseph was good. Of course the kidnapping, enslavement, imprisonment, lies, and so on and so forth were not good. These are extremely sinful and harmful. None of us have endured anything close to this kind of harm. But Joseph overcame all these evils with good.
Other options were available for Joseph. He would have been within his rights, so to speak, if he were no Christian, to hate his brothers. The damage that his brothers inflicted upon him was too great to ever be repaid. Joseph could never get back those many, many years that he was removed from his beloved father. With the money and power that he acquired in Egypt he had enough resources to make life miserable for his foul, unlovable brothers.
The way that the devil likes us all to be is continuously stirred up against one another. But he likes it even better when we have ironclad, unassailably good motives behind our acts of revenge. Hurt is caused by one person. Then the other person has the full and complete license to take back eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth. Revenge sometimes masquerading and justice goes round and round until the fires of hatred burn white hot. One party blows on the fire from one side. The other blows on it from the other. And when they both feel good and righteous about their hatred, I don’t see how it can ever stop except through death—death of the individuals or the death of the relationship.
Otherwise the only way that this tit for tat kind of thing can stop is when one or the other party quits throwing fuel on the fire. That is to say, the one party allows itself to be defrauded, or hurt, or shamed, or what have you. If one cheek is struck, the other is not withheld.
Our Old Adam really hates this kind of thing. Our Old Adam might be willing to do this sort of thing with our kids or someone that is really close to us (but even there I’m not so sure). Our Old Adam would sooner die than do this with one of our enemies. Here’s why: Because this would mean that the other party would win! They’d get what they want. We’d lose. And from a certain point of view this reasoning is ironclad and irrefutable.
Do you know that there are still a great many people who think this very same thing about Jesus Christ our Lord? He lost. He didn’t free the Jews from their enslavement to the Romans. He didn’t reform the Jewish church by kicking out all those evildoers who put him to death. There is a way of looking at Jesus where he is extremely weak and passive. He was beaten, mocked, spit upon, crucified and died. And he just took it. What a waste!
But, of course, this was the way that Jesus overcame evil. He was like a sponge. He sucked up all that evil into himself so that he “became sin,” as Paul shockingly says of him. He didn’t return evil for evil. He took evil into himself and gave blessings in return. Joseph is a chip off the old block in this regard. He also absorbed evil and gave blessing.
This is good, beautiful, and at the very heart of Christ’s kingdom into which we have been brought. This is the way of life that overcomes the devil, shuts down his white hot forges and furnaces of hatred, and brings balm and healing to our sore and inflamed relationships. This is glorious, just as our crucified and risen Lord Jesus is glorious. It radiates with the love of God the Father. We are to be merciful, just as he is merciful.
The shortest creed in Christendom is: I believe that Jesus Christ is my Lord. There are two parts to that lordship. First he purchases and wins me so that I may be his own. Then he would have us live and serve in his kingdom. Living in Christ’s kingdom is hard on our Old Adam, to say the least. In fact, as the Bible itself days, there’s a crucifixion that takes place. But there is also the promise of the resurrection. What is resurrected is holy, good, and beautiful.
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How did Jesus’s words strike you this morning? “Blessed are you who are poor, because yours is the kingdom of God. Blessed are you who hunger now, because you will be satisfied. Blessed are you who weep now, because you will laugh. Blessed are you whenever people hate you because of the Son of Man.”
Then, on the other hand: “Woe to you who are rich, because you are receiving your comfort now. Woe to you who are well fed now, because you will be hungry. Woe to you who laugh now, because you will be mourning and weeping. Woe to you when all people speak well of you.”
How did these words strike you?
Unfortunately, they probably didn’t strike you very hard. We are lazy. These words are hard. Jesus is saying something that sounds like the very opposite of how we naturally think. And so, like a math problem you don’t know how to solve, you might look at it for a few seconds, and then push it aside. We can’t understand it. And it’s not our fault. According to our customs, if something is said, but not understood, then it is always the speaker’s fault. The hearers are never held responsible for their lack of effort. If the speaker wanted to be understood he should have said it better. So it’s Jesus’s fault.
However, we won’t even let our thinking get that far. That conclusion might come around to bite us. We might be held responsible for coming to the conclusion that Jesus just isn’t a very good teacher. So we just mentally push it aside without further ado.
This is a simple, common way to make Jesus’s words have no effect. There is another, more sophisticated way to deal with Jesus’s words. If you can’t figure it out and you stare at it like a math puzzle, who is there better to turn to than an expert? Call a theologian. They can turn Jesus’s extremely plain words into something a little less definite. They can give us some wiggle room. A couple very handy tools that the theologians have in their tool bag are principles and distinctions. By applying principles and distinctions he can probably shape and mold Jesus’s words into whatever you might want to have those words say.
So, with the text at hand, a theologian might immediately point out that here we are dealing with something that is quite unworkable. It doesn’t fit in with what we already know. Jesus’s words can be taken to mean that being poor, hungry, sad, and not well liked is the way that a person can earn his or her way into heaven. On the other hand, no one is allowed to have nice things, nice food, good times, or lots of friends. Hell is the reward for these things.
This, of course, is not what Jesus actually says, but, close enough right? We know that it is not necessarily a sin to be rich or well-fed or well-liked. We especially know that the opposite of these things doesn’t get us any closer to heaven. The price that is needed to get into heaven is much costlier than that—the very blood of God is what is necessary. And so Jesus’s plain words get pitted against other truths in such a way where what Jesus says is emptied of its meaning. The lawyer-like handling of his stark words make them say hardly anything at all. Or, if the theologian is really good, he might even manage to make them sound something like the very opposite. Instead of “Blessed are the poor,” for example, you might get “Blessed are the rich,” “so long as they give their fair share in the offering plate.”
But I’m not against doing a lot of learning when it comes to God’s Word. How could I be? I’ve spent many years and many thousands of dollars to learn principles and distinctions. Even with the words that we are considering today, it’s helpful to have someone lead you into understanding them. The assumed meaning can be too hard so that we push them aside in the hopes that we won’t be responsible for having heard them.
That won’t do if we wish to be Jesus’s disciples. Note the way Jesus begins this talk. Luke says, “Jesus lifted his eyes to his disciples and said, ‘Blessed are the poor,’” and so on. These words aren’t meant for all people everywhere. They would never accept them. These words are meant for those who want to be his disciples, that they might learn from them. So my goal is not to undo Jesus’s words, nor can I really persuade you of them. Most people won’t be persuaded. But I hope to help you understand them so that you can embrace them as something good, which they truly are.
Toward that end, I think there is one huge factor that prevents us from hearing the good in Jesus’s words. That factor is fear. Fear is a big problem for us. It made its entrance into this world when Adam and Eve rebelled against God. Before that they were not afraid. They could always turn to God. After that fear would never completely leave them so long as they lived in this flesh. They and we shouldn’t fear. If God is for you, who or what can be against you? But that requires faith that God is actually for us. “Who knows?” we think. “Maybe he will let us down.”
Do you know what won’t ever let us down? Money. You can’t ever have too much money. Money is the most useful and versatile little devil you ever did meet. It is for good reason that Luther says in his Large Catechism that Mammon is the commonest idol on earth. Jesus blasts a broadside against this idol when he says, “Blessed are you who are poor, because yours is the kingdom of heaven.” Then, on the other hand, “Woe to you who are rich, because you are receiving your comfort now.”
That’s bad enough, but, I’m sorry, it gets even worse: “Blessed are you who hunger now, because you will be satisfied,” and, “Woe to you who are well-fed now, because you will be hungry.” How often have any of us have been hungry involuntarily? How often have we been hungry because we couldn’t afford to buy it? We maybe even haven’t imagined such a desperate situation for ourselves. I can imagine, though, that if this were to come to pass we might long and plead for money with our whole heart: “Pretty, pretty please! Just a little more money!”
But it doesn’t have to be that dramatic. We mourn when we can’t afford this or that. If only we had just a little more money we could get a car that doesn’t break down. We could take a trip to somewhere fun. I’m bored to tears, and I’m sick to death of this scraping by. I want some good times. Jesus says, “Blessed are you who weep now, because you will laugh.” And, on the other hand, “Woe to you who laugh now, because you will be mourning and weeping.”
The overall message that we tell ourselves is that we can never have enough money. It ticks all the boxes. It solves all kinds of problems. We tell ourselves that of all the gods that we could choose from so as to worship it, there’s nothing like money. Jesus disagrees. He flatly, plainly says that this god is going to let you down. You might think that you have it pretty good now, but you won’t later. On the other hand, if you leave money behind as a god, if you trust in the Lord your God, then there will not be anything that you have given up for Jesus’s sake that will not be restored to you 100fold. But it is hard, you might say impossible, for us to believe that because we are afraid.
The reason why we are afraid is because that’s what happens when the gods, that is to say, the things that we have trusted in are brought to nothing. Whatever we take to be stable and reliable, when that is taken away, we become very afraid. The thought, for example, of the end of the world is very frightening. If the sun didn’t come up this morning—the moon, the stars, the tides, everything that we have taken to be reliable and predictable were no longer reliable and predictable—we might faint in fear.
But what does Jesus say that we should do when we see these things beginning to take place? He says we should lift up our heads, shoulders back, and start looking. Jesus is coming. Our redemption is coming; our complete and final deliverance from evil is coming. Those who are looking for this—looking for Jesus—will laugh and go out leaping like calves from the stall. Those who have believed in other gods will be horrified at the utter failure of the gods that they had believed in.
They won’t take too good of a shine to the one true God either. They might wonder, “Why didn’t you tell us? Why didn’t you warn us?”
And, of course, you know the answer. How could Jesus be any plainer in the words of his sermon? If there is a failure here, it isn’t on the part of the speaker. Jesus is plain as plain can be. The failure is on the part of the listener. They didn’t listen because they didn’t want to listen. They wanted to keep all their stuff. None of us can say that we really want to listen because we are so predisposed to idolatry. We think our idolatry is going to work like a charm. Trusting in God, on the other hand, who knows?
So we need some encouragement if we are to embrace Jesus’s words as our own. We need some encouragement with emphasis on the middle part of the word “encouragement,” which is, “courage.” We have to fight against our fear. Our fear makes us run for cover. We can find our comfort any number of various gods—the bottle, the fridge, our wealth, the progress of civilization, what have you.
The one we should run to for comfort, however, is our God. Psalm 130 says, “Out of the depths have I cried to you O Lord. O Lord, hear my voice. Let your ears be attentive to the voice of my supplication.” Our anchor that is to hold in the veil is Christ, the solid rock on which we stand. All other ground is sinking sand.
Our Lord Jesus has died for us and been raised for us. As you trust in him do not be afraid of the size of the wave that is coming towards you. That is to say, do not let the circumstances of life turn you away from God, away from his will and his commandments, to run after other sources of meaning and comfort. Instead, trust his promises.
You have money today. That’s all well and good. Thank God for it, because that’s who it comes from. Tomorrow you might need to give it away. Today you laugh. Praise God! That’s such a precious gift from him. Tomorrow you might be mourning.
With all the changes of life Christ, the rock, does not change. There is no wave so high that might come towards you which you cannot survive. Even that wave that comes crashing down on you so as to snuff out your very life and breath—it’s no matter for the one who trusts in Jesus.
I’m going to conclude by reading Jesus’s words one more time. Jesus’s words are good words. They are for you, his disciples. As you listen, keep in mind the way that Jesus overcomes everything for us—even those things that we are afraid of.
Jesus lifted up his eyes to his disciples and said:
Blessed are you who are poor,
because yours is the kingdom of God.
Blessed are you who hunger now,
because you will be satisfied.
Blessed are you who weep now,
because you will laugh.
Blessed are you whenever people hate you,
and whenever they exclude and insult you
and reject your name as evil because of the Son of Man.
Rejoice in that day and leap for joy because of this: Your reward is great in heaven! The fact is, their fathers constantly did the same things to the prophets.
But woe to you who are rich,
because you are receiving your comfort now.
Woe to you who are well fed now,
because you will be hungry.
Woe to you who laugh now,
because you will be mourning and weeping.
Woe to you when all people speak well of you,
because that is how their fathers constantly treated the false prophets.
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Everyone has something that he or she wants. Everybody’s calling has its own challenges and disappointments. We take it as a given that not everything is going to go right all the time. It would be quite a surprise if all of a sudden all those things that we want were suddenly to fall into our lap.
This is what happened to Peter. He was a fisherman together with at least three of the other apostles—his brother Andrew, and James and John. Being a fisherman on the Sea of Galilee was probably not the most lucrative of jobs. The Sea of Galilee is a fairly small body of water. There aren’t a lot of opportunities for expansion. So it might have been a kind of hand to mouth sort of existence.
On the night before Jesus asked to come into his boat in order to preach to the people who were on the shore Peter had been out trying to catch fish. He had had little success. So they had called it a day and were washing up their nets. He wasn’t overly excited about going fishing again with Jesus. But, who knows? Might as well give it a shot.
Peter, like all people, would have had some mental picture of success. There was some number of fish that he knew would pay the expenses. He knew what would turn a profit. If he got a whole bunch there would have been things that he would like to buy. That picture was completely exceeded, however, by what Jesus brought into his nets and into his boat. The nets were straining under the load. His boat, as well has his partners’ boat, were so weighed down that they started to sink.
Peter could have responded to all of this by saying something like, “Gee whiz, mister, thanks a lot! I’ll put you on my speed-dial.” Then he could take his haul, sort it, count it, and laugh all the way to the bank. Flush with cash he could buy those things that he had been wanting to buy for so long. Jesus gave him exactly what he had been hoping for.
But, as you know, this is not what Peter did. The only way his actions can be explained is that he was lifted out of the normal course that he otherwise would have taken by none other than the Holy Spirit. We often think that unbelievers are nasty, dark individuals. I suppose they can be, but those are the outliers. Most unbelievers are trying to make a living for themselves, raise their kids, and make memories. Being an unbeliever is what is normal. Being a believer is what is unusual.
Peter’s actions are unusual. He loses interest in the fish and suddenly becomes very interested in Jesus. Behind his humble words of “Go away from me, for I am a sinful man, Lord,” is a heart that is hoping for the opposite. He doesn’t feel worthy to be with Jesus, but there is nothing he would like more than to be with Jesus. And Jesus does not disappoint him. He tells him, “Do not be afraid.” Then he adds, “From now on you will be catching people.” Peter used to catch fish. Now he will be catching people.
Finally Luke says that when they reached the shore with their boats, Peter and those who were with him left everything and followed Jesus. This means that they left behind all that wealth that they had had in their mind’s eye as the very picture of success.
It’s as though Peter could have been singing one of our hymns: “What is the world to me With all its vaunted pleasures? When You and You alone, Lord Jesus are my treasure? You only dearest Lord, my soul’s delight shall be. You are my peace, my rest. What is the world to me?”
Although Peter’s actions are unusual, in one sense, at least, his actions, worked by the Holy Spirit, are eminently practical and reasonable. What is the world with all its vaunted pleasures? What would it benefit a man to gain the whole world, but to lose his soul? We are so attracted and crave the things that have been created. But behind all that is the Creator. If the creature or the created thing is good, doesn’t the Creator have to be that much better?
And, of course, he is. Let us not forget what God is like. Those instances in the Bible when God partially reveals his glory should be of the highest interest to us. Things will not always be as they are now, as Jesus lives and reigns quietly through his Word and Sacraments from the right hand of God the Father. One day Jesus will come in power and great glory to judge the living and the dead. Then we won’t have the created things. We won’t even have our clothes. All the created things that have given us comfort will be no more. Only the One who created all those comfortable things will be there in his full splendor. How vitally important it will be at that time to have been given faith in our Lord Jesus Christ who has reconciled us to God. At that time him being our friend and our brother will be more important than a kettle of fish. So it’s not like Peter’s desire to be right with God is unreasonable or impractical.
But we are pretty clever with our reason, especially when it comes to turning things to our own advantage, so we might come up with a third option. It would be foolhardy to just say, “Thanks for the fish Jesus,” and go shopping. On the other hand it seems a little extreme to just leave all that money sitting in the boat and following after Jesus. How about a third option where we could have both? Maybe we can cash that big fat check and, in some sense, also follow Jesus.
I plan to show you how, according to God’s Word, this option that appears to be ever so reasonable won’t work out as we hope it would. Before I do that, I have to admit that there is something to it that is true.
We have been made by God to be creatures who require food and drink, clothing and shoes, house and home, wife and children, and so on. To leave absolutely every created thing behind in our pursuit of the Creator would not be pleasing to God. That would be putting God to the test. We need money and goods. To do otherwise would be like throwing yourself off from the pinnacle of the Temple, relying on the angels to save you, when there’s a perfectly good set of stairs that you can walk down. Again, if God wanted to feed us by flying a roasted chicken into our mouths, he could surely do that, but the ordinary way he works is that we do this is by working, buying, cooking, and so on.
But there’s a big difference between surviving and thriving. We should see to our needs in order to survive while having our sights set on the Creator. The problem is that we don’t just want to survive, with our Lord Jesus being our treasure. We want to thrive. We want an abundance of created things. We are no different than the Israelites in the wilderness. They soon grew tired of manna and water. They remembered the cucumbers, melons, and garlic that they used to enjoy in Egypt.
While they were eating their bread from heaven and drinking their water from the Rock the Israelites were the supreme people on earth. They were blessed beyond measure, far above every other nation on earth, because they were a nation of priests. They were a people who lived in God’s presence and thrived on the holiness that he communicated to them. They were surviving with the Lord as their God. But what did they want to do? Over and over and over and over again they want to kill Moses and head back to their old lord Pharaoh. In Egypt, at least, they had something decent to eat.
I’m sure that if you took a poll among those Israelites they all would have agreed that God was God. They were all for acknowledging him and keeping him on speed-dial even if they had gone back to Egypt. But where was their heart? It’s obvious to see the truth of Jesus’s saying: “No man can serve two masters. For either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and mammon.” Even though Jesus clearly says that no one can serve both God and mammon, that’s never stopped us from trying.
So it was, also, when the Israelites came to settle in the promised land. In the histories recorded in the Bible, and in the prophets’ preaching, you hear about their idolatry. Folks often assume that they turn completely to Baal or to Ashtoreth. That is absolutely not the case! The Israelites never saw themselves as rejecting the Lord their God. In fact they even named their kids these extremely pious names like “Jonathan,” which means, “The Lord gives,” or “Joshua,” which means, “The Lord saves,” and so on. The very names of their children proclaimed the praises of the Lord.
But they also wanted to thrive. Thriving meant that they had to be practical. The way to get ahead in life is not by putting all your eggs in one basket. Do don’t drop your membership in the Lord’s church, but riches can be had by following the practices of Baal, Ashteroth, or Molech. Plus the entertainment that is offered at these places of worship ain’t half bad either, if you know what I mean. So don’t be stupid. Don’t drop your membership or you might go to hell. But there’s no harm in making sure you don’t miss out on the good things of life. This dual allegiance to both God and idols is what God complains about so bitterly. The Lord our God is a jealous God.
Among us, also, we are in very bad shape. God, for most people, is just an insurance policy that is supposed to bail you out from going to hell. But even in the church conditions are not much better. What people really want for their kids is for them to thrive. They want them to be prosperous and successful. To have a kid not get a good education, not get a good job, this is horrible! Tragedy of tragedies! Catechesis, growth in faith, practicing prayer, living as Christians regardless of the consequences—these are side dishes. They’re good side dishes. I don’t know of any parents who don’t want their kids to be actively participating in church, but they’re side dishes just the same. What is really important is that they are good citizens with good jobs and that they make many happy memories.
So if we had to vote between a couple boatloads of money on the one hand or catching men alive for the kingdom of God on the other, unfortunately I know which would win. What good will catching men do anyone? The salvation of the fellow sinners is pretty low on the priority list. “Have the pastor do it. That’s what we pay him for. Meanwhile, let’s get busy thriving!”
Who’s the god here though? What do people believe in for their happiness? What are their greatest ambitions? It isn’t the one and only true God. God is hardly more than an assumption. Nobody is getting ready to meet the one whom Isaiah saw in the temple, high and lifted up. The voice of the created seraphim made the foundations of the threshold shake. What could that Creator do?
We must not be short-sighted with our lives. We only live 70 years, or, by reason of strength, 80. Whatever we might cling to in this life inevitably rots and decays. Folks could shovel your casket full of stuff. It will do you no good. These fake gods stink. Jesus has come to redeem you from them, so that you may know the true God.
You are not in too terribly different of a situation than Peter. God has not called you nor even me to be an apostle. But he has indeed called you to have a higher conception of life than earthly riches, power, or glory. He calls you to know him, for Jesus to be your treasure, and for you to catch other people alive, just as you yourself have been caught.
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Sermon manuscript:
I’d like to begin today by talking about lovelessness. There is a kind of lovelessness that is irrational and there is a kind that is rational. Irrational lovelenssness just doesn’t make sense. Rational lovelessness makes sense. Irrational lovelessness is when people do things that are mean for no good reason. Rational lovelessness is when people do things that will make them get ahead of others.
Both kinds of lovelessness are real problems for us human beings. I think we’d like to believe that, by and large, we’re alright. If there is any lovelessness, then it’s of the rational kind. We’re mean in order to get ourselves or our team ahead. But that’s not true. It’s not hard to find meanness just for meanness’s sake. If you could be a fly on the wall of an elementary, middle, or high school classroom, you wouldn’t have to wait too long to observe meanness. There’s no good reason for this meanness. It seems to be done just for the pleasure of it.
Meanness can also be found in a lot of families’ homes. Fathers and mothers can be mean to their children. Perhaps they themselves were treated meanly by their parents and so they hardly know anything different. Sometimes children can be mean to their parents. They just want to hurt them. Siblings can be mean. Husbands can be mean to wives. Wives can be mean to husbands.
If we were required to give an answer for ourselves for why we are so mean we might say that we were somehow hurt by them at some point in the past. This is a condition that always exists, by the way, if two or more people live together long enough. So with the justification of having been hurt at some point in the past, whenever the opportunity arises to get back at them we make sure we don’t let that opportunity pass.
This is an evil spirit. Whether it is literally and explicitly demonic, I wouldn’t want to say, but it certainly fits the pattern of the devil and the demons. They are mean. They hurt for no good reason. One of the things that Jesus did as he moved about was he cast out evil spirits. We should not assume that we are somehow immune from having an evil spirit. A lot of folks figure that since we live in modern times there’s no such thing as evil spirits. Now we call these phenomena psychopathy and sociopathy, so no evil spirits around here! But the older way of speaking has something to it. It does a better job of explaining, for example, how it is that the victims of abuse can very easily end up being abusers themselves. The unclean spirit got passed on.
Jesus is the one who can truly get rid of evil spirits. The demons are subject to him because he is God. There’s nothing more fundamental to Jesus’s work than bringing about a change from lovelessness to love. As John says, “God is love.” Lovelessness, meanness, is the opposite of God. God could have just destroyed us, which is what the demon of the man in the synagogue was afraid of, but instead of destroying us God redeems us and sets us free.
There is something old that used to be said at a Christian baptism, which very nearly made it into our hymnal (but some thought it to be too medieval). It was an exorcism said just before the baptism. It said: “Depart, O unclean spirit, and make room for the Holy Spirit.” Thankfully the hymnal committee wasn’t too modern to get rid of the renunciation of the devil. At baptism we renounce the devil. We renounce all his works. We renounce all his ways. We renounce our old Lord and believe in our new Lord—the Lord Jesus Christ, who lives and reigns with the Father and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Our Lord Jesus came to destroy the works of the devil, which certainly includes irrational lovelessness—this meanness whose existence is hard to explain.
A more rational lovelessness can be much harder for people be ashamed of. Meanness is straight forward. When sin grows up it puts away these childish ways. Lovelessness learns logic and wraps itself up in fine sounding words. Instead of a loveless action being a loveless action it becomes a shrewd way to do business. Or it’s done to teach them a lesson. Through lying to one’s self disobeying the authorities is not disobeying the authorities. Adultery is not adultery. Stealing is not stealing. Gossiping is not gossiping. Coveting is not coveting. All these sins, you see, are not actually sins. They might be manifestations of great wisdom, or even, (God forbid!), the manifestation of deep piety. I’ve already mentioned that sheer meanness is devilish. You know what else is devilish? Lying.
It’s hard to know which of the two kinds of lovelessness is worse. We tend to think that random acts of meanness are worse, perhaps because we don’t understand them, but does having a rationale make the evil any less evil? Adam was led astray not just by the meanness of disobeying God, but also by the rationale that was supposed to make it acceptable.
People kind of pride themselves on not being psychopaths or sociopaths, like the ones on 48 hours or Dateline, who do evil things without hardly any reasons at all. Respectable people aren’t like that. But this is foolish. What credit is it to anyone to break God’s commandments with impunity because they can dream up some reason for doing it. Psychopaths, sociopaths, as well as the more sophisticated sinners all need to get thrown into the same pot. We are all sinners, the Bible says. We are all liars, the Bible says. If we are not set free from our bondage to evil spirits, then we will never be free. We will never love.
Love is a word that gets used so much that we all think that we know what it means. How could anybody not know what the word means? But if you think of how loveless we are by nature, then you will see how this assumption is mistaken. How can creatures who are loveless know what love is? To know what love is, we have to be taught by God. God is love.
The apostle Paul has been inspired by God. He teaches about love in our epistle reading today. I’d like to go through what he teaches so that we may be benefited by it. I want to give you a word of advice before we get into it. When you hear what Paul says you must be careful that you only judge yourself. If you don’t want to judge yourself, then you might as well leave, because it won’t do you a scrap of good to be thinking of other people’s lovelessness while ignoring your own. We each will be judged by God for our own actions. Nobody is excused because somebody else is worse. You are responsible for your own actions, so don’t waste your time puffing yourself up in comparison to somebody else.
Paul says, “Love is patient.” This word means that we should not be easily provoked. It is a sin to be angry. Anger is the sinful root of the fifth commandment.
“Love is kind.” This word means that a person is mild rather than harsh. There is an affection behind their actions rather than judgment and a disregard.
“Love does not envy.” Literally this says, “Love is not zealous.” Zeal is not always a bad thing. It is a bad thing when it is done for one’s own personal advancement and hates it when anybody else is better than one’s self.
“Love does not brag.” Bragging is a way to get ahead in life. If you don’t toot your own horn, nobody else is going to do it for you. Everybody else is too busy tooting for themselves already. But someone who believes in God knows that God sees, judges, rewards, and punishes. We do not need to make our own case by bragging.
“Love is not arrogant.” The old King James says, “Love is not puffed up.” That’s an exact translation. Puffing one’s self up, thinking you are really something, is not love—except, of course, love for one’s self, which comes perfectly naturally to us sinners.
“Love does not behave indecently.” Literally this says, “Love does not reject the scheme of things.” The way things are set up is a scheme. Love does not require everything to revolve around one’s self and one’s own thoughts and desires. Love joins with the others so as not to bring about discord.
