Sermon for Easter 3B, April 19, 2015

Text: Luke 24:36-49

            Beloved in Christ, one of the serious dangers the church has always faced is to make Christ less than He really is. Most people don’t have a problem with believing in a God who is all-powerful. They do have a problem with believing in an all-powerful God who gets so much into the muck and mire of our life that He will take on our human nature. Most people don’t have a problem with a holy man who spouts off pearls of great wisdom. They do have a problem with a holy man who is also true God. Most people don’t have a problem with the idea that something in a human being survives death—a soul or some such thing. They do have a problem with someone rising from the dead and continuing to exist in body as well as soul. In short, most people don’t want a real Lord God in the flesh. And once He has been killed off, they don’t want Him back in the flesh again. They don’t want Him standing authoritatively in their midst.

            But we in the Christian church want no other Jesus. When the disciples thought that Jesus was merely a ghost, they were frightened. Only when they realized that it truly was the risen Lord were their hearts calmed. A ghostly Jesus terrifies. A risen Lord in the flesh brings comfort.

            Think of the comfort that our Lord brings and think of the comfort that some people would substitute. Every so often you hear people say after a loved one has died, “As long as we remember them, they will live on in our hearts.” That sentiment is cold comfort. After all, we are all forgetful. Does that mean that whenever we forget our loved one, even just for a while, they have ceased to exist? It’s a ridiculous and cruel notion. And if we believed that about Christ, it would give us no hope.

            After all, we want more than just memories. We face flesh-and-blood problems. We need a flesh-and-blood Savior. We need a Savior who was so flesh-and-blood that He could march into death to deal with our very real sins. And we need a flesh-and-blood Savior who has risen again to give us forgiveness and new life. We need a flesh-and-blood Savior who will continue to work in and through us, as He daily forgives our sins and guides us in paths of righteousness. An idea or a memory is not enough for us Christians. Anything less than the real Jesus—the real God in human flesh—won’t cut it.

            But where do we meet this risen Savior? I think most of us would naturally think of the Lord’s Supper, where our risen Lord gives us His very body and blood under the bread and wine. Most certainly He is there—in the flesh. He is there in perhaps the most powerful way that we can imagine. He brings His very body and blood that won our salvation. He not only shows His body and blood to us, but He gives us these very things for us to eat and to drink, to assimilate them into our very being, so that He and we can be closely bound for all eternity. But it is not a dead Lord who does these things, but the very much alive Jesus Christ. For just as it was the living Christ who instituted the sacrament on Maundy Thursday, so it is the Christ who lives again who continues to serve as our host at this most holy meal. Here we encounter Christ as in no other way—as host and banquet—as we come with hungry souls in weary bodies.

            Not that that is not the only place we encounter the risen Lord. No, when we were baptized, we were united in a very real and powerful way with His death and resurrection, yes, with Christ Himself. But today’s Gospel reminds us that we encounter our risen Lord in another way, namely, through the Scriptures. The Scriptures are about Jesus Christ from beginning to end, from Genesis to the Revelation. And when those Scriptures are read, the Holy Spirit brings us fully into the presence of our Lord Jesus Christ.

            But you may say, “Is the Old Testament about Jesus? After all, He hadn’t been born then.” But from beginning to end, the Bible is about Christ. He was there when we were created, for He, the Father, and the Holy Spirit held a special conference before creating us and they agreed, “Let us make man in our own image.” And as soon as mankind turned to sin, His birth was foretold. He would be the “offspring of the woman.” Since nothing was mentioned about His being an offspring of a man, one could already understand that He would have no earthly father but would be born of a virgin. He would come to “crush [the devil’s] head,” even though it would come at the great pain of having His heel bruised.

            With the dawn of every new era, there would be a further prophecy given about what He would be like. After the flood, Shem was told that he would be the ancestor of Christ; several centuries later, Abraham was told the same; and then Abraham was told that this blessing would come through Isaac, not through Ishmael. Generation by generation this promise was passed down: to Isaac, to Jacob, and then to Judah. Before Jacob died, He foretold how Christ would come from Judah, but only when Judah would lose total control over its people, which occurred when Pilate took away the right for the Jewish council to hear capital cases. (Even in exile, the Jewish community had retained that right.)

            Now as we turn to Exodus, you might think that here the story wanders away from Christ, but that would be wrong. God delivered the Israelites from slavery to the Egyptians, but it was no mere political act or military act on God’s part. After all, there have been all sorts of oppressed nations throughout world history. Why did God single out the Israelites? He wanted to foreshadow the sort of deliverance that God would provide through the Messiah. Just as the blood of the Passover lamb spared the Israelites from death and set them from bondage, so too our Lord’s death set us free from bondage to sin and death. Just as God commanded the building of the tabernacle and instituted the office of high priest, so Christ would be our true temple and our great high priest. Israel was called to be God’s people and to bring His light and salvation to the whole world, but they ultimately failed. That is why Christ had to come.

            This is underscored by two passages in the books written by Moses. You see, you could get the false impression that the first five books of the Bible (called the Pentateuch) are just about Moses delivering the Israelites and establishing a new nation. You might think, as the Jews today still do, that Moses’ law was the culmination of all of Israel’s hopes, and that was that. But in one of Moses’ last sermons he said that God would raise up a greater prophet than himself, for He would speak with the very voice of God. Shortly before he had said those words, the prophet Balaam had outlined Israel’s history, from Israel’s settling in the Promised Land to the coming of the Romans. But as far as Balaam was concerned, everything revolved around “the Star of Jacob,” the one whose coming would not happen for centuries, but whose coming would change everything.

            The Prophets added further details to what the Law of Moses had revealed. So too did the Psalms. We do not have time now to explain all the passages in the Bible that foretold the life, death, and resurrection of Christ. Several come to mind. David was told that He would be the ancestor of our Lord. Micah foretold that Christ would be born in Bethlehem. Isaiah gave such complete descriptions of our Lord’s life and ministry that he has been called “the fifth evangelist.” Indeed, Handel’s Messiah, which tells the life of Christ, is drawn largely from Isaiah, not from the four New Testament gospels. In all the prophetic books of the Old Testament you see a common pattern. The prophet will complain about the wickedness of his generation and call people to repent, but he will also point forward to the coming of Christ. The Messianic promises are almost always an exact antidote to the current problems that the prophet was facing.

