Lent 4, 2024: Numbers 21, Ephesians 2, John 3

How we Lutherans love this statement today from the letter to the Ephesians: For by grace you have been saved through faith; and this is not your own doing, it is the gift of God -- not because of works, lest any man should boast. Perhaps, however, we don’t emphasize as much what follows organically and immediately: For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them. And truth be told, I don’t think we hear much at all anymore about what precedes and provides the background for the wonderful statement about grace: You were dead through the trespasses and sins in which you once walked, following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience.  Among these we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, following the desires of body and mind, and so we were by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind. Whoa! What a downer! Who wants to hear that?

We could say the same about our other two equally unsettling texts this morning. We have heard our much loved John 3:16, For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life. But we have also heard that men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil. For every one who does evil hates the light, and does not come to the light, lest his deeds should be exposed. And what about the murmuring of the children of Israel complaining of hardships on their path to freedom: And the people spoke against God and against Moses, "Why have you brought us up out of Egypt to die in the wilderness? For there is no food and no water, and we loathe this worthless food." What a strange tension throughout these texts! It’s almost as if there is a battle going on within our texts between the attractive statements about divine self-giving love which saves by unconditional grace providing a source of healing on the one hand, and on the other hand, dark diagnoses of the human condition, loving darkness rather than light, being spiritually dead, by nature children of wrath, ever and again backsliding from the divine call to freedom.

But what we are presented with in our Scriptures today is not just a problem of cognitive dissonance, of mental confusion about apparently contradictory statements. The tension is not merely between contradictory ideas but contradictory realities Which is it? The God loves unconditionally? Or the God who hates with holy hate the evil that hates the light to prefer the darkness as cover for its evil deeds? If we say, as we should, that the truth is both/and and not either/or, we are saying that the problem is not cognitive dissonance about contradictory theological ideas but rather the troubling two-sided truth about us and about God on which we focus throughout the season of Lent.

Let me put it this way, God’s unconditional grace is for the sinner – only the sinner. God’s surpassing love is for the dying – only the dying. God’s liberating and redeeming power is for the prisoner – only the prisoner. That little word “only” drives home the point of all three of our texts today. We receive in reality the unconditional grace, the surpassing love, the liberating power of the God of the gospel only as we truly know ourselves as those in such need. True knowledge of God and true knowledge of self are correlative, they go together hand in glove. Knowing in truth our need and God’s unimagined supply is exactly what we devote ourselves to in this season of Lent.

Actually, just such self-knowledge is what Martin Luther meant by faith when he lifted up the doctrine of justification by faith as the chief doctrine of Christianity. In faith I say something about myself and about God. I say in faith that I am the sinner of God’s forgiving, the sheep of his gathering flock, the prisoner of his liberating, the dying of his eternal embrace. Moreover, I say that just this true knowledge of self and of God in faith is not my own doing of which I might boast, but the astonishing gift of God bringing me out of the darkness of self-deception into the light of God’s penetrating scrutiny from which no one can hide. In this way faith says the truth both about God and about ourselves.

This difficult and double-sided truth matters immensely. If we try to avoid the real tension, not just a mental confusion, but the real tension of this inseparable combination of judgment and grace which justifies only the ungodly and only by faith, our Christianity becomes saccharine, Pollyanna-ish, untrue to real life, a self-serving religious fiction, an ecclesiastical ideology, a bromide marketed in the religion business.

In our real lives in this troubled world we participate in powerful systems of malice and injustice. We take comfort in the propaganda that slanders our enemies and flatters our own self-righteousness. We are pleased when our enemies fail and distressed when our partisans lose. We are complicit and cannot extract ourselves from the cycle of human violence, both verbal and physical. That is our dark human reality. Every time I switch on the lights or turn on the computer, I use the electricity created by the burning of fossil fuels that is cooking the planet. Every time I rejoice in my portfolio rising in value, I take profit from corporate powers that monopolize and exploit. Every time I lift myself from depression by going on a spending spree, I fail to feed the hungry and cloth the naked. Every time I passively abide the bullying, the shaming, the pervasive cruelty of daily life, I submit again and again to the domination of anti-divine powers. Shall I go on? Elsewhere St. Paul asks, why do we desire our own subjugation? We must know this about ourselves. Not superficially, as if I could pass a checklist like the 10 Commandments which to my knowledge I have not transgressed today, or this past week, Gee, for quite a while. But in reality, I have not loved the Lord my God with my whole heart nor my neighbor as myself. I have omitted much good that I could and should have done. In reality, I am in bondage to sin and cannot free myself. Consequently in this self-awareness of profound life-changing repentance, I can never act with fanatical zealotry as if I were some kind of savior. Rather, in a fitting even dignified humility I know that I must be saved in the same way as all the others, including my opponents, need to be saved.

True, and crucially true. For just so our three texts today tell us about the act of power which is the grace of God not limited or restricted or conditioned by this vert truth about ourselves. They tell about the surpassing love of God for the very world in darkness which flees God and prefers to remain in darkness because its deeds are evil. The God who works costly redemption by lifting up his own beloved Son on the imperial gibbet of Rome for our healing gaze. Here in the midst of our human darkness the event of surpassing divine love takes place. Consequently, you he made alive, when God, who is rich in mercy, out of the great love with which he loved us raised us up with him, and made us sit with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, that in the coming ages he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus. Yes, you, you he made alive, just you who were dead to God, you whose gaze has been shifted from your complicity in the world sinfulness to the righteousness of another who has lived and died for you in our midst. As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of man be lifted up.

In faith knowing that we are the children of Israel smitten with the consequences of our own deep complicity in the darkness of the world, turning back from the hard path to freedom, rebelling against the liberating intention of our maker and Redeemer, we nevertheless in the same faith look upon the saving cross so that whoever believes in him may have eternal life. So in our Lenten faith, we received wisdom and power to live in the tension of the Christian life, at the same time sinful and righteous, not superior to any other of our common humanity in whose complicity with evil we inevitably share, but boasting only of the cross of Christ in which we glory, for our salvation but also for the salvation of all those others, however deplorable they may be. For God sent the Son into the world, not to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through him. Just so, we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them. This is what it means to say that the light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it.

Lent 3, 2024: Exodus 20: 1-17; 1 Cor. 1: 18-25; John 2:3-22

Our Lenten journey continues, summoning us to draw near to the Lord who drew near to us once and for all on his path to Calvary. Today already we find him in Jerusalem, already in the Temple driving out beasts sold for sacrifice and the money-changers there. That is because today we find ourselves in the peculiar gospel of John. John is different. In Matthew, Mark and Luke, this story, traditionally called the cleansing of the Temple, comes at the end. But in John it comes at the beginning. In the others, it is last thing Jesus does which provokes the authorities to take action against him. In John, it is the first provocative thing Jesus does. What is going on here? It is as if John wanted to signal: this is what it is all about! This is what the whole story of Jesus is about.

It is, in other words, it’s all about worshipping God in spirit and in truth. It is not about a mountain top in Jerusalem or Samaria or Mecca or Rome or Wittenberg or anyplace else but about the community of disciples who abide in Jesus’ word, as children in truth sharing in his own true relation to God as his heavenly Father in the powerful love of the Holy Spirit. It is not about buildings made with hands, not about buying and selling the relationship to God; it is not about the religion business. It is about what Jesus did on the cross once for all people, therefore the free gift of new life in his name. As Paul tells today: Jews demand signs and Greeks seek wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. Let’s look and see!

            The Passover of the Jews was near… Passover, you recall, was the annual holy day commemorating the escape of the children of Israel from slavery in Egypt. To remember their salvation, once a year in the Spring Jews slaughtered a lamb for a feast, recalling that dreadful and awesome night long before, when the angel of death passed over those houses signed with the blood of the slaughtered lamb but slew the first born of the slave-masters in all the rest. Thus Jesus, like generations of Jews before him, went up to Jerusalem to worship this judging and liberating God of Israel, who casts down the mighty from their thrones but exalts them of low degree. But what does he find? What’s going on in the Temple?

Does he find a community gathered around the Word of the Lord, studying his liberating commandments that they might also be instruments of God’s righteousness in the world, setting free the oppressed? We have heard this morning the two tables of the divine law of love, spelled out concretely in the 10 Commandments of Moses, telling us how to love God above all and all God’s creatures in and under God. We need to hear this instruction and study it! Indeed, nothing would be more fitting in the season of Lent than to recite the 10 Commandments publically for self-examination along with the Catechism’s explanations of the meaning. Or are we otherwise like the temple that Jesus cleansed? Where the last thing occupying the people was such study of the Torah of God?

 In the temple Jesus found people selling cattle, sheep, and doves, and the money changers seated at their tables.  He found what, alas!, we so often we find in the history of humanity: the idolatrous, the blasphemous religion business, buying and selling the relationship to God. Those traveling into town from afar to worship could hardly bring along animals for sacrifice, you see, so a lucrative tourism industry developed. It was rigged. They had to change their foreign currency for special coins valid only on the precincts of the Temple. Thus the money-changers. What a racket!

Making a whip of cords, he drove all of them out of the temple, both the sheep and the cattle.  The whip is meant for the animals, to drive them out. Nonetheless we have no picture here of a mamby-pamby, teddy bear Jesus. He is angry. He takes righteous action. He also poured out the coins of the money changers and overturned their tables. He told those who were selling the doves, "Take these things out of here!” The opposite of love, friends, is not anger, you see, but apathy which does not care. Anger can be righteous. Anger can be love opposing what is against love. “Stop making my Father's house a marketplace!" Here is clue to his righteous anger.

It is love for his Father, the very God of Israel, love for this One who is truly God creator of all, thus love for his Father’s house as a house of prayer for all people, love for all people who need to know the free grace of God and thus to be set free from the worst of all illusions, the very illusion cultivated by the religion business: that God can be manipulated like magic with religious works, animal sacrifices, silver and gold. That is why his disciples remembered that it was written, "Zeal for your house will consume me." The zeal of liberating love drives Jesus into action.

Naturally enough, the people of Jerusalem whose livelihood was affected by the dramatic protest action of the virtually unknown prophet from backwoods Galilee were not impressed. The buying and selling had been business as usual for centuries. It was time honored tradition. It was a system that met the needs of locals for labor and out of towners for services. It was, in short, good business. So they asked the angry prophet: "What sign can you show us for doing this?" They are asking for a divine confirmation of the claim hidden in Jesus’ action, a claim that in all the hub-bub of cattle stampeding and doves flying and sheep baying and coins flying we might have overlooked. Jesus referred to the temple as his Father’s house. It is as a true Son coming into what is rightfully his inheritance, zealous for his own Father’s name and reputation, that Jesus has cleansed the temple. That is what they want to know about. By what right, with what authority, man, what are your credentials?

The answer of Jesus gives contains one of those double meanings we find so often in the Gospel of John. Jesus answered them, "Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up." Later, at his trial on the night the Jewish court called the Sanhedrin met to condemn Jesus to death as a blasphemer, this statement was thrown up in Jesus’ face. Not knowing who Jesus really is, this Son of the Father, not understanding his holy passion, the righteous zeal, the Torah-instructed love which drives him, how else can they take his words? They take them as a threat that he, who had attacked the business in religion going on in the Temple, would now go on to tear down the Temple building to rebuild it according to his own desires. So they object literalistically. "This temple has been under construction for forty-six years, and will you raise it up in three days?"

Such are the double-meanings which abound in the gospel of John. Jesus says something spiritually and he is misunderstood literally. They have asked for his right, his authority, his credentials to act in his Father’s name as a true Son. He answered "Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up." But he was not speaking of their building made with hands under construction since the time of King Herod the Great 46 years ago. He was speaking of the temple of his body which they would destroy on the cross and bury in the grave, hoping thusly to obliterate. He was speaking of the temple of his body, that is even more profoundly, the church, the community of his disciples, of all who believed in him after his resurrection. And so he is talking about you and me who in his name worship the Father in Spirit and in truth.

Dear friends, we are not to be in the religion business, buying and selling the most precious thing of all: the relationship with God. We are not to market it like a commodity, advertise it like a good deal, fleece the gullible, bargain with the skeptical, hawk and cajole and in general propagandize, proselytize, in order to profiteer. Martin Luther, after whom our tradition of Christianity takes its name, was filled with Jesus’ own holy zeal for his Father’s name and reputation in the world when he saw the poor throwing away their money on worthless scraps of paper superstitiously promising relief for loved ones burning in purgatory. If the church really has such power, he demanded in a single question which overturned all these new moneychangers, why in the name of love don’t we just give the indulgences away? Our Father’s house is to be a house of prayer for all people!

Dear friends, we are in the gospel business of just giving it away because Jesus gave it all away once and for all in his sacrifice at the cross. We are in the gospel business of proclaiming the free grace of God  which cannot be bought or sold but only feared, loved and trusted above all things. We are in the gospel business of building up a caring community of disciples, a temple of the Holy Spirit, the body of Christ gathered not around our would-be sacrifices to God as if to buy his favor or somehow bribe him, but around this holy meal of the Eucharist, commemorating his sacrifice once and for all to win us back to his Father’s grace and favor. We are in the gospel business that others might see truly good works, works of holy zeal and true love, and so give glory to our Father in heaven.

For the glory of our God is to give. God so loved the world, as we will hear from this gospel of John next Sunday in our Lenten journey, God so loved the world that he gave his only Son. His house therefore is to be a house of prayer for all people, where this gift is given and received, from whence the praise of God arises in hearts sincere and true. Let this be our Lenten resolve: that the holy zeal of Jesus take hold of us and put us to work, cleansing the Temple which is you and me and our life together in Christ, making it a house fit to sing the praises of God’s free grace. The Lord grant it to us here. Amen.

Lent 2, 2024: Mark 8, Rom 4, Gen 17

            Our Lenten journey continues, the Scriptures asking us to draw near to the Lord who drew near to us, once and for all. Today Jesus tells the disciples for the first time that the Son of Man must undergo great suffering, and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again. Peter does not like that. He does not think that is any way for a Messiah to be thinking. He rebukes Jesus as if the devil had gotten hold of him. But Jesus shoots right back: Get behind me, Satan! For you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things. Incomprehensible as Jesus’s path of suffering is to Peter, it is the path God has in mind for Jesus. And not only for Jesus, but also for all who follow him: Those who want to become my follower, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.

