Sermon originally preached July 30, 2017. As always it will be helpful to read the assigned texts below by clicking on or tapping their links before you read the sermon. As with the other sermons reposted this week, this sermon also grapples with the important topic of the enigmatic power of God at work in his sin-sick world. For those with ears to hear, listen and understand.

Lectionary texts: Genesis 29:15-28; Psalm 105.1-11; Romans 8.26-39; Matthew 13.31-33, 44-52.

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

We have been working through the climax of this section (chapters 5-8) of St. Paul’s letter to the Romans. Two weeks ago we saw that there is no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus because of his saving death and resurrection. Last week we saw that to be in Christ requires our suffering for his sake because the powers, while broken, are not yet fully vanquished. Today, St. Paul offers us much-needed encouragement as we live in God’s fallen world as redeemed followers of our Lord, and this is what I want us to look at this morning.

“All things work together for good for those who love God.” That probably wasn’t the first thought that occurred to Jacob when he woke up the morning after his wedding. Jacob, the master deceiver, found himself deceived and forced to work another seven years to secure his beloved Rachel as his wife. Assuming Charlie Gard’s parents love God, I’m pretty sure they are struggling to believe this promise in the aftermath of their infant son’s illness and death (may God have mercy on the sin-sick souls of those who prevented them from bringing Charlie to the U.S. and then home to die). Likewise for the families of the young man killed and those who were critically injured at the state fair this past week. Likewise for +Grant L., one of my old professors at Trinity, and his wife, who must suspend their ministry in Africa because of life-threatening health issues confronting her, thus leaving a medical and spiritual void in the lives of those they have served so well. Likewise for many of you whose lives have been disrupted by all kinds of affliction, and who continue to struggle to make sense of it all. 

To add insult to injury, we hear the mocking voices of those who are hostile to the faith and who see our struggles and failures to live as Christians. Where is God in all this? Why doesn’t God act? You are a fool to believe such nonsense as St. Paul writes in Romans 8. If God were real, God would do something about all the suffering and injustice in the world. How is God possibly working for good in all things for you who profess to love God in Christ? Then there are the troubling voices from within, from time to time asking the same taunting questions.

And yet… And yet… These questions all presume to know how God can and should work in God’s world, bless our pointy little arrogant heads. They presume that because God is all-powerful, God will just wave God’s hand and destroy all the forces of evil in one fell swoop. Doing so, of course, would mean that God would have to destroy the entire creation and all of us because we are all hopelessly infected by the power of Sin and Evil. But we know Scripture consistently testifies that God in his faithfulness has promised to ultimately redeem his creation, rather than destroy it and every living creature in it. No, the long perspective of Genesis, not to mention the whole of Scripture, tells us quite a different story about how God is at work to bring about God’s promise to heal and restore God’s good creation gone wild. 

We see God working in the life of Jacob and his forebears Abraham and Isaac with all their duplicity and half-faith, to fulfill God’s promises to Abraham to make a family from his loins that would be so large it could not be counted (mustard seed, anyone?), and through that family God would heal, bless, and restore God’s world (Genesis 12.1-3; 17.1-7). This is our first clue as to how God chooses to work to heal and restore God’s good creation: through human beings and through ways that are both mundane and spectacular. And what was Abraham’s response? Twenty-five years went by and no promised offspring. So he and Sarah took matters into their, um, own hands and voila! A son was born to Abraham’s slave Hagar whose offspring would be at war with Abraham’s offspring to this day. Not only that, but twice Abraham lied about his relationship with his wife Sarah to save his own skin. These aren’t exactly paradigms of faithful and virtuous behavior, but God worked through them and Abraham’s line eventually produced Jesus the Messiah, the Savior of the world, just as God promised. But for Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, God’s hand wasn’t always readily apparent and so they sometimes (often?) resorted to taking matters into their own hands, especially Jacob the deceiver, just like you and I do today when God’s hand isn’t readily apparent in the midst of the chaos and suffering in our lives.

Notice that the writer of Genesis never tries to explain why God operates in this way. Neither does the psalmist in today’s psalm. Instead, he simply proclaims the faithfulness of God. So does St. Paul in our epistle lesson. As we saw last week, St. Paul assumes we will suffer on behalf of the Messiah because it was in suffering that Jesus broke the power of Sin over us and took on our just condemnation so that we would no longer stand condemned in God’s eyes. This is the essence of justification about which St. Paul speaks today. 

No, instead of trying to explain why God apparently doesn’t act in the ways we want or expect God to act, the apostle assures us that God is indeed active and involved in God’s world. How does St. Paul know this? First and foremost because he had met the risen Christ face-to-face and knew that the resurrection was an historical reality that made Christ’s death on the cross all that it was, at least as far as we can plumb the depths of its meaning. As St. Paul would write to the Colossians, on the cross the dark powers and principalities had been defeated, and in today’s lesson St. Paul makes the astonishing claim that we are more than conquerors through Jesus who loves us. If we assess the truth of St. Paul’s statement—not to mention the rest of the NT writers—based on evidence from this world, we are likely to conclude that they are delusional (and so are we who believe their claims of God’s victory over the powers of Sin, Evil, and Death). But St. Paul would tell us that his claims of Christ’s victory over the dark powers is not based on deductions from our daily experiences. After all, he wrote his letter to the Colossians while he was imprisoned for Christ’s sake and would soon be facing more imprisonments, persecution, and ultimately death because of Jesus. Rather, St. Paul would tell us that his claims are based on the faithfulness of God first revealed to the patriarchs and manifested supremely in the cross of God’s own dear Son, Jesus Christ. In other words, St. Paul’s claims were based on faith, a gift from God the Father himself, and available to all who want it. 

This is how it goes. We know that in all things God works for good for those who love God, who are called according to his purpose, even when we cannot see it in the life of the world and in our own lives. In addition to Jesus’ death and resurrection, the apostle assures us we know this to be true because of three other reasons: 1) the groaning of all creation to be liberated; 2) our own groaning in our suffering as we await the redemption of our bodies, i.e., our resurrection; and 3) the inarticulate groaning of God’s Holy Spirit who lives in us. All these are signs that God’s promises to heal and redeem God’s creation and us are true. If we are old enough, everyone here has been in a situation where we have reached our wits’ end. We don’t know what to do or say, let alone pray. And so we groan in our misery. It is precisely at this moment that St. Paul tells us that God’s very Spirit is also groaning in us on our behalf and for our good. So in the desperate times of our lives we have God’s assurance that both the Son and the Spirit are interceding for us on our behalf, and they are doing so because it is the will of God the Father. And in doing so, somehow we find the strength to endure and to press on as we walk through life’s dark valleys. I suspect that if I were to ask you to give me an example of this from your life, every one of you here could give me at least one example of this phenomenon occurring. We find unexpected strength, or a friend or a stranger suddenly appears in our life to say and/or do just what we needed to hear or see at that moment. And the funny thing is, we didn’t even know we needed what we got till it happened. For Christians, in light of what St. Paul tells us here, there should be no such thing as coincidences or chance happenings. Nothing happens by chance. Nothing. We can have confidence that in the smallest things, the hand of God is at work on our behalf for our good. Amen? Be mindful of this and work to cultivate this mindset as you live out your days with their various trials. You’ll never regret it.

Our Lord Jesus says much the same thing in our gospel lesson. He too was besieged by the “why” questions. If you are Messiah, why aren’t you kicking butt and taking prisoners? Why have you assembled a ragtag group of followers and go about espousing peace and doing all kinds of healing? God’s people won’t get free by doing that stuff! To which our Lord offered, in part, the parables we read in our gospel lesson today. The kingdom of heaven (or God’s kingdom, not God’s space) is like a mustard seed or like yeast. You don’t see either actively at work in their normal operation. But at the end of the day, you see massive results. And so God is at work in me, God’s Son and Messiah, to bring in God’s kingdom on earth as in heaven. And guess what? God is calling you to follow me and give yourselves to me utterly. Yes, you are losers and ragamuffins just like my original followers. Like them and like Jacob and the patriarchs, your faith will waiver and you will conform your lives to mine in very uneven ways. In fact, you’ll get things wrong as much as you get them right. But if you resolve to understand what the kingdom is about and how God works through me and what I must do for you, and then through you as you give your lives to me, you will know that the kingdom does come on earth as in heaven. Don’t waste time asking and trying to answer questions you aren’t capable of answering. Focus on me. Give your lives to me. Love your neighbor as yourself. Love and forgive your enemies. Don’t judge others in a self-righteous manner. Develop a generous heart because your Father has a generous heart and gives to you far beyond anything you deserve. Work for the good of others, even if it costs you a great deal. Suffer for my sake. Don’t lose heart or hope. Why? Because eternal life in God’s new world is worth more than anything else in all the world. Your worldly aspirations of power, security, and wealth cannot save you. Neither can any identity other than being in me save you. I know. It’s enigmatic and perplexing this side of the grave. But take heart and believe because I have overcome both the world and the grave, the latter which you will see when I raise you from the dead upon my return to finish the work I started. 

This is why we are more than conquerors, my beloved, the only reason why we are more than conquerors. We live in the power of God, a power nothing or no one can defeat, strange and inexplicable as that can be for us at times. We have given our lives to Jesus, the Son of God, who has conquered all by his saving love on the cross and who has been raised from the dead as a tangible sign of the fulfillment of God’s promise to heal and redeem us forever. We have God’s very Spirit who witnesses to us and who groans on our behalf when we are afflicted. Please. May none of us ever throw away this pearl of greatest price because it is the only pearl that really has any eternal value to it. It is the pearl of the Good News of Jesus Christ, our crucified and risen Lord, 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 July 26, 2015. As always it will be helpful for you to read the assigned texts below by clicking on or tapping their links before you read the sermon. This sermon deals with an important topic: the power of God made known in his sin-sick world. Let’s be clear: the Christian Faith is emphatically not another self-help program. The Father gives us his Holy Spirit to help us fight the good fight and prevail, even though sometimes (oft times?) it feels otherwise to us. But feelings are notoriously fickle when it comes to assessing the spiritual life and we need to actually believe that God has the power to help us overcome and to bring about real justice and righteousness. For those with ears to hear, listen and understand.

Lectionary texts: 2 Samuel 11.1-25; Psalm 14.1-7; Ephesians 3.14-21; John 6.1-21.

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

What are we to make of the apparent contrast of themes in our readings this morning? On the one hand the psalmist tells us that God looks down from heaven to see if there are any who seek him and finds no one because all are corrupt and their deeds reflect this stark and depressing reality. We get a real-life example of what this looks like in the sordid tale of David’s adulterous affair with Bathsheba and its aftermath. On the other hand we read St. Paul’s soaring prayer with its emphasis on goodness and power that accompanies his astonishing claim made earlier that it is through the Church, through you and me, that God will make his wisdom known to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly places (Ephesians 3.10). Do you feel up to that task? So what are we to think and believe? Is St. Paul’s prayer to live a godly life simply naive and unrealistic in the face of the human condition? This is what I want us to look at this morning.

The sad tale of David and Bathsheba is pretty straightforward and doesn’t need much explanation. The writer makes it clear that David wasn’t where he was supposed to be. He should have been on the front fighting with his men. Instead, he was at home in Jerusalem taking it easy. We aren’t told why David wasn’t with his men, only that he wasn’t, and that got him into big trouble. Here we see the pragmatic wisdom behind St. James’ warning in action:

One is tempted by one’s own desire, being lured and enticed by it; then, when that desire has conceived, it gives birth to sin, and that sin, when it is fully grown, gives birth to death. Do not be deceived, my beloved (James 1.14-16).

Now we might expect a man of lesser character to act as David did when he saw a beautiful naked woman. But this is David we are talking about, the man after God’s own heart, and as we watch David commit adultery and then ultimately resort to murder to cover his tracks, we are shocked. The first thing we want to ask is what kind of heart does God have if David does this? 

The answer to that question is not that God has an adulterous and murderous heart. David, despite his great sin in this sordid affair and his penchant for shedding blood as a warrior, was a man after God’s own heart because he never turned to other gods or worshiped them. Despite his many flaws, David remained faithful to his God, although certainly not perfectly. Instead, the writer invites us to focus on the human condition. As the psalmist observed in our lesson, no one is immune from sin, not even God’s anointed king, the man after God’s own heart, and we see that being played out in this story. We have already noted that David was not where he was supposed to be and at least for the moment had too much time on his hands, time that he used for sinful purposes. We also note that nowhere did David stop and ask God to help him resist that alluring temptation. Perhaps David had become proud or was deceiving himself, thinking that because he wasGod’s anointed, God would not find out or give him a free pass. But as we shall see next week, David could not have been more wrong. Sin always has its consequences. Hence, one of the things the writer surely wants us to see is that anytime we rely solely on our own strength or cleverness or devices, we are setting ourselves up for a fall. If this can happen to the Lord’s anointed, it can happen to anyone. This is why we are never to put our whole hope and trust in human leaders because all have gone astray (Romans 3.23).

And a moment’s thought about our own experience confirms the wisdom of all this. We may not be adulterers and murderers like David was, but every one of us has our own skeletons in the closet, the deep dark secrets we are terrified that others might find out about, which will expose our own serious flaws and less than perfect character. How often have we resolved to live a life pleasing to the Lord, only to end up confessing our failures, almost on a daily basis? For those of us who truly desire to have a deep and faithful relationship with God, this can become very distressing and discouraging. How can we ever hope to love God with all our being and our neighbors as ourselves when we get it wrong so often? And if that is the case, can God really love and forgive us? After all, isn’t the road to hell paved with good intentions and fatally flawed execution? The words of the psalmist continue to haunt us: there is no one who does good in God’s eyes, not even one. How can we possibly have a future and a hope?

