Sermon originally preached on September 15, 2019 at our quarterly healing service. As always it will be helpful to read the assigned texts below by clicking on or tapping their links before reading the sermon. Here I deal with the enigmatic biblical proclamation regarding God’s healing power. It is enigmatic because even though God has the power to heal our infirmities, sometimes God chooses not to or to answer our prayers in ways other than we intended or wanted. This can lead us to fall away, the ultimate disaster for any human being. For those with ears to hear, listen and understand.

Lectionary texts: Jeremiah 4:11–28; Psalm 14; 1 Timothy 1.12-17; Luke 15.1-10.

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

Today we hold our quarterly healing service. But what is the basis for our healing? Obviously the power of God but are there other factors involved? Our lessons today give us some insight into this question and this is what I want us to look at this morning.

Our hard-to-hear OT and psalm lessons remind us in a graphic way that we are a sin-sick lot. God tells his prophet Jeremiah that his people Israel are stupid and lack understanding. Why? Because they are skilled at doing evil and do not know how to do good. Likewise the psalmist makes the stark observation that there is no one who does good, not one single person. To the contrary God sees that many increasingly refuse to believe that God even exists! The result? God’s people and the human race in general are alienated from God and ripe for God’s terrible judgment on our wickedness. This is tough stuff because it refers to you and me. Not only that, our rebellion against God’s perfect and good ways corrupts the land. God created us to care for his creation, land included, and when we refuse to reflect God’s goodness out into the world, the land suffers along with us (strip mining and pollution-caused catastrophes, anyone?), this on top of the fact that creation already suffers under God’s curse for the sin of our first ancestors. 

Not only do our sins result in God’s judgment on them (if you haven’t figured it out yet, God detests any form of evil, even as he loves us), our sins make us sick: physically, emotionally, spiritually, and mentally because they separate us from our only source of life and health: God our Creator who sustains us. End our sin-caused alienation from God and every kind of illness, malady, and land corruption go away (new creation, anyone?). So today you get the punchline to the sermon’s title right away. Value added. You can nap in peace now and still pass the quiz at sermon’s end. But here’s the problem. If we believe the OT (which we should), we are powerless to heal our sin-sickness by ourselves. Our sin destines us to wander in the wasteland of the wilderness even as we live in our million dollar mansions and grow fat on our sumptuous diets and enjoy the glut of consumer goodies produced by our economy. Human knowledge and technological advancements may allow us to overcome the corruption of the land and to an extent heal many of our sicknesses, but we cannot cure the root cause of all illness: our alienation from God.

But it is to the glory of God our Father that the grim message about Sin contained in the OT is not the final word, that the OT was always a story awaiting its completion, and that final word is the coming of Jesus Christ, the only Son of God. To be sure, the human condition about which I have just spoken did not change from the OT to the NT periods. Neither has it changed today. We are more sophisticated in hiding, rationalizing, and dressing up our alienation from God, but the psalmist’s charge about the wickedness of the human race remains true and valid today. So what changed?

The Good News of Jesus Christ, of course, with its proclamation that God has fulfilled his promise to Abraham to address our sin-sickness and heal us through Abraham’s family. God has accomplished that in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, God become human, to rescue us from our slavery to the power of Sin that has bound us ever since our original ancestors got booted out of paradise. We get a glimpse of the heart of God in our gospel lesson this morning and it is the key to our healing at the deepest level of our being. In response to his opponents’ criticism that he was always partying and hanging out with folks who were most despised in his culture, our Lord told two parables about the relentlessly loving heart God the Father has for his image-bearing creatures. 

In the first parable, we see the shepherd (God through Christ) leaving his flock behind to search for the one lost sheep. What kind of sheep was that? Was it the cutest one? The one who nestled up to the shepherd to sleep? The one with the finest wool? No, the shepherd went after the sheep because it was lost. No prerequisites, no qualifications except disqualification (sin). No structure of personal piety, no good sense (it got lost), no obedience. This was the one that got a ride home on the shepherd’s shoulder. This one is you and me in all our inglorious chaos and vanity and baggage we carry around. The message here is that there is nothing we can do to get a ride home; it is entirely up to the Shepherd searching for and finding us, and the Shepherd is willing to search us out! And here we need to be clear about what this parable isn’t saying because too often it has been used to excuse ongoing sin which fosters ongoing alienation from God. Christ was not saying that God accepted the people he hung out with as they stood. Sinners must repent so that God can heal us. The sheep didn’t run away from the shepherd once found; it let the shepherd carry him back home. God searches for us and calls us to repentance, not because God hates us but because God loves us and wants to heal us. He searches for us as we are (rebellious and hostile toward him, skilled at doing evil and not knowing how to do good without the help of God), but God doesn’t expect us to stay as we are. The folks who hung around Jesus had to resolve to give up their lifestyles that made them sick so that God could thoroughly heal them. Likewise with us. 

None of this negates the power of the parable in which our Lord tells us about the great love the Father has for us; in fact, it reinforces it. That is why there is rejoicing in heaven. God has brought another lost sheep back into the fold and the Father’s heart overflows with joy because he loves each and every one of us in all of our disarrayed glory! Imagine you are that lost sheep our Lord finds. What would be your reaction? Would it not be one of instant relief and healing? Would you not be rejoicing and want to please the One who loves you despite your hostility toward him and wants you to be his forever?

Elsewhere the NT tells us a definitively about the Father’s great love for us made known in Jesus Christ. We are washed clean by the blood of the Lamb shed for us. Our sins have been put away. God’s desire for justice and mercy has been accomplished on the cross so that we are spared of God’s terrible judgment on our sins because God took it on himself; and our slavery to the power of Sin has been broken. We know this because Jesus Christ has been raised from the dead and we have been given God’s Spirit to help us lead new lives when we have the good sense and humility to let the Shepherd carry us home on his whipped and crucified back.

So why aren’t we all healed? There are many reasons (as well as a great enigma in it all), but I only have time to explore one of those reasons with all its complexity. Some of us are self-loathing. Like David in Psalm 51, we know our transgressions and our sin is ever before us. We can’t believe that a good and righteous God could ever love us, let alone have mercy on us. We read about God’s hatred of all things evil and we conclude that because of our sins, we too are evil and therefore outside of God’s love and mercy. The Good Shepherd would never come looking for us. We are beyond saving. But our self-loathing comes from the world, the flesh (usually from within ourselves), and the devil. It ignores the truth about the love and mercy of God made known in Jesus Christ and him crucified for our sins and for our sake. When our self-loathing prevents us from accepting God’s love for, and mercy upon us, we effectively run away from the Good Shepherd or refuse to let him put us on his shoulders to carry us home. Our self-loathing is a subtle form of pride and alienation against God, all dressed up in pietistic language and thinking, and it distinctly goes against the parable of the lost sheep, which is all about the love and mercy of the Shepherd, who seeks out the least, the lost, and the self-loathing. As a result, our alienation from God continues because we falsely believe God can’t and won’t love us and we never are open for the core healing that comes when we are reconciled to God our Father through Christ. If you are one of those self-loathers, STOP IT!!! STOP IT RIGHT NOW!!!! I plead with you to take this parable to heart and give your Father a chance to show his love for you. You will not be disappointed.

And here is where the parable of the lost coin comes into play because it speaks as much about God’s perseverance as it does about rejoicing over finding the lost. As we saw, Christ implicitly calls us to repentance in the parable of the lost sheep, and many of us consciously seek to repent but often find ourselves failing miserably. This is especially bad for you self-loathers; it just adds fuel to the fire. Does that mean we really haven’t repented and remain lost? The parable of the lost coins suggests otherwise. Repentance is not a one time deal or event. Neither is our relationship with God a one time event. We are a work in progress. St. Paul recognized this when he made the astonishing claim in Romans that we will share in a death and resurrection like Christ’s because we are baptized in him (Romans 6.3-5). He then immediately acknowledged that we are not done with sin until we die (Romans 6.6-7). That means we will sometimes fail to miss the mark but that in no way negates the power of the cross and Christ’s victory over Sin and Death for us. The cross is the eternal sign of God’s great and relentless love for us, that God is patient and perseveres in his pursuit of us, despite our flaws, weaknesses, self-loathing, and rebellion. This is because God created us for life and creation, not death and destruction. God’s love for us means the Father wants the best for us and has acted as only God could on our behalf to bring us safely home to him where there will be no more sickness or sighing or alienation or death. 

St. Paul also serves as a poster child for this mind-boggling promise. He wasn’t just a lost sheep. He was a wolf who actively devoured the sheep by persecuting God’s reconstituted people in Christ out of a sincere but mistaken belief that Christ was not the real deal until Christ got a hold of him. St. Paul’s story reminds us that sincerely held beliefs about God, wrong as they can be when we do not humbly submit to God’s word, cannot rescue us. Only God can rescue us. St. Paul, chief of sinners because he actively persecuted God’s people in Christ, is saved by the One who pursued him relentlessly and patiently until he repented of his evil. The message? Nobody is beyond hope. Nobody is beyond the healing love and mercy of God. We simply have to accept the gift offered to us unconditionally. The extent to which you have accepted the gift is the extent you will find healing.