            Of course, that’s still true today. Just as the Old Testament Scriptures proclaimed “that the Christ should suffer and on the third day rise from the dead” so “that repentance and forgiveness of sins” could be also preached, so we in the New Testament proclaim that Christ has died and risen from the dead and we call people to repent of their sins and to receive the forgiveness of their sins.

            Beloved in Christ, may you understand the Scriptures fully and believe what they are saying, and thereby meet the real flesh-and-blood Jesus who has risen from the dead! Amen.

Sermon for Easter 2B, April 12, 2015

Text: John 20:19-31

            Beloved in Christ, we spent several weeks in Lent considering the way of the cross. We saw that we are redeemed by Christ’s death on the cross. We also learned that Christ’s cross sets the pattern for our lives, for we too are called to serve rather than to be served. But we live in the days after Easter. We wouldn’t for a second deny the death of Jesus Christ or say that it was unimportant. But we know how the story ends. It ends with Christ rising from the dead on the third day, vanquishing death for Himself and for us. And so we cannot live as if Christ remains dead and our joys have all been vanquished. What are we to do?

            Today’s Gospel gives us the answer. Here we meet some of the first people to learn that Jesus had risen from the dead. More importantly, Jesus Himself directs them so that they would do what the church would do ever since, at least until He returns in glory. Christ appeared to the disciples twice in today’s Gospel, and we learn something important from each visit.

            First, we see that Christ commissioned the church to deal with sins—forgiving repentant sinners and withholding forgiveness from the unrepentant. In fact, that is why the church exists at all. If we ignore sin or if we ignore the atonement for sin, we really have no reason for existing at all. We would be just another club or social organization. But we exist because sin is a serious matter. Sin is a problem for every human being, for the pious as well as the ungodly, for the enforcers of the law as well as the outlaws. Sin is a problem that we cannot extricate ourselves from. The more we struggle, the deeper we fall into the quicksand and mire of sin. It is for that reason Jesus Christ had to die on the cross in our place and rise to give us new life.

            You don’t believe that sin is that much of a problem? Just ask your spouse, who can fill you on some details you may have overlooked. Or, if you are single, ask any neighbor who knows you well; or consider that you have a number of ex-girlfriends or ex-boyfriends who are more than willing to say why you weren’t perfect. But I would hope that you wouldn’t have to look that far. Instead, I would hope that you would see that the same problems that we complain about as prevailing in the world also exist in you, although on a smaller scale. The same rage that leads nations to war is in you. You may never harm another person physically, but that doesn’t mean that you are exempt from that rage. Maybe overall you are overall a fairly calm individual, but don’t tell me that there haven’t been moments when your anger just bubbled up to the surface and you vented it. We could say the same about all the other attitudes that lie behind open rebellion, sexual misconduct, thievery and robbery, and every other vice that we don’t like on the grand scale.

            Nearly two thousand years of life after Easter hasn’t brought evil to an end, inside or outside of the Christian church. We continue to stand in need of God’s forgiveness. We continue to need the words spoken by Jesus, “Peace be with you.” We continue to need the wounds of Jesus on “His hands and His side.” Yes, we continue to meditate on them, to poke and to prod, for “by His wounds have we been made whole.” Easter does not end our need for a Savior. Instead, Easter proclaims that our Savior has triumphed.

            But Christ does more than forgive us. He commissions the church, especially her pastors, to forgive sins wherever Christ Himself would forgive our sins. Thus, Christ sends the church on a mission, just as He Himself was sent by the Father. The Father sent Him to make atonement for the sins of the world. Christ now commissions us to bring the benefits of that atonement to wherever it is needed and to proclaim His Word so that people can come to faith in Him and so be saved.

            It is with that mission in mind that our Lord imparts the Holy Spirit. Note why our Lord says that He is doing this. It isn’t so that we can roll around in the pews or do other crazy antics. It is all about forgiveness and withholding forgiveness. Let me start with the latter. There are times when the church (and her pastors) must withhold forgiveness. Given that this is mentioned last, you would (rightly) assume that this is less common than imparting forgiveness. But there are still times when we must withhold forgiveness. It has nothing to do with us adopting a peevish attitude or bearing a grudge toward someone. Rather, when people are unrepentant, we cannot give them God’s forgiveness. They don’t want it, anyway, and it would be pointless to give it to them. Instead, they would come to think that God’s forgiveness is a meaningless phrase, rather than something won at great cost—the cost of our Lord’s life.

            Therefore, we explain God’s Law carefully so that everyone will know how holy God is and what sort of things He expects out of us. When we hear this Law, we should be moved to see ourselves as sinners who need forgiveness or else we will be doomed forever. When we see ourselves for who we are—a microcosm of the world’s problems, as I mentioned before—then the good news of the forgiveness of sins makes sense. More than that, we desperately want it and greatly appreciate it when it is offered.

            Moreover, we will see that the thing that most radically transforms people and entire societies is understanding that they have been forgiven by God for Christ’s sake. Don’t accept any substitute for that wonderful gift. Don’t substitute self-forgiveness for God’s forgiveness. You hear people saying, “You’ve got to learn to forgive yourself.” Poppycock. Only a self-centered, self-indulgent egomaniac would have the gall to forgive himself or herself. Such forgiveness would actually be a grave sin. But God’s forgiveness—that’s what we really want. We want none other than the Creator of the universe to say that our sins have been dealt with once and for all, and we are now innocent before Him. And when He forgives our sins, we can look forward to the future. We are no longer bound by our past sins. Instead we are marked with the new life that He gives us. We are free to walk in new paths of righteousness rather than in the well-worn trails of evil. We can strive to live as children of God, not because we have achieved perfection or soon will, but because we live with God’s favor and good will.

            The church exists, therefore, as something distinct from all other entities in society. We are not about educating, networking, creating technology, organizing activities, providing entertainment, or doing any of 1001 other such activities. Individual Christians may have callings to do those things, but that is not the church’s mission. Instead, we provide the forgiveness of sins. It is as simple as that—and as radical as that.

            So far I have talked about what the church and especially her pastors do. But how are individual Christians supposed to respond? Here we look at the second time that our risen Lord appeared to the disciples. From that incident we learn that we are to live by faith, not by sight.

