Sermon originally preached on October 13, 2019. As always, it will be helpful to read the assigned texts for the sermon by clicking on or tapping their links below before reading the sermon. Another take on the mistaken belief that God is not in control of his world and/or does not love us. For those with ears to hear, listen and understand.

Lectionary texts: Jeremiah 29.1, 4-7; Psalm 66.1-11; 2 Timothy 2.8-15; Luke 17.11-19.

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

Our lessons this morning all exhort us to faithful living, especially during times when it seems that God is no longer in control of things. This is what I want us to unpack this morning.

We start with our OT lesson. The prophet speaks a surprising message to God’s people Israel who are living in exile in Babylon. Last week you recall that our psalm lesson had some very harsh things to say about Judah’s captors. Happy is the one, said the psalmist, who takes their little ones and dashes them against the rocks. In his cry for justice, the psalmist, it seems, takes a dim view of his captors (to put it mildly). Behind this shocking statement, however, rests a faith in God to make things right on behalf of his people and to exert his sovereign control over the nations by giving justice to his people Israel who are living in exile.

In today’s lesson, we see Jeremiah’s faith shine through in a distinctly different way. We have every reason to believe that those living in exile would have welcomed the psalmist’s sharp call for God’s justice against their captors. After all, hadn’t God used human agency (the Babylonians) to bring judgment against his own people? In today’s OT lesson, on the other hand, we have every reason to believe that the exiles would have disliked Jeremiah’s exhortation to pray for the peace and welfare of their captors every bit as much as they liked the psalmist’s cry for justice. A bit of context is needed for us to fully understand why the exiles in Babylon would have had such a dim view of Jeremiah’s advice to them to pray for their enemies. As part of God’s awful judgment on the sins of his people Israel, there were three deportations of God’s people living in Judah to Babylon. Jeremiah was addressing the exiles involved in the first deportation before the Babylonians finally sacked Jerusalem and burned down the temple. God’s people exiled to Babylon were hearing false prophets among them predicting a short exile. Not so, said Jeremiah and Ezekiel, God’s true prophets or spokesmen. You are suffering God’s ultimate curse for breaking his covenant and chasing after false gods (read Ezekiel 23 if you want God’s earthy and graphic description of his exiled people). But being the stubborn people they were (just like we can be stubborn), many of God’s people refused to believe God would punish his beloved people. Instead, for many living in exile, it seemed to them as if God was no longer in control. How could he be with them if they were exiled?

But Jeremiah disagreed with that assessment, having laid out a compelling and damning case against God’s people on behalf of God. Israel was in exile because she had been unfaithful to God’s call to them to be his people to bring his healing love to God’s broken and hurting world. Instead, they had adopted the false gods others around them worshiped and had become like those they had been called to heal. And precisely because God was in charge, now they found themselves exiled in a foreign land. You’re going to be here for awhile, Jeremiah told his people, so pray for your captors and for their welfare. It is the destiny of God’s people to flourish and prosper, and your situation depends on the welfare of your captors. So take the long view here, people of God. Pray for your captors even if you despise them. 

This advice requires great faith that God is in control despite appearances to the contrary and we all get this. Life for the exiles as they knew it before they were deported was over. For all intent and purposes, their sentence was permanent. God would one day end his people’s exile but well past their life span and this would surely have been demoralizing to the exiles just like we get demoralized when our world is rocked by awful change, be it the death of a loved one, a serious or debilitating illness, financial catastrophe, or being betrayed by a loved and trusted friend, to name just a few. Like the exiles, we ask where God is in it all? If God really is in charge why all the chaos in our lives and this world? 

And how about the Church? Almost every day I hear folks predicting the Church’s demise and proclaiming our irrelevance to this culture. But what if God has exiled his Church due to the sins of our ancestors as well as our own? What are we to do then? Accommodate the demands of our culture to be “relevant” again to win people for Christ? No, said Jeremiah to his people and us. Pray for your enemies and remain faithful to God’s call to be his people and embody God’s holiness. For Christians that means we imitate Christ in the power of the Spirit. We must therefore ask God to bless our cultural enemies because our welfare is tied to our broader culture. If God weren’t in control, even in the midst of the chaos that swirls around us, if God isn’t sovereign over the nations, this advise would be absurd. Without God in charge, why bother praying? Instead we would be wise to adopt the attitude that it’s every person for him/herself; we’re on our own, baby!

But Jeremiah and the rest of the biblical writers would tell us not to lose hope or become demoralized like that, just like he told his own people, because a few verses later we hear this astonishing promise from God to a demoralized people living in exile under the curse of God’s judgment: “For surely I know the plans I have for you, says the Lord, plans for your welfare and not for harm, to give you a future with hope” (Jer 29.11). This is what God’s grace looks like on the ground and if God weren’t sovereign or in charge, God could never promise this to us. Almost twenty years ago when I was living through one of the darkest periods of my life and actively considering suicide, I memorized this passage and repeated it often and on a regular basis. Because I am standing here today I can attest to the power of God’s word to heal and sustain in the midst of immense darkness and would encourage you to do likewise as you walk through your own dark valleys. God is faithful and his plans for us are for our good. We can depend on him if we are willing to be patient and take the long view of life.

In our epistle lesson, St. Paul tells us to do essentially the same thing as Jeremiah told his people. Following the advice and practice of the psalmists who remembered God’s power to deliver his people from their captivity in Egypt with its own cruel chaos, and who encouraged God’s people to do likewise during the dark times of Israel’s history as well as their own, St. Paul remembers the power of God as he gladly endures suffering for the sake of the gospel. St. Paul points us to Jesus Christ, crucified, died, and buried, raised on the third day to new bodily life. Like Jesus telling the returning leper in our gospel lesson to get up—the Greek word for “get up” refers to resurrection—and get on with life because the leper’s faith had saved him (or made him well), St. Paul makes the bold claim that Christ’s resurrection is the historical event that was the game-changer for those of us who put our faith in Christ. Echoing his claim in Romans 6.3-5, St. Paul reminds us that because we have died with Christ in our baptism, we will live a resurrected life with Christ in God’s new world. Despite the darkness, loss, sorrow, heartache, fears, chaos, and the transitory nature of life, we who belong to Christ will share in his eternal future. We must therefore be bold in proclaiming this truth, a truth that will one day overthrow the dark powers who currently rule God’s world, and in doing so we must expect to suffer for Christ’s sake. If we are willing to suffer for Christ, we will reign with him in the new heavens and earth. Our future destiny isn’t rest and refreshment. It’s a call to be what God created us to be in the first place—God’s image bearers who run his new world and reflect his goodness and glory. There will be no darkness or evil in that world and life because we will live in God’s direct presence as Revelation promises. Christ’s resurrection is definitive and historical proof that God has defeated the powers of Evil, Sin, and Death on our behalf and calls us to imitate our Lord Jesus in the living of our days. It is a call for us to be fully human beings. Being human in this mortal life, of course, means we will also sometimes miss the mark, or in St. Paul’s words, we will be faithless. But we are to take hope because Christ is always faithful, just like the Father is always faithful to his people and good to his word. So we dare not cave to our culture nor should we be ashamed of proclaiming the gospel to a hostile world that desperately needs to hear it but refuses much of the time to do so. This can be discouraging itself, but we are to stand firm. We are resurrection peeps, my beloved. We must take the long view of life because we have a future and a hope, a sure and certain expectation. Is your faith strong enough and bold enough to sustain you when you must walk through your own dark valleys? 

I don’t know why God allows so much suffering and wrong in this world. I don’t know why God allows the bad guys to prevail sometimes. But I do know this. Our future in Christ is secure and we have been washed clean of our sins and all the separates us from God by the blood of the Lamb shed for us to end our self-imposed exile and alienation from God. The Father has rescued us from the dominion of darkness and transferred us to the kingdom of his beloved Son, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of our sins. I know all this is true because I know Jesus Christ is raised from the dead and I therefore I know he reigns over this world and his promises to us are true as Scripture proclaims, even in the midst of chaos and darkness. 

So here is how we as God’s people in Christ can find power to live in a world gone bad. First, we ensconce ourselves in God’s word contained in Scripture and faithfully interpreted by the Church to learn the story of God’s rescue plan for his good but sin-corrupted world. We learn it to know God is in charge, to recognize God’s ways, and to understand our role in God’s rescue plan. Second, we pray for our own welfare and for the welfare of our enemies and captors even as we are bold to expose their lies and proclaim God’s Truth contained in the gospel. And last, together we remember our resurrection faith and let it sustain us in the power of the Spirit by reminding us that despite appearances to the contrary, God has reclaimed his world and us and defeated the powers of Evil, Sin, and Death. Are you doing these things to help sustain you in the living of your days? If not, you are setting yourself up for failure as well as denying the Lord’s love for you along with his power to heal and rescue you, and when you crash and burn, you will have no one but yourself to blame. Don’t despise yourself like that, my beloved. For the love of Christ, don’t do that to yourself.

So how does all this apply to our stewardship campaign? Simply put, stewardship is a loving and thankful response to the power of God. It acknowledges God’s ways are not our ways and gives thanks that we have meaning, purpose, and hope in this mortal life. We are in day 28 of our 40 days of prayer and fasting, praying to the Father to end our homelessness. Are you persistent in your prayers? There is no way you can be if you do not believe in the efficacy of prayer! As we have seen, praying is one of our main duties as Christians because prayer has the power to heal and transform. Sometimes it seems as if we are too small a parish to really make a difference and we tend to be stingy with our time, our talents, and our money. But this attitude denies the power of God that we have seen is available to us who come to him in faith with thanksgiving. As you consider your pledge for 2020, I urge you to have a generous heart patterned after the Father’s generous heart as manifested chiefly in God the Son. We have been given an immense gift in Christ and called to be God’s own through him. Let us resolve to give generously to ensure that we at St. Augustine’s really do live out our mission statement to be “changed by God to make a difference for God” in the power of the Spirit. Our future is secured and this knowledge can and will help us live faithfully in this present age because we know our work in the Lord is not in vain (cf. 1 Cor 15.59). We know this because we know know that Jesus Christ is raised from the dead and our present and future are secure because of it, thanks be to God! To him be honor, praise, and glory forever and ever. 

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

Sermon originally preached on October 15, 2017. As always, it will be helpful to read the assigned texts for the sermon by clicking on or tapping their links below before reading the sermon. Let’s be honest. Many of us don’t really believe God is active and present in our lives or his world. The temptation to succumb to that lie inevitably leads us to despair. The Good News is that Scripture categorically rejects the lie of an Absentee/Uncaring God. Therefore, so should we. For those with ears to hear, listen and understand.

Lectionary texts: Exodus 32.1-14; Psalm 106.1-6, 19-23; Philippians 4.1-9; Matthew 22.1-14.

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

What are we to make of that strange story we read in our OT lesson this morning? Here are God’s people, rescued by God from their slavery in Egypt by an awesome display of power, and then nurtured by God and his servant Moses as they made their way through the desert to the promised land. What would make God’s people Israel abandon their rescuing, faithful God for a lifeless and powerless idol? And why should we care about this story as Christians living in 21^st century America? This is what I want us to look at this morning. 

To help us make sense of our lesson today, we need a little background. The Lord had called Moses up to the mountaintop to give Moses instructions for building the tabernacle, which would be the place on earth where God would dwell with his chosen people, Israel. Let that fact sink in. God is giving Moses plans that will enable God’s people to enjoy in a special way God’s presence with them as God’s people (cf. 1 Kings 8.1-13). No other people on earth could claim this privilege, dangerous as God’s presence could be at times. God was making preparations with his servant to make good on God’s promise to be their God in a meaningful way.

But the meeting between God and Moses was taking longer than the people apparently expected. Exodus 24.18 tells us Moses was on the mountaintop forty days and nights, but God’s people don’t seem to have gotten that memo. And so they started grumbling to Aaron, Moses’ brother and God’s appointed priest, who would mediate God’s presence with his people once the tabernacle was built (don’t forget that last little nugget). Make gods for us who will lead us, they tell Aaron. As for Moses, we don’t know what the heck happened to the dude. He just checked out on us. In effect, the people were telling Aaron that they weren’t sure God was with them anymore as God had promised, and so they wanted God’s priest to make them gods to fill the perceived leadership void. Astonishingly enough, Aaron immediately agreed and forged a golden calf in direct violation of the first three commandments God had given Moses. Later in the story when Moses challenged his brother as to why he had done this, Aaron had this to say: 

“Do not let [your] anger burn hot; you know the people, that they are bent on evil. They said to me, ‘Make us gods, who shall go before us; as for this Moses, the man who brought us up out of the land of Egypt, we do not know what has become of him.’ So I said to them, ‘Whoever has gold, take it off’; so they gave it to me, and I threw it into the fire, and out came this calf” (Exodus 32.22-24)!

Seriously, Aaron? The first thing out of your mouth is to pass the buck and then to offer that ridiculous excuse about throwing gold into the fire and it coming out as a calf on its own? Really? Any self-respecting five-year old could do better than that! So it seems that God’s priest was no better than God’s people (I would invite you not to draw too many conclusions about priests from this; I might resemble that statement). Despite having witnessed God’s deliverance of them through the Red Sea, despite the presence of the Lord in the pillars of cloud and fire, despite the manna from heaven, despite God giving his people water to drink in the midst of the wilderness to sustain them in their journey (at that point) to the promised land, God’s people Israel, Aaron included, demonstrated how profoundly broken they were. Once they perceived God to be absent from their midst, they chose to take matters into their own hands pretty quickly so that all hell began to break loose. It is a sad and astonishing story for us to ponder on the brokenness of the human condition. Take God out of the picture for a moment, give us an inch, and we will take a mile. This is the legacy of the sin of our first ancestors, Adam and Eve.

And it would seem that God’s people in Christ are not immune to this problem either. In our epistle lesson, St. Paul addresses the growing problem of a conflict between two prominent women in the house church at Philippi. While St. Paul does not directly say it, it is not unreasonable for us to conclude that one of the reasons for the conflict was the perception by at least some that the Lord was absent among them. Otherwise, why would St. Paul bother to say in the context of addressing this conflict that the Lord is near? Not only that, but the apostle had some recommendations for the Philippians to help them cultivate the Lord’s presence amongst them. More about that in a minute. So this problem of misbehaving when we perceive the Lord to be absent seems to be common to both the people of the old and new testaments. 

