Sermon for Pentecost 7 (Proper 10B), July 12, 2015

Text: Mark 6:14-29

            Beloved in Christ, last week I urged you to be a strong disciple amid a skeptical world. Don’t wait for the world to come to faith in Christ. Don’t wait for the world to approve of your morality or your trust in God. Be a Christian anyway, “in season and out of season.” Understand that there have always been those who rejected Christ and His followers. Don’t let it bother you. Instead, be faithful and follow our Lord Jesus Christ.

            We can take this approach because we understand both the law and the gospel—and we delight in them. We understand that God’s law is so much deeper than a few platitudes about “keeping your hands off other people’s stuff.” We know that what it commands it does for our good. Nobody is helped by making themselves or their desires or their pleasures into something they worship. Nobody is better off for having misused God’s name or neglected His Word. Nobody can prosper when rebellious against authority, angry at the world, lecherous, greedy, or untruthful. Now it stings when we hear God forbid these things—not just the outward action but also the attitudes and thoughts that lead to actions. We are deeply flawed human beings who cannot live up to the standard that God has set. God’s law is absolute holiness and goodness, just as God is holy and good. We, though, are not. But we don’t set aside God’s law for that reason. As Christians, we always strive to do better and we confess our failings and we repent of our sins. In all of that, we do not set aside God’s law, but rather embrace it.

            But even more important than God’s law is the gospel, the good news that God has saved us by sending Christ into the world to live the holy life in our place that we never could have lived and to die the death we could not have endured in order to pay for our sins. Think about it. We have a God who loves us so much that He is willing to suffer and die to get us out of the mess we created for ourselves. We have a God who not only made us, but also got into the nitty-gritty of His creation rather than just cluck at us from afar. Therefore, Christianity is radically different from every other philosophy and religion. They teach people to improve themselves morally and make them more acceptable to God and perhaps society too. But Christianity is all about God giving us life and salvation in Christ Jesus. It is all about God pronouncing us righteous through the forgiveness of sins before we have done even the smallest thing. Now, of course, such a teaching does lead to our moral transformation, but it is all because God is at work.

            That in a nutshell is what we Christians teach and believe and what gives a foundation for our hope and our lives. But, as I noted last week, not everyone accepts that idea. We are called, therefore, to be “strong disciples amid a skeptical world,” as the banner in our bulletin reads. But this week our text talks about what it is like being “a skeptical world amid strong disciples.” For, just as being surrounded by an unbelieving and hostile world can cause consternation for faithful Christians, so the mere existence of Christians is enough to send an unbelieving world into fits. And that is exactly what happened with the people in today’s Gospel. Now you might ask, “Why should we even pay attention to what opponents of Christianity are saying or thinking?” Well, we certainly will not turn to them to figure out what is right and what is wrong. We’re not going to buy into the world’s ideologies. And yet it is useful to know what other people are thinking. How can we explain the Christian faith to others if we don’t know their preconceptions and misconceptions? For that matter, how can we be strong disciples who can navigate our way in an unbelieving world, if we don’t know what that unbelieving world is trying to get us to think?

            Today’s text introduces us to three individuals—Herodias, Salome, and Herod—who each had a different take on John the Baptist. Often we make the mistake of assuming that all people outside our household of faith all believe the same things or take the same attitude toward God or Christians. That is not the case. Herodias was extremely hostile to John. She couldn’t stand him and wanted him dead. Her daughter was Salome, as the historian Josephus tells us. It was Salome who was the one who actually asked for John’s head, but it wasn’t because she was rabidly opposed to him. Instead, she was manipulated by her mother to make that request. And then there was Herod. Herod actually admired John, listened to him, and wanted to protect him. Yes, he arrested John partly because he didn’t want him to preach boldly about Herod’s sins. But he also arrested John in part to protect him. If he was confined to a prison, he couldn’t be doing the sort of rabble-rousing that would make Herodias angry. It was his way of keeping John alive, and it worked until Herodias outsmarted him.