“Love does not seek one’s own.” Here, again, seeking one’s own can seem like the only way to get ahead in life. Nobody gives it to you, you have to take it. But Paul means what he says, even if people think he is stupid. Love isn’t zealous for one’s self, but for others.
“Love is not irritable.” The word here means “to sharpen, to make sharp,” as you would with a sword. So this is saying that love doesn’t have those little needling words and actions that are purposely done to annoy somebody else. They irritate. But they do not go so far or are so blatant that you can be charged with any serious crime. Another way you could put this is that love does not push the other’s buttons.
“Love does not keep a record of wrongs.” How prone we are to do this, and how poisonous this record of wrongs is for any and every relationship! Why does any relationship get destroyed? Isn’t it precisely because we tally up a good long list of why they are such bad people that not only is it allowable to write them off, it is positively the right thing to do? These damned records of wrongs are the documentation for every unhappy marriage, every divorce, every ended friendship. Whenever you start making a mental list of how much other people stink, realize that this does not come from the Holy Spirit, but from an evil spirit.
“Love does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth.” This shows that love is not merely utilitarian. There is a kind of love that is extremely pragmatic. There is a kind of love that is nice, non-judgmental, and wouldn’t hurt a fly. But the goal is only to look good in the eyes of our fellow human beings. It is a shallow love that won’t risk hurting someone in order to help them.
“Love bears all things.” This means that love will take a lickin’ and keep on tickin’.
“Love believes all things.” This means that love is gullible. It’s willing to be hurt.
“Love hopes all things.” This means that love is not cynical. It doesn’t say, “They will never change,” so not only is it allowable to write them off, but it is positively the right thing to do.
“Love endures all things.” This means that love doesn’t quit.
In fact, “Love never comes to an end.” Love can’t come to an end. How could it? God is love. At this point in the reading Paul goes on to speak about heaven. Heaven is where we will no longer know in part, but will be fully known. Heaven is when we will no longer have to puzzle things out as in a mirror, but will see God, who is love, face to face. Heaven is where love will be all in all. Love never ends.
Since love never ends, I hope you can begin to see through those lies that we tell ourselves in order to justify our lovelessness. We make all those excuses for why we can’t possibly keep God’s commandments because, you see, otherwise we will be left behind. We can’t be naïve, or gullible, or a so-called doormat. That would be a waste. Not so. The opposite is in fact the case.
What good will it do you to have a charmed life for 70 years, or, by reason of strength, 80—always seeing to your own happiness first, and only willing to suffer for others if it is beneficial for one’s self? What are 70 or 80 years compared to eternity? Love never ends. God is love.
Paul says that when he was a child he spoke like a child, he thought like a child, he reasoned like a child, when he became a man he gave up childish ways. So also we have been born loveless. We are selfish. Nobody had to teach us how to lie or manipulate. This is how we were as a child. A lot of people think that growing up means you just get shrewder and shrewder, meaner and meaner, richer and richer, better and better. I suppose you can do that if you are training yourself for going to hell. There you will be taught by the true master how to get ahead in life.
As Christians we should put away these childish, selfish ways. Maturity is not cynicism and becoming worldly wise. Maturity is becoming like a child. Jesus points to the child as the one who is great in the kingdom of heaven. “Unless we turn and become like little children,” Jesus says, “we will by no means enter the kingdom of heaven.” Why? Because otherwise we don’t belong in heaven. With lovelessness, and tireless training in lovelessness, the sinner will go to hell, which is where he belongs.
Jesus came to destroy the works of the devil. He came to set us free from evil spirits. He came to open us up so that we can love. This is the work that God has begun in you with your baptism. Remain in Jesus’s word. Then you will be his disciple instead of the devil’s disciple. Then you will know the truth and the truth shall set you free. Being set free allows us to love others and not just ourselves.
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Our epistle reading today picks up where our epistle reading from last week left off. Last week, if you remember, Paul was talking about spiritual gifts. One and the same Spirit gives different gifts to Christians. Among the gifts that he mentioned were the word of wisdom and the word of knowledge. Faith is given by the same Spirit. Then he talked about gifts that were more common at apostolic times like miracles, prophesy, and speaking in tongues.
In my sermon last week I mainly spoke about how we should understand these unusual gifts and not be led to false conclusions about them. If you missed that sermon, you can look it up at the website listed in the bulletin. The reading today picks up where we left off last week.
The final verse in last week’s reading was that the Holy Spirit distributes spiritual gifts to each and every Christian, howsoever the Holy Spirit might wish. One Christian is given certain gifts that are not given to another. The gifts that are given to another may not be given to one’s self. This is like the different parts of our body. The eye is a part of the body that has been equipped to do certain things that a hand cannot do. Likewise there are things that the hand is able to do that the eye could never do.
With this discussion of how the different members of the body of Christ are necessarily different from one another, and yet members of one body, Paul is addressing a problem in the Corinthian congregation. The church at Corinth was very vibrant and energetic. God gave them many gifts. They were excited to use the gifts that God gave them. But it also appears that they were seeking after glory for themselves with the gifts that had been given to them. Thus they were especially coveting the flashy, unusual gifts that would bring them glory.
With Paul’s discussion of how the members of the body are necessarily different from one another, and yet members of one and the same body, he would have the Corinthians understand that Christians are not meant to be in competition with one another. A body works together. A body cannot be made up of members that are all the same, otherwise that is not going to be much of a body at all. As Paul says, “If we were all an ear, where would our sense of smelling be?” Ears should not wish to be noses; noses should not wish to be eyes. The different members of the body are essential for the body to function because of the different abilities that are given to each member.
Whether a member of the body is an ear or an eye is something that God determines. Paul says, “God has arranged the members in the body, each and every one of them, as he desired.” No matter how much an ear might wish to be an eye, there’s nothing that an ear can do to make itself into an eye. In a sense, this is what the Corinthians were trying to do. The ones who had not been given the gifts that had been given to others really wished that they had those gifts. They wanted the glory that would come along with that. But whatever gifts there might be, if they are genuine, are from God. His intention is that the gifts should be beneficial to the body of Christ, to the fellow members of the body.
There are also parts of the body that God has put together that are thought to be weaker. Paul doesn’t specifically say which members of the body he is talking about, but he does contrast these so-called weaker members with the eye, the ear, and the nose. They eye, the ear, and the nose are sensitive members. They are very special. The eye, especially, is not only very useful, but it is also very beautiful to look at. What is some other slab of flesh compared to the eye? “But,” Paul says, “the members that are thought to be weaker are necessary.” Why? Because God made it so. He is the one who has put the body together the way he wants.
Here I’d like to pause in my explanation of Paul’s words to point out something that I think is important. Paul is speaking here in a way that is very different from what comes naturally to our sinful nature. We are not naturally content with the lot that God gives us in life. Sometimes, in fact, our teachers explicitly teach us to be discontent with who and what we are. The rationale behind that is if we are discontent with who and what we are, then we will want to become something better.
For example, our kids are generally taught that it is better to be a leader than a follower. They are taught that it is better to be good at sports than not good at sports. They are taught that everybody is supposed to have super high test scores. Everyone is supposed to be the best, and the only way to be the best is to be discontent with the way that one happens to be. The result of all this is self-loathing on the one hand wherever we supposedly do not measure up, and a drunken euphoria over achievements on the other.
This is such a standard way of thinking about life, that we all assume that this is just the way that it is supposed to be. We are all taught these slogans, and they appear to us to be true, and even pious: “Be the best that you can be.” “Shoot for the stars.” “Never give up.” “Nothing is impossible,” and so on. But you will not find any of this taught by the Bible.
It’s true, there are a few passages that get torn out of their context and get put onto plaques and paintings for wall art. If you actually look up what is being talked about in those passages, you will find that they never, ever are talking about digging deep within one’s self in order to get up to the next and higher plane of existence. What the Bible does say is that this striving after personal glory can hardly be done without sin.
Just think of the very first sin. Adam and Eve became convinced that the way that God had made them was not quite good enough. They were truly, exceedingly wise in their own way, but certainly not wise in the cynical, scoffing ways of the devil. They believed that they could become better by setting God, God’s designs, and God’s law aside. They would reach out and take for themselves what would bring them glory and happiness.
When they ate from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil they did become more knowledgeable in a way. They learned first-hand the horror of evil, the terror of alienation from God, and the sadness of self-loathing. But they did not become wiser. They become much stupider—particularly in understanding the meaning of their lives as God’s creatures. This stupidity has been passed down to us through original sin.
So what is the alternative to this way of living that we are all so accustomed to? It is being content with God being our creator and we being God’s creature. We are finite. Not all gifts have been given to any one of us. We should not covet what has not been given to us. We should be thankful for what God has given to us. We should seek to fill our lives with thanksgiving to our Creator—hymns of praises.
Nowhere in the Bible do you ever find God commanding us to hate ourselves. It is not God pleasing to hate ourselves. It is not God pleasing to hate our bodies. How common it is for people to hate their bodies because they do not look a certain way! Sometimes people can whip up such a hatred for their bodies and for themselves that they will be propelled to harsh action to change it. But where does the Bible ever say anything about doing this? If anything the Bible warns against strange measures being taken with food. Instead of hating our bodies, we should give thanks to our Creator for our bodies. Who cares if you don’t look like a model? God’s gift to you of your body is something to thank and praise God for, even if it is thought to be way down there on somebody’s scale of what a body is supposed to be like.
It is not God pleasing to hate our minds. Some people have been given a gift for cleverness or complex reasoning. Maybe you have not been given such gifts in as much abundance as has been given to others. So what? You don’t become any cleverer by hating the good gift that God has given to you. Instead of coveting what has been given to others, be thankful to your Creator for giving you what you have.
Perhaps we could sum up the difference between the way that our teachers have taught us to live to the way that the Bible teaches us to live by where our focus lies. The way that we have been taught to live is that we should be obsessed with ourselves. We should scrutinize and evaluate, hate our short-comings with a white-hot hatred, and love ourselves to death for whatever is supposedly good about ourselves.
There’s another way to live, but very few people ever even try it—that our focus should be on the Creator who gives us gift after gift instead of upon ourselves. We should thank and praise him for filling our lives with good things. Instead of hating what he has chosen to give us, we should thank him for it, because it surely is not as bad as our evil spirits and the evil advertisements make it out to be.
When God blesses us with glory or success, we should thank and praise him all the more, because it certainly came from him. Earlier in this letter Paul asks the Corinthians: “What do you have that was not given to you?” That’s the truth. Whatever we have or don’t have is according to God’s choosing, blessed be he! What unnecessary torture we put ourselves through with our incessant coveting! Turn your eyes away from yourselves and from other people and look up to your Father who is in heaven.
We’ve taken a good long pause here to consider how things are among us, but this hasn’t been entirely beside the point. The Corinthians were cut from the same cloth that we have been. They had the same desires and foolishness that we suffer from, even if it might not have been so extreme and overwhelming among them as it is among us. They, too, thought that they could transform themselves into being an eye, when they were in fact—let’s say—a hand, and coveting only brought with it sadness and backbiting as a result.
The truth for them is the same as the truth for us. God has made us members of Christ’s body. He has apportioned to each what is proper and good. Those members that are thought to be weaker are, in fact, necessary and good. God is deserving of thanks and praise also for those members who do not have what is thought to be the shine and shimmer of others.
Let’s sum up: Just as God has joined together the members of our own body, so he has joined together the members of Christ’s body. To each and every member of the body of Christ God has given different spiritual gifts. None of us are sufficient on our own, just as an eyeball lying on the ground is no longer beautiful, but completely repulsive. It is repulsive, destructive, and divisive to brag one’s self up and to look at others and wonder, “What’s wrong with them? Why aren’t they like me?”
The way that we all are has been brought about by God. He is the one who has shaped and formed us, incorporated us into the body of Christ, and thereby given us life. We have not become members of the body of Christ by virtue of our own striving or accomplishments. It is something that God has given to us.
Thus we should thank God for putting us into the body of Christ and thereby giving us eternal life. He has also given us whatever gifts we might have. There is no gift that we have that did not come from him. And as far as how we should look at the follow members of the body of Christ: We should love them, which we will hear about next week, with the continuation of our reading from this week.
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It is not uncommon for people to think that if the Bible is true, then there should be lots of miracles. The Bible records many unusual signs and wonders that God has performed. The way the thinking goes is that if the Bible is true concerning these things, then these miracles need to keep happening.
It is understandable how a person could arrive at such an opinion, but it is not right. The Bible does, indeed, record unusual things that God did. But God does not just work through unusual means. In fact, he only rarely uses unusual means. All the other times he works through ordinary means.
Ordinary means would be those ways that do not appear unusual. Adam and Eve, for example, simply told their children what God had revealed to them. Abraham told Isaac about the covenant that God had made with him. We tend to think that speaking is not a big deal. We do it all the time. It can seem as though God’s not involved in it at all, because he does not come with thunder and lightning and smoke like he did at Mt. Sinai.
To illustrate God’s ordinary means we should say something about how God works in the Old Testament after the time of Moses. God gave the Israelites the tabernacle / temple. He proscribed priests and sacrifices for them. This was the way that God’s holiness was communicated to them.
So it is also with the New Testament. Jesus instituted and commanded baptism as a new birth in the Holy Spirit. Jesus instituted and commanded us to observe the Lord’s Supper. He says that the Lord’s Supper is the New Testament in his blood for the forgiveness of sins. These, together with preaching, are the ordinary means for Christians to receive God’s grace and holiness.
But, as the saying goes: “Familiarity breeds contempt.” These ordinary means that God uses to communicate his will towards us, his grace and favor towards us—they become boring. Our reason starts to think that they must not be that valuable because only rare things are valuable. The Word and the Sacraments are given out quite liberally and no bills get sent out for services rendered. And so Christians might go hankering after something a little more exotic, a little more uncommon.
So when we read a portion of the New Testament like our reading today from 1 Corinthinans 12, we might think, “This should do the trick!” Paul speaks of “spiritual gifts.” Among these gifts are messages of wisdom, knowledge, and faith. He also speaks of some spicier gifts.
He says, “And to another, the same Spirit gives healing gifts. Another is given powers to do miracles; another, the gift of prophecy; another, the evaluating of spirits; someone else, different kinds of tongues; and another, the interpretation of tongues.”
As you well know, these gifts have not been given to me or to any of the other members of this congregation. I’m not aware of anyone who can heal. I don’t know of anyone who has performed miracles. None of us have been able to know the future. When we think we do know the future, we are often wildly wrong. No one has spoken in tongues. Since no one has spoken in tongues, there is also no need to have tongues interpreted.
These were gifts that God gave to the apostolic Christian church. We hear of them not only here, but also in the book of Acts. God performed unusual signs through these earliest Christians, perhaps to confirm the preaching of the Gospel of Jesus. Since these signs were present among the Christians of the apostolic church, many people get deceived into thinking that there must be something deficient about the Christian church of today. We do not have these signs or we do not have them in like measure. This is a very dangerous and destructive deception. Although it has the appearance of being biblical, it definitely is not.
There is a big difference between miracles happening and miracles being required. God is free to do miracles. The Bible tells us about them. Nowhere in the Bible do you ever hear him requiring his people to perform miracles. There is no expectation that God’s people should perform miracles that are recognized as being miracles as by outsiders. In fact, in the grand scheme of things, miracles are not that terribly common in the history of God’s people.
Since the Bible records those times in the history of God’s people where God did things that were unusual, folks get the idea that miracles were happening all the time. That is not true. The Bible is not an exhaustive, minute-by-minute, or even year-by-year account of each generation of God’s people. There are many gaps of hundreds of years where the Bible doesn’t say anything about what was going on with God’s people.
During those times the people continued on with the ordinary means whereby God dealt with his people. They preached the Gospel. They went to the tabernacle / temple. They observed the festivals. The people during these times were not deficient or inferior to the people of God who were living during those times when God did more unusual things.
Whether God did unusual things or not does not indicate that God was more pleased or less pleased with the people living at time that he did them. Take, for example, the Israelites when they came out of Egypt. I don’t think there has ever been a generation of people who saw more of God’s signs and wonders than this generation. They saw the plagues God inflicted upon Egypt. They crossed through the Red Sea on dry ground. God rained down bread from heaven. He made water come out of a rock. They saw God’s glory in the cloud and at Mt. Sinai, and many more.
These people had miracles coming out of their ears. And yet, what does God say of them? He says that they are a stiff-necked people. He becomes so angry at them that he several times tells Moses that he is going to wipe them all out and make a nation of Moses and his descendants instead. But Moses interceded for his fellow Israelites, and God did not carry through with his threats.
So we should not think that the more impressive the signs, the happier God must be with us. The more unusual the signs, the more spiritual power a group of people must have. The primary thing about being the people of God is not having spiritual power. The primary thing is to know the will of God towards us by his Word and promises. This is the way it was in the beginning, is now, and will be for as long as this present age lasts. What God’s people have had in common from the time of Adam and Eve is God’s promise of mercy and salvation in Jesus. This word from God to us does not need signs and wonders to make it true, effective, or believable.
In fact, Jesus complains about the Jews at his time who were always wanting him to perform more and more miracles. He tells them that they are an evil and adulterous generation as they are hankering after miracles. He tells them that the only sign they are going to get is the sign of Jonah. Jonah spent three days in the belly of the fish. The Son of God would spend three days in the belly of the earth, dead, in a tomb.
How’s that for a sign? Christ’s death, burial, and resurrection is a miracle that doesn’t suit people’s fancy to this very day. Those Jews who were wanting him to do miracles certainly would not have been impressed with him being crucified and buried. If anything they would have taken his crucifixion as a sure-proof sign that Jesus was an imposter and an evil-doer. He was getting his come-uppance for what they took to be blasphemy. The signs that they were keeping an eye out for were signs that appeared powerful and impressive, and so they rejected the Son of God. So we must not judge God and find his ways unsatisfactory because they don’t match up with what we think would be powerful and effective.
Folks want flashy signs. Barring that, they tend to think that spiritual gifts do not exist at all. This is another error that we must be on guard against. Some people know that the crazy things that are touted among the Pentecostals are not right, but then they fall off the horse on the other side. They don’t think that God is involved in the lives of his people at all.
Paul begins our reading today by saying, “I do not want you to be uninformed, brothers, concerning spiritual gifts.” Spiritual gifts exist. Some of the spiritual gifts that he goes on to mention were special to that particular time in the history of God’s people. We see this kind of thing elsewhere in the history of God’s people. It’s like the way that God manifested himself to the Israelites at Mt. Sinai as I mentioned. He did tremendous and unusual things before them. It wasn’t always that way, however. Later in the history of God’s people there weren’t these unusual things.
So it is also with the time of the apostles. At their time there were unusual signs. We should not expect, and we certainly shouldn’t require, that such signs should be done among God’s people today.
On the other hand, there are spiritual gifts that are always present among God’s people. Paul says that no one can say that Jesus is Lord except by the Holy Spirit. Here we do not have a flashy sign. Saying that Jesus Christ is Lord will hardly impress anyone, but it can only be said by the Holy Spirit.
Paul also speaks about wisdom, about knowledge, about faith. These come from the same Holy Spirit. These, also, can be easily despised. It is very common for people to think that it is no big deal to believe that Jesus is Lord. Knowing Scripture is not highly regarded as a life skill. Having God’s wisdom often looks terribly impractical according to the way that the world thinks. Regardless of what our reason thinks of these gifts, they are gifts from the Holy Spirit nevertheless. They are present among God’s people.
Paul also speaks about spiritual gifts in his epistle to the Christians in Galatia. He says, “The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control.” These gifts, which are given to those who believe in Christ, are priceless. They renew our sin-sick hearts. They bring about miracles of self-less love and sacrifice. But they are not terribly flashy. If you compare these fruits of the Spirit to lightning coming out of your fingertips, you know that the world is going to be more impressed with the lightning. But the world is stupid. It doesn’t know what is truly good.
The Corinthians, to whom Paul is writing in our Epistle reading, have the same flesh and blood as anybody else, and so it seems that Paul is gently teaching them not to overestimate flashy gifts and to crave those gifts that are beneficial for others rather than those gifts that are more likely to puff up the one to whom the gifts have been given.
Our reading today is from chapter 12. In the very next chapter, chapter 13, Paul says that the spiritual gift that they should prize above all others is love. 1 Cor. 13 is the so-called “love chapter,” which is fairly well known. This is where he says things like, “Love is patient, love is kind. It is not puffed up. It does not seek after its own. Love never ends.” The Corinthians were looking for those gifts that would make them appear great in the eyes of their fellows, but that is not right.
Jesus says, “Whoever would be greatest must become as the least. Whoever wishes to be first must become a slave. For the Son of Man came not to be served, but to serve, and give his life as a ransom for many.”
So we must be on guard against two things that our flesh more easily believes rather than the truth. Our flesh thinks that either Christians should be doing miracles every day of the week and twice on Sundays in order to be genuine and believable. That’s the one extreme that we are prone towards. The other extreme is that God doesn’t work at all. It is thought that there are no spiritual gifts. The spiritual gifts that are always present among God’s people are not recognized as miracle. Spiritual gifts must only be flashy and unusual ones like dreams, speaking in tongues, or miracles of healing.
But the truth is that spiritual gifts do exist. God gives them to those whom he has chosen for salvation. But they are not readily apparent to outsiders. They might not even be apparent to ourselves as we battle against the flesh, the world, and the devil. But the Holy Spirit is quietly at work in the people of God. He is healing them from their unbelief and sin-sickness. It’s like when a seed is sown in the earth. First it sprouts, then come the leaves, then comes the ear. So also the Holy Spirit works through his Word and Sacrament. Quietly and unassumingly the Holy Spirit increases our faith towards God and our fervent love towards one another.
So we must not be led astray on this important topic that so easily becomes obscured in our day due to Pentecostals on the one hand, and rank unbelievers on the other. God reveals his will towards us with his Word and Sacraments. That’s the way he’s always done it. This is his usual means of dealing with his people. He can also deal with us in unusual ways, but we shouldn’t expect that, and we certainly should not require it. He gives his Christians those spiritual gifts that Paul talks about, but sometimes we have a hard time seeing them clearly, and unbelievers hardly ever recognize them. But those common gifts that cause us to be believing towards him and loving towards our neighbor are the best gifts God gives.
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We entered the season of Epiphany with the festival of Epiphany this past Thursday. The word “epiphany” means, “to be revealed.” So Epiphany and the season of Epiphany has as one of its main emphases the way that this person named Jesus was revealed to be something more than an ordinary person.
The Epiphany festival itself is about the way that wise men came from the east. They gave gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh to Jesus. What is of greatest significance is that they bowed down and worshipped Jesus. That is something that should never be done with anyone or anything that is not God, so by this activity the wise men are confessing their faith that Jesus is God.
The festival that we are considering today, the Baptism of our Lord, is on the first Sunday after Epiphany. It is an appropriate thing to consider to kick off the season of Epiphany since this baptism is very revealing. Two very important things can be seen at Jesus’s baptism—the Holy Trinity and Jesus as the Christ. There are hardly any more important things that we could possibly know since the Holy Trinity describes God and Christ is our Lord and Savior.
Let’s begin with the Trinity. Let me remind you about the simple reason why we speak of the Trinity. The word, “Trinity,” is a made up word. You won’t find it in the Bible. It is the combination of two numbers—three, tri-, as in triangle or tricycle; and one, uno, unity. So the word Trinity means “three-one-ness.”
While the word, “Trinity,” is nowhere to be found in the Scriptures, the thing that the word is describing is very easily found in the Scriptures. The Bible says two things very emphatically. The Bible says that there is only one God. Deuteronomy says, “The Lord your God is one.” That’s the one thing the Bible says about God. The other thing that the Bible says about God is that he is the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. We call these the three persons.
So we speak of the Trinity or the Triune God because the Bible very emphatically and clearly speaks of God as one. The Bible also very emphatically and clearly speaks of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. The goal is speak of God as the Bible speaks of him. The goal is not to make this idea plausible or acceptable to our reason, otherwise we may very well decide to revise what the Bible says so that we can better understand it or convince others to believe it.
The Baptism of our Lord is one of the many places where we hear of the three persons of the one God. The Son, Jesus Christ, is in the Jordan River with John the Baptist. The Holy Spirit took on the bodily form of a dove and descended upon him. The Father spoke from heaven. He said that this man Jesus is his beloved Son. He is well pleased with him. Here we see how all three persons of the Trinity are involved and approving of the ministry, life, death, and resurrection of the Christ.
Some Christians, who already aren’t too big fans of the Trinity, will try to make better sense of what the Bible speaks about by talking about “dispensations.” By the word “dispensation” they mean a time of special prominence and importance. So they say that the Old Testament was the dispensation of the Father. Supposedly the Old Testament is full of wrath and violence, and it is imagined that this is the special area and expertise of God the Father. The New Testament times are the dispensation of the Son. Here, supposedly, we see a kinder and gentler side of God. Finally, supposedly, we are now, in our times, in the dispensation of the Spirit. So during our times we are supposed to be on the lookout for special and unusual miracles that are supposed to come from the Holy Spirit, but I suspect come from evil and deceiving spirits.
This is a very dangerous false teaching. It strikes right at the root of the Christian faith. Our faith is in nothing else whatsoever except our God. This teaching goes about revising who our God is. To my mind there is almost the fabrication of a whole new god, masquerading under the names of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. There are not special dispensations that are particular to each of the persons of the Trinity. We say this quite often in our worship services, and it is true: as far as our God is concerned “as he was in the beginning, he is now, and will be forever.”
The Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit as the one true God is eternal. God has no beginning and no end. All three persons of the Trinity were present at creation. God the Father created. He did this through the Word, the Son, as John’s Gospel teaches in his first chapter. And the Holy Spirit was there, hovering over the face of the waters.
Here at the Baptism of our Lord the Holy Trinity manifests himself again. God the Father is not some supposedly mean, bad god as the dispensationalists claim. As Jesus embarks upon his great ministry that will culminate in the atonement and salvation of all mankind, the Father says, “This is my Son whom I love. I am well pleased with him.” There is no division or antagonism between the persons of the Trinity. What is pleasing to the Father is pleasing to the Son is pleasing to the Holy Spirit. What is pleasing to God is the wonderful life and work of this man Jesus, who is Christ and God.
This brings us to the second very important thing to be seen at the Baptism of our Lord—how Jesus is the Christ. We are so accustomed to hearing “Jesus Christ” that it can almost seem as though Jesus is his first name and Christ is his last name. But the word “Christ” has much more significance than just being a name.
The word “Christ” means “anointed one.” Anointing is the pouring of something on someone, usually on one’s head. We don’t do that much anointing in our times. Baptism, actually, is about the only anointing that we do. In baptism we anoint people’s heads with water. In the Bible anointing was more common and laden with significance. It was the way, for example, that priests and kings were put into office in the Old Testament. Instead of kings being crowned in the Old Testament, they were anointed with oil. The Old Testament kings were christs, in a sense, in the sense that they were anointed ones, but of course we rightly reserve the term “Christ” for Jesus as the king who was promised to come and save his people.