Now a perplexity arises. Why then would anyone ever want to – follow Jesus? What’s the deal? Isn’t Christianity supposed to be a good deal – believe a few things, live a good life and go to heaven when you die? What’s going on here? Even worse, Jesus continues.  For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it.  Whoa! That sound like what a poker player calls upping the ante. Or an investment advisor warning that you’re pricing yourself right out of the market! Not only is this beginning to sound like a real dealbreaker – believe in Jesus and you get to suffer too—now the stakes have been raised to eternal life and death. For what will it profit to gain the whole world and forfeit life? Indeed, what can one give in return for life? Pie in the sky in the sweet bye and bye? So it may seem: Jesus is talking about true life, the life of the resurrection, life with God in his coming kingdom, the pearl of great price, the one thing needful. Are you willing then to give up everything else here and now, to let go of present goods in hand for the sake of an unseen future in someone else’s power? Bad deal, bad odds. Not a few have on reflection, said: Forget it!

            Indeed so it seems to any one of us when we, like Peter, are setting our mind not on divine things but on human things. Paul calls it the stumbling block of the cross, the foolishness of what we preach: Christ crucified. To the usual human mentality based on law and common sense, not grace and faith, the gospel of Christ crucified can only sound like a bad deal with bad odds. But that is just the point. To come to faith, our mentality has to be changed – to a mind set not on human but on divine things. Paul explains this change in mentality by reminding the Romans of father Abraham: For the promise that Abraham would inherit the world did not come to him or to his descendants through the law but through the righteousness of faith. If law, faith is null and the promise is void. See what a total contrast Paul makes here? It is a basic alternative between two ways of thinking and living: the mentality of law, performance, reward or punishment or the mentality of grace, promise and faith. The contrast is at root very simple: the law gives us what we deserve on the basis of works we have done, visible for all to see, something to boast about it. But the promise gives us what we do not deserve on the basis of God’s promise of what he will do, not visible until he fulfills his promise, thus something present only in faith which through the Holy Spirit grew strong, Paul says, as Abraham gives glory to God, being fully convinced that God was able to do what he had promised -- setting his mind not on human but divine things.

            But how are we to get this new mentality? Aren’t we all just like Peter who takes offense at the counterintuitive wisdom of God? Paul tells us that Abraham, at least, did not weaken in faith when he considered his own body, which was already as good as dead (for he was about a hundred years old), or when he considered the barrenness of Sarah's womb. Where does his new mentality come from? How did Abraham get that faith, Paul calls it, hoping against hope meaning that it was not worldly optimism based on a rational calculation that things will work out well, but hope in God, who gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist. Where does this conviction come from, that beyond all my own possibilities, beyond all possibilities in the world that I can see or imagine, with God nothing is impossible, with God new possibilities are given, with God not even death ends the story, with God new worlds come into being???

            Friends such faith with its new way of thinking is not a human work. Faith is not a human work at all. That would make faith into life under the law all over again, a human act which is my part of a bargain with God. Then faith would be focused on me all over again. Do I waver, do I doubt, do I want it purely, earnestly, sufficiently? Do I pray enough, suffer enough, deny myself enough, worry enough? Then faith would be something I could boast about, and the gift of God would become the reward I merit. No, no, no. We get this new mind of repentance and faith in hope against hope as God the Holy Spirit works out the cross and resurrection of Jesus in our lives, putting that legalistic old Adam to death and raising up in his place the new person in Christ, with the new mind full of faith, hope and love. Talk about a change in mentality!

            How did Abraham get that faith? The LORD appeared to Abram, and said to him, "I am God Almighty; walk before me, and be blameless. And I will make my covenant between me and you…” The Word of God comes and lays claim on Abraham. How does Paul get that faith? The gospel Word of God came to him on the road to Damascus and laid its claim on him telling of Jesus who was handed over to death for our trespasses and was raised for our justification. The Word of God is spoken and elicits faith, true faith which puts the focus on the Lord, no longer own ourselves, so that we being changed give God the glory for all his rich mercy in Christ, trusting him to bring his promises to pass, taking up the cross to follow Jesus through the cross to the promised life of the resurrection.

The Holy Spirit works repentance and bestows faith by the preaching of Christ crucified! When we hear indeed that out of unfathomable love for us innocent, holy Jesus, setting his mind on divine things, walked the way alone to death for our trespasses; when we hear how God the Father, seeing that total love of Jesus to the bitter end for us as his very own, raised him for our justification, the human mind is turned upside down and inside out and all; its rational calculations of reward and punishment based on what is visibly performed fall to pieces. For Almighty God in reckless, extravagant grace hides all his glory under suffering and shame to reach us, trapped as we are in our petty, legalistic mentalities, full of envy, greed, strife, jealousy, contempt, pride. For the law brings wrath.  But astonishing grace brings the end of that old mentality when it tells of the humble Son of God who is given into the hands, yet also for the sake, of the proud creature and just so delivers even us to the clean, fresh air of faith.

            Though we stumble on the way of faith, though we be not heroes of faith like never wavering Abraham, though we often wander, still by baptism we share Abraham’s faith, which "was reckoned to him as righteousness." So Paul quickly adds that the same righteousness will be reckoned to us who believe in him who raised Jesus our Lord from the dead. For in either case it is really all about God who makes all things new. Bad deal? Yes, for that old Adam faithless, hopeless, loveless it is the worst of deals! It’s a death sentence!  Bad odds? No, not for the new person in Christ, full of faith, hope and love who has experienced a downpayment of that promised future spiritually in dying at the hands of the Holy Spirit and rising with Christ. In any case, you can’t have a resurrection without first a death.

That’s what our Lenten season of self-examination is about: not giving up candy or something trivial like that, but giving up that old person figured in Peter who rebuked the Lord, instead taking up our own cross – this means whatever trouble, adversity, handicap, burden laid on you in life, like Abraham’s old body or Sarah’s barren womb, whatever it is that afflicts you—taking up the cross in active faith, as new people who do not yet see but nevertheless trust, as new people who do not lash out but rather turn out-ward to others in need to form the caring community of Christ’s people, as new people who hold one another up in life difficulties and hold out in hope against hope for a new world in which all affliction, oppression and violence shall cease, as new people with new minds formed by grace, promise and faith, as new people who give God all the glory for all his rich mercy in Christ. A bad deal? The best of news!

Lent 1, 2024: Genesis 9, 1 Peter 3, Mark 1

Our Lenten journey to Jerusalem in the footsteps of the Lord has now begun. Not literally but spiritually. You would have to get into some science fiction time machine and fly back to the dusty highways and byways of Galilee to follow Jesus literally. Thankfully that’s not necessary. Indeed, it would not help us in any way. Rather, for our true good, we need to follow Jesus right here and now, every day in every way. And we get to do that because the Holy Spirit, the same Holy Spirit who descended on Jesus in the figure of the dove at his baptism and then drove him into the wilderness to do battle with Satan; the same Spirit who after John was arrested and removed from the scene brought Jesus back from the wilderness into the towns and villages of workaday Galilee, there to proclaim that the time of waiting was over, that God the King was on the march and drawing near to end the usurper’s dominion and set imprisoned people free; the very same Spirit who then prepared people for the coming of the one who is truly God by working in them an about-face in orientation, a change of heart and change of mind, turning away from pathetic resignation and complicity rather now to anticipate, yearn for, even take risks for the coming of the Lord – the very same Spirit calls you here and now by the gospel, enlightens and equips you with  divine gifts for following Jesus Christ into the liberation battle for the oppressed and groaning earth.

We should really call him the holying Spirit, the Spirit who holies people -- meaning that he makes them sick of sin and rather yearn for God, righteousness and life; the holying Spirit who makes followers trust in forgiveness by showing the glory of Jesus, the merciful friend of sinners. He is the holying Spirit, because just as he drove – did you notice the strong word? drove!—just as he drove Jesus into the wilderness to battle Satan, he drives you and me too, to battle, through many trials and tribulations at last  to arrive in the Father’s waiting arms of mercy. That is what it is to be made holy – to land forever in God’s arms never to be lost again, holy to God, precious to God.

And do you know what? As each follower of Jesus arrives at last forever into the arms of God the Father in the power of that same Spirit, they bring with them the cosmos. For each one of us is a microcosm of the whole cosmos. Joni Mitchell wrote these words, later to be sung by Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young: “We are stardust. We are golden. And we've got to get ourselves back to the garden.” This longing for the redemption of the earth, of the very matter which composes you and me, by which each one of us is a representative of the whole creation, a microcosm of the macro cosmos, would be the fulfillment of the covenant God made with Noah, symbolized by the rainbow: When the bow is in the clouds, I will look upon it and remember the everlasting covenant between God and every living creature of all flesh that is upon the earth. So we do not follow Jesus in the power of his Spirit just for me myself alone, but we follow Jesus in the power of the same Spirit as representatives of the entire oppressed creation. We follow on behalf of the inanimate creation and we follow for the sake of unbelieving humanity still lost in darkness under the dominion of the usurpers of the earth.

            Therefore, we don’t need a time machine if we have the Holy Spirit at work to make Jesus real to us by making us believers, to make us believers holy by leading into Jesus’ narrow path through the cross to the crown. We should carefully notice the two movements of the Holy Spirit and always bear in mind the sequence in which they happen. For what happens to Jesus at his baptism prefigures what happens also to us. Indeed, in so far as we are baptized into Christ, we are baptized, so to say, into his baptism so all that happened to him now also applies to us. The holying Spirit makes us holy in a two-step operation.

First: And just as Jesus was coming up out of the water, he saw the heavens torn apart and the Spirit descending like a dove on him. And a voice came from heaven, "You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased." See, before Jesus has done anything for God, here at the beginning of his ministry as Jesus is publicly indistinguishable from any of the multitude of penitents surrounding the River Jordan who had heeded John’s the Baptist’ urgent demand that they wash up as a sign of repentance – now the Spirit seizes the initiative, descending on Jesus as the voice of from above, tearing back the heavenly veil, announces love and good pleasure and favor in the this beloved Son. See, the first thing the Spirit does confirm the divine declaration of the favor and good pleasure of the heavenly Father which makes holy. Clearly, this communication of dine good pleasure comes not by virtue of anything Jesus has done, but, of God’s delight laying its precious claim on Jesus. This word of God the Father’s good pleasure is the basis of the public life Jesus now goes on to live as the Christ, the Spirit-anointed Messiah of God, just as it also is for us Christians baptized into him, we little Christs who follow Jesus. God’s favor is not some uncertain goal. God’s favor is the starting point of this new life, and so it remains valid every step along the way which Jesus now proceeds with we disciples in his train.

How important that is for you and me – this absolute priority and all sufficiency of God’s free grace lavished on us in the Holy Spirit pouring into our hearts the love of God! St Paul tells us in Romans 8 that just so we have not received a spirit of timidity to fall back into fear but a spirit of sonship, crying Abba, Father – how could it be otherwise? It is the very same Spirit, the holying Spirit of Jesus sent upon him once and for all at the beginning of his journey to Jerusalem, the same Spirit who makes us holy. If the word, “holy,” makes you nervous with joyless puritanical vibes, see that it means first of all precious, beloved, those in whom the God of grace delights, just because they are recipients of God’s unmerited favor. You are holy because you, no matter what you have been, are loved without measure.

Now, second. Notice then what happens next. And the Spirit immediately drove him out into the wilderness. He was in the wilderness forty days, tempted by Satan; and he was with the wild beasts; and the angels waited on him. Those whom God loves discover very quickly that there is an enemy of love whom the earlier I described as the usurper of the earth, this dreadful figure of the Satan. Those whom the holying Spirit makes holy by sheer grace of unmerited favor quickly find out that there is an unholy spirit, a spirit of jealousy, envy, greed, malice which hates all that God loves and works to destroy all that God creates. He is personified in Scripture as the Satan. His name in the Hebrew language means the Adversary, the Prosecutor, who attacks the creation from without in catastrophes of every sort, but attacks God’s people from within by questioning, by testing, by trying. Look, the Spirit does not leave Jesus waiting around for this to happen. Mark says the Spirit drove Jesus into direct and immediate confrontation. Mark does not spell out the temptations which we are familiar with from Matthew and Luke: the thrice repeated satanic test question, “If you are the Son of God…” as Jesus had heard at his baptism. Mark wants us to understand that the entire life of Jesus lived henceforth in grip of the holying Spirit is one long, uninterrupted, immediate confrontation with Satan, indeed, one in which Jesus seems finally to be defeated. Yes, that’s what I said: that’s how it looks in Mark. In the end, alone, betrayed, abandoned, denied, rejected, Satan wins when dying Jesus admits that he has been forsaken by God, that he was wrong and deluded to think himself God’s beloved Son whom his favor rested. Shocking, yes. But so it seems.

Truth be told, however that’s also how our Christian lives as would be followers of Jesus also seem to be under constant attack. What kind of Christian are you! Surely you are dreaming if you think God loves you or cares about you! Let me count your sins and spit them in your face, let me wake you in the night and make you sleepless with your doubts, you fool who dares to think the Holy Spirit has poured God’s love into a heart as foul as yours or there remains. Delight in you? God abandons you. Friends, this is the very voice of Satan who makes us doubt God’s word of grace and favor by accusing us of our sins and rubbing our faces in our unworthiness. And at no point do we feel more the great distance between holy Jesus on whom the holying Spirit came and dwelt and us poor Christians, so weak and wavering in our discipleship.