But Israel’s misbehavior wasn’t simply a product of God’s perceived absence. As Jesus’ parable about the wedding banquet warns, while all are called to the banquet, many simply aren’t interested in attending if it means they must live under God’s rule and rules. This flies in the face of our modern sensibilities where inclusion is king and we don’t want anyone to be left out of the reindeer games. But as we saw last week, while living in God’s direct presence in this mortal life is a huge privilege, it is also a very dangerous privilege. How can sinful mortals stand in the presence of a perfect and holy God who is opposed to any form of evil? Just ask Aaron’s sons who were consumed by fire when they offered unauthorized fire to the Lord (Leviticus 10.1-3). As Christians, we believe that humans are made fit to stand in the presence of our holy God because of the blood of the Lamb shed for us on the cross. But the sad fact remains that there are many who do not want to live their lives in the manner God desires. 

This is the point of Jesus’ parable of the wedding banquet. To be sure, God loves us as we are, but God does not desire to keep us where we are. Think about it. When Jesus was confronted by the lame, the blind, and the demon-possessed, he didn’t tell them he loved them as they were. He healed them. Likewise, Jesus loves mass murderers, child molesters, drug pushers, ruthless and arrogant business people, and manipulative parents who damage their children’s emotions for life. But because Jesus loves these folks, not to mention folks like you and me with our own brokenness and baggage, whatever it is, Jesus doesn’t want to leave us in our current condition because he hates the effect of our sin on us and those we afflict by our sin. 

In a few moments we will come to our Lord’s Table to feed on his body and blood and be reminded that we are reconciled to God so that we have a future in God’s kingdom when it comes in full on earth as it is in heaven, just like we pray for every Sunday. But if we love our sins more than we love God, we are effectively thumbing our nose at God and telling him no thanks when he invites to enter his banquet forever. The fact of the matter is that God’s kingdom is a kingdom in which God’s love, justice, truth, mercy, and holiness reign unhindered and God calls us in Christ to be people who embody these virtues, however imperfectly we do so in our mortal lives. And so when Christ calls us to be his, he expects us to act the part, to come and die as Bonhoeffer put it, with Christ’s help, of course. And when we don’t act the part, our Lord tells us to confess our sins and receive his healing love and forgiveness made possible by his saving death. This is what it means to be God’s people—in Moses’ day, in St. Paul’s day, and in ours. All are called. Jesus died for the sins of the world, not just a few. But many will reject the gracious invitation for whatever reason and will face the consequences of rejecting Christ’s love and righteousness. That is the sad reality of the human condition in our world today.

Returning to our OT lesson, what was God’s reaction to the golden calf? God tells Moses that God’s people are no longer his people, they are Moses’s people. In effect, God tells Moses, “Take your people and good riddance.” I’m going to destroy them and start all over. You are going to become the new Abraham, dude! But Moses wouldn’t have it. He reminds God of God’s covenant faithfulness to God’s people, a covenant sworn to Abraham and his descendants. You are good to your word, God. You can’t destroy these people because they are yours, not mine, and if you do that you will look like a cosmic Loser in the eyes of the Egyptians out of whose country your brought your people. You will lose your well-deserved cred. 

Of course, God, being who God is, relents. God cannot renege on his promises and Israel is saved, at least for the moment. But hear what else Moses said to the Lord when he returned to the mountaintop after confronting Israel with their colossal sin and folly:

On the next day Moses said to the people, “You have sinned a great sin. But now I will go up to the Lord; perhaps I can make atonement for your sin.” So Moses returned to the Lord and said, “Alas, this people has sinned a great sin; they have made for themselves gods of gold. But now, if you will only forgive their sin—but if not, blot me out of the book that you have written.” But the Lord said to Moses, “Whoever has sinned against me I will blot out of my book. But now go, lead the people to the place about which I have spoken to you; see, my angel shall go in front of you (Exodus 32.30-34a).

It is worth our time to consider carefully the effect that being in God’s presence had on Moses. Think about it. When God first confronted Moses in the burning bush, Moses was reluctant to fulfill God’s call to him to lead God’s people. He made dozens of excuses as to why he couldn’t do what God asked him. And of course Moses later murdered an Egyptian who was abusing a fellow Israelite. Moses wasn’t exactly ready for prime time in his new role as God’s chosen leader. But now we see Moses interceding for his people, begging God to spare them and offering himself in their place if only God would not destroy them. Can you say transformation?

And God did relent, at least partially. God did not destroy either Moses or God’s people. God spared them both. But we also know that there would come a time when God did not spare his chosen One from bearing the punishment of the people for their sins. No, God sent his only Son to be tortured and die a humiliating and agonizing death to spare God’s enemies—you and me—from God’s holy wrath on the evil we commit every day. God’s only begotten Son, Jesus our Lord, willingly gave himself in accordance with the Father’s will to save us from our slavery to Sin and to break its power over us so that we could enjoy our invitation to God’s wedding banquet of which the Lord’s Supper is a foretaste, thanks be to God. This is the kind of God who calls us to be his and who is present to us in the power of the Holy Spirit just as he was present to his people in the pillars of fire and cloud as they wandered through the wilderness. This God is good to his Word. We need not doubt God’s Presence among us. Ever. Yet whether it was through their faulty perception that God had abandoned them or their own willful rebellion again-st God and God’s rule, God’s people have often gone astray and worshiped false gods or idols.

Now before we get all smug and uppity about our spiritual ancestors and their shortcomings, it might help if we conducted a reality check about our own spiritual condition. Of course when you come to worship on the Sundays that I preach, and hear these divine sermons, you will naturally be tempted to think you have been transported to heaven. I know that temptation is strong, but resist it because it is only an illusion. In fact, we are every bit as prone to go astray because of our own inherent hostility toward the Lord and/or our perception that he is absent among us. Think it through. When sickness or death strikes us or our loved ones, we want to ask where God is in it all. Where was God when the Las Vegas sniper was mowing down innocent people? Where is God in the bombast about nuclear war that we hear coming from the leaders of North Korea and our own country? Where is God in this country as we seem to increasingly tear each other apart, and often irrationally? Where was God when the hurricanes afflicted this county and the Caribbean islands? We are constantly bombarded with bad news, and instantaneously, and are tempted to think God has abandoned us. And it’s not just turmoil in our country and world; it’s all the turmoil in our lives and the lives of our family as well. You get the point. We are every bit as prone to look for something or someone else to lead us (astray) as the ancient Israelites were because we do not perceive God’s leadership.

That is why we should pay attention to what St. Paul had to say to the Philippians in today’s epistle lesson. First he reminds us that the Lord is near in the power of the Spirit. That said, as with any relationship in a broken world, we have to do our part to cultivate our knowledge of his Presence and our relationship with him. Yes, the Lord is near to us. So St. Paul tells us to do three things to cultivate a sense of that Presence. First, come together as his people regularly to celebrate our Lord’s presence among us. That’s what St. Paul means when he tells us to rejoice always. You don’t have to spend too much time here at St. Augustine’s to get a sense of that Presence. Or consider Christian funerals. We can rejoice, even in the midst of our sorrow, because of the fact that God has defeated Sin and Death in the death and resurrection of Jesus his Son. Second, focus on the goodness of creation, especially in prayer. That doesn’t mean we ignore what’s wrong with creation. Rather, it means we focus equally on its goodness because it is a reflection on the goodness of its Creator. Focus each day on whatever is good, right, just, and beautiful in your life and the lives of your loved ones. Give thanks for the little things that happen to you that are good and wholesome. Those things aren’t coincidences. Make this a habit and eventually you will be reminded that God is very much present in God’s world. Last, live as Jesus’ people. Embody his love, mercy, goodness, justice, and holiness. The key concept here is habit. Imitate your Lord in his life and death, focus on his goodness and presence, and you will not be disappointed because as we have seen, God is faithful to his promises, even when we cannot see how. This is the Good News we are called to both embrace and proclaim, my beloved, now and for all eternity. But we must put in our sweat equity and then trust our Lord Jesus to continue to be good to his eternal promise to lead us to the new heavens and earth. To him be honor, praise, and glory forever and ever. 

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

Sermon originally preached on October 11, 2015. As always, it will be helpful to read the assigned texts by clicking on or tapping their links below before reading the sermon. Here I deal with the uncomfortable truth (for many) about God’s justice. Yes, God is gracious and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love. But because God does love us, God will also make sure his good and right justice prevails. Are you ready for that in your life? Whether you are (or aren’t), you’d better cultivate and grow your relationship with Christ. For those with ears to hear, listen and understand.

Lectionary texts: Job 23.1-9, 16-17; Psalm 22.1-15; Hebrews 4.12-16; Mark 10.17-31.

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

The writer of Hebrews tells us that, “The word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing until it divides soul from spirit, joints from marrow; it is able to judge the thoughts and intentions of the heart. And before him no creature is hidden, but all are naked and laid bare to the eyes of the one to whom we must render an account.” Sobering words, aren’t they? So this morning I want us to reflect on what this might look like on the ground and why we should care. 

We begin by clarifying what the writer of Hebrews has in mind when he talks about God’s word. The writer doesn’t tell us, but based on how God’s word is used in the rest of the NT, the four gospels included, it is not unreasonable to think that the author had in mind both the word of God contained in the OT and the message that Jesus himself had announced, that God’s kingdom was coming to birth in and through his work. You know, that strange little announcement Jesus made about the kingdom of God being at hand and therefore the need for us to repent and believe the good news (St. Mark 1.14-15; St. Matthew 4.17). Put another way, the word of God as the writer of Hebrews uses it means the promises contained in the OT that God’s kingdom or rule would break in on earth as in heaven and usher in the Age to Come, and how those promises had come true in Jesus, especially his death and resurrection.

This word of God, the promises of the OT made manifest in Jesus, is not some lifeless print on a page. It is living and active. It created the cosmos. And somehow it cuts right to the chase, right to our disordered hearts, exposing them and us for what we are: hostile and rebellious creatures who constantly try to usurp God’s rightful place and rule, putting our own wants and needs ahead of God’s commands and his good will and purposes for us. It is precisely this rebellion that got us tossed from paradise and causes so much of the world’s suffering and folly. Thankfully, God is busy putting to rights all the wrong in his world and we can join him or fight him. In a nutshell, this is God’s word. We can spend our time avoiding it. We can spend our time denying its ability to cut to the chase. We can spend our time denying that God’s word even exists—and it seems that more and more folks are choosing that option these days. But as Fr. Bowser so eloquently stated last week, our attempts to run from or deny reality really don’t matter. God’s reality is what it is and that means we have a choice to make. We can either run from God’s word or embrace it. There is no middle ground.

This seems to be part of the author’s point. We can spend our life ignoring God’s word, relegating it to the proverbial “to-do list,” precisely because we don’t see it as being relevant to our lives. But we cannot escape the ability of God’s word to judge all our disordered desires in the end. It will expose us for what we are, even what we try to cover up or repress. No use, says the author of Hebrews. God’s word will one day catch up with you and will judge you. You can run, but there’s no place to hide. And if you haven’t made the necessary changes to get your house in order, you will not achieve the promised rest for God’s saints in Christ when the New Age comes in full and heaven and earth are united in a new creation. And here’s a helpful hint. You don’t want to lose your eternal rest. Trust me. If we are looking for some feel-good passages in Scripture, Hebrews 4.12-13 probably isn’t a good place to start. 

But even in the midst of this sobering warning comes encouragement. If we know God’s judgment is coming on our sin and folly, it is better to get with the program and examine ourselves in the light of God’s judgment and truth so that with his help, we can start working on the necessary changes we all need to make (more on that in a moment). And we get this at a basic level. Isn’t it better to have a doctor examine us right away, uncomfortable and even painful as the examination might be, than to wait for the doctor to do a post-mortem exam on us after it’s too late? Yet even though we know this is true about medical and spiritual conditions, how many of us prefer to live in denial and hope that our condition just goes away? 

That is why guys like me, um, encourage you to engage the Scriptures regularly, because among other things we all need a healthy dose of reality. We live in a culture of increasing unreality where I’m OK and you’re OK and everything will be all right in the end. But that’s just not true and we need a healthy dose of reality and Truth that can only be found in God’s word made manifest in Jesus. The sooner we are honest about ourselves and our standing before a just and holy God who cannot tolerate evil of any kind, the sooner we will find ourselves on the road to recovery. For most of us in this room, the good news is that we seem to have a pretty healthy view of reality and our need of God the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. But in light of our epistle lesson this morning, none of us dares sink into complacency because our tendency toward self-delusion is almost limitless. We need the constant exposure of the living and active word of God in our lives lest we head back to La-La Land and lose our rest. I can hear some of you now. Not fair! Not fair! That sounds like a lot of work! Well, yes it is because we live in an evil age and our hearts are desperately sick (Jeremiah 17.9). But don’t worry. There will be plenty of time to rest when God’s new world comes in full. When that happens, we’ll all be glad we were willing to do the hard work of living obedient and faithful lives.  

We see how God’s word penetrates and shakes things up in our gospel lesson. Jesus is confronted by a man who asks what he must do to inherit eternal life. The Greek for eternal life can also be translated as the Age to Come, the time when God’s rule is fully reestablished on earth as in heaven. So let us be clear what the man is asking Jesus. He is not asking how he can get to heaven. He is asking Jesus what he must do to be part of the Age to Come when heaven and earth are recreated into one. In effect he asks Jesus, What must I do to become a citizen of God’s kingdom on earth?