The promise of the coming Christ, or King, is the scarlet thread that runs through all of Scripture. Already at the fall into sin in the Garden of Eden God promised to send a Seed of the woman who would crush the serpent’s head. Later God promised that a descendent of David would sit on his throne forever and ever. This promised King is Jesus, and at his baptism we see how he is anointed.
First of all, he is baptized, that is to say, anointed, with water by John the Baptist. Furthermore, it is of the highest significance that he is not anointed just with oil, like the Old Testament kings before him, but the Holy Spirit himself. The Holy Spirit descends in the bodily form of a dove and alights above Jesus’s head. This is Jesus the Christ, Jesus the anointed one, Jesus the King. From this point onward Jesus is going to accomplish the great purposes for which the Father has sent him. This is going to culminate in yet another anointing and the greatest manifestation of him as the King.
Do you remember what Pilate had written on Jesus’s cross as the great charge against him? He had them write: “Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews.” There Jesus was anointed with his own blood, a crown of thorns upon his head. Pilate was being ironic when he had that written. What Pilate meant to say was that this is what happens to those who claim to be king. His intent was that people should laugh at the disjunction between the grand title of king on the one hand, and this miserable worm of a man who writhed upon the cross on the other.
But this was of God. That title speaks the truth. Jesus of Nazareth is the Christ. He is the Christ particularly when he was suffering on the cross as punishment for the sins that we have committed. He is accomplishing God’s purpose of bringing about atonement. God’s just wrath is being poured out upon him instead of upon us. When that Father says at Jesus’s baptism, “This is my Son, whom I love. With him I am well pleased,” this means that he was pleased with all of Jesus’s life. Surely this also includes the great culmination of Jesus doing the work of being the Christ—when he was crucified.
Contrary to the dispensationalists, the Father does not hate human beings, but rather loves them. The way that he loved the world was by sending his only begotten Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish, but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son in the world to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through him. This salvation is the work of the Christ and of the triune God.
The Baptism of our Lord is an epiphany. It is truly revealing. It reveals the Trinity. It reveals the Christ. All things in heaven and on earth are being brought together in this man Jesus, standing in the Jordan River.
Finally, we should also mention the great importance of our own baptism as well. It is easy to despise baptism. It’s just an anointing of water. Many Christians don’t remember being baptized because they were baptized as babies.
But Christ commanded that we should be baptized. By that baptism we are united with Christ. We are united to the Triune God. Baptism connects us with Jesus and God. It is the full bestowal of all that Jesus the Christ accomplished for us by his holy life, atoning death, and his glorious resurrection and ascension. In the words of our Small Catechism: “It works the forgiveness of sins, rescues from death and the devil, and gives eternal salvation to all who believe this as the words and promises of God declare.”
Thus our baptism is an epiphany as well. When we were baptized God revealed himself to us so that we may believe in him and be taken up into his saving will.
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Let me begin with a story that some of you will get and some of you will not get. A person went to a mechanic one day because their car wasn’t working right. They went into the waiting room while the mechanic looked over their car, high and low, left and right. The mechanic walked into the waiting room, wiping his hands on a rag, and said, “It’s the muffler belt. It’s shot. You need a new muffler belt.”
Some of you are going to understand that this is a joke. Others won’t quite get it. Whether you get it or not has to do with how well you understand how cars work. You’ve probably heard of cars having mufflers. You’ve probably heard of them having belts. But if you know how mufflers work and how belts work, then you will know that there can’t be any such thing as a muffler belt.
Mufflers are the pipes that carry the exhaust from the engine to the back of the car. Besides carrying the gasses, they also muffle the sound of the engine that would otherwise be much louder. That is why they are called mufflers. But basically a muffler is a fancy pipe.
Belts run on pulleys or wheels. They transfer energy from one part of the machine to another part of the machine. Belts do tend to break or need to be replaced, so a mechanic telling you that you need a new belt isn’t that surprising. But there’s no way that there could be any belts on a muffler. That’s like saying you could get into your car and drive across the ocean. It’s not going to happen. It can’t happen. But you can’t know that without already having a good bit of knowledge going into it.
Jokes are a pretty sophisticated way of talking. If you don’t know what is being talked about, then you probably won’t get the joke. Praising, giving praise, is another sophisticated way of talking. Let’s say that someone starts singing the praises of the Ford 5.0 liter engine. They start listing off thinks like torque and horsepower. Some of you are going to get that praise. A lot of us, including myself, might start to get a little glassy eyed. The praise is meaningful to some. To others is just a bunch of blah, blah, blah. You might need to learn some stuff in order to understand why someone might be excited.
Our epistle reading this morning is a hymn of praise. That makes it one of these higher levels of talking. If you don’t know what Paul is referring to, then it is going to sound like a bunch of blah, blah, blah. Just as a car enthusiast won’t take the time to explain horsepower or torque while he is singing his praises, so also Paul is not explaining the different things that he is referring to in this hymn to God the Father, about his Son Jesus Christ.
So we will have to do some work before we can begin to understand what Paul is saying. Even then, I think you should take this bulletin home and carefully read through it again later today.
Let’s begin by talking about the main theme of Paul’s hymn before getting into the details. The main theme is that Paul is praising God the Father. He says, “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.” Three times in these verses he refers to God’s glory. God’s glory is to be praised. Praise and glory go together. It is the glories of the 5.0 liter engine that lead some to sing its praises. God’s glory provokes praise.
Let me give you a couple examples of God’s glory, before going into the glories of God are specifically talked about in this hymn. God’s creation itself is an example of God’s glory. All the things that God has made—its strength, its beauty, the joy it gives us—these are God’s accomplishments that provoke praise. Another example of God’s glory is the way that God liberated Israel who was enslaved under Pharaoh. God twisted Pharaoh’s arm to let them go. Then he destroyed Pharaoh and his chariots, throwing them into the sea. This was God’s accomplishment that calls forth praise. So it is with all of God’s accomplishments in the Old Testament.
Paul, however, is focused on one multifaceted thing: our Lord Jesus Christ. In these twelve verses Paul uses the phrase “in Christ” at least eleven times. When you read through it again, pay attention to how often he says either “in Christ,” or “in him.” When it says, “in him,” it is referring to Christ. So, overall, Paul says, “In Christ,” God accomplished this. And “in Christ,” God accomplished that. These accomplishments are God’s glory that call for our praise.
But here we run into another difficulty when it comes to our praise. God’s accomplishments in Christ are of a far higher order than earthly things. We can somewhat understand the glory of God by looking at his creation. We can somewhat understand the glory of God in him defeating the Egyptians. It is harder for us to see how the redemption of his blood forgives our sins or makes us blameless before God. It is harder for us to see how we are adopted as sons through Jesus Christ.
One part of this problem is that we haven’t yet experienced even the tenth part of what God accomplished for us in Christ. This is kind of like talking about torque or horsepower to someone who isn’t a car person. There’s probably no better way to understand torque than to experience the feeling of being pushed back in your seat when the gas pedal is punched to the floor. There’s probably no better way to learn what horsepower is than to see a truck pull something really heavy.
But, as Paul says in our reading, we, for whom God has done all these thing in Christ, haven’t gotten our inheritance yet. We have the Holy Spirit, sure, but we have not yet had our bodies finally redeemed from death and decay. How can we know what it is like to rise from the dead when we haven’t yet experienced it?
So this is one part of the problem: we haven’t experienced anything that is even similar to the accomplishments of God that Paul is praising him for. The other problem is much more serious. It is our active hostility towards heavenly things, and our insatiable craving for earthly things. Characteristic of this mentality is how we get carried along by the spirit of this age. We get deceived into thinking that reality is only the things that are seen. We think that what is permanent and important are the nuts and bolts of this world. We over-estimate the importance of things that we see and can buy and can consume.
When it comes to a person’s relationship with God, on the other hand, this is taken as something very light and unimportant. Either people take it for granted—something that no one needs to worry about, or God is seen as premodern and mythological—again, something that no one needs to worry about. What do we need to worry about? Getting ahead in life.
And so we have a very hard time appreciating the things that Paul is talking about because our flesh is hostile to such thoughts. In fact, just after where our reading ends, Paul has what seems like a strange prayer. He prays that God would bless the Christians in Ephesus with the Holy Spirit so that they may know Jesus. They are already Christians, and yet Paul prays that God would intervene so that they may know Jesus. This shows us that knowledge of Jesus is different than gaining a knowledge of torque or horsepower. There is a deadness and a hostility that needs to be overcome.
Understanding the difficulty of knowing Jesus, and asking God to give us his Holy Spirit, let’s return to the main theme again. Paul is praising God the Father for his glory. The glory that is being praised is “in Christ” this, and “in Christ” that. Let’s briefly go through the accomplishments that God has worked in Christ:
He has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places. He has chosen us before God created the world. He makes us holy and blameless. He chose us to be adopted as God’s children by being united with Christ.
Paul speaks about the way that we have come to be saved. We have not been saved by the use of Ten Plagues or by the opening up of the Red Sea, like it was with the Israelites. Instead we have been saved by a sacrifice that Jesus has done. In Christ is redemption, the forgiveness of sins, through his blood. He gives us wisdom and insight, not of earthly things, but of heavenly things. Christ came in the fullness of time, as the heart of God’s will toward us. At the end of time all things are going to be brought together in Christ—things in heaven and things on earth.
Here, again, we see how mistaken our thoughts about reality can be. Right now it seems of little consequence if a person believes in Christ or not. It can seem much more important how much money, prestige, or fun a person might have. But all things are going to be brought together in Christ. He will be the only thing that matters. Paul says in another place that all things will be put under Jesus’s feet, then he will hand everything over to God the Father, so that God will be all in all.
But let’s finish what Paul says in our reading about the things that God accomplishes in Christ. In Christ we have an inheritance. Abraham’s descendants inherited the land of Canaan. We have a greater inheritance in heaven. Finally, in Christ we heard the word of truth, which is the good news of our salvation. And in Christ, when you believed, you were sealed with the Holy Spirit. This is the down payment of the inheritance, the redemption of our bodies.
With all of the things that we have talked about God accomplishing in Christ, perhaps you have understood certain things more and other things less. Maybe some of the things sound like torque or horsepower. It is important that we are not satisfied with Paul’s hymn of praise sounding like a bunch of blah, blah, blah.
There is literally nothing more important that Paul could possibly be talking about. All things are going to come together in Christ. Plus he is not talking about something that is unrelated to you and to your future. The things that he is talking about are going to affect you directly and personally. This is not a hobby. This is God and you. It is God’s relationship with you. And what are the terms of that relationship? It is the thing that Paul keeps saying over and over in this hymn. The terms of this relationship is: “In Christ, in Christ, in Christ.”
So do well to take in hand that strange prayer that Paul has for the Ephesians—that God would give us the Holy Spirit so that we may know Christ. When was the last time that you prayed for God to give you a knowledge of Jesus? Just as a lack of knowledge of the 5.0 liter engine might prevent us from singing its praises, so also it is our lack of knowledge of Jesus that prevents us from joining in with Paul in praising the glory of God in Christ. It is because we do not understand the greatness of what has happened in Christ, that our praise falters. Instead our thoughts and our subsequent praises may well be directed towards other things—ourselves, or our family, or something else of ours, for example.
So, as I mentioned at the beginning, you probably have to do a little work to understand the glories of God that Paul is praising him for in our reading. Read through this reading again, later today. Join in with Paul, praising God for the glories he has accomplished in Christ. Those glories of God have been done for you out of love for you.
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It’s a little jarring, the day after Christmas, to celebrate the martyrdom of St. Stephen. Talking about a fiery man, who wouldn’t shut up, to the point where people pelted him with stones until he died—that stands in stark contrast with a certain view of the Christmas spirit. For many Christmas is a celebration of celebrating. Here we might ask, “What happened to the party?” Now we are talking about somebody who said such stark and stringent things that those who heard them screamed at the top of their lungs, dragging him outside of the city, bludgeoning him with rocks. Merry Christmas, right?
But people’s popular conception of Christmas is quite lacking when it comes to the real content of Christmas. Jesus Christ, the Son of God, is different than Santa Claus. Jesus is the king of righteousness. Santa Claus, contrary to what you have been told, doesn’t keep track of who is naughty and who is nice. What gets Stephen into trouble is not that he’s been telling everyone he comes across that they are all jolly good fellows. He’s told them that they’ve been naughty. This has ticked them off. They don’t repent. They get even.
It is easy for us to forget how fundamental this kind of thing is to life. In our Gospel reading Jesus mentions the blood of righteous Abel. Abel was the second son of Adam and Eve. His older brother, Cain, killed him. Cain was the first human being conceived and born in the natural way. What is this first-born of the whole human race? He’s a murderer. Why does he murder? Because he is corrupt. He wants the good reputation of piety, but he’s not actually pious. God, who knows all things, knew this, and was not deceived by his sacrifice. God had regard for Abel and his honest sacrifice, but he did not have regard for Cain’s sacrifice. Abel was a living, breathing reminder of Cain’s inadequacy, corruption, unwillingness to do what is right. So Cain got rid of him.
This kind of thing is archetypical for life on this sin-infested planet. It happens all over the place. There is shady practice after shady practice. We become conditioned to it so that we hardly notice it. If we do notice it and do something about it, we’ll pay dearly for it, so it’s in people’s best interest to ignore it.
Let me try to explain the kind of thing I’m talking about. It’s a little hard to explain because it’s easy to think I’m just talking about one isolated thing here and another isolated thing there, when what I’m trying to get across to you is that this is thoroughly enmeshed into lives. But let me give you some examples of what I’m talking about.
Let’s say there’s a business that bills by the hour. They start working for you a quarter to the hour until half past the hour. You get billed for two hours because time was spent during each of the hours of the day.
Another example: You buy something at Kohls. You use it for what you need, careful not to damage it. Then you return it and get your money back.
Another example: Mom or dad tell you to do something. You know what they mean, but you don’t do one iota more than what was literally said, because not each individual step was specifically laid out. Then you can plead innocence, “because you didn’t know.”
Another example: Your friends say terrible things. Perhaps they say blasphemous things, but you keep your mouth shut because you don’t want to hurt the relationship.
I could go on and on and on with these little things. I’ll spare you that, but let me point out one more thing: whatever your calling, your line of work might be, there is bound to be countless little tricks and lies and manipulations that happen day in and day out. Tiny dishonesties, even. They are assumed to be just the way that stuff gets done, so it probably doesn’t weigh heavily at all on anybody’s conscience. But it is crooked, corrupt, and when the light of truth shines upon it, people can see it unless they’ve become blind.
Jesus says that we are to be salt and light in the world. We are to let our yes be yes and our no be no. We are not to try to manipulate anyone. Paul says that we should not be conformed or schematized to this age—to the way that things normally get done. Instead we are to be metamorphosized, transformed in our thinking, to know what the will of God is. We should learn what is good and pleasing to God.
This requires active work on our part. What is natural is to always look out for yourself and not give a hoot what is good for others or pleasing to God. That is especially the case if the situation calls for us to be inconvenienced in order to do what is good and acceptable to God. And if we were called upon to suffer—like getting fired, or losing your social status, or being frowned—you can just forget it! It’s not going to happen.
But this is precisely what we as God’s children have been called upon to do in this life. We are to be straight, true, forthright, honest in this world. Without a doubt we are surrounded by crookedness and corruption, meanness and envy on every side. But we are to live according to a different set of rules—God’s rules.
And that means that we are going to clash with the world around us. We are going to have conflict in work and business. We are going to have conflict with friends and family. We are going to have conflict in a congregation. In all areas of life there is crookedness and corruption. But we are to be true, living sacrifices, commending ourselves to God who judges justly.
This is what St. Stephen did. He plainly interpreted the Scriptures in the synagogue of Freedmen. That might have been his own synagogue as well as Saul’s synagogue, who later is known as the apostle Paul. When Stephen interprets the Scriptures as pointing to and culminating in Christ, his compatriots are confounded. God also did signs through Stephen, which God did more often in those apostolic days. Stephen was not making a name for himself. He was testifying to Jesus. He was magnifying Jesus. It is obvious that Stephen does not bear ill will against his fellow men, even though they hate him. You can tell that by his prayer that God would not hold their murdering of him against them.
So Stephen suffered and died precisely because he was good. In this way he followed his master Jesus, who also was someone who was straight and true in the midst of a crooked generation who put him to death. Suffering for doing good is a high and holy thing. It is our highest calling as Christians. Stephen was the first Christian whom God chose to honor in such a way. Stephen’s life, testimony, and death are a precious gem. Plus it produced tremendous fruit in the man who would eventually become known as the apostle Paul.
Towards the end of the reading, you heard how the men who stoned Stephen put their outer garments at Saul’s feet. (That’s the same man we know of as Paul.) Saul was a ferocious persecutor of Christians, zealous for Jewish orthodoxy, but eventually he was converted by none other than the Lord Jesus when he was on his way to arrest some Christians who were living in Damascus. But people are not usually converted in a single day. I can’t help but think that Paul remembered the testimony, the grace, the forgiveness, and the prayer that came from Stephen.
There was no way for Stephen to know that one of those men for whom he prayed would become a great apostle. He certainly wasn’t engineering it in any way. It was natural fruit that grew from the cross that was laid upon him. His suffering for doing good, rather than for doing evil, had God’s own design behind it.
But some people might object to calling Stephen good. We have to note this, because such thinking is very common in our day. Some people will say that Stephen wasn’t very good because of the way that he talked to his fellow Jews. He said, “You stiff-necked people with uncircumcised hearts and ears! You are always resisting the Holy Spirit!”
There are many people who would throw a penalty flag here. He was roughing the hearer. He used unnecessary language. The words were too harsh. He could have said it in a nicer way. Stephen can end up being put on trial instead of the stiff-necked Jews who were resisting the Holy Spirit.
Not only can Stephen (and others like him) be put on trial, he can also be found guilty in the court of public opinion. I guarantee you that there were some people there who thought that Stephen got what was coming to him. They were appalled at how he was insubordinate to all the religious leaders in the room. He was too cheeky and bold. He needed to have somebody cut him down to size.
It is very important that you realize that when Christians suffer for doing what is good, they are usually painted as being bad by others. And that painting that is done by others can be and often is highly plausible. The apostles and Christians who were put to death were not put to death because they went around telling everyone they were such jolly good fellows. They stepped on a lot of toes, just like Jesus stepped on a lot of toes. Some of the people whose toes got stepped on repented. Others got even.
But ultimately such revenge is no matter. As Christians we are free. If you fear God, then you will not fear men nearly as much as you otherwise would. This freedom is a wonderful thing to behold.
Did you notice Stephen’s freedom? Perhaps the main reason why the crowd became so stark raving mad at him was precisely because of his freedom. He wasn’t scared of them. He testified to what he saw—Jesus at the right hand of God—even though he knew, and he knew that they knew, that this would absolutely enrage them.
When they started to bludgeon him with stones he prayed for Jesus to receive his spirit. He was not thinking of trying to figure out a way to save his life. He was thinking of Jesus. If he were begging for his life, or calculating a way to save his own life, he never would pray a prayer like that. Such a prayer was offensive to the bullies who were going at him. It just added fuel to their fury.
It is said of the devil that he is a very proud spirit. The one thing he can’t stand is being despised or neglected. He wants people to think that he is really something. People’s evil spirits are like that too. When they’ve decided that they don’t like a person, the one thing they can’t stand is for that person to be free and easy. They want that person afraid of what might happen to them. They want to control and dominate. However, a very common feature that is seen in a great many of the stories of the early Christian martyrs is that even though they were staring death right in the face, they were not afraid. They were free.
But they were also gracious. They were not trying to upset people with their freedom. By the power of the Holy Spirit, they loved those who were hurting them. They prayed for those who persecuted them. Their lack of malice towards the ones who were hurting them is an important sign that makes Christian suffering different from the suffering of others.
Now let’s talk about you. You are children of God. You are free. You are to stand up and fight for what is true and right. Then you are to not lose your courage when you get blowback from it. God knows what is going on. You aren’t alone. The people who look like they can do terrible things to you are no match for God. And it might be that God will produce tremendous fruit from the cross that he lays upon you. You can’t know that. But God already does. What’s important is that you understand what Peter says in his first epistle: You should not be ashamed of suffering for doing good. That is a blessed thing, a following after our master, Jesus.
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The message that the Bible gives us is that God dwells with his people. In our Old Testament reading today we heard about God entering the tent that God had instructed Moses to build. For about ten chapter of Exodus there are very specific and elaborate instructions that are recorded. The tent had three parts. There was a curtain placed around the whole perimeter, kind of like a wall. The tent itself was to be inside this courtyard. There were two chambers in the tent. The ark of the covenant was to be in the most holy place in the back. That was where God dwelt.
In our reading, the glory of God that was manifest in the cloud came to rest in that tent so that Moses could not go into it. When the glory cloud would go up from the tent the people would pack their things. They would follow God wherever he led. When he came to rest, they would unpack their things, including the tabernacle that God had instructed them to build, and they would stay there until the cloud of his glory would go up again.
This was a new epoch for God’s people. With Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob God did not stay with them in such a way. God would appear to the patriarchs from time to time and speak to them by the Angel of the Lord. When he appeared he would give them promises to encourage them. But he did not dwell with them the way that he dwelt with their descendants as he led them out of Egypt with the pillar of cloud by day and the pillar of fire by night. After the ark of the covenant and the tabernacle was built, that was the way that God dwelt with his people.
Among all the nations of the earth that existed, it was only among the descendants of Jacob that God dwelt. This made them a holy nation. They were blessed by being in God’s presence, whereas those who were not holy were repelled by God’s presence. That’s the way it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be. Those who have been prepared to be in God’s presence by being forgiven and sanctified find God’s presence to be healthy and life giving. Those who are unholy and sinful bear God’s holiness.
The Old Testament, from Exodus onward, has this presence of God among his people at the heart of it. God is present with them first of all in the tabernacle, then later with King Solomon’s temple. Generation after generation God sanctified these people. They were blessed to know him and his Word in this life and were prepared to live with him in a yet more intimate and better way in the next.
A new epoch for God’s people came with Jesus. The Apostle John speaks to this in the opening words of his Gospel that we heard this morning: In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him everything was made, and without him not one thing was made that has been made… This Word that existed already at the beginning became flesh in the person who was named Jesus. God dwells among us in this Jesus.
I mentioned last Sunday that there is nothing in the Old Testament that holds a candle to what the angel Gabriel said to Mary. The God of the Temple and the tabernacle, the God of Mt. Sinai, the God who created the world was going to take up residence in her womb. This is astounding almost to the point of being absurd. On the other hand, though, it is quite in keeping with the general way that God operates.
When God chose a nation to be his own, he did not choose the most powerful or populous nation. He chose Abraham, and his wife, Sarah. He chose them when they were childless and already well advanced in years. They didn’t even have any offspring who could receive the inheritance that God was promising to them.
With the new epoch of God’s grace that came through Moses, you see the same thing. This people hardly deserved to be called a nation. They were an enslaved people under the Egyptians. They didn’t have any autonomous government. They didn’t have a military. God fought for them and subdued the Egyptians with his mighty arm. They were a wandering band for forty years before they entered into their promised inheritance in Canaan.
After that, through all the years when the Israelites lived in Canaan, they never developed into anything more than a regional power. They never became as great as the Egyptians before them or the Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, or Romans after them. They were a small people with the great God in their midst.
The birth of Jesus fits this pattern. At this time the Israelites were again a subjected people. The Romans ruled over them. The flesh and blood for the eternal Son of God was chosen to be from a virgin who didn’t even live in Jerusalem. She lived in Galilee, the hinterlands.
It’s quite clear that Mary and Joseph did not have a lot of money. Otherwise they never would have found themselves in the straights that they were in at the time of Jesus’s birth. If they could have afforded it, they probably would have found some better accommodations than a manger for his bed. The sacrifice that they gave at the temple shortly after his birth was the cheaper option of two pigeons instead of the more expensive option of a lamb.
Plus, what’s much more, who should believe Mary and Joseph? It’s one thing to be a nobody from nowhere without a penny to your name. It’s another thing to be disbelieved as a charlatan and a fool. To this day there are people who think that it is impossible that Jesus does not have an earthly father. They think that he was conceived by an earthly father out of wedlock.
This is how it has always been, however. People who looked at Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob would not have believed that God was in their midst. People who looked at the nation of Israel while they were enslaved, but also when they were at the height of their power, would not have thought that God was in their midst. This is especially the case with the virgin Mary. But to those who have believed, this is a wonderful thing in their eyes. God despises the proud, but gives grace to the humble.
This general pattern of God’s grace being found among the poor and humble continues on to this day. God dwells in humble little churches that have to struggle to find a way to pay the bills. The big churches with the big endowments, the National Cathedral, or St. Paul’s in London, quite literally have unbelievers preaching unbelief to those who go to hear them. It was not the biggest, most beautiful building within which the Christ child was found. He is content to dwell in places where we wouldn’t even dream of giving birth to our babies.
So you do well to not be put off by appearances. The way things look is one thing. What God promises is another. The truth is that God’s people have never looked very impressive. In fact, whenever they started to look impressive they tended to depart from their faithfulness. But God’s people have always been blessed with the most wonderful promises.
The same is true for you as God’s people. Take, for example, what was said in our Gospel reading this morning. You, who have believed, have been given the power, the authority, the status of being a child of God. John says you have been born not of blood, or the desire of the flesh, or of the husband’s will. You have been born of God.
I cannot conceive of a higher or better thing than that you should have Jesus as your brother and God as your Father. That is what John is saying. This is what God has done by uniting himself with us. The promise is high, almost to the point of absurdity, because the appearances do not match up with it. But the appearances will come eventually when the time is right.
Right now we are God’s workmanship. He who has begun a good work in you is going to bring it to completion on the Day of our Lord Jesus Christ. Then you will behold the splendor of our God who now works among us in a humble and hidden way, preparing us for the holiness that is to come. That will be the final epoch of God’s grace when everything will be as it should be.
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The prophet Isaiah speaks about the coming Christ hundreds of years before he was born. Isaiah says in our reading tonight: “People walking in darkness have seen a great light. For those living in the land of the shadow of death, the light has dawned.”
Walking in darkness is bewildering. You cannot see where you are going. You cannot anticipate problems or dangers. You might not get to where you are going because you don’t know the way. You might not even know where you are supposed to be going.
This is a good description of us. What is life all about? You might get almost as many explanations for what life is all about as the number of people that you encounter. Everybody has different ideas of what happiness is. There are different goals for life. On good days people try their best to get to where they think they will be happy. On bad days people don’t even try. They make peace with the darkness, bide their time. Are they waiting for it all to be over?
Since some people try more and other people try less, it might seem as though they should not be put into the same group. It might seem as though some people have their stuff together. They’re going someplace. But this is an illusion. We are all in the darkness. It’s like being in a cave where there is no light whatsoever. Whoever is in that place is in the darkness. It doesn’t matter if people are moving around a lot, or a little bit, or not at all.