In a few moments we will invite you to come for intercessions and anointing to be healed. As you come forward, do so with a thankful and believing heart and mind, imperfect as both are. Your faith and resolve to follow Christ, however imperfectly you might live it, is evidence of God’s love for you and his willingness to heal you. Therefore, don’t be afraid. Continue to examine your heart and your life and resolve to ask the Lord Jesus to heal you of anything that causes you to remain alienated from God. Give thanks to the Great Shepherd, the one who pursues you relentlessly because he loves you beyond your ability to understand—not because of who you are or aren’t, but because of who God is—and let this God heal you to your very core. The Good News of Jesus Christ is this: You are created in the Father’s image to reflect his goodness and love, but you rebelled against that purpose. Despite your rebellion, God loves you and has acted on your behalf to end your stupidity and skill at doing evil so that you are freed to do what is truly human, good, and life affirming (i.e., it’s not about you, stupid, it’s about God). In giving you this great gift you will find both his peace and your healing, thanks be to God! To him be honor, praise, and glory forever and ever.   

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

Sermon originally preached on September 13, 2015. As always it will be helpful to read the assigned texts for today before reading the sermon by clicking on or tapping their links below. When Scripture calls for us to be wise, what do the writers have in mind? For those with ears to hear, listen and understand.

Lectionary texts: Proverbs 1.20-33; Psalm 19; Saint James 3.1-12; Saint Mark 8.27-38.

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

Today I want us to explore some of the often neglected treasure of biblical wisdom. What is it and why should we care about it? In answering some of these questions, we will have the chance to assess our humility quotient because ultimately our acceptance or rejection of biblical Wisdom is directly related to how humble or proud we really are.

In our OT lesson we are introduced to Lady Wisdom, the very personification of God’s Wisdom. In our passage, we see that Wisdom is not simply a set of passive principles we have the option of accepting or rejecting. No, Wisdom is seen as a teacher who is very active. She is one who cries out in the streets, peddling her wares. Like a good teacher, she is willing to do almost anything to attract and maintain her students’ attention because there is much at stake here. But sadly, the implication is that while she is actively pursuing students to learn from her, there are not many takers to be found. Hmmm. Are we one of those people?

Specifically, Lady Wisdom addresses three types of folks: the simple, the scoffer, and the fool. The simple are those who are either young or naive. They haven’t really had a chance to learn wisdom and by implication are ripe for the picking. The scoffer, on the other hand, not only rejects Lady Wisdom’s teachings, but is actively opposed to them by ridiculing the wisdom found in her teachings. We all get how this works. How often do we hear Christians being ridiculed or mocked when espousing biblical Wisdom to a world that is increasingly hostile to it? Take this proverb, for example. “A soft answer turns away wrath, but a harsh word stirs up anger” (Proverbs 15.1). How ridiculous, the scoffer snorts! Everyone knows that he who shouts the loudest or carries the biggest stick gets the prize! Who cares how many feathers get ruffled in the process? Following this advice would give the appearance of weakness and any who do follow it are fools! Or how often have we been silenced out of fear that we will be scoffed at for holding a biblical perspective on any of the current hot topics in the public forum? Then there is the fool, those people who are said to “hate knowledge.” Indeed, to love folly is to hate Wisdom and vice versa. There is no middle ground to be had here and that makes many of us who prefer to measure our colors in shades of gray rather than black and white uncomfortable. 

In our lesson we are not told specifically what constitutes Wisdom, only that the beginning of wisdom is to choose to fear the Lord. To fear the Lord means we have a healthy and reverential respect for the all-knowing, all-powerful, and ever-present God who is incomparably greater than us. It does not mean cowering from an unpredictable bully. And while Lady Wisdom does not tell us what Wisdom looks like in our lesson, the psalmist does. He tells us that Wisdom consists in following God’s good will and purposes for us. Do this, say both the psalmist and Lady Wisdom, and you will prosper. Don’t do this, and disaster will surely strike. It’s not so much a matter of God rewarding us for good behavior or punishing us for bad behavior as it is reaping what we sow. There really are consequences that accompany our thoughts and behaviors! Be wise, says Lady Wisdom. Don’t play the fool!

All this ought to make sense to us at some level. If God really is our Creator, who knows better how to make us happy than God? And so God has given us his Laws to follow (think, e.g., the Ten Commandments) because acting in these ways will surely result in harmonious, peaceable living. If we are loving and treating others as we want them to love and treat us (part of the Great Commandment Jesus gave us), we reduce exponentially the chances of strife and conflict and all the other nastiness we experience as the result of our own folly. And behaving in these ways also helps prevent evil from working its poison in our lives. 

To be sure, this doesn’t mean that wise people never suffer or that fools don’t prosper. They do at times, but this is an exception to the rule, not the rule itself, and in this life there are always exceptions to the rule. These exceptions, however, do not invalidate the rule! Choose to act wisely, Lady Wisdom exhorts us, and you will prosper. Choose to act foolishly (e.g., by acting selfishly or recklessly or following the ways of the world that are opposed to God) and you will bring disaster on yourself. There is not a person in this room who has not experienced the truth Lady Wisdom teaches here. And to top it off, she tells us she will scoff at us when we have failed to follow her advice and wreaked havoc on ourselves by our folly. Pretty harsh, Lady Wisdom. Yes it is, she replies, but the stakes are high and I want you to enjoy life as you were meant to live it. Sometimes harsh talk is needed to wake you up out of your stupor. Learn to live as God created you to live and wants you to live, and you will find out what it means to be truly happy. Do you believe this? If you do not, you might want to look at the pride in you that causes you to think you know better than God and leads you to reject his good purposes for you.

So what does biblical Wisdom, the willingness and ability to follow God’s good will for us as his human creatures, look like? Saint James has an answer for us in our epistle lesson. Consider our inability to control our tongue. How can we use our mouth to praise God in worship one minute and then use it to speak badly about others the next, he asks? This is sobering stuff because the evil that comes out of our mouth every time we use angry and abusive language or gossip about others has its very origins in hell itself. That’s why James calls the tongue a rest-less evil full of deadly poison. An uncontrolled tongue is responsible for spreading evil, Saint James warns us. It stains the whole body. In other words it works to corrupt our entire being. How? Spread gossip and people won’t trust you. Insult people and use bitter sarcasm, and they will not follow you. Who wants to be around a mean, spiteful person who never has anything good to say about anything or anyone? So much for our desire to have real relationships with others!

But it gets worse. A wicked tongue not only corrupts us, it destroys the course of our life, precisely because we eventually become what we speak. Use vulgar and crude language and you will become a vulgar and crude person. Use hateful language and eventually you will begin to act hatefully toward others. Use cruel language and you will become a cruel person. Don’t believe Saint James? Then consider this advertisement from 1964.  

Anyone see sexual innuendo in it? Any of you blush or giggle or get embarrassed or uncomfortable as I read it? How could an advertising agency publish something like this? Well, 51 years ago, our culture was not nearly as sexualized as it is today. We didn’t hear crude jokes and a steady stream of sexual innuendo and explicit sexual language in the media like we do today. That’s why if you look at any of the old TV shows from the late 50s to mid 60s, they almost seem naive in their innocence, just like this ad. And because we have been bombarded with sexualized language at every turn, it changes us ever so gradually and insidiously until voila! We see sexual innuendo in places it was never intended. Likewise with the language we use and how it changes the course of our life, for better or worse. We are not so much what we eat but what we speak. In this utterly devastating denunciation of an uncontrolled tongue, Saint James lays out a steady progression of evil, from self-corruption that extends to the whole course of our life, climaxing in exposing the tongue’s source of evil to hell itself. 

How can this be, asks Saint James? How can we Christians (notice James includes himself) who were bought at the price of Jesus’ own blood and who have the very Spirit of the living God living in us, use our tongue to speak evilly? If we have been made clean by Jesus and given his Spirit to dwell in us, we should bear commensurate fruit (cf. Matthew 12.33-37). But we don’t bear good fruit consistently because we cannot control our mouth. When we speak abusively to others and/or gossip about them, we are heaping contempt on God’s own greatness because human beings, even our enemies, are made in his image. Speak evilly about someone and we in effect speak evilly about the One who created that person. Given the great and terrible cost the Father endured to rescue us through Jesus, how can we as Christians even consider using impure and unchecked language? Where is the biblical sense of shock and outrage about this? After all, the implication is that a true Christian will not make a practice of using unchristian speech and anyone who does, gives evidence that (s)he is not a Christian and therefore in danger of hell. And yet here we are, speaking badly about those who anger us or with whom we disagree, friends included! Saint James is warning each of us that we had better be practicing self-discipline to purify our speech or we expose our faith as a sham and us as imposters, therefore making us liable to judgment after all. We might be able to fool some of the people some of the time by how we act, but God is not mocked. He knows our heart and hears our uncharitable speech. I bought you with my own dear Son’s blood, he tells us. I didn’t rescue you from your sin so you could continue to be the fallen person you were before I touched your life. I rescued you so that my image could be fully restored in you so that you would start acting in ways that are truly human. Start speaking and acting the part before it’s too late!

These are sobering words and more than a bit worrisome because our language can land us in hell. Yet how many of us tend to discount these kinds of warnings or try to rationalize them away? Saint James does not warn us about these things because he is some overbearing prude who is trying to get all judgmental on us. No, like Lady Wisdom, he warns us because he loves us and wants the best for us. How can a loving person want to see someone cast into hell? And Saint James wants us to remember Whose we are and what it has cost God to redeem us from sin and death so that we will learn to have a thankful heart, and speak and act accordingly. That’s his point about the quality of water. We’ve been healed and we need to start acting and speak-ing like we have. This is the function of biblical Wisdom and sometimes it is hard for us to hear.

