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.

Midweek Lenten Sermon (March 18, 2015): Fruit of the Spirit: Kindness and Goodness

Texts: Isaiah 54:7-10 and Jeremiah 31:10-14

            Beloved in Christ, if you count Ash Wednesday and the Holy Week services, there are only eight Lenten midweek services, but there is a nine-fold fruit of the Spirit. Thus we have to double up today on two facets of the fruit of the Spirit: kindness and goodness. This is appropriate, since the two are used sometimes as synonyms for one another in the Scriptures, and they belong together.

            Let me spend some time just introducing the concepts. “Kindness” and “goodness” are related to the word “patience” that preceded it in the list. The fruit of the Spirit is described by nine words, and you can group the words into three groups of three. Thus, the first three words—love, joy, peace—are primarily internal attitudes, while the next three—patience, kindness, goodness—relate to how we deal with external problems. Patience, which is often translated quite accurately as “longsuffering,” emphasizes more the passive aspect of how Christians handle problems. We put up with them and endure them rather than go flying off the handle. But the words “kindness” and “goodness” emphasize a more active approach to handling problems. We don’t just grin and bear it, but we actively seek to change the situation.

            You see, sometimes we are called to handle problems simply by suffering through them. We have little or no ability to change things the situation. Instead we just have to endure those particular problems. That is where patience kicks in. We are longsuffering, that is willing to suffer for a long time without being bitter or complaining. But often we do have the opportunity to do something more than just passively suffer. Sometimes we have the chance to turn the hearts of those who are ill disposed toward us. And that is where kindness and goodness enter into the picture.

            Kindness and goodness involve treating other people well who have no such intention toward us. We help those who hurt us. We speak kindly when we people speak ill of us. We render good to others who render evil to us. But make no mistake: we are no doormats in the process. We are not just rolling with the punches. No, we are actively trying to bring about a real change through our kindness and goodness. You see, the last thing that we want is for other people to stay as they are. If we wanted that, we would just avoid them when they do something evil toward us. But by exuding kindness and goodness, we show that we want to change them into something better. We refuse to let them remain our enemy, but seek to be their friend.

            That is what God does with us, after all. We had vowed to be His enemies, but He pledged to be our friend. In our first reading, the one from Isaiah, we see how this works out in practice.

            First of all, we see that kindness and goodness do not rule out a reckoning with sin. God hid His face from the Israelites. He abandoned them for a while. To go back further in history, He sent the flood in the days of Noah. We should never think that God’s kindness means that there never is a reckoning with sin or that He has no real rules or that He doesn’t take them seriously. Indeed, the unkindest thing God could ever have done would be to ignore exactly how serious a problem sin is. But God is kindly enough disposed toward us that He is willing to say exactly how sin affects us: it permeates every action of ours, separates us from Him, and brings eternal damnation. It is no small problem and God is too kind to pretend that is. A physician who does not dare tell a patient about the cancer that rages in his body is no kind physician. He is cruel, for he prefers to see his patient die a horrible death rather than undergo a painful treatment that would hold the cancer at bay. A God who would never deal with our sin would be a very cruel God indeed. Thank God that He is willing to speak about such things with us!

            But God is about more than the diagnosis. He is also about the cure. That is why He said, “For a brief moment I deserted you, but with great compassion I will gather you. In overflowing anger for a moment I hid My face from you, but with everlasting love I will have compassion on you.” The anger is temporary. The love and compassion are eternal. That is why after the flood of forty days He promised that He would never send such a flood again, not even once in all the centuries that have followed since. He promised that His love for us would last longer than the mountains.

            We do well to consider the flood as an example of God’s kindness and goodness. He delayed sending it. He had Noah proclaim a warning for a hundred and twenty years. He did not ignore sin, but neither did He want to wipe out sinners without fair warning. But finally He had to do something. The world was not getting any better, but people were getting worse. But ever since that time God has shown His great love. Even though Noah and his family would soon show their sinful ways again, the Lord had pity on them and promised never to send a flood like that again. There might be local floods, but never a flood that would cover the whole world.

            Jeremiah sings a similar tune. God had scattered the Israelites in order to get them to revere Him. But He promised that He would pity them. He would gather them, much like a shepherd who gathers a scattered flock. It wasn’t that Israel had finally gotten its act together and started behaving responsibly. No, as Jeremiah said, “The Lord has ransomed Jacob and has redeemed him from hands too strong for him.” And that can be equally said of us. It isn’t that we finally got our act together and so God relented from His just anger. No, He was the one who ransomed us and redeemed us. It was Christ who went to the cross for us and saved us. We didn’t do anything, other than to enjoy it. But we are meant to enjoy the kindness and goodness of the Lord.

            Look at the rest of the passage in Jeremiah. Notice how He describes what happens when God shows His kindness. The people of Zion sing and delight in God’s goodness. They enjoy the rich bountiful goods that He provides, such as grain, wine, and oil. For them life is like a well-watered garden. They aren’t all shriveled up and dried out anymore. They flourish. They dance because life is a dance. They feast because life is a feast. In short, they are satisfied with all of God’s goodness.

            I’d like you to have that outlook on life. God has done so many amazing things out of His kind and good heart. He has made you and given you countless things to keep yourself alive and to enjoy life. He has redeemed you from your sin and from the death and hell that should certainly have followed your sin. He has poured out His Holy Spirit in you and made you a new creation. He has born with you patiently, but more than that, He has actively treated you with kindness and goodness—all so that you could be someone different from the person who you had been.

            You are now called to live a similar life, showing the Holy Spirit’s power and work in you. You are called to be kind and good, even as God is. May the Holy Spirit enable you to do so! In Jesus’ name. Amen.

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.