Perhaps it is nobler to be moving about. At least that’s trying. The thought is that if you keep trying, and you never give up, then maybe you will find the light. Maybe you will arrive at happiness. But this almost makes the situation worse. If everywhere you decide to go is necessarily going to be the wrong place to go, then you are always only busy getting to the wrong place.
It’s like Sisyphus from Greek mythology. His punishment in Hades was that he had to roll an immense boulder to the top of the hill, only to have it roll back down to the bottom again where he’d have to start all over. Fighting against the darkness, looking for meaning and happiness, sounds like it’s the thing we should be doing. What good is it, though, if all the striving comes to nothing?
In contrast to this dreary darkness, Isaiah’s claim, God’s claim, concerning the Christ, is just as stark and grand as it sounds. “People walking in darkness have seen a great light. For those living in the land of the shadow of death, the light has dawned.” There is darkness and there is light. All live in the darkness no matter how relatively successful each might be. The light—that’s Jesus. Jesus Christ is the light of the world. He is the light that no darkness can overcome.
This sounds like it is automatically a good thing. Our problems are solved. In a place where everything is pitch black, to have the light suddenly appear, that’s marvelous. There’s no other way of getting out of the darkness than by this great light. This is true, but the light of Christ is not always welcome.
Jesus says, “This is the judgment: The light has come into the world, but the people loved the darkness more than the light. They loved the darkness because their deeds were evil. Everyone who does worthless things hates the light, and does not come near the light, otherwise their works would be exposed.”
This, at least, has to be said in defense of the darkness: Darkness seems to give us the freedom to pursue what we want. We do things in secret without really having to think about it, because nobody’s going to know. What isn’t known won’t hurt us. We learn this as little tikes. The darkness seems to give us the freedom to do what we want.
So we should not think it is strange, that when this great light dawns upon us, that we can end up hating the light and loving the darkness. We don’t want to make a clean break with our life of doing what we want. There are things that we would like to continue to do in the darkness even after the light has come. It is not uncommon for Christians to want to bring a little piece of hell with them, some sin that has given them solace or satisfaction over the years. But that is not possible. The light obliterates the darkness.
This can seem to be a great hardship, but really it isn’t. There is a great delusion with secrecy and darkness. The lie is that what we pursue in the darkness is good because we enjoy it. It’s the spice of life. It’s like an alcoholic thinking of his alcohol as his medicine. He can’t do without it. But the alcohol is not giving him life. It is dishing out death, one dose after another. So it is with all that gets pursued in the darkness. There is an implied promise that we will be blessed by pursuing such things. But all that gets accomplished is that we become more fearful of God and his judgement. The last thing we want is for the light to come and expose what we have been doing.
A further delusion is that if we abandon those things that we love to do in the darkness, then life will be boring and lame. But God is not stingy with his blessings. God is well pleased with us creatures doing our creaturely things. He wants us to eat and drink and be merry. Intimate love is so well pleasing to him that he crowns it with the birth of children. A trick gets pulled on us when we think that pursuing illicit things in the darkness is the only way we are ever going to be truly happy.
One old Christian thinker said that evil is not able to create anything. It only takes things that are good and twists them, perverts them, so that they become shameful. There might be a bit of truth lurking in the idea of taking something of hell with us into heaven. Whatever is truly good, whatever comes from the Creator, that gets twisted in the darkness, this goodness is stored up for us in heaven. It is the darkness that we have to leave behind, not the goodness. It is the lying that we have to leave behind, not the enjoyment.
Jesus says, “I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will not walk in darkness, but will have the light of life.” Jesus is good. Light is good. The light purifies and gives life. These things are true, no matter what anybody might say about them. Jesus has not come to take anything away from us except the darkness, the lies, and the sins. He does not take away. He gives.
The first thing from which everything else must flow is the way that God accepts us and takes us in as his own. Isaiah says, “For to us a child is born, to us a Son is given.” This is speaking about Jesus. Jesus was born and given as God’s gift to us. As the Redeemer and Mediator he reconciles sinners with God. For the sake of Jesus, and his cleansing blood, we do not need to be afraid when God’s light exposes our lives. For the sake of Jesus we are well pleasing to God.
Once we have understood that God accept us, saves us, justifies us in Jesus, we can begin to live a new life. Jesus says, “I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will not walk in darkness, but will have the light of life.” Taking up our cross and following Jesus, we learn from him what is good and what is evil. What is good is love. What is evil is a bad conscience before God, and a fearing of his light.
Slinking about, fearing exposure, is not good. It never has been good. It never will be good. That’s because it is alienation from God from whom all good things come. Jesus’s redemption overcomes this alienation and reconciles us to God. Every single one of us has been redeemed by Jesus. Through him we can live in light. Then we are not living in dread, fearing exposure, but are looking forward to more light and more life from God.
Apart from Christ there is only darkness. Nobody knows what he or she is doing as they search about for happiness. It inevitably ends with the futility of death, as Solomon says in Ecclesiastes. “But,” as Isaiah says, “To us a Child is born, to us a Son is given.” “The people walking in darkness have seen a great light. For those living in the land of the shadow of death, the light has dawned.” He does not come to take away anything from you except the lies and the sins that were never really good for you anyway. Trust in him. Follow him. Then you will not walk in darkness, but will have the light of life.
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Let’s begin by setting the scene for our Gospel reading this morning.
Earlier in this first chapter of Luke he speaks of the way that two baby boys were miraculously conceived. One of them was John the Baptist. The other was Jesus. John the Baptist’s father, Zechariah, was a priest. One day he had the honor of doing the priestly duties in the Temple when an angel of the Lord appeared to him. Zechariah was frightened, but the angel said to him, “Do not be afraid. Your wife Elizabeth will bear a son. You are to name him John.”
This was astounding to Zechariah because he and his wife had been unable to have children. Now this angel was telling him that he would have a son when he and Elizabeth were old. Because he did not believe the angel, God made him mute. From that time until his son was born, and Zechariah wrote on a tablet that his name was to be John, he was not able to speak. When his ability to speak returned to him, he sang the song that we call the Benedictus. This is the song that we sometimes sing during the Matins service instead of the Te Deum.
This baby, born to Zechariah and Elizabeth in their old age, was John the Baptist. His conception was miraculous because his parents were old and otherwise unable to have children. The other miraculous conception is what happened with Mary.
Mary lived in Nazareth of Galilee. She was engaged to be married to Joseph. One day God sent the angel Gabriel to her. He said, “Hello, you who are highly favored by the Lord. The Lord is with you.” Mary was perplexed at his words, and tried to figure out what sort of greeting this was. The angel responded, “Do not be afraid. God is well pleased with you. You will conceive and bear a Son. The name you should give him is Jesus. He will be the Son of the Most High. God will give him the throne of his father David. He will reign over the house of Jacob forever, and there will be no end to his kingdom.”
As you can imagine, Mary had a hard time understanding this. She asked how this would be, since she was a virgin. Gabriel answered that the Holy Spirit will come upon her, the power of the Most High will overshadow her. That is why the child who is born of her will be holy. He will be the Son of God.
Mary responded in a wonderful way. There has never been a higher Word that has been spoken to a human being. There is nothing in the Old Testament that even holds a candle to what the angel just said to Mary. She doesn’t ask for any signs or wonders to confirm the word. She simply responded, “Behold, I am the servant of the Lord. Let it be done to me according to your Word.”
The Gospel reading that you heard this morning is what immediately follows after this. The angel had told Mary that her relative, Elizabeth, was also pregnant, sixth months along. Mary went to visit her. She went from Galilee in the north down to the south, south of Jerusalem, into the hill country. Zechariah and Elizabeth were living in a town somewhere in this region.
You heard how several unusual things happened and were said when Mary arrived at their house. When Mary said hello, John the Baptist leaped and stirred about in the womb of his mother. Elizabeth then is filled with the Holy Spirit and confesses her faith. She believes in the baby whom Mary is carrying in her womb. That baby would only be called an embryo in our medical terms. Jesus was only weeks old at that point, a tiny human being. Elizabeth, like Mary, believes in the Word of the Lord. This child is God’s Son, miraculously conceived by the Holy Spirit.
Elizabeth is wonderfully comforting and encouraging to Mary. If people at that time were anything like they are at our time, then Mary would not have been treated very respectfully by everyone she came across. The way Elizabeth treated Mary must have been a nice reprieve for her. You can perhaps picture an older woman comforting a younger woman who otherwise might be treated quite roughly and rudely by others. In her comforting, Elizabeth especially points to Mary’s faith. She tells Mary that it was very good that she had believed. The promises that God spoke to her are going to be fulfilled.
Then Mary sings a song. You might also be familiar with this song. We call it the Magnificat. It is sung during Evening Prayer or Vespers. It is a great psalm, as great as any that you might find in the Bible.
The opening theme pervades everything that Mary has to say: “My soul magnifies the Lord,” or “My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord.” Her thoughts are taken up with the promises and power of God.
This is remarkable when you consider what else is going on with her. She had left Nazareth and gone way down to the south. Luke doesn’t say why she did that, but it might be because she all of a sudden became pregnant. Not everybody is going to believe that that child was conceived by the Holy Spirit. She is very pious, but in the eyes of others, it appears that she is a sinner.
She also must have been concerned about what her fiancé, Joseph, might think of her. The first thought that would come to anyone’s mind would be that she had been unfaithful. He knew it wasn’t his child, so whose was it? Joseph, for his part, also had a great faith. When he was told in a dream that the child the virgin Mary was carrying was conceived by the Holy Spirit he believed it. This was another miracle, a gift from God.
Regardless, however, this must have weighed upon Mary’s mind. In general, Mary was not in a powerful and proud state as far as her circumstances were concerned. There would have been plenty for her to complain about and to feel sorry for herself about. There is not the slightest hint, however, of self-pity in her song.
In fact, the song is a song of victory, like the great psalms in the Old Testament. Mary is joyously defiant of anyone who would be her enemy. This is not because she found some self-worth inside of herself or embraced her feminine power. It was because she believed in the Lord her God. Specifically she believed that God had not despised her for her humility (like human beings tend to do), but instead had chosen her. Since God had chosen her there was nothing that should hamper her joy even though there was plenty of fodder available for feeling blue if she had wanted to pursue such thoughts.
Here we have a good lesson concerning faith. We should learn it well, so that our souls may magnify the Lord along with her. It is not enough to believe that God or Jesus exists. It is not enough to believe that Jesus was conceived by the Holy Spirit, died on Good Friday, and was resurrected on Easter. These are all facts that the demons are surer of than we ever will be. Faith is when you believe that the Lord your God is for you. He’s on your side. He has chosen you. He’s begun a good work in you. Having begun a good work in you, he will bring it to completion on the day of our Lord Jesus Christ.
It can be hard to believe that the Lord God has chosen you. Just consider your humble estate. I see no royalty before me to day. Consider, more dreadfully, the bad things that you have done. You’ve broken all of God’s commandments. You haven’t been loveable. And yet you’ve been loved. God’s love for you has prompted him to see to all your needs of body and soul. There is no element of your life that has not been seen to by God.
Redemption has been worked by the atoning sacrifice of Jesus on the cross. He did this sacrifice one time and it was for all people. It is the great sacrifice that makes all things clean. He has brought the word of his favor to you, just like he brought it to Zechariah or to Mary. One way or another God has said to you, “You are my highly favored one.” It probably wasn’t by an angel. It might have been when you were baptized. It might have been when you heard some preaching. It might have been when you were talking with a friend. Barring all those other ways, it is being spoken to you now. Whatever way that word has come to you, you should believe that God is for you. That he has chosen you for salvation. Your sins cannot stop God. He is more powerful than your sins.
He is more powerful than anything. He is more powerful than death. He is more powerful than the United States of America. He brings down rulers from their thrones and lifts up the lowly. You can be joyous no matter what your circumstances might be when you realize that God is for you. He has chosen you. There is nothing that can stop your happiness because there is nothing that can stop God who is for you.
“Rejoice in the Lord always, again I say rejoice.” We talked about that last week. You can rejoice in the Lord in any and every circumstance. There is no exception whatsoever because God is more powerful than everything and anything. But remember what I said about that rejoicing. It doesn’t mean that you have to have a smile on your face or that you have to jump and skip around. Inwardly the Christian may be rejoicing while outwardly there are all kinds of bad things going on. But we have been set free from being slaves to our circumstances. We are not dependent upon good circumstances in order to have our joy in God.
Mary had joy despite many things that would have been very discouraging. She rejoiced in God her Savior. She would continue to have joy in her Savior. When Jesus was just born, and when Mary and Joseph brought him to the Temple, old Simeon made a prophesy concerning Jesus and concerning Mary. He told Mary that Jesus would cause the rise and fall of many in Israel. He would be a sign that was spoken against. And as for Mary, a sword would pass through her soul, he said.
A sword would pierce Mary’s soul. Like any mother she loved her child. Furthermore, she believed the Word that was spoken to her about him. She believed that he was the Holy One of God. And yet Jesus was denounced as a heretic. He was said to be possessed. He was said to be an agent of Satan. He was mocked and crucified. Mary was at the cross with only a tiny handful of others who were courageous enough to show their love for him at his darkest hour.
Don’t think that Mary had to have taken back her Magnificat when that sword was passing through her soul. Don’t think that Christian joy is dependent upon the circumstances that we are in. Those whom God loves he also chastises. The path by which we are led into eternal life is one that is specifically tailored for us. It has highs and lows. It is filled with unexpected twists and turns. It teaches us not to rely upon ourselves or upon the strength of our faith or upon any good works that we might do. God teaches us to rely upon him. Though the earth be moved, and the hills be carried into the midst of the seas, we will not fear. The Lord of hosts is with us. The God of Jacob is our refuge.
So you may sing the Magnificat, not just as Mary’s song, but as your song, regardless of your outward circumstances. Your outward circumstances, to be sure, are different than the outward circumstances that Mary found herself in when she sang this song. But what matters is that your inward circumstances are the very same as her inward circumstances. Why is Mary singing? It is because the Lord has done great things for her. He has chosen her. He is her Savior. Those very same things are also true for you. It does not matter who you are or what you have done in the past. Jesus died for you. You are highly favored by God. Believe this and it is yours.
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Rejoice in the Lord always. Again I say rejoice. Rejoicing is celebrating, being happy. We know how to rejoice. We rejoice when good things happen to us. We rejoice when we get some unexpected money, when we get a good deal, when it’s time to have fun with friends. Nobody has to tell us to rejoice. The circumstances prompt us to rejoice. We might not even be able to help it.
There are two modifiers, though, to Paul’s command to rejoice. We are to rejoice in the Lord. That’s the one modifier. The other modifier is that we are to rejoice always. What does it mean to rejoice in the Lord? We know how to rejoice in good circumstances. How do we rejoice in the Lord? This can only be done through faith. There is no way for anyone to know the Lord God except if he reveals himself to them. Only those who believe in what he has revealed of himself can ever rejoice in him.
What has God revealed about himself? He is your God. You are his people. In the whole Bible this is always what he has to say, no matter who he is dealing with, so long as they are his chosen ones. He says the same thing to all of them: I am your God. You are my people. Stay close to me. I am your rock and your castle. For you I strive and wrestle. I am yours and you are mine and where I am you may remain. The foe shall not divide us.
Whereas the circumstances are what make us rejoice otherwise, what makes us rejoice in the Lord is what he has revealed of himself to us. He is gracious and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love. His mercy endures forever. Just as you might rejoice that you can put some new-found money into your pocket, so you can rejoice that God is yours and you are God’s. This good relationship is something to rejoice about.
The other modifier is that we should rejoice always in the Lord. Nobody’s in the habit of rejoicing always. Nobody celebrates always. The party has to come to an end sometime. The circumstances that cause us to rejoice either get taken for granted or go away. We do not rejoice always. And Paul is not calling upon us to rejoice always in the normal way we use that word. We are to rejoice always in the Lord.
This means that our rejoicing is probably going to look a little different than the rejoicing and celebrating that we might see or experience with Christmas presents, for example. Sometimes people get the idea that the Christian life is supposed to be uninterrupted happiness, never-failing victory, a charmed life. This is not what we see, though, when we examine the people who have believed in God before us in the Bible.
We do not see this even with Jesus. He did not always skip around with a smile on his face. He didn’t look this way when he was being whipped or crucified. When he was looking ahead to the suffering that was coming upon him, he prayed that the cup should pass from him.
And yet, we must say that Jesus rejoiced in the Lord always. Rejoicing in the Lord does not have to match up with certain looks on one’s face or even certain feelings or emotions. Rejoicing in the Lord is inextricably tied up with faith in him. To believe in him is to trust in his salvation. No matter what might come our way, no matter which cross God might lay upon us, we can rejoice in our salvation. We can rejoice always, because salvation is his business and not ours. Since it is his business, and not ours, we can rest assured that it will never fail.
Consider Paul who penned these words. Earlier in the letter he says that he is writing while he is shackled with chains. He is in prison for preaching the Gospel. He is on his way to Rome where he will be tried and falsely found guilty. Since he was a Roman citizen it is thought that he was executed by having his head chopped off instead of being crucified. Being crucified was considered to be too shameful of a punishment for Roman citizens. Crucifixion was reserved for slaves and non-citizens.
In the midst of all of this perhaps Paul’s rejoicing may have occasionally faltered, for he was flesh and blood like any one of us. But in the main, there’s no reason to think otherwise than that he continued to rejoice in the Lord always. This doesn’t necessarily mean that he was grinning or skipping while he was being led to the executioner. People think rejoicing has to mean a certain look or a certain visible emotion. But that’s a rather superficial way of thinking. Paul believed in the Lord his God and rejoiced. Would he have rather had his head on a pillow rather than on the chopping block? Perhaps. But he took what the Lord gave him, trusting in his steadfast mercy.
Apply this also to yourself. Unless Christ comes back first, one day you are going to be dying. The circumstances will probably be such where you definitely do not feel like rejoicing in the normal way that this word is used and understood. But you are not a slave to your circumstances, where the circumstances dictate everything that’s going on with you. You have a relationship with the Lord.
It is my great wish for you that you are blessed to have someone with you at that time to help you die well. I hope that you have someone who knows God’s revelation of himself to us. Knowing that revelation, that person can tell you about the Lord God. Knowing God’s revelation, you can rejoice in the Lord while you are dying.
There’s nothing magical that has to happen. There’s nothing that has to be charged with the right emotions, or perfectly persuasive. All that’s necessary is to hear what God says about himself and about you.
What God has said is that he is yours, and you are his. You can stay with him. The foe can’t divide you. Just as God gave Abraham the sign of circumcision, so God has given us the sign of baptism. God says so often in the Old Testament that he is the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and the believing descendants of Israel always rejoiced to hear that. The Lord was their God. Their God was for them, no matter what circumstances they happened to be in.
You are a Christian. You have been given the name of Christ. You are baptized into him. You have eaten his body and drank his blood. The Lord God has revealed himself to you thoroughly. What he reveals about himself is that he forgives you and graciously receives you. No matter what happens to you, you cannot be separated from this God, because he has joined himself to you.
Paul says, “Rejoice in the Lord always, again I say rejoice.” He really means it. Rejoice in the Lord always. Death can be really hard. It can be really painful. But in the midst of this sorrow and sadness you can look to your God’s salvation of you like it’s a north star. It is a true guide. It will not lead you astray. It’s the only true guide.
It’s not uncommon the hear people say that they hope that they die in their sleep or that they will die very suddenly. There’s nothing wrong, per se, about dying in your sleep or very suddenly, but I think it’s overrated. This kind of talk makes people hope for something that doesn’t happen all that often. Plus it makes people afraid to die in a slower way. That’s not good. We’re already screwed up enough as it is when it comes to our feeble attempts to cope with dying and death. We don’t need to have Christians fear it on top of all that.
A good death is one where a person is given the opportunity to rejoice in the Lord by hearing his promises, even while their body is shutting down. A good death is one where the person who is dying is given the opportunity to believe in Jesus’s victory over death, even while they are experiencing the unpleasant side effects that go along with death. The person who dies with trust in Christ the crucified dies well, no matter what the circumstances of that death might be.
Helping your friends and your loved ones to die well does not take a lot of smarts. You don’t have to be a gifted speaker. The main thing that it requires is courage. To help that courage along it is also very helpful to be well catechized, to know God’s revelation. If a person does not feel like they know who God is and what he has revealed, they probably won’t have the confidence to speak about him—especially in such a fraught and stressful situation.
Regardless, the main thing that is needed is courage. I have become convinced that there are powers and principalities that shut us Christians down from talking to one another about God and what God has revealed. We are comfortable talking about the weather, about sports, about what-have-you, but if someone starts to talk about God we get very nervous. It’s as though this is something that is strictly set apart. Only the pastor can speak that way. This is false, false, false.
By your baptism you have been given the keys to the kingdom of God. You have been given all that Christ has. There is nothing that a pastor has that you don’t already have by virtue of your baptism. The only difference is that God has given me the job of doing this full time. The Law or the Gospel that you might speak is no less effective or powerful than the Law or the Gospel that I might speak. The Sacrament that you might administer, an emergency baptism, for example, is no different from the Sacrament that I would administer.
All of this is to say that you are fully equipped to tell your loved ones about the God who has revealed himself to us in Christ the crucified and risen. You may urge your loved ones to rejoice in the Lord always, just as I’ve urged you in this sermon. The message that makes all the difference is the one that says God has chosen you. This is what we are to believe in. I can authoritatively declare that God has chosen you because he has baptized you. You are hearing his word as it is being spoken right now. This Word of God says that he is yours and you are his. Where he is, you may remain. The foe shall not divide you.
How can we not rejoice (even if it be quietly and inwardly) when we hear that we have such a great and powerful friend as God himself? If there were any circumstances over which we could rejoice, it certainly has to be this. The mercy of God is beyond our comprehension. His power knows no bounds. He loves you and receives you, even though you are a sinner. There is peace between God and you because of the sacrifice of Jesus.
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Last week’s reading was the first two chapters of Ecclesiastes. Our reading tonight is chapters 5 and 6. Our reading next week will be the last chapter of Ecclesiastes. So our reading tonight is from the middle of the book. It is a continuation of the theme that was established right away at the beginning. We talked about this last week: All is vanity. All is vapor, totally vapor. It vanishes in the wind. Nothing lasts on this earth.
Our reading tonight brought up several topics. I’d like to focus on just one of them: work. A common reaction that people have when they hear that all is vanity, whatever we might work for is not going to last, is that we might as well just give up. We might as well not get out of bed in the morning. We certainly shouldn’t work. We should just live for pleasure—doing whatever we think is going to be the most enjoyable. These are usually all kinds of leisurely activities that we otherwise do not normally pursue because we are busy doing our work. This, we suppose, would be a lot better if it is vain to build towers that reach to the heavens or try to make a name for ourselves by becoming great.
But this desire to escape into pleasure is also vanity. Living this way does not provide the happiness that it is supposed to. Leisurely activities are great as a change of pace. Special food and drink is delicious when it is a treat. When these things become standard fare, we become bored and restless with these just like we do with anything else. There seems to be a general law in life that we build up a tolerance to stimulants in our using of them. Very often the idea of doing something is better than the actual doingof it.
For example, I have known several different people who have gotten a house on a lake. Going to the lake is a lot of fun. Boating, fishing, waterskiing, and what have you all sound like lots of fun, and they are. The whole reason why a person might buy a house on a lake is because they’ve engaged in these activities and like them. They’d like to be able to pursue them more often and more easily. But in the cases that I know of, where a person buys a house on the lake, they eventually quit doing these activities. They are all fun for a while, but then they quit being as fun. Maybe these activities end up only being done when there’s company. The company enjoys it, because it’s different and fresh for them, but the people who live there could take it or leave it.
So it seems as though people should be happier if they are not working and can devote themselves full time to their leisure activities, but that is not the case. Often respectable people will look down at those who don’t have jobs with the idea that they are undeserving of any pity. It is thought that those without jobs must be living it up, having a grand old time. Generally speaking, I do not think that this is the case. Life for these folks appears to be a seeking after one escape after another. They are looking to escape their boredom and misery but they cannot. All is vanity. This dream of letting yourself go, indulging in one treat after another, is supposed to make a person happy, but it does not.
It is in this regard that I think Solomon’s words about work are instructive as an alternative to how we naturally think. He says, “The worker’s sleep is sweet, whether he eats little or eats much.” He also says, “It is beautiful to eat, to drink, and to look for good in all a person’s hard work which he has done under the sun.” Here we have some positive thoughts about work that come from a man whose general theme otherwise is that all is vanity.
The fact is that we human beings were created to work. Even before the fall into sin God put Adam in the garden. He was to look after it and tend it. He was to exercise dominion over it and give names to all the animals. God did not set him upon a couch where he could be fed grapes and fanned and massaged. These things are good in their place, but the place for rest and relaxation is that those activities are not to be the main thing in life. If they are the main thing in life, then we won’t be truly happy. The main thing in life is that we should be active, that we should work. This is something good.
I certainly hope that God has blessed you with the experience, at least at one time or another, where you have found work to be pleasant. On the other hand, I have no doubt whatsoever that you have all experienced work to be a burden. That’s very common. It is rarer (but not that rare) that we should also enjoy our work from time to time. Sometimes even when we are really huffing and puffing, slaving away, there may well be a part of us that rejoices.
I also hope that you have been blessed by God with the experience of a worker’s sleep being sweet. Sleep after hard work is mighty refreshing. It’s similar to the way that hunger is the best spice. Ordinary food can taste mighty good to the one who is hungry. The joy in that sleeping and in that eating cannot be bought with any amount of money. It can only be known by the one who has experienced it. But it can only be experienced by the one who also has suffered somewhat.
I’ve done some hard labor during my life. I’ve known the sweetness of sleep and the goodness of food and drink. But I also know how I’m happy to be done with the hard work that brings about these pleasures. I was glad when the summer was over and I could go back to school and not have to sweat it out in the heat. So something that the fall into sin seems to have done to us is that we have lost our enduring joy in work. Thank God we catch glimpses of it every now and then otherwise work would be more disagreeable than it already is, but for the most part our joy in our work is fleeting.
Regardless, to me it seems helpful to point out that work is good for its own sake. Work is good if you are doing one thing or another thing. Work is good if you work indoors or outdoors. Work is good if you get paid a lot or if you get paid a little, or if you are only receiving room and board. What is good about work is that it is productive and helpful.
But we are prone to grumble and complain, and thus make work a torture. Bitterness with our work makes the work all the harder. Instead of thinking about the work that we do, and doing the work well, we end up trying to escape it. We think about how our coworkers are no good, our tasks are no good, our pay is no good. We’d be a whole lot better off if we worked someplace else, with different tasks to do, with better pay. Sadness, laziness, despair, meanness, and a whole bunch of other evil spirits crowd out all joy. It is usually these unhappy people who look with the most envy and anger at those who do not work at all. They wish that they could do the same as them.