Yes, there is a difference. There is a reason why Jesus is the author and pioneer of our faith and we are only followers: 1 Peter today tells us that Christ also suffered for sins once for all, the righteous for the unrighteous. It only seemed that Satan had triumphed over Jesus when he perished as a sinner in the eyes of all the world, we know, for on the third day God vindicated Jesus’ awesome life act of obedient love for us unworthy; an act of astounding love that was hidden under that shameful death, but this way in order to bring us to God. It was the holying Spirit in fact who led Jesus into this depth of commitment to us and solidarity with us at the cross, the righteous with the unrighteous, in order to bring us to God. Peter goes so far as to tell us that the costly, holy love of Jesus for the unworthy indeed reaches right into the depths of hell, binding up the strong man, robbing Satan of his captives: He was put to death in the flesh, but made alive in the spirit, in which also he went and made a proclamation to the spirits in prison, who in former times did not obey. Nothing in all creation, not even Satan’s lair, can stop the victorious love of Christ. So Peter likewise tells us that in our baptism into Christ he now saves you-- not as a removal of dirt from the body, but as an appeal to God for a good conscience, through the resurrection of Jesus Christ, who has gone into heaven and is at the right hand of God, with angels, authorities, and powers made subject to him. Jesus is victorious Lord, our saving Lord. So when Satan assails with his doubts and fears and despairs, the Christian rebukes him with one mighty word: your quarrel is not with me but with my saving Lord Jesus Christ, who has won me a poor lost sinner and made me his own. I am worthy and holy because of him.  Begone. And I will follow Jesus, bringing my world with me, into the eternal arms of the heavenly Father, no matter what outrages you still perpetrate.

So back to work! For the holying Spirit wants to draw us, beloved by God’s free grace and favor, after Jesus into this world of hurt around us to heal the sick, pardon the guilty, gather the scattered. The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.

Transfiguration, 2024: 2 Kings 2, 2 Corinthians 4, Mark 9

The story of the Transfiguration is baffling in many respects. First of all, it seems like an Easter story, a revelation of the glory of the risen and victorious Lord. There is even a hint of this at the end, as the few, selected disciple-witnesses descend the mountain, Jesus commanding silence about what they have seen until he should rise from the dead. To boot, these uncomprehending disciples deliberate what that would mean. The disciples were in fact baffled by what they had seen.

So could we be baffled also. Isn’t the story totally out of order here? The vision of Jesus bathed in heavenly glory granted to Peter, James and John appears in the middle of his earthly journey; indeed, it comes at the critical turning point in it. Jesus has resolutely turned his face to go up to Jerusalem, there to be rejected, to suffer and die and be buried and at last raised again. What are we to make of this perplexing order of events?

Here’s a clue. The Transfiguration is observed by the church on the last Sunday of the Epiphany season. It concludes our remembrance of Jesus’ ministry of healing and forgiveness in Galilee, a world hurting with world of hurt, how he dwelt there to reveal God’s glory as the Great Physician of human body and soul. In the church’s year, the Transfiguration thus marks the transition from the action of Jesus as healer to his suffering as one afflicted, by torture and fatal wounds, yes, but also by betrayal, denial and abandonment; from his merciful words of forgiveness to his condemnation as blasphemer and rebel; from adulation to rejection, climaxing in the death of the holy One of God in our unholy midst hung upon the shameful cross. This passion of the Lord we call to mind in the season of Lent beginning on Ash Wednesday, three days hence. The Transfiguration thus marks this turning point in Jesus’ story. The mighty Son of God who like Joshua or David of old came as deliverer from the anti-divine powers of devil, death and sin ends up hanging forlorn, truly dying on a Roman stake, finally defeated, laid lifeless in a tomb. What a turn of events!

To understand this turn of events, we need to recall that Jesus’ mighty action as the One who heals in God’s name provoked opposition which questioned his authority. Why? The healthy have no need of a physician, he says. I have come to call sinners, not the righteous. And so he excludes the self-righteous who see no need of healing and despise mercy. He proclaims the nearness of God to the godless; he makes fellowship with lawless people before they ever change their ways; he embraces those filthy with contagious disease; he sovereignly overrules the very Law of God, not to mention the laws of nature, in order to show mercy to frail and needy humanity; he silences the shrieking devils but elicits the loud, unquenchable thanksgivings of those whom he has delivered from their cruel grip – who is this Jesus? Who in his every deed, with his every step, provokes the question: Where have you come from? By what authority do you do these things? Are you a true prophet or a pretender? Do you cast out devils by the prince of devils? Who are you, you stranger come into our midst? You man of grace, you man of mercy, you man of healing – what are you doing in this dog-eat-dog world of ours!?

In the Transfiguration story, the curtain draws back to show not my opinion about Jesus or yours or any other human’s, whether friend or foe. These great questions about Jesus are now being answered. Answered not by not by disciples, nor by evil spirits under assault, not even by Jesus himself. But on this mountain top, in an act of divine revelation, our eyes too are made with the disciples to focus on Jesus alone, singled out from Moses and Elijah, Jesus on whom the heavenly spotlight shines, brilliant with divine light. Are you looking now? Do you hear -- the command of the heavenly voice: This one to whom Moses and Elijah bear witness, this one is my beloved Son! Give ear to him!

This command from heaven validates the preceding ministry of Jesus against the opposition, which had questioned his credentials. But it also corrects the misapprehension of disciples who were thinking of a Messiah without a cross. They might naturally expect then that Jesus, fortified in this glorious moment of divine accreditation, will descend from the mountain, gather himself an army, call down the angels and march on Jerusalem to bring in God’s kingdom by force. Such were, don’t you know, the typical messianic expectations of that day and age.

But Mark’s story takes a surprising twist. Jesus indeed heads for the capital city, where the crowd greets him as the new David entering his soon to be restored capital. Yet as quickly becomes apparent, Jesus’s purpose is not to take the throne by force, but rather to cleanse the Temple. That twist bring things to a head. Delivered by the will of God into the hands of sinners, submitting to God’s uncanny purpose, silently he goes to his cruel fate. All the greater our bewilderment when we recall the Transfiguration, realizing then the Lord who lays aside divine glory, who leaves behind the divine light in which he was bathed on the mountain, who descends from that high point down into the dark valley of the shadow of death, obedient even to death on a cross. For He has come not to be served but to serve and lay down his life a ransom for many.

If we are perplexed by this, brothers and sisters, it is a God-intended, spiritually fruitful perplexity. From glory to ignominy. From light to utter darkness. From adoration to revilement. Why, why, why? Deeply to ponder this question is precisely the point of the Lenten season. It is a salutary, saving perplexity.  It leads us to several significant insights into our own lives of Christian discipleship.

First, to know who this beautiful Savior really is, is not and can never be some clever human insight. As Paul reminds us today, It is the God who said, "Let light shine out of darkness," who has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ. Our faith to see Jesus as the beautiful Savior is always the sovereign gift of God, the light of the Spirit shining into darkened minds that we too  see Jesus truly, just like that light which shone on Jesus unexpected from above on the mountain. True faith that turns to the Lord Jesus, true faith that follows the Lord Jesus, true faith that bears one’s own cross because of the Lord Jesus’s cross comes from the enlightening of the Holy Spirit so that we come to see Jesus as the lamb provided for our deliverance. “I believe that I cannot by my own reason or strength believe in my Lord Jesus Christ or come to him. But the Holy Spirit has called me by the gospel…” So Luther taught us to understand. Whoever believes does so in the strength of his or her own little Transfiguration, namely, the Holy Spirit making Jesus alive, real, glorious, and beautiful in human eyes.  

In the second place, Transfiguration give us the confidence that everything Jesus once did in Galilee is valid still and also for us, when through the gospel he comes into our lives and we in faith welcome him into our sufferings of soul and body as our great Physician. So the addict delivered of her addiction knows in faith that Jesus still expels the demons; and the sick restored to life knows that Jesus still heals; and those reconciled after bitter fighting know that Jesus still releases troubled hearts from the crippling power and terrible burden of guilt for their offences and defenses; and the one preserved from calamity knows how the Lord who calms the waves and stills the wind is with us too in our every stormy hour, this watchman of Israel who never sleeps.

There is a third valuable instruction for us in the story. Are we to pipe up like nervous Peter with some cockamamie plan of action? No, for here in the Lenten time now approaching the Word of God must accomplish everything decisive. What we are to do is nothing but to watch and see, nothing but to hush and be still, simply, reverently, patiently, quietly give our attention to the passion of our Lord. Cease and desist with merely human speculations, nervous chatter and anxious interventions. Let the Transfiguration light shine and focus on the Son of God so that you follow him on his way to Golgotha and are changed by the sight of his passion for us and for all. Do nothing. Just be quiet. Just listen to him, watch and see.

Then we will be ready to ask: What was this thing which took place on the mountaintop before the eyes of baffled Peter, James and John who so ineptly stuttered in response to it? When the form of Jesus’ was changed, so that even his clothing glowed as purest light? Up until this moment in Jesus’ ministry people come to him, not for his own sake because of who he is, but for their own sakes, because of what they need and think to get out of him. If all we want from Jesus is his gifts, however, we do not want Jesus. We may then make up an attractive but false Christianity in which Jesus  helps us get our way, rather than to be changed by true and repentant faith by which the Spirit of holiness gets hold of us and changes us and makes us God’s own people by way of union with Jesus’ awesome act of self-giving love for us. This is his true and divine glory; the glory of the God who comes down to the depths, into our dark valley and the shadow of death, there to find us, lay of hold us and never let go. So Paul wrote to the Corinthians who are thus being changed by this Spirit-given, life-changing sight of glorious Jesus:  And we all, with unveiled faces, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being changed into his likeness from one degree of glory to the next. In a true Christianity, it is we who are being changed.

In the glorious light that shone that day, God the Father celebrated his Son’s free decision, for our sakes, to lay down his life for ours as the ransom that sets us free. The revelation reveals Jesus’ unique personal act, a free and uncoerced resolve of spontaneous and undeserved love to do far more for others than any law could ever have required or extorted. So in divine light we see God’s delight in his own Son, further God’s delight in all those for whom his Son gives himself. God’s joy in Jesus and through Jesus God’s delight with us all for whom he lived and died and rose again! The veil of unfaith, fear, distrust, and darkness of death which covers us is pealed back in this glorious moment. We see into our true future, a beautiful new harmony of love that will last forever when we too with Elisha of old will cry out in jubilation, the chariots of Israel and its horsemen! That rapture of praise for the victory of the God of love is the mystery of the Transfiguration which we perceive in our beautiful savior and celebrate today.

Epiphany 5 – 2024: Isaiah 40; 1 Corinthians 9; Mark 1

Is it not striking that the ministry of Jesus, enacting the reign of God on this earth, begins with his mission of healing? He heals in both body and soul, both the blind and the lame and those possessed by ungodly forces. Oddly Jesus calls this ministry of healing preaching. The disciples found him and said to him, "Everyone is searching for you."  And he said to them, "Let us go on to the next towns, that I may preach there also; for that is why I came out." And he went throughout all Galilee, preaching in their synagogues and casting out demons. Jesus says that he has “come out,” indicating that he has been sent on this mission, as we said, to preach healing. It is his calling, his holy vocation, anointed with the Spirit as the beloved Son and sent by the Heavenly Father to go into hurting Galilee preaching healing. He does so with authority. For it is the good and gracious will of God, the heavenly Father, Almighty Creator, that all his creatures be healed and restored to their holy vocations, no longer impaired by disabling pain in body or soul. God’s Reign takes place, God’s kingdom comes, when this will of God is done on earth as it is in heaven. In the authoritative preaching of Jesus, this saving event of healing occurs in word and deed.

Now it might be typical of us modern skeptics or of us postmodern cynics to ask, “Well, Jesus, what have you done for us lately?” And we know how certain kinds of Christians are quite insistent that the healing miracles of Jesus happen today if only we have enough faith. But that is all wrong. Little faith, great faith, or no faith, Jesus’s preaching, doing God’s will for healing, is for the sake of faith, not on account of faith. In other words, these Epiphany wonders of healing are meant to instruct and inspire humanity, in our world still full of sickness and despair, revealing what is the good and gracious will of God to be done on earth. The healings are Epiphany revelation of our Great Physician, meant both to inspire and to instruct disciples to follow him by taking up the holy vocation of healing. As Jesus sends disciples out to continue this mission, we are instructed also to be little healers in the employ of this Great Physician. So we in our skepticism and cynicism should hardly blame God for our own failure to do what is revealed in Jesus and empowered by his Spirit as our human task, particularly as his disciples! We are to be healers in all that we do. It is part and parcel of our baptismal vocation. To be sure, it is a job that none can accomplish alone but only together as the living body of Christ on the earth.

Now, on the other hand, this commission to be followers of the Great Physician can in the course of events forget that it is the mission of proclaiming the reign of God. In fact we can become so narrowly focused on the good works of healing which are in principle only temporary that we  can forget that these such good works are signs that point away from themselves to our Maker and Redeemer in whom our great and final healing rests.  Have you not known? Have you not heard? The LORD is the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth. He does not faint or grow weary, his understanding is unsearchable. He gives power to the faint, and to him who has no might he increases strength. Even youths shall faint and be weary, and young men shall fall exhausted; but they who wait for the LORD shall renew their strength, they shall mount up with wings like eagles, they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint. So the prophet reminded the discouraged of Israel in exile who drew back in fear at the prospect of traversing the desert to journey from splendid Babylon back to the ruins of Zion in Jerusalem. They feared -- journey to healing seemed to them worse than the disease of exile.

Fear not! The prophet’s preaching of the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth as our ultimate healing, I repeat, does not depend on faith but rather is said for the sake of faith, just as faith in such a God is taking courage for the journey to final healing in the mission of healing on our way. In the words of Paul Tillich, courageous faith in God is trust in the power of being overcoming nonbeing, in life overcoming death, in righteousness overcoming sin. Courageous faith in this One who is truly God is the spiritual healing needed and freely given over and above any temporary healing of body and soul on our journey to final healing. All of the persons healed in the gospel stories and restored to life nevertheless died one day. We shall all die because in God’s economy you cannot have a resurrection without first having a death. But we have the courage to face our own hurts along the way and final death knowing that in eternity as in time they who wait for the LORD shall renew their strength, they shall mount up with wings like eagles, they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint. In this faith we rest in peace to rise in glory!