            I think it is useful for us to remember that these three types of opponents to Christianity are still to be found today. There are those who spit nails as soon as they hear the word “Jesus” or “Christian.” They find God’s law offensive and they detest the idea of God forgiving our sins for Christ’s sake. It’s hard to have a conversation with such people. But we can “let [our] reasonableness be known to everyone,” as the Scriptures tell us to do. We are people of joy and hope. We are not anxious about anything, but we bring everything to God in prayer. I think that this is extremely important to remember as our society shows itself less and less willing to countenance even a smidgeon of Christian morality in its midst. We could panic and, indeed, some Christians are. But I propose that instead we show who we truly are: reasonable people who have supreme confidence in Christ as the Lord who governs all history, even when things seem to be going against Him and us. Yes, the world is going to hell in a handbasket, but it’s being doing that for millennia. We will speak the truth in love because we don’t want the world to perish, but we know that it is not up to us to save the world. That’s Christ’s task. And so we try to persuade people like Herodias, but we don’t despair if we can’t get through to them.

            Then there are the people like Salome. She wasn’t a follower of John, but then she wasn’t a hard-core opponent of him, either. She was a teenage girl who had teenage preoccupations. She was manipulated by her mother Herodias into asking for John’s head, but that is something that she wouldn’t have ever asked for on her own initiative. And so it is with many unbelievers today. They are often manipulated by vocal atheists and opponents of Christianity, but they don’t understand the issues. That’s why the Scripture tells us, “In your hearts regard Christ the Lord as holy, always being prepared to make a defense to anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is in you.” As we live a godly life, we will have occasion to explain to the unbelieving world why we do what we do. Of course we have to “do it with gentleness and respect, having a good conscience.” We don’t approach evangelism with a “take no prisoners” mentality. Again, we show that we are reasonable. The Scriptures tell us that if you act this way, “when you are slandered, those who revile your good behavior in Christ [will] be put to shame.” The people like Salome may actually be persuaded if our good behavior can overcome the slander that they have heard about us and thus earn us a fair hearing.

            And then there are the people like Herod. They respect us. They are willing to dialogue with us. They are willing to call us “righteous and holy” people. They admire us for our charitable acts. They know that we are right in our criticism of ungodly behavior, even if they can’t bring themselves actually to do something about the problem. Like Herod, they are “greatly perplexed” when they hear us, “and yet” they hear us “gladly.” When they see us suffer persecution, they feel guilty about it, much as Herod felt guilty about being the cause of John’s death. So what do we do with people like Herod? We continue to talk with them, even as John did. Herod had many a conversation with John when the latter was in prison. If Herod was open to talking with John, John was more than happy to comply. Indeed, if we are willing to try to talk with a Herodias or a Salome, we should be very eager to talk with a Herod too.

            But what happens if we don’t win over these people? What if they never become Christians? What if, in fact, we lose our heads as John did? Well, our Gospel reminds us that that won’t be the end of God’s kingdom. We know that we will go to be with God when we die and that we will be raised on the Last Day. If our life is shortened by the tyrant’s sword, it won’t matter in the end. Furthermore, our opponents will still have to face the message of our Lord Jesus Christ. Herod thought that he had ended John’s influence on his life. But if anything, he was more haunted by John and his words after John’s death than when he was still alive. God’s Word remains, even if those who bear it die.

            And so, beloved in Christ, let us continue to be strong disciples of Christ amid a skeptical world, even if that skeptical world doesn’t know how to handle strong disciples of our Lord. In Jesus’ name. Amen.

Sermon for Pentecost 6 (Proper 9B), July 5, 2015

Text: Mark 6:1-13

            Beloved in Christ, Jesus was so loved wherever He went. Everybody appreciated that He was trying to bring life and fellowship with God to them. Everybody in every village left their homes to greet Him when He came to town. Everybody welcomed His disciples when He sent them ahead to prepare the way for Him. It was easy to be a Christian during our Lord’s earthly ministry because everybody believed in Him and was eager to follow Him at all costs. Not.