But these are things that cannot be solved by changing outward circumstances. We are dealing with spiritual things here. A diseased spirit cannot be happy no matter what job that person might have. A diseased spirit cannot be happy whether the person works or not. On the other hand, a healthier spirit is going to find joy in work no matter what crosses are placed upon the person. A healthier spirit does not believe that coveting is the key to success. A healthier spirit does not believe that making monuments with money or accomplishments is the key to happiness. A healthier spirit is thankful to God rather than being engaged in never-ending negativity.
Notice that I said “a healthier spirit” instead of simply saying “a healthy spirit.” On this earth there is no one who has arrived at perfect health after the fall into sin. The only exception to that is Jesus. There you see a healthy spirit, who rejoices in the will of the Father, no matter what the will of the Father might be. With us, and with our fallen flesh, we will not arrive at perfect health until we are purified in heaven. Then we will know what it was like for Adam to work before the fall into sin. But until then, even the best of us are going to be tried with times of grumbling and sadness.
It is important, however, that we see these things for what they are. They are not good. I know that it is unbelievably common for us to grumble and complain with our work. It’s so common that nobody thinks twice about it being acceptable. But bitterness, boredom, sadness, envy, and other common afflictions with work do not come from good sources. They come from evil sources. There’s nothing the devil would like more than to strip us of all joy and thankfulness. He would have us be blind to anything that is good, and super-attentive to all that is bad.
Our work—no matter what that work might be, whether we are paid for that work or not—is a very important part of our life. If this part of our life can be ruined by evil spirits, then what great sadness the devil can work upon the earth! Jesus came to destroy the works of the devil. Prayer is a good way to drive the evil spirits away. Thankfulness, also, that is, praising and giving thanks to God, is a powerful tonic for our sadness.
With the way that Solomon says that all is vanity, a person might think that this would be true also about our work. But Solomon does not say that work is vanity. If you work for money and prestige and retirement, then, to be sure, that is vanity! But that is not why work is given to us. Work is the way that we can live happily and help other people. Work is an important part of our lives as God’s creatures.
God drive away evil spirits from you and give you his Holy Spirit. May your hearts be filled with love and thankfulness.
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We spend a lot of our lives getting prepared. Children get prepared to go to school. Those in school get prepared to go to college. Those in college prepare for getting a job. Those with a job prepare for getting a house. We get prepared for marrying a spouse. We get prepared for having a child. We get prepared for grandchildren. We get prepared for retirement. We get prepared by writing a will. We get prepared for having a funeral. We prepare for a lot of things.
One of the things that we should be prepared for, but often don’t prepare for, is to meet Jesus. The necessity of preparing for other things is obvious. We know that we have to prepare, otherwise it isn’t going to happen. When it comes to meeting Jesus a common thought seems to be: “I’m already prepared."
“I went to Vacation Bible School when I was a kid. I went to Sunday School.” But these are pretty shabby preparations. Even lackadaisically attending the divine service every week can be pretty shabby. We prepare much more thoroughly for all kinds of other endeavors in our life. What if kids studied God’s Word as hard as they study to get a good job? But that doesn’t happen. The reason is that we don’t care. We figure that we’re already prepared, so we can indulge in whatever we might want to indulge in as the main thing in our life.
This is strange, if you think about it. How can anything be more important than meeting God? But we are not nearly so logical or wise as we like to believe. Unbelief is deeply seated in our flesh. We lack the ability to think seriously about our Maker. We follow every distraction that might come our way.
It’s like we’re supposed to be on our journey to God, but every off-ramp that comes along we can’t help but take. The billboard says, “Pleasure here!” And off we go. “Honors and recognition here!” and we put on our blinker. We are ready and willing to prepare for absolutely anything that holds out promise for our happiness and blessing, so long as it is not the one thing needful.
This is why it is necessary for God to send John the Baptists. John the Baptist was sent to prepare the way for the Lord. Like a good roadbuilder he shaves off the mountains and hills and fills in the valleys. He makes the crooked places straight. He makes the rough places smooth.
Or, to continue on with the analogy that I’ve already started, the John the Baptists whom God sends put up roadblocks for the exits on the highway to our God. We need to prepare to meet the Christ. We’re never going to be prepared if we are always getting off the highway to pursue any and every other goal besides meeting our Maker.
But the John the Baptists whom God sends do not have a very easy time doing this. With practically all the prophets whom God calls to be his messengers, they all answer pretty much the same way. They all say, “Not me. I don’t want to do this.” People are stubborn as mules. We want to do what we want to do. While we are doing what we want to do we want to be assured that what we are doing is fine. It is in the nature of roadblocks that they are essentially saying, “This isn’t fine. You aren’t fine if you do this.” People don’t like hearing this.
This is what brought about John the Baptist’s death, as Luke mentions at the end of our reading. He told Herod and Herodias that it was wrong for them to divorce their spouses so that they could be together. They were committing adultery with each other. They, and especially Herodias, did not like this. When an opportunity arose to remove the head of John the Baptist from his shoulders and put it on a silver platter, she jumped at the chance. She didn’t repent. She got even.
Or so she thought, anyway. She thought that she won in a contest between herself and John the Baptist, but John the Baptist was never playing her game. All true prophets and all genuine Christians do not say what they say because they want to dominate over other people. They do not put up roadblocks because they want to throw their weight around like a bad cop. They are following instructions that have been given to them by God. Herodias thought that she was in a contest with John the Baptist, but the fact of the matter is that her contest was with God. She proved her guilt by the way she treated the prophet whom God sent her. She thought she won, but she is going to lose.
John the Baptist, for his part, lost nothing when he lost his head. He too was and is dealing with God. God doesn’t need glue to put his head back on. His ways of healing are much more marvelous than that. Doing the right thing, acting according to the Word of God regardless of the consequences, is powerfully comforting. John the Baptist could be satisfied that he had said and done what was right.
Those who are warned, however, and plunge right on ahead, driving through the roadblock, their consciences testify against them. That’s the best case scenario. If they still have a conscience there’s a chance that they can still get back on the highway to God. If they become proud of their rebellion against God, then there’s less and less hope for them as time goes on. They confirm themselves and strengthen themselves in their errors. They are lost in the imaginations of their hearts.
They don’t know the way to the highway. They cease to know what is really good and what is really evil. They don’t know which way to go. They end up going after the things that they think are good, which are actually worthless or evil. They don’t do what is good because it does not suit their fancies or advance their own ambitions. By all outward appearances they may appear perfectly fine or more than fine. They might still retain membership in the church. But God judges justly. Whether a rebuke, a warning, a roadblock was justified or not is something that God is going to decide. Whatever you might think about it won’t matter in the slightest.
Christianity is a religion of repentance. It’s been a religion of repentance from the very beginning. Adam and Eve had to change directions. The whole Bible testifies to practically all the great ones needing to change direction. Repentance is painful. It always feels better to believe that we are just fine the way that we are. But the way we are is sinful and unclean. If we just continue according to our own inclinations, then it is inevitable that we will not be on the highway to our God.
Since Christianity is a religion of repentance, it is extremely important that we be sensitive to the John the Baptists that God sends into our life for our own good. Some of these people who speak God’s truth to us might be called by God to preach in an official and public capacity—like me as a pastor. Others will not be officially called, but will speak God’s Word because they are Christians. Regardless of how God sends his Word to you, be careful that you do not despise it.
It might seem that whatever gets said to you is not God’s Word. It is easy to think that whatever gets said is just a personal hang-up of the person (or the goody-two-shoes) who is talking. It is easy to resent being told what to do. It is easy to deflect the message that should bring about repentance into something else. A person, for example, could complain about John the Baptist’s appearance, or his diet, or his harsh words. But all these are besides the point.
If you are confronted by a Word from God that gets your goat, here is some advice. Step back for a moment and think about what is going on. Ask yourself whether this person who is talking to you hates you. Do you think John the Baptist hated those who he talked to? Even though he could become very angry, it was not hatred that prompted him to speak. Even when he called the crowds who were coming to him a brood of vipers, it was so that they would wake up and repent. Perhaps the one who has spoken to you desires goodness and happiness for you. They can see that the way that you are going is definitely not going to turn out well. Even if God doesn’t take away your happiness in this life, you will be responsible for your rebellion against him in the next.
On the other hand, it is possible that the one whom you are dealing with could be evil. It is certainly possible for people to abuse each other spiritually. It’s not like every rebuke and warning has to be automatically listened to. Sometimes the person whom you are dealing with hates you, and, for example, wants to dominate over you. Plus they do it in the Name of God. Shame on them! They will be severely judged for doing that, for there is hardly a worse sin a person could commit than to mislead and harm while claiming to speak for God. Jesus warns us against wolves wearing sheep’s clothing.
It is important, therefore, that we do not simply accept whatever anybody and everybody might say. We’ve been given the Bible to know what is right and what is wrong. No human being, no matter how saintly or kindly that person might appear to be, has the right to contradict Scripture. So if someone speaks to you in such a way where he or she is claiming that it is what God says, then you do well to see that it is found in Scripture. In this endeavor, though, make sure that you don’t let the devil or your flesh trick you. The devil has been known to quote Scripture too. Sometimes people can be awfully clever, twisting the Scriptures towards their own purposes.
There are big challenges in knowing whether something that has been said is true to God’s Word or not. Such is life. Don’t be a lazy fool, like so many, who say that they can’t be bothered to know whether something is true or not. They want to pass off this task to someone else so that they are no longer responsible. You should recognize this as a foolish thought if you only think about what is going on. It’s not like this is some isolated part of our existence that we can hire someone to do for us. This is talking about the main thing. There is the highway to our God with many exits. If we end up getting off the highway, and then complain about it being hard knowing where to go, there is no one who is going to suffer for that except one’s self.
There is a divine story to all of our lives. God is dealing with each one of us. While we are in the midst of it, we usually don’t have the perspective where we can see the big picture. I’m old enough now to look back on my own life and see some critical moments where God sent a John the Baptist into my life. I must continue to be on the lookout for these gifts from God—gifts that are sometimes really painful. I will need these gifts until I’m safely laid into the grave if Christ doesn’t come first.
Eventually everyone will be able to see those critical moments in their life where they were urged to repent. It is so important that we not be like Herod and Herodias. It is so important that we do not get mad at John the Baptist instead of listening to him. Otherwise the rebukes and warnings that get spoken to us might haunt us eternally. We might wish with every fiber of our being that we had heeded the warning instead of plunging headlong into whatever it was that we wanted to continue to do.
This is not child’s play. It is not the case that what is important about your life is all the other stuff and church is just a hobby or a custom. The highway to our God is the main thing. See to it that you stay on the steep and narrow way.
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We tend to get comfortable with certain interpretations and understandings of our life where we figure we know what things are all about and we take that for granted. Who we are, and what we hope for, end up being pretty stable. We know who we are and we know what we would like to have happen. We might accumulate some wisdom for ourselves. We lay down some rules for ourselves, which we figure should help us get what we want. We are something of a work-in-progress. We make our way through the course of this life, trying to do the best for ourselves. The hope is that tomorrow will be better than today. Maybe, through wisdom and hard work, we can bring about a better tomorrow.
These kinds of thoughts are what Solomon calls in this short book of Ecclesiastes “vapor,” or another way that this same word gets translated in older translations: “vanity.” This is a peculiar word. The only way that anybody is going to learn anything about what the word means is from the Bible. Outside of the Bible nobody ever speaks this way. “Vapor” or “breath” is a good literal translation, but there’s something more that needs to be understood about it. It is not just the mist or the puff of air. It’s really about the way that something so quickly goes away.
Forgive me for my crudeness here, but it’s like someone passing gas in a 40 mile an hour wind. That fart isn’t going to stick around for long. It’s here one moment. Less than a moment later, it is gone forever. You can’t put it in a bottle and store it on the shelf, no matter how hard you try. Resistance is futile.
“Futility” is another good word to use to help us understand what Solomon and the Bible mean by “vanity.” Instead of saying that everything is vapor, or everything is vanity, you could also say, “Everything is futile.” There’s no getting around it. There’s no working harder or smarter. The end has been predetermined, and there’s nothing that can change it.
Of all the thoughts a person could possibly think, there is no thought that the world hates more than this one. Most people will not even allow themselves to go there. They don’t even think about it. It is strictly forbidden. Such thoughts are evil.
Take, for example, a cancer diagnosis. Not all cancer diagnoses are the same. Some are quite curable. Others are terminal. Even with a terminal diagnosis of cancer, however, it is against the rules to say that resistance is futile. This is especially the case if a person is young and otherwise healthy. It is so unbelievably impolite, or even evil, to say that there’s nothing to be done. Instead what everyone is supposed to say is that there’s always hope. Who knows? Maybe there’s some experimental treatment. Maybe herbal medicine might help. Hope is dished out by everyone, including the doctors, until the bitter, bitter end. It’s not until the patient is on the morphine drip that the truth may be aired that curative efforts are futile. By then the patient might already be in a coma.
Even at this point, however, we still don’t give up. Immediately the gears get changed. If we get stuck going one direction, then we’ll back up and go another. If one hope is dashed, then it’s time to move on to another. And so at the death bed the family might start to think and talk about the way that the one who is dying will be remembered. The hope for them to continue to live physically is futile, but surely the person can live on in the memories of the people who are left behind. Hope springs eternal.
This too, unfortunately, is vanity. It’s not going to happen. The memories are going to die just like their bodies did. The next generation might hold on to some memories. But what about the generation after that? By the time the third or fourth generation rolls around the memories are completely and totally obliterated.
You can know this just by consulting what you yourself know. Maybe you remember some of your great-grandparents. What kind of memories, though, do you have of those great-grandparents who died before you were born? That’s just three generations back. Four generations and the best you can hope for is that the name is remembered. Which of you can quickly and easily recall even the names of your 16 great-great grandparents? You probably have to consult some book that you have stuck in the closet.
Each of those people, your blood relatives, lived just as full and rich of lives as you have lived. People at their funeral dinners may very well have said that they were quite the character and nobody will ever forget them. Now only their names are known and hardly anything more. Resistance is futile. This is a rude thought. Sentimentality vanishes like it’s caught in a 40 mile an hour wind.
We’ve looked at but one example of the way that cherished hopes about our lives and our memories are dashed. Nothing is off limits, though, when it comes things that are vain. Solomon says, “Nothing but vapor, totally vapor. Everything is just vapor that vanishes.” He is not talking about just a little part of our lives. He’s not talking about being a couch potato, playing video games, or other things that people enjoy denouncing. He’s saying that about all aspects of our lives. Solomon was a great man. He was strong. He was wise. He was no slouch. He got busy.
He says in our reading, “I undertook great projects. I built houses for myself. I planted vineyards for myself. I made gardens and parks for myself, and I planted every kind of fruit tree in them. I made reservoirs of water for myself to irrigate a forest of sprouting trees.” He had all kinds of employees. He had all kinds of assets. He even had all kinds of lovers. No pleasure was withheld from him. He even had pleasure in how he worked hard.
Now tell me: What else should he have done? How could he have lived a fuller and richer life? He was thoroughly engaged and had the resources to fulfill every aspect of his life on this earth. He challenged himself mentally—planning and executing projects. He exercised his will with hard work and a fit body. His emotional life was not neglected either. He was a person who had it all together. He was like those people you see who wear all the right clothes, go to the right gym, eat the right food, and have overachieving children.
But what does he say about all this? He lists all his magnificent accomplishments, then he says, “I turned my attention to everything that my hands had done and to how hard I had worked for it. Note this: it was all vapor, all chasing the wind. There was no benefit under the sun.”
This thought can only be learned from the Bible. It is absolutely hateful to the unbelieving world. People draw fatalistic conclusions from it. People think, “Well, if all these worthy endeavors are futile, then I might as well seek out the bottle and the porn shop. I might as well give myself over to debauchery.”
But this is kind of like the way that we speak about the person who is dying or who has died. The noble, robust, physical life has ended. At least we can hold on to this ghostly kind of life with the memories. In like manner, when people hear that their noble efforts are futile, they think that they can at least live for the basest kinds of pleasure.
But Solomon is quite clear about this. This also is vanity. Pleasure is futile too. When he says that all is vanity, he means all is vanity. The Bible means it. All is brought to nothing. All is destroyed. All the things that people trust in are going to be revealed for the impotent and worthless things that they really are.
There is only one exception to the oppressive rule of vanity and futility that otherwise governs our existence. Paul says in Romans chapter 8: “Creation was made subject to futility, not by its own will, but by the will of the one [that is, God] who subjected it.” This shows us that the meaninglessness and futility of all man’s hopes and ambitions is not because of fate or chance. Futility is because of God. He subjects creation to futility against its will. But he does it for a purpose.
Paul goes on: “Creation was subjected to futility in hope, that even creation itself will be set free from slavery to corruption, in order to share in the glorious freedom of the children of God.” Here we have another strange thought, so we’ll really need to pay attention here. We’ve already mentioned one strange thought that the world cannot stand—that all creation is subject to futility. Here we have another, that’s similar. The world will never believe it or like it. The thought is that we will be set free from our slavery to corruption. Other words for “corruption” are “rottenness,” “decay,” “decomposition.” We should be set free from our slavery to dying, to rotting.
As it is, we are enslaved to getting old, breaking down, decomposing, even while we are yet living. Once we die our bodies are enslaved to all kinds of nasty processes. Formaldehyde or cremation is only able to mask it somewhat. There’s no staying alive once we have died. We are enslaved to corruption. There is only one way out of this, and that is Jesus who died and is risen.
So according to Paul’s teaching in Romans 8 we have some very strong statements. First of all, God has subjected creation to futility. This has been the main thing that we’ve talked about tonight. All hopes and dreams, no matter how lovely or popular they might be, are nothing but vapor, totally vapor. Every hope for lasting happiness, for immortality, for leaving your mark on this world, is a hope that is dashed to the ground. And God is the one who does this. If nothing else, he will put this futility on display when he brings about the end of the world. This is the one strong statement.
The other strong statement is that God does this in hope. The hope is that we should be set free from the slavery of death and decay that nobody can otherwise escape. The way that we are set free is through Jesus who died once and for all, but who now lives and will never die again. God has had pity on us poor creatures who have no hope otherwise. But through Christ alone we are set free from death and decay. Even more than that. Paul says that we “share in the glorious freedom of the children of God.”
As it often happens, both of these thoughts are too much for the world. The futility that is spoken of is too deep and too horrible. The world wants to believe that death isn’t that bad. It’s not that big of a deal. We can still remember and celebrate, so on and so forth. To these commonly held dreams the Bible says no. Such thoughts are vain.
On the other hand, the Bible says that we will be set free from death and decay. The stranglehold that death and decay has on this present world is going to be broken. We will even be God’s very own children, free and unencumbered. This is too high, too glorious for the world. The world knows nothing better and strives for nothing higher than having your name written in some dusty old history book that children are forced to read. Believing that we can become and, in fact, are God’s children through baptism is too strange, too unbelievable.
This is why it is so important that you do not despise preaching and God’s Word, but hold it sacred and gladly hear and learn it. You aren’t going to find these truths told to you anywhere else. In fact, the opposite of these truths will be endlessly drummed into your ears from practically every possible source.
You do well, though, to ignore these futile voices and believe that Jesus is the only decisive factor. Outside of him, everything is vanity. In him is more than we can possibly think or imagine.
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To the disciples it appeared that everything was going well as Jesus made his way into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday. In fact, things were going very well. If they would have thought back on the past few years they would have recalled things that kings and prophets would have liked to have seen and heard. Jesus did many powerful signs. He made the blind see and the deaf hear. He fed the 5,000 and the 4,000. Jesus taught as one having authority, instead of like the teachers who were only trying to fill the time and cash their paycheck. Many were converted to faith in him.
Jesus’s overwhelming success might be one of the main things we should have in our mind’s eye when we imagine that Palm Sunday. All around Jesus there were spontaneous acts of love, honor, and devotion. There was no campaign manager artificially pumping up the crowds with stirring music. That wasn’t necessary. The crowds loved him, and worshipped him, and this is the only way to understand their actions:
They threw down their garments on the road so that the donkey’s colt, a small animal carrying a fully grown man, might walk on them. They cut palm branches in their hands and waved them about. Nobody was embarrassed. Nobody was self-conscious. All that they were conscious of was Jesus. They wanted to catch sight of him. They were praising God joyfully, with a loud voice, for all the miracles that they had seen.
The words that the crowd said were heavy with all that those words signified. They sang, “Blessed is the king who comes in the Name of the Lord.” They are identifying Jesus as the king. This would have come as news to Pontius Pilate, the highest Roman official in that region, or to Herod, who ruled in Galilee. Jesus had no earthly office or authority. He was a poor Jew from the hinterlands. But these people recognize him as king.
Furthermore, they do not recognize him as the king pending the approval of the Roman Caesar or any other human authority. They say that he is the king who comes in the Name of the Lord, the God of Israel. They do not see Jesus as an upstart, making his way to the top by his own bootstraps. They recognize him as the Christ, the anointed King, sent by none other than God himself. How else could he have done the signs or taught the way he taught? Believing that Jesus is the Christ, the Messiah, which means “the anointed one,” is the shortest Christian creed. These people have this confession of faith.
The other thing that the crowds say is so outrageous that it makes the Pharisees embarrassed. They say, “Peace in heaven and glory in the highest.” This was a bit too much for the Pharisees. The Pharisees, like every believing Jew, was looking for the Christ, the one who would be like King David, but King David was just a man. The Pharisees fear that these people’s theology is getting dangerously out of whack. A human being might be able to bring about peace on earth, but what is this about peace in heaven? Only God rules in heaven. Furthermore the people are giving him glory in the highest. Only God, and certainly no man, should be given glory in the highest. The Pharisees tell Jesus that his disciples are in need of a stern rebuke.
But Jesus is not alarmed. The Pharisee’s theology is correct, as far as that goes. But they do not see what the people see, and therefore they are wrong. The people see that Jesus is God. All glory, laud, and honor are to him, the Redeemer King. If he were but a man, then it would be inappropriate to say what they had said. Since he is God in the flesh, what they have said is entirely appropriate. All creation sings its praises to Jesus the King: Fields and floods, rocks, hills, and plains repeat the sounding joy, repeat the sounding joy, repeat, repeat the sounding joy.
Palm Sunday is when everything was going splendidly for Jesus’s disciples. This is just how they had hoped everything would go once it was revealed to them that Jesus is the Christ. Exciting things were in store. Oh, the places they might go! It’s just a matter of time, they think, before the Gentiles start coming to Jerusalem with their expensive gifts. That will be sweet. And they had been with Jesus from the beginning. It’s good to be friends with the king.
But, as you know, at the end of this same week Jesus would appear before Pontius Pilate, battered and bruised. There he would declare, “My kingdom is not of this world. If it were, I would have commanded my angels so that I never would have been handed over to the Jewish leaders. But my kingdom is not of this world.” The crown that was placed on Jesus was not a crown of gold, but a crown of thorns. His throne was a cross. He was not held in honor, but was mocked and shamed. Those Pharisees who thought that he was blaspheming on Sunday probably thought that he was getting his comeuppance on Friday.
It is fairly common, even among Christians, to look at Good Friday as the day the music died. But that is the wrong way to look at it. If anything, you could perhaps think of this event as a change in key in Jesus being king. It’s like one of those bridges to a higher key that really brings the whole thing home.
Good Friday was not an accident. It was not a derailment of Messianic hopes. For the disciples it certainly seemed that way at the time. They had dreams of sitting at Jesus’s right and his left, being great in the eyes of their fellow human beings. But their sights were not set high enough. What the crowds sang on Palm Sunday was entirely accurate, even if they might not have fully realized it or understood how it might come about. This king who comes in the Name of the Lord brings about peace in heaven.
Jesus’s peace brings to an end the devil’s accusations. The devil accuses us of our sins and would have us hate and fear God as a harsh judge. And he is a judge. He declares Jesus to be guilty and punishes him in our place. The punishment that should fall upon us, falls upon this divine king, until he is crushed and dies under the weight of it all. Thus there is no condemnation for those in Christ Jesus. The devil cannot accuse us of our sins before God because the Lord is our righteousness. The fact of the matter (and this is no wishful thinking, but a plain fact) is that God’s peace and God’s good will is towards men. God’s favor rests upon mankind because Jesus the Christ has achieved peace in heaven.
Even if, through progress and hard work, we were able to achieve world peace, cure cancer, and cure COVID while we’re at it, together with all the other ambitions we might set for ourselves, these would be nothing compared to what this king does. Even if we were able to roll back all the curses and punishments that came with sin, we would still be alienated from our Creator. This king brings about reconciliation between God and sinners. Jesus works peace, good will, and happiness.
But none of the great works this king does can really be seen now. They can only be known by faith alone. Many people get lost when the music changes its key. It’s too high and they can’t sing it. They are more interested in the things of this world: How do I get people to do what I want them to do? How do I use the limited resources to my greatest advantage? I look at you and I think, “What can I use you for?”
All people are necessarily enslaved to their desires, whatever those desires might be, unless they are set free by dying and rising. We have to be born again by the water and the Spirit to see the kingdom of God. We have to die with Christ and be raised with Christ. We have to be baptized. Otherwise we will stick with what we have been doing since we were a baby. We will do whatever we can to manipulate others, to achieve our own ends.
Jesus the king opens up a different way of looking at life. Instead of looking for how you can use others, you can look for how you can serve them. Instead of trying to lord it over others and have them serve you, you can become as the least and the servant of all. You can walk in the footsteps of your teacher and master. He came not to be served, but to serve, and give his life as a ransom for many.
There is a tremendous change that takes place with the disciples’ thinking from the way the disciples had been thinking on Palm Sunday. Those who continue to believe that Jesus is the Christ even after he is crucified, died, was buried, and on the third day rose from the dead have their thinking changed very much. You can tell it by their actions. The apostles did not go out into the world to create little kingdoms for themselves. They did not gather a following so that they could sit on thrones and live richly at the expense of others. Insofar as the Holy Spirit blessed them, they poured themselves out rather than trying to collect as much as they could. They were no longer afraid of suffering and loss. They were glad to suffer for the benefit of others.
This also, just like with our Lord Jesus Christ, can be too high of a key for people to appreciate. It sounds dreadful, in a way, that we should love to the point of suffering and even death. What kind of glory is that? Suffering and death look terrible. There’s no crown of gold. The adoring crowds are nowhere to be found, and we just might get the reward of abuse and scorn instead.
But do not be afraid. Do not be discouraged. It is good to love others, no matter what anybody else might say. It is better to give than to receive, no matter what anybody else might say. It is better to serve than to be served, no matter what anybody else might say.
During Holy Week there is something divine and beautiful going on, even though it can only be seen by faith alone. Apart from faith it looks like a tragedy. With faith it is seen for what it really is—peace in heaven. This is also true in the lives of Christians. The Holy Spirit works to bring about the image of God in them, the image of Christ the crucified. This is not a defeat. It is a victory. You can tell by the way the song goes. It is high and beautiful.
So hark the glad sound! The Savior comes. The Savior promised long. Let ev’ry heart prepare a throne and ev’ry voice a song. Amen.