But hard things don’t stop us from protesting about all this. Not fair, we cry! If we can’t control our tongue as Saint James argues, how can God punish us for something beyond our control? God really must be an angry bully after all! Not so, Saint James replies. That is your hard heart speaking! Sure, controlling our tongue is very difficult and none of us is able to do it completely. After all, I’ve just told you that anyone who can control his/her tongue completely is perfect. Yet none of us is perfect! But don’t you know you have God’s very Spirit living in you, making Jesus’ healing love available to you? Don’t you know that God the Father has an egregiously generous heart and loves to lavish his children (you know, those who follow Jesus) with good gifts (James 1.5, 17)? But you don’t ask for good gifts or don’t believe God will grant them to you and so you don’t receive them (James 1.6-8). So if you really want to obey the Father’s commands and align yourself with his good and wholesome wisdom, ask him to help you control your tongue so that you can begin the hard work of repentance and self-discipline that forming new speech patterns requires. Remember we are talking patterns of speech and those patterns should reflect the healing love of Christ that is working on us as well as the Spirit who lives in us. So don’t lose heart or hope over what I’ve said or my warnings to you about the danger of unchecked speech because you have been rescued from your slavery to sin and death and freed to live your new life in Christ wisely, a life whose patterns of speech and behavior reflect the One who died for you on a cross to save you. Remember we still live in a fallen world where the glory of God is only partially revealed. Likewise with our transformation. While it has begun, our transformation will not be completed until Jesus returns again to usher in the new creation. But return he will and when he does, our speech and praise of him will be pure and unending. In the interim, let us resolve to work diligently to rid ourselves of all unchristian and unhealthy language with the Spirit’s help. Let us do so, confident that God’s healing love will continue to transform our speech patterns so that they will conform to the glory and wisdom of God while simultaneously giving witness to the world that we do this because we really do believe we have Good News, now and for all eternity. To him be honor, praise, and glory forever and ever.

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

Sermon originally preached on September 13, 2020. As always it will be helpful for you to read the assigned texts for today before reading the sermon by clicking on or tapping their links below. We hear a lot today about the no-nos of being “judgmental.” But what does that mean? Does God expect us to suspend all moral judgment in matters great and small? Hardly. Read on to see what Scripture really has to say. For those with ears to hear, listen and understand.

Lectionary texts: Exodus 14.19-31; Psalm 114; Romans 14.1-12; Matthew 18.21-35.

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

This morning we conclude our preaching series on St. Paul’s letter to the Romans. Hang on to your hats and keep up with me because there is a LOT for us to cover. Before we look at what the apostle has to say today, I want to take a moment to review some of the highlights we have looked at over the summer. In the first 12 chapters of Romans, St. Paul has reminded us of the awful predicament we humans find ourselves in. We are all slaves to that outside and hostile power that Scripture calls Sin and it both corrupts and kills us. No one is immune to its power and no one can free themselves from its grip without the help of someone more powerful than Sin’s power. That someone of course is God and St. Paul has proclaimed the Good News of Jesus Christ to us: That at just the right time, while we were still helpless and enemies of God, God moved on our behalf to free us from our slavery to Sin and Death by becoming human and dying for us. Only by the blood of the Lamb shed for us can we hope to be spared from God’s just judgment on our sins and rebellion. For those who believe God has acted on our behalf in Christ by taking on his own judgment himself, there is now no condemnation for our sins despite the fact that the power of Sin still weighs us down in this mortal life. This is all a free gift given us out of the Father’s great love and tender mercy for us. As St. Paul tells us in chapter 11, “God has imprisoned everyone in disobedience so he could have mercy on everyone” (v.32). Simply remarkable. But the apostle also makes clear that we are to respond to God’s great love and mercy by imitating our Lord in the living of our days instead of following our own selfish ways, relying on the powerof God to help us do so. In biblical parlance this is called repentance, turning back toward God in the power of the Spirit. As we have said repeatedly, the Christian faith is not another form of self-help. If that were the case it would have no Good News to offer and we would remain dead in our sins. 

Now in today’s epistle lesson, St. Paul continues to exhort us to holy living and reminds us in yet another context to rely on the power of God to do so. Here he addresses how we should treat each other as fellow Christians, both within our parish family and beyond. Before we look at what St. Paul says, we must keep in mind two very important points. First, underlying all his teaching here was St. Paul’s deep faith in the love and mercy of God made known in Jesus Christ. As we have seen, we were bought with the price of Christ’s own precious blood and are united with him by faith and through baptism. We are saved from our sins by God’s grace, not by what we do or don’t do. St. Paul summarized this nicely when he said, “If you openly declare that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved” (Rom. 10.9). It is faith in Christ that matters, a faith that heals hearts and minds and transforms life, however imperfectly and messy that looks. And because of that faith, we no longer belong to ourselves, but to Christ. 

Second, it is critical for us to understand that here St. Paul was not talking about issues that define the Christian faith, e.g., Christian teaching that Jesus is the Son of God, fully human and fully divine, or his saving death and bodily resurrection from the dead that signaled the defeat of death and the inauguration of God’s new creation. These doctrines and others were clearly taught in the NT and over the years the Church developed a consensus that reflected its one mind about these issues, various heresies and false teachings that regularly spring up notwithstanding. For issues of first importance, issues that affect our salvation and standing with God, St. Paul and the early Church held a much different view than he teaches in today’s lesson. We can see this in his rebuke of the church at Corinth for allowing a stepson to sleep with his stepmother, all in the name of “grace.” Any kind of sex outside the context of marriage is a sin and Scripture clearly teaches this throughout, despite many in today’s world who try to persuade us otherwise. How can you let this kind of sexual immortality go on? St. Paul roared. Not even the pagans allow this kind of depravity!

You are so proud of yourselves, but you should be mourning in sorrow and shame. And you should remove this man from your fellowship. …I have already passed judgment on this man in the name of the Lord Jesus. You must call a meeting of the church…Then you must throw this man out and hand him over to Satan so that his sinful nature will be destroyed and he himself will be saved on the day the Lord returns (1 Corinthians 5.1-2, 5).

Or consider his response to the Judaizers who had infiltrated and corrupted the church in Galatia by teaching that Christians had to be physically circumcised to be saved, violating St. Paul’s clear teaching on justification by faith and denying the power and efficacy of Christ’s death and resurrection. As far as St. Paul was concerned, those false teachers were wolves in sheep’s clothing. And what should you do with wolves who infiltrate Christ’s flock to corrupt and destroy it by teaching falsely? You shoot the wolves to protect the flock. Accordingly he told the Galatians, “I wish those who unsettle you would castrate themselves. For you were called to freedom, brothers and sisters.” (Gal 5.12-13a).

Contrast this to what St. Paul teaches in today’s epistle lesson about issues of secondary importance, issues for which Scripture fails to provide a clear answer and/or which have never been settled in the history of the Church. In the church at Rome in St. Paul’s day those issues included dietary restrictions and the observance of holy days. In our day, the issue of the role of women in the Church or charismatic issues would be examples of these kind of secondary importance issues. Here St. Paul addresses the weak and the strong in faith. By “weak” St. Paul did not have in mind that these folks lacked faith in Christ but rather they didn’t understand that their faith in Christ meant that they were free from all previous legalistic requirements such as dietary laws or observing certain religious festivals. These requirements were not a basis for their Christian faith but rather part of their observance of it, i.e, they believed they had to follow these practices in order to walk with Christ properly. The weak in this context were most likely Jewish converts who struggled to cast off the old or at least blend them with the new teachings of the faith. 

For St. Paul, it wasn’t the fact that these Christians observed dietary regulations/religious festivals. If doing these things helped them grow in their relationship with Christ, he would have been all for it. What the apostle is concerned about here is that by doing these things the weak would not perceive themselves as weak but rather saw themselves as upholding high religious standards and principles, all the while looking down their noses at those who didn’t uphold these practices (the “strong”) because the strong didn’t see them as important for growing in their relationship with Christ. For them, Christ’s death and resurrection had set them free from their slavery to Sin and Death so that they didn’t have to observe such religious regulations. To use an example from our day, tomorrow is the Feast of the Holy Cross. There are devout Christians who will observe this feast as part of their devotional/discipleship practices and St. Paul would approve. However, if those who observe Holy Cross Day believe that those who don’t are somehow inferior Christians or that their rescue from Sin and Death depends on them observing it and other Feast Days of the Church, rather than trusting in the efficacy of Christ’s death and resurrection to save them, then St. Paul would likely take issue with these “weak” Christians of our day. Who are you to judge a fellow Christian for whom Christ died? We have a word for this and it’s called judgmentalism.

The problem of judgmentalism wasn’t just with “weak” Christians. “Strong” Christians also looked down their noses at those who did follow such practices. To despise a fellow believer in Christ suggests that the “strong” held their “weaker” family members in contempt out of some sense of superiority. Why are you weak guys observing dietary laws or religious holidays? You don’t need any of them to have a relationship with Christ. Christ has truly set us free from Sin’s power. Make sure you stay free. Stop engaging in things that aren’t necessary. Loser. 