Woe to me if I do not preach the gospel! So we have heard today from the pen of Paul the apostle. I hope by now you are feeling the same and wondering how this missionary gospel of Jesus preaching healing, in time for eternity, might actually be our own today. The first thing to ask about our following of the Great Physician is not, “What would Jesus do?” but rather, “What is Jesus doing?” as he lives and reigns, and continues to do the proclamation of healing in our stricken world. It happens in every gathering around word and sacrament. Much of its abundant fruit, however, goes under the radar in the lives of ordinary Christian people who are alert in their daily lives to the healing word or touch they may lend, collectively in their social ministries which feed the hungry and clothe the naked and build homes for the homeless. And it is right that these good, that is, healing works are done simply for the sake of a hurting neighbor in need and not instrumentalized for purposes of religious or ideological proselytism. Such humility in doing good is fitting; and we do not boast of our good works because we know that, good as they are, the healing is only temporary, a small sign in an ocean of need, pointing then to the great and final healing promised when the reign of God comes in fullness and power.

Consequently the question presses upon disciples about how we today participate in the missionary practice of Jesus’s proclamation of the approaching reign of the LORD, the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth who does not faint or grow weary, whose understanding is unsearchable. I have often pondered this question as I have reflected on the seeming incapacity of our churches to do gospel proclamation to the community outside of the Sunday gathering of the faithful, in the workaday world of Galilee, so to speak, as I have also worried culturally that the church of Jesus is in retreat, losing the spiritual battle for the hearts and minds of people. If we connect the scary word “evangelism” properly to the evangel, the good news, the gospel of the reign of God in Jesus’s proclamation, how do we do evangelism today? Paul’s example of the aforementioned humility is instructive: To the weak I became weak, that I might win the weak. I have become all things to all people, that I might by all means save some.  I do it all for the sake of the gospel, that I may share in its blessings. We too accept people just as they are in the knowledge that just like ourselves they are hurting seeking healing even as we have found healing enough to share.

Now Jesus enters the synagogues to preach and teach and heal. We learn from Luther that it is the Holy Spirit who brings people into the community of faith where the Spirit can preach the gospel of God’s reign to them. And sure enough that is often how it happens. Folks, if I may put it this way, motivated in various ways, wander into the church, checking thing out, not even sure what they’re looking for. This is good, if we are the welcoming people of Christ where they can taste the beloved community of God that they really need for true and final healing. But Jesus didn’t only go to synagogues; he went into the highways and byways and marketplaces of the towns, taking for granted the human hunger for healing in the brokenness of this sad world.

Everyone, just like you and me, is in some way looking for healing. Whether they know it or not, they are good creatures of God but skeptical, even cynical because of lost connections, disabling life -- as we are all in need because we have lost the ultimate connection which gives meaning to the soul and hope to the body. So my suggestion is that we dust off the Lutheran Book of Worship’s neglected Service of the Word for Healing and make it a community outreach event.

No offering other than slips of paper with prayer requests. A brief catechetical instruction on the ABCs of the Christian faith. If the congregation can musically support the gathering including presumably unchurched folks, singing The Great Litany serves to introduce liturgical worship and reinforces the message of healing. Invited, a procession comes forward to the altar for the laying on of hands and anointment with oil with pastor and lay ministers available for personal counsel and prayer. And that’s it! Perhaps an offering of refreshments afterword. But emphatically, no proselytism, just the Jesus proclamation and offering of God’s healing, leaving the harvest to the only one competent, God the Holy Spirit.

The point is that as a community of faith we offer healing publicly in this way just as individually we are disciples of the Great Physician who offer healing of body and soul to every wounded neighbor laid in our path and finally consolation in Christ in the hour of death. All this as the confident proclamation that they who wait for the LORD shall renew their strength, they shall mount up with wings like eagles, they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint.

Epiphany 4, 2024 – Deuteronomy 18, 1 Corinthians 8, Mark 1

Much like these United States in 2024, Capernaum of Galilee at the time that our Lord came into it long ago was not a happy place. It was, as our story today shows, the haunt of demons, lurking even within the houses of worship. The region of Galilee lay in the dirt-poor hinterlands to the north, racially and religiously divided, occupied by foreigners with the local rich folks in cahoots with them, the poor, living off the land, taxed up to the gills for little in return.  “North of Richmond” territory! This Galilee of history is a living emblem of the human predicament: a place oppressed by the absence of God, ungodly, godless, a place ruled by other, anti-divine powers: idols and demons in the imagery of those times, compulsive greed and insatiable envy in our language today. Greed for far more than one’s fair share, envy toward whatever little success or status any another had acquired. No freedom, no community, little love but for self and one’s own. All this misery we need to have in mind when we hear from Mark the Evangelist today that Jesus and the disciples “went into Capernaum” of Galilee.

Jesus came into Galilee. Not imperial Rome with its splendid marble monuments built on the backs of slave labor. But Jesus came into Galilee, not Jerusalem recently rebuilt in lavish imitation of Rome’s splendor by the collaborator King Herod. Jesus, we might say today, came into backwoods Appalachia, poor, ignorant, backwards, fentanyl addicted, hurting with a world of hurt.

We heard last week the story immediately following Jesus’ entry into Galilee proclaiming the nearness of God. It tells about the calling of Simon Peter and his brother Andrew, then the sons of Zebedee, James and John. We might think that leaving our jobs, our places in society, with our thick web of responsibilities and obligations and duties, is what is being asked of us here. In past ages, hermits thought that way. They thought that to be a true Christian, one had to leave the world after the model of John the Baptist. Perhaps even today some are still called to enter into intentional communities of Christian discipleship in such a way. But we would miss the crucial point that it is Jesus, not John, who calls us to follow Him, into Galilee, then, not out of it. Nor then is discipleship something special and extraordinary, for elite Christians, for super-dooper believers but rather for working folk, for common people. The deeper truth is that what disciples of Jesus are to abandon is not their workplace. It is something far dearer to and far harder to give up.

What we are to abandon with true repentance is our greed, our envy, our lovelessness. See, that is how the apostle Paul diagnoses the issue of eating meat offered to idols in Corinth. He does not take the idol literally. But he takes the sin of idolatry seriously. He does not demand that Christians abandon the eating of meat, which in those days was only available in the city at the markets of the temples, where animals had been brought for sacrifice. What he demands of those “in the know,” namely, that “an idol has no real existence,” is that they abandon the idolatry in their hearts, namely, their smug self-assuredness and sense of intellectual superiority rather to respect the conscience of the weaker, perhaps ignorant ones, for whom Christ died.

You know, we could only follow Jesus literally if we got into some science-fiction space machine and flew back in time to the dusty by-ways of Galilee some two millennia ago. We cannot follow Jesus at all in this woodenly literal fashion. We follow Jesus, if at all, by His own Spirit, the Spirit poured out on Him at His baptism, the Spirit who drove Him into the wilderness to be tested by the Evil One, the Spirit who now brings Him into Galilee on His mission of mercy in God’s name. It is by this same Spirit, lavished on you at baptism that you too follow Jesus into Galilee, not the literal one of long ago but the one here and now, the Galilee of your own life and times, where also idols enthrall and demons haunt.

By the Spirit you follow Jesus into Galilee here, now, when you give up envy and renounce greed and therefore refuse to go along any longer with the corruption, when you resolve no longer to be conformed to this world which is passing away but rather be transformed by setting heart and mind on the true God, His coming kingdom and true righteousness. By the Spirit you follow Jesus into Galilee here, now, when you surrender your apathy and crucify your despair and enter in to the clean, fresh air of faith in God, who wills immeasurably more good for us all than we dare hope or imagine. By the Spirit you follow Jesus into Galilee here, now, when you abandon business as usual and go to work in the mission of mercy who is Jesus, this Man for others. When you too include the excluded, when you too encourage the distressed, when you too sorrow with the sorrowing, when you too share bread with the hungry, when you too make peace between the estranged, in all these things and more you too are following Jesus into Galilee, here and now, on the job, in school, within the home, on the playing field, in the market. In whatever Galilee God has placed you in, there you too can and may follow Jesus as once did Andrew and Peter, James and John.

No wonder then that the demon shrieks in recognition: “Have you come to destroy us, holy One of God!?” Did you catch that? The evil spirit, who has taken grim possession of a poor human being, recognizes Jesus as the holy One of God. In other words, its question is: what are you doing here, in our unholy place? It’s like a home invasion from the demon’s perspective. “This is our turf,” it imagines; “these tortured human souls belong to us. What have you got to do with us? I know who you are, holy one of God, you have come to destroy us and set our oppressed ones free.”

This demonic response to Jesus is typical in the Gospel of Mark. Always the unclean spirits recognize Jesus and start to reveal the secret of his identity before Jesus rebukes and silences them. Notice that Jesus never disputes or argues with the unclean spirits, but simply silences them authoritatively with a rebuke before expelling them, releasing the captive human being from their tyranny. You see, this powerful new teaching of Jesus is not merely instruction about the Kingdom of God, which someday will come. It is, in its pronouncement, effectively the approaching reign of God, rolling back the usurpers of the earth, those anti-divine powers that capture and control human lives. The new teaching of Jesus says what it does and it does what it says. That is why the people in the synagogue exclaim, “What is this, a new teaching with authority; He commands even the unclean spirits, and they obey him.”

The biblical word for such authoritative speech is prophecy, which is authoritative just because and only because it gives voice to the very word of God. In this respect Jesus is the new Moses, as we can see today from the first reading from the book of Deuteronomy. Here the Lord says, "I will raise up for them a prophet like you from among their brethren; and I will put my words in his mouth, and he shall speak to them all that I command him.” Such prophecy begins in the household of God. Judgment begins in the house of God. We dare not look down on the synagogue in Capernaum as if it were some other place than our own. The ambiguity of religion , then as now, is that it can be a place where the word of God is spoken and at the same time be a place where demons are in hiding waiting to ensnare and captivate. Entering into the troubled world of Galilee, it is striking but also revealing that the first encounter of Jesus with an evil spirit takes place in the sphere of religion. Maybe that should not surprise us. The theologian Paul Tillich once wrote that "the battle for the kingdom of God first of all takes place in the churches which are its representatives."

Our story today foreshadows something that Jesus will say in a few chapters: no one can enter a strong man’s house and plunder his goods unless he first binds the strong man. Jesus binds the strong man by rebuking the demons, expelling and exposing them for the unholy usurpers they are. This is the Holy Spirit’s struggle of good against evil as Mark represents it in his telling of the beginning of the Good News of Jesus. What is that beginning? Galilee is not just literally an ancient place on the earth. It was the ancient place on the earth in which the Good News of Jesus began. But at the end of the Gospel of Mark the angels pointedly instruct the women at the tomb that they are to tell the disciples to meet Jesus in Galilee. See, Galilee is not just a literal place defined by its physical boundaries in distinction from other places, it is every place where demons lurk and spread darkness and tyrannize and oppress into which the risen Jesus continues to go that we may follow. Such then is the beginning of the Good News according to Mark. Speaking new teaching with authority, Jesus has entered into Galilee.

Epiphany 3, 2024: Jonah 3, I Cor. 7, Mark 1

Good news: the reign of God is on the march and fast approaching! The present form of this world is passing away! For the Lord has repented of the threatened evil and the day of pardon and peace dawns! Therefore: turn around! About face! Re-orient yourselves, so that you join the victory march of the God of love and are not rather left behind in soon to be forgotten darkness! So Jesus enters into the workaday world of Galilee and announces.

This announcement stands over everything that he goes on to say and do. For He himself, this man on a Spirit-driven mission, is advancing in his words and works the very reign of God, penetrating into the workaday world, into the midst of family ties and familiar bonds and mundane concerns of common people. As an annointed king he speaks here with authority; his word commands and is obeyed. He seeks out, he fastens his eye, he chooses: You, drop everything! You, follow me! And just so Andrew and Peter, James and John are conscripted, enlisted, and drafted. A revolution is underway.

Heaven knows we need a revolution. A real revolution, in which the present form of this world with its wars and rumors of war, its Holocausts and Apartheids, its pandemics and famines is passing away. Only let it be the real revolution, not just one more turn of the same old wheel of human lust for power and domination. Let it be the revolution of God!

The gospel call of Jesus is, and it effects, this revolutionary power of God. Jesus brings the true revolution. It is not the French revolution collapses into Napoleon’s military dictatorship; it is not the Russian Revolution with its Lenin and Stalin who grimly drive the people to happiness with an iron fist; it is not even the American revolution, which, in spite of noble aspirations, left the suffering children of African descent to remain under the slave master’s lash. This is a revolution that is qualitatively better. It is not fought with sword and steel, but with Word and Spirit. It does not avenge itself upon enemies but mercifully redeems them, if only they execute the “about face” of soul-searching repentance. It does not derive its energy from hate, but from love excelling, beyond all telling.

            Dear Christian: this revolutionary power of God overthrows the tyrannies of this sinful world and brings in God’s reign of freedom, justice and love; therefore it has nothing to do with a phony piety which runs away from daily life in the world. Jesus’ calls to you today, as to Andrew and Peter, James and John of old to follow, but he does not lead you from your place in life, in this present form of the world. Jesus is not like John the Baptist who stands on the border, calling people to come out as if to leave the dirty world behind. But Jesus comes right into the dirty world, right into the midst of an unclean people, right into my life and your life with all our confusions and failures, compromises and hypocrisies. Jesus comes into the Galilee of your life and mine. There he seeks us and there he finds us and there he summons: You, about face! You, follow me!

And where are we to go? Deeper into Galilee, so to speak, in pursuit of all the others still bound by slavish fears of nonconformity to the present form of this world which is passing away! “Follow me,” he says to these fishermen, “and I will make you fishers of men.” His is a redemptive revolution, this coming of God’s kingdom. Here is a merciful justice, this coming of God’s reign. This revolution gives life for death, righteousness for sin, the Spirit of God in exchange for our deathly, fleshly self-reliance. Those called themselves become callers for God. Those chosen themselves become God’s inviters, welcomers, with arms wide open for others. Participating in Jesus’ own mission, see, Peter and Andrew, James and John, you and me -- we are ourselves transformed, made into new beings, who more and more bear the image of the God of love which we see in Jesus who by his own Spirit revolutionizes peoples’ lives.