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Our Gospel reading today is a rich text that is worthy of being meditated upon for a long time. I’ve known this text for many years and have taught it for many years, but I do not feel as though I’ve understood it completely. There are texts in the Bible that are like this. A person can profitably wonder about them for years or even a lifetime. We will take it up again today.
The broad outlines of the parable are clear. This is talking about Christ’s second coming. No one knows the day or the hour when Christ will come again, so, as Jesus says in the conclusion to the parable, we should keep watch. The bridegroom in the parable is Jesus. The ten virgins represent those who self-identify as Christians. Christians are waiting for Jesus to come. There’s a problem, though. Five are foolish. They end up getting locked out of the marriage feast of the Lamb in his kingdom which has no end. These are all things that can be clearly identified and understood.
There are other elements to this parable that are less clear, at least to me. What do the lamps represent? What does the oil represent? What does the extra flask of oil that the wise virgins are carrying with them represent? What does it mean that all of them fall asleep while they are waiting for the bridegroom to come? Why won’t the wise virgins give any oil to the foolish virgins? Who are those who sell the oil? What does it mean that the foolish are directed to go and get more oil, and how do they get any in the middle of the night?
These are a lot of questions. Over the years you have probably heard answers, and probably even good answers, to the questions I’ve just asked. It is often taught that the oil in the lamps is faith. The reason why the wise cannot give any oil to the foolish is because no one is able to believe for another. Each must believe for him or her self. The sellers of oil are pastors from whom a person can acquire faith through the Word and Sacraments that they are called by God to dispense.
I’m sure that there are much worse ways that this parable could be interpreted. The individual statements are true enough. What is said about faith is true. No one is able believe for another. The only source for Christian faith is the hearing of the Gospel and the receiving of Christ’s sacraments. However, I’ve never quite been sold on interpreting the parable this way. It seems to me to be an oversimplification.
It makes it seem as though Christianity is a religion where almost the whole point of it is to go to church. That’s where the oil is sold, so make sure that you have a good supply on hand. But the parable does not say that the wise virgins had just come back from a shopping trip for oil. They remembered to bring along some extra. If Christianity is just a matter of attending church, then it hardly seems necessary for there to be a final judgment at all. We’d already know whether someone has passed the test by looking at the attendance records. There’s more to faith than attending the Divine Service.
So I think it is helpful to think outside the normal interpretation of this parable. The obsession concerning oil and the lamps going out appears strange to me. They had planned on having lit lamps for the bridegroom. I’m sure they wanted their plans to succeed. But would the bridegroom care that much if their lamps had run out of oil? Would he have banned them from attending? I’m not aware of any custom or regulation from that time that made burning lamps a prerequisite for attending a wedding feast.
So the obsession with having enough oil has always struck me as being kind of feverish and dreamlike. I’m sure you’ve had those dreams that keep you half-awake all night because of something that you are obsessing about. It’s always something that is totally beside the point. You don’t have something, for example, and you think that you really need to have it. All your efforts at attaining it are thwarted. If you were fully awake you’d immediately know that it is beside the point, but in the dream there’s no getting around it: You have to have it, and you can’t get it. I’ve had many dreams over the years with this kind of theme. They are very annoying. They disturb my sleep.
This parable always makes me think of these annoying, disturbing kinds of dreams. It’s as though they are in a dream. When the virgins awaken they are all in a panic. They’ve fallen asleep without meaning to. They could have missed the whole thing by sleeping through it. Whew! But then there’s a problem with the lamps. They aren’t working right. They are low. The wise virgins are relieved that they have some extra, but the foolish ones become panic stricken again because they don’t have any. They try to solve the problem. “Please, give us some of yours.” But that doesn’t work. Now what are they going to do? Go buy some more. Oh, what a relief. We can solve this problem after all! But no! The stores are closed. It’s midnight. Now what are they going to do? It’s dreadful. They’re running out of time! Finally, by the time they manage to secure some more oil, it’s way too late. Their worst fears have come true. When they get to the gate the bridegroom says that he doesn’t know them.
Then the alarm clock starts beeping and you have to get up. You’re tired because you didn’t sleep well, but at least you’re no longer annoyed and frightened by your dream.
Of course Jesus says nothing about this being a dream. This makes any interpretation based on what I have just said immediately suspect. On the other hand, I think this interpretation accounts for more elements of the parable and is a better description of what is going with faith.
Faith is a gift from the Holy Spirit. It is not a personal accomplishment from attending church or any other activity we might engage in. Faith is something that is immensely powerful. It overcomes the world, the devil, and hell. However, at the same time, faith is something that is also easily damaged and lost. This is something that Luther always said about faith, learned from long experience living as a Christian.
Note how different all of this is from the way that most people think about faith. Most people think that faith is just a matter of doggedly sticking with the truthfulness of certain statements. Statements like: Jesus is God. He died and rose from the dead. Believing that such facts are truthful is thought to be faith. But these are facts that the devil and the demons know just as well as we do, and probably much better. Nevertheless, they certainly do not have faith.
It is also very common for people to think that they have a super-dooper strong faith as opposed to a faith that is easily damaged and lost. I’ve met many people who live in open, unrepentant sin. They have absolutely no intention of changing their ways. They are always irritated at the very idea of it and that I should bring it up to them. And yet they are 100% sure that they have a perfectly fine faith. They don’t have the least doubt that they will be just fine when they die. They often look at me rather strangely when I tell them that it’s not possible to live in open rebellion against God’s commandments and continue to have a true faith. I suspect that they think there is something wrong with my faith. They think I should have more faith in my faith.
The goal, however, is not to have unshakeable faith in one’s own ability to believe. It also is not right to have unshakeable faith in your attendance record at church. The church is not your Savior. Jesus is your Savior. You should believe in him. You should not believe in yourself, as though it’s impossible to lose your faith. Better men and women than you have lost their faith. Believing that you are just fine with your super-dooper strong faith creates a smugness and a coldness that makes you insensitive to God’s Word. God’s threats and promises go in one ear and out the other because you’re already quite sure that your just fine just the way that you are.
The fact that our sins damage us and our foolish thoughts make us sluggish is shown by the way that all ten of the virgins, both wise and foolish, fall asleep. Jesus gives the summary conclusion for the parable at the end when he says, “Watch, because you do not know the day or the hour,” but the wise virgins fell asleep too. Our faith is not so strong as we might like to believe. We can fall asleep. We can fall asleep with our faith and never awaken.
It is also possible that we wake up, but all our actions are in vain. The efforts that we make for our salvation all come to naught. This is what I think is going on with these foolish virgins. They thought they were fine just the way they were, so they make very poor preparations. They simply don’t care that much, so they don’t think to bring any extra oil. When they awaken from their sleep they go after all the wrong things. God scatters them in the imagination of their hearts. They think that their getting into the wedding feast is a matter of them having followed the rules. They’ve always imagined that they’ve followed the rules well enough because faith, for them, was a matter of having the right opinions. They thought they had these opinions in the bag, and thus could otherwise live however they might see fit. Since their faith has always actually been in themselves being good enough just the way they are, they are sent on a wild goose chase to make themselves feel acceptable again. It doesn’t even enter their minds that they should repent and seek forgiveness from the bridegroom, to be admitted to the feast by grace. They are not in the habit of repenting. They have long believed that they are just fine. Their faith is solid as a rock.
But their “faith” has been in an idol. This is a very subtle idol. It looks like the real thing. It looks very Christian, very pious. The opinions are all correct. It’s an idol that is forged in the deepest part of hell by the master himself. A lie is joined together with so much truth. The lie is where the faith gets directed—not in Christ, but in one’s own piety. This trick is so subtle and attractive that we’ve all been taken in by it at one time or another. But it’s an idol nonetheless. Believing in your faith is the wrong thing to believe in.
When the foolish virgins come to the closed door, the bridegroom says emphatically: “Amen, I tell you, I do not know you.” And it’s true. He doesn’t know them. They have not been believing in Jesus. They’ve been believing in their correctness. The thought of being locked out has hardly ever entered their heads. If it did, they’d have a ready answer to put their conscience back to sleep.
They are the good ones. Any God who would lock them out, they think, must be some kind of monster. How could God have the gall to condemn them when they’ve lived a perfectly respectable life? Meanwhile, prostitutes, tax collectors, murderers, drug users, and all manner of people whom they looked down upon their whole life will be entering into heaven before them. These people, as opposed to the ones who are always correct, learned how to repent. These people were given the gift of faith by the Holy Spirit. These people believed in Christ.
See to it that you do not despise preaching and God’s Word. Regard it as sacred and gladly hear and learn it. Do not learn to yawn at your sins and consider them to be of little importance because you’ve got your faith that you can believe in. Your faith in your faith will never save you. It is not your Savior.
Wake up from your dream. Instead of making excuses for yourself, think straight. Repent of your evil thoughts, words, and actions. Believe in Jesus, the bridegroom. He’s coming! Come out to meet him. He is the one to whom you must look. He is the one in whom you are invited to believe. Notice how the wise virgins go toward him. The foolish virgins go away from him.
This is already something that you can do now. Paul says that the Lord’s Supper is the proclamation of the Lord’s death until he comes. If you need to have your sins forgiven, then go toward him in the Lord’s Supper. Do not go away from him, thinking you’re fine nevertheless. And when that final trumpet sounds, lift up your heads and look up. Go to meet the bridegroom. Keep your eyes on him instead of on yourself and whether you have followed the rules well enough. Jesus Christ came in order to save sinners, even very bad sinners, like you.
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We have come to the last Sundays of the Church Year. At the end of the Church Year the lectionary directs our attention to the end of the world. Our readings today are especially concerned with that line in the Creed that says, “He shall come again with glory to judge both the living and the dead. His kingdom shall have no end.”
Almost 2,000 years have passed since Jesus died on the cross and rose from the dead. A person might wonder: “Where is this promised coming of his?” There is plenty of material available for a person to scoff at the notion that Jesus will come again. It’s not very hard to scoff. We human beings have been prone to scoff since almost the very beginning: “You won’t surely die.” “He won’t see us in these bushes.” “Where’s the water, Noah?” “How are we going to escape, Moses?” “If you’re really the Christ, then come down from that cross? Then we’ll believe you.”
With Christ’s second coming we are dealing with an article of faith. Hebrews says of faith that it is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things unseen. There’s hardly any arguing that can be done for articles of faith. Either something happens or it doesn’t. Arguing only plays into our natural tendency to scoff. Arguing, for example, is what convinced the Jewish leaders that Jesus could not be the promised Christ.
John’s Gospel tells us what the leaders were saying about Jesus. They said, “He has the audacity to heal people on the Sabbath! He’s a Sabbath breaker. He even continued to heal people on the Sabbath after we specifically told him not to. How can the Christ be a Sabbath breaker?” They said, “He is from Nazareth in Galilee. The Christ has to come from Bethlehem. Plus we’re not even very sure about who his father is.” Then there were all those people with whom Jesus associated: “A bunch of sinners—the whole lot of them. No self-respecting Christ would associate with people like that.”
The ringleaders who put Jesus to death had zero doubt that he was an imposter and a blasphemer. Their arguments were ironclad. It was the stupid laymen who were being taken in by him. It was for the sake of the stupid laymen that he had to be put to death and that right soon, otherwise the whole world would go after him.
But arguing, and the fear of being scoffed at, finally got the best even of almost all of the disciples. They also came to point where they denied him and disbelieved in him—especially after he died. They had thought that he was the Christ, but now he was dead. You can’t prop up a corpse on the throne and expect good government or victory over the Gentiles.
So do not imagine that those who scoff at Christ’s second coming are doing anything new. Ever since the fall into sin mankind has had a devil of a time believing anything that God says or promises. The one who believes is blessed. The one who does not believe only discovers the truth after it is too late. Waiting and seeing is different from watching and praying. Waiting and seeing is what some of the people were doing at Christ’s cross: “Let’s wait and see if the does something that is worthy of us bestowing our faith upon him.” But Jesus did not reveal himself to many skeptics after he rose from the dead. The notable exception to that was the apostle Thomas. As it says in Romans: “God shows mercy to whom he desires, and he hardens whom he desires.”
Regardless of what anybody thinks, the truth must win out. God will vindicate his people. This is one of the things that Jesus is teaching in our Gospel reading today. All people and every individual is either a sheep or a goat. Every individual goes either to Jesus’s right or his left. The sole criterion for whether a person is on Jesus’s right or his left is whether that individual believed in him and in the promise of his second coming. We are justified before God by faith. The value of faith is rather hidden in this life. It doesn’t appear all that useful. Money, intelligence, and a good work ethic appear to be more important. But faith is vindicated with Christ’s second coming.
That is when judgement comes. This is not the first time that God has judged. Jesus says that it will be like those other times when God judged. It will come at an hour that no one expects. He says it will be like it was in the days of Noah, and as it was in the days of Sodom. People were eating and drinking, buying and selling, marrying and being given in marriage. Life will be going on like it always has until it doesn’t.
There is no way to sugar coat this teaching without being wildly unfaithful to the Scriptures and to Jesus’s own teaching. There is a lake of fire that has been prepared for the devil and all his angels. The goats will go there too. There is an outer darkness where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth. There is a place where the worm does not die and the fire is never quenched. These are all things that Jesus says. You can believe in them or you can choose not to, but you shouldn’t call yourself a Christian if you are embarrassed by Jesus and his words. Faith is all important. Fain in Jesus and his words is all important.
However, this should not be construed to mean that it’s a matter of having the good sense to believe in Jesus. Faith should not be understood in merely a utilitarian sense where having faith is some way to get ahead in life, or in the next life. Such a calculating and self-serving understanding of faith is not a faith that is worked by God and given as a gift. Faith like that is the product of man’s shrewd reasoning. It is not genuine.
That Jesus is talking about true faith is plainly seen by the way that he describes the sheep and the goats in our Gospel reading. If you think that faith is merely a matter of hell insurance, a clever trick to escape punishment, then you will end up among the goats. Notice how the goats simply cannot endure God’s judgment. They are thoroughly irritated at this fellow who has the gall to judge them: “When did we ever see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or lacking clothes or sick or in prison and did not serve you?” The implication here is, “We’re good people. Why didn’t you speak up? If you would have showed up at our door, hat in hand, we would have gladly given you directions to the Salvation Army. Why didn’t you show some initiative?”
Or, when it comes to the issue of faith, they might well say, “I had the good sense to believe in Jesus! I thought it was all true as true can be! The Bible says it and I believe it. You can’t send me to hell! It’s against the rules that you yourself have set!”
But this is wrong. Faith in Christ does, indeed, save, but it must be true faith, not fake faith. True faith is given by the Holy Spirit to those who repent. Fake faith is a product of man’s reason, where he thinks that he can beat God at his own game. He makes sure that he plays his cards right, church-wise perhaps—makes sure he stays on the books, but meanwhile his heart is full of hatred, lust, greed, and all manner of selfishness. Christ, for these people, is the get-out-of-hell free card that gives them license to pursue the evil that they would have pursued regardless. Now, however, they can do it with impunity.
Nevertheless, all these people that I am talking about believe with their whole heart that they are going to be saved, because they had the good sense to believe in Jesus. It is precisely these people who will be as mad as hell on Judgement Day. Here they went to all this trouble of being a member of the church and giving offerings and serving on the church board, and all those hours of sitting through boring sermons, and it is all for naught! The goats, in general, are proud and angry.
The sheep are very different. They are humble and self-effacing. Jesus commends them for the good works that they have done, and they don’t know what he is talking about. They weren’t keeping a ledger of debits and credits. The idea of making a case for their justification before God is the furthest thing from their minds, and for good reason. They wouldn’t have a leg to stand on. During their earthly life they were repentant.
What was vivid in their mind was not all the supposedly good things that they had done, but the way that even their best works were like filthy rags. Meanwhile, unawares, the Holy Spirit was at work in their lives like leaven in a lump of dough. Unawares the Holy Spirit was working love in their life. Their left hand did not know what their right hand was doing. Just as a good tree produces good fruit because that’s just what good trees do, so also God is at work in the lives of those whom he has chosen, those whom he has given the gift of faith in Christ.
So faith is not some meritorious work that we have done which deserves the reward of heaven. Faith is a gift from God. Faith is worked by the Holy Spirit, when and where he chooses, in those who hear the Gospel. Faith alone justifies, but faith does not remain alone. Faith is followed by good works, worked by the Holy Spirit, otherwise it is not true faith. Poor, miserable, sinners, without even a spark of goodness in themselves are given access to the very righteousness and goodness of God. It is by communion with God that love is worked, because, as 1 John says, God is love.
And notice for whom the good works were done. They were done for the least of Jesus’s brothers and therefore were done to him. We can be pretty savvy about for whom we do good works. We are much more prone to scratch the backs of those who are more likely to scratch ours in return. Jesus, however, teaches us that we should love our enemies and not just our friends. He says that if we are going to give a dinner party we should not invite rich people who will invite us to their home in return. We should invite those who cannot pay us back.
Our calculating reason, which is always looking out for our own welfare, find such advice distasteful: “No thanks. I don’t want to do anything nice for those who have hurt me.” We might be willing to do “good works,” but those good works better have a pretty good rate of return, otherwise you can forget it.
Thus you can see how different the sheep are from the goats. Thus you can see what a difference there is between true faith and fake faith. The sheep did their work naturally and without calculation. They did what they did because their nature was changed by God. They were made to be like their heavenly Father who makes his sun to shine on the evil and the good. It is a miracle for anyone to love his enemy, but that is what God works in his disciples. As disciples, or students, they learn from and follow the works of their master Jesus. He did not just die for the good (otherwise there’d be no one for him to die for), he died for the evil. This is the most beautiful and good thing that has ever happened, and it is a wonderful thing when it is manifested also in his followers—even though it is noticed by precious few.
So when Christ comes in glory to judge the living and the dead, it will indeed be on the basis of faith. Realize, however, that we can fool ourselves into manufacturing a convenient faith for ourselves that is fake and self-serving. Faith is for those who have empty hands. They know their sins and believe that God would be right to send them to hell for the evil life that they have lived. But they believe that God has loved them in Christ and made atonement for their sins. He is the Savior. They love and trust him.
Thus their lives are changed by God. Jesus is the vine and we are the branches. Apart from him we can do nothing. In him we produce fruit. These works of the faithful are not done for the purpose of making our case for being a good person. This is what the goats do. Instead we do these works for no other reason than that the works are good.
In preparation for that great and terrible day of the Lord that is coming, we should not wait and see, but rather watch and pray. He is coming. In the meantime he is at work in us, making us into the beautiful image of Christ the crucified.
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With the observation of All Saints’ Day we think of those who have died with faith in Jesus. They have been made holy and are in heaven. Since we are talking about people who have died, this gives us a good opportunity to talk about the important topic of death. The world is full of thoughts and teachings about death. The Bible teaches quite differently about death compared to the world. So today I’d like to speak about what the Bible says about death.
From the outset a person might expect that the Bible only has one message to tell about death. That’s how we often think about things that are true. 2+2=4. It doesn’t also equal 3 or 5. So we might think that the Bible would just have one message. But the fact of the matter is that the Bible speaks both very negatively about death as well as positively.
There are countless examples of God causing people to die as punishment for their sins. This goes all the way back to the Garden where God connects disobedience with the sentence of death: “In the day that you eat of it, you will surely die.” The flood was a massive demonstration of God’s wrath against mankind which had grown decadent and corrupt.
God brought about the death of people within his church as well. God caused Judah’s son, Onan, to die for spilling his seed onto the ground instead of doing his duty towards his brother’s widow. Under Moses, many thousands of Israelites died in the wilderness for their disobedience and grumbling against the Lord. This is also true in the New Testament church. Ananias and Sapphira are struck dead before the Apostle Peter for lying about what they put in the offering plate.
With these few examples (and there are countless more) you see what Paul says in Romans: “The wages of sin is death.” The wicked perish and are cut off from the land of the living.
But it is not just with those whose sins are black as coal that death is spoken of negatively. Good king Hezekiah begged God to extend his life when the prophet Isaiah told him that he was going to die. God granted him his wish.
King David speaks bitterly about death in Psalm 6. He says, “O Lord, deliver me! … For in death there is no remembrance of you. In the grave who will give you thanks?”
Moses says to God in Psalm 90: “All our days have passed away in your wrath; we finish our years like a sigh. The days of our lives are seventy years; and if, by reason of strength, they are eighty years, they are nothing but labor and sorrow. It is soon cut off, and we fly away. Who knows the power of your anger?”
This is also not just an Old Testament thing. Paul says in 1 Corinthians 15 that the last enemy to be destroyed is death. Death is our enemy.
These few examples (and there are many more) show us that the Bible speaks very negatively and even distressingly and terrifyingly about death. Perhaps this way of speaking has been surprising to you, and no wonder! It is considered extremely bad form to speak this way about death in our day. No one does it. Even pastors won’t dare to speak this way for fear of alienating their flock.
Instead of speaking negatively about death, everyone wants to speak positively about it. Everyone wants to be assured that everything’s fine. There’s nothing to worry about. It’s all just natural and a part of life. This, of course, is not true. It contradicts the Bible. We were not created for the purpose of dying, but for living. Death is not natural. It is God’s punishment for sin. Death is not just something biological. It is also tied up with our relationship with God.
Since our death is tied up with our relationship with God, it should not be surprising that the Bible also will speak positively about death. A person’s relationship with God can be one of unbelief and rebellion. Death is never a good thing in such situations. But a person can also be reconciled to God and trust in him. This makes death into something that is beneficial.
Let’s look at some examples of the Bible speaking positively about death. Those kings of Israel who remained faithful unto death are said to have been “gathered to their fathers” when they died. Being gathered with those who have died in the faith is a very warm and happy thought.
Psalm 116 says, “Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of his saints.” Psalm 49 says, “But God will redeem my soul from the power of the grave, for he shall receive me.” Job says, “I know that my Redeemer lives, and at the last he shall stand on the earth. After my skin has thus been destroyed, nevertheless, I will see God. My eyes shall see him, and not another.”
So also, Paul, in the New Testament, says, “To live is Christ, but to die is gain. If I live on in the flesh this will mean fruit from my labor; yet what I shall choose I cannot tell. For I am hard-pressed between the two, having a desire to depart and be with Christ, which is far better.” Death is something that is good, because the Christian departs to be with Christ.
So the Bible speaks negatively and positively about death. Someone might think that the Bible is simply contradictory. But that is not the case. As we’ve already mentioned, whether death is negative or positive has to do with a person’s relationship with God. Thus death being negative or positive also corresponds to the distinction between Law and Gospel.
Death, according to the Law, is a dreadful punishment. The only thing that is worse than death is hell, which is spoken of as a second death, or an eternal death. Death, however, is also something that is overcome by the Gospel. Death as punishment, death as God’s wrath, has been done away with by Christ’s death and resurrection. These most horrifying aspects of death were placed on God’s beloved Son and were carried out completely in him. It’s no longer death with a capital D. All that is absolutely terrifying and horrifying about death—namely, that along with everything else, death is also God’s wrath and punishment—has been purged from death. This changes its character to the point where we can speak of it as being a sleep.
It is one of those good sleeps. When a body is good and tired and lays down, it feels good to rest. If it is a good sleep, the next thing a person knows is that it is morning. The sun is shining. You’re well rested and ready to get up and live.
That is how a good sleep of death in Jesus’s name will be. We die tired and sluggish. We die sinful and unclean. In this life those things that we want to do we do not end up doing. Those things that we don’t want to do are the very things we end up doing. It is not just our bodies growing old, tired, and weak. Our souls, also, grow weak and hard and brittle. It’s time for a rest.
When we awaken in heaven from having fallen asleep in death, and when we awaken with the resurrection, everything is changed. The old has passed away. Behold, the new has come. Our bodies will be renewed. Our souls will be renewed. All the sluggishness, boredom, apathy, and bitterness will be gone. All our natural and sinful blindness and deafness towards God will be healed. We will see and hear and know God like we never have before, because sin will no longer get in the way of that anymore.
In our first reading today, from Revelation, the Apostle John is given a view of heaven. What is heaven like? He tells you: There’s a multitude of people there from every nation, tribe, people, and language. They are standing before the throne of God and before the Lamb. They are clothed with white robes and with palm branches in their hands. They call out with a loud voice (I wonder what that voice of millions might sound like?) They say: “Salvation comes from our God, who sits on the throne, and from the Lamb!”
Then all the angels, and there are four living creatures, and the elders fall on their faces before the throne and before the Lamb. They burst out from their innermost being: “Amen! Blessing and glory and wisdom and thanks and honor and power and might belong to our God forever and ever! Amen!”
Adam and Eve are among that number. Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob are among that number. Moses is among that number. David is among that number. Mary is among that number. Peter and the twelve are among that number. Paul is among that number. If your loved ones have remained faithful until death, then they are among that number too: Grandma, Grandpa, aunts, uncles, mom, dad, brothers, sisters.
But let’s be on guard here so that sentimentality does not lead us astray. We will not go to heaven to worship and commune with our fellow human beings, no matter how much we have loved them, but with our God, with Jesus. We will love each other like we have never been able to before, but only because we love God more.
Death (or how it should really be thought of among Christians: falling asleep in Jesus’s name) is the way that we will enter into this reality unless Jesus comes back while we are still alive. Entering into this life, this healing, this whole-hearted worship makes it obvious why the Bible can speak positively about death. It is positive, because death is no longer really death. Jesus has made it so by defeating it. He knocked the stuffing out of it, you might say, so that it is hardly a shell of its former self.
We must be crystal clear, though, about to whom this applies. It doesn’t apply to everyone. Jesus has defeated death for everyone. He has made full atonement for everyone’s sins. Everyone is forgiven. But not everyone believes. Jesus says, “Whoever believes and is baptized shall be saved. Whoever does not believe will be condemned.”
There is a very strong compulsion in us to absolve everyone who dies. Nobody wants to think of others going to hell. We certainly don’t want to think of that for those whom we love. And so we are tempted to say of everyone who has died that they are now in a better place. That’s not true for those who do not hold fast to Jesus the only Savior. They are not in a better place, but in a worse place, and time of grace has passed away.
It is also not the case that only a tiny fraction of people fail to enter heaven and end up in hell. Jesus was quite clear about this. “Narrow is the gate and hard is the way that leads to eternal life, and few there are who find it. Broad is the gate and easy is the way that leads to destruction, and many enter therein.” So we should not think that it is uncommon for someone to fail to enter heaven. This is especially true in our society where God is turning us over to our desires. Few can be troubled to hear God’s Word. Few can be troubled to receive the Sacrament that is the remembrance of Christ’s death. Outside of Christ, death remains the horrible, terrifying thing that it always has been. It is God’s punishment. In Christ, death is the door to everlasting life.
This shows how important faith in Christ is, and how important the Gospel and the Sacraments are. If all dogs go to heaven and everybody ends up in a better place regardless of the Son of God, then who is Christ and what has he done? It is a denial of Christ to say that everyone goes to heaven. Then he would not be a Savior. The prophets and the apostles would all be liars. God, if he is even acknowledged at all, would be entirely different from the one that is revealed to us in the Bible. This is absolutely intolerable and furthers what is number one on devil’s agenda—that people should not believe in Jesus. But this is precisely what we are doing if we do not distinguish between those who die with faith in Christ and those who do not.
