Sermon for Pentecost 4 (Proper 7B), June 21. 2015

Text: Mark 4:35-41 and 2 Corinthians 5:1-10

            Beloved in Christ, we love our little Jesus. We love our little Jesus who enters our little world and solves our little problems. We are so happy for Him to come and fix our boo-boos and heal our emotional owies. We see Him as a great physician, more talented than an ordinary doctor, to be sure, but still like a physician. He treats His patients one by one, as any doctor must. He sees our physical and emotional ailments. He diagnoses what is wrong. He touches us and He cures us. Because He handles each case individually, nobody else understands what He is doing for each of us, just as we don’t know what He is doing for them. Those around us may not appreciate what is happening, but we know the change and the healing that He has brought to us.

            Now we know that Jesus is more than a healer of our bodies. He has come to restore our souls no less than our bodies. And so we call Him the Great Physician and acknowledge Him as the healer of both body and soul. But even as we acknowledge this added dimension to Christ, we are still tempted to think of Him exclusively in personal terms. We are quick to confess, as we ought, that “He restores my soul. He leads me in paths of righteousness,” even “through the valley of the shadow of death” so that “I will fear no evil.” We may acknowledge that He is doing similar things to other individuals, but we don’t necessarily see His grand plan. We may not even see His true divinity. After all, one doesn’t need to be divine in order to be a good physician, even a spectacular healer. Plenty of prophets in the Old Testament, such as Elijah and Elisha, healed people and even restored some to life. And so we may be tempted to consider Jesus to be like one more holy man with great powers to bring healing and life where disease and death prevails. Indeed, many people who had encountered Jesus so far assumed that that was all He was.

Joos de Momper the Younger,
Storm at Sea (Der Seesturm)

            But Jesus does something in today’s gospel that utterly amazes His disciples. He calms a storm. Our Lord was no longer treating a human body that occupied a few cubic feet. Instead, He was dealing with a whole weather system that governed the Sea of Galilee. His power was clearly more extensive than people had imagined. We can understand someone having power within them to touch another person and bring them health. But how can you touch wind and wave? How you can govern such unruly forces?

            The Israelites would have known that God alone can do that. They would have been familiar with Psalm 107, which describes God’s deliverance from a variety of evils. One of those evils described by the psalm is a storm that threatened to sink a ship. The psalm describes how the sailors called out to God, who heard their pleas and brought them safely to their harbor. For centuries the Israelites had prayed that psalm and learned that God alone could bring them to safety when they were in peril on the sea. But now Christ did something amazing, something that only God could do. It was just as the psalm described. The disciples “cried to the LORD in their trouble, and He delivered them from their distress. He made the storm be still, and the waves of the sea were hushed.” Clearly, then, Jesus is to be identified with the LORD God.

            This incident forces us to go back and re-evaluate who Jesus is. Is there any hint so far in Mark’s gospel that Jesus might be more than a healer or miracle-worker? Indeed, there is. The demons acknowledge Jesus to be the Son of God when they were cast out. Our Lord ordered them to keep quiet since it was not quite time for that truth to be revealed. But it was stated nonetheless. Then there is that curious phrase recorded in Mark 1, where we are told that Jesus was driven into the wilderness where He was tempted. Mark tells us that Christ “was with the wild animals.” Clearly, He had a bigger purpose than merely being tempted so He could help individual believers. He was out to restore all creation, to tame those ferocious beasts that had been made wild by mankind’s sin.

            When we think of sin and its effects, we tend to have too narrow of a scope. We look at sin as a personal problem. We have failed to live up to our potential. We made a mistake that embarrassed us or caused us some grief. Since we sinned personally and individually, then there are only personal and individual consequences. But that is not the case at all. Our sin affects other people. Think, for example, of how one man’s racist rage had devastating consequences for nine other people this past week. His sin wasn’t just a matter between God and him alone. Our sin may not be as heinous as his was, but it does harm and scar other people. And so when Christ dealt with our sin on the cross, He had to deal with the harm that we have caused others as well as the guilt we have borne.