St. Paul and the rest of the NT writers have the answer for us: the love of God made known supremely in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. There is no sin and no amount of sin that cannot be overcome and forgiven because of Jesus’ blood shed for us. If it weren’t for the love of God made known on the cross, none of us would ever dare to have any real hope about a present or future life with God because we are all dead in our sins and so thoroughly infected we cannot possibly hope to drag ourselves up by our own bootstraps. But we do have hope, precisely because of the blood of Jesus Christ shed for us. That is why St. Paul could boldly tell the church at Rome there is now no condemnation for those of us who are in Christ Jesus because in Jesus, God has condemned our sin in the flesh and taken it on himself so that we no longer need to fear God’s righteous wrath or condemnation (Romans 8.1-4). 

This is more than just mere platitude, folks. If you do not really believe this, you will never have any hope of having St. Paul’s prayer for you come alive in your life because the whole prayer is predicated on us accepting God’s real love for us and his real forgiveness of our sins, irrespective of what they are. If we still worship an angry God whom we think is nothing more than a bean counter who gives us a bunch of rules we cannot possibly hope to follow on our own so that he can beat us up, we are not worshiping the God of the Bible and should therefore not be surprised when our prayers for help to this false god go unanswered. For us to live in the power of God, we must first understand that while we are sinners, we are forgiven sinners, bought with the price of the Son’s own dear blood and greatly loved by the Father.

This is a gift from God, freely offered to one and all, and by God’s grace we can know we are loved and forgiven. This is not our own doing. If we are to really know the breadth, length, height, and depth of God, that knowledge must come from God. It cannot be manufactured by us, any more than we can manufacture knowledge about our loved ones’ love for us without them making their love known to us. And once we truly believe we are forgiven and loved by God, we open ourselves to the power of God so that we do not have to be defeated in our living the way David was or the way we are when we try to live a faithful life by our own strength.

St. Paul tells us how to tap that power. First, we must truly desire to have the power of God working in our lives. God never forces himself on us. True love cannot do that to the beloved. But all too often we are like our own St. Augustine, who, desiring to leave behind his old life of sexual promiscuity, prayed to the Lord for chastity, but just not right then. Augustine wasn’t quite ready at that time to give up sexual lust for women to more fully love and serve his Lord and was at least honest enough to pray that. So while St. Paul’s prayer is all about the power of God in our lives, it is based on the presupposition that we desire to have God at work in our lives, i.e, we must be willing to put in our sweat equity.

Once we are willing to do that, St. Paul tells us that if we ever hope to fulfill the task of the Church to make known God’s wisdom to the powers and authorities, we must ask God to equip us for the task. To do that, we must be firmly united with Christ in and through the power and presence of the Holy Spirit who lives in us and one can’t happen without the other. This is the Christ who meets us where we are and uses what we present to him to feed us and others, just like he used the bread and fishes to feed the five thousand. This happens most tangibly at communion when we come to the table to feed on our Lord’s body and blood and find renewed strength. This is the same Christ who walked on the stormy sea, the very symbol of evil and darkness, and overcame it. Without Christ in us, we have no chance or hope of ever being his people because we will not have the Holy Spirit in us. But as St. Paul’s prayer reminds us, to have Christ live in us, we simply have to ask and expect it to happen. I suspect many Christians who live in this country really don’t believe this. We’ve bought into the alternative story line that things like feeding the five thousand or walking on water or Jesus living in his people are just fairy tales and myth. They can’t possibly happen. So we might say the words St. Paul tells us to say—strengthen me with power by your Spirit by connecting me with the Lord Jesus—but we don’t really believe anything will happen. We are not used to seeing signs and wonders and so we secretly (and sometimes openly) scoff at such requests. And I can promise you, if this is the case, you will not be disappointed. You will get exactly what you have asked for—nothing. 

This is why so many churches limp along, powerless and rudderless. They don’t really believe in the power of God. They have never experienced it in their individual or collective lives the way many of us do here at St. Augustine’s. Just ask Dr. Falor sometime about the Spirit’s power, or think of the times in your life where you surprised yourself in the way you handled an extremely difficult thing. The same Jesus who overcame the stormy sea, who walks with us through the darkest valley, and conquered even death itself, is available to us right now as his body at St. Augustine’s. All we have to do is ask for his help and power and believe that he loves us enough and is powerful enough to grant us our requests that are according to his good will and purposes for us as a parish because he has commissioned us to bring his healing love to our neck of the woods, and it will be ours. Do you believe this? Really believe this?

Please don’t misunderstand. I do not suggest any of this is automatic, quick, or easy. We are profoundly broken people who are also subjected to the influence of the dark powers and principalities. But we are made stronger through adversity and Jesus’ death and resurrection stand as God’s eternal testimony that the power of God’s love made known to us in Jesus Christ is stronger than any adversity or foe we face. To be sure, none of us will be sin-free until we lose our mortal bodies (cf. Romans 6.7). But we are assured that we can be more than conquerors through him who loved us because neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord (Romans 8.37-39), thanks be to God! Simply put, if you want the power of God to live in you to make you a new creation to bear good fruit for the kingdom, you simply have to ask and expect God to do this for you because he loves you and wants you to be the fully human being he created you to be.

I close with a story I hope illustrates and summarizes what I have been talking about.

We sat down to table and the officer began his story: “I have served in the army ever since I was quite young. I knew my duties and was a favorite of my superiors as a conscientious officer. But I was young, as were also my friends, and unhappily I started drinking. It went from bad to worse until drinking became an illness. When I did not drink, I was a good officer, but when I would start drinking, then I would have to go to bed for six weeks. My superiors were patient with me for a long time, but finally, for rudeness to the commanding officer while I was drunk, they reduced my rank to private and transferred me to a garrison for three years. They threatened me with more severe punishment if I would not improve and give up drinking. In this unfortunate condition all my efforts at self-control were of no avail and I could not stay sober for any length of time. Then I heard that I was to be sent to the guardhouse and I was beside myself with anguish.

“One day I was sitting in the barracks deep in thought. A monk came in to beg alms for the church. Those who had money gave what they could. When he approached me he asked, ‘Why are you so downcast?’ We started talking and I told him the cause of my grief. The monk sympathized with my situation and said, ‘My brother was once in a similar position, and I will tell you how he was cured. His spiritual father gave him a copy of the Gospels and strongly urged him to read a chapter whenever he wanted to take a drink. If the desire for a drink did not leave him after he read one chapter he was encouraged to read another and if necessary still another. My brother followed this advice, and after some time he lost all desire for alcoholic beverages. It is now fifteen years since he has touched a drop of alcohol. Why don’t you do the same, and you will discover how beneficial the reading of the Gospels can be. I have a copy at home and will gladly bring it to you.’

“I wasn’t very open to this idea so I objected, ‘How can your Gospels help when neither my efforts at self-control nor medical aid could keep me sober?’ I spoke in this way because I never read the Gospels.

“‘Give it a chance,’ continued the monk reassuringly, ‘and you will find it very helpful.’

“The next day he brought me this copy of the Gospels. I opened it, browsed through it, and said, ‘I will not take it, for I cannot understand it; I am not accustomed to reading Church Slavonic.’

“The monk did not give up but continued to encourage me and explained that God’s special power is present in the Gospel through his words. He went on, ‘At the beginning be concerned only with reading it diligently; understanding will come later. One holy man says that “even when you don’t understand the word of God, the demons do, and they tremble”; and the passion for drink is without a doubt their work. And St. John Chrysostom in speaking about the power of the word of God says that the very room where the Gospel is kept has the power to ward off the spirits of darkness and thwart their intrigues.’

“I do not recall what I gave the monk when I took the copy of the Gospels from him, but I placed the book in my trunk with my other belongings and forgot about it. Some time later a strong desire to have a drink took hold of me and I opened the trunk to get some money and run to the tavern. But I saw the copy of the Gospels before I got to the money and I remembered clearly what the monk had told me. I opened the book and read the first chapter of Matthew without understanding anything. Again I remembered the monk’s words, ‘At the beginning be concerned only with reading it diligently; understanding will come later.’ So I read another chapter and found it a bit more comprehensible. Shortly after I began reading the third chapter, the curfew bell rang and it was no longer possible for me to leave the barracks.

“In the morning my first thought was to get a drink, but then I decided to read another chapter to see what would happen. I read it and did not go. Again I wanted a drink, but I started reading and I felt better. This gave me courage, and with every temptation for a drink I began reading a chapter from the Gospels. The more I read, the easier it became, and when I finally finished reading all four Gospels the compulsion for drink had disappeared completely; I was repelled by the very thought of it. It is now twenty years since I stopped drinking alcoholic beverages.

“Everyone was surprised at the change that took place in me, and after three years I was reinstated as an officer and then climbed up the ranks until I was made a commanding officer. Later I married a fine woman; we have saved some money, which we now share with the poor. Now I have a grown son who is a fine lad and he also is an officer in the army.”

—The Way of a Pilgrim

Notice first how Christ used human agency (the monk) to introduce the young soldier to his Gospel. Notice the monk’s persistence and the faith he had in the transformative power of the Gospel in people’s lives, a faith based, in part, on past experience.

Next, pay attention to how Christ used circumstance instead of understanding to stay the young soldier’s hand from drinking. He read the Gospel without understanding it, but was prevented from going on a drinking binge because he had lingered in his quarters to read it.

Finally, mark how understanding occurred—through persistent reading. Ask anyone who reads the Bible regularly and systematically and you will hear this same answer. God grants understanding to humble minds willing to submit to his word (as opposed to trying to make his word submit to their agendas) through our persistent reading of his word (i.e., though our sweat equity). There is nothing sexy or spectacular here, just the power of the Spirit at work changing lives. St. Paul tells us the same about the power and efficacy of prayer in his own prayer for us today. Ask. Persist. Believe it will be yours (cf. St. Matthew 7.7-11; St. Luke 18.1-8). St. Paul knew it was true because he practiced it and as a result knew first-hand the transformative power of Jesus in his life. That same power is available to us right now so that we too can be changed by God to make a difference for God, thus helping to fulfill St. Paul’s prayer and God’s will for Christ’s body the Church. And that, folks, is not only an awesome privilege, it is Good News, now and for all eternity. To him be honor, praise, and glory forever and ever. Amen.

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

Sermon originally preached on July 28, 2013. As always it will be helpful for you to read the assigned texts by clicking on or tapping their links below before reading the sermon. This sermon on forgiveness and the love of God made known to us in Christ, was preached for a baptism and is especially appropriate for that blessed sacrament as baptism brings us into the family of God and signals the beginning of our healing as Christians. For those with ears to hear, listen and understand.

Lectionary texts: Hosea 1.2-10; Psalm 85; Colossians 2.6-19; Luke 11.1-13.

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

In our OT lesson today, we are confronted with some graphic and colorful language that is even more shocking when we remember that it comes from the Lord himself via his prophet Hosea. Let’s face it. We don’t really expect to hear God engaging in this kind of name calling! But more importantly we are also confronted with an apparent enigma about God. How can God condemn his people Israel in one breath and then turn around and call them his children in the next? It is this issue I want us to look at briefly this morning because it gets to the heart of the nature of God and our relationship with him.

The first thing that grabs our attention in our OT lesson is God’s call to his prophet Hosea. God calls him to act out symbolically God’s prophecy, much like God called Jeremiah and Ezekiel to do. Hosea is to marry a whore and have children by her. We don’t know for sure if Gomer was a prostitute when Hosea married her or whether she was unfaithful to him later on. But that really isn’t the point. The point is that God wants Hosea to live in a relationship that is symbolic of the relationship between God and his people. If we can get past our initial shock of hearing God calling his people Israel a whore and not focus on the graphic language, we realize that the text is pointing us to the real problem of unfaithfulness on Israel’s part and we can understand this very well. Just this past week, for example, a mayoral candidate who had gotten himself in trouble before for texting graphic pictures of himself to other women was at it again. And once again we see this man’s wife standing by him as he confesses his sins to the public, making us scratch our heads in bewilderment and disbelief, among other things. 

A similar dynamic is going on in our OT lesson. Hosea is to embody God’s faithfulness to Israel by remaining faithful to Gomer, despite her whoredom. Just as Gomer had (or would) dally with other men, thereby being unfaithful to her husband, so Israel had dallied (and would continue to dally) with false gods and idols, which had led them astray so that they were no longer being faithful to God or living as his called-out (holy) people to bring God’s healing love to the nations. As we think about the pain that Gomer’s unfaithfulness would have caused Hosea (and the pain Israel’s unfaithfulness clearly caused God), we are tempted to wonder why Hosea just doesn’t dump Gomer and move on. Why doesn’t Hosea just let her spend the rest of her life in the mess she’s created? After all, it would serve her right! But when we judge Gomer like this we bring judgment on ourselves because who among us has been entirely faithful to God? It would be just as easy for us to ask why God doesn’t just dump us and move on, leaving us to live with the messes we have created! 

That’s why it is so easy for us to understand the significance behind the naming of Hosea’s and Gomer’s children because we understand that when one party is unfaithful in a relationship, it has the power to damage or destroy the relationship and our relationship with God is no exception. No wonder there was judgment in the names of the three children born! God has had enough of his wife Israel’s unfaithfulness and now judgment is coming. And that’s the scary part because if we are really honest with ourselves we know that we too deserve the same condemnation for our unfaithfulness to God. But then at the end of the lesson we read the most amazing thing. After telling his people Israel that they are no longer his people and he is no longer their God, God speaks of a startling reversal. Not only will Israel enjoy unheard of prosperity, they will be known as children of God! What is going on here? Is this another example of God going all schizo on us again?