Standing up for faith in Christ in order to have a blessed death will not make you very popular, but Jesus wasn’t very popular either. He told us beforehand that if we are his disciples, we shouldn’t be surprised if we are treated like our master was.
Instead of denying Christ, we should confess him. We have a simple message to tell. No human being can be justified before God. All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. Anybody who hopes to have a good relationship with God apart from God’s own reconciliation and atonement in Christ will be horribly surprised and defeated.
But God sent his Son for all people and every individual. All who are weary and heavy laden should come unto Jesus and he will give them rest. Whoever believes in him will be saved. Jesus himself says, “God loved the world in this way, that he sent his only begotten Son, that whoever believes in him will not perish, but have eternal life. For God did not sent his Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through him.” Jesus is powerful to save. Whoever puts their trust in him will not be put to shame.
[Over the past year, Linda Meyer has departed to be with the Lord. Blessed be her memory.]
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504 years ago today, October 31, 1517, Martin Luther posted 95 theses, or statements, against the Church’s sale of indulgences to the door of St. Mary’s Church in Wittenberg. Luther making this protest is the reason why October 31st was the date that is chosen to commemorate the Lutheran Reformation of the Catholic Church. But October 31, 1517 was just the beginning of the story.
The pope’s sale of indulgences was not going to be the main point of contention. Fairly quickly much bigger questions were raised. Who or what is authoritative for Christians? Do Christians need to submit to the pope or to the Scriptures? Who or what determines the doctrines that are taught? What if there are discrepancies and conflicts between the authorities in the church and the Scriptures?
We could talk a long time about these questions and issues. But what I’d like to spend our time on today is what became the most important issue during the Reformation. The most important conflict was concerning how a person could be found to be acceptable in God’s sight. When God renders his verdict concerning an individual, what will that verdict be? And why? What is the basis for God’s verdict concerning the individual? These are the questions behind an important church word that it is good for you to know and understand, which is “justification.” How can a person be justified in God’s sight? That is a pretty important and practical thing to know, since our eternal fate is dependent upon it.
Before we speak about what Luther and the other reformers rediscovered from the Bible, let’s first briefly describe how justification was understood in the Roman Catholic Church. Overall, the most important thing to understand is that according to the Catholic Church if we are to be justified before God it is because of a cooperative effort between God and I. God does his part. I am to do my part.
God’s part is largely a matter of several different graces or gifts, such as the seven sacraments, and some other less important things. (Included, by the way, among these less important things would be indulgences, which Luther posted the 95 theses about.) God gave these graces to Peter and the other apostles. Therefore, through the ministers of the church, God dispenses his grace to those who wish to receive it. This is God doing his part, and you can count on God doing his part.
But, according to Roman Catholic teaching, I also have to do my part. What is my part? First and foremost, I must receive these graces that are given out by the clergy. Then I must live a good life, keeping God’s and the church’s commandments.
Whereas God can be counted on for doing his part, the Christian is not so trustworthy. Even the Catholics recognize that. But there is a remedy for that. The Christian can go to confession with the priest. He can buy indulgences. If the Christian sins a lot, then (even if all else fails) he can still work off his guilt in purgatory after he has died. Purgatory is not taught by the Bible, but eventually it came to be understood as a place where imperfect Christians who have died can go to get cleaned up through suffering, through being purged of the guilt that has been accumulated. Eventually the Christian will have done his part and will be holy enough to become a saint and can enter heaven.
There is a lot more that we could say about the Roman Catholic Church’s teachings about being justified before God. Great big books have been written about this. Let it be said that the Roman Catholic Church’s teaching is not wild and nonsensical. It is not something that can just be written off as stupid. There is a good deal of truth in Roman Catholicism, particularly with what they say about God doing his part. Indeed, the whole overall arrangement makes a lot of sense to our natural way of thinking. There are so many things in life where the one party does his part, and the other party does their part. It seems reasonable that a person’s relationship with God should be that way too.
But, as we heard in our reading from Isaiah 55 a couple weeks ago, God says: “My thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are my ways your ways.” What is often reasonable and helpful in our daily, earthly life can be a roadblock if we transfer that thinking over to the kingdom of God. God doing his part, and we doing our part, sounds reasonable, but that’s just not how it works.
From long and bitter experience Luther learned how unreliable our reason is when it comes to the things of God. He tried his hardest to do his part. One of his problems, some Roman Catholics have said, was that he was too honest about his efforts. No matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t achieve what the church taught him he should be able to achieve. This made him very concerned about how he might be judged by God. How would God render his verdict concerning Martin Luther?
Wanting to know God’s will and judgments led Luther to search the Scriptures. What he found in the Scriptures was different from what the Church had taught him. It is not a situation where God does his part and I do my part. It is a situation where God does everything. I do nothing—at least not anything good.
Our being justified before God is completely God’s doing. God chose those whom he would save from eternity, before they were even born. The Son became man in order to redeem sinful mankind as the great atoning sacrifice. God causes his Word of salvation to be spoken so that sinners are justified through faith in Christ, through Christ’s goodness, instead of the life that they had lived and are living.
The end point for the Christian is not purgatory. It is not a self-improvement project. It isn’t a big fat bill of what we owe in order to do our part after God has done his part. The end point for the Christian is joy and thanksgiving at what God has done and is doing.
It’s like when the Angel spoke to the shepherds on Christmas Night. The Shepherds were encouraged to rejoice: “Fear not, for I bring you glad tidings of great joy that will be for all the people, for unto you is born this night in the city of David a Savior, who is Christ the Lord.” God gives a great gift of salvation to poor, miserable sinners. He distributes his salvation through the Word and the Sacraments. To receive these things we believe them, and thereby make good use of them. It is a dreadful thing to disbelieve these things, because that is calling God a liar.
“But,” you might be wondering, “what about our part?” “Isn’t there something that we have to do?” “What about our good works?” “The Bible talks a lot about us doing good works.”
This is true. The Bible does talk a lot about good works. What is important is that we properly understand these works that a Christian does. They are not our part of the bargain, like it is in the Catholic system. They are an added gift, separate from how God regards us. Good works do not enter in to whether or how we are justified before God. If our works are considered for that judgment, it cannot result in any other verdict than condemnation. But we are not judged according to our works—good, bad, or otherwise—when we believe in Christ. Through faith in Christ we are judged according to a different basis, which is Jesus alone.
Instead of good works being something that is required from us for our end of the bargain, good works must be understood as yet another gift from God on top of his justification of us sinners. He declares us not guilty with Jesus’s resurrection from the dead. Jesus died for all our sins and atonement has been made. On top of that, together with faith in Christ, God begins to heal our sin-sick heart. Instead of being sold to sin and enslaved to the devil, we are set free to walk in the good works that God has prepared for us beforehand to walk in.
The best picture for what is going on here is a picture that Jesus himself uses. He says, “Every good tree produces good fruit, but a bad tree produces bad fruit. A good tree cannot produce bad fruit, and a bad tree cannot produce good fruit.” As we are of ourselves, as we were born by nature, we are bad trees. We live in ignorance of God, or, if we learn of him, we rebel against him and his will. We care for nothing and for no one except ourselves and what is ours. We are bad trees. We cannot help but produce bad fruit.
God creates a good tree by killing the old tree and uniting us with Christ. This is brought about by God converting us to faith in Christ. Those who believe in Christ are well pleasing to God. After all, it was for the purpose of believing in Christ that God sent his only begotten Son to begin with. Thus, through faith in Christ, a person’s whole life is sanctified, is made holy. God does not count our sins against us, and all the activities that we do otherwise while believing in Christ are sanctified so that they are acceptable and pleasing sacrifices to God. Even if we pick up a single straw or give a cup of water to a child, such humble acts, done with faith in Christ, are better than anything we might come up with in our sinful flesh to establish our justification before God.
Faith has the power to change our whole life. It doesn’t change our life in an outward way, where people can see it. It might not even be changed in the way that we can always feel and know. But faith changes our life before God—which is all that matters.
Entire lifetimes could be spent studying all the different facets of what happened and what was discussed in the Reformation. There are many other important, godly, and helpful things that we could talk about. But the most important thing that happened during the Reformation was the return to what the Bible says about our justification before God. Our relationship with God is not a matter of the Law. It is not a situation where God does his part and we have to do our part.
Our justification before God is a matter of the Gospel. It is a situation where God pardons and forgives us for Jesus sake. He also gives us his Holy Spirit to fight against our sinful flesh. Even where you might anticipate that we are supposed to do our part—with our good works—it is a matter of grace. For good works to be genuine, and not self-serving, they have to be created by the Holy Spirit. This is what the Bible teaches about our justification before God.
Luther understood how hard it was to believe what the Bible says about our justification. He always warned those who were younger than him, who didn’t go through the struggles that he went through, that this teaching could easily be lost. That is true. It can be and has been lost in vast swaths of our own Lutheran Church. Our Synod, also, is not immune to this being lost.
This is not surprising. The fact of the matter is that our old Adam doesn’t like the Gospel and cannot understand it. The grace of God, the giving and giving of God, is incomprehensible to our Old Adam. That is why the miracle of a conversion is necessary. It is only by the almighty power of the Holy Spirit that we can see God and his will for what it really is. If God has bless you and enabled you to know him from the Scriptures and to see from the Scriptures how God regards you, then you will rejoice even while you bear your cross.
In order that we may enjoy this good life of knowing God and believing in Jesus, let us not forget to pray in all seriousness what Jesus taught us to pray. Let God’s Name be regarded as holy among us. Let God’s kingdom come among us. Let God’s good and gracious will be done among us.
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There are two common errors when it comes to fighting against the devil and other evil powers. A person can either think too highly of these enemies and have an exagerrated response against them, or a person can think too little of them as though no response were needed at all.
Those who think too highly of the devil, demons, and other evil things can get carried away. They often want to know more about these things than what the Bible tells us. The Bible doesn’t speak that much about such things, and certainly the Bible never explains how these things work. Often people can develop an intense desire to understand what has not been revealed. Doing that seems pious enough. The thought is that if we understand how these things work, we can take reasonable action against them.
It is also rather exciting to see the world as a drama where the devil and his demons take center stage. How might they be involved at the top echelons of power? What do the world leaders do behind closed doors? Knowing or learning about such secrets is very interesting and exciting. But that is the very reason why we need to have our guard up concerning such things.
Our flesh is easily bored. Grand narratives involving secret powers can attract us like a moth to the flame. But the flesh profits nothing. Being fascinated by such things doesn’t enable anybody to do anything against them. The only way to overcome evil is by the new creation in Jesus. Oddly enough, becoming fascinated with secret knowledge about spiritual evils might be part of their very own strategy. What harm does it do them if people get whipped up about them, but are completely powerless to defeat or hamper them.
So one of the errors when it comes to fighting against the devil and other evil powers is that a person gets carried away with movie-like conspiracies and explanations. This is not so common an error among Lutherans. Pentecostal-like groups are much more likely to fall into this. Among Lutherans the other, the practically opposite error, is much more common. We are prone to believe that such things do not exist. Or, perhaps we believe that they exist on paper, but we are prone to act as though such things do not matter. They have no impact on our life.
Of the two errors, this second one is worse. It betrays a rank, unbelieving, secular outlook. According to this outlook life is nothing more and nothing less than making do and trying to have a good time. God doesn’t matter. The devil doesn’t matter. What matters is me—my paycheck, my fun, my memories. To such a person Paul’s statement that we wrestle with evil spiritual powers is backward, pre-enlightenment superstition. It is as though somewhere along the line some really smart people discovered that neither God nor the devil exist. But this has never been discovered or proven. It has only been assumed. As an assumption it’s really not that impressive or original. This assumption goes all the way back to the first human beings who became convinced in their heart that there is no God, so we might as well do whatever it is that we feel like doing.
So it is no good to believe that the devil and demons do not exist or have no impact on our life. It is also bad to go overboard about these enemies of God. So if both of these alternatives are bad how should we think about them and counter them? We are given some practical and sober things to think about with our Epistle reading today, Paul’s letter to the Christians at Ephesus.
He says: “Finally, be strong in the Lord and in the strength of his might. Put on the whole armor of God, that you may be able to stand against the schemes of the devil. For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places. Therefore take up the whole armor of God, that you may be able to withstand in the evil day, and having done all, to stand firm. Stand therefore, having fastened on the belt of truth, and having put on the breastplate of righteousness, and, as shoes for your feet, having put on the readiness given by the gospel of peace. In all circumstances take up the shield of faith, with which you can extinguish all the flaming darts of the evil one; and take the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God.”
The first thing that I’d like you to notice from these words is the very first word. He says, “Finally.” These words are a conclusion to things that he has been speaking about previously in the letter. I think this context is very important for a proper attitude concerning these evil forces. Immediately prior to where our Epistle reading picks up the apostle is speaking about the various callings in life that a Christian might have.
He speaks at length about the proper relationship between husband and wife. Husbands are to love their wives. Wives are to submit to their husbands as to the Lord. He tells children that they should be obedient to their parents. Those who honor their parents will enjoy long life, full of good things. Employees should be submissive and helpful to their employers. They should work, not as though they were just trying to earn a buck, but as though they were serving the Lord. Employers should act similarly towards their employees. They should not be abusive. They are cut from the same cloth as their workers, and God is not a respecter of persons.
Think about the realms of life that Paul is talking about here. What could be more practical and immediately relevant? Whom do you associate with from one day to the next? Is it not all these relationships that Paul lays out here? He is talking about the people who live in your house that you see every day. He is talking about the people whom you see at work. These are the people who make up the vast majority of our life. We, as Christians, are to fill these callings with submission towards one another, with love, and with honor. It is after saying all these things that Paul says, “Finally, be strong in the Lord and in the strength of his might. Fight against the devil and all the evil spirits.”
So where do the devil and the evil spirits do their work? They work within these ordinary callings. They do not want us to be loving towards the people who live with us. They do not want us to be cheerful and helpful at work. They want us to grumble and complain. They want us to treat each other badly, so that we isolate from one another. They want us to heap up sins in our daily walk of life so that we bring down God’s wrath upon ourselves and upon our nation.
In order to combat this we must put on the full armor of God. Notice that all these pieces of armor come from God. They do not come from us. It won’t work just to try harder. We must receive what God gives in order to be at all effective. Gird your loins with the belt of truth. Put on the breastplate of righteousness. Shod your feet with the gospel of peace, that is, being forgiven, forgiving and moving forward. Take up shield of faith. Paul is not talking about one of those little circular shields here. He’s talking about one of those great big ones, shaped like a door, covering the whole body. The devil can do nothing against the one who continues to believe. Have your mind encased on salvation like a helmet. The only offensive weapon here is a dagger, which is the Word of God.
Armor brings to nothing the efforts the enemies undertake to bring about your demise. The devil and the evil spirits want to destroy your faith, hope, and love. Generally speaking, they do not go at us with visions, apparitions, dramatic possessions, and so on. Can they do such things? Certainly! But it is far more effective for them to sow hatred wherever they can. People do not think that hatred comes from evil spirits. They think that it comes from the other person being such an despicable specimen of the human race! It is within our homes and within our workplaces—those places in life where we spend 90% of our time—that is where we must be strong in the Lord and the strength of his might.
The focus, therefore, with the devil and the demons is not against some grand or vast conspiracy. It is not on the skull and bones society, the illuminati, or other secret clubs. Can these things be full of occult and evil activity? Certainly! And I believe that they are evil and occult. Furthermore, can the devil and the demons be active at the top positions of power? Certainly! If I were preaching to senators and presidents, that might be something worthwhile taking up. But I don’t see any presidents here today. What I do see are people who have families, jobs, and other important relationships. We all have enough to handle with looking after ourselves. We don’t need to get involved in grand narratives, where the villain is always black as coal, and always someone else, and never myself.
In our callings in life we must take seriously the schemes of the devil, the principalities, the cosmic forces at work in this present age of darkness. We must not think, for example, that everything can be explained simply by brain chemicals or hormones. Nor is it a purely natural, sociological matter of getting along or not getting along. The front lines of your battle as a Christian are in your living room, at your kitchen table, and in your bedroom. They are on your work floor and in the breakroom. In these places we are to be salt and light. Those around us should see the good works that God works in us by his Holy Spirit, and glorify God for them.
It is very easy to be misled into thinking that only the big stuff matters. Only the people sitting in the halls of power matter. But it’s actually the other way around. The only reason a government exists is for the sake of the lives that we live every day. The government is God’s gift so that our daily life may continue to go on in relative peace. Life is not for the purpose of having a government. The government exists for the sake of everybody’s homelife. It is our homelife that is primary. Furthermore, when God judges and punishes, it is not just for the serial murderers, devil worshippers, and other monsters. It is for the sharp words, the sharp looks, the hatreds, the little disobediences that have the power to make a homelife miserable.
So when you think of the devil and the demons do not think that they are somewhere else with séances, baby’s blood, or other esoteric practices. Are the devil and the demons involved in such things? I have no doubt about that, and you should have absolutely nothing do with such things! But the devil and the demons are closer than you think. The enemy is in your daily life. Your daily life matters a great deal.
There is more than one way to skin a cat. The devil knows that too. Our faith can be attacked through the front door, through the back door, or through the window. The evil forces do not act the way that people expect them to, with dramatic fanfares and blood-soaked rituals. They know how important our daily life is. What they’d like is for us to leave our armor in the closet, thinking that our enemies are far away in Washington or wherever.
So fight the good fight in your daily life. Be strengthened in the knowledge of God’s love toward us in Christ. Put on God’s truth, God’s righteousness, God’s salvation. The closer these things are fastened upon you, the better. They are your life. They are your destiny. Stand against the devil in the evil day when you are tempted to be angry, disobedient, lazy, and selfish. Jesus has come to destroy the works of the devil, and there is no more important place for the devil’s works to be destroyed than in our daily life.
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It is a part of our human nature that we like to fix things. Wherever there might be a problem, let’s figure out a way to fix it. So if you’re naked, go make some clothes. If there is pain with childbirth, let’s give an epidural. If there’s oppression against women, let’s start a movement. If the work is heavy or boring let’s get some hydraulics and robotics. If thorns and thistles come up let’s spray some Roundup. If there is sweat on our brow, let’s fire up the air conditioner. If we are to turn back into dust go get the formaldehyde. Whatever the problem might be, we figure there must be a way to eliminate it or at least make it easier.
Because we are more or less successful in eliminating problems, we come to believe that we must be doing alright. Our civilization is doing quite well. All the different parts keep humming along. The future looks bright because just look at all the problems that we’ve been able to solve in the past. Surely we will be able to solve some more in the future.
But all of this problem solving only has to do with one side of life. It has to do with created things. We manipulate the created things of this world in order to bring about our desired outcomes. What about the things that have to do with our Creator? Are there problems there? Certainly. But here we can see another way of dealing with things besides fixing them. We can also ignore things.
This has been the natural strategy with God from the beginning. As soon as Adam and Eve came to believe that there was no way that God could be their friend, they tried to put God out of mind. God had said, “You will surely die.” The devil had said, “You won’t surely die.” Adam and Eve hoped the devil was right.
Then they got busy fixing what they took to be problems. First things first, let’s cover up this nakedness. That will make us more comfortable and secure. Then let’s figure out other ways to make ourselves more comfortable. When God started to walk through the garden in the cool of the day it sounded horrible to Adam and Eve. They worked harder at ignoring God by climbing into some bushes.
This is so typical and programmatic for how we deal with God, particularly when we have fallen into sin. When we feel and know our sin we want to stay away from God just like a criminal wants to stay away from the police station. The criminal doesn’t want to get caught. Sinners don’t want to get caught. Maybe, just maybe, we’ll get away with it. Let’s hope so. In the meantime, let’s get busy trying to get some more money so that we can buy ourselves some more comfort. Maybe if we can get more comfortable we can just forget about all this God business.
But God still exists whether we ignore him or not. Whereas we might be very impressed with ourselves in the way that we can fix problems, God is not impressed. We might think that we are at the pinnacle of civilization, achieving great things, God is totally bored with our fumbling and bumbling. Like an adult watches a toddler play with blocks, that’s how God looks at us with our nano-technology and nuclear reactors. God has an expectation of us as his creatures, and it is not that we should know many things about many things or be able to do this, that, or the other thing with his creation. Of all the creatures God has created, human beings are the only ones who have been made in his image. Human beings are the only ones who can hear him, believe in him, and pray, praise, and give thanks. That is what God intends for his people, because God intends good things for his people.
In our Gospel reading Jesus spoke about a landowner who planted a vineyard. He took good care of that vineyard. He put a wall around it. He dug a winepress for it. He built a watchtower to keep it safe. These words of Jesus’s would have been quite familiar to the Jews to whom he was speaking. The prophet Isaiah, hundreds of years before, used the same picture to describe the relationship that God had with his chosen nation. God chose the descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob to be his people. He put them in the vineyard that he had made for them. He made it quite safe and free from anything that would adulterate and ruin it. But, as Isaiah said, instead of sweet clusters of grapes it only produced sour grapes. The Lord had an expectation for the vineyard that he had planted, but the vineyard didn’t produce anything good.
What God would have us produce as his vine is, first and foremost, faith. We should believe in him. We should not ignore him. We should not go after other gods who promise to give us comfort and happiness. Faith is the fountain and source from which all other spiritual goods must come. Without faith everything else is going to be hypocritical, shallow, and self-seeking.
Another fruit that God would have us, as his vine, produce, is a happiness in God’s Word. We should want to hear and learn more about God. We should want to learn about how he has dealt with his people in the past, how he deals with his people now, and learn what he has in store for his people in the future. What an amazing thing it is that we have either no desire or such a coldness towards learning about our Creator. We’d much rather spend our time doing this, that, and the other thing. No matter how important these earthly things might be, they are necessarily trifles compared to God’s Word.
So we should take in God’s Word. We should also send our words to him. It’s kind of like breathing in and breathing out. We breathe in. We take in God’s Word and will. We should also breathe out. We should call upon his Name in every trouble, pray, praise, and give thanks. Just as human beings can’t be healthy and vigorous if they are only breathing in or only breathing out, so also our spiritual life is quite hampered if we only breath in and never out, or if we are only breathing out and never taking in God’s grace through his Word. There needs to be both. We must hear God speak to us. We must speak back to him.
The good fruit that is to be produced in God’s vineyard is this relationship with God. We are to believe in him. We are to hear him. We are to speak to him. This is all that God wants from us. He couldn’t care less about all our other accomplishments. They do not impress him. In so far as they are good, they come from him anyway. What he desires is that we become like a little child. We should love him, listen to him, and speak to him in psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs. This is what it meant to be created in God’s image. The reason why God sent his only-begotten Son was to restore that image that was lost through sin, to reconcile us to God, so that we could gladly be his creature and he could be our God. Without Christ it is impossible for the vine to produce good fruit.
Now that we know about this other side of our life, the side that has to do with our Creator, the side that we are so prone to ignore, we might start to think about how we can solve this problem too. Our Old Adam is a Mr. Fix-it. He always hopes he can fix things up in a jiffy. Barring that, he believes with his whole heart that he can fix things if only he tries hard enough and never gives up. While this might be the case, somewhat, with earthly things (but even here I’m skeptical), it definitely is not the case with our relationship with God.
When it comes to our relationship with God there is no self-help that will work. This relationship flows from faith, and there’s no way to have true faith unless the Lord himself should give it to you. There is no way to try hard and never give up and thereby create faith. Whatever such a technique might produce would not be true faith. It might, indeed, be something that you hope is faith—something selfish, where you can thereby believe that you won’t be condemned—but that is a far cry from the real deal.
True faith is created by God. Since it is something that is not dependent upon us, or our efforts, or our fixing, it necessary kind up jams up the gears of our brain. Faith is different from the way we think things should go. Nevertheless, it is something that God works in us by his Word.
Consider our Old Testament reading. God says, “Hey, all of you who are thirsty, come to the water, even if you have no money. Even though you have no money, come, buy and eat. Come, buy wine and milk without money and without cost.” How can you buy something without money? How can something be purchased that has no cost? You might think that God is just speaking gobbledy-gook, but I assure you he is not. He is making a very important point about our relationship with God and faith.
When it comes to that relationship we do not have any merit or worthiness in us. We don’t have any money, you might say. There’s no amount of effort, tears, or sacrifice that can fix that relationship—no matter how pious or churchy those efforts might appear to be. Everything comes from God. He is the one who establishes the covenant. He is the one who provides the atoning sacrifice. He is the one who will even give us faith in his promises. Since it is all his doing, it is just a matter of making a happy announcement.
That is what is going on in that Isaiah reading. It is a happy announcement which is completely one-sided. God is providing everything that is necessary. He gives water to the thirsty. He gives wine and milk without money and without cost. What he has to say is able to satisfy one’s soul. So incline your ear to him and listen to him. Make sure that you don’t let this opportunity pass you by. Call upon him when he is near.
The only way that we can really appreciate and appropriate this message is when we are no longer trying to fix our relationship with God, but instead are happy to receive a gift. If we still think that we have some merit or worthiness we are going to be working on fixing things. But our fixing of things is always tainted. It’s always looking for self-advantage. It’s looking for a way we can use God—use him for what we want, but then we can get away with not doing other things. We like being in charge of our own salvation because then we decide what we want to do and not do, believe and not believe. We need to just stop all of that and receive with empty hands the gift that God gives to us.
The gift is perfect reconciliation and friendship for Jesus’s sake. He invites us to fear, love, and trust in him. He’d like to establish us more firmly in Christ with his Word and Holy Spirit so that our joy may be full in God’s love towards us. He would like us to come to him in every trouble instead of trying to fix everything by ourselves. He would like to us pray and give thanks to him for his goodness and his mercy that never ends.
But the only way that this can come to us is when we are quiet and behold the works of the Lord. That is what God told the Israelites when they were at the Red Sea, convinced that they were about to be slaughtered by the Egyptians. He said, “Be still and know that I am God. You will see your salvation.” Then God fulfilled his Word and promise to them. Then the Israelites gave God thanks and praise.
God’s Word comes to you. He speaks to you in the Scriptures. He speaks to you through preaching and teaching that is in accord with that Word. He gives his covenant to you in Baptism. He gives you the New Testament in Jesus’s blood for the forgiveness of your sins in the Sacrament. These are all things that no amount of money can buy. And yet he says, “Come, eat; come, drink.”
God is at work in you, creating spiritual fruit. Jesus is the vine, and you are the branches. Apart from him, you can do nothing. In him you can have faith in God and all the goodness that flows from that. This is the fruit that our God is looking for. He does not care about buildings, technology, or mountains of cash. He is looking for those who will worship him in spirit and in truth. God’s Word to you today would have you embrace this gift of friendship with God and enjoy it to God’s glory.