            Today’s gospel reminds us that sin has a cosmic influence. Winds and wave are unruly because mankind is unruly. Our disorder has brought chaos into the physical world around us. There were no storms in Eden, just as there were no weeds, poisonous plants, vicious animals, and all the rest that we are familiar with. Instead, all of those things have come about because we are under God’s judgment for sin. The whole created world around us is not pleased with the way things are now. The Scriptures tell us that “the creation was subjected to futility…in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to corruption and obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God.” Nowadays we are apt to debate how much of all the degradation of the created world around us mankind is responsible for. The truth is that we are responsible for all of it, for had we not turned away from God, there would never have been animals going into extinction, droughts, floods, and all the other so-called natural disasters. Each and every one of those events is a microcosm of the disorder we fill ourselves and others with.

            Our Lord Jesus Christ has come to be our Savior in every dimension. He isn’t just our Savior from the angst we naturally feel because of our guilt. No, He is our Savior from all the harm we have caused others. And He is our Savior to rescue us from the destruction we have brought into the created world. That is why Mark would later record that “there was darkness over the whole land” for three hours when Christ was on the cross. He had freed His disciples from a storm that had threatened to engulf them, but He Himself would not be spared. He allowed the darkness within creation to prevail over Him so that He could restore it to wholeness.

            When Christ rose from the dead, He reversed the curse not just on humanity, but on all creation. He has made us His new creation and now all “creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God.” We are not yet fully what we will be. And so part of what it means to be a Christian is that we live as part of God’s restored, new creation amid the decaying, old creation. We live with the tension between the two. Life often is difficult for us precisely because we are not yet where we are going. Moreover, we see that where we are going is grander than where we are; indeed, it is a far more expansive and greater future than we can imagine at the present. And so the old part of us is dying away and a new person is emerging. Now, the old part of us may have been content with a little Jesus who leaves us as we were, except just a tad better. But the new person in Christ that is inside of us understands a greater vision: we are part of a new creation that will encompass the entire universe one day.

            That is why the apostle Paul emphasizes in today’s epistle how he was willing to serve the Corinthians “in afflictions, hardships, calamities, beatings, imprisonments, riots, labors, sleepless nights, hunger.” If he were focused only on himself and his personal advancement, he would try to get out of all those things. Instead he embraced all these things “by purity, knowledge, patience, kindness, the Holy Spirit, genuine love; by truthful speech, and the power of God.” He and his fellow apostles could be treated by others as “imposters,” “unknown,” and “marked for death,” but he knew that he was the real deal, known to God, and not only living but giving life to his hearers.

            And so, beloved in the Lord, do not underestimate Jesus Christ. He is more than just an amazing healer. He is Lord of creation, and as Lord of all creation He has entered into this world and into your life. In Jesus’ name. Amen.

Sermon for Pentecost 2 (Proper 5B), June 7, 2015

Text: Mark 3:20-35

            Beloved in Christ, for quite some time now Christians have presented a rather tame picture of Jesus. In the last century or two artists and theologians alike tend to portray Him as soft and gentle. There is no manly ferocity about Him, nor even an intensity of soul. He is presented as almost a nothing, someone who can be fashioned into whatever you want to believe or think about Him, but certainly no one who would ever shake up your world or your worldview. But as the Anglican theologian N.T. Wright has observed, there is nothing in these portrayals of Jesus that would explain how He ended up on a cross. A Mr. Milquetoast may be an altogether pleasant individual, but a Mr. Milquetoast never gets crucified, either.

            Now I am not saying that Jesus behaved like a marauding barbarian. His ferocity and intensity did not show itself in violence and butchery—and neither should ours. But He intended to shake up society as much as Attila the Hun would. Indeed, Attila came and went, and whatever havoc he caused soon diminished after his passing. But our Lord’s kingdom continues to endure twenty centuries after our Lord began His ministry.

            The early Christians understood this. Mark, in particular, grasped this truth. Of all the gospel writers he is the most forthright about describing Christ’s stunning power as well as the opposition it evoked. And we see that in today’s gospel. On the one hand, Jesus was so incredibly popular that crowds were trying to get near Him, leaving no time for them or Him to grab a bite to eat. On the other hand, his own family thought that he was crazy, while the learned religious teachers thought that he was downright demonic. The one thing you didn’t hear people say about Him was that He was just okay.