Jesus’ answer shouldn’t surprise us. Follow the commandments he tells the man. After all, God gave his people his commandments to help equip us to live as citizens of his promised new world. If God won’t allow murderers, thieves, adulterers, liars, et al. in his new world, why would he encourage us to live that way now? It’s not about being a goody two-shoes. It’s about living in ways that will help us become fully human beings again and that takes a lot of practice. The man tells Jesus he has kept the latter half of the Ten Commandments (did you notice that Jesus curiously omits any mention of the first three that insist on our ultimate loyalty to God?). So far so good. The man probably was feeling pretty good about his chances of making the cut. But this is Jesus he is talking to, God’s word made flesh, and things are never as straight-forward as that. You lack one thing, dude. Your money is your god. It is a false idol. So go and sell all you’ve got, give the money to the poor so that you will have treasure in heaven, and follow me. BTW, in telling the man that he will have treasure in heaven, Jesus doesn’t mean the man has to go to heaven to access it. If I tell you I have a cold beer waiting for you in the fridge, it doesn’t mean you have to get in the fridge to drink the beer. Neither do we have to go to heaven to access the treasure God stores for us there. He’ll bring it to us when the time is right. 

We hear crickets chirping in the background amidst the ensuing silence. God’s word, sharper than any two-edged sword, has just cut to the chase. The man refuses to get rid of his false idol and goes away sad. This story does not have a happy ending, folks, much as we would like to see one. We see only God’s judgment fall silently and terribly on the man’s idolatry and it means death. This is how God’s word cuts to the chase. Are there any false idols we need to ditch in our lives, idols like diversity, liberty, tolerance, science, power, wealth (none of which are bad until they become idols), the notion that all religions are equal, et al.? We won’t even know they are false gods unless we allow the word of God to expose them for what they are in our hearts. And if we wait too long, we will never have a chance to ditch them, ask forgiveness, and follow the one true living God made known to us supremely in Jesus Christ. Mark tells us this through the story. In telling the man to ditch his false god and follow him, Jesus is telling the man that loyalty to him now serves as the exclusive loyalty God demands of his people in the first three commandments! That’s just cray-cray, we exclaim! Aren’t there multiple paths to God? Nope, says St. Mark. There’s one true God and he’s shown himself to us in Jesus. End (or beginning) of story. It is right about now that we feel the word of God penetrating our hearts deeper and deeper. The writer of Hebrews would surely tell us our eternal rest is in danger if we don’t wake up and worship the one true and living God revealed as Father, Son, and Spirit.

Or consider our reading from Job this morning. Had Fr. Bowser not gummed up the works and complicated my task by his preaching last week, we would have seen how God allowed Satan to be present in God’s heavenly council and gave him permission to wreak havoc on Job’s life. Consequently, Job lost it all—his property, his children, his health. But of course Job is not privy to this heavenly agreement. He doesn’t know that God has allowed Satan to ruin his life. And while we are in on the joke regarding Job’s story, we too are not told why God allows evil to operate in his world to corrupt and destroy it. We just know that God allows it. 

Now conventional wisdom in Job’s day (and ours to a lesser extent) went something like this. God blessed righteous people with wealth and abundance as a sign of his favor on them. This was the basis for Satan’s challenge to God in the first place. Job acted rightly because God had blessed him with lots of stuff. Take the stuff away and Job would surely curse God. It is also the basis behind the apostles’ reaction in our gospel lesson. If the rich who are blessed cannot be saved, what about the rest of us schmucks? Now in today’s lesson, we hear part of Job’s lament to God. He wants a hearing with God because Job knows he is a righteous man. Job wants justice, baby! He wants his day in court so he can question the Judge about all the unjust things that have happened to him, things he is mistakenly convinced God has caused. 

But here’s the rub. Job cannot seem to find God. God is absent to him. No matter where Job looks, no matter how he cries out to God for a hearing, God doesn’t seem to be around. Sound familiar? Can you relate? The longer we are in this life of being a Christian, the more likely it is we have had this experience of the seemingly absent God. But how can that be? God is everywhere! To make matters worse, Job finally comes to the conclusion that God will do what God is going to do. After all, God is sovereign. No one can stand before him or change God’s mind. This realization terrifies Job. How can he possibly prevail? And he starts to lose all hope and heart. As we listen to Job’s anguished cries, not to mention the psalmist’s, whose very lament Jesus used on the cross as he felt the weight of the world’s sin crush him so that for the first time in his life Jesus felt his Father’s absence, we start to feel the word of God penetrate our hearts and it is not a comfortable feeling. We too become terrified at the possibility of either an unjust God who is unlimited in his ability to be unjust (at least from our perspective), or who doesn’t love us enough or care about us enough to be present to us in our anguish. 

But this is God’s word we are talking about and while there is justice and judgment in that word, there is also grace, mercy, and forgiveness. And so we return to Hebrews for the last word. The writer reminds us that Jesus has ascended into heaven as a fully human being and serves us as our great High Priest, whose God-given job it is to serve as an intermediary between God and humans, a sure sign of God’s love for us. As our great High Priest, Jesus intercedes to God for us. He is an effective intercessor because he knows completely what it is like to be human, except without sin. Jesus remains fully human and knows our afflictions. He knows how we are tempted, how we are afraid, how we are prone to disorder and folly as often as we are to goodness, righteousness, and truth. This allows him to be fully sympathetic to our needs and answer our prayers effectively. Most importantly, he has the power to help us. Let that sink in for a moment. Let it challenge your fears and disbelief. Let it begin to heal you and give you the basis for real hope to be able to live in this world faithfully as his disciples.

The writer of Hebrews tells us that we are to approach Jesus’ throne of grace, God’s unmerited forgiveness of us through the blood of the Lamb, with boldness. We aren’t being encouraged to be arrogant here. To the contrary, real arrogance would be to refuse God’s offer to help and heal us through Jesus and the operation of his Spirit in our lives! No, God knows our weaknesses and offers us a real solution to overcome them. If we take this promise seriously and pursue it faithfully, there is never a reason we should ultimately succumb to evil or be defeated by it. Yet all too often when trouble comes, we forget this promise and fail to avail ourselves of it. Hebrews 4.14-16 should therefore be a constant go-to verse for us whenever we are in trouble. In closing, then, let us resolve today to work on getting well, seeking the help of others if needed, but always approaching Jesus’ throne of grace with confidence and hope. Let us remember that this is Jesus, the one who died for us, who rules the cosmos, and who intercedes for us. Let us take our hopes and doubts and fears and dreams to him, confident of his love and power. Doing so is another way we can proclaim to the world that we really do have Good News, now and for all eternity, as we invite others to join us in finding the love and mercy and healing we all crave. To him be honor, praise, and glory forever and ever. 

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

Sermon originally preached on October 12, 2014. As always, it will be helpful to read the assigned texts by clicking on or tapping their links below before reading the sermon. Here I tackle the question of what Christians must do on our part to ensure we have a seat at the greatest table and feast of all: Christ’s Wedding Banquet. For those with ears to hear, listen and understand.

Lectionary texts: Exodus 32.1-14; Psalm 106.1-6, 19-23; Philippians 4.1-9; Matthew 22.1-14.

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

All of our lessons this morning get around to asking the same questions. Exactly whose people are we? Our own? God’s? Someone (or something) else’s? Of course Scripture’s consistent answer is that we are God’s. And if that is the case, what is expected of us as people of God? It is the answer to these questions that I want us to look at briefly this morning.

In our OT lesson we come to a major turning point in Israel’s wilderness wanderings. Moses has gone up to the mountain to receive God’s commandments for his people. But he is delayed and God’s people get restless. They seem to be confused as to their exact identity. Are they Moses’ people or God’s? They apparently think (mistakenly) that they are Moses’ people because they demand that his brother Aaron make them a god to worship in Moses’ absence and sadly (and quite astonishingly given that Aaron is an ordained priest) he obliges them and makes an image of a golden calf.

God’s reaction is swift and predictable, not to mention terrifying if we have the good sense and humility to put ourselves in the midst of this story. He tells Moses that he had better go back at once to his people that he brought out of Egypt. In other words God is scornfully agreeing with his wayward people’s assessment of their identity as Moses’ people. God is essentially saying to Moses, “It didn’t take long for the children to misbehave in your absence because they have violated the first two commandments! So leave me alone that I may put an end to your people and start afresh by giving you new offspring so that they can be my people.”

Moses’ response is quite astonishing (even foolish—who wants to argue with God when he is whipping up his wrath?). Moses reminds God that Israel is not his people, they are God’s people and it was God who delivered them out of their slavery in Egypt. Moses then appeals to the covenant God made with the patriarchs to make a people (Israel) for himself and to give them the promised land so that they could become beacons of God’s light and love to bring his healing to a sin-sick world. God, of course, could not be unfaithful to his covenant with his people and so God relented. More accurately, the actual Hebrew says that God changed his mind or repented! Imagine that. Here we see an act of sheer grace on God’s part as he spares his people after they violated the Prime Directive of worshiping no God other than the Lord. 

But we miss one of the main points of the story if we focus on God’s grace instead of looking at what is required of us if we are to be God’s people. Clearly the writer of Exodus wants us to see that Israel was not Moses’ people but God’s. It was God who rescued them from their slavery and delivered them out of pharaoh’s hands. But God rescued them so that they could be his people to fulfill their part of the covenant agreement God made with Abraham to bring his healing love and blessing to a broken and hurting world (Genesis 12.1-3, 15.1-5). To do that meant that God’s people had to be and act differently than the rest of the world’s people. First and foremost it meant that they could not worship false gods or idols like most of the people around them did because we become what we worship. They had to worship the one true and living God so that they could get to know him and be shaped by him so that God could use them to be a blessing to others. Almost 3500 years later the same challenge remains for us as God’s people in Jesus our Lord. With privilege comes the awesome responsibility to be God’s light and salt to his broken world. 

And like God’s people Israel who wandered in the desert in search of their true identity, so we as Christians wander in our 21^st century deserts in search of our true identity in Christ. We have been rescued from our slavery to sin and death and reconciled once and for all to our Creator in and through the blood of Christ shed for us. But do we really believe that? Some of us don’t because we simply cannot believe God is that merciful, choosing instead to believe a false stereotype of a God who is vengeful and angry, a stereotype that is derived from misread-ing stories like our OT lesson. Others of us want the rewards and benefits of being saved but we don’t want the attendant responsibilities. And so we fashion our own idols and worship them instead of the one true and holy God: The Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. This is a serious problem, folks! Not only for us, but for the world to whom we are called to witness because when we act and think in these false ways we rob ourselves and others of the real Good News of God’s salvation in Jesus Christ with its promise to heal and redeem his broken world and its creatures.

If we understand the identity issue that our OT lesson raises for us, we are ready to hear Jesus’ parable in our gospel lesson this morning because it echoes what’s going on in our OT lesson. Jesus, of course, is debating his opponents in Jerusalem, the same opponents who will bring about his death on the cross. He uses a parable to castigate them for not receiving him as God’s Messiah despite the many warnings of the prophets and God’s continual invitation to them to be the people he called them to be. And here Jesus issues an equally chilling warning to them (and us) that their time is about up and there will be no more chances to be part of the Son’s (Jesus’) wedding banquet. Notice Jesus is addressing the same issue of Israel’s identity that is raised in Exodus. Jesus is the Messiah and it is only by following him that we become true Israelites so that God can use us to bring his healing to the world. But Jesus’ opponents would have nothing to do with that and they were thus calling down judgment on themselves.

But now the parable gets even more, um, interesting because Jesus tells us that God will invite all sorts of folks to be part of the Son’s wedding banquet, even those who are outside Israel! At first blush we are all about that because Jesus is telling us that one and all are invited to the banquet and we dare hope that even we might be invited! And of course, Jesus always meets us where we are, no matter what kind of spiritual or moral shape we are in. 

But thanks be to God that Jesus loves us enough not to leave us where we are and this is the point of the second part of the parable. The man who was not dressed in proper attire, i.e., who was not willing to act appropriately at the banquet, was thrown out and this ought to make sense to us. What if we were invited to dine with the president at the White House? Would we dress in our worst clothing and act in rude and boorish ways? Of course not! We’d put on our best clothes and be on our best behavior and this is the point Jesus is making here. Being invited to his wedding banquet is a great honor. It means that we are rescued from sin and death and are invited to join him in celebrating his glorious new creation future that is about total and complete healing and eternal life! What could possibly be better or more important in life?

But we are called to the banquet with the expectation that we act accordingly, just like we would if we dined at the White House, because we are called to be Jesus’ light and salt to the world (cf. St. Matthew 5.1-16). And to be Jesus’ light and salt to the world, we have to imitate him in our character and actions. If we are unwilling to do this, like Jesus’ opponents, we effectively decline God’s invitation to join in his great feast and bring judgment on ourselves. 

Again, this should make sense to us if we understand that when we become like Jesus in our character and actions, we are healed. Think, for example, what happened when sick people came to Jesus. He didn’t tell them they were all right as they were. He healed them! Likewise with tax collectors and prostitutes. He didn’t tell them they were all right just as they were. He invited them to follow him so that he could heal them. To be sure, Jesus loves child molesters and terrorists and ruthless business people. And yes, even you and me. But he loves us enough not to want to leave us where we are because if we do not change, we cannot stay at the banquet and he wants us to stay! Think about it. In the new creation do you want to live for an eternity with evil and evil people, yourself included? God’s judgment is a terrible thing. But part of the point of judgment is to bring healing and justice to a badly broken world. So when we are called to the Son’s wedding banquet we are forgiven and called to change, to come and die, so that we too can become like the Son and act like we belong there.

So how do we do that? It right about here that I need to speak a word to those of you who struggle to believe that God really has rescued you in and through the blood of Jesus because like David, you know your transgressions and your sin is ever before you. Part of being a Christian and living our lives with joy and power and purpose is to accept the grace of God offered us. At one level it literally is unbelievable. But if we don’t accept it, we open ourselves up to despair and being picked off by the dark powers and principalities. That is why it is absolutely crucial that we appropriate the gift of salvation offered freely to each of us irrespective of who we are or what we have done, and here St. Paul has a word for us in our epistle lesson. 

If we do not want our life to be a field of weeds that is filled with darkness and despair and hopelessness and idol worship, we have to sow lots of healthy grass and flowers so that the weeds do not have a chance to sprout and take root. How do we do that? St. Paul tells us. We are to rejoice always. By that, St. Paul doesn’t mean we put on a happy face when everything is crashing down around us, but rather to hold public celebrations over the fact that we are Jesus’ people who have been bought with the price of his own dear blood and whose future is resurrection and new creation. We do that, of course, every week in worship when we participate in a foretaste of the Son’s wedding banquet by coming to his table to feed on his body and blood.