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In our Old Testament reading we heard about a man named Jacob—a name with which you are surely familiar. But oftentimes our Bible reading is not what it should be, so we have a hard time putting together the things that we have learned over the years. So today I’d like to talk about the events leading up to what happened with Jacob so we can better understand and apply to ourselves the way God works.
Where I’d like to begin today is with Jacob’s grandfather. His name was Abram. Later God gives him the name Abraham. We are introduced to this man in Genesis chapter 12, and, in a sense, the rest of the Bible and the rest of world history is all about him and his descendants. God chose Abraham and told him to move to the land of Canaan. God promised that this land would be his and his descendants’. God would make a mighty nation of him. In him and in his seed all the nations of the world would be blessed. (This promise about Abraham’s seed refers all the way back to the Garden of Eden when God promised that Eve’s seed would crush the serpent’s head.) God appeared to Abraham several times, repeating these promises to him, and Abraham believed these promises. This faith was accredited to him as righteousness.
Abraham’s faith, which is accredited to him as righteousness, is the way that the rest of the Bible and the rest of world history is about him and his descendants. God caused his flesh and blood descendants to flourish outwardly, but the people of God, properly speaking, have always been such inwardly, by faith. All or almost all of you are Gentiles. You are not related to Abraham by blood. But you are children of God’s promises, just like he was. God made a covenant with Abraham. God has made a covenant with you. God gave Abraham an outward sign of that covenant in circumcision. God has given an outward sign of his covenant with you in baptism. If you remain faithful unto death, just like Abraham, you will be given the crown of life. That is an even greater inheritance than what God promised Abraham.
So Abraham is one of the greatest men of the Bible. It is important to understand that the rest of the Bible and the rest of world history is about him, and his descendants, and God’s promises to these descendants. The Bible is also about tests to people’s faith, and that’s the case also with Abraham. God said he would make a might nation of Abraham and his descendants would be as numerous as the sand on the sea shore. But Abraham didn’t have any children when God said that. And Abraham and Sarah were getting old. In fact, the Bible says, the way of women had ceased with Sarah. But Abraham believed God. Eventually, after a great deal of time, probably much more time than Abraham would have liked, God fulfilled his promise. Isaac was born to them in their old age.
Isaac was not the same kind of man his father was. There are not nearly as many adventures in Isaac’s life as there were in Abraham’s life. Isaac’s sons, also, had much more adventurous lives. Isaac, for his part, seems to have been a very peaceable man. If someone took his well, he would just dig another one. He was not feisty like his father or his sons after him.
Just as Abraham and Sarah had a hard time conceiving and bearing children, so also Isaac and Rebekah had a hard time conceiving and bearing children. No children came for a long time. Finally, when Rebekah did become pregnant, it was with twins. She inquired of the Lord what was happening to her because already in the womb they were fighting with one another. God told her that two nations were fighting within her, and that the older would serve the younger. And so it happened that when it came time for the delivery that Esau was born first, then Jacob. But Jacob was holding Esau’s heel. They were tremendous rivals.
They also were quite different from one another. Esau was hairy and an outdoorsman. Jacob had smooth skin and didn’t hunt. Esau was the favorite of his father, Isaac. Jacob was the favorite of his mother, Rebekah. Eventually Isaac grew very old and feeble. He became blind in his old age. The time came for Isaac to give his blessing, and he intended to give it to the firstborn, Esau. But Isaac’s wife, Rebekah, found out about his intentions. She wanted Jacob to be blessed. So she worked it out so that her husband would be tricked into thinking that Jacob was Esau. She made him hairy and fixed a meal just like Esau would have. Although it seems that Isaac was skeptical when he gave his blessing, nevertheless, he blessed Jacob instead of Esau. The word of the Lord to Rebekah was fulfilled. The older will serve the younger.
When Esau figured out what had been done to him he was furious. He intended to kill his brother once his father was dead. Isaac knew that it was dangerous to keep them together so he told Jacob to go away. Jacob was to go back to the homeland where he might find a wife. Isaac and Rebekah did not like the native, idolatrous women of Canaan. They wanted Jacob to have a wife from their own people.
This brings us to our reading this morning. Jacob left Beersheba, where Isaac lived, and was on his way to Haran where his parents’ relatives lived. Night fell at a certain place and Jacob lay down to sleep. There is this odd detail where he used a stone for a pillow. When he fell asleep he dreamed. He saw a staircase or a ladder. The Lord was at the top of it and angels were ascending and descending upon it.
God said to him: “I am the Lord, the God of your father Abraham and the God of Isaac. The land on which you are lying, I give to you and to your descendants. Your descendants will be like the dust of the earth, and you will spread abroad to the west, and to the east, and to the north, and to the south. In you and in your seed all the families of the earth will be blessed. Now, I am with you and will watch over you wherever you go, and I will bring you back again into this land. Indeed, I will not leave you, until I have done what I have promised to you.”
This had to have been a very welcome and cheerful word to Jacob. I can’t help but think there had to have been some guilt, or at the very least, uncertainty over what he had done to his brother Esau. That wasn’t the most honorable thing he had ever done. Now his brother hated him so much that he wanted to kill him. He was sent off from home all alone. It seems as though he had nothing better to lay under his head than a stone he had found at that place. What was going to come of all this?
Then God spoke to him. God told him many things that he already knew. Jacob was told of the God of his father and grandfather from the time that he was a little child. He himself was circumcised, the sign of God’s covenant. But now God reaffirmed his covenant with Jacob, in the midst of his turmoil and doubt, just as God had done with Abraham and Isaac before him. At that moment it certainly didn’t look like Jacob was going to have much for blessings. He was sad and lonely. But Jacob believed God, and it was accredited to him as righteousness.
The story of Jacob’s life would go on. He would be blessed according to the Word of the Lord. He would get married. He would have 12 sons. Those sons would go on to become the 12 tribes of Israel. His descendants would eventually settle to the north and south, east and west of Bethel, where Jacob had this dream. Jacob was blessed according to the Word of the Lord, but all of these blessings did not come about in the way that a person might expect.
Anybody who is familiar with the details of Jacob’s life knows that his dealings with his father-in-law were fraught with grievances and rivalry. When Jacob comes back home with his wives and children he is met at the ford of the Jabbok by God, who wrestles him all night long until God finally puts his hip out of joint. Jacob walked with a limp the rest of his life, but he managed to wrestle a blessing out of God and received the new name “Israel.” Jacob’s sons would disappoint him in all kinds of ways. They even went so far as to almost kill their brother Joseph, but instead sold him as a slave. Finally, Jacob’s descendants would come to inhabit the land of Canaan, but only after 400 years of slavery in Egypt.
Jacob believed in the Lord his God and was accredited as righteous, but that did not mean that everything went the way that Jacob thought things should go. The Bible records the story of faith, but also records tests of faith. The way that we think things should go is not always the way that God makes them go. I might even go so far as to say that God hardly ever lets things go the way that we think they should go—at least not down to the very details.
I think there is a good reason for this. It is so that we do not think that we are God, but rather that he is God. God has explicitly said as much, for example, with the judge Gideon. Gideon was in a war with the Philistines. God told Gideon to send away practically all his troops. God wanted to make it clear that he was the one who was giving them the victory. They did not achieve it for themselves.
We, of course, do not enjoy being humbled. We do not enjoy being made weak. It seems that we would like it if we just became stronger and stronger so that we could be our own God. But God, in his mercy, does not allow us to do that. It is by faith that we are righteous, and if we come to believe in ourselves we most certainly will not be believing in the Lord our God.
So we cannot look at the circumstances of our life to determine whether we are ones who are blessed. What would happen if we did that to Jacob and to Israel? Jacob was a limping man with a broken heart in his old age. He never got over what he supposed to be the death of his favorite son Joseph. He even died in a strange land, in Egypt, instead of in the land that God had given him. Judging by outward appearances it would appear that Jacob was cursed rather than blessed.
But Jacob was blessed. He had the covenant of the Lord his God. He had circumcision as an outward sign of that covenant. The Lord was his God, and he was God’s chosen and beloved. He knew that according to the Word of the Lord instead of by examining his circumstances in life. He believed in this promise of God and was accredited as righteous. God prevented him from false belief and despair. He did not believe in himself or in any other gods. God did not let him down.
We, as the descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob by faith, may learn from this. God has caused his promises to come to you. He has chosen you. He has given you the sign of baptism. He has given you the sign of the Lord’s Supper. He causes his Word and his promises to be spoken to you week in and week out. You are in no less of a favorable situation than Abraham, Isaac, or Jacob, and arguably you are in a better situation because you see the fullness of God’s love and mercy in Christ the crucified.
But what might be going on in your life? Does it appear that you are blessed or cursed? What things might happen in the future? Perhaps you might be afflicted with great sadness or pain or sickness. In the midst of these things we must remember that God is faithful to his promises. The most important thing in your life is that you keep your faith in the Lord your God, because there is no other way to be accredited with righteousness. Is it really surprising, then, that God might work things in certain ways in order to keep you in that faith? We are not God. God is.
So we must not attach ultimate importance to the way that we are feeling, whether good or bad, or the things that God gives us or takes away. Job, a man who was severely tested, said, “The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away. Blessed be the Name of the Lord.” The Lord our God is good. His mercy endures forever. Though your faith in that might be tested from time to time, do not despair. When the time is right, God will cheer you up just like he did to Jacob while he lay sleeping on that rock.
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You’ve probably heard it said that there are two tables or tablets of the Law. The Ten Commandments can be divided into two groups. There are commandments that have to do with God—that’s the first table of the Law. Then there are commandments that have to do with other people—that’s the second table of the Law. The first three commandments, “You shall have no other Gods,” “You shall not misuse the Name of the Lord your God,” and “Remember the Sabbath day by keeping it holy,” have to do with God. The last seven commandments have to do with your neighbor. “Honor your father and your mother.” “You shall not murder.” “You shall not commit adultery.” “You shall not steal.” “You shall not give false testimony against your neighbor.” And, “You shall not covet.”
When it comes to how well people understand the commandments, there is a big difference between the first table of the Law and the second table of the Law. People well understand that a person should not murder or steal. Our government has strict laws on the books about these things. Anybody who is found guilty of murdering or stealing is severely punished. This earthly punishment does quite a bit in instructing us about what is right or wrong.
Most people also know that committing adultery is wrong, but this isn’t nearly so clear as the wrongness of murdering or stealing. Our government’s laws against adultery, divorce, and other sexual perversions have been so relaxed that people might think that there’s nothing wrong with any of these things. However, the damage that these sins can do to the victim whom we can see and know will still make most people understand that there is something wrong with it.
That seems to be a key part to whether we understand how something is wrong or not. If we can see the damage that it causes it is easier for us to understand. Coveting, for example, doesn’t seem to be too big of a deal to most people. It doesn’t seem to harm others that I am envious of them—so long as I don’t act on that envy. When someone is murdered, on the other hand, the hands are red, there is a mess to clean up, and people mourn the destruction of life.
So perhaps you can see why people are much less sensitive to the seriousness of the first three commandments versus those commandments that have to do with our neighbor. Our government is practically built on the principle that no laws should be made about faith in God, worship, or religious instruction. This gives a very strong impression to people that a person’s relationship with God is totally optional and a mere matter of personal preference. This may not have been our forefather’s intent, but it has certainly been the result. The government gets involved in the important matters of life. Since the government does not get involved in our relationship with God, it is inevitable that people will think that religion is unimportant. Whether a person believes, prays, or hears God’s Word is seen as though it is hardly more than a hobby. Some people like to pray. Other people like to play tennis. Who cares?
It is also the case that people have a hard time seeing the harm their breaking of the commandments against God might have. Where’s the blood? Where’s the destruction of property? Where are the tears of the victim? There aren’t any. It’s a victimless crime, seemingly. It doesn’t appear to make any difference whether a person believes in God or not, whether God is prayed to or not, whether a person gladly hears and learns his Word or not.
So if we, like Jesus in our Gospel reading, were asked, “Which is the greatest commandment of the Law?” we would almost certainly respond, “Murder. Definitely murder.” After all, that is what we have been taught. Who receives the longest prison sentences? The harm that murder causes to our society is such that punishment should be severe. Since there are no punishments for the commandments about God, they must be unimportant.
Of course, as you know, Jesus answers the question of which is the greatest commandment quite differently than we might: “The first and greatest commandment is that we love God with all our heart, with all our soul, and with all our mind.” Maybe Jesus is a champion of lost causes. Maybe he likes to cheer for the underdog when it comes to the ranking of commandments. But, of course, I’m joking. Jesus choosing this commandment is not a mere whim or personal preference. He is completely serious and has good reasons for saying what he did.
To believe in God is to raise our eyes beyond the horizon of this present life. This is something that makes us different from other animals. We were created in God’s image. We have been given an ability to understand God’s Word. In the garden Adam and Eve understood when he said, “In the day that you sin, you will surely die.” We can know that we will die. We can at least have some kind of intuition that we might be responsible to a Creator for the way that we have lived our lives. Animals, on the other hand, have their sights fixed on this present life and cannot look beyond it. Cow, pigs, cats, and dogs are concerned with food and shelter. So long as they have these, so long as they are comfortable for the moment, they are more or less content.
Human beings can live that way too. Their sights can be set only on the things of this world. In fact, that is what we’ve been talking about today. People cannot see the importance of the commandments that have to do with God if all that they are concerned about is having a comfortable life. Work, school, extra-curricular activities, vacation—if any of these things come into conflict with worship or religious instruction they will always pick the one over the other. It is as Jesus says, “No servant can serve two masters.” One or the other is always going to be picked, always going to be preferred. And if life is simply a matter of this world, then God and his commandments are always going to take the back seat.
Now you should not misunderstand me here. I’m not trying to introduce God to you as some kind of victim so that you no longer regard sinning against the first three commandments as a victimless crime. I’m not trying to make you feel sorry for God so that out of the goodness of your heart you’ll pray or come to church. That would make you an equal with God, or even his superior—as though he is eagerly awaiting to receive scraps of your attention. God’s not like that. He doesn’t mope or weep over people despising him. Those who despise him are simply not worthy of him.
I’ve always been struck by the severity of Jesus’s words to this effect, even when I was a child. Jesus says in Matthew chapter 10: “Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me, and whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. Whoever does not take up his cross and follow me is not worthy of me. Whoever finds his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.”
Good fathers and mothers and good sons and daughters are probably the best things that this life has to offer us. If you have been blessed with such things, then you know that you can’t help but love them ever so deeply. But if these are the highest and best things in your life, then you already have your god. The truth is that there is another, higher, better God than these. He is the source of all good things. He richly and daily provides you all that you need to support this body and life. Furthermore, he has redeemed you with the holy precious blood and innocent suffering and death of his beloved Son. He has given you the spiritual gifts through which your sins are forgiven and you may live happily with God in all his holiness, righteousness, and glory.
If you love the good things of this life, then you should love, thank, and praise God even more, for those good things did not appear by random chance. They are given by God. Plus you should raise your eyes above the horizon of this present world. This world and this life are not everything. In fact this life is a veil of tears, despite all that is good about it. There is altogether too much sadness, boredom, meanness, pain, and death. Life wasn’t supposed to be this way. Our love and our forefather’s love of darkness and disobedience to God is what brought it about.
God certainly could have consigned us all to the ash-heap. He’s done that before with his fearsome wrath—such as with the flood or Sodom and Gomorrah. But instead he planned for your salvation from before the foundation of the world. He decided to send his eternally begotten Son to redeem you by dying in your place the eternal death that you deserve. Thus, beyond this life, there is a purified and holy life, an inheritance from God, that is laid up for you.
Must we not, then, agree with our catechism when it says, “For all this it is my duty to thank and praise, serve and obey God”? Must we not agree with Jesus when he says that the first and greatest commandment is that we love the Lord our God with all our heart, with all our soul, and with all our mind? There is no greater ambition that we could set for ourselves than that. People have all kinds of ambitions for life. They want to go to the moon, do this, that, and the other thing. They want to be the greatest. All these ambitions pale in comparison to the ambition of loving God.
God does not give his commandments because he is such a drag and a stick in the mud. He isn’t trying to make us miserable with his commandments. His commandments promote and protect life for all who keep them. Thus the first table of the Law is given for our good. Those who keep these commandments about our relationship with God will find that they will not be disappointed.
And Jesus says there is another commandment besides this first and greatest commandment. He says the second is like it: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” You who are children of your heavenly Father are to become like chips off the old block. John says in his epistle: “Dear friends, let us love one another, because love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. The one who does not love has not known God, because God is love.”
God is unbelievably generous with his love. He causes his rain to fall on the just and on the unjust. He opens his hand and satisfies the desires of every living thing, regardless of whether they thank and praise, serve and obey him. You have been baptized. You have become a child of God. Thus you should strive to become like our Father who is in heaven.
Here we have another wonderful ambition to go alongside of the one that I already mentioned. There is no higher ambition than that we should love the Lord our God with all our heart, with all our soul, and with all our mind. So also there is no higher ambition than that we should do good to our neighbor. We should forgive those who trespass against us. We should be kind and friendly to all those whom God puts in our path.
This is especially the case with those people we easily overlook—the people within our own household. We get tired of the people we live with. They annoy us. They don’t notice the nice things we do. They don’t do anything nice for us. (So we stupidly think.) These are the kinds of poisonous thoughts we might have. Banish them back to hell from whence they came. Regardless of how the people in your household treat you, make it your ambition to be helpful, kind, patient, forgiving, and so on towards them. Try to be a chip off the old block. Be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect.
There is no more practical advice that a person could ask for than what Jesus points us towards in his answers about the Law. People have all kinds of advice for how to live life. They should do this, that, and the other thing. They should have this job, this sport, this diet. All that stuff is supposed to make you happy. The deepest happiness comes with the gift of the Holy Spirit who gives us a good conscience for Jesus’s sake, and begins to make us love God and love one another. Instead of our evil, selfish heart, God gives us a new heart that loves.
Let me sum up today with the words from the close of the commandments in our catechism: God threatens to punish all who break these Ten Commandments. Therefore we should fear his wrath and not do anything against them. But he promises grace and every blessing to all who keep these commandments. Therefore we should also love and trust in him and gladly do what he commands.
Audio recording
Sermon manuscript:
Let me tell you something strange: On the one hand, nobody likes being corrected. On the other hand, everybody likes correcting others. It’s like there’s a one way street. All correction is to issue forth from us unto others. We resent it when any correction might come from others upon us.
Jesus once asked, “Why do you focus on the speck that is in your brother’s eye, but do not consider the beam that is in your own eye? How will you tell your brother, ‘Let me remove the speck from your eye,’ when, in fact, you have a beam in your own eye? Hypocrite! First remove the beam from your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye.”
Try to imagine what that might look like. Whenever the person moves his head, this big beam or log is swinging around. Regardless of that log, all the correcting is a one way street. Wherever that beam happens to swing is where that critical eye will notice something wrong. Everybody else is subpar. You alone are right. It must get lonely as you sit atop that mountain of righteousness, all by yourself.
So how might we fix this? Certainly something must be said for Jesus’s advice: “Judge not, lest you be judged.” Stop judging. Stop correcting others. Just for the sake of outward peace and harmony it is often good to hold your tongue. There is a common false belief that judging and censuring and condemning is the sign of a great intellect or a vigorous prophetic spirit.
Thus, particularly in the church, it is easy to find people who are never satisfied with anything that is not their own. Martin Luther called these people “sour-faced saints.” Their faces always looked as though they had been sucking on lemons. Because they were always so sour about everybody else’s supposed misdeeds, they thought that they were very saintly.
Unfortunately for them, judging is not named as one of the fruits of the Holy Spirit. The whole tone and tenor of that list of the fruit of the Spirit goes against these sour-faced saints. “The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control.” There is an openness in this list. We are to be open to others. If we meet others with intending to shoot them down, we always need to have our pistol at the ready. Be ready to shoot, lest the other person get their shot off first. Such a person is closed rather than open—always on the defensive, always ready to strike back. They do not want to be corrected, so they always have their attacks ready to put a stop to being corrected before it even starts.
This way of protecting one’s self, of closing down, of shutting one’s self off from others, is a natural response. Here we see that what is “natural” is not what is godly. It is natural to shut down and protect yourself, but that isn’t godly. There are a lot of things that are “natural” but nevertheless ungodly. Lust is natural. Anger is natural. Greed is natural. Loving your friends and hating your enemies is natural. Yet Jesus says, “Love your enemies, and do good to those who persecute you.” Loving those who want to hurt you is impossible for our flesh, which is always looking out for numero uno. It is that same looking out for numero uno that shuts people off from others, guns drawn, finger on the trigger.
The alternative is an openness that is manifested in patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. But with this openness, honesty, laying your heart out there, there is the possibility of getting hurt.
Let me try to explain. Perhaps you can see this most easily with children, for they have not yet become so guarded and jaded. Suppose there’s a child who likes to play with a toy that his peers might think is for younger kids. The child doesn’t know there’s anything wrong with playing with that toy. But one of the other kids (and there are always plenty of these around) makes fun of that kid. And the other kids (and there are always plenty of these around too) can’t stop laughing at the gullible child. That kind of suffering makes a kid retreat within himself. Blessed is that child (and adults know this is true) who can resist this bullying and can continue to express his love openly. But this is rare, because we don’t like to suffer. The easiest way to make the suffering stop for that kid is to shut down.
Something we should learn as Christians is that suffering is not the worst thing. We don’t have to avoid suffering at all costs. If we have decided that we are going to avoid suffering at all costs, then we are going to retreat to our mental fortresses, ready to shoot at anything that moves. Being open makes a person vulnerable to other’s attacks.
It seems like being willing to suffer is a terrible idea. And yet this is what our Lord Jesus did by going to the cross. He most certainly did not need to go to the cross. There was no law that said he had to suffer so severely. His friend, Peter, thought it was a terrible idea for him to go about the Christ in that way. But Peter was wrong. What Jesus did was good. So we, too, should be open and vulnerable, and not be afraid of suffering.
This means that we should also be open to being corrected. Remember how I started today. Nobody likes being corrected. We only want to correct others. There’s a good reason why we don’t like to be corrected. It’s because it hurts to be corrected. We don’t want to suffer, and so we might retreat into some fortress, guns drawn, and refuse to be corrected in any way. Here’s the thing, though: Sometimes we need to be corrected. That’s an understatement. We often need to be corrected.
This is something that sets Christians apart from others. By nature everybody hates to be corrected, but those who are converted to faith in Christ eventually become grateful for being corrected. Wise King Solomon says in our Old Testament reading: “To ears that listen, a wise person’s correction is like a gold ring or like jewelry made of pure gold.” A wise person corrects. The person listens and is corrected. That correction is like a gold ring or jewelry made of pure gold. The reason why we like gold rings and jewelry is because we like to look at them. We find them beautiful. The one who is converted to faith in Christ is thankful that they have been turned away from the broad, easy road that leads to destruction.
Blessed is the person who hears a hard word, who takes it to heart, and is humbled by it. There is pain and suffering that goes along with this, but it is a good kind of suffering. It is a suffering that is healthy. It’s like when a doctor cleans out an infected wound. It might hurt like the dickens to have the doctor poking around in there, cleaning out the filth, packing it with gauze. It hurts, but it is good. So it is, also, with the sinner who is brought to repentance. It hurts, but being corrected is a good thing.
Sometimes people turn Jesus’s statement, “Judge not, lest you be judged,” into an absolute principle. They take it to mean that nobody should ever be corrected. That is incorrect. It is obviously incorrect. Jesus judges and corrects a lot. In our Gospel reading you see him correcting others. In fact, it is obvious that the whole situation is quite tense and awkward.
Jesus asks them, “Is it lawful to heal on the Sabbath?” Silence. Nobody wants to stick their neck out. Nobody wants to be corrected. Jesus heals the man suffering from edema. Then he asks them another question: “Which of you, if your son or an ox would fall into a well on a Sabbath day, would not immediately pull him out?” Silence. The answer is obvious, but they are probably angry with Jesus for making them feel embarrassed. And when Jesus sees how they are jockeying for the best seats, engaged in that ridiculous contest for who is the most popular, Jesus tells them that they should take the lowest seat. “Everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, and whoever humbles himself will be exalted.”
Being corrected like this might have made their ears burn and their cheeks bright red. Ouch. So embarrassing! But if only they could embrace what Jesus has told them as though it were a gold ring, or some jewelry made from pure gold! Jesus is a good doctor. He is working to heal them. The pain involved is for their good.
Jesus is also talking about correcting others with that parable about the man who has a beam in his eye. It is not as though Jesus is forbidding any and every correction in that parable. After all, he himself says, “First remove the beam that is in your own eye. Then you will be able to see clearly to take the speck out of your neighbor’s eye.” The speck’s no good. It’s good to get that out of there. But imagine the bumbling and fumbling that would take place if your eye doctor had a beam swinging around the examination room every time he turned his head! Nothing good is going to come from that.
Whether it is right to judge others or not depends on the heart of the one who is doing it. If the heart is good, then the judgement is going to be good. If the heart is evil, then the judgement is probably going to be self-seeking. Correcting others with the motive of helping them can be one of the most loving things a person can do. It is very loving because often correcting others is not appreciated (to say the least). Trying to correct someone might get you a whole lot of abuse and scorn in return. They might unload that machine gun of theirs on you in return.
But not all correcting of others is done this way. Sometimes people correct others to show the world how wonderfully pious they are, what a fine grasp of science they might have, or how especially suited they are to judge. It’s a way of dominating over others. It feels good to dominate. Dominating over others makes a person think that he is better than others. When God’s Law is used for this activity it is a misuse of holy things for vain and idolatrous purposes.
Some very evil so-called Christians like to see others squirm in the pain they can cause with their judgements. This would be like a doctor who is interested in torturing and killing his patients rather than healing them. That would be a very evil doctor. This is very thing that the devil likes best. In a way, he is very good at judging. He knows just where to hit. His goal is to have people be in despair and remain in despair. He wants them to hate themselves. If possible, he’d like it if people would murder themselves. Often the judgments that he throws around are true, but he doesn’t want anyone to move on from these truths to the higher truths of God’s mercy. He wants them to remain in their misery. He does not want them to have a good conscience.
All genuine, Christian correction is going to have the goal of giving the sinner a good conscience. When a sinner has been humbled, the sinner must be urged to embrace Christ’s redemption and salvation. It is not enough to just clean out the wound with all the pain that goes along with that. Salve must be applied. Medicine must be given. And that medicine is God’s full and free pardon and acceptance of the sinner for the sake of Jesus. To the one who has been humbled, God himself says, “Come up higher, my friend. Sit next to me.” That is a wonderful thing.
Let me sum up what we’ve talked about today. First, it is good to be open, even though being open makes you vulnerable to being hurt. Second, it is good to be corrected, even though being corrected causes pain and suffering. Being corrected is healthy and leads to life. Refusing correction will bring about gangrene and death. Third, it is important that when we correct others we do it for their good, and not for our own perverse pleasure. We must be like a good doctor who wants the patient to do well. Correcting and judging others for one’s own benefit is evil. May we all be corrected by Jesus, the good physician.