Following Jesus: How to Honor and Participate in God’s Plan of Redemption

Sermon delivered on the second Sunday of Lent, March 4, 2012, at St. Augustine’s Anglican Church, Columbus, OH.

Lectionary texts: Genesis 17.1-7, 15-16; Psalm 22.22-30; Romans 4.13-25; Mark 8.31-38.

In the name of God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.

This past week, we suffered another terrible calamity, this time in Chardon, OH, where a 17 year old boy shot and killed three fellow students and wounded two others. What is going on here? Where is God in all this? If God is good and really exists, why does he let this kind of stuff happen? Whenever we are confronted by the reality of Evil, we still do not know what to do with it, even with all our scientific and technological advancements and “enlightened” thinking.

Of course, what is implied in questions like these is our desire to have a God who is big enough to meet our needs, address our fears, and be there when we need him, because we all know that we live in a world created good but gone terribly wrong because of human sin. We want our God to be like Superman, who rushes in to rescue us before it is too late or who will use shock and awe to zap our enemies in some spectacular manner and instantaneously rid all the world of its evils (and evil people). How many of you expect (or want) a God like that? And here’s the problem, folks. When God does not behave according to our expectations, it causes some of us to have doubts and to lose hope and faith. And it certainly provides fodder for the critics of Christianity, as evidenced by the rise of the so-called new atheists.

Is God big enough to protect us? Is God there when we need him? Is God capable of shock and awe? You bet, and Scripture makes that abundantly clear (cf. Exodus 12.1-14.31; Psalm 73.1-28; Acts 23.12-35; Acts 27.27-28.10). God will indeed put the world to right in an instant one day when Christ returns in great power and glory to usher in fully God’s promised new creation. And when that happens there will be no doubt in anybody’s mind, God’s enemies included, that God is a God who is big enough to protect his people and defeat evil completely and forever. But a quick review of Scripture tells us another story about how God has chosen to confront the sin and evil that bedevil his good but fallen world. And so this morning I want to look briefly at what Scripture tells us about how God works to put to right his fallen world and end our exile from him forever so that we can have a better understanding of how God typically operates in his world and our lives. In the process, I hope it will answer some of your questions related to where God is in the midst of evil, how God typically interacts with us and his creation, and what it can mean for us as we continue our journey through this season of Lent.

As we have seen so far in our other Lenten sermons, God created his creation and creatures good and made human beings in his own image so that we would reflect God’s love and goodness out into the world and be wise stewards over God’s creation. The creation narratives alert us immediately to the fact that from the beginning it has always been God’s intention to rule his world through faithful and wise human stewardship. We might wonder why God would choose to establish his operational ground rules in this manner or even question God’s wisdom in using humans as his proxy rulers. But no one who is familiar with the biblical narrative can dispute that this is God’s intention for humans and that God interacts primarily with his creation through us.

But then human sin entered the picture and we started reflecting our own damaged image out into the world instead of God’s. When that happened, it got us kicked out of paradise and things went terribly wrong in a hurry for the human race and all of creation, as evidenced, for example, by the recent string of natural disasters in this country. And here we have a major reason for why God allows evil to exist in his world. When we failed to live up to our call to be God’s good, wise, and loving image-bearers and turned inward on ourselves so that our desires became selfish and disordered, we gave evil a natural conduit in which to operate in God’s good creation. That’s why murder entered God’s world after the Fall along with a host of other evil (cf. Genesis 4.1-6.8). This, of course, does not address the question as to where evil comes from in the first place (why was the serpent allowed in the garden?). But it does help us understand how evil uses our fallen nature to operate and spread itself. To the point, no one who has had God’s image truly restored in him through Christ and the power of the Spirit would do what T.J. Lane did last week. No one. When we turn inward on ourselves and follow our own selfish and disordered desires instead of reflecting God’s wise and healing love out to the world, we give evil an opportunity to act through us.

Of course, God could compel us to act wisely and do good all the time. He could have prevented us from falling into sin. But then we would be his puppets and slaves and we would be incapable of entering into a relationship with God freely and willingly. You cannot have a real relationship with anyone, God included, that is entered into under compulsion and the creation narratives make it clear that God created us to love him and have a relationship with him so that we could be his wise stewards and image-bearers. Hence, God could not compel us to act good and wisely all the time because that would run contrary to God’s creative intentions for humans. This, then, is the sad state of the human condition. Humans have been given the freedom to choose and we have used that freedom to turn inward on ourselves instead of reflecting God’s good and loving image out into his world and being its wise stewards as God created and intended us to be.

This brings us to today’s OT lesson because here we see an important example of God acting through humans, in this case Abraham and his descendants, to put God’s broken and hurting world to rights by once again calling his people to be his true image-bearers. In Genesis 12.1-3 God called Abraham and blessed him so that he and his descendants would be a blessing to others. In other words, God called Abraham to be part of God’s plan to rescue his fallen world and broken people. And while today’s lesson focuses on God’s promise to give Abraham countless descendants, we should not lose sight of the fact as to why God called Abraham in the first place—to be a blessing to others. God’s promise to Abraham in today’s lesson is an integral part of that original promise because of course Abraham was mortal and so here we see God promising Abraham to take care of that little problem so that Abraham’s people, all people of faith, both Jew and Gentile, could bring God’s blessing, healing, and love to his world. That, of course, explains God’s often rocky relationship with Abraham’s physical descendants, the people of Israel, because they frequently failed to be the people God called them to be.