Of course not. There is almost always an element of God’s grace that accompanies his judgments in the OT because it is God’s nature to be gracious and merciful. But the fuller answer is found in our epistle and gospel lessons this morning. St. Paul talks about God taking the record of our sins—sins typically caused by our unfaithfulness to God when we chase after other, lesser gods, including our own disordered desires, all of which God’s law condemns—and nailing it to the cross of Jesus. What makes this promise even more remarkable is the startling fact that St. Paul proclaims God himself arranged the condition for our forgiveness and pardon by becoming the man Jesus of Nazareth and dying for us so that we would be spared his just judgment on our unfaithfulness. Not only that, St. Paul makes the equally incredible statement that on the cross, God has disarmed the dark powers behind our sinfulness and waywardness. 

All this is language that simply means that by becoming human in Jesus, God himself has broken sin’s power over us and the death that results from it, and instead has paved the way for us to have new life, free from the fear of God’s just condemnation (cf. Romans 8.1). There is no condemnation because when we are Jesus’ people, when God looks at us he sees Jesus’ faithfulness, not our unfaithfulness. This is why we don’t need to have our flesh cut away as a sign that we are God’s children. Instead, we are circumcised with a spiritual circumcision, i.e., by his death and resurrection, our Lord Jesus has cut away the power of sin over us so that we are able to live as God’s children, faithful and obedient to God, and this is the outward sign that we are God’s children through our relationship with Jesus. As we are healed by Jesus, we become jealous for God’s good name to be honored among all the nations, just as our Lord taught us to pray in his prayer. That’s what “hallowed (holy) be your name” is all about.

And how do we receive this gift? By believing it’s true and as a result, living our lives as if we really believe Jesus is Lord. This is what St. Paul calls being in Christ. We start this process of being in Christ at our baptism, which is the sacramental sign of our new and restored relationship with God in Jesus. St. Paul tells us that at our baptism we and all that keeps us hostile and alienated from God are buried with Christ so that we can also be raised with him to new life. This latter promise speaks to our current situation as well as our future living in the new creation. When we are baptized, we are initiated into God’s family and become his children through our faith in Jesus. Of course, like any relationship, our relationship with God requires our effort. There is nothing magical about baptism. Rather, it is an outward and visible sign of the inward and invisible reality that we are loved and rescued by God because of what God has done for us in Jesus’ death and resurrection. God has a history of rescuing his people and baptism is no different. What this means is that we no longer need to fear God or God’s just judgment because in Jesus we have redemption, the forgiveness of our sins.  

But, you protest, even if this is all true and God has forgiven us in and through Jesus, we are still broken and fallen people. We still miss the mark and we have a track record to prove it. I’m glad you voiced this concern because it will allow me to finish this sermon in a timely manner. I am not suggesting that our relationship with God will be easy or automatic as a result of what God has done for us in Jesus or at our baptism because, yes, we are still weighed down by our body of sin. But there is good news even in this area because part of what St. Paul and Jesus want us to see is that when we come into a real relationship with God through Jesus, we no longer have to live life alone or solely under our own power. We are promised the gift of the Holy Spirit to live in us to transform us over our lifetime into the very image of Jesus so that we can truly be the people God called and created us to be.

Yet even having the Spirit live in us won’t make us immune from hurt or failure. We live in a fallen world where things sometimes go wrong and as St. Paul reminds us in Romans 6.7, we are not totally free from sin until we die. But that should not discourage us because none of this negates what God has done for us in Jesus. When we truly believe that in Jesus, God has rescued us from sin and death and act like we believe it, we still don’t have to worry about facing condemnation, even when we are unfaithful on occasion, as long as we repent and return to faithful living. And when we have the Spirit living in us, we can be assured that we are given a power to live according to God that would simply be impossible without his healing and transforming presence. And as Jesus reminds us in our gospel lesson, all we have to do is ask for the Spirit to come and live in us. Are you praying this audaciously? 

So what do we do with this? In a few moments we are going to baptize baby James into God’s family of redeemed people in Jesus. We have been reminded what happens in baptism and the wonderful hope and promise it symbolizes. But as we have also seen, this is only the beginning. Like a physical birth, there is much growth that will occur thereafter, God willing. And there will be great opposition to James’ new birth and to his new life in Christ as he grows and matures. So what are we to do? Well, as Jesus reminds us, we start by praying for the entire Sang family, that God will equip them to raise James faithfully. They will do that in large part by sound teaching and embodying Jesus in their daily lives. But the Sangs are not an isolated unit. They are part of our family and we are given the task of helping them raise their sons, not only by sound teaching and how we live our lives, but by how we love and support this family as they live their lives.

This is where paying attention to the context of St. Paul’s letter to the Colossians can help us. St. Paul tells us not to be taken captive through philosophy and empty deceit. His arguments and word choice for captive suggest that the Colossians were being assailed by false teachers, most likely Judaizers who were trying to persuade them that Jesus wasn’t sufficient for healing, forgiveness, and redemption; neither was he sufficient for them to fully understand God. Instead, all of this would come only through their obedience to the law. Not many of us have to worry about coming under the influence of Judaizers but that does not mean we are out of danger because in our world today there are many forces that seek to pull us as Christians away from Jesus. We hear constantly that all religions are equal, that there are many paths to God. This message can lead us to think that we can add elements from other religions to our Christian faith to help us find deeper spiritual fulfillment, whether it be New Age, transcendental meditation, or whatever. But that is not what St. Paul and the first Christians proclaimed and our epistle lesson stands as a clear warning against any such dallying because it will surely lead us astray, make us lose our focus on Jesus, and result in us living unfaithfully, just as it did to God’s people Israel. James will face this temptation as he grows up just as we do now and this makes the necessity for prayer and our grace-filled fellowship even more urgent so that we do not give up the wondrous gift of God to us in Jesus. If we want to know the true God, his heart and character, we need look no further than Jesus because he is the very embodiment of God. 

So we must all be careful to always keep our focus on Jesus and not be distracted by other, lesser things or gods and be eventually consumed by them. I say this especially to those of you this morning who might be struggling with issues of forgiveness or with your relationship with God. God himself has called us out of darkness and transferred us into the kingdom of light. In God’s sovereign grace and power, God has declared us not only fit in his sight, but also his children in Jesus—forgiven, healed, and greatly loved. He has given us tangible signs of his healing love in the sacrament of baptism and in the lives of his saints. Dare to believe this and take hope and comfort that no one is out of God’s reach. No one. This is the hope and promise that is baby James’ at his baptism and it is the hope and promise of all God’s people, broken as we are, because in the end, the gospel is not about us or our power. It is about the amazing love and healing and sovereign power of God as manifested in Jesus Christ. And when by God’s grace you really do embrace the promise, you will surely know what it means to have Good News, now and for all eternity. 

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

Sermon originally preached on Sunday, July 17, 2106. As always it will be helpful for you to read the assigned texts by clicking on or tapping their links below before you read the sermon. The Christian hope of glory can sustain us in the darkest times of our lives. For those with ears to hear, listen and understand.

Lectionary texts: Amos 8.1-12; Psalm 52; Colossians 1.15-28; Luke 10.38-42.

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

In our epistle lesson this morning, St. Paul tells us that he is working to make the word of God fully known to us so that we will be let in on a profound mystery. God’s mysteries for the apostle and the rest of the NT writers are things previously unknown but now revealed to us by God. And what is this thing St. Paul is talking about? It’s none other than Christ in us, the hope of glory. But what does St. Paul mean by that? This is what I want us to look at this morning.

Contrary to what many of us think, the mystery revealed to us in Christ isn’t about getting right with Jesus. It isn’t just about Jesus and my salvation, although that is certainly part of what St. Paul is talking about. No, St. Paul has in mind something much richer and more exciting. He is talking about how God has revealed to us his promise to redeem his good creation gone bad, us included. If we don’t understand this fundamental promise, that God has promised to heal and redeem his broken creation, both the physical and spiritual dimensions of it, Scripture won’t make a lot of sense to us because that’s exactly the story it has to tell.

Take our OT lesson for example, with its message of the destruction of the northern kingdom of Israel’s happiness, “The end has come upon my people Israel; I will never again pass them by. The songs of the temple shall become wailings in that day,” says the Lord God; “the dead bodies shall be many, cast out in every place. Be silent!” (Amos 8.2b-3). Many of us hear judgment oracles like this and conclude that God surely must be the supreme tyrant and ogre who is always angry with us and just waiting to rain on our parade, preferably with fire and brimstone. This (false) god we conjure up in our minds is determined that we should not have a good time and unfortunately has the power to enforce his wishes. 

But to read these texts in this way does violence not only to the text but to God himself because we almost completely miss the point of what is going on in the story contained in them. We must always keep in mind that the OT is the story of God’s interaction with his called-out people Israel, the people whom God chose to help him heal and redeem his good but sin-corrupted world. You can and should read the background for this narrative in Genesis 1-11 and God’s call to Abraham starting in Genesis 12. God’s people were supposed to reflect the glory and love of the one true God to the nations around them who did not know God and who worshiped false and destructive idols, because we inevitably turn into the idols we worship. But instead of acting in the truly human ways as God created them for, and the people God called them to be, so that they could show others who did not know God a much better way, Israel astonishingly adopted the ways of the nations they were supposed to convert! Sound familiar?

Now in our OT lesson, we see the fruit Israel is bearing, and it ain’t real tasty. As was God’s habit, God sent a spokesman to speak to his people on God’s behalf, in this case Amos, and we learn that after repeated warnings Israel had rejected God’s call to turn from their false and dehumanizing ways of living that had resulted from God’s people worshiping false and dehumanizing idols. And here we get a glimpse of what was happening. Merchants had made profit their idol and this resulted in all kinds of shady economic practices and the poor being exploited. These greedy folks were so eager to line their pockets they cut short their God-mandated sabbath rest and the festivals that were to produce real and heartfelt worship of the one true God. We all know what endless work does to our body, mind, and spirit, and we all know what happens when we fail to worship God regularly. We get flat worn out and our hearts get hardened. These folks presumably pursued their wealth for the same reason we pursue wealth so hard: for power and control. Implicit in these behaviors was the notion that God could not be trusted to provide. No, these folks wanted to be in control instead of aligning their lives and work to mesh with God’s good creative purposes for human living and work. It’s not that God wants us to sit around waiting for him to drop good things into our laps. It’s about who is in charge of things, us or God? When we choose the former over the latter, all hell breaks loose.

So after repeated warnings, we see God announcing the end of his people’s happiness. Their celebrating would turn into mourning when God’s final judgment fell on them. It would be so terrible that even the creation would mourn for God’s people, and we are reminded once again that God created us to be wise stewards over God’s creation so that when we act selfishly and myopically, all creation suffers, not just humans (cf. Romans 8.22). If we understand the backdrop to this story, we see what’s going on. To be sure, God is not happy with sin because sin corrupts and dehumanizes, and causes chaos and evil to erupt. But there’s more to the story than this. We see God the Father angry at his children for not living up to their purpose as God’s people. Instead of reflecting the glory of God and the promise of his redemption outward to those who desperately needed it (whether they knew it or not), God’s people had turned inward and saw their status as God’s people as a privilege with no accompanying responsibility. To make matters worse, many of them had turned away from worshiping God and worshiped false gods or idols. As parents we all get this dynamic, especially if we have dealt with children who wanted nothing to do with being part of the family. It gets messy and complicated in a hurry and that is what is going on here, only on a cosmic level. God’s people had refused to live up to their calling to help bring God’s healing to the world and in the process they had adopted lifestyles that were destructive and dehumanizing. Real love never wishes that for the beloved. Never. 

And then we read a strange thing happening as part of God’s judgment on his people’s bad behavior. God would withhold his word from them and the effect would be devastating. As Genesis 1-2 make clear, without God’s word to bring order, there is only chaos, chaos in all creation and chaos in our personal lives. As Fr. Bowser continually reminds us (does that mean he is doing a lousy job of preaching if he has to keep reminding us of what he tells us?—asking for a friend), if we do not align our lives to God’s good creative purposes for us, we can expect our lives to be chaotic and we will personally experience all kinds of physical, spiritual, and mental chaos. Here in our OT lesson we see the same thing happening to God’s rebellious people Israel. Go figure. 

When God’s word is absent in our lives, we instinctively know it and it terrifies us because we know that without God’s word, we will not experience God’s order, God’s blessing, God’s fulfillment of his wonderful purposes, and God’s forgiveness. Here God is telling his people that he is withdrawing from them, giving them up in judgment to their own evil desires, and the people frantically search for that which they’ve lost. No wonder their happiness has turned to mourning! Remember, this is not about God raining on people’s parade and denying them a good time. God is condemning those behaviors that cause suffering and injustice (chaos) to break out on folks, especially on the poor, the weak, and the helpless. How can God’s love spread throughout his creation to heal it if God’s people will not cooperate? 

Before we look at what St. Paul has to say about this, we need to stop for a moment and reflect on what this means for us because we too are called to bring God’s healing love to the world. God’s judgment on Israel’s greed and love for injustice falls on our own practices. It reminds us we cannot be two different people, ones who worship God on Sunday and then go to our areas of work to worship the god of avarice and greed. It means we must look carefully at all sides of the burning social issues of our day so that we can best bring God’s healing to bear on them. It reminds us that we have to pursue justice, hard as that can be at times, so that the poorest and weakest of our day do not suffer at our hands. When we stop looking after the needs of others, darkness and chaos will surely descend on us as it did for God’s people Israel.