Now a revolution is not pain-free. Transformation of our lives involves a real, often wrenching turnabout. “Jesus bids a man to come and die,” wrote the German Lutheran pastor, theologian and martyr under the Nazis, Dietrich Bonhoeffer,” and in so dying to find his true life.” Do you know his story? Although he lived in extraordinary times, he was a mortal human like you and me, like Peter and Andrew, James and John; he felt and loved the ordinary bonds of life: love of homeland, love of safety and comfort, love of a beloved fiancée, love of his budding career, love of his own physical life with its creature comforts. These indeed are all real treasures of human life on this earth. To lose any one of them is to lose something of real value. In 1939 Bonhoeffer spent the summer in the USA. A prestigious academic post was available for him. American friends urged him to stay here in safety. Returning to Hitler’s Germany and wartime life would mean certain suffering, probably death. Indeed, life and safety in America would mean the opportunity further to develop his ideas and have a positive influence on the future.

As he wrestled through these questions, one Sunday he happened to walk into a rather conservative and old fashioned Presbyterian Church in NYC. He listened to these words from our Gospel lesson today and he heard the call of Jesus saying, Dietrich, Follow me. Follow me deep into Galilee, into that land of gathering darkness, into the midst of an unclean people, right there where Satan seems to reign. And so he did. He died on the gallows in a concentration camp just days before the Allied army would have rescued him. His last words to a fellow inmate were: “For me this is the end, but really it is the beginning.”

            Jesus bids a man to come and die to the present form of this world which is passing away, and in dying to find true life. I judge it unlikely that you and or I shall be called to make this extraordinary witness of martyrdom, though Christians throughout world today are so called and do so obey: in Nigeria, in Nicaragua, in China and many other places. We should know more, and care more, about these persecutions. No one in their right mind aspires to suffering and the Lord himself teaches us to pray: Save us from the time of trial! There is nothing lovely about suffering and persecution or hanging on a Nazi gallows. Nevertheless, the extraordinary life of the martyr of Christ like Bonhoeffer illumines the ordinary witness that every disciple of Jesus makes in everyday life even in ordinary times where, hidden or visible, the form of this world is passing away.

Are you prepared to drop everything and follow Jesus when cruel language and hateful talk vilifies and degrades those who are vulnerable in our world? Are you prepared to drop everything and follow Jesus when office politics and personal power plays corrupt one and all on the job? Are you prepared in this society whose cathedrals are the malls, and whose values are ever more debased by insatiable binges of self-indulgence, to let all that glitter pass away, in order to follow Jesus in valuing the valueless of our Galilees, in loving the unlovable, in treasuring those who have no treasures in this life?

You are prepared if indeed Jesus is the One who is preparing you, you are able if indeed it is his Spirit who from baptism day to resurrection day is revolutionizing your life. People come to church looking for help with their personal problems, of course; God’s revolution really helps. But it does not help you to adjust to the present form of this corrupt world, which is passing away. It does not help you to go along in order to get along. That would be to cure the sickness with more sickness. But God really helps you by summoning you to leave behind the petty problems entrapping you in the present form of this world, by getting you involved with the mission and ministry of Jesus for others. Self-forgetting Jesus love for others is what really (dis)solves our personal problems. The real self-care is other-care in the context of the beloved community of God where we bear one another’s burdens and so fulfill the law of Christ. The social form of God’s revolution takes is to make a community of self-forgetting love in the midst of Galilee; this is the missionary church, a caring community of Christ’s people where the call of Jesus is sounded in sermon and sacrament every Sunday, manifesting the dawning day of resurrection and the new creation. Here ordinary people are step by step changed into the likeness of Jesus.

Our God is in it for the long haul. He is the patient revolutionary. The progress of his kingdom ebbs and flows, though its victory is certain. Now is the appointed time. Today is the day of revolution. God’s kingdom is on the march and calls us to join in. For Jesus has stepped into Galilee. Therefore, the present form of this world is passing away. Game on! The true revolution has begun. Amen.

Epiphany 2, 2024: 1 Samuel 3, 1 Corinthians 6, John 1

In this season of the Epiphany we turn attention to those notable events of the ministry of Jesus which reveal the mystery of his person: his baptism in the river Jordan, his proclamation of the nearness of God’s reign, the authoritative call to discipleship, healings of the broken in mind and body putting the Evil One and his minions to flight, the parables he told of God’s amazing mercy, the pronouncement of the double love commandment demonstrated then – of all things!-- in dining with tax collectors and sinners as in a wedding feast, all of this culminating in the Transfiguration when the glory of Jesus as the Son of God is revealed to Peter, James and John.

We have a big advantage in all this. Unlike the characters inside the gospel story, we already know the secret of this ministry of love. Unlike Phillip and Andrew and Peter and Nathaniel, we already know the mystery of the man Jesus, this son of Joseph from Nazareth. The Gospel of John has already told us in its first verses that what we are about to witness as the narrative unfolds. We will see the eternal Word of the Father become flesh, that is, being spoken here and now into our time and space by the Gospel’s living color portrait, so to speak, of this man on a mission. Jesus from dusty, insignificant Nazareth, known by his workingman father’s name, Joseph, this rare man of mercy among us calculating men and women, is shown to us the very Son of God. The fourth evangelist tells us at the end of his gospel that he has recorded all these stories about Jesus in order that we may believe that Jesus is the Son of God and that believing, we too may have life in his name.  ERGO, Come and see! Indeed, let’s look and see!

Notice first today how Jesus is the One who takes the initiative. He comes into Phillip’s life unexpected as also into ours, whether we are looking for him or not, and with authority commands, You! Follow me! You! Pay attention! Later in the Gospel of John, Jesus will therefore remind these very disciples, “You did not chose me, I chose you.” And this holds true for all believers. In the preaching of the gospel, the risen Jesus Christ is the One who is coming into our lives, disruptively, calling us out by name also to arise and follow him. He takes the initiative. He calls with authority. He commands our attention, our allegience, our faith. He seeks and finds us.

Notice next how we who are called characteristically misunderstand and get it backwards from the start. We just heard that it is Jesus who seeks and finds. But what does Phillip say to Nathaniel? Does he say, I was lost but now am found? I blind but now I see? No, he says to Nathaniel, We have found him of whom Moses prophesied. We have found him, we have done it! Our insight, not God’s revelation! But of course such a merely human claim is eminently debatable. Nathaniel, with good cause, replies by challenging the claim, I’m from Missouri, he says. Show me! Skeptically he asks, Can anything good come out of nowheresville Nazareth? From the son of a rude workingman, the guy Joseph whom we know? What a silly idea! To his credit Phillip does not now argue. Challenged, he realizes that his merely human claim avails nothing. If he is really speaking about the One sent from God, the Messiah who takes the initiative and establishes his own divine claim on us as a true and merciful Lord taking hold of his own lost and perishing creature, he cannot argue anyone to faith, let alone on his own authority just say it is so. He can only bear witness and invite. So Phillip simply replies, Come and see!

Come and see! Come to think of it, isn’t that why we don’t get bored with the old, old story which remains ever good and ever new? Come and see Sunday on Sunday with your mind’s eye the One whom we get to know in these down to earth stories of a life of loving service and final sacrifice for one and all on the cross – just as if this One were not dead, but alive and active, just as if the son of Joseph from Nazareth from long ago were indeed the Son of the living God, alive, active, present! Indeed! Therefore, even today: Come and see – him! Come and discover what he is doing! Don’t wonder, as the well-meaning slogan has it, what Jesus would do. No, come see what Jesus is doing! Come and see and hear him! So that we become again as little children, attentive like the child Samuel of old, with open mind and heart, saying: Speak, Lord, for thy servant heareth.

So it happens in our story today, which now shifts focus from Phillip to Nathaniel. Nathaniel indeed comes to see Jesus who greets him with a statement that utterly disarms him. He addresses Nathaniel as a genuine, true Israelite, without guile, that means, not a deceiver or a cheat. This puzzling, surprising greeting indicates that here too Jesus takes the initiative, revealing Nathaniel. Thus it elicits from Nathaniel in turn the astonished response, How do you know me? When Jesus replies in the apparently irrelevant way, I saw you under the fig tree, Nathaniel the seeker and inquirer suddenly turns into an extravagant confessor, heaping praise and acclamation that seem all out of proportion: Rabbi you are the Son of God, the king of Israel! What’s going on here? How does this instantaneous conversion of Nathaniel come about?

We have to recall the Old Testament the story of the patriarch Jacob to understand. Jacob, you may recall, was a rascal and cheat, full of guile, whom God nevertheless chose, blessed and in the long course of his life finally transformed to be given a new name, Israel. Jacob fled away, having stolen his brother Esau’s paternal blessing by deceiving his sick, blind, bedridden father Isaac. When he fell asleep exhausted from the flight, he had a dream of the ladder to heaven, where the angels ascend and descend. There again, later, after many years, returning to make peace with brother Esau whom he had defrauded, Jacob wrestled with the Angel of the Lord all night till dawn. He would not let go until he was blessed. That wrestling match is the origin of the name, Israel – a new, second name given to Jacob; it means, the one who strove with God, who sought and fought in faith for God’s promised blessing in spite of his sins. Jacob full of guile and deceit is therefore renamed Israel, man of faith who holds onto God’s promise of blessing, not on the basis of his own insight or righteousness, let alone his conniving, but purely on the basis of God’s gracious choice and call. As Luther would’ve put it, in Jacob’s all night wrestling match Jacob was “rubbing God’s ears in his promises.” Thus in being renamed Israel, Jacob strove with God and prevailed. The self-reliant way of guile, deceit and trickery in the process was washed out of him.

This great narrative of Jacob the cheat turned into Israel, man of embattled faith, is in the background of Jesus’ greeting to Nathaniel. He calls Nathaniel a genuine, true Israelite, one who strives with God for his promised blessing, but, unlike the old Jacob, one in whom there is no guile, no deceitfulness or conniving. Even though he is skeptical that the Messiah comes from Nazareth, even though he does not simply accept Phillip’s human claim to have found him, he is willing to come and see because, as a sincere Israelite, he seeks in faith the promised blessing of God. He is an authentic seeker; although he knows not whom or what he seeks, he is looking for blessing of life that comes from God. He is not a scoundrel, a cheat, a deceiver, a phony, like the old Jacob who uses God for his own sinful purposes, who loves the Giver only for the sake of the gifts. He is really seeking God and his kingdom and righteousness; he is the true Israel. Nathaniel is astonished at Jesus’ greeting because it penetrates to this deepest truth about himself. Nathaniel at once realizes that through all his seeking for life and blessing, he has been drawn to this moment of truth, of revelation, of encounter with Jesus.

Jesus concludes the episode by telling Nathaniel that he will yet see “greater things,” just like the patriarch Jacob in his dream long ago saw the heavens opened and the angels ascending and descending. But this time not on a upward ladder but upon this Son of Man, this Jesus from Nazareth, the son of Joseph. Jesus in person comes as the stairway to heaven, the gateway to heaven, the threshold of heaven, and Nathaniel the seeker who has come to see Jesus will henceforth see indeed that in Jesus God opens wide the door to heaven, the door to life, true life, abundant life, eternal life. Henceforth he knows, as the apostle Paul teaches us today, that he is no longer his own, but has been bought with a price that he may glorify God in the body

Dear Christian friends, the gospel story is always old because it is always about this same old Jesus from Nazareth and what he once and uniquely did for us all. But it is always new, because it is also about each and every Phillip into whose life Jesus comes and commands: Follow me! Each and every Phillip who bears witness and invites: Come with me to see Jesus! It is about each and every Nathaniel and Jacob-turned-to Israel; the old, old story is just as much about our being drawn to Jesus, our coming to see but therewith being discovered and known, welcomed and converted, until we to exclaim and proclaim him who has sought and found us and led us through the wide open door of mercy into the presence of the God of love. The old, old story of Jesus and his love is always new because the gift of eternal life and blessing of God is simply lavished there upon us and upon all who come and see. This is what Jesus is doing today and every day when his people gather around his Word, blessed Epiphany! To God all the glory for all his rich mercy in Christ. Amen.

Baptism of our Lord – 2024 Genesis 1, Acts 19, Mark 1

Today we mark the beginning of the Epiphany season by observing the Baptism of our Lord. In the Gospel of Mark, Jesus’s baptism in the river Jordan tells us something about Jesus before it goes on to show Jesus in action. The knowledge of who Jesus is precedes knowledge of what Jesus does. The important reason for this precedence is that we rightly understand the works of Jesus only in light of the identity of Jesus. This precedence in knowing who Jesus is over what Jesus does was a major insight of the German martyr theologian, Dietrich Bonhoeffer. He lectured on the identity of Jesus in 1933 at the University of Berlin under the dark shadow of Hitler’s rise to power.

Many in that time, also in the church, were hailing Adolf Hitler as their Führer, virtually as their new Messiah. They did so because they judged on the basis of his visible works: uniting the people, putting down the dissenters, restoring pride and power, liberating the nation from oppression, promising greatness to come. Only 12 disastrous years later would they learn who Hitler really was. Bonhoeffer was teaching to the contrary that Christians do not look for messiahs in politicians, because they already have one. Nor do they judge on the basis of visible works which can be deceptive. Much later in the Gospel of Mark, Jesus says that many will come doing wonders so as to deceive even the elect. But Christians, knowing in the Spirit the Messiah whom they have in Jesus the beloved Son of his Abba Father, the God of Israel, have learned that the genuinely creative and redemptive work of God in the world comes by Jesus surprising way of humble service and self-giving, the way of the cross.