Again, keeping in mind that St. Paul is talking about secondary issues here, the apostle warns both sides not to judge the each other. We need to be careful about terms here, my beloved. When the NT warns us not to judge, it is not telling us to suspend moral judgment on behavior and thinking. There is far too much perversity in this world and to be living sacrifices to God requires us to make those kinds of judgments! What St. Paul is talking about here is the sin of pride and presumption. Each side condemned practices (or lack of them) out of a sense of superiority and sadly we continue to do this all the time to our brothers and sisters in Christ. Just look at Father Maney! He eats and drinks too much and preaches lousy sermons. He can’t be a Christian in good standing! And why does Father Sang cross himself? That’s just weird. Or Dr. Falor. Why he hasn’t prayed the daily office since Moby Dick was a minnow! I pray the office everyday and I’m pretty sure that makes me a better Christian and more pleasing in Christ’s sight! And how about those wussies who didn’t come back to chapel today to worship like we have? Second rate Christians for sure! Real men don’t eat quiche and real Christians don’t stay away from church. You get the idea. Nowhere does St. Paul prohibit vigorous discussion and debate over issues of secondary importance, only our presumptive judgment on our opponents. Iron sharpens iron. Presumptive condescension produces rancor, ill will, and hopeless division. It separates rather than unites. This same argument would also apply to interdenominational conflicts within the Church regarding secondary issues. It’s one thing to prefer your own tradition. It’s quite another to condemn those who don’t see it your way.

Looking beyond our parish family and the Church catholic we see this kind of presumptive pride and sneering all the time, especially in politics today. It’s the way of the world and we are not to participate in it. Our sin is not that we disagree with those who do not share our political views. Our sin is in presuming our views make us more pleasing in God’s sight than our opponents. Still don’t believe me? When you heard St. Paul ask, “Why do you pass judgment on your brother or sister?” who did you think of first? The person who has passed judgment on you and your views/practices and got you all hot and bothered, or did you think about yourself? If you’re like me, you probably thought about instances where you have been wronged rather than the times you served as a stumbling block to another’s faith. That, my beloved, is a sure sign of pride and presumption and St. Paul has some stern words for us here: Be careful of your judgmentalism and the proud presumption behind it. We all have to stand before God’s judgment seat and give an account of our lives to God. This should be enough to strike fear in anyone who takes the judgment of God seriously.

So what’s going on here? Is this the same Paul who earlier proclaimed the Good News that there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ? If no condemnation, how can St. Paul say something like this, both here and in 2 Cor 5.10? St. Paul is not talking out of both sides of his mouth. What he is reminding us is that only God knows our hearts and minds and only God has the power to judge. It simply won’t do to make God’s grace an idol. We can’t presume because we say the right words and do the right things that God owes it to us to not condemn us. When we presume God’s mercy and grace on us while at the same time we are unwilling to extend them to others, or when we see ourselves as being superior to others because of what we do (or don’t do) compared to them, we are setting ourselves up as de facto judges and claiming moral superiority over them. Remember, we have been bought with a price. We are saved only by the blood of the Lamb shed for us to free us from our slavery to the power of Sin, a free gift from the Father’s loving and generous heart. Without that, none of us has any real hope to be spared from the fires of hell because as St. Paul has already warned us in chapters 1-3, all have sinned and all will therefore be judged. 

This in no way negates what he has said earlier. God did bear his own judgment on our behalf when he took on our flesh and became human. At just the right time Christ did die for us, even while we were helpless and still God’s enemies. There is indeed nothing in all creation that can separate us from the love of God made known in Jesus Christ. But this is God’s gift to give out of his tender love and mercy for us, not ours to presume. And because it is God’s free gift to us, it is God’s prerogative to withhold them from us if by our lives and our tongues we demonstrate clearly that we see the cross as nothing more than a get-out-of-jail-free card for us so that we can continue behaving as badly as we did before we knew Christ. We cannot and dare not presume God will rescue us from his judgment just because we call ourselves Christian or we read snippets of the Bible, come to church regularly, and partake in the Eucharist while all the time running down and sneering at our opponents. Our life and death are God’s, not our own, and we dare not presume otherwise. To be sure, we can rely on God being good to his word and promises to us that he has indeed rescued us from Sin and Death and from his terrible judgment in and through Christ. But we dare not presume it and show our presumption in how we mistreat or judge others with haughty contempt. 

Christ tells us virtually the same thing in his parable in our gospel lesson this morning. The first servant had an impossible debt to pay, just like we cannot save ourselves from God’s just judgment on our rebellion and sin. The king took pity on the servant and forgave his impossible debt at great cost to the king. And what did the servant do? Did he realize the great grace and mercy offered him? Did he resolve to treat others similarly? Not a chance! He went after a fellow servant who owed him a manageable debt and refused to offer him the same grace he had begged the king to grant him. And our Lord’s punchline? If you want God to forgive you, you’d better do likewise. Don’t presume you have it automatically. Forgiveness is God’s prerogative and God owes us nothing other than judgment. So if you want God to forgive you, you’d better forgive others freely. We pray it every week in the Lord’s Prayer. Do you pay attention to it or dismiss it as inconvenient?

This warning not to presume God’s mercy and grace provides us with a healthy balance to help us live out our faith. We’ll surely get it wrong and no amount of do gooding will make God obligated to rescue us from his judgment. The knowledge that we all must stand in front of God’s judgment seat and give an account of our lives is the great equalizer and provides us with a much needed dose of daily humility. Yet we also dare to approach his throne with hope, trusting in God’s promise that there really is now no condemnation for those who put their hope and trust in Christ and live out their faith, however badly that might look at times. When we realize God owes us nothing but judgment but has moved instead to rescue us from that judgment, we can have confidence that the Holy Spirit will use that knowledge to heal and humble us and so be made ready to receive the eternal crown of glory in the new creation. To him be honor, praise, and glory forever and ever. 

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

Sermon originally preached on September 10, 2017. As always it will be helpful for you to read the assigned texts by clicking on or tapping their links below before reading the sermon. Here I deal with the difficult topic of conflict resolution. In today’s society that is often a forbidden notion. Many seem to strive for conflict rather than try to resolve it. As is the case of the body of Christ, the Church, so it is for society’s that are hell-bent on pursuing conflict. It will not end well for us if something doesn’t change in the power of the Spirit. For those with ears to hear, listen and understand.

Lectionary texts: Exodus 12.1-14; Psalm 149; Romans 13.8-14; Saint Matthew 18.15-20.

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

Have you ever stopped to consider what an awesome privilege it is to be called to be one of God’s people in Christ? While the Church is many things, above all else it is a living organism composed of redeemed followers of Jesus, you and me. As such, we are called to do business in ways that are fundamentally different from the way the world does business. In our gospel lesson this morning our Lord tells us how we should resolve conflicts between each other and this is what I want us to look at this morning. 

Before we look at the model for conflict resolution Jesus commanded us to use, it is necessary for us to lay some groundwork so that we approach this subject with our minds right and in the proper Spirit. Some Christians believe that there should never be any conflict between Christians. You know, love your neighbor and all that. But this viewpoint simply does not take into account the human condition. We are all badly broken and prone to self-righteousness, some more than others, and so conflict is bound to erupt, even among Christians who have been redeemed by the blood of Christ. Not only that, but there are times when perfectly legitimate and unsullied viewpoints will clash. Even a superficial reading of Scripture bears this out. Proverbs 27.17 tells us that, “As iron sharpens iron, so a friend sharpens a friend,” and sometimes conflicting opinions will actually bring much-needed clarity and wisdom about an issue. For example, Saints Barnabas and Paul got into a sharp disagreement over whether to take Mark (the gospel writer) with them on their next missionary journey. Apparently the young Mark had lost heart and deserted Saints Barnabas and Paul during their previous (and dangerous) mission work and that landed him in Saint Paul’s doghouse. The disagreement between Saints Barnabas and Paul became so sharp that the two parted ways and we have no record of them ever seeing or speaking to each other again, a sad ending, considering they had survived many perilous situations together during their missionary journeys (Acts 15.36-41). Surely Saints Barnabas and Paul had legitimate reasons for wanting to take or leave Mark with them and in this particular instance they couldn’t work it out. But this doesn’t make their conflict illegitimate or immoral. Sometimes things like this happen because we live in a broken world and there can be more than one correct perspective regarding a situation. As a happier postscript to this story, we know that Saints Paul and Mark were eventually reconciled and that Saint Paul counted on Saint Mark’s companionship and faithfulness as the former languished alone and abandoned in prison awaiting his execution (2 Timothy 4.9-18). This gives us a hint as to what Jesus was driving at when he gave us this model to resolve conflict and to the fact that Saint Paul was faithful to it because he was eventually reconciled with Saint Mark. So as Christians, we need not fear conflict with other faithful Christians and should accept that legitimate conflict is inevitable. If that is true, then the question before us is how to resolve conflicts faithfully when they arise.