Thankfully for us, however, we are not entirely like Israel because as St. Paul reminds us, God has become human in the man Jesus to be the faithful Israel and so complete God’s plan to heal and redeem his good world hijacked by human sin and the evil it unleashes. St. Paul further reminds us that we belong to Jesus, who is the firstborn of all creation, and who rules over God’s current creation and will rule over God’s promised new creation. He tells us that on the cross, evil has been defeated and we have been reconciled to God. St. Paul doesn’t spell this out in any detail, only that this is what God has accomplished. Evil has been allowed to do its worst to Jesus and has failed to destroy him. Instead, God raised him from the dead and in doing so, ushered in God’s new creation, God’s newly healed and redeemed world in Christ. Not only that, but God has called us as Jesus’ people to be human agents of God’s new creation in the world. When we believe that God really has overcome evil and reconciled us to him in and through Jesus’ death on the cross, we know that we too will share Jesus’ ultimate fate of resurrection so that what happened to our Lord will also happen to us. We become a forgiven people in Christ and we have confidence that we can stand before God as Jesus’ people, despite our sins. 

And as Jesus’ people, we are called to work on deepening our relationship with him so that we do know without a doubt that the above promises are true and that we too are part of God’s promises to heal and redeem his good creation. This is the mystery St. Paul talks about in our lesson today. Jews are not the only ones who are called to be part of God’s new world. Gentiles are called to be part of it as well, specifically Gentiles who put their hope and trust in Jesus and who develop a living and active relationship with our living and active Lord. This is what it means to have Christ in us, our hope of glory. It means he is available to us at all times in the power of the Spirit to love us and heal us and help us live as people who have real hope, even in the midst of our present adversities, because we have faith that we too will share in his risen glory. What this means on a practical basis is this. As Jesus’ people, we know first and foremost that we are loved and forgiven by our Creator so that we know the real heart of God. This, in turn, means we are to live our lives patterned after Jesus for the sake of others. We look out for each other and care for each other. We are careful not to pursue our own self-interests at the expense of others. We are quick to forgive and slow to judge in self-righteous ways. We are tenderhearted toward each other and bear each other’s joys and burdens. Every time we do these things, the new creation becomes a fuller reality. And it all starts by engaging with Jesus, the Word of God. No wonder our Lord reminded Martha and the others that Mary was doing the needful thing by sitting at his feet and listening to him teach God’s truth and wisdom. It’s the very truth and wisdom that enables us to know we have Good News and to live it, 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 Sunday, July 23, 2017. As always, it will be helpful for you to read the assigned texts by clicking on or tapping their links below before reading the sermon. The topic of suffering and redemption is critical for all Christians to grapple with and the Church seems to have stopped teaching that suffering is a real path for redemption. Unfortunate. For those with ears to hear, listen and understand.

Lectionary texts: Genesis 28.10-19a; Psalm 139.1-12, 23-24; Romans 8.12-25; Matthew 13.24-30, 36-43.

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

This is the first time I have preached on my birthday. It doubtless will be an even more spectacular sermon than usual, precisely because it is my birthday and unlike the Beatles, I know you still need me now that I’m sixty-four. I know you still need me because of my brilliant sermons, rugged good looks, and award-winning personality™, not to mention my great humility. That and one other small thing. Like you, I no longer stand under God’s just and right condemnation because of the cross of Christ as we saw last week. Good News, that. Have you pondered it this week? I hope so. So what happens now? What should be our expectations as recipients of God’s astonishing love and mercy? This is what I want us to look at this morning.

St. Paul wastes no time in telling us in our epistle lesson. We are God’s children and are therefore heirs of God! Think about that for a moment. We are going to inherit God’s kingdom with all of its attendant good! We are heirs, of course, because of what God has done for us on the cross of Jesus. If we tried to lay claim to any of God’s kingdom on our own, we would find ourselves bereft and without a family, exiled to the streets as desperate beggars because as we also saw last week, left to our own devices we are all enslaved to the power of Sin and as the apostle warned us in Romans 6.23, the wages of sin is death, and death certainly isn’t part of God’s kingdom. That’s why we must always recognize that our inheritance depends solely on Christ. We are joint heirs with him because in our baptism we know we have died with him and look forward to being raised with him. This is our glorious inheritance! Amen?

So if we are heirs of God, what can possibly go wrong? This no condemnation stuff is awesome, baby. Smooth sailing from now on, right? Not so fast, says St. Paul. As God’s heirs you can expect two things from your inheritance: suffering and redemption. Well, Paul, we like that redemption thingy. But suffering? What’s that all about? What the apostle is urging us to do is to think clearly about living in a world that has been corrupted by human sin and rebellion and the attendant evil so that it labors under God’s curse. More about that in a moment. Like other biblical writers, most notably the author of Job, St. Paul here assumes the presence of Evil in God’s world but does not try to explain it. Rather he tells us what we can expect as Christians who now no longer live under God’s condemnation as the rest of the world does. 

First, the apostle talks about our own fallen nature. If God has condemned our sin in the flesh by sending his own dear Son to bear our just condemnation, why would we want to go back to our old rebellious ways of living? Why would we choose to live life without God? That kind of living, where we pander to our own selfish and disordered desires, i.e., live according to the desires of our flesh as St. Paul puts it, leads only to death. There’s no future in it—literally—and its source is the Satan himself who hates us and wants to see us utterly destroyed. Who in their right mind would go back to a life of slavery when they could have real freedom instead?

But here’s the problem. As we saw last week, although Evil, Sin, and Death have been defeated on the cross, there’s still quite a fight in them, not to mention the dark powers behind them, so that we have to work each day to kill those disordered and death-producing desires in us. This is no small or easy task and we can expect to suffer as we work to kill off our hostility and rebellion toward God. Who wants to stop doing things that feel so good, even if they are so wrong? The good news is that we don’t engage in this struggle on our own as St. Paul reminds us. We do it with the help of the Spirit, who testifies to us through our doubts and fears and darkness that we are God’s beloved and adopted children, heirs to his eternal kingdom, in and through Christ, and that we can stop doing those things which keep us hostile toward God. 

Putting to death our fallen nature is not the same as self-help or pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps. We already are free from God’s just condemnation because of Jesus’ death and resurrection. There is nothing we can do bootstrap-wise to earn that pardon. God gives it to us because he loves us and wants us to live, not die. Yes, we struggle to kill off our disordered desires in the power of the Spirit and sometimes we fail because we are that infected by Sin’s power. But God’s power is greater than Sin’s and even in our failures, we no longer stand condemned because of what Christ has done for us. Moreover, we are to take heart because we know we do not struggle alone. We have our Lord Jesus present with us in the power of the Spirit to help us overcome the world, the flesh, and the devil, and who will always forgive us when we miss the mark. As St. Paul will tell us next week, nothing in all creation can separate us from the love of God in Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen?

However, there is another dimension of our suffering that St. Paul talks about. It is suffering that results from living in a sin-sick and evil-infested world, and we all know what that looks like: desperate poverty, cruelty, racism, addiction, alienation, war, injustice, all kinds of deviancy, greed, hatred, idolatrous self-worship, adultery, abuse, sickness of all kinds. The list goes on and on and it is enough to overwhelm us. When that happens, we need to return to this chapter in Romans to be refreshed and encouraged by it because it is precisely at this point that Paul makes the bold and audacious claim that God is going to heal his world from top to bottom. St. Paul tells us that the whole creation groans in eager anticipation for the redemption of our bodies, i.e., for the coming of our Lord Jesus and the resurrection/transformation of our bodies, so that we will once again be the wise and just stewards God created us to be. Our sin and the evil it unleashed has made a mess out of God’s good world. But St. Paul makes the astonishing claim that it is God’s intention to restore his good creation through the agency of his Church, through losers and ragamuffins like you and me, as we suffer on behalf of creation. Far from withdrawing from the world, God calls us to bear its pains (and our own) by taking on its wounds and scars and afflictions. We do this in and through prayer and humble, loving, and selfless service to others. We give our time, our effort, and our money to help alleviate suffering wherever we encounter it. We don’t turn our backs on the world’s worst and neediest. We embody the love of Christ to them in the power of the Spirit. And when we trust God enough to start doing this, guess what? We will suffer because we will be abused and exploited and scammed and mocked and everything in between. But the kingdom comes through our suffering.

Suffering is the way God redeemed the world. Think it through. Christ suffered for us and so we suffer for the world on his behalf because he has given us the precious gift of life. Impossible! we want to snort back at St. Paul. You are out of your mind. I’m not finished yet, says Paul. There’s more. As Christians you are going to be confronted with the additional challenge of dealing with your afflictions and the world’s, even when you can make no sense of those afflictions or see any hope of them being successfully resolved. We all know what that looks like. I’m thinking, e.g., of Len and Sharon, who are dealing with Len’s chronic and debilitating back pain. Despite several rounds of surgery, despite our persistent prayers, nothing seems to be getting better. I’m thinking of those of you who are under- or unemployed with little hope of sustainable income in the near future. Each one of us here bears the pain of unresolved and/or unjust pain and suffering. It’s enough to crush us and make us think we are godforsaken.

It is here that the apostle speaks of hope, the sure and certain expectation that comes from having an unshakable faith in the God of the Bible, despite our circumstances, because we know that God never reneges on God’s promises and God has promised to one day heal and redeem us so that our suffering ends forever. Listen again to St. Paul as he speaks of this hope.

We know that the whole creation has been groaning in labor pains until now; and not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly while we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies. For in hope we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what is seen? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience.

This is why St. Paul tells us that our current sufferings, terrible as they are, are not to be compared with what awaits us. God has promised to heal and restore us fully when God brings in his promised new world at our Lord’s return to complete the redemptive work he started in his death and resurrection. This God can be trusted because this God has overcome all that opposes him: the world, the flesh, and the devil, but in a most unexpected way—the way of the cross. And this is the path God expects us to take so that in our faithful suffering, God will use us to help bring about the world’s healing and ours. Creation knows this and eagerly anticipates it. Do you? 

Let us be clear about what Paul is saying here, my beloved. He is not telling us to minimize our suffering or discount it. Anyone who has really suffered knows what a bunch of pious caca that is. There are times when we have all felt Godforsaken in our suffering and where we can make no sense of it. It is precisely then that St. Paul tells us to remember our hope, to remember that we are God’s heirs. Think about this with me carefully for a minute. When we feel Godforsaken, we must head back to the foot of the cross and remember the supreme example of Godforsakenness. As our Lord Jesus was bearing the full brunt of God’s just condemnation of our collective sins and the full power of evil unleashed on him, he too experienced being abandoned in ways we cannot even begin to comprehend or imagine: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Cry out those desperate words with your Savior as he was being crushed and condemned for your sake and then remember that God used his suffering to bring about your redemption. Take comfort and hope in that. This is not a God who abandons you.

Or go and read great stories like our OT lesson today where we find Jacob, the deceiver, the one who lied, cheated, and connived to steal his inheritance, the one who took pride in depending on his own cleverness to get what he wanted, just like you and I do. And what was God’s response to him as he fled for his life in today’s story? Don’t be afraid. I am with you and I will fulfill the promises I made to your grandfather Abraham through you. I am close by. That’s why I allowed you to see my ladder so that you know heaven and earth are not far apart nor am I far from you, even in your smug and sinful foolishness and folly. I am God and am always good to my promise. The God who made that promise to Jacob makes that same promise to you in and through Jesus. He’s with you right now in the power of the Spirit and when things get so bad in your life that you can only cry out Abba Father! because you don’t know what else to say or do, remember that it is the Spirit himself, not you, crying out to God on your behalf, the God who knows you intimately and loves you thoroughly as our psalmist proclaims, the God who wants all to be saved and thus is patient in executing his final justice as Jesus reminds us in our gospel lesson today (cf. 2 Peter 3.3-9).

This is our hope as Christians, a hope not based on the chances and changes of life, but a hope based on the faithfulness and love of God the Father made known supremely to us in and through our Lord Jesus Christ. We cannot as yet see this hope. It has not been made fully known to us yet. That’s why we call it hope. But it’s a done deal and it frees us to act as God’s heirs, to be bold in our proclamation and good spirit. There is no place for moping and feeling sorry for ourselves as Christians. We are no longer under God’s condemnation and we have a real future and a hope! As we have just discussed, when we see our suffering for what it is and that God actually uses it to help bring about his kingdom, we will have hope even in the darkest night. This in no way diminishes the seriousness of our suffering or our struggles with it. It simply reminds us that suffering can be redemptive, even when we cannot see how. That takes great faith and a humble acknowledgement that there are some things in this life that are simply above our pay grade, even as we put our hope in God to fulfill his redemptive promises one day.

But if we really do not know this God about whom we have been talking—the God of the Bible, not the one of our imagination or the world’s—we will never have this hope in our suffer-ing and we will be defeated. To be agents of God’s redemptive plan for us and his creation, we must steep ourselves in Scripture to know this God and this God’s promises to us. We must be focused in our prayers, both for ourselves and for the world, and persist in them even when no answer is apparently forthcoming. We must come to table each week to feed on our Lord and be refreshed and reminded that he really is present with us in the power of the Spirit. And we must accept the gift of fellowship with which God has blessed us to strengthen and encourage each other in the midst of our trials and sufferings. This is our inheritance, my beloved. Suffering and redemption. When we know we are heirs to the best inheritance in the world, it frees us to endure our suffering and to act boldly in the present on Christ’s behalf because we know our future is secure. We know our future is secure because the Spirit testifies to us that we have been claimed by the suffering love of Jesus Christ our Lord and so we await our final glorious redemption at his Second Coming. And that, my beloved, is Good News, strange and vexing as it sometimes sounds to us, 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. Come, Lord Jesus, come. Amen. And until you do, equip us to fight the good fight on your behalf. Amen.