            When our Lord rose from the dead, He did not continuously stay with His disciples. He appeared to them now and then until forty days after His resurrection, when He removed Himself entirely from their sight for good. He had a good reason for doing this. For the previous three years they had shared all their waking moments with Him. They had eaten their meals together, wandered from town to town together, stayed in the same homes together—in short, done everything together. But our Lord wanted them to know that He would still be with them, although they would not see Him as before. And so He popped in and out several times. When He came, He reminded them that He would always be with them and would leave His peace with them. When He disappeared, He was getting them used to living by faith, not by sight.

            Unfortunately, Thomas did not understand this truth. He was used to the old way of “seeing is believing.” He had to see Jesus before he would believe in Him. More than that, he demanded the right to poke and prod to see that it really was Jesus. The Greek is rather blunt about what Thomas was asking. He didn’t just ask to “place [his] finger into the mark of the nails.” More accurately, you might translate it that he wanted to “thrust” it there.

            Jesus warned Thomas—and us—not to put aside God’s Word in order to demand something “better” or “more trustworthy.” The Word is all that we have. Few people in world history would be privileged to see the wounds of Christ. Instead most of humanity would have to rely on His Word as it was preached by His pastors throughout the centuries. But Jesus said that that Word was sufficient. As Jesus noted elsewhere, people really don’t believe even when they see something miraculous. Yes, even if someone were to come back from the dead, it wouldn’t mean that people would get over their skepticism. Either people believe that Word or they don’t. That is the way it has to be until Christ returns in glory.

            Beloved in Christ, our Lord has spoken through the apostles this word of forgiveness. May you take it to heart and believe and so be blessed. In Jesus’ name. Amen.

Sermon for Easter, April 5, 2015

Text: Mark 16:1-8

            Beloved in Christ, how are we supposed to react to Easter? Over the centuries we have developed a script as to what to do: we place lilies in our churches and in our homes; we might put on new clothes; and we devour eggs and chocolate. These are all customs developed by Christians over the centuries to show their great joy in the Lord’s resurrection. Lilies are one of the earliest flowers to break through the winter landscape as a harbinger of spring. So too our Lord has broken through the landscape of a humanity pockmarked by death and heralded our own resurrection on the Last Day. New clothes remind us that we have been clothed with the righteousness of God and the joy of Christ’s resurrection. The eggs and the chocolate proclaim that the season of Lenten penance is over and the joy of Easter has begun.

            Those customs are fine in and of themselves. But the first Easter wasn’t like that. The women who went to Christ’s tomb weren’t wearing new Easter bonnets while nibbling on chocolate eggs. They were going to deal with a grave matter—literally. They were going to arrange further our Lord’s body. They had hastily placed His corpse in the tomb since the Sabbath was about to begin that Friday evening. They had wrapped Him in a shroud and put a minimum amount of spices on Him. Now they were going to go back and do a proper job. They knew that His body would soon decay, and they couldn’t stop that. But they could put spices all around it so that it would stink less when they came back in a year or so to put His bones in a box called an ossuary. It was a dreary task.

            But Easter surprised them. We are told, “Trembling and astonishment…seized them.” And I pray that you too will be surprised by Easter. Sure, you may know the Easter story, but may its message take hold of you as it did the women at the tomb.

            I suppose we shouldn’t be surprised to hear Mark write in his gospel, “Trembling and astonishment had seized them.” It may be some of the last words that Mark wrote, but he had been saying something like that all along in his gospel. As we have been reading the gospel of Mark, we have seen again and again how Christ acted with great power, as He cast out demons, taught the perplexed, and healed the sick. But there is also a corollary: wherever Jesus went, people marveled at Him. The demons trembled at His presence; the people in the synagogues were astonished at His teaching with authority; and the sick and helpless were utterly amazed at what He had done. All along Christ had been bringing God’s kingdom in great power, which had made people tremble and be astonished. Why should His resurrection from the dead be any different?

            Now you may ask, though: Why should people tremble at the thought of Christ’s resurrection? The answer is clear enough: Every time people in the Bible encountered God, they trembled and were afraid. Even when God or one of His angels was bringing a piece of good news, everyone’s first reaction was one of fear. Why? We are sinful human beings and so we are naturally afraid of God. Adam and Eve were not afraid of God at first, when they lived pleasantly in the Garden of Eden. But when they had broken His commandment, they cowered in fear ever thereafter. They knew that judgment rightly followed sin.

            The women who went to the tomb were also rightly afraid. They thought of how righteous our Lord had been. Indeed, He was the one human being in all of history who never committed a sin. Now if such a righteous person could be grabbed off the street, unjustly tried and condemned, and then led off to execution, what could happen to a person like you and me who could not claim such innocence? And if God had stepped back and let this all happen to a person without the slightest fault, what sort of justice should we expect from God? They were afraid before they had even approached the tomb. The smallest of things, no matter how benign, would have only sent them over the edge.

            And then they discovered that God wasn’t doing a small deed. He was dealing with life and death. He was turning everything upside down and inside out. He had condemned His innocent Son so that we guilty ones could be exonerated. He had brought the Prince of Life into the bowels of death and up to the gates of hell so that we who had been marked by death might know life. This is all more than we can take in. And if we have any sensibility at all, it does strike a bit of fear into us.

            But it should also astonish us. Now at last we see what sort of a God we have and what sort of a Savior. If we were looking earlier in the Gospel of Mark, we would have seen a wonderful teacher well worth studying. We would have seen a person who brought healing to a sick world. We would have seen someone who spoke truth even to the powers that be. All of those things are good. But we have seen other people do similar things. We have seen wise people offer us their learned insights. We have some physicians heal horrible diseases. We have seen people challenge injustices in the world. All of those things are admirable, but not necessarily astonishing. What is really astonishing is that someone was willing to go into the depths of death and hell in order to redeem us from them—and that this someone was none other than true God.

            As we see Christ risen from the dead, we learn that He did not die as one more martyr to a cause or one more victim of a cruel world. Instead we see someone who wanted to transform the world deeper than we ever could. He came to do more than make us wiser or healthier. He came to restore us as creations of God, holy and righteous before Him. He came to bring us back into fellowship with Himself. He came to put an end to the death sentence that has stood over humanity for millennia. By rising from the dead He guaranteed that we will all rise from the dead on the Last Day and that all who believe in Him will have eternal life. There have been many great men and women over the centuries, but nobody else has done such an astounding feat.