            Jesus was either demonic, crazy, or the incarnate Son of God. Some of you have heard of C.S. Lewis’ threefold dilemma: Since Christ claimed to be the Son of God, either He was a liar, a lunatic, or the Lord. As Lewis explained, either Christ was the Son of God or He wasn’t. If He wasn’t the Son of God, He either knew that He wasn’t or He was deluded into thinking that He was. If He knew that He wasn’t, He would have been a liar. If He was deluded, He would have been a lunatic. But if He was telling the truth, He must be Lord. Note that there is no option of merely “Good Teacher” among the possibilities.

            Mark in effect sets up the same dilemma, but he sharpens it. He doesn’t merely say that Christ would be a liar if He knew that He wasn’t the Son of God. No, He would actually have had to have been demonic, for even His enemies knew that He did supernatural things. Far from being a good teacher, He would have had to have been the devil incarnate if He tried to pass on such a horrible deception that He was the Son of God when He wasn’t. And so Lewis may have spoken of the choices being liar, lunatic, or Lord, but Mark sets forth the choices as demonic, crazy, or Lord.

            Well, how do we evaluate these choices? Today’s gospel gives the “crazy” option rather short shrift. If Jesus were that crazy, He wouldn’t have drawn such large crowds as He did. If you seriously think that He was crazy, we can talk about that after the service or in a future sermon. But let us look instead at what interests Mark the most: the accusation that Jesus was demonic and advancing His kingdom by using satanic powers. The accusation takes seriously—as it should—that there is a spiritual realm beyond the merely physical and that not everything in that spiritual realm is good. Both Jesus and His opponents would have agreed on those premises. Many people today would not, and that shows how spiritually impoverished our society is. No society can be truly spiritual if it denies the spiritual realm altogether or equally if it naively assumes that everything spiritual is good, as the “spiritual but not religious” crowd tends to believe today.

            Well, what would have aroused suspicion among Jesus’ opponents? After all, so far in Mark’s gospel Jesus had cast out demons and healed many people. Those are good things, and we might expect that they would confirm Jesus to be a truly spiritual man. But He did a couple other things that rankled some people. First, He forgave the sins of a paralyzed man. Had Jesus just healed him, nobody would have had any problem. But the way He set it up implied that His ability to heal proved His ability to forgive sins. Second, He proclaimed Himself “Lord of the Sabbath” and healed on the Sabbath and defended His disciples who had plucked grain on a Sabbath and nibbled on it on the way. In so doing He was trumping Moses and setting Himself up as someone greater than Moses.

            These incidents get at the heart of why people hated Jesus back then and why they hate Him now. He doesn’t proclaim Himself a mere guru or wise teacher. He proclaims Himself Lord of creation, including Lord of the Sabbath. But the real sticking point is that He comes bringing the forgiveness of sins. If He were to stick merely to helping people improve themselves, then everyone would accept Him. But He says that He can forgive sins and wipe the slate clean. For us that naturally seems as diabolical as diabolical can be—the inverse of real spirituality. For there are two truths that we hold self-evident: we are not sinners and, even if we have done some bad things, we can get to a point in our life where God will have to accept us for all the good that we have done. Either way, sin is not a problem that needs to involve Jesus’ meddling.

            Thus, either we or Jesus are diabolical liars. Either He is devilish for interfering in the natural process whereby we do enough good works to earn favor with God, or we are devilishly deceived in thinking that our works are good enough to please God. Well, which is the case? You might consider the comments you made this past week about other people and consider whether or not others might make similar comments about you. Just as you felt justified in your criticism of others, they would be equally justified in their thoughts about you. Now if this is what other people think of you, even though they cannot examine your thoughts and impulses and desires, how do you think you will fare before Almighty God, to whom all thoughts are known?

            No, Jesus is not the diabolical one. We are. We are the people who have taken our bad deeds and tried to pass them off as heroic virtues. We are the people who want to take our sweaty stink and call it perfume. And so when Jesus sets Himself before us as our Savior, we had better take Him seriously, for our hope does not lie in ourselves.

            Our Lord invites us to see that He is doing something breathtaking. He intends to do nothing short of overthrowing Satan and the whole demonic realm. He began casting out demons, but He didn’t stop there. He stopped our demonic habit of trying to justify ourselves. Let’s face it. We’ve been doing that ever since the fall into sin in the Garden of Eden. We pointed fingers at others and said, “They are the problem. They are the reason for any sin in my life. They are to blame, not I.” But Jesus stopped that blame game by Himself taking our blame. He carried that guilt all the way to the cross, where He died. He allowed Satan to bruise His heel so that He in turn could crush Satan’s head.

