Sermon originally preached on August 26, 2012. As always, it will be helpful for you to read the assigned texts for today by clicking on our tapping their links below before you read the sermon. Want to know the one true God? Only in Jesus Christ will you find him. For those with ears to hear, listen and understand.

Lectionary texts: 1 Kings 8.1, 6, 10-11, 22-30, 41-43; Psalm 84; Ephesians 6.10-20; St. John 6.56-69.

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

Have you ever longed to know what God is really like? Have you ever worried that maybe God doesn’t really exist, or if he does, he isn’t really all that accessible to us so that we can ever really hope to know him or take comfort in him or be protected by him? If you have ever had these kinds of questions—and I suspect if we are honest, almost everyone here has had questions like these at one time or another in our lives—then you will begin to understand why the temple was so important to God’s people Israel. Like us, and before the temple was built, they often wondered if God was with them or whether he was really all that accessible. So imagine how wonderful you would feel if you longed for God to dwell with you and your people as he promised, and now you believed that God had finally done just that by coming to dwell in his temple, not as we humans occupy a house and live there, but that you could come to a physical place where you believed heaven and earth intersected so that you could actually be in God’s presence. If you understand how comforting and awesome that would be, you can begin to understand why today’s OT story was so important to God’s people. We want to know that God is with us and is accessible to us, and so this morning I want us to look briefly at this notion of temple and why we Christians don’t go to a temple to find God.

A temple, by its very definition, means that it is a dwelling place for a deity, in this case the God of Israel. Now in one sense, God had always dwelt among his people, especially from the time he called them out of slavery and bondage in Egypt. God had led his people through the wilderness by the pillars of fire and cloud and he would eventually have Moses build a tabernacle, which would house the Ark of the Covenant. But the tabernacle was designed to be a mobile dwelling that moved when God’s people moved. There was really no permanence about it, at least in a geographical sense, and despite God’s presence among his people, there were plenty of times when they rebelled against God or grumbled about whether God was really going to take care of them and deliver on his promise to bring them to a new land and give them rest from all their enemies. But after a long and checkered history that was characterized by chronic rebellion and unfaithfulness on the part of God’s people, God had finally given them the land and the rest from their enemies as he promised so that Solomon—whose very name is derived from shalom, which means peace—was able to build God a temple in which to dwell. 

And as today’s OT story tells us, when Solomon dedicated the temple, God did indeed come and dwell there. His presence was so powerful that it drove the priests out from it so that they could not do their duties, at least temporarily. Finally God’s people had a place to come and bring their thank offerings as well as their fellowship and sin offerings. In other words, they had a place to come directly (well, almost directly) into God’s presence and through the mediation of a priest find forgiveness and reconciliation with God. But even then, as our story alludes, God wasn’t entirely accessible to his people. Initially the cloud hid his presence and afterward only the chief priest was allowed once a year to enter the holy of holies where the Ark of the Covenant rested, which was God’s “footstool.” God was so close to his people but in some ways still so far away. How then could the people really get to know God and experience his presence first-hand among them? In other words, how is it possible for the Creator to dwell with his creatures? After all, the OT writers made it clear that to see the face of God meant death because sinful mortals were unable to gaze directly on the presence of God’s perfect holiness and survive. Was God’s presence in the temple the best they (and we) could hope for?

If we understand these dynamics, we have some of the background to help us understand today’s gospel lesson in which Jesus finishes his discourse about being the bread from heaven. We are also in a position to understand why Jesus’ words drove so many folks away. But first a bit more background. Earlier in St. St. John’s gospel we see Jesus driving the money-changers et al. from the temple (cf. St. St. John 2.13-25). This was not an effort to reform corrupt temple practices. Jesus’ actions went way beyond that. It was Jesus acting out a prophetic judgment on the temple and all that it had come to stand for in a manner similar to OT prophets like Jeremiah and Ezekiel. And if we remember that in Jesus we see the very embodiment of God, we quickly realize that in this episode we are watching God pronounce judgment on his temple and all that had become distorted in and through it. It is quite a sobering thought.

Now in today’s gospel lesson we see one of the logical outcomes of Jesus clearing the temple. When Jesus pronounced God’s judgment on the temple and made the cryptic reference to his body being raised in three days when asked by what authority he had done so, he was effectively telling his challengers and us that he is the new temple. Jesus is the place for us to come and interact with God, not the temple, because he is the Word made flesh. No longer would God’s people have to bring animal sacrifices to a priest to find forgiveness for their sins because in Jesus’ costly death on the cross we are directly offered forgiveness of our sins once and for all, and with it, reconciliation and peace with God. Jesus was going to do for Israel and the world what God had called Israel to do (and for which Solomon had prayed), but which Israel had failed to do. Just as God had delivered his people from the bondage of slavery in Egypt, so now in Jesus God would deliver his people from our bondage to sin and death. Sadly not everyone will accept this gracious gift offered to us. But it is God’s free gift offered to everyone, regardless of who we are or what we have done. No one is outside the love of God!

Jesus goes on to tell us that he is the giver of life and his claims will be vindicated after he has ascended into heaven, NT code for reminding us the risen and ascended Jesus is now Lord of the universe and rules through his people by the power of the Holy Spirit that he promised to send on us. This is why St. St. Paul reminded us several weeks ago at the beginning of Ephesians that the people of God, both Jew and Gentile who had been healed and reconciled to God and each other, were now the new and reconstituted temple of God (cf. Ephesians 2.19-22). We are Christ’s body, the Church, built on the foundation in which Jesus is the most important stone because only in Christ do we find true forgiveness of sins and reconciliation with God and each other. This, in turn, equips us to be the people God calls us to be, holy people whom God will use by the power of the Spirit to bring his healing love to bear on others.

As we think about all this, two things strike us immediately. First, if Jesus really is the embodiment of God (which he is), it makes perfect sense that he would claim to be the new temple where we would come to meet and commune with God. This solves the vexing problem that has always existed for humans—how do we really get to know God? Granted, in Jesus we see God interacting with us as a human and therefore being subjected to human limitations. But if we want to see the face of God, if we want to know the heart of God, if we want to know how God expects us to behave, we have a clear example in Jesus to follow. Jesus is telling us to find healing, forgiveness, peace, and reconciliation in and through him. That is why if we ever hope to be the truly human beings God created us to be, we must establish our very lives and being in him so that he can work in and through us in the power of the Spirit to transform us into his very likeness. This is not a one-off event. It is a process that takes a lifetime and it can be difficult at times because we are so profoundly broken. But it is the NT’s consistent promise to us that if we do our part to cultivate our relationship with Jesus, we will be changed into his very likeness and with that will come a newfound sense of peace, power, and purpose for living. Are you enjoying the fruit of that promise in your life? 

And here we also see the reason why so many people found Jesus’ teachings difficult. The very idea that we can meet the God of this universe fully in Jesus of Nazareth is so offensive to some people that they will immediately be driven away from its truth. The folks of Jesus’ day were not prepared to deal with the possibility that God would finally fulfill his ancient promise to come and live with his people by becoming a human being. They wanted (and in the temple had) something sexier and more spectacular. It’s quite a stretch to think about the God of this universe, not as a brilliant and awe-inspiring presence that dazzles and overwhelms, but as a mere mortal human being. The thought of it rocked Jesus’ world and it continues to rock ours. But if we really do worship the God of this universe, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, we should expect him to rock our world, precisely because he is God and is free to manifest himself to us in any manner he chooses. The day we make God our intellectual and emotional equal is the day we stop worshiping the one true and living God and start worshiping a god of our own making. That’s why we need Jesus if we ever hope to really get to know God, at least as best as we are able.

But true as Jesus’ promises are to us and active and powerful as the Spirit is in our lives, we can get distracted and forget all that God has done for us in Christ. And of course, being the physical creatures we are, we need the physical touch for a lot of reasons, especially to help us remember important things. That is why Jesus has been reminding us to feed on his body and blood. Think about it. We have all kinds of customs and rituals that help us remember what is most important to us as individuals and families because we are so distractible. We give each other wedding rings as a tangible reminder of our marriage vows. We have family holiday traditions to help us remember the good times past and the people we love but see no longer. That’s why newly married couples sometimes have difficulties in finding the right blend of family traditions to celebrate the holidays. Who we are and where we have been are important!

That’s why Jesus gave us a meal. He wanted to give us something tangible to remember him! It has been hotly debated if Jesus is talking about the Eucharist in today’s lesson, but surely he is because we don’t find an account of the Last Supper in St. John’s gospel, at least not about Jesus passing the bread and cup and interpreting what they mean to his disciples. But here our Lord has been reminding us to feed on him so that we have life, to feed on him so that we remember that we meet God through him and find life and wholeness for which we so desperately yearn. We can’t find a much better reason to come to the Lord’s table than that!

But most of us only feed on our Lord once a week. So what about the other six days? What do we do to keep us faithful and firmly rooted in Jesus so that he will use us as visible signs of his new life and creation? St. Paul has the answer for us in today’s epistle lesson. He reminds us that we are in a state of war at all times. There are spiritual forces out there who hate us and want to destroy our faith and us, and we had better take them seriously or they will get us. Their existence is a big reason why many of us struggle in our faith or are confronted by struggles and difficulties in life. Don’t get bogged down in trying to personify these forces and don’t look for the devil under every rock. Accept that they are real and also acknowledge that dangerous as they are, they are still under God’s sovereign rule and that Christ has defeated evil and death decisively on the cross, even if that victory has not been fully consummated.  

In the interim, to help keep us faithful, St. Paul tells us to put on the armor of God. The imagery St. Paul uses is based on the armor of a Roman soldier, which was designed to be used in formation with other soldiers to put up a formidable collective shield. And that’s what we need to pay attention to here. St. Paul is telling us as the Church to put on the armor of God individually and then come together as Christ’s body so that the Spirit can use us to help shield one another in prayer, mutual Bible study, and good works. In addition to feeding on our Lord each week, we need to read the saving narrative of God’s plan to rescue his fallen world and the numerous sub-stories that make up the larger narrative. We need to pray for each other and encourage each other. We need to reach out and provide tangible help to one another and the world when we see need and can do something about it. Every time we act like Jesus in real and tangible ways, we can trust that God uses these acts to help us keep the Main Thing the main thing. 

Of course, none of this is particularly easy. If it were, and if we were not such distractible people, none of this would be necessary. But because we are at war, life isn’t always easy and we do need tangible reminders that will help us keep rooted in the life and power of Jesus. And when by God’s grace we experience his presence and power in our daily lives, even in the midst of our struggles, we will also know what it means to have Good News, now and for all eternity. 

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

Sermon originally preached on August 23, 2020. 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.

How are we to be faithful to Christ when we are so profoundly sin-sick, incapable of fixing/healing ourselves? If we rely on our own power, we will inevitably fail, and this can lead us to fall into despair and become disillusioned. For those with ears to hear, listen and understand.

Lectionary texts: Exodus 1.8-2.10; Psalm 124; Romans 12.1-8; Saint Matthew 16.13-20.

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

This morning we continue our preaching series on St. Paul’s letter to the Romans. In our epistle lesson, St. Paul urges us not to be conformed to the world but to be transformed by the renewing of our mind so that we can present our bodies as living sacrifices to God. What in the world is he talking about? Is he here exhorting us to try harder to be a good Christian or advocating for a more robust self-help program (like we need more delusional thinking)? If you heard our epistle lesson like that, you probably missed that little adverb “therefore” at the beginning. What is the therefore there for, you ask? I’m glad you did. Maybe now I can get into the heart of this sermon.

The therefore reminds us that St. Paul is not talking about human power, the power to make ourselves better, an oxymoron at best. No, St. Paul is talking here about the power of God. And this should make sense to us if we review quickly how St. Paul has gotten us to this point. Recall that in Romans 1.18-32 he talked about a good amount of wrong thinking, the kind of thinking that darkens our minds, makes us hostile to God, and begins to erase God’s image in us so that we behave more like animals than humans. It results from humankind’s universal enslavement to the power of Sin as St. Paul emphatically states in Romans 3.9. This kind of wrong thinking produces in us lusts of all kinds, malice, envy, murder, and strife. It makes us inventors of evil, faithless, heartless, and ruthless. Left to our own devices—and that’s the key phrase—we refuse to submit to God’s rule and are quick to blame others for our problems and the problems of the world, rather than acknowledging that we too are every bit as enslaved to Sin’s power as those we blame and rail against. It started with Adam and Eve and has continued unabated ever since. No wonder St. Paul talked about the futility of self-help in Romans 7! Try as we might, the human race does not have the power to fix itself from our sin-sickness and all that alienates us from God and each other.

That’s the bad news, of course, and to our detriment we avoid talking about it like the plague. After all, who wants to talk about God’s judgment on our sins? But St. Paul has also proclaimed the gospel boldly to us in this letter, reminding us that to truly be Good News for us, we have to see what he teaches as the power of God working on our behalf to heal us and reconcile us to himself and to each other. Hear him now from previous chapters in Romans: 

 Because of our faith, Christ has brought us into this place of undeserved privilege where we now stand, and we confidently and joyfully look forward to sharing God’s glory (Romans 5.2)

When we were utterly helpless, Christ came at just the right time and died for us sinners (Romans 5.6)

[S]hould we keep on sinning so that God can show us more and more of his wonderful grace? Of course not! Since we have died to sin, how can we continue to live in it?  Or have you forgotten that when we were joined with Christ Jesus in baptism, we joined him in his death? For we died and were buried with Christ by baptism. And just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glorious power of the Father, now we also may live new lives. Since we have been united with him in his death, we will also be raised to life as he was. We are no longer slaves to sin. For when we died with Christ we were set free from the power of sin. And since we died with Christ, we know we will also live with him. We are sure of this because Christ was raised from the dead (Romans 6.2-5, 6a-9b).

So now there is no condemnation for those who belong to Christ Jesus. And because you belong to him, the power of the life-giving Spirit has freed you from the power of sin that leads to death. God did what the law could not do. He sent his own Son in a body like the bodies we sinners have. And in that body God declared an end to sin’s control over us by giving his Son as a sacrifice for our sins (Romans 8.1-2, 4).

And then from last week’s epistle lesson, perhaps this most remarkable statement of all: “For God has imprisoned everyone in disobedience so he could have mercy on everyone” (Romans 11.32).

In all these statements St. Paul reveals to us the character and power of God. The operative agent is Christ, not us. In Christ’s death and resurrection, we are freed from God’s terrible but just judgment on our sins and are promised healing, reconciliation, and new life forever in God’s new heavens and earth by virtue of what Christ has done for us. Here’s what this means for us as Christians. It means that our broken minds, bodies, and relationships will be restored, partially in this life and fully in the age to come. It means God is our friend and lover, not our enemy, so that we really do have nothing to fear, not even death and dying. We have these gifts and promises, not because of who we are, but because of who God is made known supremely to us in Christ. Christ died to free us from our sins and draw us to him so that on the last day he can raise us up to everlasting life, complete with new bodies, to live in a world where there will be no more tears or suffering or injustice or fear or alienation. All that was broken will be made new. Christ keeps us united to him by the power of the Holy Spirit who makes Christ known to us. We deserve judgment and death. Instead those of us who have a relationship with Christ get mercy, pardon, and life. This is the kindness of God and the power of God at work in his world and our lives to save us from ourselves and to free us from our slavery to the power of Sin, thanks be to God! Amen?