            Even more astonishing is how deeply God loves us. That is now apparent, as never before, now that Christ has been raised from the dead. Now God’s whole plan has been laid out in front of us. It is as clear as day. We see how His great love for us moved Him to send His Son to become one of us. And the Son of God loved us so much that He became like one of us. He was carried in His mother’s womb as each of us were. He was born as we were. He grew up like one of us, complete with skinned knees and all the other childhood frustrations. And though He had an amazing career, He chose to be like us in one more way: He chose to die, even as we do. But more than merely die like one of us, He took on all our deaths. He faced the loneliness and pain that we fear will mark our own deaths. He did all this because He loved us.

            But then He rose from the dead—not just for His sake, but for our own as well. You see, He wanted this to be a shared experience. This was not just going to be His private little victory, but the victory for all of humanity over death. Just as He became like us in every respect even to the point of death, so He will make us like Him in rising from the dead. It may take some time before we experience this. Already the church has been waiting for two millennia. But one day our Lord will return in glory and raise our bodies to be like His glorious body. Why? Because He loves us. A lifetime with Him is too short a time, He thinks. He wants to spend eternity with us.

            In fact, what God will do in and through us because of Easter is no less astonishing. The cowardly disciples would become pillars of the faith. A persecutor of the church would be made into an apostle. A small band of hopeless people would become a mighty church that would spread into all continents and embrace billions of people. People who had given themselves to every vice or who despised God or didn’t even believe in Him would be changed as they lived lives of faith in Him, now revering Him and walking in His commandments and trusting fully in His promises.

            Yes, Easter remains astonishing to this very day. Let us not be so overwhelmed with all the conventions of chocolate and Easter bonnets and the like that we overlook just what an amazing day it is. Let us with trembling and astonishment join the saints over the last twenty centuries as we contemplate exactly what God has done in raising Christ from the dead. In Jesus’ name. Amen.

Sermon for Good Friday (April 3, 2015): The Fruit of the Spirit: Self-Control

            Beloved in Christ, we have been considering the fruit of the Spirit this Lenten season. As we have been looking at each aspect of the fruit of the Spirit, we have seen how it was most visible in the life and death of our Lord Jesus Christ. This is no less true of the last aspect, which we explore tonight: self-control. Christ exhibited this virtue in a way that no other person has ever done before or after.

            First of all, there is the fact that He allowed Himself to be crucified—and stayed on the cross. Now you and I have a hard time following through and completing difficult tasks. Sometimes we are able to stick with it and get everything finished. Other times we get distracted or frustrated or bored or tired and give up. We’ve all had those occasions when we’ve undertaken a major project and vowed that we would complete it all in one day. We work for several hours and realize that it is bigger than we had imagined. And we may just give up and say that we’ll complete the task the next day or sometime in the future—and then we never get around to it. But that is not what Christ did.

            He could have said, “It’s not worth it” and walked away from the cross. He could have said, “This is more than I had bargained for.” He could have pulled rank, using His divine nature to loosen Himself from the cross, scatter the Roman soldiers, and smite all who had wrongly condemned Him or mocked Him. But He didn’t use His divine nature to free Himself from the pain. Instead He joined His divine nature with His human nature so that it intensified what He was going through infinitely. Had He suffered as one more human being, He could have saved one person. But because He suffered as true God and true Man, joined together for all time, He was able to suffer on behalf of all people and save all.

            That took a high degree of self-control. It’s one thing to use your self-control to keep soldiering on when times are tough. It’s quite another thing to use that self-control to ratchet up the intensity of the task. And yet that is what our Lord did.

            Next, we see our Lord’s self-control in the way that He forgave other people, especially the way He forgave those who were crucifying Him. Again, think of how you and I would have handled the situation. We would have said, “Fine. I’ve got to do this painful task because it will help humanity. But I won’t forget the people who were responsible for doing this. Those Roman soldiers will regret the way they’ve had their fun with me, scourging me and mocking me with a crown of thorns. They’ll be sorry they ever drove a nail in my hands or gambled over my clothing. And I won’t forget the lying witnesses, the high priests, the Sanhedrin, Pontius Pilate, and all the rest.” You see, we may do what we are ordered to do, but we aren’t going to let off the hook those who made our life miserable.

            And yet what does Christ do? He forgives even the people who had carried out the execution. He charitably said of them, “They know not what they do.” They weren’t complete innocents. They knew that they were being needlessly cruel, but that’s how they always behaved. They didn’t understand that He wasn’t a person they should treat in that way. And so He asked His Father to forgive them. He showed self-control rather than the natural anger we would have shown.

            Another way He showed self-control was that He refrained from drinking the sour wine until the very end. The soldiers had taken vinegary wine and added myrrh as a pain-reliever. However, Jesus had refused to drink it. He would bear the full pain of the cross. If He had deadened the pain somewhat, He might have left some people out when He was atoning for the world’s sins. And He didn’t want that.

            We are told that the fifth word our Lord spoke was “I thirst.” But note when our Lord said those words: He said it when He “[knew] that all was now finished.” Not until the job was finished would He ask for a little relief from His pain and thirst. Also note why He said it: “to fulfill the Scripture.” Psalm 69, which had predicted Christ’s crucifixion, had said, “When I was thirsty, [My enemies] gave Me vinegar to drink.” If He had had to forego that drink of vinegar and myrrh, He could have. But the psalm had predicted that His enemies would “poison [His] food and…give [Him] vinegar to drink.” And thus He allowed Himself to drink that wretchedly spiked potion.

            In one last way He showed self-control, and that is how He addressed His Father. You would have expected Him to have railed against Him, complaining how unfair it was for Him to bear mankind’s burden. We are tempted to curse God when life becomes hard. At the very least we want to mutter and complain. But Christ did not.

            Now He did say, “My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?” At first glance, that sentence appears to be a complaint against God. But our Lord was quoting the opening lines of Psalm 22, and He expected everyone who heard Him quote the Psalm to think not only of the first verse but of the entire Psalm. You see, in biblical days people assumed that you knew the whole context and were thinking about more than just the line quoted. For us it is different. We quote lines from movies all the time, completely oblivious to their context. If the jingle fits, we’ll use it. But that’s not how people in Christ’s day would have handled quotations, especially from the Scripture. They would think not just about the words being quoted, but also the broader context.

