Sermon for Lent 4B, March 15, 2015

Text: John 3:14-21

            Beloved in Christ, if you were to ask most people what Christianity is about, they would say that it is about learning how to live a moral life. They would go on to add that that is what all religions and philosophies are ultimately about: getting people to learn to avoid doing bad things and to do good things instead. And so they look at Christianity with mixed feelings. They believe that it is important that people don’t go around behaving badly. After all, no one wants to live in a society where people murder, rape, rob, and plunder without giving it a second thought. And yet these same people don’t like having to learn all sorts of moral lessons, especially having to hear them again and again. That is why you often hear people say how they grew up Catholic or were taken to a Baptist church when they were young, but don’t attend much anymore. What they want you to understand is that they weren’t raised in a barn. They were taught the difference between right and wrong. Even if they don’t want to be lectured about such things now that they are adults, they want to have us know that they aren’t complete barbarians.

            Now if Christianity were all about morality, you could see why people would grow uninterested in the church after a while. After all, morality is fine, but it is rather boring. But what if Jesus came to give us something better than morality? What if He didn’t deny the importance of being moral people but nonetheless didn’t say that morality was His mission? Well, that would be more like the Jesus we meet in the Scriptures and the Jesus who is proclaimed in this church. He isn’t the Jesus of popular culture. He isn’t a moral teacher or reformer. He is the Savior of the world.

            If Jesus had come to be a mere reformer or moralist instead of a Savior, John 3:16-17, the heart of today’s gospel would have read something like this: “For God so loved virtue that He gave His only Son, that whoever obeys His rules should not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send His Son into the world to save the world, but to give an example of what a moral life was truly like.” But this is how the passage actually reads: “For God so loved the world, that He gave His only Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send His Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through Him.” Those verses tell us many things. It tells us that we would naturally perish, if Christ had not stepped in. But God in His great love sent His Son, and the Son in His great love gave up His life, all so that we would not be condemned or perish for all eternity, but instead enjoy eternal life and fellowship with Him.

            Christianity is about light and life, about fellowship with God and the way knowing Him suffuses our entire life with His joy and peace. That’s why Jesus spoke with Nicodemus as He did. At the beginning of John 3, Nicodemus had paid Him a high compliment, calling Him a “Teacher come from God.” But Jesus didn’t want such compliments and titles, at least not if they were going to obscure His mission. He told Nicodemus that he had to be “born again,” that is, “born of water and the Spirit,” in order to enter God’s kingdom. Mere moralizing wouldn’t cut it. Instead, he—like all of us—would have to receive the new birth that God gives in holy baptism.

            As Christ unfolded the life that the Holy Spirit gives through baptism, He also told Nicodemus about His own work. And there was one image that came to our Lord’s mind that best explained what He was all about: the bronze serpent in the wilderness. If Nicodemus could understand what had transpired back then, he would understand exactly what our Lord Jesus Christ was doing when He came in human flesh and when He headed to the cross. And so you could say that this is one of the ways in which Christ explains the atonement, the process by which He reconciled sinners to God.

            Consider what had transpired in the wilderness. The Israelites were not committing some horrible crime. They were not stabbing each other to death, robbing each other, or doing some other heinous misdeed. They grumbled. They did the sort of thing you and I tend to do rather frequently. They “became impatient on the way,” and they let that impatience show by their words. They griped about the food and the water and the leadership Moses had provided. Now we might dismiss all this grumbling as nothing serious. But we would never want to be on the receiving end of such criticism. More than that, God knew that what lay behind the grumbling was nothing else than rank selfishness of the highest order, and that is the source of all sins.

            It’s not just the notorious sins that rightly earn God’s wrath, but also the smaller ones and the more common ones. No one in the crowd would have dared to stab Moses and see him dead in an instant. They knew that there would be tremendous consequences: whoever killed him would be quickly put to death. But instead of trying to kill him with one blow of the knife, they were perfectly willing to kill him over the years through thousands of lashes of the tongue. The net effect was the same, but they held themselves blameless because they never wielded a knife. Thus, we too should not overlook our more “minor” sins but instead regard them as very serious indeed.

            What was the result of the Israelites’ sins? The people were bitten by fiery serpents. As they had been backbiters, so they were appropriately bitten in their heels. Just as they had poured forth venom from their mouths, they experienced the serpents pouring venom out of their mouths. And just as they had wished Moses and God would die, so they experienced death at the hands of these snakes. The punishment fit the crime. But how could they get out of their predicament?