            Therefore, now the truly crazy and demonic thing to do would be to oppose our Lord Jesus Christ. That is why our Lord warned us against interfering with the Holy Spirit’s work in such a way as to blaspheme the Holy Spirit. Our Lord didn’t mind being called all sorts of nasty names. That came with the job, as far as He was concerned, for He would be called many things on route to the cross to atone for the world’s sins. And so He let those insults roll off of Him. But He didn’t and doesn’t want us to call the work of the Holy Spirit satanic. The Holy Spirit calls us to repent of our sins and to trust in Christ. If we call that work of the Holy Spirit “demonic,” it will cut us off from the one path that leads to eternal life.

            It isn’t that badmouthing the Holy Spirit is worse than badmouthing Jesus or God the Father. What Jesus is talking about here is resisting the Holy Spirit tugging at our hearts, convincing us of the truth about Christ, and leading us to repentance. If we persistently and consistently to our death resist the Holy Spirit’s prompting, then all is lost, for we will have cut ourselves off from the only person who could have helped us.

            Instead, our Lord invites us to look more carefully at Him. He is not a tame Jesus, but the one who has tied up Satan and proceeded to plunder all his treasures, which by the way would include us, who had been his captives. Therefore, Christianity is not a tame religion, nor are Christians tame people. Again, as I said earlier, we do not behave like barbarians. When Jesus spoke of tying up Satan and plundering his house, He wasn’t saying that He would act like a common criminal. Instead, He was saying that His kind but firm and persistent actions would have that devastating effect on Satan's dominion. In the same way, we persistently and intensely follow our Lord. We are like the crowd that can’t get enough of Jesus, but who hang on His every word. And, thus, we are also His brothers, sisters, and mother, as dear to Him as He is to us. In Jesus’ name. Amen.

Sermon for Trinity Sunday, May 31, 2015

Text: John 3:1-17

            Beloved in Christ, every so often you hear critics say, “No one can really know God. He is beyond our comprehension.” And the critics have a point. We can discern that there must be a God, but that doesn’t mean that we naturally know much about Him. We can discern from the vastness of creation that He must be mighty. We can figure out from the conscience implanted in us that He must be holy. But to understand who God is, what He is really like, what He thinks, and so forth is beyond our ability. Trying to figure out God on our own is like expecting a kid who hasn’t even learned three plus four to know how to build a particle accelerator and interpret the results of the experiments. God’s nature is so beyond us that we can never figure Him out on our own.

            To be sure, some religions openly boast that they are just speculating and guessing about God. They use their reason and experience to come up with some sort of answer. But when you ask them how they know, they have to admit that it is simply their speculation and they know nothing for certain. But that is sort of like taking a math problem where you don’t really understand the principles at work and just writing down a number because it seems rather good and hoping that you’ll convince your teacher just to accept it. It is no wonder then that the skeptics say that every religion is just people guessing at what God might be like.

            And that is where the skeptics err. They are right to say that it is difficult to learn much about God and that many religions are just guessing. But the Christian faith is not our guesswork as to what God must be like. It is founded in something deeper: His own revelation. And this is more than just God imparting information to a person wise enough to apprehend it. No, this is God coming into our midst and being the revelation itself.

            That is what Jesus was trying to get Nicodemus to understand: “No one has ascended into heaven except He who descended from heaven, the Son of Man.” Now Nicodemus was willing to compliment Jesus and say that He was a “rabbi” and “a teacher come from God,” someone with the hand of God upon Him as He did great miracles. But Jesus rejected those kind words. He said that Nicodemus didn’t know anything about the kingdom of God, indeed was outside of it, if he thought of Jesus simply as a great “teacher come from God.” Instead Jesus wanted to be acknowledged as the one “who descended from heaven,” in other words, one who was true God. In other words, He was not just another teacher, passing on third-hand knowledge of God, that is, passing on what he had read or heard from a prophet who had heard something from God. He was also not just another prophet, that is, someone hearing God but passing on his best interpretation of what he thought God had said. Instead, He was true God in every sense of the word and, therefore, able to open up to us everything that He wanted mankind to know about God.