 Next, St. Paul tells us we are not to worry about anything. Why? Because the Lord is near! Therefore we can bring our hurts and sorrows as well as our joys and thanksgiving to God through Jesus our great Mediator. “That’s baloney,” you scoff. “Life’s tough and it is naive to say to us not to worry about anything. There’s plenty in my life to worry about.” All true. But here’s where St. Paul is eminently practical in his advice because he uses the Greek verb logizomai again. Do the math, he says. Think about all that God has done for you. Remind yourself that he is near. Say to yourself that you are rescued by the blood of the Lamb and keep repeating it until you believe it! Think about the good things in life and the goodness of God’s creation. Focus on those things. Doing so will help you counter the darkness you hear or experience in your daily living. Do these things and the Holy Spirit who lives in you will honor your work and change you so that you will indeed develop the character and actions that are befitting of the Son’s banquet. 

We’ve been offered the gracious invitation to participate in the most wonderful of feasts. We are no more worthy to be invited than most of us are worthy by worldly standards to be invited to dine at the White House. But invited we are and doing these things will show everyone involved, God included, that we really are thankful for and covet our invitation to feast in the new creation. It’s hard work, but it’s the most rewarding work in which we will ever partake because we are living out our identity as God’s chosen people in Christ to embody his healing love to others. Only then will we discover that we really do have Good News, now and for all eternity. To him be honor, praise, and glory forever and ever. 

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

Names have been changed to protect privacy. As always, it will be helpful to read the assigned texts for the sermon by clicking on or tapping their links below before reading the sermon. Our culture desperately needs to recover an appreciation for God’s good created order. For those with ears to hear, listen and understand.

Lectionary texts: Genesis 2.18-29; Ephesians 5.21-33; John 15.1-8.

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

Dick and Jane, I want to talk with you briefly this afternoon about what it will take for you to have a good marriage and so I’ve titled this sermon, Ribs (or Marriage) Done Well, a title derived from our OT lesson from Genesis. If God really is our Creator as Genesis proclaims and our faith believes, who knows better than God what it takes for his human creatures to be happy and prosper in this foundational and most important of all relationships—marriage? A quick look at the relational history of humankind with all of its failed alternative solutions to God’s original intention for how men and women should live together as families shows us the wisdom of this. Is it just coincidental, for example, that in this country alone we have seen the breakdown of the God-given family structure and the rise of mass murder, addiction, alienation, loneliness, and depression over the last 60 or so years? And so my hope and prayer for you, as well as the rest of us here, is that you will have the needed God-given wisdom and humility to hear what God has to say about what you need to do to ensure that your marriage relationship remains healthy and strong over the years.

In our OT lesson we read the beautiful story of how God created man and woman in his own image. We are told that God saw it was not good for man to be alone so God formed woman out of the man’s rib to be his helper and the man immediately recognized that this was exactly what he needed to fulfill his deepest and most basic relational needs. Two things immediately jump out at us from this story. First we see one man and one woman coming together to form a lifelong relationship as husband and wife. God did not create multiple Eves nor did he create another Adam to be Adam’s companion and helper. God created Eve from Adam’s rib with the intention that the two should become one permanently in this life, something our Lord Jesus himself confirms (e.g. St. Matthew 19). In telling this story, the text proclaims that God created, ordained, and blessed marriage as the foundational relationship for humans.

Second, as we saw during counseling, the logic of the text suggests that only when man and woman come together as one do they become the complete image-bearers of God that God created us to be. When God told Adam that he would make a partner and helper for him, God did not intend this to mean that the woman was somehow inferior to the man or that her purpose in life was to toady after him. Her purpose was to be his equal partner so that together as a family they could be faithful in their task of being God’s wise stewards and rulers over God’s newly-created world.

It was from this created order that St. Paul would later write to the church at Ephesus about the structure and good order of Christian households that we read in our epistle lesson and here is where I want to speak to you both personally because this is what it takes to have ribs (marriage) done well. Let me start with you, Jane. In Ephesians, St. Paul tells us that wives should be subject to their husbands. It is right about now that the women here start giving me the stink eye and wonder where I am going with this. Let’s be honest. The notion of the wife being subject to the husband does not play well to our modern ears or sensibilities. But if we bow to our own hangups and prejudices, we do violence to the text and will miss completely St. Paul’s sound teaching about healthy marital relationships. So please hear me out as you did during your premarital counseling sessions.

St. Paul wisely understands that every social structure needs a good leader, and he appeals to the created order (man first, then woman) when he tells the wife to be subject to her husband. St. Paul does not mean that the wife should become a doormat for her husband or that somehow she is inferior or unequal to her husband. That would do violence to the creation narratives as we’ve just seen, and St. Paul knew his scripture too well to do that. What he means is that the wife should recognize her husband’s God-given leadership role in the family and allow him to lead. This is further tempered by the fact that St. Paul recognized Christ as the ultimate head of every family. More about that anon. But for right now, Jane, as you enter into marriage with Dick, I encourage you to allow him to lead in the manner of Christ and to gently correct Dick when he fails to do so. Of course you both will have to work out what this leadership looks like on the ground in the context of your married life. But if you have the grace, wisdom, and humility to do this, and if Dick has the grace/wisdom/humility to lead in a godly manner, your marriage will thrive.

Now to you, Dick. If Jane allows you to lead in a godly manner, your charge is far more difficult. In Ephesians St. Paul tells us that the husband’s job is to love his wife in the manner that Christ loves his Church. When scripture talks about love, it does not have in mind some kind of sappy, sentimental emotion or the kind of unhealthy love that attempts to fulfill all the beloved’s desires, even when those desires are disordered or unhealthy. To be sure, scripture validates and celebrates romantic love as the Song of Solomon powerfully attests. But in Ephesians, St. Paul is talking about always acting in the light of God’s truth for the best interest of the beloved. So when St. Paul talks about the husband’s leadership role (not headship) in the family he doesn’t have in mind the husband running roughshod over his wife or barking out orders for her to fetch his slippers, bring him a beer, or cater to his every need. That is not loving your wife, that is loving yourself.

In other words, the kind of leadership St. Paul has in mind is the servant leadership that was exemplified by Christ himself (cf. Philippians 2.6-11), who died for us while we were still God’s enemies so that we could be healed and reconciled to the Source of all life, and who tells us not to lord it over others but rather to lead by becoming like slaves who serve (cf. Mark 10.35-45). This does not come to us naturally or easily and that is why you have the far more difficult task as husband in your marriage. Your job is to love Jane and care for her more than you care for yourself. Of course, Jane, you are called to love Dick in the same manner by supporting his godly leadership. If you both can do this, you will demonstrate by your actions that Jesus really is your Lord and the true head of your household, that you are part of his vine, and you can therefore confidently trust his promise to be your rock-solid foundation on which your marriage will be able to withstand even the most terrible storms of life (St. Matthew 7.24-27). Our Lord did not tell us we would be immune to those storms, only that when we submit to his Lordship and order our lives as God intends, we will have a power that is greater than ours to help us withstand and overcome any evil that besets us.

To help you love each other in the way Christ intends, I want to suggest a good exercise for you both, but especially for you, Dick, because you are given the task of leading your family. Memorize and recite excerpts from 1 Corinthians 13 and substitute your name in places where you read “love” so that it reads, e.g., Dick iis patient, Dick is kind. Dick does not insist on his own way. Dick is not irritable or resentful, etc. If you both can rehearse passages like this on a daily or regular basis, preferably together, you will discover that it will have a profoundly wonderful effect on you both, that your relationship is strengthened and blessed, and that you will find joy and purpose in living together that you never dreamed possible. 

Again, I do not suggest that any of this is easy or automatic. You have to work hard at it and you have to work hard at cultivating your relationship with Christ so that you allow him to be Lord of your individual and married lives. To do this, you will need to pray together, read scripture together, and be part of a community of faith who will love and support you, in addition to your families and friends, because there are many forces out there, supernatural and human, who are opposed to your married life and want to destroy it and you. But if you are wise enough and humble enough to do these things together and as part of the greater family of Christ, you will find that you will bear much fruit as Christ promises in our gospel lesson and so have the necessary power to live your life and marriage as God intends for you. May God bless and enable you to have a marriage that is done well. I couldn’t be happier for you both and have every confidence you will live out your marriage in godly ways that honor our Lord Christ.

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

Sermon originally preached on October 7, 2018. As always, it will be helpful to read the assigned texts by clicking on our tapping their links below before reading the sermon. Here I begin to explore the massively important but oft- neglected letter to the Hebrews. Why is it critical for Christians to keep their eyes on Jesus in the power of the Holy Spirit? Our very life depends on it for starters. We who try to live faithful lives to God are up against a terrifying array of power enemies who are hell-bent to destroy us forever and we’d better have the wisdom and grace to seek the only One who is capable of defending us. For those with ears to hear, listen and understand.

Lectionary texts: Job 1.1, 2.1-10; Psalm 26; Hebrews 1.1-4, 2.5-12; Mark 10.2-16.

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

Today we begin our preaching and teaching series on the letter to the Hebrews, a massively important but often-neglected book in the NT. We will be focusing on the assigned readings from Hebrews through Christ the King Sunday at the end of November. October is also stewardship month, where we will be encouraging you to reflect on your favorite topic—giving your money to advance the Lord’s kingdom work on earth. This will culminate on Pledge Sunday on October 28, where we will offer our pledges for the coming fiscal year starting in January. There’s a lot to do and reflect on in the coming weeks!

We begin our study of Hebrews by way of Job. What are we to make of that strange story about God assembling an angelic council, apparently to make policy for running creation, contrary to our epistle lesson’s bold claim that God subjected all creation to the control of humans? And since the Satan was among them, were those on the council actually rebellious angels? Is this an example of Scripture having a split personality and contradicting itself? Well no, because as the writer of Hebrews makes clear, humans do not exercise their God-given task of being in complete control over God’s good creation—that apparently has to wait until God’s new creation arrives—and we all know this to be painfully true. There are many things beyond our control that afflict creation and us: death, destruction, human nastiness, Sin, Evil and disasters of all kinds, to name just a few. The result? We see life riddled with anxiety and we experience disorientation and disruption. No, as the writer of Hebrews says in massive understatement, “we do not yet see everything in subjection to [humans]” and this is where the book of Job comes into play because it explores the riddle and mystery of what has happened now that we have abdicated our God-given responsibility to rule. Something or someone has to rule in our place and our abdication of that privilege by way of our sin and rebellion opened the door for the dark powers of Evil to usurp our rightful role. But how can an all-powerful God allow Evil to operate in his world so that even the innocent are afflicted by it? Why doesn’t God just fill the void? God clearly remains in charge. The Satan could only do to Job what God allows. In presenting these mysteries, Job challenges the OT principle of retribution in this life, that God afflicts and punishes the wicked while rewarding the righteous with all kinds of spiritual and material prosperity. 

In the story we see Job, who clearly was a righteous man in God’s eyes and had indeed enjoyed God’s blessings, being afflicted with God’s permission by the Satan—and please, let’s leave behind our childish concepts of Satan as looking like some bad cartoon character and grow up in our thinking about Evil so that we see it for what it is— to see whether he will curse God. We as readers are aware of this heavenly intrigue, i.e., of the dark powers usurping our role as rulers, but Job is not. This begs the real question, however: Why does God allow the forces of Evil to operate at all to corrupt God’s good creation? Nowhere do we find an answer to this existential question. We are told that God limits the destructive power of Evil but does not banish it in his creation. Why not? Clearly God’s creative purposes for both his creation and image-bearing creatures are being thwarted, so why would God allow that? Scripture doesn’t say. To be sure, Scripture does offer us partial answers to questions about Evil. As we have seen, human sin allowed Evil to get a toehold in God’s good world so that now we and all creation live under God’s curse. A cursed world can account for a good deal of the evil in God’s creation but not all of it. Nor are we told why the serpent was present in the garden in the first place to work his evil. Further, we are told that human sin and folly are directly responsible for all kinds of evil and suffering. But we are not told why God allows the forces of Evil behind our sin to continue to operate to corrupt and destroy God’s good world and people’s lives. What the NT does answer is what God is doing about this resident Evil and we are expected to live with all the riddles, ambiguity, and unanswered questions and trust God’s good plan for the redemption of all creation and our own. Enter the letter to the Hebrews and more precisely, enter Jesus.

The writer of Hebrews starts by reminding us of a breath-taking reality, that God the Father, God the Creator of this vast universe, has acted decisively and lovingly on behalf of his weak and rebellious image-bearing creatures to rescue us from our predicament. To be sure, our ongoing sin and rebellion grieves God’s heart to its very core. But God did not give up on his creation or us. Instead God became human in the person of Jesus and entered human history, something I fear we Christians have heard so often that we’ve lost the awesome wonder of this claim, to act decisively against the outside powers of Evil, Sin, and Death. God did not act outside history to defeat these dark powers. Instead, God became human (or in NT language, God the Father sent his only begotten Son) to suffer and die for us to free us from the terrible and deadly consequences of our sin and folly, and to break the power of Evil in our lives so that we are no longer its slaves. God did this in Christ’s death and resurrection and then by sending the Holy Spirit to live in each of us to make our risen and ascended Lord’s presence real and known to us, thereby enabling us to overcome our fallen human nature and the forces of Evil who hate us and assail us on a regular basis. None of this plays out in an easy or straightforward manner as we all can attest. Sometimes we miss the mark and fall off the proverbial wagon. Sometimes we choose to be willfully stubborn and rebellious toward God. Sometimes we are just plain stupid. Despite all this, however, the writer of Hebrews makes the stunning and audacious claim that in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, we not only find forgiveness of our sins but real power to resist and overcome evil. That is one of the underlying points in our gospel lesson this morning. If there weren’t power available for our hard hearts to be remade into human ones, Jesus’ teaching about marriage and divorce would be hopelessly idealistic. But the fact remains that while some (many?) of us have succumbed to divorce, many more have struggled and succeeded in remaining faithful to their marriage vows despite great obstacles and odds. This fact alone attests to the power of the Holy Spirit who lives in God’s people. 