            And the Psalm that Christ quoted—Psalm 22—poignantly sets forth His suffering and death, but also proclaims the resurrection from the dead that would follow. Thus, when our Lord quoted the first verse, He was showing His confidence in His Father in the end to deliver Him from the grave. He professed His willingness to continue to undergo all that He was experiencing because He knew that it would end well for Him. Although He would naturally feel abandoned by His Father, He knew that that was not the end of the matter. For even though He was experiencing the full fury of His Father’s wrath, that would come to an end and He would be vindicated by being raised from the dead.

            That is why He was also able to pray later on that day, “Father, into Your hands I commit My spirit.” He did not have control over His own life, but He exercised self-control so that the power would really rest in His Father’s hands.

            I have spoken quite a bit about Christ and the way that He exercised self-control. Well, what about us? If I’m going to talk about self-control, shouldn’t I talk at great length about how we should resolve to go out and do likewise? Shouldn’t the whole point of this sermon—indeed, of the whole Lenten season—be to motivate us to be better people? And yet, every time that I have talked about us in this sermon, I have contrasted how weak our self-control is compared with the vigor of our Lord’s self-control on the cross. Shouldn’t I praise us more or at least say that we can approach His level of virtue? Isn’t that what Christianity is all about?

            No. It is not. I certainly want you to grow in all the virtues. I certainly want you to bear the fruit of the Spirit in you. I want you to excel as disciples of our Lord Jesus Christ. But never, ever think that you can attain the same level of virtue as our Lord Jesus Christ. Never, ever think that you can become so virtuous that you will no longer need a Savior. Jesus remains the only completely holy person ever to have lived. Even on the best of our days we show far less self-control than He did on one of His most relaxed days. And we certainly could never imitate the self-control He showed on the cross.

            But that is all right. Good Friday is all about Jesus and what He has done and the virtue that He has shown. It’s not really about us—or it’s about us in the sense that we are receiving His good gifts. Nonetheless, confessing our feebleness and having received the benefits of His self-control and of all His other virtues, let us be moved to grow in holiness of life and imitate Him as best we can. Let that happen not because we will ever be our own Saviors, but rather because we hold our Savior dear. In Jesus’ name. Amen.

Homily for Maundy Thursday (April 2, 2015): Fruit of the Spirit: Gentleness

Text: Mark 14:12-26

            Beloved in Christ, during our Lenten midweek services we have been looking at various aspects of the fruit of the Spirit. Altogether there are nine, and they can be grouped into clusters of three. First are the three general internal attitudes that permeate our being: love, joy, and peace. Next come the three attitudes that help us deal with external matters, especially when people are less than nice toward us: patience, kindness, and goodness. And then there are the last three, which help us to have the fortitude and persistence to live as new creations in Christ: faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. Within those last three, we see a different relationship emphasized: we are to be faithful to God, gentle toward others, and possessing self-control with respect to our own selves.

            Tonight we speak of gentleness. You could also translate it “meekness,” for it comes from the same root as the word “meek” that we read in the Beatitudes: “Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.” People who are gentle or meek are not arrogant. They don’t think that other people exist purely for their own pleasure. They don’t stomp on others just so that they can get their own way.

            Well, what do we learn about meekness or gentleness from tonight’s readings? As always, that virtue is to be found in our Lord Jesus Christ. Since He is the holy Son of God in human flesh, you wouldn’t expect anything less out of Him. He submitted Himself wholly to the law. But more than that, He kept what the law did not even demand. He was meek and gentle toward us human beings when that was not required. God had commanded, “love your neighbor as yourself.” But Christ went beyond the call of duty in loving others wholeheartedly and in a sacrificial way. He did not pull rank on us, but “humbled Himself by becoming obedient, even to the point of death.”

            I mention Christ’s meekness for a couple of reasons. First, He does indeed serve as an example of real Christian virtue and the fulfillment of the law. That is why the Scriptures commend Christ’s humble obedience and urge us to have the same mind that Christ did. But there is a second reason to mention His meekness and that is to enjoy the fruits of all that He has done. He was meek not merely so that we also could be meek. He was meek so that we could be saved. For He knew that the only way to redeem an arrogant humanity was by embracing the way of gentleness and meekness.

            In today’s gospel we see three traces of His gentleness and meekness, one in each of the larger paragraphs. First, He humbly celebrated the Passover in rented space. He could have demanded the biggest hall in the city. He could have ordered Herod or some other dignitary to invite Him to their Passover feast. Instead He allowed Himself to be hosted in an ordinary home. He also kept the festival in the generally expected manner. Nothing in this paragraph seems remarkable—and that is what makes it all the more remarkable. This was going to be our Lord’s last Passover and the night that He would institute the Lord’s Supper. This was going to be the grand finale. But He didn’t book a place at the swankiest downtown hotel, but chose an ordinary home.

            But there is an even deeper gentleness that we see in the next paragraph, where He tried to convince Judas not to betray Him. Now His disciples would do all sorts of things: they would deny Him and run away from Him. And so elsewhere He warned the disciples to be on the alert not to yield to temptation. Nonetheless, it is Judas’ sin that looms large. A faltering cowardice of a hasty moment can perhaps be undone by later bravery, but premeditated treason is so permanent. It is not that Judas was contemplating an unpardonable sin, something that even Christ couldn’t countenance atoning. No, his act of betrayal would scar him in a more profound way than other sins would. And our Lord would use all of His gentle persuasion to try to restrain Judas from his course.

            Let me take a moment to talk about why Jesus had to deal with Judas’ sin. You may have heard the saying, “All sins are equal” and wondered why Jesus dealt so seriously with Judas. Well, the saying is both true and false. That is to say, there is something true about it and something utterly misleading and false. It is true that all sin is equal in a certain sense. Every sin—from disobeying the smallest traffic sign to committing the most gruesome murder—is a sign of our innate selfishness and is therefore damnable. Furthermore, there is no such thing as one isolated sin, as if a person could live entirely righteously except commit one tiny, little boo-boo. Because sin comes out of our self-centeredness, there is no way that it can take place in isolation. Sin is like mold that has gotten into the walls. You see black spots appearing here and there and you may be able to paint over it and block it for a while. But the wall is moldy through and through, and it is going to manifest itself again. In the same way we bear a sinful nature that is going to show itself again and again. The fact that we keep it from popping up in certain ways doesn’t mean that we’ve solved the problem. Every sin, therefore, is an indication of a deeper problem, and thus all sins are equal.