Sermon originally preached on Sunday, July 12, 2015. As always it will be helpful to read the assigned texts below by clicking on or tapping their respective links before reading the sermon. Becoming a disciple of Jesus has never been easy. Fightings from within and without are always there, the latter especially in today’s world where the strident voices against Christianity/Christians are becoming more strident and more common. If we are not willing to literally give our lives to and for Christ, he considers us to not be his disciples. That’s a problem because only in Christ do we have a chance for eternal life. For those with ears to hear, listen and understand.

Lectionary texts: 2 Samuel 6.1-5, 12b-19; Psalm 24.1-10; Ephesians 1.3-14; St. Mark 6.14-29.

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

Have you ever been confronted by an issue or event in your life that either caused you to walk away from your faith or seriously question it? Have you ever been afraid to speak about your faith to others or apply it to public affairs for fear of how others might react toward you? In our gospel lesson we see that biblical faithfulness can be terribly costly and this is what I want us to look at this morning. What can we learn from the sad story of John the Baptizer’s death?

St. Mark spends more time describing this event than any other gospel writer, and so we need to ask why that is. What does St. Mark want us to learn from this unseemly story? It has all the needed elements to grab our attention: royalty, sex, booze, and religion. St. Mark tells us that Herod Antipas had John arrested after he called Herod out about his extramarital affair with his brother’s wife, Herodias, whom Herod would ultimately marry. People who commit adultery often rationalize away their behavior and the inevitable consequences that result from it, and Herod doesn’t seem to be an exception. But even Herod’s toadies knew better than to call him on his behavior. Doing so would have probably landed them in prison or worse. But that didn’t stop John, the fiery preacher who called people to repentance and who had announced the coming of the promised Messiah. 

For Herod and Herodias, this was more than just a moral embarrassment. John’s denunciation of their illicit marriage had political ramifications as well. Herod, who had  aspirations to be Israel’s new king and deliverer, could not really have someone like the Baptizer calling him out on his adultery. After all, how could Israel’s promised Messiah be involved with illicit sex? That certainly wouldn’t play well with the general population and so Herod moved to silence his famous critic, and here we see St. Mark inviting us to compare Jesus with Herod. Which of the two had better credentials and cred with the people? In one corner we have Herod, who rules because he happened to be born into the right family and who had just married his own brother’s wife. Not much Messiah-like character there. In the other corner, St. Mark invites us to look at Jesus in this “sandwich” story of the Baptizer’s death. St. Mark has just reported mighty acts of power demonstrated by Jesus and his disciples. People were healed of all kinds of diseases, a dead girl was brought back to life, and evil spirits were cast out of folks. And immediately following today’s story, St. Mark will report Jesus feeding the five thousand, walking on water, and performing even more healings. All of these mighty acts of power were tangible signs that the kingdom of God was indeed powerfully present in Jesus and his followers, and this is why St. Mark reports on all these events. He wants us to see Jesus is the real deal while Herod is not.

But St. Mark wants us to see something else in this story, and it is precisely that biblical faithfulness can cost a person his or her life. John was probably aware of the political ramifications that accompanied his denunciation of Herod’s marriage to Herodias. But there was clearly a moral concern underlying John’s calling out Herod. We know this because John told Herod it was not lawful for him to marry his brother’s wife. The law to which John is referring is of course the Law of Moses, which derived part of its authority from the creation narratives (Genesis 1.27-28, 2.18-24; cf. St. Mark 10.2-12; St. Matthew 19.3-9). That’s why the Lord commanded us to honor our father and mother (male and female in an exclusive, life-long relationship) and to stay away from adultery (Exodus 20.12,14,17). John was being faithful to God’s original creative intention for men and women and St. Mark wants us to see that doing so can literally cost us our lives. Evil does not like to be confronted by God’s goodness. No wonder Jesus would tell his followers to stop and count the cost before deciding to follow him (St. Luke 14.25-33)!

Herod, like many of us, apparently had a love-hate relationship with the prophet and his God. In a wonderfully realistic story, St. Mark reports that while Herod imprisoned John, Herod liked to hear John speak, even though John perplexed him, and that Herod protected John, even when his wife wanted to see him dead. Was there something in John’s message of repentance that struck a chord with Herod? Did he know in his heart of hearts that John was right and that God should not be mocked nor should we try to deceive him? We aren’t told. What we are told is how Herod’s lack of character led to the Baptizer’s death. In a moment of apparent drunken titillation over the dancing of Herodias’ daughter, Herod promised the girl virtually anything she wanted, and at her mother’s prompting she told him she wanted John’s head. To save John’s life, Herod would have had to display moral character and courage that he simply did not possess. So Herod took the easy way out. He gave Herodias what she wanted. Like his cousin Jesus, who would also later die for his faithfulness, John met an unseemly end, all because he remained faithful to God’s word in the midst of a sin-sick world. But as we will see in a moment, it is to the glory of God that along with you and me, Jesus came to rescue even bad guys like Herod, Herodias, and Pilate, as well as all the bad guys who live in our world today.

Now before we look at some possible applications in our lives from this story, let us not get all uppity about Herod and pat ourselves smugly on the back, saying that we would never have acted like that. Because the fact is, we all act without integrity on occasion, even if a life isn’t literally at stake. Now is not the time for self-righteousness, but self-examination. And let us also resist the temptation to say that the bad guy wins again and gets away scot-free. Indeed, the bad guy won in this instance. John paid for his faithfulness with his life and his disciples showed remarkable courage and faithfulness in coming to take John’s body away for burial. They could have ended up just like their master! But there is more to this story than St. Mark reports. We know from extra-biblical sources that within a decade after this incident, Herod would find himself defeated militarily by his enemies and exiled to Gaul (France) by the Roman Emperor Claudius Caligula where he and Herodias would spend the rest of their lives as political outcasts. It seems that God will indeed not be mocked and we need to remember this the next time we hear about a bad guy apparently getting away with murder. 

So what can we learn from this sad story? Where’s the good news? As with the entire narrative of Scripture (and that’s why we must read the entire narrative!), we have to see the story in its proper context and look to see how the bigger story of God’s rescue of his sin-sick and unjust world plays itself out. Since we are still living out the story of God’s rescue plan in Jesus Christ, the first lesson we can learn is a hard one to hear. God’s call to us and his claim on our lives can be quite costly. While none of us is in immediate danger of being killed for our faith, we are living in an age where things can get quite uncomfortable for us. For example, if we want to remain faithful to the biblical teaching about marriage as opposed to the redefinition of marriage as a result of judicial fiat, we can expect to be looked at increasingly as freaks and there are folks out there who will be delighted to tell us that. I know. I experienced that kind of abuse when I was taking a class at Bexley Hall Seminary of all places, and I can tell you it is not much fun to be mocked and ridiculed in front of people. But if we hold to the biblical notion that marriage is the God-given vehicle by which our species is propagated, our society is ordered, and God’s good creation is ruled, as opposed to a human right, we had better be prepared to face our share of scorn and hatred. But why would any of us subject ourselves to this kind of abuse over the faith once delivered to the saints that we hold?

The answer comes from St. Paul in our epistle lesson. This passage is so rich in content that it should be one of our regular go-to passages whenever we are walking through the dark valleys of our lives. Are we tempted to believe in a deist god who basically functions as an absentee landlord who really doesn’t care all that much about his creation and us? No such thing, counters St. Paul! We worship a God who has called us from before the world was created and who is actively involved in our lives. About this time I suspect Fr. Bowser is starting to squirm nervously in his seat, wondering if I am going to get all Calvin on him and the rest of you. Relax Father. God’s election is for a different sermon. We’ve got bigger fish to fry here. 

The point St. Paul is making is all about God’s sovereignty over his world and involvement in our lives. It is God who initiates, who became a human to bear our sins and die for us so that we might live. It is God who loves us first and invites us to respond to his great love by turning from ourselves back to him so that he can heal and transform us bit by bit, inch by inch, day by day. It is God who has a plan to heal and transform his entire creation and who invites us to be an integral part of that work. This is what our passage today is all about and this truly is Good News. It reminds us that contrary to what the world wants us to think, God is not absent or uncaring. To be sure, God’s ways can be quite mysterious and vexing to us. But we are not to lose heart because he has given us himself in Jesus so that evil, sin, and death are overthrown if not yet fully vanquished, and new creation is launched. We are therefore invited to live as people who have that hope. Evil may win some battles, but it has lost the war. Jesus is alive and rules over his cosmos, and we are invited to his eternal party. This all happened because of Jesus’ death and resurrection, and we are given God’s very Spirit, the Holy Spirit, as a guarantee of this promise. The word St. Paul uses to describe this guarantee is a technical term equivalent to earnest money we put down when we decide to buy a property.

Why is this important? Because this is our guaranteed future and hope, and this hope is what sustains us when we walk through the dark valleys that test our faithfulness. It also informs us how we are to live in ways that are consistent with God’s will for us, and that will produce the greatest good and happiness for us and those around us. As resurrection people, we should never be without hope or fundamentally pessimistic. In Christ, God has overcome the world and all that is hostile to God, and we are invited to be part of that victory, starting right now. 

So how does that work? Returning to the issue of marriage, as Christians who believe Scripture is God’s true word to us as played out in the story of creation, fall, and redemption, what is our response to be to the recent SCOTUS ruling? First, while we can rightly lament the decision, we are not to lose hope or heart. As Herod and Herodias found out, God will not be mocked and since we believe God is intimately involved in his world and our lives, we should not fall into despair. When we are mocked and considered freaks and haters and [fill in your favorite insult], we are to remember we are Jesus’ people and so we are to return their curses with blessings and forgiveness, precisely because Jesus is Lord and the victory is won. 

Second, since we are called to be part of God’s eternal party in Jesus, we are to carefully examine our own lives to see where our faith serves as Christ’s beacon of light and where it falls short. We are to repent of the latter and continue to practice the former because as St. Paul reminds us today, this will result in the praise of God’s glory. This might not always be self-evident to us, but we need to relax because we are not God and God really is in charge as St. Paul proclaims. Accordingly, we are to take up our cross daily and follow our Lord faithfully, trusting in God’s faithfulness to us, even in death, as manifested most powerfully in Jesus. 

Third, and related to this last point, if we are married, we are to work hard at making our marriages a shining example for the world to see and celebrate. If we view marriage as basically a disposable commodity to be discarded when our needs are no longer being met, we are being as unfaithful to God’s intention for marriage as any SCOTUS justice, and the light of Christ shining through our marriage is extinguished. I speak sadly from experience about this. Being twice divorced, I am still dealing with the fallout and carnage of my own sinful behavior that essentially pushed God and his intentions for family aside to meet my own perceived needs. There is not a day that goes by that I don’t deal in some way with the consequences of my misguided thinking about marriage and divorce, and I suspect I am not the only one who suffers from this. To be sure, I am forgiven and God has blessed me with a wonderful wife with whom I am passionately in love, and who loves me likewise. But the consequences remain. One of the reasons I behaved as I did is because no one ever took the time to really impress on me the sanctity of marriage and the devastating consequences of trying to play by my own rules rather than God’s when it comes to marriage and family. I get it now. Back then, not so much. 

The good news for St. Augie’s is that I see a good and wholesome witness to the God-given blessing of faithful marriage. Think, for example, of the Bowsers and Falors who are approaching 50 years of marriage, or how Tim remained faithful to his wife during her long battle with Alzheimer’s, or how Monroe cares for Judy during this difficult time. Think too how we’ve rallied around these folks to let them know we love them and remind them that they are not walking through the valley alone. Here is the power of Christ’s light shining in the midst of darkness! Contrast those examples with spouses who abandon their spouse when the going gets tough or exploit them for their own selfish gain. Not much to celebrate there.

We can also celebrate the sanctity of God-given marriage by publicly renewing our vows during worship because Christian marriage is always lived out within the life of the Church. I know I want to do that with Dondra next year on our 15th anniversary (unless I’ve chipped her first, then maybe not). Simply tell us you would like to do this and we will roll out the red carpet for you and celebrate your love publicly and with joy for all the world to see. Never underestimate how God can and does use these small acts of faithfulness to help bring in the kingdom.

Last, behind every issue like marriage is a human being with real needs, fears, hopes, desires, and dreams. We must always remember to embody Christ’s love for all, even when we have to call some to repentance. Here we can learn from our gospel lesson. If you are like me, when we hear folks like John denouncing adultery, we sometimes think this means that John called Herod a miserable rotten sinner who was going straight to hell. But the text does not warrant that interpretation. St. Mark simply reports that John told Herod what he was doing was wrong. Like Jesus, John rarely made it personal, except to the egregiously self-righteous. Perhaps this is one of the reasons why Herod still wanted to hear John after he arrested him. 

The point is this. The sexual revolution will continue to produce new casualties and we as Christians must be prepared to minister to them so they too have a safe haven. Most of us are not called to be prophets, although we all can speak prophetically at times. This means that we cannot and should not focus on denouncing things and people. Instead, we are to take our cue from Jesus, who called sinners to repentance by meeting them where they were and inviting them to follow him. We can’t fix folks and their problems. What we can do is to introduce them to the Guy who can, but that won’t likely happen if we are busy telling people they are dirty rotten people who are going to hell, etc. That’s simply not our job. Our job is to embody the love of Christ for all folks, to live our lives in a manner that will offer a compelling and positive reason why folks would want to get to know Jesus. Certainly, we cannot bless what God does not bless. But this does not give us license to reject folks out of hand. 