            Yes, there are still things we don’t know about God because He has chosen not to reveal them. We will never know everything about God, for we would become easily confused with the information. Nevertheless, Christ came so that we would know everything that we need to know about Him in order to live faithfully in this life and the life to come. And so the most basic thing that we can do is to listen to His words, not as words of a great teacher, but as words of God in human flesh. As we hear those words, we are directed to where He would have us go. He told Nicodemus that he need to be “born again” in order to “see the kingdom of God.” Jesus further explained what He was talking about. He was talking about being “born of water and the Spirit”—holy baptism, as we call it. This is how God wants to work in us, in order to begin a new life in us so that we can begin to appreciate the truths that He teaches us in Christ Jesus.

            That is because baptism is more than a simple ceremony or a ritual bath. It is the way that the Holy Spirit imparts new life in us by giving us a second birth. This birth isn’t like the natural birth that we received when our mothers had us. Instead, this is a heavenly birth. Once the Holy Spirit has started this new life in us, we are no longer completely earthly minded. We can begin to comprehend the heavenly truths that our Lord teaches. More than that, we are made part of God’s kingdom and thus know about it from the inside. In baptism we are united with Jesus Christ, His death, and His resurrection. Thus, we know God in a deep way, for we have been made to undergo the most profound things that God incarnate underwent. But we also learn about the Father—who is called “God” in this passage—for we learn about His kingdom. We also are led and shaped by the Holy Spirit, who brings us to faith through this holy washing. Thus, baptism does more than just teach us about the three Persons in the Trinity. It leads us to experience the work of the Trinity.

            Once baptized, we turn our attention to the words that God has spoken. We learn the heavenly things, the real spiritual matters rather than just the child’s play. We pay attention to the words our Lord spoke. We also listen carefully to the Old Testament prophets, for Christ approved of their message and said that they pointed to Him. We also hear attentively the words of the apostles, for Christ Himself commissioned them. If Christ had never come, the words of the prophets and apostles would lack full authority. They might be divine, but how would we know for sure? But because Christ, who is God in human flesh, has come and spoken and given His stamp of approval to these prophets and apostles, we now listen to them as speaking with divine authority.

            As we listen carefully to the Scriptures, we learn to speak clearly about God. And that is all we are doing when we confess the Holy Trinity. Our teaching that God is Triune—three in one—is not some speculation on our part. It is simply stating in short-hand what the Scriptures have to say about God. The more you read the Scriptures, the more you see Jesus Christ distinguishing Himself (the Son) from the Father and the Holy Spirit. We see that in today’s gospel, where He talks about the Father sending the Son to save the world and where He speaks about the Holy Spirit’s work in giving new birth. Furthermore, elsewhere we see that each of these Persons are truly and fully God, not partially so. And yet the Scriptures emphasize that there is one God, not three Gods. How that can be, we freely admit that we do not fully understand. But we know that we won’t solve the problem by simplifying the Trinity to fit our terms, either by reducing the three Persons into one Person or by diving the one Godhead into three.

            We teach the Trinity because that accords with the explanations that God Himself has given about what He is like. Occasionally you hear people say that the doctrine of the Trinity was something Christians invented three centuries after Christ’s birth to fit in with Greek philosophy. That is the argument, for example, that Dan Brown has made in his Da Vinci Code. He argues that nobody had ever worshipped Jesus as divine until in 325 A.D. the Council of Nicaea met and tried to reconcile the Bible with Greek philosophy. You hear similar things when TV programs try to explain the origin of Christianity. But, of course, that is sheer fiction, fiction worthy of a novelist, not a historian.

            What do I mean? First of all, I do not know how anyone can say with a straight face that the first time people thought of worshipping Jesus Christ as God was in 325 A.D. I don’t even need the New Testament to prove that Christians worshipped Christ as divine from the earliest of days. Even non-Christians knew that Christians worshipped Christ as God. Pliny, a Roman governor, mentions that fact in a letter to the emperor around 112 A.D. There is also a famous graffito in Rome from around 200 A.D. that says, “Alexamenos worships his God,” and it shows a caricature of someone on a cross. Sure, it is a mockery of Christianity, but it wouldn’t make sense if Christians didn’t worship Christ as divine. And then there are theologians such as Irenaeus, Justin Martyr, and Tertullian, who all lived in the 100’s A.D. and whose main writings had the explicit purpose of proving the divinity of Christ. In fact, Tertullian was the one who coined the term Trinity, long before the Council of Nicaea. But we don’t have to go that far afield. Even the most skeptical critics believe Paul’s letters were written within three decades of Christ’s death, and it is clear that Paul thought of Jesus as divine. So the argument that the divinity of Christ and the Trinity are latecomers to Christianity is preposterous.