            Now if Christianity had all been about moralizing and teaching the difference between right and wrong, Moses would have simply given them a lecture on the vice of grumbling. But he didn’t, because he knew that this was a matter not just of right and wrong, but of life and death. And so, based on God’s instructions, he made a bronze serpent and set it on a pole. All who saw it would be healed.

            The bronze snake had that same fiery color look that the fiery serpents had, but it had none of their poison. In the same way, Christ was in every respect like sinful man, but without the venom of our sin. The bronze snake was lifted up. So too was our Lord Jesus Christ. But while that bronze snake didn’t feel anything, one way or the other, when it was lifted up, our Lord suffered horribly when He was lifted up on the cross. The bronze serpent brought healing to all who looked at it in faith. So too does Jesus Christ. When we believe that He was crucified for us, the guilt of our sin is removed. We live despite the bite sin has taken out of us. We live because Christ was lifted up for our sake.

            Christ was lifted up on the cross so that we might believe that He is the One who reconciles us to God so that we can be rescued from condemnation and eternal death. He offers us life and light. But do we want that? Our Lord has already died because of our sins, and so we are free from condemnation if we trust in Him. But if we do not put our trust in Him, we stand condemned already, for we are rejecting the one source of help. Yes, it would make as much sense as being bitten by one of the fiery serpents in the wilderness but refusing to look at the bronze serpent because you were too angry to do so. (And I’m sure that there were several people who behaved that way.) But our Lord points out a sad truth: many people will choose to continue to live in darkness rather than embrace the life and the light that Christ gives. It may be hard to fathom why anyone would do this, but Christ offers an explanation: Some people hate the light and prefer the darkness.

            Beloved in Christ, it may seem painful at first to come out of the darkness into the light. The light can bewilder and blind us at first, at least until our eyes get adjusted to it. But it is so much better in the light. Yes, the light exposes our deeds and shows how they have been tainted by sin. But, as forgiven children of God, we now enjoy Christ’s righteousness. We are clothed with it. Who would want to keep that hidden in the dark? Moreover, we begin to live a new life and walk in His holy ways. We are not terrified by the light, then, for we know that it will show the good work that God is doing in us. In short, it is delightful to walk in the light.

            That is what Christianity is about. Let’s make sure that we understand that it’s about life and light rather than just good and evil, and let’s help others to understand it too. In Jesus’ name. Amen.

Sermon for Lent 2B, March 1, 2015

Text: Mark 8:27-38

            Beloved in Christ, we looked at the first two paragraphs of today’s gospel back in January, when we celebrated the Confession of Peter and those paragraphs were the text of the day. Today’s Gospel adds the third paragraph, and so we will spend a good portion of today’s sermon looking at that part of the text. But still it would be helpful for us to go back and understand what the first two paragraphs of today’s text teach us.

            We see that we Christians must know who Jesus is and what He has done for us. We must know that Jesus is the Christ and that He came to be our Savior. We must know both these truths. If we believe that Jesus is the Son of God and the Father’s anointed messenger, but have no idea why He came for us or have the wrong idea, it does us no good. Or if we believe that He came to be our Savior, but think that He is just another ordinary mortal, it does us no good, either. We have to believe that He is the incarnate Son of God—that is, He is true God and true man—and we have to believe that He alone is our Savior from sin, death, and hell.

            Of course, when we confess that Jesus is the Christ and the one who was crucified and raised in order to save us, we confess several things about ourselves, too. If Jesus is the Christ—God’s Anointed One—then we are not. We are not the Messiah, and neither is anyone else. If Jesus is the unique Son of God, then we are not. If Jesus is our Savior, then we must have some sins to be atoned for. If it cost Jesus His life and that in a most gruesome manner, then our sins cannot be trivial. If Jesus had to undergo death and resurrection for our sake, then our problems cannot be trivial but must be matters of life and death. And if He was willing to undergo all these things, then He must love us indeed.