Before we answer that question, we must first look at some assumptions behind Jesus’ model for conflict resolution. For us to follow Jesus’ command about how to resolve conflicts with other believers within his body, the Church, we must approach conflict resolution with a clear understanding of the human condition and a profound sense of humility, leaving behind our built-in sense of self-righteousness. We can only do this if we first share the radical view Saint Paul had about the leveling of human distinctions that has occurred in Christ. What does that mean you ask? It means that Saint Paul believed and taught that every one of us stands under the just and holy judgment of God, that there is no one who is good. All of us are sin-sick to death and in desperate need of the Lord’s healing that is available to each of us in the shedding of his blood for us on the cross and in the power of the Holy Spirit who lives in us. Without the saving death of Christ who loved us and died for us while we were still his enemies, none of us has a hope or a future. None of us. Therefore none of us enjoys an inherent advantage or high ground when it comes to disputes. To be sure, there are some instances where one party is clearly in the right and the other clearly in the wrong, but that does not have blanket application because in the next instance the tables might just as well be turned because we are all profoundly broken and enslaved to the power of Sin without help from the Lord. When we understand this about ourselves and the love God has for us as demonstrated supremely in the death and resurrection of his Son, we enter conflicts with the required sense of humility about ourselves and with the understanding that the person with whom we are in conflict is also a greatly-beloved and rescued sinner by God’s grace, and only by God’s grace, just like we are. When we forget who we are and our status before the Almighty and Holy God without the blood of Christ shed to reconcile us to God, our inherent sense of self-righteousness will kick in and we will immediately see our needs and our views as superior to those of the person with whom we are in conflict. And if reconciliation is the goal of Jesus’ conflict resolution model, we all know that bringing a haughty sense of self-righteousness to an argument is surely the kiss of death in terms of being reconciled with one’s opponent. 

This is why Saint Paul spent so much time telling his churches to love one another and to bear each other’s burdens, even when some people are like fingernails on a chalkboard to us. None of us is superior to the other in God’s eyes. We are all guilty sinners deserving of nothing but God’s righteous condemnation and death. But because God loves us more than God hates our sins, God as acted to redeem us in and through the cross of Christ and to raise us to new life with our risen Lord and Savior. That’s why we must always enter a conflict with a fellow Christian with a baptismal mindset where we acknowledge that we have died with Christ and are raised with him. That is what makes us right, nothing else. If you enter a conflict with this in mind, you will be amazed at the difference it makes in how you see and treat your opponent. 

We see this dynamic clearly at work in Saint Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians. Hear him as he chastises that little congregation for taking each other to court over various disputes: 

When any of you has a grievance against another, do you dare to take it to court before the unrighteous, instead of taking it before the saints [fellow members]? In fact, to have lawsuits at all with one another is already a defeat for you. Why not rather be wronged? Why not rather be defrauded? But you yourselves wrong and defraud—and believers at that (1 Corinthians 6.1,7-8).

If we do not understand that Saint Paul always operates from the perspective of Jesus Christ, we are likely to conclude that Paul is a lunatic in admonishing the Corinthians as he does here. But when we see that behind Saint Paul’s admonishment there is a firm belief that because all Christians are rescued by the blood of Christ—being rescued while we were still his enemies, no less—why should we not imitate our Lord’s love for his enemies and bear their wrongs instead of insisting on our rights? I cannot tell you how many times my, um, “interesting” sense of humor has gotten me in trouble with others because I inadvertently offend them at times. Now if I were to bring my natural sense of self-righteousness to bear against the offended, I might snort and say something like they are too sensitive and need to get over themselves. But there is no humility in that. There is no recognition that the one I offended is as beloved in Christ’s eyes as I am and that I might actually be in the wrong. So instead of getting all huffy, which will surely escalate the argument and perhaps damage our relationship long-term, why not swallow my pride for the sake of the other? Doing so imitates our Lord’s self-giving love for the sake of us both and in the process, goes a long way in reestablishing holy Christian fellowship between two redeemed believers of Christ’s body. If all of us had this mindset consistently, think of how much stronger and blessed we would all be because our relationships would be nourished and strengthened. Nobody wants to feel the sting of rejection. Nobody. So behind our Lord’s command is the command to be humble and faithful, just like he was and is.

Turning now to the actual model itself, our Lord commands us to gently confront the one who offends us. Again it is important for us to remember that this is how we are to treat fellow believers inside the Church. We are to confront each other because we are commanded to love each other enough not to let our relationships deteriorate. Jesus always has in mind reconciliation where possible. This should make sense to us. After all, Christ died to reconcile the world to God. So why wouldn’t he want us to be reconciled to each other after our disputes? 

But many of us do not want to confront those who offend us because then we open ourselves up to criticism. When we confront another, we must be prepared to hear their perspective about us and about how we might have contributed to a dispute or conflict. It’s easier for us to get all self-righteous. So instead of confronting the person who offends us, we try to run down that person to others. We engage in gossip and backbiting. Did you hear about Maney? He’s at it again. He’s always so critical and standoffish. You just can’t talk to him. And he’s quick to spend our hard-earned pledges on stupid stuff. This is not conflict resolution, my beloved. This is backbiting and evil speaking and is called triangulation, drawing a third party into our conflict. These are wicked behaviors that dishonor our Lord and his love for us because they foment ill will and actually escalate conflict. They do not serve to promote reconciliation. 

Or sometimes when we are offended about something that goes on in the church, we might decide to withhold our pledges as a way to voice our disapproval. Does Father Maney think we really need a new church building? What’s wrong with this one? I’ll show him. No more giving until he comes off his mark. Do you see how this kind of thinking and behavior does not help anyone? The problem still exists and persists, festering until it explodes. This kind of thinking is born out of self-righteousness that makes us think only we can be right, and the offending person never has the chance to defend his position. To be sure, there may be times when withholding our money might be necessary, but not until all the facts are laid out for all to see and consider. Better for us to confront our offender and lay out our case to him first so that we can listen to his perspective as well. But we are to do so in private so as not to publicly embarrass the person. Again, keep in mind what we have said about the need to approach the person in humility and with the deep understanding that the offender is greatly beloved in Christ and stands redeemed in God’s eyes, just like we are loved and redeemed. And so we confront our offender, and we cut to the chase, not sugarcoating the issue or trying to rationalize the fact that we are offended. If we can work out our differences, then Jesus tells us we have gained a brother or sister and God’s approval, thanks be to God. A vast majority of arguments could be ended this way and the parties reconciled if we would only follow this model.

But there are some cases in which the offending person refuses to come off his mark and the person offended must then bring evidence and witnesses to bear against the offender, again not to humiliate her or “win” an argument, but to seek reconciliation with the offender. This should be done with extreme care, not to mention with much prayer, because it indicates that there has been a serious breach between two believers and one of them apparently is digging her feet in for a fight. Again, the emphasis is on confronting the offender, not speaking evilly about the person or engaging in backbiting about the person with others. There is no room for that among believers who all stand under God’s judgment and mercy. If after confronting our offender with witnesses and further evidence of her wrongdoing, the offender repents, we have won a sister and reconciliation is achieved, thanks be to God.

But our Lord was wise enough to know the human heart and how desperately sick it is. He knew that there would be some who would not repent of their offenses even when confronted by compelling evidence and witnesses. And so he commands us to take the issue before the entire parish. This is the nuclear option of conflict resolution and should be used sparingly and with great trepidation. We cringe when we hear this because we have become so private and individualistic. But if there is a cancer in the body, it must be excised for the health of the body. Doing so should never be done hastily and it should always be done in sorrow. But even here our Lord has in mind reconciliation. The person is not excommunicated to be punished but in the hope that the offender will come to his right mind, repent, and be reconciled to the rest of the body of Christ. We can see this played out again in Saint Paul’s letters. At the church of Corinth there apparently was a man who was having sex with his stepmother. The congregation had done nothing about it, apparently in the name of grace. But Saint Paul would have none of it. After all, he had asked the Romans how they who had been freed from their slavery to Sin and Death by the blood of Christ could go on living in a lifestyle that fostered their old death-producing slavery. So here Saint Paul tells the Corinthians the same thing. Expel the man, he tells them, not to punish him but to perhaps help him come to his senses so that he will bear the fruit of repentance and be restored to fellowship with the Lord and within the body of Christ because his sins were damaging everyone, not just those immediately involved (1 Cor 5.1-5).

This is tough stuff, my beloved, and thankfully most of us won’t need to escalate our conflict resolution to this level. But if we love others enough, we must be willing and able to confront them for our sake as well as theirs and the body of Christ’s because we are called to live out our life and faith together. If we fail to confront those who offend us because we are uncomfortable in doing so, we are essentially declaring we really do not love them enough to be concerned about our mutual health and life together. Of course, we cannot force offenders to change, but we can and must love them enough in the power of the Spirit to confront them about the destructiveness of their behavior to themselves and to our relationship in the hope that they will. In doing so we realize that we could easily be in their position except by the grace of God. This Spirit-driven knowledge is essential in conflict resolution, Jesus-style. So we don’t gossip. We don’t triangulate (bring in another person to do our work), we don’t speak evilly about the offender to others, and we don’t remain silent and seethe. We are called to love the other enough to confront him or her because we know we are all greatly beloved by Christ and are all forgiven and redeemed sinners. This is the basis of conflict resolution for Christians within the Church, my beloved. It is based on the Good News we are to embrace and trust, now and for all eternity. For the sake and honor of our Redeemer’s holy Name and for the health of his body here at St. Augustine’s, not to mention our own health, I implore us all to resolve our conflicts in the holy and faithful way our Lord commands. Doing so is a powerful testimony to the world that there are better ways of being human, and it starts by patterning our lives after Jesus our Lord, especially in how we handle conflict when it arises. To him be honor, praise, and glory forever and ever. 

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

Sermon originally preached on September 9, 2012. As always it will be helpful for you to read the assigned texts by clicking on or tapping their links below. Here I deal with the sometimes enigmatic topic of faith and healing. For those with ears to hear, listen and understand.

Lectionary texts: Proverbs 22:1-2, 8-9, 22-23; Psalm 125; Saint James 2.1-17; Saint Mark 7.24-37.