Such lifelong Christian learning, the discipleship of our minds, happens to us this year of the Gospel of Mark as we in the Spirit follow Jesus on his life’s way through the cross to his glory. Our learning is inaugurated here in the beginning at the baptism of Jesus. He is identified by the heavenly voice as the beloved Son, that identification simultaneously making that heavenly voice to be that of Jesus’s heavenly Father. This mutual identification of the Father and the Son is then confirmed as the Spirit, in the figure of the dove, alights upon Jesus, picking him out from the crowd for us to focus on. This anointing with the Holy Spirit, moreover, makes Jesus the beloved Son the anointed one whom Israel awaited, which is what the word Messiah (in Hebrew) or Christ (in Greek) means.

When we continue with Mark’s story in several Sundays, the Spirit who has anointed Jesus will compel Jesus into the wilderness to be tested by an enemy, the Unclean Spirit who opposes the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit thus inaugurates the Epiphany combat of Jesus which follow as Jesus enters Galilee to expel the demons, heal the sick and forgive sinners. We are shown in this way that the grace of God enacted in Jesus is a militant grace. It goes to battle against the forces of darkness. It breaks into the strong man’s house and binds him up in order to plunder his goods, which are suffering human beings addicted to power or pleasure or, even perversely, addicted to pain, desiring their own subjugation as weighed down by failures, burdened with guilt. Or, alternately, high on their own sense of righteousness and power, unfree in any case to live as joyful children of God in the workaday world of Galilee.

So Mark wants us to know from the outset who it is that we are dealing with, the beloved Son on whom the Holy Spirit abides, each sent by the heavenly Father, the God of Israel. Knowing this from the get-go, we will properly understand all that Jesus does and suffers on his life’s way. And knowing this, we will be equipped as disciples ourselves to follow him in the power of the very same Spirit through the cross to the crown.

So we should notice that all three of our Scripture lessons today are bound together by specifying the work of the Holy Spirit. Our short excerpt from the very first verses of the Bible in Genesis shows us that the Word of God and the Spirit of God go together, distinct but inseparable, in acts of creation and new creation: The earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep; and the Spirit of God was moving over the face of the waters. And God said, "Let there be light"; and there was light. Genuine acts of creation are reserved to God alone. We human beings can be creative since we are made in the image and likeness of God, but being creatures, we do not summon into being that which does not yet exist, out of something without form and void, sheer absolute darkness. Rather, when we creatures are creative we work with existing materials, fashioning and reshaping them according to our intelligent design and moral purpose. But God alone creates, as we say in theology, out of nothing: light out of darkness, order out of chaos, life out of death, life-giving righteousness out of death dealing sin, and so on. God so creates by his Word and Spirit, his Word which commands and his Spirit which animates and enlivens.

We Lutherans, descended from the Reformation, have historically been very good on the Word of God, which we sing as our great heritage. But we haven’t been so great on the Word’s own testimony to God’s Spirit, whom the creed tells us is the Lord and giver of life. The word of God proclaims the identity of Jesus as the beloved Son given for us but it is the Holy Spirit who instills in us the confident trust in the man Jesus such that he really is our own in whom we too are beloved and well pleasing to God. Thus in another place St. Paul tells us that the Holy Spirit bears witness to our spirits, against all discouragement and despair, that we are indeed the children of God. We need to know about this precious gift of the divine Spirit, the Lord who gives us true life by grasping hold of our heart of hearts, because otherwise we put a terrible and false burden on ourselves, whether or not we really believe. Oh no! Confident trust in the Word of God is the pure gift of grace by the Holy Spirit literally inspiring us to believe in spite of our unbelief, just as the Spirit first inspired Messiah Jesus at his baptism to go into battle for us.

So you notice that that what applies to the Christ at his baptism is reapplied to his Christians, that our baptism is a baptism into his baptism. Here in the sacrament, daily to be remembered with a hearty “amen,” the same heavenly voice announces our adoption as beloved children of God, sending into our hearts the same confident trust which is the Holy Spirit. So our second lesson today from the Acts of the Apostles testifies. Let’s listen to the chief part again: Paul asks, Did you receive the Holy Spirit when you believed?" And they said, "No, we have never even heard that there is a Holy Spirit."  And he said, "Into what then were you baptized?" They said, "Into John's baptism." And Paul said, "John baptized with the baptism of repentance, telling the people to believe in the one who was to come after him, that is, Jesus." On hearing this, they were baptized in the name of the Lord Jesus. And when Paul had laid his hands upon them, the Holy Spirit came on them; and they spoke with tongues and prophesied. Practically speaking, I wonder how many modern Christians, other than the Pentecostals, have never even heard that there is a Holy Spirit! No wonder, folks are tormented about whether or not they truly believe and wanting relief from this torment, decide that Christian belief is beyond them, over their paygrade. So in reality it is. Luther taught us to confess, “I believe that by my own reason or strength I cannot believe in my Lord Jesus Christ or come to him, but the Holy Spirit has called me through the gospel, enlightened me with his gifts and united me with his faithful people.”

Luther’s teaching is verified today by the comparison made between  John’s baptism and baptism in the name of Jesus, the beloved Son, together with his anointing Spirit and the Father in heaven speaking love. As Paul explains, John’s baptism was a human act signifying repentance and hope for the forgiveness of sins when Messiah comes. I repeat, a human act. A good human act, but a human act subject to all the uncertainties of any human act. Even John the baptizer, according to Paul, redirected the question of belief away from himself to the one to come, the mightier one who would baptize with the Holy Spirit. And notice, on hearing this word of God, Luke tells us, something happened to these folks in Ephesus. They did not do something, something happened to them: they were baptized, passive voice, hands laid upon them, passive voice, and the Holy Spirit was given, passive voice, so that they burst out – now at last active voice! –, in the confident praise and proclamation of hearts born anew into a living faith. Who you are as newborn Christians by baptism, precedes what you do as Christians! See again as well the collaboration of the Word and the Spirit, each distinct but inseparably operating together. Knowing who they are, consequently or rather, now knowing whose they are, these folks in Ephesus burst into action, giving all the glory to God for all his rich mercy in Christ.

So if you are wondering where today is this outpouring of the Spirit which Scripture witnesses to us here and now, look around you and see! Simply recognize the spiritual reality that occurs every time we gather around gospel word and sacraments which follows us thereafter, so to speak, into the workaday world of our own Galilee or Ephesus. For you, like these folks at Ephesus, are made the temple of the Holy Spirit; you each become a prophet, that is, mouthpieces of the Spirit to speak the word of God in the community of Christ, voicing praise and thanksgiving, sharing comfort and consolation, lending the courage to the discouraged, simply being faith operating in love. When you do not fall for the hucksters, but rather when you build up the community, accompany the grieving, clothe the naked, visit the prisoner, feed the hungry, forgive the trespasser, love the enemy, make peace, rejoicing in all that is good and beautiful – in short when you are the little Christs, anointed with the same Holy Spirit, of the great Lord Jesus Christ by your baptism into his baptism, then hearts, your own and those around, are touched with the assurance that we are indeed the beloved children of God. So the Holy Spirit brings the word of God home to create what had not been, the beloved community of Christ and his people, harbinger of God’s new humanity, a light in the darkness which the darkness has not overcome. This is who you are, whose you are, you, the baptized, in whom the Father’s Word, now in flesh appearing, is spoken into the world in the power of the Holy Spirit.

Christmas I – 2023: Isaiah 61:10--62:3, Galatians 4:4-7, Luke 2:22-40

Happy New Year! It is a happy new year every Sunday, the day of the Lord’s resurrection. This day marks the passing of the old aeon and the dawning of the new time of God’s grace. Happy New Year! It is a happy new year because when the time had fully come, God sent forth his Son, born of woman, born under the law, to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption. Just because Jesus was born into solidarity with us in the old and perishing age –born of a woman and born under the Law-- the happy new year of God’s grace, set in motion by his coming to us in the old, means that, you, newly adopted children of God…You shall be a crown of beauty in the hand of the LORD, and a royal diadem in the hand of your God. Happy New Year!

It helps us to appreciate and reverently to celebrate God’s happy New Year when we understand how it came to pass that God’s Son, born of a woman, born under the law, just so worked our redemption and adoption as children of God. Understanding this requires us to think in a twofold way about what it means to be “under the law” – namely, as those instructed by the law, the Torah of God, and as those criticized by it.

On the one hand, being “under the law” means that Jesus grew up under the Torah’s instruction in order that he fulfill of Israel’s ancient hope for righteousness on the earth. If, as we have heard in Advent-tide, that we are with Israel to hope in, and fervently pray for, and so live in anticipation of a world in which righteousness is at home, we see in the coming of God’s Son into solidarity with us his life-deed of righteousness in our world, sign and seal of all God’s promises. This is the primary meaning of being born under the law, the meaning particular to ancient Israel and its hope for a Messiah, a true son of David who would bring about righteousness on the earth. We especially see this in Luke’s stories of the infant Jesus, brought to the Temple in Jerusalem, where the aged saints Simeon and Anna rejoice in the fulfillment of God’s ancient law taking shape in the child Jesus, just as Luke concludes today: And the child grew, and waxed strong in spirit, filled with wisdom: and the grace of God was upon him.

So Jesus grew to live out a whole life of obedience to the double love commandment, namely, that we should love God above all and all creatures in and under God.

This life of righteousness is what marks Jesus out as the Christ, the Messiah of Israel, and teaches us how to think about the salvation that He brings, which is not any old thing we might want. I might want a Lexus convertible in 2024, but that is not the salvation of righteousness that Jesus brings as the Messiah of Israel. I might want personal power such that the Boss fears me, the spouse is wrapped around my little finger, and my kids are living duplicates of good ol’ me. But that’s not the salvation of righteousness that Jesus brings as the Messiah of Israel.  Rather, let us learn what the salvation of righteousness is from Simeon today (in the elegant old language of the King James version): Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace, according to thy word: For mine eyes have seen thy salvation, which thou hast prepared before the face of all people; a light to lighten the Gentiles, and the glory of thy people Israel. Such is the salvation of righteousness that Jesus brings about, the glory of Israel whose law, now fulfilled and so illuminated in the life of love that Jesus led, enlightens all the peoples of the earth, showing them love of God above all and all creatures in and under God. We need to be under the law, then, in the sense of being taught this righteousness as our truly human vocation.

There is, however, a second meaning of being born under the law, namely this, that as the law of God speaks a commandment of righteousness as love, it speaks against us who are not so loving. You see, love, if it is not sheer sentimentality, must be against what is against love. “Love what is good, hate what is evil,” thunders Israel’s great prophet Amos. “Let love be sincere,” Paul admonishes the Romans, “hate what is evil.” God’s love is zealous and holy, active in all things like a prosecuting attorney. In righteous indignation, according to the testimony of Scripture, God judges what is against love, to cast down the mighty from their thrones but exalt them of low degree. And that is why in another place Paul the apostle says that all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God, that there is none, no not one, who is righteous, no one who actually loves God above all and all creatures in and under God —until God sent forth His Son, born of a woman, born under the law, to redeem those who were under the law.

So this is a second meaning of “under the law,” which is not exclusive to ancient Israel, but in fact is the experience of all creatures under the sovereignty of the one who is truly God. Under the law here means that in our historical experience, in all the mysterious and often dark twists and turns of our journey, we meet God, our Creator as critic. In this part of the letter to the Galatians, Paul names the Law, with a Greek word that comes into English, as pedagogue, literally a servant who guides the footpaths of a schoolchild. In Paul’s Greek world, however, this was not a happy role. The pedagogue was not simply an instructor but a taskmaster who harshly forced the children to study and behave. Paul compares God’s governance of a fallen and wayward humanity through the Law to such a pedagogue. That is why our Lutheran Confessions remind us lex semper accusat: the Law always accuses. Because in this second sense the Law works on us as a pedagogue, chastising us to love and disciplining what is against love. In this sense, we need to be freed from being under the law, to pass from the old life of slavish fear of threats and proud claims to merit deserving of reward to the glorious liberty of new-born children of God – those who now freely and willingly love God above all and all creatures in and under God. How does this wondrous passage to the happy new year of life under grace transpire?

The deepest mystery of the Christian faith tells how Jesus, who purely proclaimed Israel’s Torah as the great double love commandment, fell under the Law’s accusation of those who are not so loving or righteous. How so? On account of his solidarity with us. For, born of a woman, born under the Law, He loved us children of earth who fall short of the glory of God. Indeed, He was notoriously the friend of sinners, even scandalously of tax collectors, hated collaborators with the Roman occupiers. Likewise, scandalously he proclaimed the forgiveness of their sins in the name of God. This forgiveness was not a magic trick. He did not wave of a magic wand and disappear the sins he forgave into thin air. But he took responsibility for us; he took on himself the sin he took away from others. And thus at the culmination of His life He had to drink the bitter cup, the consequences of His life of love in God’s name for those not so loving or righteous. Martin Luther called this culmination of Christ’s life, born of a woman, born under the law, “a strange marvelous duel…the Law battling the Law in order to become liberty for me.”

You see, the mystery of the cross as the culmination of the righteous life deed of Christ is that the Law as God’s own will to love came into conflict with the Law as God’s own conflict with us not so loving nor righteous. And God’s will to love prevailed in this marvelous duel, finding a new way forward of mercy. Mercy that redeems those under the Law and effects their adoption as beloved children of God so that it is really true to say of those whose being in Christ is now under grace,  “You shall be a crown of beauty in the hand of the LORD, and a royal diadem in the hand of your God.”

Just as the birth of God’s Son of a woman under the Law was an event in history, then, so also it is an event—let’s call it God’s ever-ready New Year celebration of grace—when by the proclamation of this the Holy Spirit makes it an event in your history, too. God’s love is not a lifeless idea or timeless principle, but God seeking, finding and delighting in those sought and found. Behold, if anyone is in Christ new creation! The old has passed away – happy New Year!