Moreover, the writer of Hebrews makes clear that Jesus’ death and resurrection was God’s decisive action against the dark powers and the power of Sin that corrupts us and causes death to reign. But the war is not over as we all know. Final victory awaits Jesus’ return. Until then, we won’t see humans fulfilling their God-given commission to rule God’s world, but we do see Jesus paving the way for that to happen by casting out demons, ruling over the forces of nature, bringing healing of all kinds, and finally dying a God-forsaken and terrible death for us and taking on himself all the awful consequences of our sin and rebellion so that we can ultimately live in God’s new world to fulfill God’s original creative purposes for us as human beings. Jesus’ resurrection guarantees the promise to be valid and true. 

What does all this mean to us as Christians who struggle to live faithful lives? First, as we are buffeted by darkness and suffering in God’s world and our lives, we are tempted to believe that God has given up on his world and us. The reality of Jesus reminds us that nothing could be further from the truth. God has not abandoned us. Neither does God hate us. The existence of Jesus Christ reveals to us the great love the Father has for his rebellious creatures and the length and depth he will go to reclaim us and his world so that we can one day enjoy creation as God always intended for us. It’s a free gift offered to us and we better have the wisdom to accept the gift of God’s good grace. If Jesus really is God, and we know him to be, then we have received the definitive revelation about who God is and what God’s intentions are for his world and us. No further revelation is needed and we are called to embrace God’s offer to us to accept his forgiveness and love made known to us in the suffering and death of Jesus Christ. 

This, in turn, means we must make a decision to accept or reject the healing and forgiving love of Christ. In reality we do both simultaneously in our lives because none of us loves God perfectly like Jesus did as man. But we see Jesus and that means we don’t bury our head in the sand or wring our hands in despair. It means that when the forces of darkness threaten to overwhelm us we look to Jesus for strength, refreshment, and encouragement. When we do, it must change us, especially when we remember that we have God’s very Spirit living in us, testifying to us the truth about God’s love and rescue of us from Evil, Sin, and Death in Jesus. So we continue to move forward, following Jesus, learning to give our lives to him completely. This means we choose to love and forgive our enemies and those who revile us. It means we are implacably opposed to evil and injustice and are resolved in the power of the Spirit to be agents of God’s goodness, love, mercy, and justice. It means that we go to Scripture to learn and be reminded of the story of the Good News of our salvation, and we struggle with God in prayer. It means we are given the power to sometimes just endure, but always with hope because if we really do see Jesus, we must be people of hope. And it means we give our financial resources to help advance the Kingdom work. God has given generously to us. Are we not to respond likewise to God? Given the importance of money in our culture, this is perhaps the best litmus test of our love for and faith in God. Of course, Kingdom work does not take place exclusively in the confines of parish ministry, although that is important. Sound preaching, administering the sacraments, and godly fellowship are critical components of worship and worship is critical if we ever hope to love the Lord with all our heart, mind, soul, and strength. But Kingdom work goes on outside our parish and is an important part of our stewardship. So, for example, in addition to giving ten percent of our income to St. Augustine’s, the Maneys give regularly to the ASCPA and to Faith Mission because we believe they engage in good and holy work. How we spend our money will give us a keen insight into the state of our faith in Jesus. I don’t say this to lay a guilt trip on you. I say it to remind you that Kingdom work involves every dimension of our lives from worship to fellowship to service to giving. Everything we have comes from God who has an egregiously generous heart. Seeing Jesus in our lives and the life of the world produces hearts that are also egregiously generous and willing to share God’s abundance to help those in need. 

Therefore, my beloved, be intentional in seeing Jesus so that you will not lose heart or hope. Be intentional in seeing Jesus so he can transform your own hard heart into a truly human one. Seeing Jesus is a sometimes challenging and difficult task that requires our constant attention along with our regular worship, persistence in prayer, and engaging in fellowship with God’s people, both inside and outside our parish family. But seeing Jesus is the only real answer to our fears and anxieties about our purpose for living as well as our own fate and the fate of this good world of God’s gone bad. It is a story with a happy and healing ending and it is offered to everyone who has the good sense to accept it as well as the One who is the main character of the story. Ask God to give you the grace and power to see Jesus and follow him more completely. Doing so will affirm or reaffirm to you that you really are participating in the Good News of Jesus Christ who has rescued you from the dark powers, now and for all eternity. To him be honor, praise, and glory forever and ever. 

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

Sermon originally preached on October 8, 2017. As always, it will be helpful to read the assigned texts by clicking on or tapping their links below before reading the sermon. As Christians, we are supposed to have Good News, the Good News of Jesus Christ crucified, died and buried, raised from the dead by the power of God, and ascended into heaven to rule as the Cosmic King of the universe. In Christ’s saving Death and by the power of the Holy Spirit, we believe that we have our one and only chance to be healed and reconciled to God the Father now and for all eternity. The Good News is not good advice or good suggestions, it is the jaw-dropping news that God our Father has intervened in human history on our behalf to rescue us from the hell of eternal separation from him. Christ is the hinge on which all of history hangs. Is this your gospel or are you carrying around some counterfeit version of it that will get you nowhere? Your very life, both in this mortal life and in the world to come, depends on how you answer this question. For those with ears to hear, listen and understand.

Lectionary texts: Exodus 20.1-4, 7-9, 12-20; Psalm 19; Philippians 3.4b-14; Matthew 21.33-46.

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

As Christians, we are people who are supposed to have Good News, or the gospel. But do we? If someone asked you what the gospel is all about, could you answer that person? Now I know many of you would be quick to say that you do have good news. You have an awesome rector who preaches brilliant sermons to counteract the tepid sermons of the other priests. While that’s certainly true—I am awesome and a brilliant preacher—it’s not the Good News I have in mind this morning. And the question is more than just rhetorical in nature because I suspect many of us don’t have Good News in the sense that we really believe what God has done for us in and through Christ. Therefore I want us to look at this issue carefully this morning because if we are going to live as people with power, we have to know the source of our power. 

In our OT lesson this morning we read about God giving Moses the Law, the Ten Commandments. It is critical that we understand that the Commandments originate from God, not humans. More on that in a moment. When I was a young man I used to hate reading or hearing about the Ten Commandments because they seemed to me to be designed to rain on my parade, and I suspect I am not alone in my feelings. Don’t worship idols. That’s tough to do when I want to make life all about me and my wants and needs. Watch your language about God. That was tough, given I have the mouth of a sailor. No illicit sex. Well what about all those attractive women I see? Don’t lie about or to your neighbor. But it’s so fun and gratifying to spread juicy gossip and diss those folks I don’t like! C’mon man. You get the idea.

The writer of Exodus tells us essentially the same thing about God’s people Israel. Apparently they weren’t very fond of the Commandments either because it reminded them of their sin and standing before a holy and just God. I mean, let’s get real about this, folks. We all know how hard it is for us to keep the Commandments and it was especially critical for God’s people Israel because they believed their ability to keep the Commandments determined their right standing before the Lord. That’s what St. Paul was talking about in our epistle lesson before he met the risen Lord Jesus. So they were willing to talk to Moses about being God’s holy or called-out people, but they were terrified at the prospect of standing in God’s holy presence because they knew they would die. Why? Nobody keeps the Commandments perfectly. 

But this kind of thinking about the Commandments demonstrates a profound misunderstanding about God and God’s purpose for giving us the Commandments, even as it exposes the dark side of human nature and our slavery to the power of Sin without outside help. To understand what the Commandments are all about, we have to place them in the proper context of the biblical story of how God is rescuing his good but fallen world and image-bearers from the ravages of Sin and Death. As Christians we should all know at least the basic outline of that story of how God created this vast cosmos, our world included, and then chose to create image-bearing creatures, humans, to run God’s good and beautiful world. It was utter paradise as long as our first ancestors did as God told them. You can read about that in Genesis 1-2. But we know Adam and Eve didn’t obey God’s command and the result was our expulsion from paradise and the unleashing of the dark powers of Evil, Sin, and Death to corrupt and destroy God’s good world and creatures. After Adam and Eve rebelled, literally all hell broke loose in God’s world, corrupting and defiling it. That’s why we are confronted with all the evil in its various forms that assails us today. As Fr. Bowser rightly explained in his mediocre sermon last week, the cumulative effects of human sin brought an ever-increasing level of destructiveness to God’s good world and his human image-bearers, and unleashed an array of fearsome powers who hate and and want to destroy us forever. We need to look only to the massacre in Las Vegas last week to be reminded of this reality, and that the human condition really hasn’t changed from Adam and Eve’s day to ours. Investigators are at a loss to explain a motive for the shooter’s actions, and even if they were to find one, it doesn’t really explain or justify amassing an arsenal to slaughter 58 people and wound countless more. There’s no good reason or justification for doing this. Welcome to the world that our first ancestors’ sin unleashed.

But God was never going to let his good creation be corrupted permanently and so God called Abraham and his descendants to bring God’s healing love to God’s sin-sick and corrupted world. You can read about that starting in Genesis 12. If you do, you will find that Abraham and his descendants were every bit as flawed as the people to which they were called to bring God’s love and blessing. It wasn’t that God didn’t know or anticipate this happening. After all, God is eternal and all-knowing. God knew this was going to be the case before God ever created Abraham in his mother’s womb. But God in his great love and graciousness for his called-out people Israel stuck with them, and now we are ready to understand why God gave Moses the Commandments. Given the sin-sickness of the human race, Israel included, God was showing Moses and God’s people what it would take to flourish as fully human beings. It all starts by us recognizing there is only one true God, the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, and to align ourselves with that God in choosing how we live our lives. Think about it. If we worship false gods, we learn false and dehumanizing ways to live. If, for example, money is our false god or idol, we will align our living around it. Given our brokenness, we will likely do whatever it takes to procure more of this idol, falsely believing that being rich will make our lives infinitely better and that money will give us life. But a second’s thought reveals how ludicrous this thinking is. Are rich people immune from the problems of the poor? Materially, the answer is probably yes. But wealth doesn’t keep us mentally, physically, or spiritually healthy. Money doesn’t guarantee we will have satisfying relationships or be anxiety-free. Money does nothing for us but give us a false sense of security and increase our innate sense of pride. 

Or think of the destructive power pornography has on a marriage. Porn is more addictive than crack cocaine so that it literally enslaves us. And it sets up a false reality and expectations about what true love and sex are all about, thus sowing the seed for the destruction of an important basis for marriage between a husband and wife. Likewise with lying, gossiping, and coveting. How many times have we heard stories about people who pursue these false gods, only to leave a trail of destruction and anger and betrayal and disillusionment, to name but a few. No, if we follow any god other than the real God, we are assured of a life that is temporary and unreal, a life that will steadily wipe out God’s image in us and ultimately make us sub-human creatures. That’s what Sin does to us. It dehumanizes us and makes it impossible for us to flourish. I am persuaded that this is at the heart of what is happening in our country today with all of its alienation and polarization.

So here we see God, our Creator—and who knows better about what it takes for God’s creatures to flourish than their Creator—giving Moses and his people concrete guidelines to help them flourish and spread the goodness, love, and blessing of our good Creator throughout the world, and to help them be real humans. If you understand this about the Commandments, they will no longer seem like an odious burden, unless of course you think your ability to get and remain right with God depends on your ability to keep them. This is exactly what many Israelites believed, and for those who could keep the Commandments better than most (like St. Paul), it became a source of pride. This, of course, meant that any good law keeper was already defeated because pride does not come from God. It comes from the power of Sin.

And we Christians are not immune to this phenomenon. We all know folks who call themselves Christian, but who go about life grimly or arrogantly, struggling to keep the Commandments or having a false sense of pride and superiority when they manage to keep a majority of them or to keep them better than they perceive others doing. These folks self-righteously proclaim that they have “good news” because they see themselves as being able to keep the Commandments better than most, thereby improving their standing before God. 

But as St. Paul reminds us in Romans 7, unless we are able to keep all the Command-ments, and not just some of them, we are utterly lost. And so instead of seeing the Command-ments as a framework to allow us to flourish as fully human beings, we elevate keeping the Commandments and make them our own idol. Yes, we are that profoundly broken, my beloved. 

Now don’t misunderstand. I am not suggesting that keeping the Commandments is not important. Of course it is, but not in terms of determining whether we are right before God. Those Christians who end up making their faith all about keeping the Commandments will inevitably end up gritting their teeth while they grimly deal with increasing levels of anxiety because none of us can keep the Commandments perfectly, hard as we may try. To make matters worse, many of us resent the notion that we need help from an outside power to help us get right before God. At its essence this is what is going on in our gospel lesson. Jesus had called out the lie that we can save ourselves by following the rules and had announced in word and deed that he was the true Messiah, the only hope the world had to really get right with God. This infuriated the religious leaders of his day, as it does many of us in our day, and it ended up getting Jesus killed.

But thanks be to God that in Jesus’ death we find and gain our life. This is the Good News of Jesus Christ. It is not about our ability to follow the rules. None of us can. We are too sin-sick to do so and unless God does something about it, it means that we have no share in God’s present world or the world to come, despite the material blessings and relative power most of us enjoy. When Jesus returns to finish the work he started in his life, death, and resurrection, there will be no room for evil in God’s new world, and that is for our good. Who wants to live an eternity being bedeviled by Sin and Evil? The new heavens and earth is the culmination of the biblical story of God’s plan to rescue his world from the ravages of Sin, Death, and Evil, and the powers behind them. At first it involved God calling out a people to do this and culminated in the one true Israelite, Jesus, the Son of God, who came to die for us and break the power of Sin over us. In Jesus’ death, God condemned our Sin in the flesh so that God would not have to condemn us, the real perps. Instead, on the cross Jesus bore God’s wrath against our Sin. We did, and can do, nothing to earn this gift of life. It flows from God’s very heart and love for us. This is the same God who swore to Abraham in that strange ancient covenant ratification ritual we read about earlier this year in Gen 15.12-21, where God in his actions unilaterally vowed to bear the curse himself if either God or Abraham broke the Covenant the two had made. This is the same God who astonishingly consigned all to disobedience so that he could have mercy on us all (Romans 11.32). This is the God who sent his own Son to die for us while we were still God’s enemies to reconcile us to himself (Romans 5.6-11). And what must we do in return? Believe the story. Believe the promise and begin, with the help of the Spirit, to reorient our lives back toward Jesus, God become human, so that we can flourish and not die. If you understand this whole story of salvation, however imperfectly, it is a sign that you have God’s Spirit in you because without his presence, it is impossible for humans to understand. 