This is why the therefore is there for. St. Paul wants to remind us again that we aren’t transformed by our power—if that were the case, he would be laying a supreme guilt trip on us in a most cruel way because we are bound to fail—but by the power of God. He reminds us that we are already new creations, people who have God’s image restored in us by virtue of Christ’s death and resurrection and the power of the Holy Spirit living in us. Yeah, I know. If you’re like me it doesn’t feel that way very often. I still am conformed to the ways of the world more than I want to be. I still get discouraged and frustrated and angry more than I want to be, but as St. Paul reminds us here, it isn’t about me. I can’t raise myself from the dead. I cannot heal my sin-sickness. Only Christ can (and does) do that in me by the power of the Spirit, and he does that in you as well. Don’t rely on your feelings as a valid basis to judge if Christ is working in you to renew your mind and transform you into the image-bearer God created you to be so that you can run his world on his behalf. Feelings in this matter are notoriously fickle and unreliable because like us, our feelings are weighed down and distorted by our sin-sickness. Instead, St. Paul encourages us to let God renew our mind so that we can think rightly and faithfully about our new status before God and what that means for the living of our mortal days with all of its flaws, imperfections, sorrows, injustices, and evil. 

So how do we do this? If St. Paul is talking about the power of God at work in us by virtue of our relationship with our crucified and risen Lord, does this mean we can just kick back, act snotty, and wait for the Lord to fully heal and transform us? I don’t think so (unless you are an incorrigible slacker like Carl or Father Bowser or my wayward Methodist friend Compton who is with us today). No, God thinks too much of us not to make us invest in his great love and mercy for us so that we can slowly be healed and transformed by Christ in the power of the Spirit. God expects us to put in our sweat equity and God will do the rest. What does that look like? It starts with worship, reading and studying Scripture, and regular partaking in the eucharist—there’s more to it than these things, but not less, and I am only going to focus on Scripture today because of time constraints. As Christians, we should be able to retain chunks of Scripture to help us in the living of our days. We should memorize and rehearse snippets from the psalms, from Proverbs, from the prophets, and from the gospels and other NT writers. As we have already seen today, there is a rich treasure of wisdom and Truth in St. Paul’s letter to the Romans. How much of it can you pull up right now to reflect on? Then of course there is 1 Corinthians 15 and Revelation 21.1-7 that talk about Christ’s resurrection and the promised new world. This should be stuff we think about, talk about, and rehearse every day. That’s our sweat equity. We see it at work in our gospel lesson. St. Peter clearly knew enough of his Scripture and had seen enough of his Lord to declare him to be God’s promised Messiah. Christ commends him by telling him that he didn’t come up with this revelation on his own. He did so by the power of God. This is what transformation looks like when God renews our minds. It’s not necessarily spectacular or sexy. It’s just real and good and healthy and wholesome; we see reality much more clearly. But as we will see next week, St. Peter quickly reverted back to the mindset of the world when he denied that his Lord would have to suffer and die. Whoever heard of a crucified Messiah?? This earned him a sharp rebuke from Christ and this poignant story reminds us that until Christ returns to finish his saving work, we must get used to living in a messy world where things are not always cut and dried, much as we would like them to be. 

So we read Scripture and worship God together and feed on our Lord’s body and blood together to open ourselves to the power of God. God will take our sweat equity and use it to further heal and transform us by renewing our minds. Here are two quick examples of how God’s transformational power might work. I’m sure you will find many parallels in your life to which you can apply this dynamic. I have a friend whose father effectively disowned him when he left home to attend college at an out of state university. Sadly, he and his dad never reconciled and his father has since died. It’s as sad a story as you will ever hear because reconciliation and redemption are no longer possible. My friend has carried his heavy burden very well but you can see the hurt bubble up from time to time and anyone with an ounce of compassion and empathy, themselves gifts from God, understands the underlying pain that continues to roil just beneath the surface and can never be adequately resolved. How can God heal that deep and awful hurt? Well, since both father and son were (and are) Christian, despite their breach, God can use the promise of full healing and restoration at the renewal of all things made possible only by their relationship with Christ who was crucified and raised from the dead to give my friend real hope (expectation) and promise. By an informed faith he can meditate on the love, mercy, and power of God made known in Christ along with God’s promise to restore all things to himself for those who are in Christ. The unresolved conflict becomes a season of hurt rather than a permanent failure with its accompanying hurt, allowing God to bear the brunt of the pain on behalf of my friend. How that will happen is not up to us nor do we have the power to effect it. But it is in God’s power made known supremely in Christ’s death and resurrection and God will use that knowledge to transform and heal my friend if my friend will let God do so. I’m not talking about a quick fix solution. I am talking about my friend reminding himself in a sustained way about the love and power of God made known in Christ and letting God start to bring about real, if only partial, healing in this mortal life. Complete healing will have to wait for God’s new world, but what a blessed hope and promise to anticipate! What hurts, heartaches, and sorrows in your life do you need to let God begin to heal (transform) by the renewal of your mind?

Or consider our upcoming elections—and you are going to hear a lot from me on this topic in the coming days because the Church needs to be bold in our leadership by living out the high standards of our gospel proclamation. Our nation is torn apart by bitterness, division, and rancor. We are quick to condemn our enemies and love to play the blame game. There are people on both sides of the divide who truly loathe their enemies and are ready to call them all kinds of vile things, sometimes even wishing for their death! This is being conformed to the ways of the world where we look to our own false righteousness instead of God’s to justify our darkened thinking and behavior. So how can the power of God renew our minds so that he can begin (or continue) to transform us back into his full image-bearers again? Consider this. What would it look like the next time we are ready to lambast our favorite political enemy if instead we reflected first on the reality that Christ died for that person too, whether he/she believes or accepts that fact or tries to live by it? What if we stopped and remembered that we too are sinners unworthy of Christ’s love but who enjoy it anyhow and have therefore been made into new creations, warts and all, because of our relationship with our crucified and risen Lord? If Christ has forgiven us, why can we not forgive our enemies in the power of the Spirit and speak kindly and/or gently about them (or simply remain quiet)? To be sure, this isn’t easy to do. But if we resolve to reflect on Christ’s love for our enemies and his command to us to forgive those who mistreat us, then we may find ourselves less willing to engage in ad hominem attacks on those whose views/behaviors disgust us. If we get to that place, we will know that God is indeed transforming us by renewing our minds. Can you imagine how differently our country would look if Christian voters resolved to open themselves to the transformative power of God to renew their minds? Can you imagine what this little parish might accomplish if we all availed ourselves to the power of God made known to us in the death and resurrection of Christ? 

This is what it means to offer our bodies, i.e., our entire selves, as living sacrifices to God. For you see, my beloved, our transformation must always lead to changed behavior, speaking, and thinking and that takes place within the framework and context of our bodies. It must mirror what we already are and what we will fully become when Christ ushers in God’s new creation. God gave us bodies and intends to raise them from the dead one day. He therefore calls us to use our bodies in his service and service to others. When we do, we are assured that we are seeing the fruit of our transformation, the power of God at work in us so that we can live to become the fully human beings that God created us to be, the people we already are because we are united with Christ. This isn’t about self-help. This is about the power of God at work in us. Rejoice and be thankful for God’s great gifts and mercies he showers on you. It may not feel like you are making any real progress. In fact, sometimes you may feel like you are actually regressing! But don’t be afraid or get discouraged. That’s your fallen self trying to prevent God from transforming you by renewing your mind. God is greater than your fear and doubt. So let us encourage each other and remind each other that we are already new creations, even when that reality is hidden from our sight. Let us also read Scripture together and serve and worship the Lord together, rejoicing that we love and serve such an amazing, generous, kind, and loving God. To him be honor, praise, and glory forever and ever. 

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

Sermon originally preached on August 18, 2013. As always it will be helpful to read the assigned texts below by clicking on or tapping their links before reading the sermon.

How can the Lord Jesus be a great divider when he came to bring peace between humans and between God and humans? Well, he divides because we live in a very sin-sick world and many are unwilling to follow Jesus by obeying him, and when that happens division occurs. It’s as simple and complex as that. For those with ears to hear, listen and understand.

Lectionary texts: Isaiah 5.1-7; Psalm 80.1-2, 9-20; Hebrews 11.29-12.2; Saint Luke 12.49-56.

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

If you have ever wondered what the modus operandi of a prophet looks like, you need to look no further than today’s OT lesson. In it we see God’s prophet taking God’s people to task for not being the people God called them to be, in this case to be doers of justice (cf. Micah 6.8). How are we to read texts like these? More importantly, how are we to read texts like these and not fall into utter despair and hopelessness? After all, are we as God’s people in Jesus Christ any less broken than God’s people in ancient Israel were? It is these questions I want us to look at briefly this morning to see what kind of answer we can glean from our texts.

You recall that last week I talked about the overall story of the Bible being a five-act play, vis-a-vis Bishop Wright’s model, and we can locate our OT lesson as being in Act 3 (Israel). I also encouraged you to look for grace notes in the midst of judgment oracles and in today’s lesson we have to look carefully for a grace note because it’s not easy to spot at first blush. We see God’s prophet Isaiah use some trickeration on God’s people Israel (Judah). Isaiah plays the part of a wandering troubadour and as he enters Jerusalem, he announces he is going to sing a love song to God’s people. We can imagine the people eagerly gathering around Isaiah to hear him sing of God’s love for them. The song starts off well enough. He tells the people about a vineyard—a well-known metaphor for God’s bride, Israel—and how God has called her into existence and tenderly cared for her over the years even though by definition a vineyard would not be able to ask for such treatment or deserve it, other than to be the beneficiary of the caretaker’s kindness and loving care (there’s the grace note; did you catch it?). So far so good.

But then Isaiah begins to speak about the caretaker’s expectations for his vineyard, i.e., for his people Israel, and here is where things start to go south. Isaiah asks why, in light of the TLC the caretaker has showered on his bride (vineyard), is it not reasonable for the caretaker to expect his vineyard to produce good fruit? Instead, however, the vineyard is only producing wild grapes—bad fruit. Isaiah’s audience would surely have understood that he was talking to them about being the people God called them to be but that clearly they were failing to live up to that calling. And if there was any doubt in their minds, Isaiah begins to speak directly to the people to confirm their suspicions. Was God to blame for their failure to respond to his call to them to bring his healing love and justice to the nations? After all, hadn’t God done all he could to care for and nurture his people? But they had not produced the fruits of their calling and now there would be terrible judgment on them and they had no one to blame but themselves.

So why the trickeration on Isaiah’s part? Isn’t it a bit unsporting of God to have his spokesman use this kind of strategy to deliver his message? Not at all, especially when we consider how none of us likes to hear hard truth about ourselves. Think of how the prophet Nathan confronted David about his adultery and murder. Nathan told David a parable about a rich man and poor shepherd, which at once aroused David’s anger and condemnation. Only then did Nathan confront him with the awful truth that David was the man. Likewise with Isaiah here. The people of Judah were not ready to hear the hard truth about themselves, that they had failed to be the people God called them to be. We see evidence of this in our psalm lesson. Writing on behalf of his people, the psalmist asks God why God has allowed foreigners to overrun his people and Promised Land. We can sense a bit of “What? You’re mad at little ole me, God? Pshaw. What have I done?” And so Isaiah had to invite his audience to sit in judgment of a third party before he could tell them about God’s hard truth and impending judgment on them. God called them to do justice, to take care of the oppressed. But instead all God saw was the rich murdering the poor for material gain and heard the agonized cry of the oppressed as they cried out to God. 

If you want to understand the prophetic view of justice, here it is. It isn’t Lady Justice blindfolded, holding balanced scales. Justice in God’s view is about action, about advocating for the powerless whenever and wherever we reasonably can, just the way Jesus exhorted us to do when he told the parable of the Good Samaritan. And as we think about God’s stern warning of judgment on his people, we cannot help but wonder how it will go for us. After all, do we advocate consistently (or at all) for the powerless in our speech and actions? Do we love to be merciful all the time? Are we always walking humbly with our God? The answer, of course, is no. And so we must ask ourselves if we too must face God’s righteous judgment on us.

Well, yes we do have to face that judgment unless something radically changes. We are too profoundly broken and self-centered to heal ourselves. But just when we are tempted to cry out in hopeless despair over our situation, we hear God speaking a further word to us, a word of hope and good news. The very love of God that grieved over his stubborn and rebellious people is so faithful and strong that it dared to become embodied in Jesus of Nazareth, to bear the baptism of fire, a symbol of God’s judgment on us, so that we do not have to bear it ourselves, and so be healed and reconciled to God, thanks be to God! And as the writer of Hebrews hints at in our epistle lesson, in Jesus’ Resurrection we are given a glimpse of the world to come, of God’s new creation in which God will finally put all things to rights and heal all of our wounds, banishing evil from his good creation forever. This is the new Promised Land we are to inherit as Jesus’ people and it God’s free gift to us in Jesus, accepted through faith. More about that anon.

But being Jesus’ people comes at a cost. I am not talking about the gifts of mercy, forgiveness, and eternal life because they are freely given. But accepting God’s gifts to us by faith requires that we come and die as Bonhoeffer put it. Like ancient Israel, we are called as Jesus’ followers to work to bring about God’s kingdom on earth as in heaven by bringing God’s healing love to all people without exception. To do this requires that we put to death our sinful nature with the help of the Spirit so that we are equipped to do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with our God. It means we embody kingdom values in a world that is increasingly hostile to those values. Whether it be in the area of economic or social justice or sexual ethics or how to treat each other as part of Christ’s body, the Church, Jesus calls us to embody the love and values of Scripture that he himself embodied. Moreover, as Jesus makes clear elsewhere, he expects us to be his followers in deed, not simply word (cf. Matthew 7.15-27; Luke 13.23-30).

And this is where it can get really costly because as our Lord reminds us in our gospel lesson, when we choose to follow him and adjust our thinking, values, and lifestyle accordingly to align them with God’s good will and intentions for us as his image-bearing creatures, we are going to meet opposition and sometimes outright persecution. Sadly, not everyone will accept Jesus’ offer of new life. Not everyone will embrace life as God intends for us to live it and when that happens there will be division and conflict, even among families and even among churches! But we are to take heart and hope when we suffer for our Lord because Jesus himself tells us he was willing and eager to suffer for us so that we could be reconciled to God and become citizens of God’s promised new creation. Evil remains alive and well right now and that often puzzles and perplexes us. But it is the consistent testimony of the New Testament writers and countless Christians over time and culture, that in Jesus’ death and resurrection, God has overcome the evil of this world and launched his promised new creation. However, because God’s new world is only partially established and not yet fully consummated, this takes faith on our part.

Faith, as we read in last week’s epistle lesson is, “The assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen” (Hebrews 11.1). This means, of course, that faith is much more than wishful thinking. It means we have to use our brains and find examples of the things hoped for, i.e., God’s in-breaking kingdom on earth as in heaven under Jesus’ rule (the new creation), so that we can have confidence in the veracity of our faith and act accordingly. Put another way, if we are not convinced that we have been reconciled to God through Jesus’ death on the cross, if we are not convinced that in Jesus’ Resurrection we have seen the first-fruits of God’s promise to abolish evil and death, we would be out of our minds to act as Jesus calls us to act. If we do not believe in the promise of new creation, then why would we continue to kick against the pricks and act in ways that engender the world’s opposition and hatred? If this world is all that there is, we’d better get with the program and do as the world does, baby! Otherwise, time’s a-wasting and we are simply playing the fool.