            Furthermore, the other argument, namely, that Christianity borrowed the idea of the Trinity from Greek philosophy only makes sense to those who have never read Greek philosophy. There is nothing like the Trinity in Greek philosophy, where three persons share one essence. In fact, that contradicts the rules of philosophy. However, those who opposed the Trinity often were heavily influenced by Greek philosophy. For example, Arius taught that Jesus was a godlike being, but not fully God. That sounds a whole lot like the Demiurge in Plato’s Theaetetus.

            Before we draw this sermon to an end, let me address one more question: what difference does this all make? Quite a bit. God doesn’t want us to live in ignorance of Him. He has created us to enjoy life and fellowship with Him. The Father sent the Son, and the Son willingly went to the cross under the Spirit’s guidance, all so that we could be freed from death and everlasting condemnation. To know God truly in the way He should be known is nothing other than life. To know Him as we ought is the basis for all true prayer. Therefore, may you hear God’s Word attentively and learn what you could never have learned on your own. In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Sermon for Memorial Day Weekend, May 23, 2015 (Given at Concordia Cemetery in Forest Park, Illinois)

Readings: Genesis 9:8-17; 1 Peter 3:18-22; Matthew12:38-41

            Beloved in Christ, at the dawn of creation, the world was a lifeless place. “The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep.” All that one could see—if one could cut through the darkness—was the deep, or more accurately, its surface. What was churning in its lifeless waters, no one knew. But already at this point we are given hope, for we are told that “the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters.” We are not surprised to see this untamed world give way to God’s good order, as He calls out light from darkness, the heavens from the world below, and dry ground from the midst of the sea. Far from being a lifeless place, the sea becomes a home for “the great sea creatures and every living creature that moves, with which the waters swarm.” And as with the rest of His creation, “God saw” it, “and behold, it was very good.”

            But it is difficult to believe in the goodness of creation, for we live after the fall into sin. Everything has been tainted with sin. The good world is now designed for futility and marred with destruction. And so for the rest of the Scriptures the sea is almost always not a good place to be. Its waves drown sailors and sink boats. Its creatures—leviathan and behemoth—frighten landlubbers. It is wild, unpredictable, and stormy. In the Revelation it is a sea that separates the Apostle John from God, and it is out of the sea that the beast with ten horns and seven heads arises.

            One of my predecessors would have understood that imagery quite well. You know me as the pastor at First Bethlehem Lutheran Church, but for eighteen years I also served as vacancy pastor at Grace Lutheran Church at 28^th and Karlov in the Little Village neighborhood of Chicago. In July of 1915 my predecessor there, Pastor H. Boester, conducted funerals for twenty-six of his parishioners, many of them buried in this cemetery. They were all employees of Western Electric or their family members, and they had all boarded the Eastland on the fateful day of July 24, 1915. The Chicago River was not a rough body of water, but it was sufficient to drown over 1,000 people that day.

            But the Eastland pales in comparison to the greatest maritime disaster of all ages, the Flood. For it is in the Flood that we first see just how dire a verdict stands against humanity. Yes, before then we had been exiled from Eden and the ground had been cursed. We had been told that we are mortal, that we are dust and to dust we shall return. But how we laughed. What were a few weeds amid a still fertile earth? What was death when we could count on living to 800 or 900 years? And so we grew more insolent. Brother murdered brother, and then each generation grew more violent, more itching for a fight. Even the godly were drawn by worldly pleasures and turned away from God. Noah warned us for over a century, but we could not—we would not—hear. At last, God sent a disaster like none other before or afterwards. He unleashed a wave of death and destruction. For once humanity saw what it deserved, as millions of people died, drowned in the waters. Ever since then we’ve taken death more seriously. We may still deny it. We may still pretend that it won’t come for us. But the Flood taught us to fear death and take it seriously. More than that, it taught us to take God and His wrath against sin seriously.