This is the Good News of Jesus Christ, my beloved. Is it your Good News? Do you understand that God sent his only Son, Jesus Christ, to die for us so that we can live? Do you understand that as one of Christ’s own beloved, your ultimate future is new creation, a new bodily reality, where you will live as a fully human image-bearing creature who is once again charged with running God’s world on God’s behalf as you enjoy living in God’s direct presence forever? Do you understand this is so because of Jesus’ own resurrection? Do you realize that you are totally unworthy of such a great love and salvation but that it is yours anyway because of who God is, not because of how you try to live your sin-stained life? If you do, thank God right now for the gift of his Spirit who lives in you and sets you free to be fully human again. With this kind of humble knowledge, you will inevitably be filled with a joy that does not originate in you, a joy that has the power to transcend the worst the dark powers can throw at you, and you will be prepared to imitate our Lord Jesus in his life and in his death, in his suffering and in his victory, because that is what it means to follow Christ. Of course you cannot do this on your own power or strength and you will be tempted to balk at that, just like any good proud and self-righteous person would do. But God’s love and power is greater than our weakness. Amen?

In closing, I appeal to you to reject the false gospel that so many of us want to follow because of our folly and pride, the gospel of Pulling Yourself Up By Your Own Bootstraps, which will inevitably fail and cause you to fall into despair over your inability to live a good and right life before the living God. Please don’t choose to proclaim and live that false gospel in what you do and say. Instead, take heart and hope and remember that the God who loves you and who has claimed you from all eternity is stronger than the dark forces who are at work inside and outside of you. That same God sent his Son to die and rise for you, and to destroy the grip the forces of Evil have on this world and us, death being the ultimate Evil. This is the Good News we are called to both embrace and proclaim, now and for all eternity. No wonder St. Paul considered everything in his life before he met the risen Christ to be caca. May we also be blessed with the same grace and privilege. To him be honor, praise, and glory forever and ever. 

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

Sermon originally preached on September 25, 2016. As always it will be helpful to read the assigned texts by clicking on or tapping their links below before reading the sermon. If you call yourself a Christian, do you have a Resurrection Faith and Hope that will help sustain you through the darkest valley? If you don’t, you are cheating yourself of real power for living in an increasingly dark and evil age and you had better look in the mirror and ask yourself the hard question about whether you really are a Christian at all. For those with ears to hear, listen and understand.

Lectionary texts: Jeremiah 32.1-3a, 6-15; Psalm 91.1-6,14-16; 1 Timothy 6.6-19; Luke 16.19-31.

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

In one way or another, our lessons this morning remind us of the need to live in the present with God’s future in mind. For us as Christians, that future, of course, is resurrection and living in God’s new world. So this morning I ask you this question. Are you living your life as if the resurrection of Jesus and the hope and promises that accompany it really matter to you, or are you simply schlepping along, whistling through the graveyard, as you try to navigate through life? How you answer this question will determine whether you are overcoming this sin-sick and evil-infected world world in the power of Christ or are being overcome by it.

We start by looking at the remarkable story in our OT lesson. How do we explain Jeremiah’s apparently bizarre decision to purchase land in the midst of utter chaos and hopelessness? I mean, after all, Judah’s cruel enemy, the Babylonians, were laying siege to Jerusalem and would eventually burn down the city and its Temple. Not only was Jerusalem under siege, but the entire nation was being overrun and destroyed by the Babylonians. Adding insult to injury, Nebuchadnezzar, the king of Babylon, had already carried out a mass deportation of the Jewish people and would carry out a second one that would leave only a tiny remnant of Jews to live in the land God promised to give them. And if that weren’t bad enough, Jeremiah found himself imprisoned as a traitor in the midst of a starving Jerusalem where cannibalism was commonplace. If we assess this situation on its own merits, things look hopeless. Why would anyone in his right mind want to buy real estate given those conditions? There really wasn’t any hope that the land would increase in value in the future. There was no future! Common sense dictated that Jeremiah’s purchase was utter foolishness and stupidity!

But Jeremiah wasn’t looking at the present with myopic eyes. He looked at the hopelessness, despair, and destruction in his own life and the life of his people with an eye on God’s future. And what did that future promise? Healing and restoration of the land and its people. Just as the Lord had astonishingly told his exiled people through Jeremiah to settle down in their exile, to build houses, marry, have children and prosper, to pray for their captors, and for the peace and welfare of the place where they were held captive (Jeremiah 29.4-14), so now Jeremiah is instructed to purchase his relative’s property, which Jeremiah did. But why? Not because Jeremiah was cray-cray, but because God promised to return to his people and to restore them from their exile! Their sins had yielded the ultimate covenant curse of exile from their beloved land (Deuteronomy 28.36-37). But God in his grace and mercy was not going to let that be the last word. He was going to forgive and restore his broken and hurting people, and return to dwell with them as he had done before their exile and destruction. So Jeremiah did the apparently crazy thing. He bought land that conventional (worldly) wisdom proclaimed to be worthless because he had a real hope in God’s promise to heal and restore his people and the land in which they lived, and that made all the difference in the world to Jeremiah. This is what living in the present with an eye on God’s future looks like for God’s people. This is what hope for a future with God does for God’s people. It makes us look crazy in the eyes of the world! 

For us as Christians, of course, that future is resurrection and new creation because we believe that in Jesus’ death and resurrection, God has acted to defeat evil and put to rights all that is wrong with us and his world, including ending our alienation toward God and restoring us to a new, right, and life-giving relationship with God. As Christians we believe that we are given a glimpse of God’s new world in the bodily resurrection of Christ. In Christ’s death and resurrection we believe, contra conventional wisdom that proclaims dead people don’t come back to life, that when God raised Jesus from the dead, God defeated death forever and declared that our bodies as well as God’s creation are important to God and will be restored to full health, beauty, and vitality. As we grow older and our bodies are afflicted by more sickness, infirmity, and decay, we are reminded that this process isn’t the end game, that one day we will experience healing and restoration and a deathless existence for all eternity. This hope compels us to take care of our bodies because they matter to God, and so they should matter to us.

But the new heavens and earth are more important than just the hope of bodily resurrection, massively important as that hope is. The new heavens and earth promise to be free from evil and injustice and suffering and loneliness and fear and all the other nasty things that afflict us in this present age. It will be like this because we will get to live directly in God’s presence for all eternity and be the real human beings God created us to be. It means we will have new work to do as God’s regents over his new world. Think of the best times of your life when you were healthy and happy and fulfilled in your personal and professional life, and then multiply that feeling by a gazillion-fold, and you will begin to comprehend the hope and promise that is yours by virtue of belonging to Jesus. And like Jeremiah, that hope should impact how you live and view this present age as you wait for God’s new age, the age to come, when Jesus reappears to complete his healing and restorative work as he ushers in fully God’s new creation.

We have to keep in mind this future hope of God’s promise to heal and restore all creation to God’s intended good and beautiful state, us included, as we read our epistle lesson this morning. Without keeping God’s future in view as we live out our lives in this present age, we are likely to read passages like this as God trying to rain on our parade and force us to follow a bunch of arbitrary rules so that we can get our ticket punched into heaven. Nothing could be further from the truth. What St. Paul (and Jesus in our gospel lesson) are doing is warning us not to succumb to false gods and unreality. There is only one true God, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. Only in this God, who revealed himself most supremely in Jesus, will we find true happiness and real life. Nothing else will do, try as we might to make lesser things a viable substitute for authentic contentment that is based on a real and life-sustaining relationship with God. And in our culture, the temptation to worship the god of money is a supremely powerful one.

Think about it. In our affluent and consumer-driven world, we are bombarded with the message that more is better and instant gratification is the ticket. We need more money to buy more stuff so that we can enjoy ourselves and gain a modicum of security and a sense of importance. After all, it’s the rich who get ahead and gain the headlines and notoriety, right? And so we scrimp and save. We become stingy with our money because we believe our security and very existence depend on it. At minimum we need food, clothing, and shelter, don’t we? And everyone knows there’s just not enough to go around (egoic mind anyone?). In other words, we tell ourselves that God can’t or won’t provide abundantly and it’s up to us to fill in the gap.

But this mindset leads us to make money our god instead of the one true and living God. Yet a minute’s thought exposes this folly. Money cannot buy us life or sustain it forever in the way God can and does. And all that hard work and saving? Anyone who lived through the great recession of 2008 will tell you that’s a lie. Wealth can be wiped out in a skinny minute. How many folks do you know or have heard about, who now must continue to work because their retirement savings were obliterated in the stock market crash? So we slave and work to have more, only to realize how fleeting is that wealth, and how uncertain. We watch anxiously over our money and worry about keeping and/or protecting it. And we are tempted to do just about anything to get more of it. No wonder St. Paul and Jesus warn that love of money (not money itself) is the root of all evil and causes many otherwise faithful people to fall into complete destruction. It very well may be that St. Paul had Jesus’ parable in our gospel lesson in mind when he issued this warning! It’s not that money in itself is bad. After all, in our epistle lesson, St. Paul admonishes the rich to use their money generously for the benefit of others. He doesn’t command them to give it all up because money is evil. What is evil is our desire to be self-sufficient and independent of God, and we foolishly believe that money is the best way to help us attain our goal of God-independence. 

Of course, in all of this, we see what happens to us when we live for the present age only and reject or minimize our resurrection hope. As we have seen, we become anxious and fall victim to the changes, chances, and circumstances of life, which are often cruel and unjust. We become self-contained and fearful, looking out only for ourselves and for our own best interests. We are willing to sacrifice others to gain what we think we need because we convince ourselves we are in it all by ourselves with no other available resources to help us overcome the hardships, difficulties, suffering, and injustices in our life. In other words, we have no future hope to sustain us in the present!

Contrast this anxiety-ridden mindset to St. Paul’s admonition to practice godliness that leads to contentment. What does that mean? To practice godliness is to decide to make God our one and only king and to live our lives in ways that are consistent with God’s good created order. This leads to contentment because we are living in harmony with our Creator. And when we really believe that Jesus has rescued us from evil, sin, and death, and that we have an eternal future with him in God’s new world, it helps us meet the present difficulties with courage and hope, which leads to even more contentment because we trust God to provide what we need right now based on his promises for a renewed future (cf. Philippians 4.11-13). We understand that all we have, money included, comes from God. Sure, we have to put in our sweat equity, but ultimately all the good things we enjoy—health, wealth, meaningful relationships, family, and everything in between—come from God and are not strictly of our own doing. God blesses us because he loves us and is gracious to us. He doesn’t always give us what we deserve, either good or bad—thanks be to God! But God created us and knows what we need to make us truly happy and content, and it all starts with our relationship with him in and through Jesus. When we have our eye and hope set on God’s future, we can navigate through this world with meaning, purpose, and power. 

We will also start behaving in ways that the world considers strange at best. Instead of striving to gain and hoard, we strive to give away because we understand that all humans are created in God’s image and are therefore critically important. We take to heart God’s command for us to look after the least and the lost—because they matter to God as we matter to him. We lose our usual rationalizations for not giving our money to those in need (you know, they’re lazy, they’ll just buy drugs, they choose to be poor, etc.) because we know these folks are important in God’s economy, even if they aren’t important to the world’s. 

And you know what? Every time we do stuff like this, God uses us to bring in his kingdom on earth as in heaven, just like we pray for every week in the Lord’s prayer. For example, when we go to Faith Mission, the hungry are fed. What would happen if we all stopped doing that? People would starve and there would be all kinds of unknown and unexpected consequences. That person we refused to feed might murder to eat or steal money so he can buy food. Whatever it looks like without our generosity, the world would certainly be an uglier and darker place. Likewise when we give money to build a beautiful worship space like we are trying to do. We do so to worship God together and be refreshed and strengthened together to do God’s work in God’s world in new and unexpected ways. This is what godliness looks like. It means we love God with all that we are and others as ourselves, because all creatures are important to God, especially his image-bearing ones. I could go on but you get the idea. 

When we place our hope and trust in God at the center of our lives, we learn to develop a godly contentment, and that enables us to keep the long view of life in mind. We realize we have a future and a hope because we take to heart God’s promise to us that he knows his plans for our welfare and not our harm, plans that ensure we have a future and a hope (cf. Jeremiah 29.11). And we have seen the empty tomb of Jesus and experienced his risen presence among us in the power of the Spirit living in us as God’s people. This means that nothing in this world has the power to overcome us, not even the fear of death. Fr. John Wesley, an Anglican priest and founder of the Methodist movement, once said that the mark of real Methodists is how well they died. By that he meant that Christians should not fear death because we believe God has abolished death when he raised Jesus from the dead so that death doesn’t have the final say, even though our bodies lie moldering in the grave. Reports of Wesley’s own death indicate he died an astonishingly peaceful death. He knew the reality of his risen Lord with its attendant resurrection hope and so died in great contentment. There’s real power in that, my beloved. 

Now don’t misunderstand. I am not suggesting we minimize our struggles and fears in this world. There are truly scary things that can happen to us and there are lots of scary people around. But when we have a real and vibrant resurrection hope, we understand that not even the gates of hell can overcome us because we belong to Jesus and we have a real future in God’s new age. That future begins right now because God’s new world will be the renewal and transformation of God’s current world, but without all the evil and heartache and suffering that afflict us now. Therefore we are called to get to work on our Lord’s behalf and generously use our resources toward that end, gifts from our generous and loving God, on behalf of God and his people. We will fight injustice and work to overcome all that dehumanizes people. In doing so we proclaim boldly that Jesus is Lord and the world’s systems are not. The world will hate us and persecute us to stop us and shut us up. But we are simultaneously people of the present age and age to come so that we do not fear persecution or ridicule. We know the One who guarantees our future and therefore we know our present is secure, despite appearances to the contrary at times. And that, folks, is the essence of living the Good News, not to mention our mission statement (to be changed by God to make a difference for God), now and for all eternity. To him be honor, praise, and glory forever and ever. 