Yet despite the Bible’s clear-cut teaching about marriage and sex, being faithful to God’s word continues to perplex us in the current climate, in part because of our fuzzy thinking about what constitutes love. Jesus and John understood that real love always acts in the best interest of the beloved, even when their love was rejected, and they acted accordingly. When someone can tell us how supporting something that contradicts God’s original design for men and women is a loving thing to do for people instead of being harmful to them, we too should hop on the sexual revolution bandwagon. But of course that case cannot be made so we won’t.

Instead, if we love folks, we are called to share the Good News of Jesus Christ and show them God’s good intentions for his human creatures by the lives we live, muddled and sloppy as that can be at times, and then to walk with them if they are willing to commit them-selves to really knowing and loving Jesus in ways that are consistent with the historic under-standing and consensus of the Church. When the Church starts doing that, I promise the world will take notice. Some will consequently want to destroy us as Herodias wanted to destroy John when he called her on her sin, and this is where our faithfulness will be severely tested. But others will join us by God’s grace because they see a better way of living, and it is the latter group we must attend to and support, while standing firm against the former.

I do not pretend this is going to be easy work or even straightforward. It will be extremely hard and complex work that will tax us and our faith. But if we are going to be Jesus’ followers who deny ourselves, take up our cross, and follow him so that he can use us to help build on his foundational kingdom work, it is work we must be willing to do. If we can remember the great praise and promises of God contained in today’s epistle lesson so that we remember we are resurrection people whom God uses despite our warts to manifest his great love for his world, if we remember that God has invited us to be part of his great eternal party that consists of new life and new creation, if we remember God is present with us always, even when we are too blind to see, we can do this work and remain faithful to his word because we know we 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.

Sermon originally preached on Sunday, July 12, 2020 during the COVID pandemic. As always it will be helpful for you to read the assigned texts for before you read the sermon by clicking on or tapping their respective links below. Recognizing the multifaceted dimensions of God’s power is essential to our Christian faith because we live in a fallen world increasingly gone mad. For those with ears to hear, listen and understand.

Lectionary texts: Genesis 25.19-34; Psalm 119.105-112; Romans 8.1-11; Matthew 13.1-9, 18-23.

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

Well, my beloved, here we are on Zoom—again. If you are like me, while I am always happy to see you in any venue, I am also feeling a bit hollow and disappointed this morning. Today was the day we were to reopen the chapel and reassemble as a parish family, as the beloved people of God. But COVID had other ideas and so here we are, consigned to our virtual meeting for the near future. But I have some Good News for you this morning because as we continue our preaching series on St. Paul’s letter to the Romans, today’s passage is a condensed and brilliant summary of the essence of the Good News of Jesus Christ and this is what I want us to look at this morning. If there is anything that can lift us out of our doldrums, our epistle lesson this morning will do it.

As we saw last week, St. Paul left us in a difficult place in his letter. Recall that he wrote:

²¹ I have discovered this principle of life—that when I want to do what is right, I inevitably do what is wrong. ²² I love God’s law with all my heart. ²³ But there is another power within me that is at war with my mind. This power makes me a slave to the sin that is still within me. ²⁴ Oh, what a miserable person I am! Who will free me from this life that is dominated by sin and death? ²⁵ Thank God! The answer is in Jesus Christ our Lord. So you see how it is: In my mind I really want to obey God’s law, but because of my sinful nature I am a slave to sin. (Romans 7.21-25, NLT)

For those of us who have pondered carefully the seriousness of sin and the reality of God’s judgment on it, we know where this is leading—to our condemnation. We want to say to St. Paul, “Thanks a lot. Another piece of bad news in the seemingly never ending hit parade of bad news lately. We are so hosed!” After all, we learn to fear condemnation from a very early age, even if we haven’t pondered the seriousness of sin and God’s judgment on it. Whether seeking the approval of our parents and getting none or suffering through the humiliation of being picked last in a neighborhood pickup game or getting turned down for a job or desired relationships—I was turned down 16 times in a row before I got my first date—the message is clear: You’re not good enough. You don’t measure up. You’re not innocent. Guilty!! Guilty!! Guilty!! And so we spend much of our adult lives trying to compensate for this reality as we desperately seek to avoid the condemnation we dread. Throw in God’s condemnation, the mother of all condemnations, especially if we were/are unfortunate to have overly critical and rigid parents, and we are confronted by an ongoing and terrifying reality that we try to tamp down or ignore altogether so that we can just cope. Not good enough. Can’t make the grade. Thoroughly inadequate. Total Loser™. Wretched people we are indeed!

But right when we hit rock bottom with St. Paul, he shocks us with his conclusion to the argument he has laid out in chapters 5-7, a conclusion we didn’t see coming with the help of arbitrary chapter divisions of his letter. Who will rescue us wretches? How can we ever hope to measure up when we’ve been told by the world throughout our lives that we don’t? “Therefore,” St. Paul says as we brace to hear his expected conclusion that we must face the reality that we are consigned to being Losers in everyone’s eyes including our own and God’s, “there is no condemnation for those who belong to Christ Jesus” (v.1). Wait. What??? Welcome to the Good News of Jesus Christ.

Before we look at why St. Paul would draw this astonishing conclusion, it bears repeating that his conclusion would only be meaningful to those of us who take the reality of sin and God’s judgment on it seriously. For those who don’t have an awareness of sin or who reject its reality completely, this wonderful Good News would likely evoke a shrug of the shoulders, their own personal avoidance of condemnation notwithstanding. But for those of us who understand that God will indeed judge our sin and all that is evil in his world that defiles and corrupts it, St. Paul’s conclusion of no condemnation for those who belong to Christ is music to our weary ears and aching hearts.

But what is the basis for St. Paul’s conclusion? How can we who are enslaved by the power of Sin escape God’s just condemnation? The answer, simply put, is that the power of God has freed us from our slavery to Sin where our finite and human efforts inevitably failed. In the following verses, St. Paul lays out a condensed version of the entire gospel of Jesus Christ. We escape God’s just and right condemnation because God the Father sent God the Son, i.e., God became human, to condemn our sin in the flesh instead of condemning us (v.3-4). We need to be very careful with our language here so that we can confront the tired old false teachings that claim God is a cosmic child abuser who punished Jesus on the cross. This is emphatically not what St. Paul is saying. First, we must remember that Jesus was and is God incarnate so anything Christ did on our behalf he did willingly and in cooperation with the Father, not because the Father coerced the Son. Second, St. Paul tells us that God’s terrible condemnation (judgment) fell on our sins, not on Christ. God the Father never condemned God the Son. It was our sins and the evil they produce that was condemned on the cross. And this should make sense to us. If God is a loving God, God must condemn all that is corrupting and death-dealing to his creatures. What loving parent would stand by idly and condone evil being perpetrated against his/her children? The whole story of Scripture is about how God is rescuing his world and us from the ravages of Evil and Sin, and here is a concise statement about how God ultimately chose to do that: by becoming human and dying on our behalf so that he could condemn the real culprit, sin, while sparing us. In other words, despite our fear of not being able to make the grade or measuring up in God’s eyes—who could blame us for thinking that in light of what St. Paul has written in chapter 7 and our own self-condemnation?—God doesn’t see us as we often see ourselves. As St. Paul reminded us back in chapter 5, God loves us so much that at just the right time he became human to die for us, even while we were still God’s enemies (Rom 5.6-8)! This is the power of God at work, my beloved, the only power that can free us from our slavery to the power of Sin. When Christ died for us on the cross, it not only spared us from God’s condemnation, it also freed us from our slavery to Sin’s power (v.2). Sin has been condemned. We who have a real relationship with Christ and believe in the efficacy of his death are not. On Mt. Calvary, God has proclaimed to us in no uncertain terms that we do measure up in his eyes, that we are not the Losers we have been told or think we are (well, the jury is still out on some of you, but I digress), and that we are no longer guilty because it was sin and not us that was pronounced guilty in Christ’s body. This isn’t the work of a cosmic child abuser. This is the work of the living God who loves his children and wants to free us to be the truly human beings he created us to be. No amount of human effort or trying harder is going to free us from our slavery to Sin. Only the power of God can do that. This is why we call it the gospel or Good News of Jesus Christ.

But the gospel is more than just escaping God’s condemnation. We must remember that we are God’s image-bearers whom God created to run the world on God’s behalf, reflecting God’s goodness and glory out into the world and channeling creation’s praises back to its Creator. So God freed us to live accordingly, not to give us an eternal “get-out-of-jail-free” card so that we could continue indulging in our sinful and rebellious ways. This is the contrast St. Paul is talking about in the rest of the passage (v.5-11). When he warns that living according to the flesh produces death, St. Paul is not talking about our physical bodies being bad nor is he talking about a dualistic nature inside of us, an internal good-cop, bad-cop so to speak. That is a Neo-Platonic and gnostic notion. We must remember St. Paul was a Jew and all good Jews believed in the goodness of creation, bodies included, because God is our Creator and the Genesis narratives proclaim in no uncertain terms that all creation prior to the Fall was good and remained good, albeit corrupted, even after our first ancestors’ rebellion in the garden. Rather, what St. Paul is talking about here is who will be our master. Will we serve our fallen nature (the flesh) and the power of Sin or God (the Spirit)? When we set our minds on the flesh, when we trust in ourselves instead of God and act accordingly, we can expect God’s just condemnation. St. Paul speaks elsewhere of what living life according to the flesh looks like. He speaks of lives characterized by sexual immorality, impurity, lustful pleasures, idolatry, sorcery, hostility, quarreling, jealousy, outbursts of anger, selfish ambition, dissension, division, envy, drunkenness, wild parties, and others. St. Paul isn’t talking about one-off or occasional sins here nor is he attempting to offer a complete catalogue of behaviors and thinking that cater to our selfish and rebellious nature. Rather we should understand these things as manifestations of enslaved lives to the power of Sin. The apostle declares ominously that those who engage in lifestyles characterized by these kinds of behaviors will not be part of God’s world, either in this mortal life or the world to come, the new creation (Gal 5.19-21). 

But serving our fallen nature (the flesh) is not always about committing egregious sins, and here is where it gets really interesting because we can pander to our rebellious desires in very subtle ways. When, for example, we proclaim Jesus is our Lord and Savior but steadfastly refuse to believe that God really has spared us from his condemnation by becoming human to die for us, we are setting our minds on the flesh by not trusting the promises of God contained in his gospel. We will likely follow a gospel of self-help, making sure, for example, that we read the Bible enough or pray enough or go to church enough or give enough to earn his love and forgiveness while simultaneously pursuing our own selfish interests and being very ugly people, hoping along the way that our good efforts are enough to persuade God to save us despite our ugliness. But as St. Paul has already explained in chapter 7, that ain’t gonna happen. We are incapable of pleasing God if left to our own devices. Don’t misunderstand. Praying, worshiping, giving, service to others, reading the Bible, and other pious activities are all good and necessary things for Christians to engage in, but we are never to engage in these activities with the false belief that doing them will compel God to love us and save us. As we have just seen, God has already demonstrated his love for us and taken care of all that is necessary for us to enjoy life with him in this world and the next.

We also see life lived according to the flesh illustrated in our OT lesson this morning in both Esau and Jacob. The former let his own temporary hunger control his behavior so that he disastrously forfeited his birthright, something from which he apparently never recovered, by giving it to his younger brother Jacob, who being the great deceiver he was, always tried to manipulate people and situations to gain God’s blessing. The beauty of both the old and new testaments is that despite this, God still redeemed Jacob because Jacob was to be the bearer of God’s covenant promises to Abraham, despite himself. God does likewise with us. Or consider the parable of the prodigal son. We see living according to the flesh in both the sons in the parable. While the prodigal’s sins are obvious, his older brother had a sense of self-righteousness that is death-dealing because his focus was on his behavior/power, not God’s. Contrast this mindset with the prodigal who humbly accepted his father’s forgiveness and found new life. So it is possible for us to live according to the flesh while pretending to be pious and spiritual. If you are one who thinks you have to follow the rules to earn God’s forgiveness, or that your right standing before God depends on you doing the right things instead of Christ’s sacrifice for you, you are unwittingly or otherwise living according to the flesh and living a lie, and you should have every reason to fear God’s just condemnation because of your refusal to trust God’s power to rescue you, relying instead on your own folly to get the job done.