But like Moses who had the faithful audacity to lead his people out of Egypt against all odds or like Daniel who had the faithful audacity to remain faithful to his God, even in exile, we too have the faithful audacity to live our lives in the manner of Jesus in our world today, despite its increasing hatred toward us. And just as the examples in Hebrews surely raised the derision and scorn of people living around them, surely when we choose to live faithfully to Jesus we will arouse the same kind of scorn and derision. This is why it is so important for us to remember, to remember God’s faithful acts in history on behalf of his people and to remember the lives of faithful people, both inside and outside the Bible. Doing so reminds us we are part of a bigger project and that our job is to be faithful builders for, and not fulfillers of, God’s kingdom. It will remind us to keep our eyes on the prize, even in the midst of our suffering, and it will also remind us that we are not in this project all alone. Others have gone before us, especially Jesus, who now sits at God’s right hand—New Testament code for Jesus reigning as Lord of this universe—ready to hear our intercessions as we cry out to him in our struggles to be faithful to his call to us to be his people and to help us endure opposition when it inevitably comes. When our faith is bolstered like this, we will be like Peter and John, who rejoiced that they were counted worthy enough to suffer for their Lord after they had received a severe flogging (Acts 5.27-42). They rejoiced because like us, they knew that suffering for Jesus meant they were one of his people. And being one of Jesus’ people means they (and we) have Good News, now and for all eternity. 

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

Sermon originally preached on August 16, 2015. As always it will be helpful to read the assigned texts below by clicking on or tapping their links before reading the sermon.

Are you wise or foolish? If you’re honest with yourself you will use the overall fruit of your life, good or bad, to answer the question with integrity. How you answer will determine fundamentally if you are happy or miserable in this life. Judging by the alarming number of people who display unhinged behavior these days and from whom nothing good comes out of them, the number of fools increases with each passing day. Please don’t be one of these poor souls. For those with ears to hear, listen and understand.

Lectionary texts: 1 Kings 2.10-12; 3.3-14; Psalm 111; Ephesians 5.15-20; John 6.51-58.

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

Our lessons today tackle the biblical ideas of wisdom and foolishness. What does Scripture mean when it talks about wisdom and foolishness? What does that look like? Why should we give a fig about either? It is these questions I want us to look at briefly this morning.

Before we look at our lessons, it is helpful for us to have the Big Picture view in mind when it comes to the biblical notions of wisdom and foolishness. In general, as the psalmist proclaims (quoting Proverbs 1.7) the beginning of wisdom is fear of the Lord. Those who have good understanding live by this. And as Proverbs adds, fools despise wisdom and instruction. Scripture further distinguishes between godly wisdom and human wisdom. Godly wisdom produces a healthy fear of the Lord, not where we are terrified of God but where we realize God is God and we are not. Such wisdom produces a pattern of living that is consistent with living life fully in the manner God intends for us to live as his image-bearing creatures charged with caring for God’s good creation. Among others, it helps us discern evil from good and ultimately allows us to conduct our lives in the manner of Jesus. It is emphatically not about our ability to follow a set of arbitrary rules. Keep this in mind as we talk about what godly wisdom looks like on the ground, especially when we look at our epistle lesson. 

Human wisdom, on the other hand, is based on our desire to play God. It is typically rooted in our pride and self-centeredness. We see it emerge in the garden of Eden when Adam and Eve listen to the tempter: “Did God really say…?”. And so our spiritual ancestors ate of the fruit from the tree of knowledge in a futile attempt to determine their own happiness. They weren’t content to follow God’s good and wise instructions and the ensuing freedom that always produce contentment, wholeness, peace, meaning, purpose, and happiness when followed. The folly of human wisdom is best seen in its failure to recognize our crucified and risen Lord, Jesus of Nazareth, the very embodiment of the living God, for who he is (cf. 1 Corinthians 1.20-25). Think how many today scoff at the notion that a meaningful and happy life, as well as salvation, can be found only in a real and living relationship with our risen Lord, vainly searching for all kinds of human-devised solutions that are bound to fail because they are not anchored in God, our only source of happiness and real life. It is enough to break the heart, especially when we consider the words of Jesus in our gospel lesson this morning: “Very truly, I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you.” 

No, as the columnist Michael Cohen brilliantly argued in a recent piece, we in the west have spent the last 250 years or so trying to find happiness by tearing down all the old constraints and guidelines of religious morality in a misguided effort to become more “free” (a top priority of enlightened thinking), and we are utterly confounded when some of our youth reject their newly-won freedoms for the tyranny of ISIS.

But as Scripture reminds us, there is a problem with notions of freedom rooted in human wisdom. We are so inherently flawed that we really don’t know what is good for us. But being the wise fools we are, we don’t believe this and have rejected the godly wisdom of St. Paul, who correctly understood that only when we are free from our slavery to sin—something that is possible only in and through Jesus Christ, so that we are free to follow his pattern of living—will we ever be truly free and happy (cf. Gal 5.1). And the result of our increasingly “free” society based on human wisdom? More alienation, more meaninglessness, more loneliness, more strife and enmity, more desperate searching for new meaning and purpose of living. We know in our bones (if we are honest with ourselves) there is more to life than the unfettered freedom to pursue our own fallen desires. And yet we continue to pursue those desires relentlessly.

With this in mind, we are now ready to see what light our lessons can shed on the twin notions of wisdom and foolishness. In our OT lesson, we see young King Solomon praying for God’s wisdom. Solomon’s ascent to the throne was anything but routine and peaceful. He emerged only after a deadly struggle with his own family, part of God’s curse on his father David’s sin of adultery and murder that we looked at a few weeks ago. Solomon had relied largely on his own wisdom to gain the throne, not God’s, but now apparently the young king is humble enough to know that he’s in over his head and needs the help, guidance, wisdom, and power of One greater than him if he is to rule God’s people wisely. In effect, Solomon asked God for the ability to live his life patterned after God’s own life so that God’s thoughts permeated Solomon’s thoughts, decision-making, and leadership. Is it any wonder God granted Solomon his request? Should we wonder any less that God would answer our own sincere requests to live wisely by being transformed in our minds and thinking (cf. Romans 12.2)? As Solomon demonstrated, once his mind was transformed by God, his behavior followed. But once Solomon decided to rely on his own wisdom, well, not so much. Apostasy and idolatry followed.

From this story we see that if we are to pursue godly wisdom so that we live our lives in ways that are pleasing to God, you know, by practicing justice, loving mercy (i.e., loving others as ourselves), and walking humbly with our God (i.e., loving God with our whole being) (Micah 6.8), humility is the essential prerequisite. We have to be humble enough to recognize our own condition as being fatally flawed, and that we are not in the position to fix ourselves so that we reach out to the One who can fix and heal us. Life is complicated and we are mortal and finite. Despite what we might think, we are in it over our heads and need help from our Creator who really does know us and knows what is best for us. This realization comes only through humility.

St. Paul likewise urges us to practice godly wisdom in our epistle lesson. Be careful how you live, he says, because the times are evil. Live wisely and make the most of your time. The Greek he uses means literally to buy back your time. Here St. Paul is reminding us that life is not what God intended for us originally. It has been hijacked and snatched away from us by the dark powers and our own fallen nature, and he urges us to get the time we have back under our control. Why? So we can find real meaning, purpose of living, and contentment in our lives.

So how do we take back our time so that we find meaning, purpose, and joy? As we have seen the past two weeks, St. Paul has already told us how: cultivate the Spirit’s presence in you and let him heal and transform you so that you can live as God’s people. In today’s lesson, St. Paul expands on this, adding another dimension to his teaching. He tells us to embrace God’s wisdom. The Greek St. Paul uses here indicates that he sees this as an ongoing process, not a one-time event. Before we look specifically at what St. Paul says, we need a word of caution. I know that when I was a young man, I would read passages like this and roll my eyes. Don’t get drunk, don’t be sexually immoral, don’t party as the pagans do. In other words, I read passages like these with the understanding that St. Paul definitely didn’t want me to have a good time! All these dos and don’ts. All these rules to follow. But I knew better. Oh wait…! My point is this. If we read passages like today’s and see them as nothing more than rules to be followed, and not very fun ones at that, we are applying human wisdom and totally miss what St. Paul is telling us.

St. Paul and the other NT writers want Jesus’ body parts, you and me, to learn to take back the time that’s been hijacked from us so that we can learn to live in ways that are not only pleasing to God but pleasing to us. To do that, we must learn to live wisely, by God’s wisdom, not ours. And so here St. Paul tells us not to get drunk but to be filled by the Spirit. The Greek St. Paul uses indicates that while this is a command he wants us to follow, it isn’t something we can do in our own power. As we have seen, we do not have access to the Spirit until the Spirit chooses to live in us, and that is always God’s initiative. So here St. Paul is telling us that once we have been blessed with the Spirit, we are to do the things we need to do to allow the Spirit to do his healing and transforming work in us. In other words, what St. Paul is telling us to do is to cooperate with God so that God can do his thing in and for us. St. Paul understands that the spiritual world, like the physical world, abhors a vacuum. We must be filled with something, either good or bad (cf. St. Luke 11.24-26). St. Paul has nothing against wine or drinking. Neither does the Bible. What St. Paul (and Scripture in general) is adamantly against is drunkenness. Why? Because alcohol controls us, and usually not in good ways when we are drunk. It controls us indirectly by lowering our inhibitions so that we might say and do things we would never dream of saying or doing when sober. I know in my own experience, some of the things I have done about which I am most ashamed, I’ve done while being under the influence of alcohol: fighting, sexual immorality, evil speaking about others, boasting, selfish acts, and the like (cf. Galatians 5.19-21). By contrast, I’ve never done anything under the influence of the Holy Spirit about which I have been ashamed. Or consider the two daughters of Lot, who by using worldly wisdom, decided they needed to ensure their family line’s continuity after the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, and so devised a plan to get their father Lot drunk so that they achieved their goal by committing incest with him. Do you think Lot in his sober mind would have entertained such a scheme? If so, why the need to get him drunk? The writer of Genesis reports this, but certainly does not approve of this behavior (Genesis 19.30-36)! So St. Paul is warning us that if we want to be under the Spirit’s influence so that we can live wisely and take back our time, living in ways pleasing to God and building godly contentment in us, we must do things to cultivate the Spirit’s presence. This is a far cry from counseling us to follow the rules!

What are some of those things that can cultivate the Spirit’s presence? Prayer, as our OT lesson teaches. Reading and appropriating Scripture, as St. Paul teaches. Worship, praise and singing, along with partaking in the eucharistic feast each week, as our epistle and gospel less-ons teach. Doing these things help the Spirit to do his transforming work in us so that we can build each other up instead of engaging in thinking and behaviors that tear each other down.

In sum, the world, full of, um, its human wisdom, tells us to seek happiness by following our own desires and giving us the requisite freedom to do so. And so we seek to find happiness in booze, sex, greed, ambition et al. The result? We fail to develop meaningful relationships with God and others. Our drunken euphoria is replaced by a raging hangover in the morning. Our satiated libidos are counteracted by the loneliness and isolation we feel as the result of affairs or watching porn or one night stands. We seek to satisfy our desire for the perfect spouse by marrying, divorcing, and remarrying in an endless cycle instead of finding the joy and fulfillment that comes from a husband and wife working through married life for 30 years, like the Collins’s have, and overcoming all kinds of obstacles, things which while difficult and unpleasant at times, help us develop the kind of true and meaningful relationships we crave. 

By contrast, godly wisdom recognizes that God created us to be his wise stewards and reflectors of his image and glory out into creation. It sees the massive importance of relationships, both with God and others, and understands that this takes hard work, humility, discipline, and commitment. The world’s wisdom will scoff at all this. In fact, they will hate it and us. They will call us fools and worse, and that is why we must be prepared to suffer for the Name. But who knows better about what it takes to make us happy than our good, wise, and all-knowing Creator? Augustine recognized this when he wrote his famous statement that, “Our hearts are restless, O God, until they find rest in you” (Confessions 1.1).

The choice is ours. Living our lives consistently after Jesus (notice I did not say in a mistake-free manner) will produce godly contentment and purpose of living that will surely satisfy us forever. We do that whenever we embody God’s love for all people, pursue justice, work for peace, resolve to be a servant to others rather than try to lord ourselves over them, and whenever we are kind, tenderhearted, generous, forgiving, and the rest (cf. Galatians 5.22-25). Learning to live our lives after God’s own life in which God’s wisdom leads, guides, and counsels us, so that we become Christ’s beacons of light to a world darkened by sin and confusion is surely the hardest thing we will ever do. But nothing worthwhile ever comes easily. Following Jesus is the only way we will ever learn to know real meaning and purpose for living. 

As a parish, then, let us resolve afresh today to live as God’s wise image-bearing stewards, faithfully imitating our Lord Jesus Christ and relying confidently on his power to form us into the fully human beings he created us to be. And as Jesus does his healing and transformative work in and through us in the power of the Spirit, let us confidently, boldly, and joyfully proclaim to the world and each other, that we are wise enough to know we really do have Good News, now and for all eternity. To him be honor, praise, and glory forever and ever.

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

Sermon originally preached on August 17, 2014. As always, it will be helpful to read the assigned texts by clicking on or tapping their links below before reading the sermon.

Here I address the issue many struggle with: Is God Present and active in his world or is God an absentee landlord? How we answer this question will make a massive difference in whether we have a real and life-sustaining faith. For those with ears to hear, listen and understand.

Lectionary texts: Genesis 45.1-15; Psalm 133; Romans 11.1-2a, 29-32; Matthew 15.10-28.

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

In all of our lessons this morning, we are confronted with the strange but ultimately trustworthy ways of God and his providence over the affairs of his creation and creatures. What might we learn from these stories to help us better understand God’s ways revealed to us so that our faith and hope in God might be bolstered and we can live without being afraid?

In our OT lesson we see the strange outworking of God’s will in the life of Joseph. Bishop Stephen touched on some of the highlights last week but it will be helpful for us to review Joseph’s story so that we can better understand how God works in the lives of his people. You recall that Joseph was sold into slavery by his own brothers, who then lied to their father Jacob about Joseph’s fate. Sadly, we get this because we’ve all had to deal with jealousy, competition, pride, anger, and dishonesty on a regular basis. Sometimes we are the ones who act this way.

Joseph was eventually sold to Potiphar, an officer of Egypt’s Pharaoh, and we wonder how that could have possibly happened. He quickly found favor with Potiphar and was put in charge of Potiphar’s household because as the narrator tells us, the Lord blessed Joseph—even as a slave. But Joseph’s good fortune didn’t last long because Potiphar’s wife came on to him and when Joseph refused her sexual advances, she lied to her husband about the whole sordid thing and Joseph found himself prison, lucky (or was it luck?) that he hadn’t been killed. 

Joseph’s fortunes didn’t seem to get any better while in prison. Despite helping one of Pharaoh’s chief servants who had managed to get himself imprisoned along with Joseph, the servant forgot to plead for Joseph’s release when the servant gained his freedom and Joseph languished in prison another two years. Finally the servant remembered Joseph and he was summoned to interpret a troubling dream of Pharaoh. Before we go any further, let’s stop and put ourselves in Joseph’s shoes. We’ve been sold into slavery by our brothers. The wife of our master falsely accuses us of sexual advances when we are totally innocent and we are thrown in prison to languish there. While imprisoned, we help a fellow prisoner out and he promptly forgets us when he is released, despite our plea to him to intercede on our behalf to the country’s leader. Are you feeling the love and providence of God? But that’s part of the point.