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

Sermon originally preached on September 26, 2021. As always it will be helpful to read the assigned texts by clicking on or tapping their links below before reading the sermon. Here I look at the terrifying reality of God’s holiness and justice, terrifying that is for the true enemies of Christ. We have spent so much time deluding ourselves about the seriousness of Sin while watering down God’s justice as presented in Scripture—not the phony and unreal justice of wokery in all its various forms of wickedness, but real justice, God’s justice—that many of us, Christians included, don’t take it seriously anymore. Huge mistake that can lead to deadly consequences barring repentance. For those with ears to hear, listen and understand.

Lectionary texts: Esther 7:1-6, 9-10; 9:20-22; Psalm 124; James 5.13-20; St. Mark 9.38-50.

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

What are we to make of the rather sordid but compelling story of Haman’s execution in our OT lesson? How about St. James’ example of God answering Elijah’s prayer only after Elijah had slaughtered the prophets of Baal? And how about Christ’s hyperbolic exhortation for us to rid ourselves of any source of sin? Our lessons this morning all remind us in their various ways that God hates evil of any kind and acts in judgment against it, both in this mortal life and at the Day of Judgment. What then should be our response as Christians to this rather unsettling reality? This is what I want us to look at this morning.

Let us start by acknowledging the terrifying truth that God is no doting old grandpa, willing to look the other way with a wink and a snicker at our sins. To the contrary, it is not too strong a statement to say that God hates evil and sin in all its variety. Why? Not because God is some angry bully waiting to come down hard on wrongdoers. If that were the case, why would God have made us in his image? Why are we still even here? It’s not because of our own virtue and righteousness! No, God hates evil and sin of any kind because sin corrupts us and dehumanizes us, i.e., it slowly erases God’s image in us so that we can no longer be his stewards called to run God’s world as God created us to do. And this should make sense to us because we all know how evil can evoke anger. Who in their right mind doesn’t hate that drug dealers destroy lives and bring ruin on others, all for the sake of money? Who among us doesn’t abhor child molesters and pedophiles for the same reasons? God created us to be fully human beings who bear his image and who have been given the awesome responsibility to rule God’s world on God’s behalf, reflecting God’s goodness out into creation and reflecting creation’s praises back to its Creator. Sin and the evil it creates corrupts and perverts our holy task as God’s image-bearers and God cannot countenance that forever, patient as God has demonstrated he is. God did not speak creation and us into existence to foster madness and loneliness and sickness and alienation, and because God loves us and wants us to live with him forever, God cannot look the other way on our sin forever. In our OT lesson, e.g., Haman plotted to destroy God’s people the Jews, in part to satisfy his megalomania. (I would encourage you to read the entire book of Esther as it is as compelling a story as you will ever read and God’s name is not mentioned in it once). But there God is, operating behind the scenes, judging Haman’s evil to bring justice to God’s people, wicked as they were, because of God’s love and faithfulness to them. 

In our epistle lesson, St. James’ reference to Elijah points us to God’s relenting in his judgment on the land and its people only after the prophets of Baal had been slaughtered. As with the story of Esther, healing could not occur until God had decisively dealt with the sins of evildoers. Why? When we are beset continually by evil, we can never be fully healed, again reminding us why God will not let sin and evil reign forever—it sickens and kills us and God will not tolerate that massive disorder to his good creation and creatures forever. God loves us too much. In our gospel lesson, Christ essentially tells us the same thing. Be prepared to cut out anything in your life—even if the things you must cut out are inherently good and useful—if they cause you to continue to sin because God will one day judge you and you will find yourself in the flames of hell forever. Christ’s warning is a stark reminder that without outside help from a power stronger than the powers of Evil and Sin, none of us have any hope of ever enjoying life in God’s new world when it comes with our Lord’s return. None of us like to think about this and the thought of eternal separation from the healing and life-giving power of God is so terrifying that many of us spend our time living in denial and deflecting the truth, convincing ourselves that God would never do that because God is too loving and merciful. Yes God is loving and merciful. That we are here worshiping God this morning is living proof of that truth. God is not the problem here. We are the problem because we are all slaves to the power of Sin, and unless something is done about that, we are all doomed to eternal destruction. We see it in the story of Adam and Eve, who were expelled from paradise after the Fall. God cannot tolerate forever that which corrupts his beloved (that would be you and me in all our unloveliness). We see it in the story of God’s Tabernacle in the wilderness. God gave Moses strict rules about how sinful humans could approach God’s holy Presence and those who did not follow those rules found themselves destroyed [when the profane/holy meet]. Our problem today is that most of us have persuaded ourselves that this simply can’t be true. We’ve become too used to living with and rationalizing sin, both ours and the sins of others. This is emphatically not the biblical witness on the subject, however, and by God’s grace we would be wise to take these warnings seriously.

But all is not lost, my beloved. Far from it. While it is true that none of us can extricate ourselves from the death grip of Sin’s power and all of us are evildoers, some worse than others, it is also true that the Father’s great love for us is greater than our slavery to Sin. As St. Paul proclaims in his letter to the Romans, God demonstrated his love for us by sending his Son to die for us (i.e. God became human in the man Jesus), even while we were God’s enemies, estranged from and hostile toward God, to bear his own right and just judgment on our sins, thereby clearing the way for us to have a future and a hope. The Death and Resurrection of Jesus Christ was and is the turning point in human history where God the Father acted decisively for us to save us from eternal damnation and open the way for us to live in God’s holy Presence forever. But we don’t have to wait till the new heavens and earth arrive. We can enjoy sweet, albeit imperfect, communion with God right now, enjoying his presence when we worship him together and feed on Christ’s body and blood each week. To be sure, evil still runs rampant in God’s world and we all suffer from it. Every one of us here today brings our sorrows and fears and brokenness to worship. But just like God’s power working invisibly to bring justice to the wicked Haman, God’s power in and through the Holy Spirit, through his word proclaimed and preached, through sweet fellowship with each other, and in and through the Holy Eucharist, God is at work in us now, both individually and collectively, to bring healing and hope as he makes his invisible Presence known to us, thanks be to God. 

So what should be our response to God’s goodness, mercy, love, and truth? How are we to live faithfully in the midst of increasing chaos and disorder? We start by believing the promise that in Christ we are saved from our sins and God’s wrath and judgment on them. Just as God provided for our rebellious and frightened ancestors after he expelled them from paradise, just as God remained faithful to his stubborn and rebellious people despite sending them into exile, and just as God remains faithful to us by blessing us with his Holy Spirit, so we are reminded that God’s promise to free us from our slavery to sin and evil will be ultimately fulfilled, even if only partially now. We have Christ’s Death and Resurrection to remind us always that God’s will and purposes to heal and rescue us will be done fully when Christ returns to finish his saving work on our behalf. Come Lord Jesus. This must create in us thankful and grateful hearts. When we begin to recognize the enormity our sin and rebellion against God and what God has done to rescue and heal us from those sins, we cannot help but have grateful hearts, hearts (or will) to love and serve Christ and others for all that he has done for us. And when we really believe the promises and are persuaded that despite our sins and foolishness, God still loves us and wants us to be with him forever, forgiving us through Christ’s blood shed for us, we will experience new healing, healing that flows from a thankful heart. 

Our healed hearts will also compel us to pray for others, especially our enemies—we may hate drug dealers and pedophiles, but we’d better be praying for their repentance and salvation—even as we long for real justice, not the phony kinds of justice various groups try to foist on us today, but the kind of justice that flows from God’s holy heart. We pray ultimately with the realization that we too are evildoers who deserve God’s justice and so we pray for God to heal our enemies and the hearts of evildoers so that they will not suffer such a terrible fate, the fate we too would suffer without the healing love of Christ. Far from being ineffective, prayer is one of the most powerful weapons we Christians can bring to bear on evil and God’s good but sin-corrupted world. But we pray with eyes wide open, realizing that we are at war with the forces of evil who hate us and want to destroy us, and so we bring our fears and sorrows and needs to God, trusting that God is working invisibly as God always does to bring his world and its disordered creatures to rights. There’s more to all this, but there is certainly not less. Let us as God’s holy people bring our prayers to bear on this world and its people, repenting of our own sins and trusting our holy and loving Father to bring about his promise to heal and restore us according to his good will and purposes for us. And let us make sure we do this together as God’s people in Christ because the promise is for us together. To him be honor, praise, and glory forever and ever. 

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

Sermon originally preached on September 30, 2018. As always it will be helpful to read the assigned texts by clicking on or tapping their links below before reading the sermon. Another variation on the theme of where’s God in all this? For those with ears to hear, listen and understand.

ectionary texts: Esther 7:1-6, 9-10; 9:20-22; Psalm 124; James 5.13-20; Mark 9.38-50.

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

How can a book that never mentions God’s name end up in the canon of Scripture? That is the question the confronts us in our OT lesson this morning. The book of Esther never once mentions God by name, at least in the Protest versions of Scripture. What are we to make of that and how does it relate to the baptism we will celebrate in a little while? This is what I want us to look at this morning.

The book of Esther is unique in all the Bible because not once in its ten chapters is God’s name mentioned. Despite this curious fact, God is very much present in the lives of his exiled people. We see it in the circumstances of the story which are loaded with “coincidences,” an oxymoron if there ever was one. We see God’s activity in the lives of God’s people and even God’s enemies to bring about their rescue from certain annihilation. Consider these examples. An uppity queen who paves the way for Esther to become Xerxes’ queen. A king’s attendant who takes a special liking to Esther that is crucial to her becoming queen. Esther’s cousin Mordecai who thwarts a plot to kill the king by being at the right place at the right time, but who is a forgotten man in the king’s eyes. A wicked advisor who plots the destruction of God’s people  because of his hatred toward Mordecai and who rapidly becomes a favorite of the king. A restless night of sleep for the king that leads to his remembering Mordecai and ultimately leads to the reversal of fortune for Mordecai and Haman. The courage of Esther who risked her life for her people to expose the wickedness of Haman and his evil scheme to destroy God’s people. No, God’s name is never mentioned in the story but God is everywhere present in the circumstances and lives of his people to bring about their redemption! That is why throughout history the book of Esther has not been read as an isolated event in Jewish history but as symbolizing the final salvation of God’s people at the end of time (the eschaton).

This should be enormously encouraging to us as Christians who labor under God’s good but cursed and often-confusing world. The story of Esther reminds us that there are forces of Evil in this world that God has mysteriously and enigmatically allowed to usurp his rightful reign—but only to a degree. God is still Sovereign and ultimately in charge of his world. Despite appearances to the contrary, sometimes to an almost overwhelming degree, the story of Esther reminds us that God is in charge and is working to free his people from the power of Evil. 

St. Mark tells us essentially the same thing when he talks about casting out demons. His message? The forces of Evil and their human minions are indeed active in God’s world. We are at war and have been since human rebellion got us expelled from paradise. But the evil powers do not have free reign. God is still Sovereign. The evil powers must submit to Jesus and in doing so, God’s people find protection and respite from the havoc they wreak. Most of us do not perceive this war raging on with our human senses, but the war is real nevertheless as we all can attest because we all have experienced Evil in our lives. The story of Esther reminds us that God cares for his people, in part, through human agency, just like God did when he rescued his people through the actions of Esther and Mordecai, just like he does when we give a follower of Christ a cup of water or when we pray for healing for the sick. We want to push back at this claim because it strains against our sense of how the “real world” works. “How can that be,” we ask? “How can my small actions be of any importance to God?” Nowhere does Scripture answer that “how does it all work” question. It just reassures us that our actions do matter and are an important part in this ongoing war with Evil as God and his people fight against its forces. This claim about the importance of human agency should make sense to us, given that God created us in his image to run God’s world on his behalf. Why wouldn’t God work through human agency to help reestablish his kingdom on earth as in heaven? The forces of Evil certainly use human minions to impose their chaos on God’s good world and people! So why wouldn’t God use humans as agents to spread his goodness, love, mercy, and justice? Make no mistake. We don’t bring in the Kingdom. God does. But God calls us to do our part in the war against Evil. That is why it is so important that we order our lives according to God’s laws and God’s ordering of his creation. Otherwise, we help the enemy; and as Jesus himself warned us in our gospel lesson, that will result in God’s fearsome judgment on us. There will be no Evil and evildoers, human or otherwise, in God’s new world, the new heavens and earth (Rev 21.1-8).

This is why we must take seriously the underlying theme of the story of Esther with its proclamation that despite the presence of Evil and evildoers like Haman in God’s world, God works through the circumstances of life, chaotic as those circumstances can be, and through all kinds of people, to bring about salvation for God’s people. Every time we see Evil defeated, every time we see the sick healed, every time we see mercy extended or God’s justice carried out like we see in the story of Esther, we are reminded that these are signs meant to help us believe that God is busy at work rescuing his people from Evil, Sin, and Death. Esther reveals for those with ears to hear that life and death are determined by identification with a people—God’s people Israel in the OT and God’s people Israel reconstituted around Jesus Christ in the NT that includes both Jew and Gentile (Eph 2.14-18). We as God’s people in Christ are therefore called to embrace the promise that in Jesus Christ we are rescued from our sin and folly and ultimately from death itself because of the blood of the Lamb shed for us. The eschatological reality of eternal life for God’s people foreshadowed in the celebration of Purim is fully realized in Christ’s resurrection. We live because Jesus lives and because Jesus is the resurrection and the life. Not even our mortal death can prevent this promise from being fulfilled or separate us from the love of God made known to us in Jesus Christ our Lord (St. John 14.19, 11.25-26; Romans 8.31-39)! Amen? Because of Jesus’ death and resurrection our destiny has been reversed from death to life, this against all human expectation, and we as Christians find in Christ God’s ultimate promise to protect us from death. Those of us who are God’s people in Christ will be delivered from death and live forever, just as our Lord Jesus was, thanks be to God! 