And of course we see in today’s Gospel lesson the supreme example of God working through humans to bring his healing love to bear on his world. God himself became human so that he could be Israel’s true representative, God’s Messiah, and so fulfill God’s call to Israel to be his true image-bearers and wise stewards, thereby allowing God to redeem his world and its people through Jesus’ atoning death. But this is not what God’s people expected or wanted and I suspect the same holds true for many of us today. No, as our gospel lesson plainly tells us, instead of dealing with sin, death, and evil by using shock and awe, Jesus expected to bring in God’s kingdom, God’s saving rule and healing love, through his death and resurrection. And Jesus tells us in no uncertain terms that if we want to be his followers, if we want to have God’s image restored in us by the power of the Holy Spirit so that we can once again be wise stewards who reflect God’s healing love out into his world, we have to deny ourselves, take up our cross, and follow him.

Do you get it? Jesus is calling us to do what it takes, by the power of the Spirit living in us, to restore God’s image in us so that God can use us to bring his healing love to the world, just the way he created us to do and has always called us to be! That is why Jesus got so angry with Peter, because Peter was intent on having God work according to Peter’s expectations, not God’s design, and this gave evil an opportunity to sneak in and do its terrible work, in part, by tempting Jesus to abandon his mission to go to the cross so that we could be reconciled to God. It also explains what Jesus is getting at in his stern warning that those who save their life will lose it, not because God is some angry and capricious God who is determined that we will not have any fun in this life, but because giving up all that is opposed to God and obeying Jesus is what needs to happen if we want to be God’s image-bearers and wise stewards and live with God in his promised new creation! There won’t be any evil or selfishness or sin in the new creation—thanks be to God!— and so Jesus is reminding us that we had better get busy right here and now, and work on developing the habits of heart and the Christian character needed to live directly in God’s presence. Jesus calls this denying ourselves and taking up our cross. Paul calls it crucifying our sinful nature. It all points to the fact that we have to work at developing the habits of heart and mind, the Christian habits and character, again with the help of the Spirit, that will allow God to use us to be his wise stewards and image-bearers once again.

And because we are so profoundly broken, this will take our constant effort and practice to develop the necessary characteristics, the fruit of the Spirit—love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control (cf. Galatians 5.22-25)—that God can indeed use to bring his healing love to bear in his world. This is how God works and if we think about it, that’s really good news for us because God loves and respects us enough to invite us to help him in his mighty work of healing and redemption. What an honor! This is also what Lent is all about, a season of confession, self-denial, and repentance where we, with the Spirit’s help, focus on identifying and rooting out all that is within us that prevents God from using us as he intended when he created us. It’s not about getting ready to go to heaven. It’s about getting ready to do God’s work right now by having God’s image restored in us. Oh yes. In doing so, we also get ready to be citizens in God’s new creation. Awesome. Simply awesome.

And here is where faith comes into play because none of us can prove empirically or mathematically that Jesus’ promises or the promise of new creation are true. If that is one of your conditions for believing, you will never be able to claim the gift of life offered in Christ, as Paul reminds us in today’s epistle lesson. But when we have faith it will perforce change the way we act because faith always manifests itself in corresponding action. For example, we go to bed and set our alarms because we have faith that we will be alive in the morning and that the world will exist and we will have our job to which to go. We have faith in all this and act accordingly. We plan and save for retirement because we have faith that we will actually one day retire and be alive and healthy enough to enjoy the fruit of our labor. So our faith drives our work and we save for our retirement. Likewise with the Christian faith. If we really believe that God has chosen to interact with his world mainly through humans and that he has called us through Jesus to be part of the action, we will indeed work to deny yourselves, take up our cross, and follow him. We will engage in the terribly hard work of putting to death all the fun stuff in us like envy, rage, malice, selfish ambition, jealousy and the rest (cf. Galatians 5.19-21) because we know these things serve to dehumanize us by distorting God’s image in us and so prevent us from being his wise stewards. Otherwise, why would we try to do something like that? Simply put, if you don’t have faith in Jesus and you try to follow him by doing what he says in today’s gospel lesson, you are dumber than the day is long because life is short, you’re going to die, and so you’d better not waste any time getting yours while you still can (cf. 1 Corinthians 15.19).

But of course we do believe the promise that God loves us enough to call us to help him in his healing work by following Jesus in our lives. And so we live differently. How might that look? Let me end with where we started, with T.J. Lane. Yes, we must call for justice to be done because this young man murdered three image-bearers of God. But here is where it gets tricky. Here is where we must deny ourselves and take up our cross by resisting our urge to be self-righteous or vengeful. We must remember that Lane is made in God’s image too, even though that image is terribly flawed in him. And so we must do the hard work of forgiving Lane for his murderous acts and praying for him and his family as much as we are praying for the families of the victims, even when everything inside us screams otherwise. We must also ask God to turn Lane’s heart back to God (or maybe to God for the first time) because that is the loving thing to do and we should desire that all people find Christ, not just the ones we happen to like. Only then are we being God’s wise stewards and true image-bearers. Only then can God use us to bring his healing to the world.

Of course, being God’s image-bearer is precisely what we are trying to do as a church. This is what it means for the church to be the mission–to bring God’s healing love to his broken world and its people one person at a time in the context of our daily lives. There are millions of ways we can deny ourselves, take up our cross, and follow Jesus. What is our Lord calling you to do? To whom does he call you to be his image-bearer? How will you respond to God’s outrageous love for you in Christ? Whatever the call, and however God intends to use you, remember what a privilege it is to serve the one who loves you and gave himself for you in a terrible and costly act so that you might have life in abundance. When you understand how God works to bring healing, hope, and restoration to his world and that you are an integral part of that plan, you will know what it means to have Good News, now and for all eternity.

In the name of God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.