            As we meditate on these things, we are led to view our lives more deeply. We have a tendency to think too highly of ourselves, too little about God, and too trivially about our sin. But if Christ is the holy Son of God and our Savior, then we are led to think humbly about ourselves, to think highly of God, and to think deeply about our sin. We are not naturally inclined to acknowledge our sin but, if we do, we speak of them as trifles, as mere foibles hardly worth mentioning. You see, we just love to gossip to pass the time; we have no malicious intent. Or we just love a little risqué humor; we don’t mean anything really by it. Or it was just a worthless item we took that nobody will miss; we’d never take anything valuable since we’re not thieves. Or we just got a little too tipsy, not fall down drunk; we’re not an out-of-control boozer. Or we just uphold high standards; we’re not snooty, self-righteous people. In short, we cannot think that all of our little quirks—annoying though they may be to others, as we may well admit—are really all that serious, let alone damnable. But then we look at things in light of the cross and we see they are.

            People tend to be amazed that our Lord was willing to die on the cross in order to save murderers, gangbangers, rapists, robbers, and the like. They are amazed that Christ in His mercy can save such people. I, however, am amazed that our Lord was willing to die on the cross in order to save the so-called petty sinners, those who suffer from the same sinful nature as the notorious sinners do but who are blind to its real influence. A tumor that is visible to all can quickly be seen to be cancerous and removed. But the tumors that lie deep within the body and cause no real discomfort or pain go a long time without ever being noticed and thus prove more deadly. People who have sinned in blatant ways can quickly submit to the divine surgeon’s scalpel and have their guilt removed, but people who sin in slyer ways often never come to the point of having the sin dealt with. That is why we Christians gather weekly to confess our sins and look to Christ’s forgiveness, for we understand the grave danger our subtler sins pose to us. Only by God’s law do we see the danger, and only by Christ’s death for us is that danger removed.

            Therefore, Christ’s death remains the focus point of the Christian life. In His death on the cross we see exactly how much we deserved to suffer because of our sins. We also see exactly how much God loves us in that He was willing to experience all that for our sake, so that we would never have to undergo it. That is why the cross remains such an important focal point in the Christian Church. It is at the heart of Christian theology. Everything we need to know about ourselves and about God is revealed through the cross.

            It isn’t that we deny the resurrection that followed on the third day. No, we rejoice greatly that Jesus Christ rose from the dead and lives forever and ever. But the resurrection of Christ shows us the real power that was unleashed on the cross. It shows us that Christ’s death on the cross was not just the anguish of one more man suffering at the hands of an unjust regime. Rather, here was Almighty God, willing to go into the bowels of death for us. The resurrection underscores just how momentous the crucifixion had been.

            There is nothing in world history like the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. But it isn’t just His story, but ours too. Jesus lays down the pattern of the cross and resurrection as the pattern for our lives. He tells us to deny ourselves and take up our crosses and follow Him. Just as the cross was the way that He gained great glory for Himself and did great good for the world, so too our crosses give us great gain and allow us to do great good for our neighbors.

            I read a remark of G.K. Chesterton this past week where he noted that the idea of “Whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life…will save it” is not just sound theology, but sound advice in every sphere. He pointed out that the sailor and the mountain climber live by that principle as much as does any cleric. When climbers face one side of a mountain that is particularly dangerous, they must scoot around to another side, often exposing them to greater danger temporarily. Or when sailors are passing through a storm, they will have to expose themselves to the elements and risk being swept out into the unruly sea, just so that they can batten down the hatches or trim the sails or do whatever else is necessary to keep the boat afloat. The safe course guarantees disaster. To live safely, we must be willing to risk even our life.

            But our Lord does not call us to throw away our life on every last foolish adventure. A sound mountain climber doesn’t try to jump fifty feet away in some grand gesture. A sailor in a storm doesn’t try surfing the waves. Instead they focus on doing the task that they should. We are called to take up our crosses and follow Jesus, not take up our crosses and go any which way. And Jesus shows us what that venture consists of: holding onto His words in the midst of an “adulterous and sinful generation.”

            Our Lord warns us not to be ashamed of Him and of His words. That is the real challenge. That is the real cross. You see, there is something a bit embarrassing about His words. They don’t fit in with a society that believes it needs no savior. They don’t fit in with a culture that believes that enjoying the good life is what it is all about. They don’t fit in with the American belief that we are our own saviors and don’t need any help, divine or human. Yes, there is something embarrassing about our Lord’s words. If you don’t find that to be the case, either you’re not paying attention to His words or you live completely ignorant of the society around you and the impulses within you. But it is an “adulterous and sinful generation” we live in. We should not be embarrassed by what they are embarrassed by, but embrace the words of the one who will matter for all eternity.

            And so, beloved in Christ, look to Christ’s cross and do not shirk your own. It is the way of Christian discipleship. It is the way of life. In Jesus’ name. Amen.