This means that even in the darkest circumstances of our life when joy is far from our hearts and everything looks dark, just as it did for Esther and her people before she confronted Haman in front of the king, we are assured of our current good standing with God and our final destiny in God’s new world because of the blood of Christ shed for us on the cross. Our sins are forgiven and we are being transformed into new creations by the power of God’s Spirit who lives in us and who makes the presence of our risen Lord a reality for us. That is why we can face even the darkest times with hope as God’s people. We live now and will live forever because Christ lives now and lives forever. This is the Good News of Jesus Christ that we profess. Without it, life is bleak indeed. With it, we have power to overcome the worst the forces of Evil can throw at us because Jesus is Lord and they are not.

In a moment we will baptize Tori into God’s family and into this breathtaking promise. She will receive the Holy Spirit and be made holy and pure to serve her Lord all the days of her life. Her parents will promise on her behalf to raise her in ways that will open the way for Jesus to be alive and present in her. We see none of this directly and we acknowledge we are dealing with a holy and awesome mystery. But we don’t have to “see” the Holy Spirit because like the story of Esther, we trust in the promise that baptism will accomplish what it promises, even when we cannot perceive its invisible reality—after all, that’s why we call it a sacrament—and our faith in the power and presence of the Spirit causes us to say, “Amen.”  Believe and trust in that promise, my beloved. Embrace your identification as a member of God’s people in Jesus Christ and be refreshed by God’s love, mercy, and grace that allows you to have membership in his holy family now and forever. Let it sustain you in your darkest hour and let it change you so that God can always use you as a force for his good in a world that desperately needs all the good it can get. When you do, you will be participating in the Good News of Jesus Christ, now and for all eternity. To him be honor, praise, and glory forever and ever. 

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

Sermon originally preached on September 27, 2015. As always it will be helpful to read the assigned texts by clicking on or tapping their links below before reading the sermon. As Christians are we to desire justice or be merciful? Is there even a conflict? This has tripped many a Christian up in our world today, mistaking God’s mercy for his justice. The short answer to these questions is that Christians must always choose mercy and forgiveness first. That does not mean, however, that we are to abandon our desire for real justice, God’s justice. Moreover, mercy requires forgiveness, and many don’t understand what real forgiveness entails (it is not forgive and forget). The ability to forgive is not possible without the living Presence of the Holy Spirit living in us to help us live out our Lord’s inconvenient demand and truth that those who are without forgiveness and mercy can expect to receive none themselves on the terrible day of God’s Judgment. For those with ears to hear, listen and understand.

Lectionary texts: Esther 7.1-6, 9-10, 9.20-22; Psalm 124; James 5.13-20; Mark 9.38-50.

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

How many of you got a little uncomfortable with our OT lesson this morning with its description of celebrating and rejoicing over the death of another? Or how many of you, upon hearing the story, reacted with some guilty pleasure. A bad dude got his. The good guys won. Yes! But aren’t we supposed to forgive our enemies and pray for them, even if they are out to destroy us? If you had one of these reactions—and I suspect if we are really honest with ourselves most of us did—you are not alone. You are dealing with a vexing issue for many Christians: how to balance justice and mercy. This is what I want us to look at this morning.

In our OT lesson we witness the culmination of a gripping drama made even more remarkable by the fact that God is never mentioned throughout the entire book of Esther. Yet God is always there as we see in our lesson today. The story is about evil being perpetrated by human agents, in this case Haman, King Xerxes’ right-hand man. Haman had been offended by Mordecai, a Jewish exile who refused to bow in submission to him, and as a result, Haman had resolved to exterminate the Jews by essentially tricking the king into issuing an edict to this effect, an edict that could not be revoked. Because of Haman’s wounded pride and vanity, we are confronted with the real possibility of unspeakable evil being committed. And we all know what genocide looks like. We’ve seen the footage from the liberated Nazi concentration camps.

But we are talking God’s people. So where is God in all this? How can God allow such evil to be perpetrated against his people? After all, isn’t God always faithful to his covenant promises? We expect God to rush in and deliver his people in a mighty act of power, just like he did for his people Israel when he rescued them from their slavery in Egypt at the Exodus. But God doesn’t do it that way in this case. He rescues his people by placing two of them, Esther and Mordecai, in critically important positions and using them to bring about his justice on the wicked Haman. So far so good. Most of us do not have a problem with justice being executed on evildoers. But the possibility that we might have to forgive this guy? Really??

And then we learn that Mordecai issues an order instructing all the Jews living in the Persian Empire to celebrate Haman’s death and their deliverance from destruction, a celebratory spirit that is implicit in our psalm as well, and now our reaction may not be so straightforward. We are Christians, after all, and should never celebrate the death of anyone, no matter how evil they might be. We do this because God himself tells us he takes no pleasure in the death of evildoers (Ezekiel 18.23, 32). Yet most of us remember watching the crowds gather to celebrate the death of Osama bin Laden. Some of us may even have wanted to join in the celebration. After all, our archenemy, the face of pure evil, finally got what was coming to him. The good guys won. I’m sure the reaction was the same when the news of Hitler’s death was announced. For those who are not Christian, this is no big deal. After all, they are not bound to follow the crucified one who died to spare us from God’s terrible and right judgment on our own sins. They don’t need to stop and think that they are celebrating the death of an image-bearing creature of God, marred as that image might be [ed. note: think, e.g., about the recent vile reactions of those who celebrated the death of Charlie Kirk recently on the first anniversary of his assassination]. But for us who profess to be Christian? What to do? For many of us, I suspect the answer is that we experience some guilty pleasure over the death of an evildoer. We know we shouldn’t but we just can’t help ourselves. We want justice, especially when it is comes to really bad guys like bin Laden. So what does the gospel have to say about all this? The answer is not as straightforward as some would like us to think.

Of course we are to take to heart and practice Jesus’ teaching and follow his example. We are to love mercy first and practice it. We are to pray for our enemies and forgive them instead of seeking to exact revenge on them. Doing the latter makes us agents of evil and that is simply not acceptable. Rather, as St. Paul reminds us in Romans, we are to leave room for God to execute his good and righteous wrath on evildoers (Romans 12.14-21). We are to leave this to God because God is our Creator and sovereign. Only he has the right to execute justice on evil and those who commit it. Let me be clear. I am talking about us as individual Christians, not the role and duty of the state. As St. Paul would write later in Romans, the state is God’s ordained instrument to carry out God’s wrath on the wicked (Romans 13.2-4). But most of us are not heads of state. We are just ordinary Christians who are called to embody the love and mercy of God made known to us in Jesus.

But it is a misreading of the gospel if we see all mercy and no justice. A closer look reveals that even the gospel acknowledges the existence of evil in our world and reminds us God is doing something about it. So while we are called always to forgive and be merciful to our enemies, even the blatantly evil ones, we are not called to ignore our desire to see God’s righteous justice being executed on those who perpetrate evil. As we saw last week, God will not be mocked and Scripture makes clear that God is implacably opposed to evil of any kind. He simply cannot and will not tolerate it. We see this at the Fall in Genesis 3.1-19. Adam and Eve rebel against God’s good will for them and find themselves (along with everyone else ever since) under God’s curse. We see it in God’s response to the evil his people committed when they worshiped idols and the corresponding lifestyle that developed as a result. You see, we end up becoming what we worship and when we worship false and wicked things we begin to act in corresponding ways. We see it in our OT lesson when the wicked Haman gets his just reward. He was hanged on the very pole he had erected to hang his enemy Mordecai. We see it in our gospel lesson, albeit more subtly. Along with tender words about caring for the little ones who care for Jesus comes the chilling reminder of millstones around the neck and the unquenchable fire of hell. We see it in St. James’ letter with its emphasis on prayer. The example of Elijah’s prayer to which St. James refers contains both God’s mercy and judgment. Elijah had originally prayed for drought as a result of Israel’s wicked idolatry and his prayer for rain came only after he had the 450 priests of Baal slaughtered. God was merciful and rain came, but only after judgment. 

These examples serve, in part, to remind and show us that God is a good God who is implacably opposed to evil of any form and who is simultaneously at work restoring his good but fallen creation back to its original goodness. We are called to be part of that rescue mission and have strict orders to act accordingly—and to let God do likewise. Part of our calling is that we are not to take justice into our own hands. To do that results in holy lynch mobs. But to advocate mercy at the expense of justice would be to violate our sense of what is right and deny that God is both a God of justice and mercy. If God is not both, there would be no need for the cross.

So part of the challenge of living faithfully as Christians is to strike a healthy balance between justice and mercy. We must never turn mercy and forgiveness into forgive and forget, where we deny that any wrong has been done to us. That is not how forgiveness works. To truly forgive someone and extend mercy to that person requires that we first and foremost acknowledge the person has acted evilly and done us real harm. So when we forgive, we acknowledge the harm but resolve not to exact revenge and become evildoers ourselves. The hurt matters and we must work though it and ask God to heal us. This is precisely why forgiveness is so difficult and costly. When we forgive, we resolve not to get into the ditch with the pigs and become like them. We trust God to deal with our hurt as well as those who caused it because we realize God is just as well as merciful, and that we are as much in need of his mercy as our enemies are. And if we are open to this dynamic, God will never let us down.

This is why St. James ends his letter with the exhortation to pray for each other and forgive each other. Healing comes with forgiveness. Real healing. And it’s the only way we will ever be able to experience real healing from sins and evil perpetrated against us as well as from our own sins. St. James has been warning us to follow the way of Christ, precisely because he knows we are at war with our disordered hearts and the powers and principalities who use our disordered desires to entice us into more sin and evildoing. But unlike many today would have us believe, there are terrible and eternal consequences to our sins as Jesus reminds us in our gospel lesson. This is why we are to love mercy, do justice, and walk humbly with our God. We are to love mercy because we ourselves have received mercy in and through the death of Jesus and St. James warns us not to throw our pearls to the swine by acting and speaking in ways that are contrary to our call as Christians. That is why he links prayer and forgiveness to healing. 

But this doesn’t mean we should ignore our desire for justice. God cannot tolerate evil. Why should we? But here’s the rub. As individuals, we are to let God execute his vengeance and justice on evildoers and are not to take glee when he does. If we truly are being transformed by God’s love in Christ made known to us in and through the power of the Spirit, if we really are Jesus’ people, we should be praying for evildoers so that they don’t suffer the eternal fate of unquenchable fire. To really desire that for someone is a damning indictment of our own hard heart and indicates at some level we really have not accounted for our own sin or have a real faith Jesus. To be sure, there are different levels of sin and evil. But God is opposed to even the slightest trace of sin or evil and that makes us liable to his judgment as well.

St. Mark has some godly wisdom for us in this department. If we take to heart what he tells us, it will help us from becoming hard-hearted and self-righteous folks. Unlike St. James, St. Mark imparts God’s wisdom by telling us stories about Jesus and so we have to pay a little closer attention to what he says. Case in point. Consider Jesus’ rebuke of John. We stopped a man from casting out demons in your name, he tells Jesus, and I suspect he said that rather proudly. In saying this, John was really saying that only those who are authorized by Jesus can do his work. Not so, retorts Jesus. Anyone who isn’t against me is for me. Furthermore, if you hinder anyone from believing in me, you are toast—literally. So what was Jesus talking about? The context of this warning, coming on the heels of John’s statement, suggests that Jesus was not talking about leading others to do immoral things like making someone lie or cheat or steal. Rather Jesus was warning his disciples to take a hard look at their own behavior. He was afraid that people would take offense at him because of what his followers did. So examine yourselves, he tells us. Cut out anything that might cause others to think badly about me because of what you say or do. 

In the context of balancing justice and mercy, what do you think we could do that might make people more readily take offense at Jesus because of our actions: That we are too merciful or too eager to exact justice? Again there is a fine line here and balance is needed. But God help us if we do not take Jesus’ warning seriously. We saw last week why the Nones don’t come to church. They think we are judgmental hypocrites. Here our Lord himself warns us about the same thing. A desire for justice, yes. But each of us who have been rescued from sin and eternal death by the blood of the Lamb had better be as willing and eager to extend mercy to our enemies as we are quick to condemn them. This is true not only because Jesus tells us we will be judged by the measure we use to judge others (Matthew 7.2), but also because we embody his presence as his followers, and he calls us to be better than our enemies. This doesn’t mean we ignore the need for justice to be done. It means that we are as concerned for the welfare of our enemies as we are for our own welfare. This is radical and disconcerting stuff, and there is always the danger that we will offend some folks in our call for justice and others in our insistence that we be merciful to evildoers. But maintaining this balance is being faithful to the entire gospel message and Jesus himself, and this must always be our goal as Christians.

 In closing, then, let us all reflect soberly on these matters of justice and mercy. As Christians we are always called to be merciful and to forgive. That is a gospel imperative and there is no other option for us. However, the gospel is also concerned about the need for justice. Justice is part of God’s healing of the nations, of God putting all the wrongs of his world to rights, and the demand for justice is all over the gospel as we have seen. But the gospel is Good News and should make a difference in our lives. It should transform and heal us in response to God’s love, grace, and mercy extended to us in Jesus. It should give us a real hope that God does not let evil go unpunished, unlikely as that seems to us at times. We have a real future ahead of us, a future devoid of evil and suffering, a future that entails our radical renewal where somehow all of the hurts and wrongs done to us will be fully healed so as to never hurt or wound us again. We don’t have this future because we are worthy of it. We have this future because of the blood of the Lamb shed for us, unworthy as we are. Our Lord calls us to embody his love and to live our lives in ways that will cause others to want to know him as their crucified and risen Lord, just like he is ours. Having a healthy and balanced perspective on justice and mercy a perspective that reflects our need to show mercy to our enemies just as we desire God to show mercy to us, while at the same time acknowledging that God’s restorative justice is part and parcel of the healing of the nations as well as our own, is one of the best ways we can proclaim to the world that we really do have Good News, now and for all eternity. To him be honor, praise, and glory forever and ever. 

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