Now we come to our story today. Joseph has become Pharaoh’s right-hand man and has been reunited with his brothers. We don’t know how much time has passed but it is not unreasonable to think that it has been several years because the brothers do not recognize Joseph. And this is where the story gets really interesting. We might expect Joseph to be bitter toward both God (how could you let this happen to me, God?) and his brothers (you sold me as a slave, you @#$%*!) and want to exact a full measure of revenge on them. But this is not Joseph’s demeanor at all. To the contrary, he tells them he is not angry at them because these events were all God’s doing to preserve life (cf. Genesis 50.15ff)! What is going on here?

Or consider the story of Esther and Mordecai, a Jewish girl and her cousin who were living in post-Babylonian exile in Persia. By a series of remarkable “coincidences” Esther is made queen and Mordecai also finds favor in King Xerxes’ sight. But almost immediately both are confronted by the wicked Haman who hates their people and tricks Xerxes into issuing a decree to effectively exterminate God’s people. Again, by a series of remarkable events and “coincidences” Haman’s wickedness comes back on his own head and God’s people are not only saved but prosper (Xerxes, e.g., can’t sleep one night and this triggers a chain of events that leads to Haman’s downfall and Mordecai’s vindication). You will search the book of Esther in vain for God’s name. It is not there in the Protestant version of Scripture. But the writer surely wants us to see God’s presence and guidance in the “coincidences” and events as they unfold in the story to protect God’s people.

And here is the main point of these stories. Despite human wickedness and rebellion, despite how things seem to us from our limited perspective, God is firmly in control of things and uses even human evil and rebelliousness to advance his plan to heal and rescue his world and its creatures created good but badly corrupted by human sin and rebellion. The story of Joseph is ultimately about the story of God’s faithfulness to his promise to Abraham to use Abraham and his descendants, the people of Israel, to heal and bless his sin-sick world and its creatures. God made that covenant with Abraham and the rest of the story of the Bible is about how God has worked out his covenant promises despite human rebellion and unfaithfulness! 

Not only is God faithful to his covenant promises to heal and redeem us, God has the power and the will to overcome any and every opposition to it. As Joseph would tell his brothers later, “You intended evil for me but God intended it for good ” (Genesis 50.20). God knew a great famine was coming, a famine that had the potential to wipe out his people Israel before God could use them to fulfill his covenant promises to Abraham, and so he sent Joseph ahead to prepare for that famine, which Joseph did. Likewise with the story of Esther. Had Haman prevailed in his wickedness, God’s people Israel would have been destroyed and God’s covenant promises would have gone unfulfilled. But God simply would not allow that to happen because God is a God who is utterly trustworthy and faithful to his promises, and who is intimately involved in our lives. Notice carefully the dynamic in these stories: God working through humans, willing or otherwise. From our perspective, we can see only humans at work.

Not only that, God called his people Israel to come to Egypt so that he could ultimately demonstrate a mighty act of deliverance on their behalf. The Exodus is still the defining event for Jews to this day. We’ll hear that story beginning next week. But for right now, the story of Joseph is all about God’s faithfulness to his promises and his called-out people, you and me, and God will not allow anything to prevent his plan to heal and redeem the world through his people from succeeding. As we have seen, this is not always obvious to us. Perhaps it rarely is. That is why we must keep reading stories like these to keep reminding ourselves of the truth they teach about God’s love, faithfulness, and providence in our lives and history. 

We see a similar dynamic in our epistle lesson this morning where St. Paul is finishing up his complex musings about the fate of God’s people Israel. We have seen that St. Paul genuinely feared that those Jews who did not believe Jesus to be their Lord and Messiah would be cut off from God’s promises. But this created an obvious dilemma for St. Paul. How could the very people God called to extend his blessings to the nations of the world be cut off from God? This would make God a liar and show God to ultimately be unfaithful to his covenant promises. What’s the answer? “God’s gifts and promises are irrevocable,” says St. Paul (do you believe that?). So God has imprisoned all in disobedience so that God might show mercy to all. Say what? 

To understand this we have to summarize St. Paul’s previous arguments. St. Paul has argued elsewhere in Romans 9-11 that God used Israel’s disobedience in rejecting Jesus as their Messiah as the vehicle to rescue the Gentile nations. The Gentiles, whose disobedience God used in his mercy to call Israel into existence to make them his own in the first place (Genesis 12.1-3; Romans 9.4-5), were now offered mercy through their faith in Jesus so that they could be grafted into the olive branch that was the true remnant of Israel, defined by St. Paul as those Jews and Gentiles who believed that Jesus was their true Messiah. And God would use the believing Gentiles to offer mercy to his people Israel by making them jealous so they would return to him by believing in Jesus. So it was through everyone’s respective disobedience that God was able to offer mercy to all those who would accept it, both Jew and Gentile.  

To us who are on the ground, this logic might seem convoluted and even tortuous. We  ask why God would work like that. We might even add that from all appearances it doesn’t look as if God’s plan is working all that well. But here again, we are confronted with the consistent witness that God is in charge and we are to relax. At the end of the day, we are not God. So who are we to challenge God’s plan and his manner of fulfilling his covenant promises ultimately through Jesus the Messiah? To be certain we do not always understand God’s ways. In fact, we only understand that which God chooses to reveal to us. But this begs the question. Do we  believe God is good to his word to heal and redeem us through the death and resurrection of Jesus and God’s sending the Spirit to live with us in the midst of our often chaotic lives or not?

This leads us to our gospel lesson where we see Jesus hinting at the strange and often puzzling ways that God works. He has just sparred with the Pharisees about ritual purity. The issue for Jesus is about heart health. What makes us holy and therefore fit to stand before the perfect and holy God? The Pharisees argued that it was ritual and works based on the law of Moses. Not so, says Jesus. It is not what you put into your body that makes you clean or unclean. It’s what comes out of your mouth because that is indicative of what is in your heart (the essential you). Jesus does not offer a remedy for the condition he has diagnosed. But here again if we follow the story to the end we will have our answer and discover perhaps the most astonishing and strange outworking of God’s love and grace because we see that Jesus himself is the ultimate remedy to our sin-sickness. We are washed clean by his blood shed for us and healed by his body broken for us, and we continue to partake in God’s gracious act of healing and redemption when we come to the Lord’s Table every week to partake in the eucharist. 

Moreover, we are given the Holy Spirit to dwell within us to help us learn holy lifestyles so that what comes out of our mouth will sooner or later become more edifying than not. For many of us this takes a lifetime to achieve and no one ever gets it entirely right. But that is not the point. The point is we are healed and reconciled in and through Jesus’ death on the cross. This in itself is far from obvious and this is the foolishness of God about which St. Paul speaks in 1 Corinthians 1.18-31. Those who are hostile to God’s kingdom and hold an opposing worldview mock us and ask how God could have healed and redeemed and forgiven us through the suffering of Jesus. How could God have defeated evil on the cross? Jesus was executed. The bad guys won! God didn’t rescue his people in the way an all-powerful God should act to destroy his enemies and so rid the world of evil in the manner they demand. So it is foolishness.

But no. Now we are back to Joseph’s story. What the dark powers and their minions intended for evil, God intended for good. To be sure, the cross would have been an everlasting symbol of shame and defeat had it not been for the resurrection of Jesus with its foretaste of the culmination of God’s covenant promise to heal and redeem his world through Israel embodied in the one faithful Israelite, Jesus. I’m talking of course about the New Creation and that is why we as Christians must always be resurrection people. The extent we can appropriate the resurrection and make it our living reality is the extent we can live as people who do not fear and who have real hope, even in times of great suffering, because we believe that God uses even our suffering to draw us closer to him so that he can use us to heal and bless his world, a world redeemed ultimately by Jesus’ death and resurrection. Let the church say, “Amen!”

Notice this same dynamic was at work in Joseph’s story. God’s plan was not obvious to Joseph’s brothers and they were constantly afraid. God’s plan was made clear to Joseph and he was not afraid and never lost his faith in God, despite the substantial suffering he endured during his life. In fact, Joseph’s sufferings apparently helped bolster his faith because in his suffering Joseph was able to discern the will and purpose of God, strange and wonderful as the out-working of God’s purposes were and are.

These lessons about God’s sovereignty and covenant faithfulness can help us as we are confronted by all kinds of evil in our life, from the terrible news around the world to the trials and tribulations we are currently enduring. All these things can make us fearful or angry or doubtful (or all of the above). But the consistent message of Scripture is that we are not to be afraid because we worship a God who is bigger and more powerful than the sin and evil that bedevil us and his world. We are not promised immunity from suffering, but we are promised power and redemption and healing because God has not abandoned us and is always true to his word. 

What is it that you are struggling with right now? Whatever it is, keep these stories in mind as you bring your hurts and fears to the Lord Jesus in prayer. Don’t misunderstand. I am not suggesting any of this will be easy or straightforward. But keep wrestling. Don’t give up. Ever. Remember that you might not see your prayers answered for some time. Joseph’s surely weren’t. Perhaps your prayers will never be answered as you desire. But it is precisely at this point that you must remember that you are one of God’s people in Jesus and God will not let you ultimately be destroyed or separated from him because his steadfast love endures forever as does his faithfulness to his people. You are greatly loved by God and you have the cross, the resurrection with its promise of New Creation, and the power of the Spirit as living witnesses to this truth. So embrace the promise, despite all the mysterious and apparently ambiguous ways of God, and fear not. God is firmly in charge and you are always within his healing love and embrace, even when it is not self-evident to you. And if you know this, you will know you 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 August 12, 2018. As always, it will be helpful to read the assigned texts by clicking on or tapping their links below before reading the sermon. What do you do when disaster strikes you or your loved ones? Having a real relationship with the living Christ does not make us immune for life’s sufferings and hardships. What it does is give us power to persevere and overcome. For these with ears to hear, listen and understand.

Lectionary texts: 2 Samuel 18.5-9, 15, 31-33; Psalm 130; Ephesians 4.25-5.2; John 6.35, 41-51.

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

“Out of the depths, O Lord, I cry to you.” How many of us have prayed this prayer in one form or another in our lives? Like King David in our OT lesson, we are often afflicted by tragedy and other darkness. As Christians, what should be our response? Does the Bible have anything to say about the despair we all feel from time to time? This is what I want us to look at today.

So what can we learn from our psalm lesson this morning, with its cry of despair along with its embedded hope? As we read in our OT lesson, if David didn’t actually pray this prayer, he surely felt its emotion as he grieved the death of his beloved son. Likewise with us. While we may not have lost children to violent death, we have suffered betrayal and loss and hurt and sickness. We have been afflicted by fear over our health, our financial security, the uncertainty of living in a world going increasingly mad by the day, and by the unknowns in our life that afflict and oppress us. We may not have prayed Psalm 130 explicitly, but we understand the despair contained in it all too well. So what can this psalm teach us?

First, it reminds us that our cries of despair are not signs of faithlessness. Some of us believe that to have feelings of fear and anger and despair over the darkness and evil in our lives are signs that we don’t trust God. But that belief would surprise the psalmists who wrote prayers like the one in our lesson this morning. Rather, our cries of despair indicate a much-needed humility that recognizes we do not have the power to overcome everything that life throws our way and that we do need to cry out to the One who has the power to make all things right. Just as Jesus rebuked the crowds in our gospel lesson for their hard-hearted rejection of how God operated in their lives, the psalmist acknowledges that we are incapable of solving all our problems and must turn to God with a humble trust to rescue us when life overwhelms us. That is the essence of real faith. This is not easy for us to do because we much prefer our own delusional narratives that make us equal or superior to God. 

Second, the psalmist reminds us that Sin and the evil it has unleashed in God’s good world are at the root of all that afflicts us and here we must be very careful. The psalmist is not saying that all that afflicts and oppresses us is our fault. As we saw last week, while God forgives our sins, sometimes God allows the consequences of our sin to remain like he did with David, and we saw that tragically played out in our OT lesson. So sometimes the darkness in our lives that causes us to despair is caused by our own sin and folly. But as the book of Job powerfully reminds us, sometimes the affliction we suffer is not our fault. Mysteriously and enigmatically, sometimes really bad things happen to innocent people. For example, innocents are in the wrong place at the wrong time. Terrible accidents happen that cause permanent wounds and alter lives forever. Innocent babies are born with horrible defects and deadly diseases. Whether we are responsible for that which afflicts us or not, the fact remains that we live in a sin-sick and evil-infested world and we are all afflicted by that, directly or otherwise. The psalmist recognizes correctly that only when Sin and Evil are properly dealt with by God can we expect to be truly healed and liberated from all that makes us despair. That is why we cry out to God from the depths, i.e., when we are overwhelmed, because we realize that only God has the power to deal with the darkness of Sin and the evil it unleashes. More about that in a moment.

Third, we need to be careful that we don’t misunderstand the key terms of hope and waiting on God contained in our psalm. As we have seen before, hope as it is used in both the OT and NT is more than an attitude. It’s much more than keeping good thoughts. Hope as the psalmists and NT writers use it is better translated as a confident expectation. Both terms require an object: We expect something or wait for someone. And so just as a guard waits for the morning to come, and with it an end to the dangers and threats of the night, so does the psalmist wait for the Lord to act on his behalf. 

And while there is an attitude of patience in our psalm, we must not be misled by its implications. While we might think that waiting patiently suggests a calmness or having a mellow attitude, this is not the attitude of the OT and NT writers. For them, waiting is impatient and urgent. Listen to them now (all translations from the NLT).

I am sick at heart. How long, O Lord, until you restore me? (Ps 6.3); O Lord, how long will you forget me? Forever? How long will you look the other way?/How long must I struggle with anguish in my soul, with sorrow in my heart every day? How long will my enemy have the upper hand? (Ps 13.1-2); How long, O Lord, will you look on and do nothing? Rescue me from their fierce attacks. Protect my life from these lions! (Ps 35.17);  How long, O God, will you allow our enemies to insult you? Will you let them dishonor your name forever? (Ps 74.10); O Lord, how long will you be angry with us? Forever? How long will your jealousy burn like fire? (Ps 79.5); O Lord, how long will this go on? Will you hide yourself forever? How long will your anger burn like fire? (Ps 89.46); O Lord, come back to us! How long will you delay? Take pity on your servants! (Ps 90.13); How long, O Lord? How long will the wicked be allowed to gloat? (Ps 94.3); How long must I wait? When will you punish those who persecute me? (Ps 119.84). 

Do you hear and feel the sense of urgency and impatience for God to act on behalf of his people who cry out to him from the depths? Now listen to these final two verses of the NT. 

The one who testifies to these things [Jesus] says, “Surely I am coming soon.” Amen. Come, Lord Jesus! [And until you do, t]he grace of the Lord Jesus be with all the saints. Amen (Rev 22.20-21, NRSV). 

St. John has just finished recounting the vision given him in Revelation regarding how God will finally defeat Satan and his minions, i.e., the forces of evil, both spiritual and human, so we are meant to read these closing words with impatient longing and expectation. Of course there would be no impatient expectation if God were not faithful to his promises and/or lacked the power to deliver. Thus when we are overwhelmed by the darkness in our lives that afflicts or oppresses us, we too are called to have the same impatient longing for God to act on our behalf. This is part of living out our faith.