Contrast this to living by the Spirit, who frees us to be truly human beings and God’s image-bearers (I see Father Bowser twitching with delight over the mention of the Holy Spirit). Notice carefully what St. Paul is telling us here. He is not telling us that those who have the Holy Spirit living in us will never sin. That won’t happen till after our mortal death (Rom 6.7). No, what St. Paul is telling us is that because we are united with Christ in his death and resurrection, we are given his Spirit who will live in us and transform us over a lifetime to become more and more like Christ. It is the power to live as fully human beings, imperfect and utterly messy as that may look at times, precisely because we are united with Christ in his death and resurrection at our baptism (cf. Rom 6.3-5). The presence of the Spirit allows Christ to dwell within us and unites us to him. In his letter to the Galatians, St. Paul put it like this: “My old self has been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ [who] lives in me. So I live in this earthly body by trusting in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me” (Gal 2.20). That’s why those who don’t have the Spirit don’t have Christ. First and foremost, the Spirit reveals to us God’s great love for us so that despite all our feelings and fears to the contrary, we really do believe that we no longer have to fear God’s condemnation because our sins have already been dealt with once and for all on the cross. We live in an Über touchy-feely age and frankly we need to get over that and embrace the objective reality that we have been transferred from the dominion of death into the dominion of God’s Son, in whom we have redemption and the forgiveness of our sins (cf. Col 1.13-20). That same Son lives in us and helps heal and transform us into God’s restored image-bearers who think, speak, and act accordingly if we only let him. When we do, irrespective of how imperfect that might look in our lives, we really will experience peace because we trust God’s promises and great love for us. We no longer feel compelled to pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps to escape God’s condemnation. We believe it to be true, despite everything in and around us trying to tell us otherwise. It would take a whole separate sermon to flesh out what these two contrasting lifestyles would look like in our lives, but mercifully I won’t pull a Deacon Wylie on you and keep you till suppertime (well, maybe he didn’t preach that long a couple of weeks ago, but I like my story better so I’m sticking with it).

So let me close with this. If you really believe what St. Paul is telling us here, my beloved, it will change you and free you to live your life courageously and boldly, without fear of God’s judgment, because you trust in the unfailing love and power of God, not your own power or delusions. The NT calls that having real peace. And God knows we need courageous and bold Christians to proclaim a better way of life—a life lived according to the reality of no condemnation because of the love of God made known in Jesus Christ—to the forces of godlessness and lawlessness that swirl around and within us. It will make you want to please God because you realize it’s no more than your humble response to a done deal God has accomplished unilaterally on your behalf. You’ve been freed from your slavery to Sin’s power and your sins have been dealt with forever. Here is the Good News in a nutshell. St. Paul speaks of the saving work of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit—three in one and one in three, all working together to rescue and heal you so that you are equipped to live as the truly human being you were created to be—reminding us that those who belong to Christ share in Christ’s power and destiny, which is new bodily life at the Resurrection of the dead (Romans 8.11). We did nothing nor can we ever do anything to deserve God’s great gift of life. We only have to accept the gift offered us and believe we are worthy in the God’s sight. God is loving and faithful to his word and God has the power to do the impossible. Embrace the gift along with the hope and promise, my beloved. Let it change you so that you live your life with new power, freedom, boldness, and joy in your Lord Jesus Christ. After all, he lives in you and is your hope of glory (Col 1.27). 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 Sunday, July 14, 2019. As always it will be helpful for you to read the assigned texts for the sermon by tapping on or clicking their respective links below. The issue of locus of control is important for all Christians to ponder because he can have a great impact on our faith, either for good or for evil. For those with ears to hear, listen and understand.

Lectionary texts: Amos 7.7-17; Psalm 82; Colossians 1.1-14; St. Luke 10.25-37.

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

What are we to make of the prophetic oracles contained in our OT and psalm lessons with their fearsome message of God’s judgment on human sin? Or what can we expect to happen to us when we fail our Lord’s challenge to us to act like good Samaritans toward our neighbors (and even our enemies)? This is what I want us to look at this morning.

To begin, it will be helpful to look at our lessons through the lens of locus of control. On whom is the responsibility placed? Locus of control implies being in charge so this is a critical question for us to answer. Who is really in control of God’s world, God or us? In our OT lesson, the Lord, though his prophet (or mouthpiece) Amos, clearly condemns Israel’s idolatry which had led God’s people to practice all kinds of perversity and injustice. This is no small matter because we always become what we worship, whether for good or for ill. Despite God’s repeated calls to his people to repent, they stubbornly refused to do so, choosing instead to worship all kinds of false gods instead of the one true living God, the God who had called them to be his people. Their stubborn refusal to repent would lead to their exile to Assyria some twenty-five years later. And when Amaziah the priest challenged Amos’ prophecies, he too found himself under God’s terrible judgment. The locus of control seems to be with God’s people, presumably because they had a real choice. God called them to repentance and expected them to choose wisely, giving them the freedom to do so. But God’s people failed to choose wisely and found themselves under God’s ultimate judgment of exile. 

Likewise, in our psalm lesson, God condemned the rulers of his people for ruling unjustly as God called them to do. Instead of protecting the weakest and most helpless in society, Israel’s rulers had apparently ruled as the rest of the world’s rulers ruled. They took care of the rich and powerful while ignoring the needs of others. While God had given his human image-bearers the freedom and power to be stewards over creation, Israel’s rulers had failed to learn the ways of God and ruled instead in the darkness and evil of the world’s ways. This resulted in God’s judgment on them and their rule: exile and death. Once again the locus of control seems to be with the rulers. God had given them the free will and ability to choose wisely to rule on God’s behalf and they had failed to do so. Like God’s people Israel over whom they ruled, Israel’s rulers found themselves under God’s fierce and terrible judgment for failing to act faithfully as God’s image-bearing stewards. 

Turning to our gospel lesson, the locus of control seems to remain with humans. In his parable about the good Samaritan, our Lord tells us unequivocally that we are to act like the true image-bearers that God created us to be. How do we do that? In part, by loving our neighbor, neighbor broadly and inconveniently defined to include anybody and everybody in need, enemies included. It won’t do to treat well just those we like and love. No, we are to treat all human beings well because all human beings are created in God’s image, even if some have worked really hard to destroy that image. But what happens to us when we don’t follow the good Samaritan’s example in our Lord’s parable? While Jesus didn’t explicitly tell us, the implication is that we too will fall under God’s judgment because we will have failed to act wisely (in the manner God expects). The locus of control still seems to be with us. We have a choice to do as Jesus tells us to do and many times we fail to act accordingly.

Now for those who do not believe in God or have any notion of Sin and its power to destroy, this is no big deal. They go blithely along without a clue or care in the world, at least about locus of control when it comes to acting rightly in the image of God, supremely modeled by our Lord Jesus Christ. But as Scripture makes clear, ignorance is no excuse; neither is it bliss in this context. Those who deny God or reject God’s commands for us to act rightly will still come under God’s judgment and this should bring us no joy because we too are in the same boat. God calls us to act justly and rightly and all too often we miss the mark, acting selfishly and myopically, pursuing our own broken desires and interests. This can cause us great anxiety, especially if we believe in God’s righteous-ness and justice. If God truly is good and right, how can God not judge our sinful behavior and us? God gave us free will to choose between right and wrong and expects us to choose the right, much like we as parents expect our kids to choose the right. So when we miss the mark, i.e., when we sin by failing to act as truly human beings God created us to be, the consequences fall on us because we have a choice and fail to choose wisely. Consequences follow.

But here’s the problem with that line of thinking as St. Paul pointed out in his letter to the Romans. While we do have free will and ostensible freedom to choose, ever since our first ancestors rebelled in the garden and got expelled from paradise, the human race has been held captive by an alien and hostile power better known as Sin. I am not talking about the misdeeds we do (our various sins). I am talking about Sin, that dark power that has enslaved us and greatly circumscribes our fee will. Don’t believe me? Check out Romans 7 for starters. How many times have you resolved to do the right thing, only to find yourself thwarted? For example, how are those new year’s resolutions you made in January coming along? Want to lose weight? No problem. Go on a diet. Want to break your addiction to porn? No problem. Just stop looking at it. Want to stop smoking? Just put down those cancer sticks. Right. Naiveté anyone? Because we have free will and the ability to choose wisely, because we are made in God’s image and therefore have God’s spiritual DNA, it should be no problem for us to do these things. We are blessed with locus of control! But the history of the human race since after the Fall tells a grimly different story. Father Bowser spoke of it two weeks ago when he talked about the “egoic mind,” our fallen nature. We all seem to have a bent toward sinning beyond our control that makes us behave and speak and think in ways that sometimes just baffle us. This is the power of Sin at work and it has enslaved all of us to one degree or another. 

Let me be crystal clear. I am not talking about a “devil made me do it” mentality. Nor am I absolving us of any responsibility for our actions. Nothing could be further from the truth. What I am suggesting is that the myth of unfettered free will and locus of control is just that—a myth. There are dark forces at work in our world that have enslaved us and cause us to work in some very ungodly ways at times, some more so than others, much to our chagrin. Even so, our behaviors fall under the judgment of God. We can’t and won’t be able to use Sin’s power over us as an excuse when we stand before God’s judgment throne and are required to give an account of our lives. 

So what’s the answer? So far, there’s been no Good News in what I have just said. If we are enslaved by an outside power that hates us and wants to see us destroyed, what to do? St. Paul has the answer for us in our epistle lesson. The Father, he tells us, “has rescued us from the power of darkness and transferred us into the kingdom of his beloved Son, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins” (Colossians 1.14). St. Paul, of course, is talking about Christ’s death and resurrection. God knows we don’t have the power to break our slavery to Sin, desperately as we might want to be freed from its tyranny. And so God broke Sin’s power over us on the cross, bearing its full weight himself, so that we could be truly free to act as fully human beings who are created in the Father’s image. We will indeed have to give an account of our lives when we stand before God’s judgment seat, but we will hear the verdict of not guilty because we have put our whole hope and trust in Christ and the power of him crucified and resurrected. As St. Paul would write elsewhere, none of us are totally free of the vestiges of Sin’s power over us until we die (Romans 6.7), but as Christians, we have nothing to fear because we kneel in humility and repentance at the foot of the Cross, our only hope to escape God’s just and terrible judgment.

This great gift of unmerited grace must change us in the power of the Spirit. We don’t see the Cross as a “get out of jail free” card that allows us to keep living in a state of perpetual rebellion against our Creator and Father. No, when by God’s grace and power we begin to grasp the terrible cost and deep love the Father and the Son have shown us in Christ’s death and resurrection, it hits us like a ton of bricks how costly our sins and slavery to Sin’s power is to God the Father, and with what love he has acted to free us so that we no longer need to fear his just condemnation of our sins, irrespective of locus of control. 

And because we are given the Holy Spirit to help break and mitigate Sin’s power over us so that we truly can be free people in Christ (Galatians 5.1), we are given the power to live godly lives, not perfectly of course; for whatever reason we are not completely free of Sin’s power this side of the grave. To complicate things further, God’s power at work in our lives through the gospel is typically not spectacular or sexy. Sometimes we don’t even recognize it! The Father works in our lives through his Spirit in quite unremarkable ways, and this can sometimes trip us up because when we hear the term “power” we are conditioned to think shock and awe. But that’s not how the Spirit typically works. Listen to this example and pay careful attention to the dynamics in the story because in it we see the power of the gospel, i.e., the power of God, at work.

We sat down to table and the officer began his story: “I have served in the army ever since I was quite young. I knew my duties and was a favorite of my superiors as a conscientious officer. But I was young, as were also my friends, and unhappily I started drinking. It went from bad to worse until drinking became an illness. When I did not drink, I was a good officer, but when I would start drinking, then I would have to go to bed for six weeks. My superiors were patient with me for a long time, but finally, for rudeness to the commanding officer while I was drunk, they reduced my rank to private and transferred me to a garrison for three years. They threatened me with more severe punishment if I would not improve and give up drinking. In this unfortunate condition all my efforts at self-control were of no avail and I could not stay sober for any length of time. Then I heard that I was to be sent to the guardhouse and I was beside myself with anguish.

“One day I was sitting in the barracks deep in thought. A monk came in to beg alms for the church. Those who had money gave what they could. When he approached me he asked, ‘Why are you so downcast?’ We started talking and I told him the cause of my grief. The monk sympathized with my situation and said, ‘My brother was once in a similar position, and I will tell you how he was cured. His spiritual father gave him a copy of the Gospels and strongly urged him to read a chapter whenever he wanted to take a drink. If the desire for a drink did not leave him after he read one chapter he was encouraged to read another and if necessary still another. My brother followed this advice, and after some time he lost all desire for alcoholic beverages. It is now fifteen years since he has touched a drop of alcohol. Why don’t you do the same, and you will discover how beneficial the reading of the Gospels can be. I have a copy at home and will gladly bring it to you.’

“I wasn’t very open to this idea so I objected, ‘How can your Gospels help when neither my efforts at self-control nor medical aid could keep me sober?’ I spoke in this way because I never read the Gospels.

“‘Give it a chance,’ continued the monk reassuringly, ‘and you will find it very helpful.’

“The next day he brought me this copy of the Gospels. I opened it, browsed through it, and said, ‘I will not take it, for I cannot understand it; I am not accustomed to reading Church Slavonic.’

“The monk did not give up but continued to encourage me and explained that God’s special power is present in the Gospel through his words. He went on, ‘At the beginning be concerned only with reading it diligently; understanding will come later. One holy man says that “even when you don’t understand the word of God, the demons do, and they tremble”; and the passion for drink is without a doubt their work. And St. John Chrysostom in speaking about the power of the word of God says that the very room where the Gospel is kept has the power to ward off the spirits of darkness and thwart their intrigues.’

“I do not recall what I gave the monk when I took the copy of the Gospels from him, but I placed the book in my trunk with my other belongings and forgot about it. Some time later a strong desire to have a drink took hold of me and I opened the trunk to get some money and run to the tavern. But I saw the copy of the Gospels before I got to the money and I remembered clearly what the monk had told me. I opened the book and read the first chapter of Matthew without understanding anything. Again I remembered the monk’s words, ‘At the beginning be concerned only with reading it diligently; understanding will come later.’ So I read another chapter and found it a bit more comprehensible. Shortly after I began reading the third chapter, the curfew bell rang and it was no longer possible for me to leave the barracks.