            But in another sense not all sins are equal. A flash of anger and a murder have the same root cause, but a murder has more devastating consequences for both the perpetrator and the victim. That is why Christ did not treat Judas’ betrayal in the same way He treated the other disciples’ abandonment of Him. He knew that Judas would afterwards wish that he had never been born and would end his life in despair. Christ didn’t want that to happen. And so gentleness doesn’t mean that we ignore sin. It would have been so much easier for Christ to have ignored what Judas was contemplating. After all, Jesus was going to the cross one way or another, so what difference could Judas’ act of betrayal make? But Jesus gently appealed to Judas not to give in to this sin, for it would have devastating consequences. Because Jesus loved Judas, He couldn’t ignore his sin.

            Indeed, He couldn’t ignore our sin, either. And this leads us into the third paragraph, where we see a third aspect of our Lord’s gentleness. He deals with our sin by going to the cross and by giving us His body and His blood for the forgiveness of sins. The words our Lord spoke instituting the Lord’s Supper draw the two together. On the one hand, He had to deal objectively with sin. He had to be given into death and pour out His blood so that the penalty for sin could be dealt with once and for all. If Christ had not done these things, it would have been pointless for Him to institute the sacrament. Even if He gave His body and blood, it would mean nothing without His death creating a way for us to stand before God. Indeed, without His death for our sin, this feast would only terrify us, for we would be receiving the body and blood of the holy Son of God, even though we were under God’s wrath and condemnation. So, on the one hand, Christ had to deal with our sin once and for all, and He did so on the cross.

            On the other hand, it would do us no good if Christ had made atonement for our sins, but then didn’t connect us with that forgiveness. If He kept it a secret, it would do us no good. If He told us about this forgiveness, but never let us access it, it would do us no good. But He has given us His Word and the sacraments of baptism and the Lord’s Supper so that we can have access to this forgiveness and grace. In His Word He does more than inform us about the possibility of forgiveness. He conveys the very forgiveness He has won. Through His Word He speaks to us, “I forgive you all your sins.” He has commissioned pastors in particular to preach and to teach His Word—not as mere information, but as the living voice of God, pronouncing holy and forgiven those for whom Christ has died. He has also given us baptism and the Lord’s Supper so that we can receive this grace in a very personal way. I mean no slight to the Word of God, but the Word is spoken to all. It is a message to all, not just to me. But when I was baptized, I was united with Christ and His death, burial, and resurrection. And when I receive the Lord’s Supper, I myself encounter Christ’s body and blood that had won my salvation.

            But then we see more of our Lord’s meekness and gentleness in doing both these things: dying for us on the cross and giving us His body and blood. Dying for us would have been more than a kind and gentle way to treat us. But He shows His great gentleness toward us in that He continues to serve us after His resurrection. If we had done such a mighty feat as our Lord had done, we might have said, “I’m glad that’s over with. Now let me forget about humanity and enjoy my retirement.” But Christ continues to treat us gently. He meekly comes to us in a way that we cannot see or fully explain and gives us His body and His blood. He does this all because He knows that we need it.

            And so, beloved in Christ, we benefit greatly from our Lord’s gentleness toward us. I pray that you would relish His meekness and be moved to show a similar gentleness toward other people whom you meet. In Jesus’ name. Amen.

Homily for Lent 6B, March 29, 2015

Text: Mark 14-15

Note: Because of the length of the Gospel, the sermon was shortened to a brief homily. The Passion of our Lord according to St. Mark was the primary preaching on Palm Sunday.

            Beloved in Christ, God’s kingdom advances with power. That has been the theme of Mark all along. Where God’s kingdom comes, disease and demons must yield and run away. Where Christ comes, all naturally marvel at His teaching. They may embrace it as something authoritative or they may be frustrated because they cannot refute Him. Either way, Christ’s kingdom does not come “through mere idle chatter, but with power.”

            But what happened? We have come almost to the end of Mark’s gospel, and God’s kingdom doesn’t seem to be advancing with power anymore. It seems to have hit some kind of a snag. The chief priests and scribes no longer feel confuted by Christ’s wise teaching. Instead they are bold enough to plot against Him and seize Him. His own disciples prove unreliable. One becomes a traitor, another a denier, and the rest cowards. How can a kingdom be set up when the king’s cabinet behaves so shamefully? But it just keeps getting worse. He is falsely accused; He is condemned; He is mocked by soldiers; He is led away to be crucified, even though He cannot even bear His own cross. On the cross He is mocked by passersby. The power of God’s kingdom seems to have evaporated.

            And yet. And yet maybe that’s too hasty a statement. Maybe Christ knows more than He is letting on. He predicts Judas’ betrayal and Peter’s denial. He institutes a sacrament by saying that He is giving His body and blood that are given and shed for the forgiveness of sins—and that is not the act of a powerless man. Even while He was on the cross, the curtain in the temple was torn in two because of His death. All nature seemed to react to His death, as if it seemed to understand exactly how unnatural all this was. And so the centurion, the ancient Roman equivalent of a battle-scarred, no-nonsense master sergeant, was moved to confess, “Truly this man was the Son of God.”

            Yes, this was the mighty Son of God throughout. He showed His great power by doing what we couldn’t. He prayed fervently in Gethsemane when we could not watch for even one hour. He remained faithful to God when we couldn’t. He went to the cross when we were unable to bear that heavy load. And through all of that He did something that nobody else was able to do in all of human history: He dealt with our sins once and for all and reconciled us to God. That is real power.

            And so, beloved in Christ, the very same Jesus you see on the cross is the Jesus who had cast out demons, healed countless people, taught with authority, and did a thousand miracles. He is the same Jesus, the one who always intended to come in power and change history, and indeed has done so by His death on the cross. In Jesus’ name. Amen.

Midweek Lenten Sermon (March 25, 2015): The Fruit of the Spirit: Faithfulness

Text: Lamentations 3:22-30 and Luke 16:9-13

            Beloved in Christ, we now turn to faithfulness, the seventh facet of the fruit of the Spirit. Greek doesn’t have two words (as English does) for “faith” and “faithfulness.” Instead, it uses the same word for both concepts. And that makes a good deal of sense. If you truly have faith in someone, you will be faithful to him or her. If you have lost faith, you won’t be faithful to that individual, even if you continue to go through the motions. Where a person’s faith is determines to whom or to what a person is faithful.