Christmas Eve, 2023: Isaiah 9, Phil. 2, Titus 3, Luke 2

Martin Luther characteristically preached on this festival: “It does you no good that Christ was born in Bethlehem if Christ is not also born in you.” Have we, however, in our post-Christendom culture converted Christmas into something else? Is the  meaning of our Christmas feast being hijacked and turned on its head in this consumer culture of malice and envy, this entertainment culture of wayward passions and false pleasures, swallowed up by the miserable, scarcely veiled secret of too many contemporary lives: hating and being hated. All the more so it bears repetition for emphasis: Christmas is about our conversion, the Holy Spirit’s change of the very loves of our hearts:  “O holy Child of Bethlehem, descend to us we pray,” we sing in one of our beloved carols. “Cast out our sin and enter in, be born in us today!” Have we converted Christmas into something else, or does Christmas convert us?

“Be born in us today!” -- this is the earnest prayer of every Christian, who knows Christmas, not as indulgence in physical gluttony or spiritual sentimentality, but as our holy day remembering when first the kindness and love of God our Savior appeared in this dark, dark world of wars and rumors of wars, of refugees and persecutions, so that we too would have this mind that was in Christ Jesus, who, being in the form of God did not consider his equality with God something to take advantage of, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant  The message is that God turns to us all in unfathomable mercy in the Babe of Bethlehem – this is the first and literal Christmas. Our hearts in reply are reborn in Christ by the Spirit to God – this is the second and spiritual Christmas, since it does you no good that Christ was born in Bethlehem if Christ is not also born in you this night!

Maybe, just maybe this year of an ever darkening world situation, amid all the words, words, words of foolish advertisements from the mouths of disobedient hucksters, deceiving us and enslaving us by all kinds of passions and false pleasures, maybe just maybe we will take to heart the one Word which are to hear and obey in life and in death with new hearts to trust the message of Christmas which is truly trustworthy: [God the Father] saved us through the washing of rebirth and renewal by the Holy Spirit, whom he poured out on us generously through Jesus Christ our Savior, so that, having been justified by his grace, we might become heirs having hope of eternal life. This is the word from God concerning our conversion, our own spiritual Christmas, which does not trick us into buying yet another toy we don’t truly need, but rather works in us new devotion to doing what is good, excellent and profitable for all.

            So we are here tonight to proclaim that Word of the first and literal Christmas: Unto you is born this day in the City of David a Savior, who is Christ, the Lord. Of the increase of his government and peace there will be no end. He will reign on David’s throne and over his kingdom, establishing and upholding it with justice and righteousness from that time on and forever. The kindness and love of God our Savior appeared not wrapped in bows, as we have heard, but in swaddling clothes, strips of rag that a poor woman used to warm her newborn; not fulfilling false expectations of greed and malice, but rather laid in a lowly animal trough, since there was no human place available – all this, to fulfill God’s purpose that this little Child save us. From what? From this very culture of greed and malice which has no room in the inn the poor, the homeless, the refugee! On what grounds does God purpose to save us through this child? Not because of righteous things we had done, since we were rather all caught up in unrighteousness, but because of his mercy – mercy which melts ice-cold hearts, mercy which convicts in order to convert and so opens our small, closed minds to the Father’s wide open arms and all-embracing purposes. To what end? To reign over us in peace and justice, that means, by our own conversion from the false loves of greedy beings enslaved to sin, our conversion as those devoted to doing what is good, excellent and profitable for all.  This is the second, spiritual Christmas, that we be changed through the washing of rebirth and renewal by the Holy Spirit

            We need this spiritual Christmas, for the loves or desires of the human heart motivate us in everything we do. We do what we do because of something we want, in order to get it. This is the law of our nature. We are creatures, not creators. We do not have life of ourselves, but must constantly seek life. But what do we want? Alas, we seek false goods, eating food that does not satisfy, drink that does not quench. So endlessly unsatisfied we become ever more greedy: our desires turn into envy of those who have more, jealously over what little we have, malice lashing out at others as competitors against us. Love we must, but humab loves are false, until our hearts are made new through the washing of rebirth and renewal by the Holy Spirit, persuading us that we are indeed beloved children of God for Jesus’ sake, working in our hearts in reply the new, true love for God with all his people. Such rebirth and renewal is our own spiritual Christmas!

See how the whole Trinity appears in our text to accomplish it:  God [the Father] saved us through the washing of rebirth and renewal by the Holy Spirit, whom he poured out on us generously through Jesus Christ our Savior, so that, having been justified by his grace, we might become heirs having hope of eternal life. When we were baptized in the name of the Triune God, that washing of rebirth and renewal signed the in-pouring of the Spirit into our hearts bearing witness that we are indeed the beloved children of God, the very same Spirit who first brought Jesus Christ our Savior to birth in Betlehem and thence led him through life and death to resurrection. And we needed this rebirth and renewal, just as much as we did not deserve it, because we were caught up in false loves and unworthy desires of wayward hearts of creatures lost in darkness. But our heavenly Father, rich in mercy, determined to straighten us out, leveling the mountains of vain pride, lifting up the valleys of faithless despair, by his grace, that means, by his own free and awesome decision to love us notwithstanding, to stick with us in spite of everything, to regain us for himself no matter what the cost. Cost God it did, in the fullness of time: the birth in the manger anticipating burial in the tomb, swaddling clothes foreshadowing burial linens, the homeless Child’s holy body grown up to be pierced and broken – all this  to seek and find us who were dead to God.

That is God’s costly grace which justifies us, regarding us and making us beloved children and heirs of God, having hope of eternal life. For nothing less than the eternal life of the Father and the Son in the Holy Spirit, our blessed holy Trinity, will still restless hearts, grant true peace that this world can neither give nor take away, and so at last deliver our wayward desires from false and deathly loves. This is the hope of the heart converted! Nothing less! Renewed by the Spirit, united with the Son, to live to God our heavenly Father, now and forever! So it is Christmas that converts you, not you who convert Christmas into something less, something cheap, something false and ruinous. But by the Father’s grace Christ would be born in us this day that we too may sing in the Spirit with the choirs of heaven: Glory to God in the highest, peace on earth to those with whom He is pleased.

It's not who you are, but whose you are!

Advent 3, 2023

Isaiah 61, 1 Thessalonians 5, John 1

            Today we hear again about John the Baptist, not from Mark’s Gospel as last week, but from the Gospel of John. The fourth Evangelist depicts a detailed interview of John the Baptist by an investigating committee sent from the Temple establishment in Jerusalem; they want to know just who John the Baptist thinks he is to be doing what he does. Again and again the Baptist answered them, as if to emphasize: I am not the Christ. I am not the promised one. I am not the savior. The mighty one comes after me.  The Evangelist uses the word testimony to describe this answer. It is as if the Baptist were put on trial, taking an oath as called into the dock, swearing on the Bible to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Unsatisfied with his denials, however, the investigators from Jerusalem press him, "Who are you? Let us have an answer for those who sent us. What do you say about yourself?"

Interesting question for us nowadays who seem to be obsessed with the question of identity. Who are you, John, if you are not the Christ? John answered, "I am the voice of one crying out in the wilderness, 'Make straight the way of the Lord,'" as the prophet Isaiah had foretold. See, he side-steps the question of his identity, of who he is, by pointing away from himself to the coming Christ.

If you get one thing straight about Jesus Christ, as also about yourself in your own identity, get this straight. He comes to us. You don’t go to God. You don’t have to earn points with God. You don’t have to climb mountains up to God. With a thunderbolt the Baptist silences all such falsely pious pretension and any grounds of religious boasting based upon a human identity claim. He says instead, Behold the one who comes! That means in plain English, Shush! Be quiet! Cease and desist from all nervous questioning about who you are, or what you must do, or think, or feel.

People have doubts that God loves them or cares for them. People look at themselves and sense a mess: a poor, frightened, confused, lost soul. So people throw themselves into every sort of mindless project, or latch onto some prefabricated notion what they are, to keep their mind off the emptiness within– trying thusly to make themselves right, firm, fixed, settled, an invulnerable self-same self, unchangeable identity through tempest and storm. And as such, acceptable, justified, lifting up the valleys, leveling the mountains. John says, Stop that! All such desperate, that is, hopeless human striving does nothing to prepare the way of the One who comes to us. To the extent that it succeeds, indeed, it blocks his way. It interferes with Him who comes to you, just as you are, without one plea. What, then? John summons us: Look with me instead! Open your eyes now in faith to see the One mightier than I, who comes for you, who baptizes in the Spirit, who preaches good news to the poor. Realize that who you are does not avail. What matters is whose you are!

            Jesus who comes to us is the savior, then, of all who cannot save themselves. This is his glory, the glory that is his alone. On Christmas Day, we shall hear the angel say, “Unto you this day is born in the city of David a savior, who is Christ, the Lord,” and thusly join us with the shepherds to look in Bethlehem and see. And there is absolutely nothing for us to do about that message of a Savior who comes to us but to behold with the shepherds and to believe in the sense that here the Son of God has come to seek and to find also me, indeed, to be born also in me.

As Luther used to say: it does you no good that Christ was born in Bethlehem unless he is born in you today, indeed every day, conferring his identity upon you, Christian, as you are called after Christ who has sought and found you. Later on in the Gospel of John, the Pharisees ask Jesus, “What must we do to be doing the work of God? Jesus answers, “This is the work of God: that you believe in him whom God has sent.” That’s it! Stop looking at your own selves! Stop wondering who you are, what you must do, think or feel! Stop every attempt at fixing your own identity as if to make you invulnerable, especially against the divine change to occur when Christ comes by his Spirit to be born in you! Don’t fall, then, for Satan’s subtle trick of wondering whether you have faith --  that only turns the focus back on me, myself and I. Rather, look outside of yourself with John and behold what God who so loved the world has done in sending his Son – also to you, as you are, where you are. He is the savior. Love caused his incarnation. This is his glory. And there is nothing for you to do about that but to behold and believe – and merely tell the truth, like John, so when asked who you are instead to acclaim whose you are, to testify to Christ your joy.

Like John, we Advent people of God point away from ourselves to the one who is coming, to Christ. We are different –not because we have made ourselves better than others-- our lives are just as broken and needy as any others. But in the midst of our common human brokenness, our lives are transparent to Jesus Christ who comes to us to make us his own. We become different because He is different who claims and wins us, on whom the Spirit of the Lord came and stayed forever, the LORD’s anointed sent to bring good news to the oppressed, to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and release to the prisoners. We are different because our lives point with John the Baptist to Christ, because we for our own selves identify with the oppressed, brokenhearted and captive to whom he comes to proclaim the year of the LORD's favor. That means: it is not who you are, but whose you are!

            Martin Luther once commented on a psalm verse with a similar meaning: ‘The Lord takes pleasure in those who fear Him, in those who hope in His steadfast love:’ “According to this verse,” wrote Luther, “God is by definition nothing else than grace and favor, but only to the humble and afflicted… Therefore He forbids despair as the highest wickedness. He wants us to bear the tribulation in faith; He does not want us to add despair. Presumption about our own righteousness and despair about our unworthiness are equally great sins… Each of us should bear his cross and affliction so that we are not crushed by our sorrows and fall into despair, for that would rob God of his divinity, which He shows primarily in His mercy…” (LW 12:406-7).

All week long you, dear Christian people, you are with John the Baptist put on trial for the Kingdom of God, whether you know it or not, whether you like it or not; on the job, in school, at home, you claimed and baptized people of God are put on the witness stand of life. In whom do you hope? In what do you trust? The only real question here is whether you will point to Christ, the friend and savior of all failures whose self-made identities have shattered on the hard rocks of life. Why is that sometimes so hard?

The devil’s first move is the sneak attack, assailing you with all your failings as if to say, “Look at yourself! See, what as miserable excuse for a Christian you are! How can God love or care about you? What a shameful witness you make!” So he gets your eyes off Christ and back onto your own worthiness. If that fails, the devil then tries the frontal assault, slinging at you the arrows of outrageous fortune, until it seems that the sunshine of the Lord’s favor is beclouded in thickest darkness and the whole world is lost and spinning out of control. Then you go looking in the darkness for some other work of God than the one light that shines in the darkness, the work which God has done in sending his Son to the poor, the captive, the oppressed. Then you get to thinking that you can help God out, by taking charge and straightening things out. And what a mess of things we make then! Now we are going to save not only ourselves but also God. Where do you think that will lead? History is red with the blood which has flowed from those who thought to take the kingdom of God by force, motivated as these were by the secret sin of despair.

            Joy in Christ who comes to us is the Spirit’s antidote to despair. Faith is tested and tried and to the eyes of the world it seems like nothing, as no real identity at all, just religious illusion. But we rejoice always. Waiting on God, pointing to Christ who comes to us instead of boasting of our own works or wisdom or self-made identity, trusting that he comes to us in our sadness as well as our happiness – this patience of faith does not occur naturally to us. It comes by John the Baptist’s model testimony and the Spirit with whom this Mightier One baptizes.

Luther taught us preachers and indeed all Christians to be like John the Baptist: always to urge Christ, provide Christ, point to Christ! Feed the people of God with this message of the One who comes to them, who baptizes them with his own Spirit, who himself preaches good news to the poor so that you who know how tough the life of faith can be may have your joy renewed. I will greatly rejoice in the LORD, my whole being shall exult in my God, says the prophet on behalf of all those to whom and for whom the Lord comes; for he has clothed me with the garments of salvation, he has covered me with the robe of righteousness, as a bridegroom decks himself with a garland, and as a bride adorns herself with her jewels. See now how the Lord now identifies us who merely receive and believe!

Joy springs renewed from the knowledge of divine love that comes for us, works for us, wins us now and forever. This knowledge is Christ, whose people we are. He who came in humble birth at Bethlehem will come at last with power and great glory. But in this interim, Christ comes by the Spirit's testimony that began once and for all with John the Baptist. The joy of the Advent people of God, we poor, oppressed, and captive who are nevertheless beloved, will be complete and never end, singing God all the glory for all his rich mercy in Christ. Amen.

Longing for a New Earth Where Righteousness is at Home

Advent 2, 2023
Isaiah 40, 2 Peter 3, Mark 1

But, in accordance with his promise, we wait for new heavens and a new earth, where righteousness is at home. Can you imagine a world in which righteousness is at home? A world in which no child is unwelcome, neglected, abused, unable to sleep at night for pangs of hunger? A world in which love is never betrayed? A world in which addictions and obsessions do not drive otherwise precious people to madness and the lives of their loved ones into chaos? A world in which greed gives place to generosity, suspicion to trust, and malice to goodwill? Where wars and oppressions shall cease? Our reading today from 2 Peter asks us not only to imagine such a world but to long for it with all our hearts -- and so we do, every time we pray with Jesus to his heavenly Father, the God of Israel, Thy kingdom come! Thy will be done!