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

This morning I want us to look briefly at what the biblical writers mean when they talk about faith. There are really two sermons related to faith to be had from today’s texts but mercifully, I am only going to preach one because one of the topics is fairly self-evident—that is, how we are to treat the poor and how this is a reflection of our faith. So I will only state the obvious and do it quickly. Our faith in Christ should always manifest itself in our caring for the poor because as the writer of Proverbs reminds us, they too are made in God’s image and are every bit as valuable as the Bill Gateses  of the world. In other words, how we allocate our resources, both financial and otherwise, are powerful indicators of who and what we ultimately put our faith in. And I would be derelict in my duty if I did not remind us that Scripture consistently warns of dire consequences for those who misuse the resources with which we have been blessed. As people living in the richest nation in the history of the world, I humbly suggest we pay close attention to this and put our money where our mouth (and hopefully our faith) is.

The other topic, faith and how it relates to healing, is much more complex and so merits the bulk of our time this morning. Is it true, for example, that when our prayers for healing apparently go unanswered it means we lack faith? The issues around this question are real and complex, made even more difficult by our limited perspective on what constitutes real healing, and can be faith breakers for us. So let us see what today’s lessons can teach us.

Every one of us can relate to the Syrophoenician woman in today’s gospel lesson. We all know someone who has been chronically or desperately sick or dying—I know several of you are dealing with issues and loved ones in your life like this right now—and in our desperation to find healing for them (or ourselves) we are open to almost any possible solution. This is what is happening in today’s gospel lesson. Here we see a Gentile woman who has caught wind that a wandering Jewish miracle healer is in town and she takes a huge risk by going to see Jesus because Jews and Gentiles usually mixed as well as oil and water do. But at the moment this doesn’t matter to the woman because she is desperate to find someone who can heal her sick daughter. This traditional animosity between Jew and Gentile helps us understand the some-what shocking interchange (at least to our ears) between Jesus and the woman. She pleads with Christ to heal her daughter but Jesus at first apparently rebuffs her, reminding the woman that his mission is first and foremost to his own people. But the woman’s faith would not let Jesus’ response deter her. Notice that she doesn’t argue with Jesus. She simply says to him that whatever it is Jesus has, there’s surely enough to go around, even if it is just the leftovers. 

If you are looking for an operational definition of what Saint James is talking about in today’s epistle lesson when he talks about faith expressing itself in behavior, look no further than this woman. Notice carefully her belief that Christ could heal her sick daughter, i.e., her faith, led her to risk humiliation and rejection to find a cure for her daughter. This is faith in action and irrespective of what or who we put our faith in, it will always drive our behavior and cause us to behave accordingly. In this case the woman’s faith would not let her take no for an answer and Christ rewarded her faith handsomely by healing her daughter. The woman’s faith had overcome her fear of being turned away.

And of course people today still have this fear of being turned away when bringing their deepest sorrows and troubles to Christ. On one level we might believe that Christ can bring about miraculous healing (miraculous from our standpoint, that is, because if God really is omnipotent there is no such thing as a “miracle” cure) but we worry that we or our loved ones are unworthy or that Jesus might turn us away for some reason or another, and so unlike the Syrophoenician woman we don’t even try to bring our troubles and sorrows to Christ. We let our fears overrule any faith we might have that Christ can bring healing for us or our loved ones.

But is it realistic to expect Christ to perform a healing miracle for us or our loved ones or at least be open to the possibility? On the one hand we all know or at least have heard about cases where God apparently violates the expected order of things to bring about what we would call a miraculous cure. But we also know cases where faithful people have prayed for healing, miraculous or otherwise, and the healing does not come. Instead, the disease continues unabated and/or death occurs. Are we to conclude that Jesus has turned those folks away and does not care about them or their needs? Does this mean that those folks don’t have the faith needed for Christ to act and that only folks who have their prayers for healing answered have real faith? The short answer to these questions is no. Nobody knows why God answers some prayers for healing while apparently saying no to others. And if you ever find someone who claims to know why Christ does or doesn’t act to heal, run away as fast as you can because that person is a liar.

But before we look at the answer to these questions more fully, we need to look at what today’s gospel lesson tells us about Jesus and his healing miracles. The first thing we notice is that Jesus was telling the woman he had not come to be a traveling medical missionary. Rather, he had come to announce God’s kingdom to God’s people, Israel, and to invite Israel to follow him so that they could be God’s light for the world to bring God’s healing love to bear on his sin-sick and broken world. In other words, Christ’s primary mission was to invite Israel to be the blessing God had promised Abraham they would be (cf. Genesis 12.2-3). Jesus in effect was telling the woman that he could not let her personal need distract him and keep him from going to Jerusalem to complete his saving mission on Calvary.

To be sure, Christ healed the woman’s daughter as well as many others, all signs of the promised new creation where God will finally and fully heal all his children, both Jew and Gentile alike. And to be sure, faith was intricately involved in those healings. But if we think about this for a minute we quickly realize that those Jesus healed constituted only a tiny fraction of those whom he could have healed. This isn’t because Jesus only cares about some people but not others. It’s because he didn’t have time or the opportunity to cure everyone who needed curing. After all he was human like us, and as we have seen, he didn’t come to be a medical missionary and miracle worker. He came to bring peace and reconciliation between God and his wayward and rebellious people. The healings were simply advance signs of God’s promised Messianic Age where all who are in Jesus the Messiah will be healed. It is critical that we understand this. Otherwise, we are always going to be left wondering why Christ healed some, but not all.

This brings us back to our questions about faith and healing. As we have seen, no one can explain why God chooses to answer some prayers as asked and not others’. But what our lessons remind us is that faith is always expressed in what we do (or refuse to do) and that it is intricately related to healing. And this reminds us that we have to believe Christ has the power to heal us and our loved ones. If we do not believe this, we really cannot claim to have much faith in Christ in general. 

Of course, to have this faith, we must know Jesus, not just know about him. We get to know Jesus through reading and wrestling with Scripture, through talking and listening to Jesus regularly in prayer, and through regular interaction with God’s people. Scripture reminds us what Jesus can do and has done. Prayer gets us focused on Christ so that he can help us get to know him in and through the power of the Spirit. And interacting with other faithful Christians allows Christ to give us the much-needed human touch so that we can further experience his risen Presence and faithful love for us.

As for having Christ answer our prayers for healing, much depends on our willingness to see healing above and beyond its physical aspects. To be sure, none of us wants to suffer or see our loved ones suffer and so it is natural for us to ask Jesus for healing and for us to worry about and grieve over them. But what if the answer to our prayer is no? While none of us knows why some of our prayers for physical healing apparently go unanswered, this doesn’t mean that Christ cannot or does not bring needed healing. Think about it. When human sin entered the world, it brought death with it. We all must die one day. Even the people Christ healed, even the two he resuscitated from the dead, eventually died. It is the fate of all of us. So even the most spectacular physical healing is temporary at best, good as it is and much as we desire it.

But when we know Jesus and through him, God’s faithful love for us, we are open to deeper kinds of healing that we or our loved ones might also need. When we really know Christ and have faith in his blood shed for us, death is something we no longer have to fear. As Saint Paul wrote the Philippians, for him it was better to die and be with Christ. But he realized that Jesus needed him to continue to be an apostle to the Gentiles (cf. Philippians 1.21-24). So instead of bringing physical healing, our Lord might bless us with peace about dying and/or relieve us of the anxiety we feel. John Wesley, the old Anglican priest who started the Methodist movement, used to say that one of the marks of a Methodist was how well (s)he died. By that Wesley meant that faith in Christ obliterated our fear of death and brought a sense of peace that passes all understanding, even when death was imminent. Christ can heal us in limitless ways and if we see that our prayers for physical healing are not being answered as we have asked, our faith allows us to trust Jesus enough to ask him for the kind of healing he sees that we really need. 

We could never do this if our prayers were based entirely on empirical evidence because life is entirely too unpredictable to develop the kind of faith we have been talking about. We can only develop faith if we really know our Lord and his love for us, and trust that his will for us is better than our hopes and desires and limited perspective on the situation. We don’t get this kind of faith overnight and some of us unfortunately never develop this faith at all because our faith is tied to only one answer to our prayers. But if we come to know our Lord and trust him in everything, we will be able to more readily see his healing in our lives.  

Please do not misunderstand. I am not suggesting that we should not pray for physical healing for us or our loved ones or jump for joy when those prayers apparently go unanswered. Neither am I suggesting that we should long for death because death is the ultimate evil and poke in God’s eye. What I am suggesting is that our need to be healed runs far deeper than any physical healing that might or might not occur, and Jesus can and does offer that kind of deeper healing if we have the eyes of faith and the wisdom of Scripture to see it.

And as Saint James has reminded us, our faith must always find an expression in what we do. So what kind of faith do you have? Is your faith strong enough to conquer your fears so that you go to God in prayer even if you are anxious that God may not answer you as you’ve asked? Do you know the love of Christ so well that even if your prayers for healing are not being answered as you hoped, you can change up your prayers and ask Jesus to show you how best to pray for yourself or your loved one?