            Yes, none of those statements above are true. Christianity was not popular when Christ Himself walked visibly in our midst. Christianity wasn’t even popular with the people who knew Christ best and should have been His most eager disciples. In fact, they badmouthed Him and refused to let Him do any miracles in their midst. They would rather suffer than acknowledge Jesus to be someone who could help them. They did their best to insult Him. They called Him “the son of Mary.” Now we Christians know that He was literally the son of Mary and had been conceived by the Holy Spirit in an extraordinary way so that He had no earthly father. But that is not what the crowd was getting at when they called Him “the son of Mary,” for He had been adopted by Joseph, who had raised Him as his own son. The crowd was implying that Jesus was a bastard and His mom was a loose woman—and thus He did not deserve to be heard in the least.

            If that is how people treated our Lord Jesus Christ Himself, who could do miracles that neither you nor I can do, how do you think people will treat His followers, including us? The Christian church has never had an easy time, and those who think that that is the case don’t know history. Yes, there have been times when the Christian church has had great influence on society. But such power has always been a two-edged sword, for then power-hungry people have gravitated toward the church and tried to take control of it so that they can wield power. That has meant that sincere Christians who tried to follow our Lord Jesus Christ have had a difficult time doing so, as bishops cared little for the flock of God and strove for political power. Real Christians suffered during those eras.

Jean Leon Gerrome Ferris, The Mayflower Compact
In public domain in the United States

            But often if you really look in history, you find that the Christian church has not been as powerful or influential as both its critics and admirers like to claim. For example, we know about the Pilgrims coming to this country in order to practice their religion freely. What we omit to say is that the Pilgrims were a minority on the Mayflower; moreover, most colonies (such as New York, Virginia, and the Carolinas) were not founded for religious reasons but for commercial reasons. Since then the strength of Christianity has waxed and waned. Right after independence we largely adopted the harsh secularism of our then French allies. Indeed, in 1800 only one in six Americans belonged to a church, and hardly a single Christian could be found in the elite universities of our country. Now today there is a growing secularism in our land, but it is nowhere as strong as it was in the early days of our republic. That is because the nineteenth century saw a strong renewal of the Christian church in our country. We’ve teetered back and forth since then, but have never become as anti-Christian as we were in our early days.

            So from both biblical history and church history we see that Christianity has not always been accepted by everybody or even the majority of people. Accordingly, it has always been difficult to be a Christian. In fact, you should expect that to be the case. Don’t assume that the world’s values will line up with yours. Don’t assume that whatever way of thinking is popular is automatically Christian. Being a disciple of our Lord Jesus Christ will always mean going against the grain. The world does not want to take God’s commandments seriously. The world doesn’t want to hear about a Savior saving it from God’s judgment. So don’t expect it to pat you on the back now.

            Well, how do we live in such an environment? Here consider the two things that Christ did. “He went about among the villages teaching.” And “He called the twelve and began to send them out two by two.” In other words, He continued His earthly ministry and brought in more people to do the work. It didn’t stop Him from doing His work and neither should it stop us. Just because some people didn’t want to hear Him and didn’t want His help, it didn’t follow that nobody wanted to hear His message. God’s kingdom was still advancing—maybe not in one town, but perhaps in the next.

            I think this helps us to understand how to be a Christian today. You’ve noticed that our bulletin always has the banner stating that we exist to “make strong disciples amid a skeptical world.” We are not starry-eyed people who think that being a Christian and being a good American will always line up. We are not so naïve to think that society’s values and beliefs will line up with our Christian faith. And so we don’t close up shop just because we discover that our faith doesn’t please everyone or even that it doesn’t please the majority of people. We are called to be God’s holy people, to embrace the salvation Christ offers, to live a godly life in gratitude for that salvation, and to share the good news about Jesus as we have opportunity to do so. And we are called to do that “in season and out of season,” whether it lines up with the way most people think or not.

            And so, like Jesus, we continue to proclaim God’s law and gospel and we ordain new men to do the same. The apostles were sent out without much support. They had to rely on the good will of the people who hosted them. In fact, our Lord told them not to take more than a staff for their journey. They wouldn’t have a spare tunic, as any well-to-do traveler would have had. They weren’t even to take bread or spending money along, but rely completely on their hosts to provide them with what they needed. Today pastors still rely on their congregations for their support. We don’t rely upon the government to give us our salary or to give us special authority.