The text from 2 Peter today tells us that God’s patience with our wicked world will not last forever, that God’s suffers with the sinfulness of this world in order to give time for repentance, that God’s repentant people therefore live by faith in his promise as those on the way to a new heavens and a new earth, where righteousness is at home.

This was also the message of John the Baptist, proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. Live, he demands, as God’s people on the way to a new earth, where righteousness is at home! Come out, then, from that unrighteousness world of the old humanity, take a bath in the river Jordan for all to see as if transiting from wilderness wanderings to a land flowing with milk and honey! Wash the dirt from your skins as a sign of turning from the filth of sin, with the hope and plea for forgiveness and inclusion on the great day when God’s new world arrives. People of God! You are not at home in the world of unrighteousness but rather yearn for new heavens and a new earth, where righteousness is at home.

This is also message of the remarkable central section of the Book of Isaiah, chapters 40 to 55. Here the prophet preaches to exiles who had been uprooted from Jerusalem by invaders and for forty years now had lived exiled in foreign Babylon. Babylon was the most spectacular city of the world at this time, a monument to imperial glory, decked with slave-built gardens and juggernauts and the temples of many gods. But God’s people have not been at home here. They have not been able to settle down. For all the splendor of ancient Babylon, they longed for little Jerusalem, for Mount Zion and the Temple built by Solomon – how can they sing the Lord’s song in a strange land? They have longed for God to deliver them from exile – as might we all, exiles from Eden that we are.

So after 40 years of exile, the prophet suddenly preaches the gospel: Get you up to a high mountain, O Zion, herald of good tidings; lift up your voice with strength, O Jerusalem, herald of good tidings, lift it up, do not fear; say to the cities of Judah, "Here is your God!" And what is the good tidings or gospel of God’s presence which the prophet proclaims to the exiles? See, the Lord GOD comes with might… He will feed his flock like a shepherd; he will gather the lambs in his arms, and carry them in his bosom, and gently lead the mother sheep. God’s people, who cannot settle down in wicked Babylon, howsoever great and glorious! God’s people, who cannot be at home in a city saturated with idols! God’s people, who cannot go along with the wickedness all around you! Lift up your hearts! God comes. He is on the way. That is the gospel --He will gather you up to bring you to new heavens and a new earth, where righteousness is at home.

            Are you ready for that? Are you really ready to leave behind this world of unrighteousness, no longer to hanker after its fleshpots but like Abraham to follow in faith to new heavens and a new earth? Would you leave the gilded cage of Babylon to return to broken-down Jerusalem? Would you wash away the privileges of our world of unrighteousness in naked hope for a world as yet unseen? A bird in the hand, they say, is worth two in the bush. Better the devil we know, they say, than the devil we don’t. For all its misery and wickedness, this world of unrighteousness all around us has the virtue of being visible and familiar; so we become accustomed to it, settle in and make peace with it. We learn to go along in it to get along and our hearts become attached to its bread and circuses. The season of Advent with John the Baptist wonders about us: Can we tear your hearts free?

In fact when the Jewish exiles in Babylon heard the good tidings that God at last would bring them home to Jerusalem, many resisted; they objected to the uncertainty of the promise and the long difficult travel through the desert through mountain and valleys – new wanderings in the wilderness, like their ancestors had once endured on the way from Egypt to the Promised land.. To this objection, the prophet cried out, in words that Martin Luther King Jr. often voiced to summon courage for the passage: "In the wilderness prepare the way of the LORD, make straight in the desert a highway for our God. Every valley shall be lifted up, and every mountain and hill be made low; the uneven ground shall become level, and the rough places a plain. In other words the LORD who calls you to His new world also promises to be with you on the journey to it. He will make your passage safe and make the road level. He will lead you on the way as a shepherd leads his flock, for He is not only at the goal waiting for you at the end, but guide present now on the difficult road leading you to that new world where righteousness is at home. So do not object that the way is too hard, do not resist because the trip is too demanding, do not doubt that the goal is uncertain. For the glory of the LORD shall certainly be revealed, and all people shall see it together.

            Are you ready then for your Advent journey? Perhaps it is not the fear of the trip or the uncertainty of the goal, but something else, deeper and sneakier, that weighs you down and holds you back. Perhaps you are paralyzed not by fear or doubt but by guilt. Perhaps feelings of shame and unworthiness are such that secretly you do not want that new earth, where righteousness is at home, knowing that you yourself are not righteous, that you would not be at home there. Perhaps like Peter you would respond to the Lord’s call to follow him to a world in which righteousness is at home by saying, “Depart from me for I am a sinful man!” The prophet of the Babylonian exile sensed this same resistance when he preached the good news that God is coming. That is why he began his gospel of deliverance for sinners complicit with their exile announcing God’s majestic forgiveness: Comfort, O comfort my people, says your God. Never mind, in other words: no matter how bad you feel or how guilty you may really be: God is ready and rich with mercy, ready to forgive and just so God makes you ready, just by saying so with divine enforcement authority. God’s Word does it all.

"See, I am sending my messenger ahead of you, who will prepare your way; the voice of one crying out in the wilderness: 'Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.'" Whether it is the prophet preparing exiles to march across the desert from Babylon to Jerusalem or John the Baptizer preparing the people of first century Judea for the coming of the Messiah, or your preacher today in our little corner of a world where righteousness is not at home, God’s Word does it all, for the mouth of the LORD has spoken. God’s Word makes us ready: it forgives sins, it makes us long for the Promised Land where righteousness is at home, it frees us from addictions to the unrighteousness goods of this world. God’s Word does it all. The people are grass, their constancy is like the flower of the field. The grass withers, the flower fades; but the word of our God will stand forever.

The eternal gospel, the mighty Word of God spoken beforehand as in prophets like the second Isaiah, but once for all in the coming of Jesus Christ at his birth in Bethlehem makes us God’s people; it puts us on our Advent way to join true and faithful Israel, to await new heavens and a new earth, where righteousness is at home. There proud Babylon will be but a dim sad memory. “Fallen, fallen is Babylon the great!” says the Bible’s final book. But the word of our God will stand forever, just as we heard Jesus say last week, “Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will last forever.” Are you ready?

Lend your ears to God’s glad tidings, set your hearts on His promise of a new earth, where righteousness is at home.  Pray fervently and mean it, Thy kingom come thy will be done on earth as in heaven! – and look, just so Lord has made you ready! Christ is born anew in your hearts. He is our righteousness, and He makes himself at home even in our wayward hearts, so that we are no longer at home in our world of unrighteousness. But with Abraham who left his home and family to go the place that God would show him, with the Hebrews on the way from the dark Egypt of this world through the wilderness trials and testings to the promised land, with the exiles returning through the desert, deserting the ill-gotten glories of Babylon to embrace lowly Zion, city of our God, so we too are set out on our Advent journey, looking for the coming of the Christ, the Messiah, the coming King of the new earth, where righteousness is at home. Grant it, Lord, to us all. Amen. 

ADVENT 1, 2023

Advent 1 – 2023

Mark 13:24-37

The End of All Things

            The end of all things! That has been the topic for the final weeks of the church year this past month, and look, once again it is the topic at its new beginning in the season of Advent. For the end is already present in the beginning.

The end of all things! The expression has a double meaning. Our word, end, is used in two ways. We use the word, end, to say, ‘It’s over, it’s done, it’s finished’ – like when time runs out on the clock, the ref blows the whistle, the game has ended. But we also use the word, end, a little less commonly to say: ‘Here’s the point, the goal, the purpose’ – like when we say, ‘The end does not justify the means.’ You can have good goal, say, winning the war on terrorism, but that does not justify any means of winning, say, like using terrorist tactics in turn. So the word, end, has a double meaning: the finish of things and the goal of things. This is also true of the Greek word, eschatos, found in the Bible, from which the theological word, eschatology, comes, meaning the doctrine of the end of all things. When Jesus speaks of the last things in Mark 13, he speaks both about the finish of history and the goal of history. Because we believe in God, we don’t think either the beginning or the end of things is an accident. God created the world with a purpose and when that purpose is achieved, we have come to the end of all things. So the end is already present in the beginning.

            People are fascinated by the last things. Notoriously, some ransack the Bible looking for clues about the day and the hour, expressing disobeying the word of Jesus that we have heard today: But about that day or hour no one knows, neither the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father. Beware, keep alert; for you do not know when the time will come. The timing is not part of the revelation of Jesus Christ. We are meant to be ignorant of the day and hour, so that we live everyday ready for the end of all things. From the fig tree learn its lesson: as soon as its branch becomes tender and puts forth its leaves, you know that summer is near. But doesn’t that sound like timing? Knowing the signs of the times? Here’s the difference: the cosmos may not yet be finished but your little world within it might. In fact this 13th chapter of Mark was originally composed to interpret the coming doom of Jerusalem as the Roman legions approached, advising the Christian community there to flee to the hills. Discourse put this foreboding historical event into the larger framework of God’s purposes. Likewise so are we to do. The cosmos may not be finished, but are little worlds within it might.

The truth, then, is that not only is there the Big End, but until and up to that cosmic big End of all things, we experience in history and in our little lives such endings, Christians are to understand these as dress rehearsals so to speak – not the end of time but the time of the End breaking in upon us. The death and resurrection of the cosmos at the big End is prefigured in our little experiences of trial, testing, loss, grief, when our own little worlds come crashing down. Christians need to know how to read such ‘signs of the times,’ lest they despair and think that even God has lost control of things, so that they persevere in adversity. It is like a man going on a journey, when he leaves home and puts his slaves in charge, each with his work, and commands the doorkeeper to be on the watch. Christians live between the first and second comings of Christ, having the promise that the end of all things is in His almighty hands, living now by faith and not sight, trusting, praying, working their own little worlds into the goal of God. Therefore, keep awake-- for you do not know when the master of the house will come, in the evening, or at midnight, or at cockcrow, or at dawn, or else he may find you asleep when he comes suddenly.

In other words, if you are not prepared today, you will never be prepared. I remember when my mother was suddenly stricken and lay dying. I remember praying, ‘Lord, I am not ready for this!’ As painful as losing her was to me, however, I was by the grace of God prepared for this little end of my own little world – just as all faithful Christians are. For believers know that life is a gift, that life can never be taken for granted, that God entrusts us with our time that we may spend it wisely not foolishly, that we live alert and awake to God, ready every day to render an account. Every time of trial and tribulation is for us but a dress rehearsal of that great Day of God, the end of all things – if only today and ever day we live alert and awake to God whose kingdom comes, knowing that whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord’s.

We can live this way because of the word and promise of Jesus:  Truly I tell you, this generation will not pass away until all these things have taken place. Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away. And what I say to you I say to all: Keep awake! See, what he said to Peter, James and John, he also says to us today. If that were not bold enough, however, he says that his own words endure forever. What an astonishing contrast. All that we take for granted as fixed and immovable, the sun and stars and moon and earth, the very cosmos, right down to our own little worlds, has had its beginning at God’s command; having served its purpose, so too at God’s command, all comes to completion in the consummation of all things. But the human words of Jesus, uttered in a breath and evaporated into the air, in one ear and out the other, nevertheless outlive the cosmos.

Careless readers think that Jesus in our text admits ignorance of God’s timing and thus makes himself inferior to the Father. But they should read on a little longer to see that Jesus speaks of his human words as divine and eternal words. . Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away. And this is why we have peace that passes all understanding, in life and in death, good times and bad and indeed, best of all, nothing to fear on that great Day of God, the end of all things. We may not know how things finish, but we do know that the Father of the Son Jesus Christ works all things for good to them who love Him, that the goal of God in our own little lives and indeed with all the cosmos, is the creation of Beloved Community, a fellowship of love divine, and that we are by grace included in this – and even taste it already now, amid trials and testings, by faith. Revealed in the eternal words of Jesus Christ is the goal of God: beloved community.

For when we see 'the Son of Man coming in clouds' with great power and glory... he will send out the angels, and gather his elect from the four winds, from the ends of the earth to the ends of heaven. To gather God’s people forever – that is the end of all things, the goal, the purpose, the point of God’s creation from the very beginning! St Paul called it the Body of Christ, knit together in the Spirit’s love under Jesus its Head. St John in the Revelation sees the peoples of many families, tribes, and nations streaming into the New Jerusalem. St Augustine called it the City or Society of God, immensely diverse and variegated in its peoples of every age and race and epoch of history, yet united by a common love for God above all and all things in and under God. Martin Luther spoke of God’s people baked together in one loaf, ‘a little holy flock or community of pure saints under one Head, Christ.’ Dietrich Bonhoeffer spoke in the words from the Apostles’ Creed concerning the communion of saints/communion in holy things, both their sharing in the holy things of the Eucharist and their sharing of life together now and forever. Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke in the same Christian tradition of God’s Beloved Community, where people would not longer be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.

Now we still live tangled up with what God does not choose, but what sinful humanity chooses with its wars and rumors of war. But we persevere as those who in faith know the end of all things. For the present, this is life is becoming not being, labor not rest, the journey not the destination. The City of God is the goal, to which in its fullness and glory and final victory we have not yet arrived. But we are on the way, thanks be to God, to His end of all things! And even if we stumble and fall on the way, even though scattered and oppressed, at the end of all things we await the Lord who gathers us to Himself forever, to whom be all glory now and forever. Amen.

Announcing the Sermon-of-the-Week feature coming soon

Every Monday, in anticipation of the coming Sunday’s appointed Scripture lessons from the Revised Common Lectionary, this blog will publish a model sermon of exegetical and theological seriousness for the task of preaching. Readers are free to contextualize, adapt or otherwise utilize the model sermon without need of attribution. The blog will begin with the first Sunday of Advent 2023.