I don’t say any of this as an exercise in theory. I have been battle tested myself. Four years ago this past week I walked into the ER of Lutheran hospital in Fort Wayne, IN. I had been told my mother had become unresponsive at the rehab center where she was recovering from a second round of back surgery and had been transported there. Having had chaplain experience, as soon as I walked into her room, I knew it was over. I didn’t even bother to pray for her physical recovery because I knew she was beyond that point and concluded it was her time to die. It took her three days and she didn’t die an easy death. But I could not have gotten through it had Christ not answered my prayers to help me endure what I had to endure. And Jesus did not disappoint. He sent compassionate nurses to minister to my mom. He gave me a wife who ministered to mom in ways I simply could not. And then on the third day when I was about emotionally worn out, Jesus sent two hospital chaplains to refresh my beloved and me. 

Did it turn out for my mom as she and I had hoped and desired? Of course not. Christ chose not to heal her through the two surgeries she had. But through it all, despite appearances to the contrary, I knew my mom was in Christ’s care and that she was headed for better place to be with Christ and ultimately to the new creation where she will never suffer or die or be sick again. That didn’t make those three days any easier, but Christ helped me transcend that awful moment in time. Christ brought healing and hope to me in the midst of death and decay. That’s why I can still pray for healing today and preach a sermon like this. And when by God’s grace you have the faith to experience Christ’s healing power in your life, especially when you desperately need it, you 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 preached on August 22, 2026 at the funeral of a former parishioner and founding member of the parish. May he continue to rest in peace and RISE IN GLORY. As always, it will be helpful for you to read the assigned texts by clicking on or tapping their links below before you read the sermon. Here I emphasize why it is so important for Christian ministers to preach on the Death and Resurrection of Christ at Christian funerals. It is the only balm for our grieving souls. For those with ears to hear, listen and understand.

Lectionary texts: Revelation 21.1-7; Psalm 23; 1 Corinthians 15.1-26, 35-38, 42-44a, 53-58; Saint John 11.17-27.

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

I am Kevin Maney, a retired priest in the Anglican Tradition, and I am here today at the invitation of Len’s family. Thank you, Sharon, for allowing me the privilege of preaching and presiding at his funeral. I have known Len for a long time. Back in the day we were neighbors and friends. His death is deeply personal and my heart aches as I grieve the loss of my longtime friend. I therefore do not come here today as an impartial preacher; I grieve with the rest of you. But neither do I come to eulogize the dead because even the most eloquent eulogies will not bring the dead back to life, no matter how well the life was lived—and Len lived his well, he was one of the good guys. Instead I come to proclaim the Good News of Jesus Christ crucified and raised from the dead because only Christ can and will restore the dead to new life. We all need to be reminded of our Resurrection hope because as we shall see, it is the only real balm for our grieving hearts and I strongly encourage you to embrace that hope fully today.

Death under any circumstance is hard, isn’t it? But when it is preceded by an extended period of suffering, disability, and pain, it is especially odious. Death is the ultimate form of Evil because it robs us of our human dignity as God’s image-bearers and can leave survivors stunned and angry when it occurs suddenly or unjustly. Death ends permanently the things we cherish most about our intimate relationships in this mortal life and in being human. We can no longer see our beloved, hear them, touch them, smell them or interact with them as we did before they died. Our Lord Jesus also knew this about the evil of Death because Saint John reports that he snorted in anger at his friend Lazarus’ tomb just before raising him to life (St. John 11.38), a preview of coming attractions for us. Death is our ultimate enemy, the last enemy to be destroyed as Saint Paul reminds us in our epistle lesson. It entered God’s good world as the result of human sin and has inflicted its evil on us ever since. Like Martha in today’s gospel lesson we want to throw our hands up in desperation and ask why God allows this to happen.

But if you paid attention to our gospel lesson, you heard Jesus talk about a breathtaking hope—hope defined as the sure and certain expectation of things to come, not wishful thinking—as he gave Martha and us an ultimately more satisfactory answer to her “why” question about Evil and Death. Jesus did not answer her question directly. Instead, echoing Psalm 23, he acknowledged that while Evil and Death still exist in God’s good but sin-corrupted world, he had come to destroy their power over us, which he did, at least initially, in his Death and Resurrection.

That is why Christian funerals are so important. They serve to remind us that for those who are in Christ, Evil and Death do not have the final say because of God’s great love for us expressed in the Death and Resurrection of Christ. As Jesus tells us in our gospel lesson, resurrection isn’t a concept, it’s a person, and those like Len who are united with Christ in a real and living relationship are promised a share in his Resurrection (cf. Romans 6.3-5) when he returns to raise the dead and usher in God’s new world. Jesus’ new bodily existence attests to the fact that we humans—body, mind, and spirit, the total package—matter to God, and that new bodily existence, not death or some ethereal disembodied experience, is our final destiny for all eternity. This is what resurrection is about. This is what we celebrate today and why we can celebrate at all.

Saint Paul talks about the nature of our promised resurrection body in our epistle lesson and it is worth our time to review what he has to say. Saint Paul tells us that unlike our mortal body that is subject to disease, decay, and death, the resurrection body with which we will be clothed will be like Jesus’ resurrected body. It will be a spiritual body, that is, it will be a body animated and powered by the Holy Spirit instead of being animated and powered by flesh and blood as our mortal bodies are. This means that our new body will no longer be subject to all the nasty illnesses, diseases, and decay to which our mortal body is subjected. Whatever our new body looks like—and surely it will be more beautiful and wonderful than our minds dare comprehend or imagine—it will be impervious to death and suited to live in God’s promised new world, the new heavens and earth. 

When Christ returns to raise the dead and usher in God’s promised new creation, the dimensions of heaven and earth will no longer be separate domains for God and humans respectively, and which currently only intersect. Instead, as Revelation 21 promises, the new Jerusalem, NT code for God’s space (heaven), will come down to earth (human space) and the two will be fused together in a mighty act of new creation so that all forms of darkness and evil will be banished and we will finally get to live in God’s direct Presence forever, just like our first ancestors did before they rebelled against God, only infinitely better. There will be no more sorrow or separation or sickness or suffering or pain or death or evil of any kind. We will be reunited with our loved ones who have died in Christ and get to live forever with our new body and limitless new opportunities to be the humans God created and always intended for us to be. To be sure, this promise of new heavens and earth has not yet been fully realized and so we must wait in hope and faith for our Lord Jesus to return to usher it in—that is why Death is the last Enemy to be destroyed. But even if we must wait, the promise of new creation is the only solution that will ultimately satisfy our hunger for justice and life because only in God’s new creation will all the injustices and hurts in this life be made right and Evil vanquished. In this case, Len’s life, body, and faculties will be fully restored (what better justice for the injustice of his massive suffering?) and severed relationships caused by death will made whole and complete again, a life of perfect health and happiness that will last forever, thanks be to God! What can be more just and right and awesome than that?

Please don’t misunderstand. I am not suggesting that we should not grieve; that would be cruel nonsense. You don’t love a person for an entire lifetime and then not grieve his loss when he dies. But as Saint Paul reminded the Thessalonians, we are to grieve as people who have real hope and not as those who have none at all. It is this resurrection hope, the promise of new bodily life in God’s new heavens and earth, that we claim and proclaim today. Our resurrection hope is the only real basis we have for celebrating Len’s life, worthy as it was, because without union with Christ, none of us have life in this world or the next, we are merely dust in the wind.

And now we return to Jesus’ question to Martha and us in our gospel lesson. Jesus is the resurrection and the life. Do you believe this? If you do, then act like you do, as people who have a real hope and future, irrespective of your mortal status! Here is a practical suggestion to help you get started. When you remember Len, choose to remember him in his prime, at the peak of his power, not in his later years in his infirmity. Why? Because when Christ raises him from the dead, he will once again be in his prime, only on steroids, this time forever, fully restored and healed. In this and other ways, let the Lord Jesus offer you real consolation in your grief so that you can live and proclaim his gospel boldly and faithfully in your life. 

I don’t know why God allows all the suffering and bad things that happen in this world. I don’t know why Len was afflicted as he was. I don’t know why he and his family, especially Sharon, had to endure it all as it unfolded. None of it had to go that way, yet it did. But I do know this. Len has been washed clean by the blood of the Lamb shed for him on the cross and made fit to stand in God’s holy Presence forever. He will be clothed one day with a new body patterned after the body of his Lord Jesus and set free to love and use his talents in spectacular new and old ways that honor God and others forever. I know that on the cross, Len’s sin, along with ours, has been dealt with once and for all. I know that Death will be abolished in God’s new world because Sin will be abolished and Death is the result of Sin. Both will be absent in the new heavens and earth. How do I know this you ask? I know all this because Jesus Christ is raised from the dead, the embodiment and initial fulfillment of our Resurrection hope and promise.

The promise is mind-boggling. But the God we worship is mind-boggling. After all, we worship the God who has the power to raise the dead and call into existence things that don’t exist (Romans 4.17)—nothing is too hard for God. Jesus’ promise that he is the resurrection and the life is ours, not because we are deserving, but because of who God is, our God and Father who created us to have life with him forever, and who is embodied in Jesus Christ raised from the dead. That is why we can rejoice today, even in the midst of our grief and sorrow. Because of his faith in Christ who loves him and who has claimed him from all eternity, we can have confidence that Len is enjoying his rest in heaven, safe in Christ’s care, until God’s new creation and the resurrection of our mortal bodies come in full. And that, of course, is Good News, not only for Len, but also for the rest of us, now and for all eternity. 

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

Sermon originally preached on August 30, 2015. As always, it will be helpful for you to read the assigned texts below by clicking on or tapping their links before you read the sermon.