“In the morning my first thought was to get a drink, but then I decided to read another chapter to see what would happen. I read it and did not go. Again I wanted a drink, but I started reading and I felt better. This gave me courage, and with every temptation for a drink I began reading a chapter from the Gospels. The more I read, the easier it became, and when I finally finished reading all four Gospels the compulsion for drink had disappeared completely; I was repelled by the very thought of it. It is now twenty years since I stopped drinking alcoholic beverages.

“Everyone was surprised at the change that took place in me, and after three years I was reinstated as an officer and then climbed up the ranks until I was made a commanding officer. Later I married a fine woman; we have saved some money, which we now share with the poor. Now I have a grown son who is a fine lad and he also is an officer in the army.” — The Way of a Pilgrim

If you ever needed an example to illustrate St. Paul’s statement that “God causes everything to work together for the good of those who love God and are called according to his purpose for them” (Romans 8.28), here you have it. Notice first how Christ works. He used human agency (the monk) to introduce the young soldier to his gospel. Notice how the monk abandoned his agenda (begging alms for the church), at least temporarily, to address a person’s needs that he perceived (good Samaritan, anyone?). We have to be ready to see others in pain if we ever hope to help them address it. Notice too the monk’s gentle persistence and the faith he had in the transformative power of the gospel in people’s lives, a faith based, in part, on past experience.

Next, pay attention to how Christ used circumstance instead of understanding to stay the young soldier’s hand from drinking. He read the gospel without understanding it, but was prevented from going on a drinking binge because he had lingered in his quarters to read it. Was it really coincidence that the soldier found the gospels before he got to his drinking money? This is how God typically works to control the circumstances of our lives in a wise and loving way, but we have to pay attention to realize it!

Finally, mark how understanding occurred—through persistent reading. Ask anyone who reads the Bible regularly and systematically and you will hear this same answer. God grants understanding to humble minds willing to submit to his word (as opposed to trying to make his word submit to their agendas, which sadly many try to do, especially today) through our persistent reading of his word. God doesn’t beat us over the head to make us learn (usually). Instead God uses ordinary people and circumstances along with our own efforts to speak to and transform us. 

This is the power of God at work. This is the surprising power of the gospel. If we do not pay attention to these dynamics, we will likely miss seeing God’s providential work in our daily lives and become greatly impoverished in our ignorance. But when we start to look for God at work in our daily lives we will see his presence in the various circumstances and “chance” happening in our lives, which God will then use to develop a deep trust in his goodness and love for us, each and every day. That trust, in turn, can help see us through the darkest times of our lives. Without understanding and seeing how the power of God works, we are likely to fall victim to the old lie that God has abandoned us and doesn’t care about us, that God is not active in our world; we’re in it by ourselves, baby, and that is a terrifying prospect. Understanding how the power of God works is the best antidote to counter this cancerous thinking. For you see, the locus of control, despite our illusions and delusions and darkened thinking, has always been with God, and nothing in all creation, not Sin, not death, not our own folly nor anything else in all creation can separate us from the love of God made known to us in Jesus Christ our Lord. 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 Sunday, July 7, 2013. As always it will be helpful for you to read the assigned texts below by clicking on or tapping their respective links. The matter of God’s power, God’s ability to specifically heal and make himself generally known to us is critically important for our faith. After all, who wants to give ultimate loyalty to an absentee God, if indeed that is what God is (helpful hint: he’s not). For those with ears to hear, listen and understand.

Lectionary texts: 2 Kings 5.1-14; Psalm 30; Galatians 6.1-16; St. Luke 10.1-11, 16-20.

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

In our texts this morning we are given glimpses about what it is like to live (and not live) under God’s power and authority, and I want us to look at what those glimpses can teach us as Christians who strive to live under the authority of the Lord Jesus and in the power of the Spirit. I want to do this by using our OT/gospel lessons as case studies and then drawing on what St. St. Paul and the psalmist have to say.

As we look at whose power and authority are being utilized in our OT lesson, we have a study of contrasts as evidenced by the behavior of the various characters involved. On the one hand we see Naaman, the Syrian commander, who has all the trappings of success by worldly standards and who is the epitome of worldly power, walking away in a rage after being told by Elisha to go dip himself in the Jordan River seven times so that Naaman’s leprosy will be healed. How dare this upstart little prophet refuse to heal him in some spectacular fashion! What an insult to a man of Naaman’s power and authority! Doesn’t Elisha know that Naaman has the power to crush him like a bug? What is Elisha thinking? Welcome to the world of trying to live under your own power and authority. Sometimes things don’t go the way you want them to, no matter how powerful and important you are, because, well, we are only human and cannot control everything that goes on in our lives, much as we try. Naaman would eventually be healed, but on God’s terms, not his.

Likewise, we see Joram, the unnamed king of Israel, who demonstrates, at least in this instance, that he too does not know what it is like to live under God’s authority and power. He sees the Syrian king’s overtures to him as a pretext for war and because Joram’s armies don’t match up with Ben-Hadad’s (the Syrian king), Joram gets more than a little nervous. After all, when you are trying to live under your own power and authority, whether you are a king or a commoner, all that really matters is who has the biggest stick because it is every person for him/herself and in this instance it wasn’t Joram who carried the biggest stick. 

 We can relate to the anger seen here—and the underlying anxiety that often accompanies it—because we too know what it it is like to be faced with no-win situations or have our earnest and heartfelt prayers apparently go unanswered. When either happen, especially with unanswered prayer, we wonder where God is in it all and whether he really cares about us. This tempts us to want to take matters into our own hands, but like Joram discovered, we quickly find out how futile that strategy is because our own power and authority are vastly limited and overstated. As Jesus reminded his followers, who among us can add a single hour to our life by worry (St. Matthew 6.27ff)? But we sure do try!

On the other hand we see how both the unnamed slave girl who was taken captive by the Syrians and the prophet Elisha behave, and we quickly see a stark contrast because they demonstrate that they are living under a very different power and authority—God’s power and authority. We notice how unperturbed they are about the whole thing. The slave girl simply tells her mistress that there is a prophet in Samaria (Israel) who can cure Naaman of his leprosy. No big deal. Just go do it. We notice the same peace about Elisha. Unlike his king, Elisha doesn’t get all hot and bothered by Naaman’s visit or the potentially volatile geopolitical ramifications involved. In fact, Elisha doesn’t even bother to meet this Syrian big shot face-to-face! He simply tells Naaman via a messenger to go, um, dip himself in the Jordan River seven times. 

So what’s the difference? Why did Naaman and Joram get all whacked out over the chain of events as they unfolded while Elisha and the slave girl who suggested that Naaman visit “a prophet in Samaria” did not? The answer, of course, is that the latter two lived under the power and authority of God. They knew the living God, the God of Israel, and they knew God’s track record. In Elisha’s case, he had seen God act through his mentor Elijah and had witnessed many acts of power. There was no doubt in their mind that God is a God who is actively involved in his good but fallen world and who has the power and willingness to work for the good of his people. Do you believe this about God? 

It is important for us to note that this faith in God’s power and authority did not make either Elisha or the slave girl immune from hurts and heartaches that are part and parcel of living in a fallen world. After all, the girl was a slave, captured as a result of warfare, and Elisha knew his fair share of problems as well (see, e.g., 2 Kings 6.24-32). But what was different about these two is that they both believed that God was greater than the evil that sometimes afflicted them and they acted accordingly because they really did know that in the end, the Good Guy wins and in the interim is actively involved for the benefit of his people.

We see this same dynamic of trust and faith in our gospel lesson this morning. There are several points of interest in this story that we could talk about, including the sense of urgency in which Jesus sent out the 70 disciples and the life and death stakes apparently involved in proclaiming God’s kingdom to people. But for our purposes, we note that Jesus told his disciples to expect both good and evil as they proclaimed the kingdom and above all to depend on God to provide for and protect them. After all, wolves eat lambs and if there is not a power greater than their own, it would be absolutely foolish for the 70 to embark on this missionary work. 

The disciples apparently were obedient to Jesus’ commands because St. Luke reports that when they returned they were overjoyed at their unexpected success. But it is important for us to note that they attributed their success to Jesus’ power and authority, not their own, and anyone who has acted on behalf of Jesus and under his authority will know exactly how they felt. Again, this is not to suggest that the disciples did not encounter difficulties and opposition. It is to suggest that they were able to tap into a power far greater than their own to protect them as they proclaimed the Good News of the coming of the kingdom in Jesus’ name. 

But Jesus did not want his newly enthused disciples to focus on power. Yes, he said, they (and we) have power and authority—his power and authority—to defeat the forces of creation arrayed against them (the snakes and scorpions and the forces they represent) as well as the very powers and principalities themselves that are opposed to Jesus and the coming of God’s kingdom. But what is even more important for the 70 and those of us who follow him is to know that God knows us and that nothing can ever really harm us (cf. Romans 8.31-39), i.e., their names (and ours) are written in God’s book of life contained in heaven. Persecution may come, suffering will surely come, and certainly death will come, whether by persecution or otherwise. But none of that matters when we give our life to Jesus and act in the power of the Spirit to proclaim that the kingdom of God is near. Doing so is evidence that we have a life-giving relationship with the Lord of this universe, or what the NT frequently refers to as “eternal life,” and of course that life is available to us right now because we are called to have a living relationship with God through Christ right now (cf. St. John 17.3).

All this points to the secret for living a relatively anxiety-free life as Christians, even as we live in an increasingly hostile culture. The extent to which we can put our trust in and live our life under Jesus’ power and authority rather than our own is the extent to which we will be able to enjoy the peace and confidence that Elisha, the slave girl, and Jesus’ returning disciples did, not to mention countless others across time and culture. As St. St. Paul reminds us in our epistle lesson, the reason for this peace is that we believe that in Jesus’ death and resurrection, God has both taken care of the intractable problem of human sin and the alienation and death it causes, and defeated the powers of evil decisively, although that victory has not yet been fully consummated. And as we see in our gospel lesson, when we act as if Jesus is Lord, he will use us to bring his healing love to his broken and hurting world and its people, and in doing so we have the power and authority to overcome even the forces of evil and their boss. That’s what Jesus was talking about when he reported seeing Satan fall from heaven like a flash of lightning. Think about that for a minute. Real forgiveness for our sins and power over evil and all that corrupts. This is power we cannot have on our own and it is literally a game-changer. This doesn’t mean things will automatically go swimmingly well for us or that we will not face great opposition or have to endure terrible suffering for Jesus’ sake. A quick look at St. St. Paul’s life will remind us otherwise. What it does mean is that we have the power of Jesus to help us overcome and transcend the world and the evil in it and that in doing so, we will enjoy God’s love and protection from all that can truly hurt us.

So what does that look like on the ground? Our lessons suggest that telling folks about Jesus and the kingdom is critically important for their sake as well as ours. But I want to focus on what St. St. Paul says to the Galatians, about how we treat each other as part of Jesus’ body, the Church, when the other sins and what kind of attitude we have toward others. If we truly love each other enough to confront each other when we see the other going down a dark path, if we truly love each other enough to bear one another’s burdens instead of devouring or destroying each other, this will catch people’s attention, usually in a good way, and we will be announcing that the kingdom has come. My point is that we can witness very powerfully to the world without ever saying a word (at least initially) by how we treat each other in the power of the Spirit. Every time we resist being haughty or refrain from backbiting and gossiping and other destructive forms of interpersonal behavior, we are sending a powerful message to the world and the dark powers behind them that Jesus is Lord and they are not. 

But the problem, of course, is that we aren’t built that way instinctively or emotionally to bear each others burdens. We are naturally proud and self-centered creatures. As the psalmist reminds us, when things are going well for us, we tend to become delusional and attribute our success to us and our abilities. Of course that is not the case and as the psalmist further reminds us, it often takes an awful turn of events in life to bring us back to reality. That is why humility is always the order of the day for anyone who calls themselves a Christian because like Naaman and Joram, we must learn and acknowledge that we do not have the power or authority to cope with all that is wrong in God’s world, including our own sin and brokenness. We must instead rely on the God of grace and life who calls into existence things that are not, who gives life to the dead, who heals and restores us, and who lives in and among us in the person of the Holy Spirit. When we do, of course, God gives us the power to develop the needed humility to change how we see ourselves and how we treat others who, like us, are made in God’s image and who are therefore worthy of our love and respect. In other words, God gives us the power to develop the needed humility to act in Jesus’ power and under his authority. 

Are you living that kind of Spirit-filled life and the peace that usually accompanies it? Are you helping others here to bear their burdens? Do you care enough about others that you are willing to confront them lovingly when you see them sin? Do you have the humility to allow others to do likewise to you? If you are enjoying these gifts, then give thanks to God for them and by all means keep using them! If you are not, ask the Lord of life to give you these gifts and the needed sweat equity to implement them, and then expect your prayers to be answered. After all, the kingdom is at stake and we are called to be builders of it for Jesus’ sake and the sake of the world!

In closing, here’s a quick test to help you determine whose power and authority you are living under. When things go south, at the end of the day do you say Jesus is Lord? I’m not talking about uttering a trite cliche. I’m talking about making a statement based on a real relationship with the living Lord and the firm knowledge that God has the ability and willingness to act on our behalf for the good of his world and coming kingdom. This knowledge isn’t wishful thinking but rather is based on God’s track record as revealed in Scripture, in your own life, and in the lives of God’s people. If you cannot say that Jesus is Lord when things look hopeless, it suggests that you have decided (knowingly or not) to limp through life on your own power and authority and without much hope. But if you can say Jesus is Lord and really mean it, you will surely know that you have Good News, now and for all eternity. 

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