I can hear some of you grumbling right now. That’s all well and good, Father Maney, but here’s a newsflash for you. God doesn’t always answer our desperate prayers. We or our loved ones don’t always get healed. Injustice still runs rampant in our lives and society. The wicked seem to be having a field day mocking God and his word. I prayed for a job and didn’t get it. There’s much more but you get the point.

All of this is true, my snarky ones. Sometimes God seemingly doesn’t answer our prayers, at least in the immediate way we ask him, and all this remains an impenetrable mystery for us. I do not know why that is because God has chosen not to reveal why he sometimes acts while at other times he apparently doesn’t. But in acknowledging there is the mystery of unanswered prayer, as faithful Christians, we must also acknowledge that God answers far more prayers than he apparently doesn’t, and we must be thankful for that. Whatever the reasons for unanswered prayer, they remain above our pay grade and we must therefore have enough humility and wisdom to trust God’s promises to heal and redeem us, believing that God can, does, and will act on our behalf to answer our prayers uttered from the depths of despair. To be able to do this, the biblical writers exhort us to remember God’s goodness, faithfulness, mercy, and love for us, as well as God’s ability to act on behalf of God’s people (cf. Psalm 77).

And now we are ready to turn to our gospel and epistle lessons because they provide us with the hope needed to deal with the darkness that afflicts us. They remind us of what God is doing about it all, regardless of whether we get the hoped-for response to our prayers. As Jesus reminded the crowds, God was not at their beck and call, nor is he at ours. God did not call them (or us) because we are special or somehow deserving of God’s love and mercy. We’re not, much as we love to think we are. Nobody is. And because all are hopelessly sin-sick and incapable of self-healing, we are utterly dependent on God to act on our behalf to heal and restore us to health. And how has God chosen to do that? By becoming human to die for our sins, to execute his justice on himself. It is God who calls us, not the other way around. And only God has the power to heal us from our internal sickness and external afflictions. This is why the Father sent the Son, because only in and through the Son do we find God and the resulting healing and redemption we so desperately seek. And while the claim of Jesus is exclusive (only he can save because only he has seen the Father and knows the Father’s will), the invitation to be healed (saved) is open to everyone. God calls us, pulls us, and cajoles us to him. God invites us to know Jesus because only then can we have eternal life. In turn, Jesus promises to raise up those who believe in him—those who believe that Jesus is the only way to God and that only in his Name is there salvation and forgiveness of sins—on the last day. That is why Jesus is the true bread of life who came down from heaven (who came from God). He has given his body and blood for the life of the world. In other words, in his death, Jesus has broken the power of Evil over us and redeemed us from our slavery to Sin and the death that results. Amen?

Our Lord said something similar to Martha and Mary when he came to raise Lazarus from the dead and give us a foretaste of his own resurrection. He didn’t answer their why questions (why didn’t you come earlier to heal our brother, Lord?). Instead, Jesus gave them an answer that, while demanding patient (and sometimes impatient) waiting and expectation, was ultimately more satisfying. Jesus told them he is the resurrection and the life, that those who live and believe in him will live forever, even though they suffer mortal death (John 11.27-27, 32).

And what is this eternal life about which Jesus speaks? It doesn’t mean dying and going to heaven as many Christians have been incorrectly taught (shame on the church and its leaders who have done that). Eternal life as Jesus used it meant two things. First, it refers to quality of life when we share in the inner life of Jesus. It means we choose, with the help of the Spirit who lives in us and who is given to us by the Father and the Son, to live like Christ. This is where our epistle lesson is helpful. In it, St. Paul lays out what Christlike living looks like. It means, e.g., that we look out for the other, especially our fellow Christians, like Christ looks out for us. How did Christ do that? He gave himself for us and bore our punishment so we could be forgiven and healed of our sin-sickness. So St. Paul tells us to stop lying to each other, because lying causes hurt, heartache, bitterness, and distrust. We belong to each other in Christ so why would we want to act evilly toward the other? St. Paul tells us to not let our anger control us so that it does not open the door for us to eventually hate the other. Out of mutual love, we are to work hard so that we can support those amongst us who cannot legitimately do so, and we are never to abuse others’ generosity. We are to stop our evil speaking, where we criticize each other and speak wickedly about them. We are to put away wrath, anger, and abusive language and behavior toward each other, especially toward those we dislike. We are to build each other up and be kind to each other. We do this because this is exactly what Christ has done for us. We dare not judge those whom Christ has already redeemed by his body and blood. 

Wise Christians will immediately see that St. Paul is not laying out a bunch of rules for us to follow slavishly to get our tickets punched. Instead, they will recognize that he is urging us to put away our sins and wickedness because they lead to death and will not be allowed to exist in God’s new world when Christ returns. When we realize this, we realize that by choosing to live right now as Christ lived, always with the help of the Spirit, we align ourselves with God and find life as God intends us to live it. This is what Jesus had in mind when he talked about having eternal life in him. And second, this eternal life that we enter now will extend beyond our mortal death and last forever, imperfect and flawed as we are. The life we live in God’s new world will be a perfect version of the imperfect life we live now as new creations in Christ.

This is the answer to our concerns about unanswered prayer and the problem of Evil. As Christians we remember that God has acted decisively in Christ to defeat the dark powers that afflict us and cause us to cry out from the depths. We are healed and forgiven completely by the blood of the Lamb shed for us on the cross. How that works, I couldn’t tell you completely. I just know that is does. This is the Father calling us to himself. This is why only Jesus, the true bread of life, can satisfy completely. When we give our lives to him and trust his promise that he has healed and redeemed us by his death, our fears about sin and punishment dissipate. On the cross, God has defeated the twin powers of Sin and Evil and in Jesus’ resurrection we have the promise that it’s all true, even if the promise remains partially unfulfilled. So when we cry out from the depths and wait expectantly and impatiently for God to act, we do so because as Christians we know Jesus has a job to finish and he will do so one day when he returns to consummate his saving work begun in his life, death, resurrection, and ascension. In the meantime we are his right now, warts and all, even in our affliction, and will be forever. We know this because we believe the story in Scripture and see God’s work in our lives and the lives of others, despite the darkness that descends on us on occasion. This is the only hope that truly can sustain us.  

When we find ourselves threatened to be overwhelmed by the depths, we are called to remember God’s plan of salvation revealed ultimately in Christ. God will use our remembering to help strengthen our belief that God has acted decisively on our behalf and is present with us in the power of the Spirit to walk with us so we won’t be overwhelmed by the darkness. Knowing this gives us patience and the confident expectation that victory is ours, even as we cry out impatiently for God to consummate his great and saving work. When we believe this, really believe this, it won’t save us from moments of darkness and sometimes despair. But it will have the power to sustain us, even in death, because we know that we are God’s beloved children, despite who we are, and that we have the Good News of Jesus Christ who holds the key to not only our own healing but the restoration of all creation, now and for all eternity. Take hope and be renewed in this knowledge, my beloved, as you come to the Table to feed on the bread of heaven and drink the cup of salvation, the Lord Jesus himself. 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 August 13, 2017. As always, it will be helpful to read the assigned texts below by clicking on or tapping their links below before reading the sermon. What kind of God do you profess to worship: an absentee, uncaring God who leaves us to our own devices to cope with life or the God of the Bible who is actively involved in his creation and our lives, directing everything to his desired will? Given the utter chaos and apparent reign of lawlessness in our world today it is easy to believe in an absentee, uncaring God. But that God is a lie and a fabric of our limited, disordered thinking. When we come to have faith in the real God of the Bible, it gives us the power to live and overcome, and our faith doesn’t collapse when it’s tested. For those with ears to hear, listen and understand.

Lectionary texts: Genesis 37.1-4, 12-28; Psalm 105.1-6, 16-22; Romans 10.5-15; Matthew 14:22-33.

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

Our world seems to be coming apart at the seams, doesn’t it? In this country alone people are angrier than ever at each other, and more intolerant of behavior and thoughts they do not share or support. Charlottesville, VA is the most recent example of this sad reality. We seem to revel in dissing each other on social media and elsewhere, and the bedrock values we once shared as a nation, most notably the Judeo-Christian tradition, seem to be crumbling away before our very eyes. Worldwide, the threat of terrorism isn’t going away and who can not be concerned about the bombast that we hear coming out of the governments of N. Korea and the United States? Nuclear war anyone? Some of us here struggle with debilitating health issues or pressing financial worries or alienated relationships with family members and/or folks we once considered trusted friends. Things are not all bad, of course, but they are bad enough, and for those of us who profess to be Christians, the steady streams of bad news that continue to bombard us inevitably start to beat us down and wear us out. We wonder where God is in it all. If God is all powerful and all present, why are things so chaotic? This is what I want us to look at this morning because frankly we as Christians have allowed a massive lie to be foisted on us and we must develop clear-headed and biblical thinking about this issue to combat the lie.

That lie, of course, is that God is not active or present in God’s world, leaving us to solve our own problems. It goes by many names: Epicureanism, Deism, et al., but they all posit the same lie. God is absent and essentially uncaring. Where’s God in the world? Well, he’s checked out and we’re on our own, baby. Given the human condition, that ought to scare us to death because if true, it means we are in a hopeless situation with no way out. Human self-help is a lie and a delusion and those who espouse it are whistling through the graveyard.

And while we might be tempted to think that this belief system of an absentee God is a relatively modern one, it is not as our OT lesson attests. Today’s story begins the final saga of the book of Genesis with its story of the patriarchs Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. We have seen how God promised to bring his blessing and healing to God’s sin-sick world through Abraham and his descendants, and we have also seen that all the patriarchs were not always shining examples of blessed and virtuous behavior. Old Jacob, whose name means deceiver, is deceived one more time in this story—itself a story of human wickedness and folly—this time by his own sons. We are introduced to Joseph, Jacob’s favorite son by virtue of having been birth-ed by his beloved wife Rachel, who was now dead. Jacob just couldn’t help himself and showed egregious favoritism to young Joseph, something that caused resentment leading to hatred in his older brothers. Not only that, but the writer tells us Joseph had ratted out his brothers for behaving badly, surely not a good recipe for fostering brotherly love and affection. To add insult to injury, Joseph had also told his brothers of a dream he had where his brothers and father would one day bow down in homage to him, an integral part of today’s story that the lectionary inexplicably leaves out. We are not told if this dream came from God, although given the OT treatment of dreams in general it probably did. We are simply told that this dream was perceived by both Joseph’s brothers and Jacob to be an indication of Joseph’s arrogance. We can under-stand his brothers’ anger and jealousy, even if we cannot excuse their murderous desires. Keep in mind this is the family through whom God promised to bring God’s blessing to the world.

Now in today’s story Jacob sends Joseph to check on his brothers who are off tending sheep. When Joseph finally finds his brothers, they realize that they are presented with a golden opportunity to kill their hated little brother. Reuben, the eldest brother, pleads against killing Joseph but the brothers nevertheless strip Joseph of his robe—the hated symbol and ongoing poke in their eye of their father’s favoritism—and throw him into an empty cistern to die. Shockingly, the brothers display a callous disregard of their own wickedness by sitting down to eat, apparently oblivious to the evil of their plot! Again, remember this is the family who will bring God’s blessing to God’s sin-sick world. Are you scratching your head in bewilderment yet or do you get what’s really going on here?

And then more opportunity presents itself. A band of traveling Midianite traders “just happen” to be passing by (yeah, right—ain’t no such thing as coincidence in God’s world) and Judah forms a plan to spare Joseph’s life. Let’s sell him into slavery, he says! Oh Judah. How kind and considerate of you. And so Joseph’s brothers sell him into slavery and devise a plan to lie to their father about his fate. They dip Joseph’s robe in animal blood and tell Jacob that his beloved son has met a deadly fate at the paws of wild beasts. Hear again Jacob’s reaction:

Then Jacob tore his clothes and dressed himself in burlap. He mourned deeply for his son for a long time. His family all tried to comfort him, but he refused to be comforted. “I will go to my grave mourning for my son,” he would say, and then he would weep. Meanwhile, the Midianite traders arrived in Egypt, where they sold Joseph to Potiphar, an officer of Pharaoh, the king of Egypt. Potiphar was captain of the palace guard. (Genesis 37.34-36, NLT).

We can all relate to Jacob’s great grief over his son. But do you see the evil involved here?

Jacob’s sons, the heirs to God’s promised blessing of the world, were perfectly content to kill their brother and ultimately sell him into slavery. They were perfectly content to deceive their own father to cover their tracks, all because of their hatred and jealousy of Joseph. It’s not a pretty picture, folks. It not only describes their life but ours. We may not have sold anyone into slavery or plotted murder, but we all have our fair share of evildoing toward our enemies, not to mention our friends, neighbors, and esp. God. That’s the human condition the Bible addresses. And the obvious question in all this mess is where is God in it all? Why did (and does) God let this kind of evil continue? It’s an invitation to believe in an absentee and uncaring God, right?

Well no it isn’t. For the ancient Hebrews who heard and read this story, even in exile, the answer to that question is that God is actively at work, both in Joseph’s dreams and in the “chance happening” of the Midianite traders passing by. God’s redemption is being achieved, even when it is not apparent to us, by those we reject, the weak and powerless, Joseph in this case, and ultimately in and through Jesus Christ. As St. Paul told the Corinthians, God chose the weak and foolish in the world to shame the strong and the wise, and to bring about our redemption (cf. Isaiah 53.3-6; Romans 5.1-11). God used the evil intentions and behaviors of Joseph’s brothers, as well as our own, to accomplish God’s purposes. As Joseph would eventually tell his brothers after he became second in command in Egypt and was reunited with them there, “Even though you intended to do harm to me, God intended it for good, in order to preserve a numerous people, as he is doing today” (Genesis 50.20). God would deliver his people Israel from their slavery in Egypt at the Passover and ultimately rescue his people—those who put their hope and trust in his Son, Jesus Christ—from our slavery to Sin and Death.

And here is the challenge for God’s people then and now. Do we believe that God really is active, even in the midst of the chaos that appears to be ruling God’s world? Can we, despite the apparent evidence that confronts our senses and our sense of order, really put our hope and trust in this sovereign God of ours? The biblical answer, not to mention the answer of God’s people over time and culture, is an emphatic yes. But as St. Paul reminds us in our epistle lesson, it takes faith, not superhuman effort on our part. We don’t need to go up to heaven to find God. God has descended to us in the person of Jesus the Messiah! We don’t need to go down to the abyss to find Christ. He has already been raised from the dead to conquer on our behalf Sin and Death forever, and we who are his people need to fear Death and Hell no longer. 

My point is this. When we talk about faith, we are not talking about ascribing to a set of rules or doctrines. We are talking about establishing a relationship with the Lord Jesus Christ, the eternal Son of God. Only when we know this God made known to us in Jesus, only when we put our ultimate hope and trust in this God, do we need to no longer fear as Jesus commands us. This isn’t as easy as it sounds. Just ask St. Peter in our gospel lesson this morning. Initially he had faith in our Lord because he got out of the boat and started to walk toward Jesus. But then he shifted his attention from Jesus to the waves and voila! St. Peter began to sink. Surprise, surprise. One of the things St. Matthew wants us to learn from this story is that when we keep our eyes on Christ, the eternal Son of the Father who broke the power of Sin and Death for us in his death and resurrection, we don’t need to be afraid of the waves of life that threaten to overwhelm us. But we in our pride and stupidity want to be in charge and we look to ourselves and our own clever devices to rescue ourselves from the stormy seas of life. Until… Until… Until we are told we have terminal cancer or our best friend or beloved family member dies or our finances collapse suddenly or we are struck with a debilitating illness. Only when we are confronted by evil and hatred and wickedness, both within ourselves and outside beyond our control, do we realize how utterly foolish and futile this thinking is, and in the interim we continue to try to live our lives based on the lie that we actually are in control of things. But there is no one who has the power of life other than Jesus. No one. And those who stubbornly refuse to see this have little reason to hope for a bright future of any kind, both in this life and hereafter. It is a sorrowful spectacle of human folly indeed that is well documented in Scripture.