Follow your heart. We hear that a lot today. But why should we follow our heart if what the prophet Jeremiah says about it is true: “The [human] heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked; who can understand it” (Jeremiah 17.9)? Fortunately there is a solution for this human condition of ours. Read on Macduff. For those with ears to hear, listen and understand.

Lectionary texts: Song of Solomon 2.8-13; Psalm 45.1-2, 7-10; James 1.17-27; Saint Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23.

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

On this day when we celebrate the founding of our parish, now well into its fourth year, and our patron saint, Augustine of Hippo, whose feast day was this past Friday (August 28), the anniversary of his death, how appropriate for us to consider the question, what makes a person righteous? In other words, how can we live our lives in ways that are faithful to God’s good will and purposes for us as his image-bearing creatures who are charged with being stewards over his good creation? The short answer is this: It’s a matter of transformation, and this topic was near and dear to Augustine of Hippo. This is what I want us to look at briefly this morning.

In our gospel lesson, we see Jesus again being confronted by his adversaries, this time over the matter of cleanness and uncleanness. Not being first-century Jews, these terms can seem strange to us, so let’s use the terms we are better acquainted with, righteous (or right) and unrighteous (or wrong). Yes folks. You heard me correctly. Despite what some would have us believe, there still are ways of thinking and acting in this world that constitute right and wrong. At the heart of the matter, Jesus’ adversaries are arguing that external things we do can make us right in God’s eyes. The immediate context in our gospel lesson was ceremonial (not hygienic) washing. Do this, say Jesus’ opponents, and you will distinguish yourself from the hated pagans who surround and control us, and make yourself right in God’s eyes at the same time. Sweet.

Nonsense, replies Jesus. It’s not the ceremonial things you do that make you right in God’s eyes, things like attending worship or praying or reading the Bible regularly or doing acts of charity (you know, stuff we Christians are called to do). You are focusing on the wrong things. What defiles you is what originates within you, within your heart. For it is out of the heart that all kinds of nasty things come. This is what alienates you from God and destroys your relationship with him. In other words, this is what makes you unclean and not right with God. Your corrupt heart is what makes external, ceremonial stuff necessary in the first place. It’s possible to do all those things well and still have a bad heart. For Jesus, the heart was not just the center of our emotions, but the center of our will.

This, of course, runs against our current thinking. Listen to your heart, we are told, and be true to it. Doing so is the key to success or happiness or whatever. But if we take Jesus’ claim here seriously, we can see the folly of that advise. We dare not listen to our heart, at least until it has been healed and transformed by Jesus in the power of the Spirit, because our heart is corrupt. Fixing this problem is not a matter of superficial window dressing (external acts), but of tearing down and rebuilding the very structure of the building (transformation)! 

Jesus’ teaching also refutes an argument we hear a lot these days, that “God made me this way.” God did not create us with corrupt hearts that lead us to follow our own proud and selfish desires. God did not create babies with birth defects, etc. This is the result of human sin in the garden and God’s subsequent curse on it. Anyone with a realistic and biblical perspective understands that while there are many things in this world that are good, right, and beautiful, there is also something terribly wrong with the world, and here Jesus tells us what part of the problem is. We have corrupted hearts that make us act in unwise, unhealthy, and outright sinful ways. Fix the heart and the behavior corrects itself. Jesus wasn’t railing against human tradition. He was railing against human tradition that sets aside God’s teaching about how we are to conduct our lives. He didn’t say stop washing or tithing or doing the things we do here at St. Augustine’s as the Lord’s people. He said stop thinking that doing those things make you right in God’s eyes because they may simply be covering a corrupt heart. Augustine himself saw the wisdom of Jesus’ teaching when he said that, “Our hearts are restless, O Lord, until they rest in you,” i.e., until our corrupt hearts are healed and regenerated by Jesus.

Now at this point, I can hear some of you grumbling to yourselves. “I hear what Jesus is saying, but surely that doesn’t apply to me. I’m not a murderer or a rapist or a terrorist. I don’t preach long sermons like Father Maney. I’m basically a good person.” Well, you may be a good person at some level, says Jesus, because I created you good. But you are no longer pure. Every time you say a hurtful word to others out of anger, or tell a lie, or gossip, or speak evilly about someone else, or are indifferent to the plight of another, you are bearing the fruit of your corrupted heart because none of these things is from God. None of these things are after my example. And until your corrupt heart gets healed, you have a fundamental problem with God, the source and author of all life, because your corrupt heart inevitably alienates you from God. 

Now that I’ve sufficiently depressed you and made you feel all uncomfortable and stuff, let me tell you that a corrupt heart is not the end of the story. While we must certainly acknowledge our brokenness as humans and the estrangement our hard heart causes between God and humans and between humans, it is a testimony to the love and faithfulness of God that he would move to heal our corrupt hearts by becoming human and dying on a cross to end our alienation from him and each other. No matter who we are or what we have done, there is nothing too great for the love of God poured out in Jesus Christ to overcome or heal. Nothing. God wants us to live rightly so we can finally begin to enjoy real happiness and purpose of living, something that is only possible when he replaces our hard hearts with human ones. So in addition to addressing the basis of our alienation with him by dying for us, God poured out his Spirit in our hearts to heal us and give us hearts of flesh, human hearts, that will help us to live in the manner pleasing to God and us. Contrast this response to our own when we are the victims of someone’s hard heart. Our own hard heart doesn’t tell us to forgive the offender and be reconciled to him. Our unhealed hearts make us want to lash out and seek revenge on the offender, inevitably escalating the conflict and alienation we feel. This is not what we are hard-wired for. We are hardwired for relationship and goodness and peace. But our sin changed us and gives us just the opposite. That is why God’s mighty acts of justice and mercy on the cross and his giving us the Holy Spirit are such wonderful, life-changing things, thanks be to God!

Jesus hints at this in our gospel lesson. Don’t replace God’s teaching found in the broader story of God’s redemption contained in Scripture with your own human traditions. Instead, examine your motives and seek a pure heart, a heart that can only be healed and changed by me. I am available to you in the power of the Spirit and in God’s word contained in Scripture. This means that until our consistent desire is for God to cleanse and purify us by healing our hard hearts, we will never know the real transformative power of God. Failing to desire purity and then not doing the things on our end that must accompany a real desire to be healed, e.g., obeying Scripture, etc., is simply another manifestation of our corrupt heart. 

This is why Saint James urges us to take our human condition and the resulting sin seriously. Don’t be deceived, he tells us. Sin is deadly and will ruin you if you do not embrace the gift you’ve been given in Jesus. To be sure, your sins are forgiven by the blood of the Lamb shed for you. To be sure, you have been rescued from the dominion of darkness and transferred into God’s kingdom of light because of what God has done for you in Jesus. But if you really believe God has done this for you, you must respond to the gift you’ve been given. For starters, you will begin to see your utter inability to change and heal your corrupted heart and understand that only Jesus can do that for you (humility anyone?). Faith in Jesus will also open your eyes to the utter deadliness and horror of your sin and cause you to seek to pattern your own lives after Jesus so that you can be freed from the sin that will destroy you. And how does Saint James think we do this? Through accepting the word of God in our lives, i.e., by obeying the clear teachings of Scripture found in the broader narrative of God’s rescue plan of his creation and creatures, not just the parts we happen to agree with. When we are cafeteria Christians, picking and choosing what we will obey in Scripture and what we will ignore, we are demonstrating that we prefer to follow our corrupt heart rather than submit to God’s word. This is fundamentally self-defeating because all Scripture points us to Jesus our Lord and Savior, and only Jesus can truly change us for the good for which we were created. This is why we must obey all of Scripture, not some.

As our hearts get healed by Jesus so that we become more consistently like him, it will inevitably lead us to work for God’s justice to protect society’s weakest and poorest and those least able to defend themselves, i.e., we will begin to practice our faith. Why? Because our healed hearts lead us to have real compassion for the least and the lost, folks just like us before we were touched by the love of God. But our healed hearts will do more than this. Our heart of flesh will cause us to recognize that we must consistently work to develop new behavior patterns to replace our old corrupt ones. This is what Saint Paul meant by putting on Christ. So, e.g., we must learn to put aside our anger, our evil speaking, our gossip, our pride, our selfishness, and all the other manifestations of our corrupt hearts. We don’t do this on our own, of course. We do it in the power of the Spirit. That’s why our urgent pleas for purity must inevitably lead to our transformation, maddeningly slow and idiosyncratic as that seems to us at times. But this is what Saint James is talking about when he talks about us being the firstfruits of God’s good and generous gift to us made known in and through Jesus and the presence of his Spirit in and through his people. Thanks be to God! Our healed hearts cause us to bear good fruit and give the world a preview of what will be SOP in the new creation. Right now, healed hearts are an exception to the rule. When the kingdom comes in full, it will be the rule, no exceptions. I can assure you, Augustine would be all about healing and transformation that leads to action!

As I look at the fruit we bear as a parish, it is evident to me that the Spirit is at work in and through us and our hearts are being healed. I see how we care for each other and those who are not part of our family. I sense the spirit of goodwill and charity when we gather together and I rejoice at seeing us work tirelessly for our Lord who loved us and has claimed us. This isn’t an invitation for complacency and self-congratulations. Our healed hearts cause us to know better. But it is a sin not to celebrate our Lord’s good gifts to us as we resolve to continue to work tirelessly and joyfully on his behalf. Doing so is the best way we can witness to the world that God really does heal corrupt hearts and that we really do have Good News to offer others and ourselves, 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 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.