            That’s what Jesus was getting at in today’s second reading. He said, “No servant can serve two masters, for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and money.” Now we tend to love and trust in all sorts of things to varying degrees. We do try to love several people and things and hope that they will all be pleased with having a little bit of our affection. But when push comes to shove, there is one person or one thing that we end up loving more than everything else. We may trust in all sorts of things, but ultimately there is one thing or one person that we trust in more than everyone or everything else. And that is a god.

The Worship of Mammon
Evelyn De Morgan (ca. 1909)

            All people have a god. Everybody loves and trusts in one thing or one person above all else. Even atheists have a god. It may be themselves or their intellect or science or whatever. But we all naturally look to something above all else. The question, though, is what kind of a god we have. If we put our trust in the LORD God, the Triune God, then we can spell the name of our God with a capital “G.” But if it someone or something else, then we spell it with a lower case “g.” Of course, we want to put our trust in the real God who can help us rather than in someone or something that will let us down.

            We have to know what is top priority because it helps us to make some choices. You may remember a few years ago that there was a hiker who got caught in a landslide. Some boulder came crashing down and pinned his arm. He couldn’t free himself, no matter what he tried to do. He was walking alone, and he hoped that someone would stop by, but no one did. He knew that he could not stay trapped there indefinitely or the wild animals would devour him. And so he created a tourniquet of sorts near his shoulder and then cut off his arm. It was literally his arm or his life—and he chose his life. Now usually we don’t have to go around choosing between our arms and our lives. Thank God for that! But at that moment the hiker had to choose which was more important. He didn’t necessarily hate his arm, but it looked that way when you saw his love for his life.

            Our Lord laid out a similar stark choice for us. “You cannot serve God and money,” He said. Now He was not forbidding us to have any money or to make use of it. Instead He was pointing out that ultimately there has to be one lord in our life. Sometimes we will have to make sacrifices of one to please the other. And the LORD God wants us to put Him first and not money. In those moments it will look as if we hate money because we love God so intensely. Looking at it more objectively, though, you will see that we do not despise money or any of the other creaturely gifts God has given us. We just love the LORD God so much more. Or at least that is what we should do.

            God calls us to be faithful to Him, for He is the only one who can save us. The tragedy is that we are naturally not faithful to Him. Instead we choose all sorts of other things to be faithful to, things that will in the end disappoint us. Christ used the example of money as one of the things we tend to devote ourselves to, probably because it is one of the most common things that people love and trust in more than the Lord God. But there are any number of things that we could have chosen to love. And every sin we do is because we love or trust something more than the Lord God.

            Instead of putting our faith in things that will disappoint us, why not put our faith in the one who never will? After all, our Lord Jesus Christ was entirely faithful to us, even though we were fickle and undeserving of His trust. In His faithfulness He took on our human nature, subjected Himself to all sorts of troubles and pains, and capped it all off by allowing Himself to be arrested, falsely condemned, and executed in a most gruesome way. Because He was faithful even to the point of death, we are freed from condemnation and spared the eternal death in hell that we had deserved. We have a faithful Lord. Should not we put our faith in Him?

            Our first reading shows us what a life of faithfulness toward God would look like. That reading comes from Lamentations, a book of poetry written shortly after Jerusalem had been destroyed and its inhabitants killed or dragged off into exile. (This took place in 587 B.C.) God’s people had never known such a defeat before. Yes, they had had their battles with Philistines and Midianites and the like. Yes, they had been routed in battle. But they had never lost their entire country. Armies had invaded their land and pillaged it, but they had always retreated in the end. But now the whole country was lost. Worst of all, the temple had been destroyed. The temple had seemed to guarantee Israel’s hope, for it had always stood, but now that it had been ransacked and burned, there was no reasonable hope for God’s people.

            But what does Jeremiah say? “The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases; His mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning; great is Your faithfulness.” Even though everything seemed to have been taken away—yes, even though God Himself seemed to have abandoned Israel—Jeremiah thought that God was still faithful. Why could Jeremiah say that? He knew that the final chapter had not been written. The Lord had to chastise and reprove His people, but in the end He would save them. God was faithful and could be trusted to come through when no one else could.

            Therefore, He said, “It is good that one should wait quietly for the salvation of the Lord.” If God is faithful, we can bear with what He is doing, even if it means a lot of pain for us right now. Jeremiah was willing to “put his mouth in the dust,” “give his cheek to the one who strikes,” and “be filled with insults.” He could do all those things because He knew that God would not leave him in the dust forever.

            Because Jeremiah saw that God was faithful, Jeremiah himself was able to be faithful, even when things were going badly. I have already told you about all that Jeremiah saw happening to Judah. That was bad enough. But Jeremiah had an additional burden that he had borne throughout his life: he was a prophet sent by God to warn the nation of Judah, but nobody listened to him. Thus, not only did he see his country fall apart, his own life had been a total mess all along. And yet Jeremiah was faithful to the LORD God, for he knew that the LORD God had been and would be faithful to him.

            Faithfulness comes from seeing things from God’s point of view. Faithfulness, therefore, is a gift and a fruit of the Holy Spirit no less than saving faith is. You could say that faithfulness is simply faith in God writ large. May God enable you to bear that fruit abundantly! In Jesus’ name. Amen.

Sermon for Lent 5B, March 22, 2015

Text: Mark 10:35-45

            Beloved in Christ, where’s the glory? Where’s the glory of being a disciple of our Lord Jesus Christ? We are now two-thirds of the way through Lent. We have tried taking this whole discipleship thing seriously. But we want to know that there is a reward—that we will be generously paid back for all our troubles. But until today we haven’t really had seen anyone raise that question.

            The First Sunday in Lent we saw our Lord resisting temptation in the wilderness. We heard the call to engage in a similar struggle against sin and temptation, even as we acknowledged that the Lord Jesus Christ is the only person to have done so successfully. Then the next week we learned that the Christian life might not be as glorious as we had imagined. We had heard Peter confess that Jesus was the Christ, the Son of God. Who wouldn’t want to say that their teacher is the absolute best, especially if He was? But Jesus went on to add to Peter’s statement of faith; He predicted His own death upon the cross, and Peter would have none of that. After all, where would be the glory in that?