So Scripture encourages us to know this sovereign God, the God who shows himself to us in Jesus Christ, who rules the waves and brings good out of evil as our gospel and OT lessons attest. And what kind of God is this that we are encouraged to get to know? God is not an absentee landlord who doesn’t care about us or our situations. God is not an angry or vindictive God who waits eagerly to whack us up side the head the first time we misbehave. No, this is the God who humbled himself and became human for our sake. This is the God who sent his own dear Son to die for us while we were still God’s enemies (have you really considered how breathtaking that claim of St. Paul’s is??) so that we might become aware of our desperate lot and future without God and put our trust in this God of the cross and thus be rescued from the ultimate evil of Sin and Death. This is the God we are invited to get to know and love. Most of us don’t have a clue as to the seriousness of our Sin and rebellion against this sovereign God of ours who loves us and gave himself for us. So we have apostles like St. Paul who vigorously write to tell us about this God and invite us to know and love the Father through the Son. 

We get to know our sovereign and triune God by remembering. We read stories like the ones in our lessons today and remember what God has done for us. We remember the times God has acted in our lives in great and small ways, through God’s people and through the chances and changes of life. We remember that nothing has changed, that the world has been chaotic since our first ancestors rebelled against God in the garden of paradise. We read these stories to remember that God has the power to overcome the chaos of our lives and world, but often in ways that are not readily apparent to us so that we learn to have the humility of a creature, not the Creator (cf. Isaiah 55.6-11). We dare read the story of Christ’s death in aston-ished hope, that the God in which we are invited to have faith is the God who died for us while we were still God’s enemies to rescue us from our ultimate exile which is death and eternal separation from our Creator who wants us to live, not die. That’s why we must read Scripture—to learn God’s character and to learn how to flourish as God’s creatures by following God’s ways and commands as demonstrated supremely in Jesus our Lord. That is why we come together to worship God: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, and to receive our Lord’s body and blood each week. That is why we are called to pray continually to this God who loves us, who is active in our lives, and who has the power to overcome all the chaos around and within us.

To be sure, this promise to overcome will not be fully consummated until our Lord’s return. But it is a true and valid promise nevertheless and it is being partially fulfilled right now in the context of our lives. Jesus is the only way, the only truth, the only life we have. Will you listen to this God? Will you do the things you need to do, do the required remembering, to trust this God’s sovereignty and love for you and respond accordingly? The challenges are great, just like the waves St. Peter encountered. That’s why we must remember to be reminded that our Lord’s love for us and power over the dark forces are greater than their power. God has conquered them in the most unexpected way—on the cross of a naked, bloodied, pierced, and utterly humiliated man who also happened to be the very Son of God. This is how our God works much of the time—through weakness. And God calls us to trust in God’s goodness, ways, and power, a power made manifest supremely in weakness. We aren’t called to believe this in our own strength. That would be impossible. We are called to believe this in the power of the Spirit, who mediates our Lord and Savior’s presence to us and who helps transform us into his people. This is where God is, my beloved, in the power of the Spirit and in God’s cruciform people. Stake your life on it. Please. Don’t settle for other, lesser gods that cannot give you life. Stake your life on the One who has given you the Good News of Jesus Christ, our crucified and risen Lord, now and for all eternity. You won’t be disappointed. You have God’s very word on it. 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 August 14, 2021. As always it will be helpful to read the assigned texts by clicking on or tapping their links below before reading the sermon. Christians should desire that all humans flourish. The only way to truly do that is to align ourselves with Jesus Christ. For those with ears to hear, listen and understand.

Lectionary texts: 2 Samuel 18.5-9, 15, 31-33; Psalm 130; Ephesians 4.25-5.2; St. John 6.35-51.

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

What are we to make of St. Paul’s exhortation in our epistle lesson to be a different kind of people, a people who live the good life—good life defined as conforming our lives and ourselves, our thinking, speaking, and doing, to the created order and will of God our Father—especially in light of our OT and gospel lessons that showcase the ugliness of the human condition? Is St. Paul simply being delusional and exhorting us to be likewise? This is what I want us to look at this a.m.

Scripture is crystal clear in its assessment of the human condition. Our first ancestors’ sin got the human race expelled from paradise and created a terrible chasm between God and humans and between humans ourselves. We see the fruit of our rebellion all the time: death, illnesses of all sorts, broken relationships, anger, alienation, and mutual hostility and distrust. We search vainly for all kinds of remedies for our loneliness and alienation by pursuing various idols (sex, power, and security being the most common), remedies that are sure to fail because they are grounded in unreality. I don’t have time to rehearse all the weirdness but if you are old enough, you can quickly list the crazy thinking and behaviors in our culture today. We are so alienated and hostile to God that we are willing to do almost anything to avoid being reconciled to him, despite the deep yearning in our hearts to the contrary. We see the human condition on full display in our OT lesson in the death of David’s son, Absalom. The whole sordid story is itself a grim reminder of the consequences of David’s terrible sins of adultery and murder that we looked at a couple weeks ago. Forgiveness there had been, but God had allowed the consequences of David’s sins to remain, consequences that were deeply painful and divisive for David’s house: Here is his beloved son Absalom in open rebellion against his father. Here is Absalom’s father seeking to save his rebellious son from the consequences of treachery and treason. And here is a bloodthirsty commander and relative of David’s, a relative with a history of treachery and violence, all in the name of the king he serves, who satisfies his bloodlust by disobeying the David’s direct orders and effectively murdering his son. 

Then there are the crowds resisting Christ’s teaching on a baffling scale. Did you notice the repetition in our gospel lesson? To drive his point home, Christ repeated multiple times that he is the bread of life who will raise to life those whom the Father gives him on the last day, yet the crowd hears but doesn’t understand or believe. Think about it. Christ is God become human speaking to his image-bearing creatures, the very people God the Father had called out to bring God’s healing love and reconciliation to bear on his sin-sick and evil-infested world. If there ever was anyone who could be classified as a master teacher who knew how to reach his pupils, surely Christ would be that person. But inexplicably the people do not have ears to hear, eyes to see, or minds to comprehend. Instead, after hearing the breathtaking promise of Christ to heal and reconcile them to God, and to raise them up on the last day to enjoy life fully as God created them to live it and desired for them (and us) to have, they complained about him rather than accepting the most precious gift they could ever receive! Remarkable. And if we are honest with ourselves, things haven’t changed much from Christ’s day to ours. Many of us still don’t want to accept Christ’s gift of eternal life by giving ourselves to him in faith and obedience. We, like them, are a profoundly broken and hopeless people because we are all slaves to the power of Sin, that alien and hostile power that has enslaved us and compels us to continue our ongoing rebellion and hostility toward God. There is no such thing as self-help and self-improvement. People do not come to know Christ through their own effort as Christ himself repeatedly reminds us in our gospel lesson. If this is true—and our own experience affirms the awful reality of the human condition—how can we ever hope to be the people St. Paul exhorts us to be in his epistle? How can we put away all the bitterness and rancor that plagues the human race? How can we control our anger and truly love God and neighbors when our hearts (wills) are naturally at war against them? How can we proclaim the love of Christ if no one will listen? How can we work consistently to build each other up and love each other here in our parish family with a love that encourages each other to conform to the Father’s created order rather than to cave to our own disordered desires? Answer? On our own it is impossible and if we try to be the people St. Paul calls us to be and do the things he calls us to do on our own, we will be in danger of falling into despair and/or becoming neurotic because self-help/self-improvement are a lie/delusion. We only come to Christ by the grace and power of God. Period. Those who are enslaved to the power of Sin (that would be all of us) cannot simply be told to stop sinning. It won’t happen. We must be freed from our slavery to Sin. Those who cannot hear or see the Truth of the gospel cannot be helped by assigning blame to them or offering advice, no matter how good the advice is. They have to be healed, and only Christ has the power to heal us from our sin-sickness and free us from the steely grip of Sin’s enslavement. Putting on Christ, feeding on him through holy communion, regular Scripture reading and study, prayer, Christian fellowship, and service are ordinary ways we put on Christ, i.e., ways we submit to Christ and allow him to heal and transform us, all fueled by our faith in the efficacy of his healing and saving power, a faith that is itself a gift from our Father’s generous and loving heart.

We can never hope to be the people St. Paul (and through him Christ himself) exhorts us to be unless we strive in the power of Christ available to us in and through the Holy Spirit to imitate Christ, who loves us and has claimed us from all eternity. Putting on Christ (or imitating him) is not effortless, but neither is it futile because it is rooted in Christ’s power, not our own efforts. Setbacks there will be. We are all too profoundly broken and alienated for that not to happen and Christ doesn’t manipulate us like puppets. But if we willingly seek to imitate Christ and to feed on him in the ways I’ve just outlined, we will find that our new selves, the new creation about which the NT speaks, will slowly but surely allow us to be the kind of people God calls us to be and St. Paul exhorts us to be in our epistle lesson. Why? Because we rely on Christ’s power that he willingly and gladly gives us. We do not worship a God who is a tyrant and a bully, bent on punishing or even destroying us. We worship the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ who became human and who promises to love us despite our sins and to free and heal us from our slavery to Sin’s power and our own incurable sin-sickness. And when we worship this God, the one and only true God, and are humble enough to submit ourselves to his will, believing all the time that he is busy working in and through us in the power of the Holy Spirit even when we don’t perceive that power at work, we will see growth and healing and freedom. None of it will be perfect in this life. We live in a cursed world that can never be the entirely good created order God intended it to be. But we are not people of this world. We are people of God’s new creation because we belong to Christ and Christ has promised to raise us from the dead to complete our healing process and bestow upon us perfect goodness and freedom. We will be free to love and imitate our crucified and risen Lord perfectly, and in doing so we will discover fully what it means to live life abundantly, to be fully human beings. 

This does not protect us from life’s hurts or the evil that we all must endure on occasion. What Christ does promise us is the power to overcome. We don’t come to faith in Christ without the Father first drawing us to him. Are you willing to relinquish control and trust God to do so with you and others? It’s a hard but necessary first step. That we are here is evidence that the Father has claimed us, no matter how poorly we live our faith, and it reminds us that we do not worship an absentee or uncaring God. There is much mystery and enigma in all this, my beloved. But part of a real and saving faith is the attendant humility to not need all our questions answered about God/faith, to be content with what God has revealed to us in Scripture and in his very own Son, Christ, the Word made flesh. He came to us in weakness and humility to destroy Sin’s power over us and call us to be his people, people who have eternal life starting here and now, despite the vicissitudes and ambiguities and sorrows of this mortal life. He came to free and heal us when we were still God’s enemies and he overcame the sting of Death by being raised to new life. The reality of Christ’s promise extends to us even in our profound weakness and sin-sickness. My beloved, believe this promise with all your being and might because it’s true; Jesus Christ is raised from the dead. Wrestle with it in the power of the Spirit together as God’s people, and you will find that you are becoming the people God calls us to be. When by God’s grace you really know that the promises of God are coming true, you will also find abundant life, even in the midst of a broken and hurting world and your own hurts. It is a foretaste of that glorious life promised to us forever through the grace, merit, love, and power of Jesus Christ our crucified and risen 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 August 11, 2019. As always, it will be helpful to read the assigned texts below by clicking on or tapping their links before you read the sermon. Here I explore what Christian Faith is and is not. For those with ears to hear, listen and understand.

Lectionary texts: Isaiah 1.1, 10-20; Psalm 50.1-8, 22-23; Hebrews 11.1-3, 8-16; Luke 12.32-40.

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

In our epistle lesson this morning, the writer of Hebrews speaks about faith. Given that the NT writers claim that we are saved by grace alone through faith alone, it is vital for us to understand what genuine biblical faith looks like on the ground. This is what I want us to look at this morning.

“Faith,” says the writer of Hebrews, “is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” St. James tells us that faith without works is dead and useless, and St. Paul tells us in several of his letters that we are only made right with God by having faith in Christ’s atoning death and resurrection. But what does that all mean? To answer this question, we start by looking at what faith isn’t. When the biblical writers speak of faith, they didn’t have in mind some kind of spirituality that is an entity unto itself (she’s a person of faith). Neither did they have in mind some kind of resolute belief that their faith would guarantee them wealth (gee, I’ve got faith so God will surely make me rich). Nor did the biblical writers define faith as a blind leap against known facts. Atheists and other critics of the Christian faith often parrot this latter understanding of faith when ridiculing those of us who have faith. But these criticisms are patently false and inaccurate because this is not what the Bible means when it speaks of faith.

Faith, as the writer of the letter to the Hebrews articulates, involves confident action in response to what God has made known to us through his word in Scripture and through his involvement in his created order. Faith is closely related to hope in Scripture, with both terms often used synonymously. And before we go any further, we need to be clear as to what the biblical writers meant by hope. Hope in Scripture is not wishful thinking or whistling through the graveyard. No, hope as the biblical writers use it, means a sure and certain expectation that something is going to happen in the future based on what has happened in the past. Our Christian hope of forgiveness of sins and new creation, a future hope, is based on the death and resurrection of Christ, past historical events. Without these past events, we really would be fools to believe in a future new world made perfect as well as the resurrection of the body. There would be no historical basis on which to pin our hope on God’s promised new world. But because we believe that Christ was raised from the dead, we believe that instead of judgment for our sins after we die, we will find mercy and new bodily life when Christ returns to finish his saving work because in baptism we share in Christ’s death and resurrection. We weren’t witnesses to these latter events but we believe the testimony contained in the NT of those who were. This is what the writer of Hebrews is talking about. We have faith in the power of our baptism to bind us to Christ and have the hope of bodily resurrection and new creation because the word of God promises such, both in the story of Christ and the subsequent testimony of those who witnessed these saving events. And because we trust God’s character, we trust God’s word and believe it to be truthful. Obviously if we do not know God, we will have a hard time knowing God’s character and trusting God’s word. But if we know the story of God’s salvation contained in Scripture, if we have a robust prayer life, if we are firmly ensconced in the household of God, i.e., the Church, even with all its warts, if we pay attention to how God works through human agency, then we have the basis for trust. This is why we have the assurance of things hoped for and why Christian hope is always a sure and certain expectation. 

Faith therefore is never blind because it is always based on the promises of God contained in the OT and NT, nor are we called to have a blind faith. If we do not know God, it is impossible to have a mature biblical faith because there will always be doubt in our minds as to whether God is really trustworthy, especially when things go south for us or our world. It would be really easy, e.g., for us to look at the chaos of the seemingly never-ending mass shootings and conclude God’s promise to heal and redeem his broken and sinful world and its creatures is false and unbelievable. But this mindset is present- and human-oriented. True biblical faith by contrast is always God- and future-oriented because it is based on known instances of God’s mighty power, goodness, mercy and justice at work. That is why when faith is threatened by doubt—always a threat to us, especially in the ever increasingly chaotic world in which we live—Scripture exhorts us to remember, just as the writer of Hebrews does in our lesson. Listen to these following examples taken from the psalms:

My God, my God, why have you abandoned me? Why are you so far away when I groan for help? / Every day I call to you, my God, but you do not answer. Every night I lift my voice, but I find no relief. / Yet you are holy, enthroned on the praises of Israel. / Our ancestors trusted in you, and you rescued them. / They cried out to you and were saved. They trusted in you and were never disgraced (Ps 22.1-5, NLT).