            When I was in seminary many years ago, I remember talking with a pastor from the Church of Norway who was doing graduate studies at our seminary. The Church of Norway is nominally Lutheran, but any pastor there who takes the Lutheran faith seriously soon finds himself in hot water. And this pastor had endured quite a bit for being a faithful Christian pastor in a place where the church had given in to its very hedonistic and secular society. I remember asking him why he didn’t organize an independent Lutheran church there, something that others have done more recently. His reply was interesting: “Wherever I go in my village, I do so as an official of the king.” (He meant King Olav V, who was Norway’s king back then, not our Lord Jesus Christ.) But in the end how did that help? He had the same standing as the village postmaster—one more bureaucrat to be ignored. All the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t help him advance the gospel.

            So let us not look for the state or society at large to prop us up. As much as we love our country and as much as we pray for its leaders, we know that our hope and salvation do not lie there. Instead, we are going to have to take more seriously the notion that being a Christian is a counter-cultural undertaking.

            Let me flesh that out just a bit. Christians have a different understanding of the law than does the average American. The average American says, “Is it legal? Then it’s okay to do it. Is it popular or at least approved by most people? Then by all means do it.” Christians have a different take. We understand that God’s law is much more encompassing than the laws of our country. At its best, those laws establish some rules to minimize chaos in society. We know those laws can’t keep society completely well behaved, since there aren’t enough police officers around to enforce perfect behavior, but the laws keep injustices to a minimum. But sometimes our laws don’t even do that. They punish the innocent and let the guilty go free. They set up a society that is at variance from what God would like. So be it. Let the world be the world. You be a faithful Christian.

            That means we don’t just look at some of the Ten Commandments, but all of them. It also means that we don’t just think of them in minimalistic ways. In other words, we should think that there is more to the commandment “You shall not commit adultery” than simply “Don’t cheat on your spouse.” Instead, we understand that every thought, word, or deed that goes against God’s intention of being chaste is wrong. Similarly, when we hear, “You shall not steal,” we know God is forbidding the little ways we take what is not ours, such as by wasting time while on the clock and everything else totally approved of in our culture.

            We will have to assume that our country is lackadaisical about morality and that we are called to a higher standard. But there’s more. We Christians are animated not by the law, but by the good news about Jesus Christ, our Savior. He is the Son of God who has taken on our human nature and rescued us from death and hell. He is the one who gives us hope, who heals us, who drives the demons away, and in short restores us. We take God’s law so seriously only because we take this message of good news even more seriously. Now many of our compatriots don’t like the gospel because it undercuts the notion that we are our own saviors, one of the basic premises of the American Dream. But for us who have found our salvation in Christ, we know that there is nothing more precious than to find out that God has done for us what we never could. It isn’t just a piece of good news, but the very message by which we live.

            Therefore, beloved in Christ, let’s not worry whether the world appreciate us or not. Let’s be Christians—strong Christians—amid a skeptical world. In Jesus’ name. Amen.

Mind the Gap

We have all heard people complain about the biggest gap in Christianity, the gap that is allegedly responsible for all the evils among Christians, viz., the twelve inch gap between the head and the heart. In this analysis, the problem is that too many people have a “head knowledge” of the truths of Christianity, but they don’t have the “heart knowledge” that is necessary for a Christian to thrive. What is the implied solution? The church ought to focus more on the heart and less on the head—in other words, more on the emotions and less on the intellect.

Behind this explanation is the current western way of looking at people. A human being has an intellectual center (commonly called the “head”) and an emotional center (commonly called the “heart”). Granted, nobody actually thinks that the cardiac organ is the seat or origin of emotions, but it is a convenient metonymy to differentiate between two aspects of the human mind that in our estimation have little or nothing to do with each other. We speak similarly of courage as “guts,” even though nobody thinks that our courage resides in our intestines.