            The next Sunday we saw Jesus cleaning house in the temple. Well, that’s a bit glorious, isn’t it? Jesus was showing just how powerful He was and how mighty His kingdom would be. But afterwards He spoke about how the temple of His body would be destroyed and raised on the third day. That point was underscored last week when Jesus described the way that He would be lifted up on the cross, much as the bronze serpent had been lifted up in the wilderness. That would give us our redemption and healing, but it wouldn’t be a particularly glorious moment for Him. Yes, He would be lifted up—and that sounds like being glorified—but being lifted up on a cross doesn’t sound too majestic or honorable.

            And so we naturally balk at what we have been hearing. All human beings want to have the glory that they believe is rightly coming to them. Now even we who know that our Lord was crucified and then rose from the dead may still have a hard time taking seriously His death. But can you imagine how difficult it was for the original disciples to take to heart what Jesus was saying? Every student finds one thing or another about a teacher difficult to understand and just puts it out of mind. And that seems to have been what the disciples did. They could not comprehend what Christ was talking about when He predicted His death and a shameful one at that. So they just gave it no further thought.

            And so we have a perfect formula for the clash in today’s gospel. The disciples thought that they were doing all the hard work of following Jesus all so that they could receive a great deal of glory in a couple of years. Jesus thought that the real glory would involve Him going to the cross. And so eventually these two ideas were bound to clash. And they did so when two disciples asked for special places of honor in Christ’s kingdom and the other disciples wished that they had been able to ask for the same thing first.

            Now, to be fair, James and John weren’t asking for a free ride. They were willing to do the hard work before they got the glory. No pain, no glory. They knew that. And so they told Jesus that they were able to undergo a baptism of fire if need be or drink any bitter cup that He had to drink. Of course, it was nothing but bravado. They were no different from you and me, though. We can run any race, fight any foe, do any task—at least until we are confronted with it. In spiritual matters we are sure that we can resist any temptation and confess Christ boldly at all times—at least until we face the challenge of that moment. James and John didn’t realize how unprepared they were until they saw Jesus arrested in the Garden of Gethsemane. They turned tail and ran as fast as they could, along with the other disciples. They couldn’t undergo the baptism or drink the cup that our Lord had to experience. And, if we are honest with ourselves, neither could we.

            And yet that is the way ahead for us. We couldn’t baptized ourselves with Christ’s baptism. We couldn’t plunge ourselves into His death and burial, let alone raise ourselves from the dead. We could not take up and drink the cup of God’s wrath against sin that Christ had to drink. We could not drink the cup that would lead to our salvation, let alone the salvation of the whole world. How could we ever dream of being seated at His right hand or left hand, when we don’t have the wherewithal even to be part of His kingdom? It is like someone who gets winded walking from one side of a room to another talking about whether they will get the bronze or the silver medal in the marathon in the Olympics next year. It’s folly to talk about such a prize when we cannot do the simplest of things.

            And yet—miracle of miracles—we are baptized with Christ’s baptism and given His cup to drink. For what we are unable to do, God has done for us. We were not able to endure the agony of Christ’s bloody death and the ignominy of His burial. But Christ was. We were not able to smash through death and rise gloriously from the dead, never to die again. But Christ was. And the Holy Spirit has united us with that death, burial, and resurrection of Christ so that it can truly be said of us that we have been “baptized with the baptism with which [Christ was] baptized.” We were not able to drink that bitter cup of God’s wrath against sin. We were not able to drain that cup of punishment down to the last, bitter dregs so that God’s judgment would no longer stand against us. But Christ could and did. He drank down the full cup of God’s wrath against sin. And so now we do not drink a cup of God’s wrath but rather the cup of His salvation. For He has drunk the bitter sediment from the wine of God’s wrath and left to us the wine of joy and God’s salvation. He gives us His body and His blood in the bread and the cup, not for our judgment, but for our salvation, if we will accept the gift in faith. (Of course, if we do not receive it as the gift that it is, we find it the cup of wrath instead of the cup of salvation.) The point is simply this: we could not endure Christ’s baptism and cup, but He has borne the burden of that baptism and cup and given us its fruit.

            Thus, we are baptized and we drink from this cup not in order to win a place of glory for ourselves but rather to receive good gifts from God. We are not baptized in order to serve Christ, but rather to be served by Him. And we receive the cup not to demonstrate that we are diligent enough to earn a place of honor, but rather to be honored by Him purely as a gift from Him, not as a reward for our valor.

            Well, if that is the case, who gets to sit at the right hand or the left hand of our Lord? Who is more honored than others? We’d all like to have that bumper sticker on our car that reads, “Jesus loves everybody…but I’m His favorite.” So how do we get that? How do we get onto the honor roll in God’s kingdom?

            Our Lord invites us to think differently about such matters. He told His disciples, “You know that those who are considered rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their great ones exercise authority over them. But it shall not be so among you. But whoever would be great among you must be your servant, and whoever would be first among you must be slave of all. For even the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give His life as a ransom for many.” Now it is easy to misread what Jesus is saying. You may think that He is simply saying that you will end up exalted if you don’t mind a life of service first. But that would be simply fall into the trap of the Gentile (that is to say, the heathenish) way of looking at things. The heathen have no problem doing grunt work now if it will lead to glory down the road. If they announced on TV they would give a billion dollars to anyone who could do long hours of grueling labor for ten years straight, they would probably have hundreds of people showing up at the TV studio, volunteering for the task. But Jesus is saying something more profound here. The greatest in God’s Kingdom isn’t the person who was a servant in the past and is now enjoying his or her reward. No, the greatest person in the kingdom is the person who is currently a servant—yes, a very slave—to all.

            That is because Christ was most glorious when He was on the cross, when He was showing that He “came not to be served but to serve, and to give His life as a ransom for many.” Even today, exalted as He is, He still remains a servant. He continues to intercede for us. He works hard for His church, preserving her and shepherding her. He is no figurehead or retiree. He is eternally our Servant and our Redeemer—and therefore eternally our Lord.

            Beloved in Christ, that is where the glory is. That is what our Lord has been trying to show us throughout this Lenten season. May we at last have eyes that see, ears that hear, and hearts that understand. In Jesus’ name. Amen.