I cry out to God; yes, I shout. Oh, that God would listen to me! / When I was in deep trouble, I searched for the Lord. / All night long I prayed, with hands lifted toward heaven, but my soul was not comforted. / I think of God, and I moan, overwhelmed with longing for his help./ And I said, “This is my fate; the Most High has turned his hand against me.” / But then I recall all you have done, O Lord; I remember your wonderful deeds of long ago. / They are constantly in my thoughts. I cannot stop thinking about your mighty works (Psalm 77.1-3, 10-12, NLT).

Do you see faith in action here? The psalmist is riddled with doubt. It feels like God has abandoned him and he is in danger of giving up and losing his faith. But then he remembers. He remembers God’s mighty intervention on behalf of his people at the Red Sea. In God’s dealing with his people, the psalmist is reminded of God’s character and trustworthiness. We aren’t told how the crisis the psalmist faced turned out. We simply see him working to maintain his faith, the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. When things are desperately dark in your life or when news of current events threatens to overwhelm you with its reporting of new evil and perversity, seemingly every day, do you keep your eyes on God by remembering his mighty works on your behalf (Jesus and the sending of the Holy Spirit to name but two examples) to help you maintain your faith, or do you let the darkness overwhelm you by focusing on it? 

Notice carefully in these examples from the psalms that the focus of biblical faith is on God’s promises contained in the story of his rescue of his good world gone terribly wrong. God created this world. Our faith tells us this is true because Genesis proclaims that God is our Creator and the psalms reinforce this belief. Consider Psalm 19, for example: 

The heavens proclaim the glory of God. The skies display his craftsmanship. / Day after day they continue to speak; night after night they make him known. / They speak without a sound or word; their voice is never heard. / Yet their message has gone throughout the earth, and their words to all the world (v.1-4).

This same God, Creator of all that is, is perfect, good, loving, just, merciful, and holy. God created humans in his image to run his good creation on God’s behalf and when we failed that call and our sin allowed Evil and Death to enter and corrupt God’s good world and us, God declared he would rescue us through a human family, Abraham and his ultimate descendent Jesus Christ! This totally unexpected plan is fitting for the dignity of human beings and is another sign that God honors us and wants us to return to him. Along the way, Scripture tells us the story of how God repeatedly came to his people Israel’s rescue, requiring them to choose between the old covenant’s blessings and curses outlined most notably in Deuteronomy 27-28. Covenant curses are God’s judgment on his people’s lack of faith; they chose not to submit to his way of living, in part, because they don’t believe God’s promises to them. Covenant blessings, on the other hand, result from God honoring right living which is indicative of faith in the God who promised his people to be their God and commanded them to live by his laws (more about that anon). This is what was going on in our OT lesson today. The Lord through his prophet Isaiah exhorts his people to faith by living righteously according to his laws. If God’s people Israel really had faith in God, the assurance of things hoped for and the conviction of things unseen, they would have behaved accordingly. But Israel didn’t have faith in God because they choose to worship and follow false gods. This is why true worship of God the Father requires faith. Nothing else will do in God’s eyes. By worshiping false gods, Israel in Isaiah’s day showed where their faith really was focused, and it wasn’t on the God who called them out of their slavery in Egypt and gave them the Promised Land as a base of operation for their saving mission. They could therefore expect nothing but exile and death, the ultimate covenant curses, just like we can expect nothing but judgment and death when we fail to put our hope (faith) in Christ.

The NT modifies and completes the OT theme of covenant blessings and curses by proclaiming that Jesus Christ ultimately rescued us from exile and death, even after we had fallen away. Jesus Christ was and is the game-changer because lack of faith cannot fully explain human rebellion against God. We all know that from personal experience! We rebel against God, in part, because we lack faith and, in part, because we are held captive by the power of Sin and unable to break free from its grip. So God broke Sin’s power over us on the cross and accomplished his justice. We believe this because we believe God raised Jesus from the dead and in doing so, vindicated his death. And while God has not consummated his rescue of his sin-sick world and creatures, we know it’s coming because we believe in the efficacy of Christ’s saving death and resurrection and are convinced it comes from God. With St. Paul, we believe in the God who creates things out of nothing and who raises the dead; therefore we have hope against hope (God’s hope vs. human hope) that our salvation is assured. As St. Paul also reminds us, our life with Christ is hidden with him in heaven (Col 3.3). We cannot currently see him, but we will see him one day when he returns and so we have the sure and certain expectation (hope) that he will finish what he started. In having this hope in Christ and trusting he is God incarnate because the NT writers proclaim him to be, we demonstrate our faith in the power of God and his revealed word. Simply put, our faith is based on Jesus Christ crucified and raised from the dead. Only God is capable of doing this as the whole story of Scripture attests. Our future is linked to God’s power and we are gradually transformed by it.

As we saw earlier, St. James reminds us that faith must be actionable because our actions are usually consistent with and based on our beliefs. Our faithful actions are always consistent with God’s clear commands to us to live rightly, both as individuals and as communities. That is why we forgive when wronged, are generous with our resources, show grace where none is deserved, advocate for families and life, demonstrate love for all, and pursue real justice based on God’s laws. We will live like that in God’s new world and are given a chance to show our faith in our future citizenship there by how we act in this present world. Much of faithful living is counter-intuitive and runs against our natural grain because we are all sin-corrupted and self-centered by nature. That’s the sad outcome of the Fall that Genesis 3ff describe, so faithful living does not come naturally or easily. But God the Father is greater than our sin-sickness and gives us his Spirit to help us answer his call to us to be truly free to live as fully human beings made in his image, a life patterned after the perfect life of Jesus Christ our Lord. And here again we must be clear that living faithful lives, however imperfectly that may manifest itself, does not guarantee us health, wealth, and prosperity. God’s blessing there will be for our faithful living, but that blessing does not guarantee or automatically lead to health, wealth, and power, even if the ancient Israelites often saw it doing so, a mistaken notion that our Lord himself repeatedly had to correct (see, e.g., Mk 10.17-27; Mt 16.24-27). No, living faithful lives can (and often does) result in ridicule and persecution as our actions and words challenge the fallen and death-dealing ways of our culture and the world. Even the writer of Hebrews admits that the exemplars of faith he cites died without seeing the promise of their faith fulfilled; and barring Christ’s return before we die, we too will not live to see the promise of our faith in Christ fulfilled. But we believe it nevertheless because we believe in the God who creates things out of nothing and raises the dead to life. Nothing is impossible for this God and he has the track record to prove it. 

Having said this, we must also acknowledge that God promises to reward faithful living and this promise of reward makes many of us very uncomfortable. Our reluctance to count the importance of rewards as a motivator for faith stems from a mistaken notion that real Christians shouldn’t desire a reward for faithful living, that doing so is selfish. But that thinking would have surprised the biblical writers and our Lord Jesus himself (think for example about our gospel lesson this morning or about the parable of the ten talents found in Mt 25.14-30). Why then should we blush or apologize for seeking to be rewarded for our faith? We seek all kinds of lesser rewards in the things we do, things that will pass away. Why not seek the ultimate prize of living with and loving God forever as our most desired-reward? 

With all this in mind, we can see that the theme of faith runs through all our lessons today. For example, when we look at Christ’s parable in our gospel lesson through the lens of faith, we see him calling us to faith. Be ready for the Master’s return (Christ himself), he tells us. Demonstrate your faith by doing the things that show God and others where your true riches are, by demonstrating your hope and trust in God’s love and power. It gives the Father great pleasure to give you the kingdom where you will have light and life forever. Don’t let the darkness of this world lead you astray so that you follow its values and dehumanize yourself. If you live faithfully, you will find your reward. The master will serve you when he returns (think Jesus washing the disciples’ feet at the Last Supper in St. John’s gospel). So demonstrate your assurance of things hoped for and your conviction of things not seen by living in ways that are consistent with the Father’s great love for you. Don’t make money or sex or power or security your gods. Make me your God by following and imitating me for I am God become man. Deny yourself, take up your cross, and follow me. Don’t let the darkness of this world fool you. I am going to die to rescue you from God’s terrible judgment on your sins and reconcile you to the Father, and my Father will raise me from the dead to prove to you that this unbelievable promise is really true. And what do we require from you? Faith made manifest in your living according to our will for you. My Father loves you and wants to rescue and restore you to your rightful place in his creation and has sent me to accomplish what you cannot accomplish for yourself. Please have the wisdom and humility to accept our gracious gift to you. 

 This is what real faith is all about, my beloved. As with all things from God it is rich, multifaceted, complex, and often challenging because we are mere mortals with limited understanding who live in a dark and challenging world in the midst of our own conflicting fallen and noble desires. So do what the biblical writers tell you to do when your faith is challenged. Remember, so that your assurance of things hoped for and your conviction of things not seen—forgiveness of sins and your place in God’s new creation—will not be overcome by people or forces who hate you and want to destroy you. Remember that it is the Father’s pleasure to give you his kingdom, so focus often and regularly on this God, the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, crucified and raised from the dead. This is the God who creates things out of nothing and gives life to the dead. He is the same God who wants to give you a place in his kingdom forever, starting right now and culminating fully when he raises you from the dead at his Son’s return to finish his saving work on your behalf. That’s a faith worth living and dying for, even as we live constantly in a world of uncertainty and enigma. 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 August 5, 2018. 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 the always favorite topic of human sin and its consequences. The Good News cannot be truly good news for us until we accept the uncomfortable reality that we all sin and are destined to die an eternal death without the gracious intervention of God our Father who is revealed supremely in and through his Son Jesus Christ and the ongoing Presence and power of the Holy Spirit in our lives to help save us from ourselves. For those with ears to hear, listen and understand.

Lectionary texts: 2 Samuel 11.26-12.13a; Psalm 51.1-13; Ephesians 4.1-16; John 6.24-35.

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

What are we to make of our OT lesson with its story of God’s judgment on David’s sins? How did God “put away” David’s sins? Why would God’s anointed king resort to committing the twin evils of adultery and murder after being so richly blessed by God? What are we as Christians with our own impressive baggage of sins to learn from this sad episode? And where’s the Good News to be found? If God pronounced this kind of judgment on David, “the man after [God’s] own heart” (Acts 13.22), what hope do we poor schleps have when we stand before God’s judgment seat? These are some of the things I want us to look at this morning.

If ever there were a compelling reason for us to believe the old proverb that, “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom” (Proverbs 9.10), our OT lesson provides it. After hearing God pronounce judgment on King David through the prophet Nathan, we almost instinctively wonder how we will escape God’s judgment on our sins, and it makes us afraid. The story itself raises as many questions as it answers. Yes, there is God’s judgment on David’s sins of adultery and murder. But God also tells David through Nathan that God has put away David’s sins after he confessed them. But how? And why didn’t God remove David as king the way God did with David’s predecessor, Saul? Adultery and murder are about as serious as you can get, yet David remained God’s chosen king. What’s that all about? Like all sin and God’s reaction to it, it’s complicated and there are surely some questions that will remain unanswered this side of the grave. But that should never stop us from learning what we can from God’s word.

We start with David. Why would this man, so blessed by God, resort to committing two evils? Had Father Gatwood preached one of his tepid sermons on the OT lesson from last Sunday, the ostensible answer would have been that David wasn’t where he should have been—leading his men in battle against Israel’s enemies. But this is only a superficial answer. One of the things the writer surely wants us to see is that this episode is another tragic example of how the human heart—the biblical term for the core of our very being—is desperately wicked and beyond our understanding as the Lord himself reminded his prophet Jeremiah (Jeremiah 17.9). In other words, we humans are terminally sin-sick, even the best of us, even the man after God’s own heart. Even though David wasn’t where he was supposed to be, he could have looked away and resisted his lustful urge to take the beautiful Bathsheba. But he didn’t. He chose to commit adultery and then tried to cover his sin by ultimately having her husband murdered. We can relate to this, even if we have never committed adultery or murder. How many times have we refused to take the high road and indulged our sinful desires instead? More than most of us care to admit. If our hearts are that thoroughly corrupted, who among us can hope to escape God’s judgment on the chaos our sins produce? We are truly the man in Nathan’s story. 

To make matters worse, as Nathan pointed out to David, David’s sins were like spitting in God’s face. David knew they were wrong but chose to sin anyway, despite the fact that God had been so graciously generous to David, blessing him by making him king, but also granting David success at every turn up until David chose to transgress against the Lord. We understand this dynamic as well. How often do we tend to turn our back on God when things are going swimmingly well for us? How often do we give ourselves credit for our successes and want to blame God when things go south for us? In other words, how often does success and God’s blessing actually harden our hearts toward God as it did David’s? We are the man! 

Last, but certainly not least, as God pointed out to David, his sins gave the enemies of God even more reason not to put their loyalty and trust in God. If God’s chosen one acted this way, what kind of God was he actually be worshiping? In this age of instantaneous communication, the consequences of our sin are even more vital for us to consider. As people watch how we behave and treat others in our lives, what are we proclaiming about the character of our Lord Jesus whom we profess to worship and follow? Are we accurately portraying the character of Jesus or are we projecting the image of the false idols we worship, thus causing harm to the Name? None of us likes to have our name or character besmirched by others. How much more for the perfect and holy triune God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit? As we look at how many times we have failed our Lord publicly, we are forced to acknowledge once again that we are the man.

But God’s reaction in this tragic story is just as breathtakingly mysterious. By Law, David’s offenses were clearly punishable by death. So why did God spare him? Is this part of what Nathan meant when he told David God had put away his sins? We aren’t told. And why did not God remove David from office the way God removed Saul? David’s sins were as bad if not worse than Saul’s, but God did not remove David. Why? Again, we aren’t told, but I am persuaded that we see a glimpse of God’s love and grace here that might help explain why David remained king after sinning so grievously against God. You recall that two weeks ago we read the Lord’s promise to David. David had wanted to build God a house in which to dwell (the Temple), but God refused. Instead, God promised to build David a house (a dynasty) that would one day include God’s anointed one, the Messiah (2 Samuel 7.1-17). It is here that we see the love, grace, and faithfulness of God shine through the darkness of human sin. God would punish his wayward king but God could never abandon him by reneging on his promise to David. As St. Paul reminded Timothy right before Paul’s death, God remains faithful even when we are unfaithful (2 Timothy 2.13). God cannot be untrue to himself or revoke his promises, even in the face of our flagrant sins. Here then is surely the main reason God did not remove David as king. God had to remain faithful to his promise to David that there would always be an ancestor sitting on his throne. That would be hard to do if God removed David as king! So even in the midst of judgment, we find God’s faithful love and grace piercing the darkness of our sin.