The real problem comes about when we think that this modern way of dividing the components of a human being is actually the biblical way of viewing humanity. Compounding the problem is the fact that the Scriptures urge people to have a change of heart, and we tend to read “heart” with our culture’s eyes rather than with biblical eyes. And thus we see the Bible’s call to a new heart as an invitation to rework our emotions and to stop our intellectual growth as unnecessary at best and counterproductive at worst.

But the Bible doesn’t distinguish between head knowledge and heart knowledge. In fact, it doesn’t use the word “head” to refer to the intellectual aspect of mankind. Instead, it uses the word “heart” to do so. It is the heart that thinks and verbalizes ideas (Genesis 6:5; Deuteronomy 9:4). It is the heart that remembers (Deuteronomy 4:9). It is the heart that meditates and contemplates (Psalm 16:7; 19:14). Most importantly, it is the heart that possesses the will (Exodus 4:21) and makes ethical decisions (Deuteronomy 9:5; Psalm 7:10). To be sure, the emotions are also found in the heart (Exodus 4:14; Deuteronomy 28:65). But the Scriptures do not separate what we in the West do. It knows that the will, the intellect, and the emotions cannot be isolated from one another, but work together to form a common mind. Thus, when we read such phrases as Deuteronomy 4:29, that command us to seek after God with our whole heart, we cannot see this as an exercise purely of the emotions, but also of the intellect, the memory, and especially the will. When Deuteronomy 10:16 tells us to circumcise our hearts, it clarifies exactly what it means: we are not to be stubborn. In other words, it is a command to exercise the will (not just the emotions) more appropriately.

But are we denying that hypocrisy can be a problem with Christians? No, we are just reframing the question. The current received wisdom is that Christians become hypocrites when they aren’t emotionally in tune enough or when they try to acquire intellectual knowledge instead of practical knowledge. And yet the Scriptures have a different analysis of the problem. As the prophet Isaiah says (29:13): “This people draw near with their mouth and honor me with their lips, while their hearts are far from me.” Our Lord confirms the same sentiment in Matthew 15:8. The problem isn’t that they have a high spiritual IQ and a low spiritual EQ. The problem is that they have neither, even though they mouth the words. In other words, they say the right words, but don’t understand what they are saying, let alone assent to them.

It is for that reason that the psalmist prays (19:14), “Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable in Your sight, O LORD, my Rock and my Redeemer.” The process of spiritual growth begins with the mouth and the lips, but it cannot end there. He wants his words to be orthodox and the meditation—there’s that thinking again!—of the heart that follows to be proper and in full accord with what his lips are uttering. The psalmist knows that God placed His Word very near us so that it could be on our mouth and in our hearts (Deuteronomy 30:14). We learn God’s Word by speaking it often, but it cannot be something that stays only on our lips but must be apprehended by our entire mind—will, intellect, and emotions.

As the passages mentioned above indicate, the Scriptures know that learning starts with the mouth, but must settle into the heart if it is to succeed. Thus, the Scriptures have a more nuanced attitude toward rote learning than we in the contemporary West do, which universally rejects it. As we have already noted, the Bible recognizes that people can recite certain truths without understanding, let alone believing them. It knows that mouthing the words is not the same as knowing or believing them. But at the same time the Scriptures do not eschew rote learning and memorization. They know full well that the first step in learning something is to say what one does not fully understand. Consequently, the Scriptures are full of admonitions to repeat God’s words as a way to get that Word into the heart of each generation. Deuteronomy 6:6-9 outlines such a procedure: God’s Word is meant to be stored in the heart; consequently, children are to be taught these words at fixed times during the day and these words are to be as visible as one’s head and hands and doorposts. Of course, this is only the first step, with the next step being for children to understand what they have been saying. The problem arises because children (and, for that matter, learners of all ages) can resist these words and only embrace them with their lips. But the problem isn’t with the repetition of the words of the Scriptures, but with the stubborn heart that refuses to learn.

Thus, there is still a gap that faithful Christians have to address. It’s just not the emotional-intellectual gap most Christians in America assume it is.

All Bible quotations are from the English Standard Version (ESV).