            The torrents of death will sweep over us one day, for we have sinned against God. We can struggle against the tide and perhaps succeed for a while, but eventually we will be inundated by the flood called death. God’s judgment still stands, and it crashes upon each successive generation of humanity like wave after wave falling on the breakers. Death is wild and savage and hostile to mankind—as untamed as the raging sea. And that is appropriate, for our sin is wild and savage—as untamed as the raging sea.

            But as our Scripture readings today remind us, God intends to calm the raging sea. It began as soon as the Flood was over. Now that humanity had had its first taste of raw death and all the elements of the universe arrayed against mankind, God brokered a peace. He established a covenant between Himself and all creatures, including us. It wasn’t that humanity had all of a sudden gotten religion and had started shaping up. Humanity would soon turn back to its old vices of getting drunk, tyrannically oppressing others, and building towers to drag God out of the heavens. No, it wasn’t that humanity had improved, but rather that God wanted to show mercy. And so He promised that He would no longer deal with mankind through the strict judgment of the Flood. He would no longer use the raging sea to all but wipe out humanity. Instead, He placed a rainbow in the sky so that we would understand that His wrath would end.

            But how? We turn to Peter, who explains. Christ entered the torrents of death that should have engulfed us. He was drowned with the guilt of our sins as He bore them on the cross. But He emerged from the waters of death victorious and unscathed. First, He proclaimed His victory to those who had resisted Noah. He upbraided them for their unbelief, for their refusal to trust in the one proclaimed by Noah and to repent and to receive the forgiveness of sins. And then He rose gloriously from the dead, so that He could give forgiveness and eternal life to all who hear His Word and believe it.

            But how do we receive this salvation? Through the waters of baptism. God saved Noah from the wicked generation that surrounded him by placing Noah in an ark that was buffeted by water from all directions. But God kept Noah and his family alive in that ark, while the world of unbelief drowned and died. In the same way God has placed us in the waters of holy baptism where water comes upon us from all directions. Yet God keeps us alive—indeed, makes us fully alive for the first time—while our old sinful self drowns and dies.

            We see that, both in Noah’s case and in ours, the very same flood that should overwhelm us and drown us instead saves us and brings us life. That is because both Noah and we are connected with the death, burial, and resurrection of Christ. Because He has overcome death, death no longer has mastery over us.

Christ Walks on the Water
Norwegian Sailors' Mission, San Francisco, CA
The inscription reads, "Be of good courage. It is I. Fear not."

            And so we look at death from a new perspective, as our Lord teaches us to do in our reading from Matthew. Our Lord calls to mind what had happened to Jonah. Jonah had disobeyed God. He had run from God by going west over the sea, when he should have gone east over dry ground. In the end, though, he found himself surrounded by death as well as bringing death upon the sailors and his fellow passengers. No one wanted to die. They bailed water. They dumped cargo. But in the end it was no use. Jonah threw himself overboard into certain death and the sea became calm. He was swallowed by a great fish and thus prevented from dying. For three days he was in the belly of the fish, until he was spit up on dry land.

            So it was with our Lord. Unlike Jonah, He was completely obedient to His Father, but it still landed Him surrounded by death. In fact, His obedience drove Him into death. Indeed, death threated all the people of the world, for we were His fellow passengers and sailors. None of us wanted to die. We took our vitamins. We exercised. We saw the doctor. But in the end it was no use. And so our Lord threw Himself overboard into certain death—and the raging sea of death became calm. Our Lord was in the belly of the grave for three days, until at last He rose from the dead.

            The sea of death still rages, but its days are numbered, now that Christ has calmed it by His own death and resurrection. We still must pass through many waters, but Christ’s love is fiercer than death. When we die, we discover that death no longer rages, but we are instead kept safe in the arms of Christ, more secure than Jonah was when he was in the belly of the great fish. And then one day we will rise. We will see the new heavens and the new earth. And we will look around for the sea that raged throughout our lifetime, but we will not find it. Gone will be the sea that separated the Apostle John (and us) from God. Gone will be the sea that had produced the great beast opposed to God. Instead there will only be the gentle “river of the water of life.” In Jesus’ name. Amen.