What then are we to make of God’s judgment on David? Didn’t God put away David’s sins after he confessed them to God? Well yes God did, even if we are not told exactly what that entailed. What we do know is this. God’s judgment on David matched David’s sins. David had flagrantly dishonored the marriage bed and took another man’s wife because he could. In return, God’s judgment matched the crime. David’s own wives would be taken by his own son, Absalom, and David would be publicly humiliated. David had committed murder to cover his adulterous tracks. God’s judgment also matched that crime. David’s sons would rise up in rebellion against David and two of them would die violent deaths. Violence and political intrigue would haunt David’s family until the day he died. Hard as it is for us to watch, especially considering the fact that we too are the man, we see God’s perfect justice being executed on his king.

All this makes us wonder how this represents God’s forgiveness. It is here we must remember that when God forgives our sins, this does not mean that God automatically removes the consequences of our sins. Sometimes, by God’s grace, we are spared many of the consequences of our sins, both those we anticipate and those we don’t. But God doesn’t always spare us from the folly of our sin. For reasons known only to God, we often must deal with consequences of sins long since repented of. It’s part and parcel of living in a sin-sick and evil infested world. This doesn’t mean God refuses to forgive us. After all, God spared David’s life when God’s own law demanded it be taken. Instead, God simply let God’s justice be done and we all get that. We look around at all the wrongs of our world and we know that something has to be done about it. Without justice there can be no mercy. If God is truly just and good, God must do something about the evil in God’s world and those who commit it. Unfortunately, because we are the man (and woman), we can all expect to come under God’s fierce judgment. 

Uh, Father Maney, I hear some of you muttering right now. We know you’ve haven’t been in the pulpit since like Moby Dick was a minnow, but aren’t you supposed to be a preacher of Good News? Helpful hint. Good News does not focus on beating us up and reminding us that we all fall short of the glory of God without hope of fixing all that is wrong with us, n-kay? We know all too well that we are the man!

Patience, my grumpy and judgmental ones. I have been laying out for you the basis of the Good News of Jesus Christ and it is never a bad thing for God’s people to consider regularly the consequences and destructive power of our sins, which we have just done. Doing so reminds us God is already at work on us. Yes, we are the man. Yes, our hearts are desperately sick and beyond our ability to repair them. Yes, there are often lasting consequences to our sin and folly. Yes, we all can expect to fall under God’s fierce and terrible judgment if left to our own devices. But here’s the thing, my beloved. We are not left to our own devices. Thankfully we worship and serve a God who hates evil and who has promised to rid his good creation of all traces of it. If God did not hate evil and promise to pronounce judgment on it, we would have no hope of ever living in a new creation that is devoid of all evil and brokenness and hurt. In our heart of hearts, we all know that justice is necessary to address the wrongs and transgressions we all commit, even if we don’t want God’s judgment on us. To not believe in justice means that we could not support any kind of criminal justice system, that it would be OK for us and our loved ones to suffer all kinds of injustices and crimes because none of it really mattered in the end. Nobody in his or her right mind believes that for a minute, broken as we are. We all know wrongs must be put to right and that is exactly what God promises to do. 

But God also knows we are the man (and the woman) who deserve God’s just wrath for our sins. God knows we are thoroughly infected by the power of Sin and incapable of pulling ourselves up by our own bootstraps. Self-help is a farce and a lie. And because God made us in his image and loves us more than we can comprehend, God has moved to save us from destruction. Despite the fact of our ongoing sin and rebellion against God, which will produce permanent alienation and death if left unchecked, God’s great love and faithfulness are made known to us in Jesus Christ. St. Paul reminds us that while we were still active enemies of God, God sent his Son to die a shameful and godforsaken death on our behalf so that we would not have to suffer God’s just condemnation of our sins and the evil that resides in us. Like David, we are spared from death by the mercy of God. To be sure, barring the Lord’s return in our lifetime, we will all suffer mortal death. But we will not die because of Jesus. St. Paul reminds us that when we are baptized, we share in a death like Jesus’. And because we share in his death, we also share in a resurrection like his because our baptism unites us with our crucified and risen Lord. God raised Jesus from the dead and in doing so destroyed death forever. So we too will be raised when the Lord returns to finish the work he started in his death and resurrection. As Jesus told Martha, those who believe in him will live, even though they die, and anyone who lives and believes in him will never die (John 11.25-26). So here is God’s response to our sin and the evil it unleashes. God promises to condemn evil and evildoers but sent his own dear Son to bear that condemnation himself so as to spare us from having to suffer it. God did this for us while we were still his enemies because God loves us and is faithful to his good creation. God wants us to live and God has overcome death in the resurrection of Christ, promising those of us who believe the same destiny, the promise of eternal life in God’s new world that is devoid of evil and sin of any kind. None of us deserve it because we are too broken to live as God’s people. But God gives us his Holy Spirit to heal and transform us, one inch at a time, backsliding and all, to free us from our disobedience and slavery to Sin. God can do this impossible thing because he is the God who calls things into existence that don’t exist and who raises the dead. The extent we are able to live faithful lives in accordance with God’s created order and revealed is the extent we will enjoy real peace and true happiness. Jesus promises as much in our gospel lesson today. He is the true manna, the bread of life, that we are to consume regularly on our journey to the new creation, the new promised land. That’s why we feed on him in our hearts with thanksgiving each week. We literally consume Jesus and are healed and reminded of God’s wondrous promise to heal and deliver us from our sin-sickness, thanks be to God!

If you are not overwhelmed by this Good News, then there’s a good chance that you either have not fully considered the seriousness of sin in God’s eyes and/or you don’t believe that God can be that good and loving. Believe it, my beloved. It’s true. Here is the nature of the heart of God whom we worship. God used our disobedience to imprison us so that God could show mercy on us! Amazing grace! God’s perfect justice has been executed in Christ but not yet fully implemented. One day it will be and we will be astonished at God’s love and mercy in ways we cannot now comprehend. Yes, we will all stand before God’s judgment throne. But because we belong to Christ, we will hear the verdict of “not guilty,” despite our mountain of sins.

And if you are overwhelmed by the Good News of God’s love made known to you in Christ, thank God, because it must change you. God did not die on a cross for you to continue to act like an ungrateful twit. God did not die for you so that you could keep on in your sinful and death-dealing ways. God is not a cosmic Enabler. God is the Supreme Lover. God gave himself for you and promises you eternal life so that you can start enjoying it right now in the power of the Spirit. None of us gets it right all the time, but if you want to know what being a new man (or woman) in Christ looks like, start by rereading our epistle lesson this morning. Christian unity will give you a good starting place to think about what Christlike living, real living, is all about. 

And so, my beloved, remember this. The bad news is that we are all prisoners to our sin and rebellion. The Good News is that God’s love and mercy are stronger than our sinful folly, and God has acted decisively on our behalf to give us life. Accept the gracious invitation and give your life to the One who is the source of your life. Then you will know that you are the beloved and that you have Good News, now and for all eternity, despite your sins and the times when you walk through the darkest valleys of life. 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 August 3, 2014. 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.

I deal with the often troubling questions that arise over the fact that God tests us. Whenever that happens, we usually find ourselves “wrestling” with God if we care at all about him and our relationship with him. For those with ears to hear, listen and understand.

Lectionary texts: Genesis 32.22-31; Psalm 17.1-6, 16; Romans 9.1-5; Matthew 14.13-21.

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

In each of our lessons this morning, we see someone wrestling with God. Jacob is wrestling with God over God’s promises to his ancestors and him. The psalmist is wrestling with God over some apparent injustice that afflicts him. St. Paul is wrestling with God over the fate of his people, the Jews. Jesus is wrestling with the loss of his cousin and co-worker, John the Baptist. And of course, many of you are wrestling with serious problems and issues in your life. What are we to make of all this wrestling? This is what I want us to look at briefly this morning.

Two weeks ago we saw in our OT lesson that God came to Jacob and reaffirmed God’s promises to him even as Jacob was fleeing for his life. Despite Jacob’s scheming, conniving, and deceitful behavior toward his father and brother, behavior that led Esau to resolve to kill Jacob, God assured Jacob that his promises to him were still valid and in effect, incredible as that sounded. Now in today’s lesson, Jacob is returning home after an extended stay in his grandfather, Abraham’s, home country and he has to face Esau. We can imagine what was going on in Jacob’s mind. Did Esau still want to kill him? Would he harm Jacob’s family? Or would Jacob really inherit this land that God had promised his family so that through them God would bless the entire world? Jacob no doubt felt more than a wee bit of anxiety over all this. 

To protect his family from possible destruction, Jacob sent them on ahead of him and it was only when he was alone that the divine attacker struck and Jacob wrestled with him all night. What are we to make of this? Clearly God did not attack Jacob with the intent to kill him. Otherwise Jacob would not have wrestled for very long, let alone prevailed! Neither did God apparently attack Jacob to punish him because at the end of the night God blessed Jacob, but only after he persevered and this is where we need to pay attention. 

While we might not like the idea of wrestling or struggling with God over vexing issues or events in our life, this is something God apparently demands of us because Scripture is consistent in telling us that God tests us (Exodus 16.4, 20.20; Psalm 26.2, 88.1-18, 139.23; Jeremiah 17.10; 1 Corinthians 3.13; James 1.12; Revelation 3.10, etc.). Obviously God does not test us because he does not know what is in our hearts. God apparently tests us, in part, so that we will know what is in our hearts and to help form our character (cf. Romans 5.1-5). Only after we have “passed” the test will we know what we are made of and what our faith is made of. God also apparently tests us because he knows that we are inherently not trustworthy and that we test him constantly. More often than not, we are only willing to trust God and his promises when things are going swimmingly well for us. But when bad things happen to us, we are quick to accuse God of causing those bad things to happen. This is because we tend to look at God as one who dispenses rewards for us when we behave ourselves and punishes us when we do not. But this is not always the case and perhaps rarely is. The fact is that God is always gracious and trustworthy and only when we are tested and persevere can we really know this.

This need for testing is not unlike when we deal with someone in sales. The sales person makes all kinds of promises about his product but until we buy it and try it on a consistent basis, we will never know for sure if the product and the person selling it are trustworthy and true. Notice this is exactly what happened to Jacob in our story today. God had consistently affirmed the promises he made to Jacob’s ancestors and to him. But apparently Jacob didn’t fully believe that. Instead of turning to God for a blessing, Jacob relied on his own devices to get what he wanted and it had cost him dearly in terms of his relationships. Now he was returning home to the promised land and to an uncertain future. He would need more than his own resources to survive, let alone prosper. And so it is probably no coincidence that it was exactly at this moment God wrestled with him. In not giving up or running away, Jacob learned to receive his blessings from the only source of all real blessings: God. 

And we see the practical results of God’s wrestling with Jacob when he finally confronted his brother Esau. Before this, Jacob (the deceiver) had schemed to steal Esau’s birthright and blessing from him. Now when the newly-named Israel (one who struggles with God) met his brother again, he wanted to bestow a blessing on Esau (Genesis 33.10-11)! In struggling with God and learning to trust God’s promises and active involvement in his life, Jacob/Israel was equipped by God to be the blessing for others that God called him to be. Just so with us when we persevere in our struggles with God.

In St. Paul’s case, we see the apostle wrestling with God as he agonized over the fate of God’s people Israel. St. Paul had genuine concern for their eternal well-being, even offering himself up to God on behalf of his wayward and stubborn people who refused to recognize Jesus as their true Messiah and Lord. He feared that his people would be cut off permanently from Christ and was troubled that God would allow this to happen to the very people God called to be a blessing to the world. And so St. Paul did the only thing he had in his power to do. He prayed fervently for his people even as he preached Christ to them. We can empathize with St. Paul because we too are often confronted with huge and seemingly unsolvable problems. Just look at what is going on in the Middle East today with all the horrific images of innocent victims on both sides and the seemingly intractable problem of violence begetting more violence. How can God let this go on, we cry out? How can this cycle be broken? It is precisely then that we too must turn to God in fervent prayer on behalf of all people there and we will do that only if we really trust in God’s power to deliver and heal his sin-sick and hurting world and its people.

Turning now to our gospel lesson, we see Jesus wrestling with both God and humans. Jesus found himself in a lonely place because he had just learned that Herod had murdered his cousin, John the Baptist, and surely Jesus understood that his own life was also now in mortal danger. And like so many of us when we hear of a loved one’s death, Jesus wanted to withdraw to a solitary place to reflect, remember, grieve, and pray. But the crowds did not give our Lord any time or peace to do so because they flocked to him. And what did he do? Jesus had compassion on them and healed their sick! It seems that when we wrestle with God in our grief and heartache, that sometimes the thing for us to do is to get out of ourselves and our problems and embody the love of God to others so that we can find it ourselves.

But Jesus was not done wrestling yet because now his disciples confronted him with a new problem. What to do with all those hungry people? Notice that Jesus invited them to share in the solution by offering up their meager resources to him. And what did he do with them? He used what the disciples brought him, five loaves and two fishes, to feed over 5000 people! The lesson is unmistakable. When we bring what we have to Jesus, even our fear and brokenness, he will bless us abundantly and then work with us and use our resources to bless others, and in that gracious act we will find his comfort and peace (cf. John 16.33).

And of course we notice the eucharistic overtones in this story. Jesus took the bread and blessed and broke it and gave it to the disciples just the way he did at the Last Supper. Apparently Matthew wants us to understand how critical it is for us to come to the Lord’s Table in faith on a regular basis to find Christ’s nourishment and sustenance to help us in our wrestlings with God and others. We cannot be a blessing to others if we are not blessed ourselves first. 

And lest we think that this was the extent of our Lord’s wrestling with God and humans, we must finally turn our attention to the cross because it is there that we see Jesus engaged in the ultimate wrestling match. See him as he wrestles with his awful vocation in Gethsemane and asks the Father to take the cup of suffering he must endure for the sake of the whole world as he bears God’s condemnation of our sin in his body so that we can be healed and reconciled to God. See him as he hangs naked and bloodied on the cross, his hands and feet pierced with nails, and hear the terrible cry of dereliction, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” as the awful wrath of God fully descends on him. If we claim to love our Lord, we cannot remain unmoved by these images or think that God does not care about us or is uninvolved in our lives. 

And as we stand at the foot of the cross and think the night cannot get any darker, that our Savior really is dead and the kingdom is not coming after all, especially in our own lives, we witness the empty tomb with its foretaste of new creation, and we realize that in our Lord’s struggles and resurrection we have received God’s ultimate blessing and are witnessing the final unfolding of God’s promises to heal and redeem us and his broken world, agonizingly slow and uncertain as those promises seem at times. Like Jacob at the river, we realize we are utterly undeserving of this blessing, but that by the grace of God it is ours nevertheless through faith. Like the recipients of the loaves and fishes, we realize that in our struggles with God, when we bring to him what we have, broken and insufficient as that might be, and trust God with what we give him, we will be astonished at God’s generosity and faithfulness toward us. 

So what are you wrestling with God about? As you know, our church family is wrestling with many serious and troubling things right now: cancer and other serious illnesses, family problems and difficulties, and how best to bring the love of Christ to bear on those who are hurting or in pain to name just a few. Whatever it is you are wrestling with God, consider what our lessons teach us today. While our wrestling with God is hard and exhausting, fear not. Although we are armed with nothing more than prayer and a tenacious faith that refuses to let go even in the darkest valley, we are promised that if we persevere we will prevail, not necessarily as the world sees it but as God sees it and that is all that matters. We will prevail because of God’s great love for us and because God is always faithful to his promises to us. We know this because we believe that God has reconciled us to himself in the very struggles of our Lord Jesus Christ. And because we know this, we know we have Good News, even in our most arduous and challenging struggles, 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.