Sermon originally preached on Lent 4B, March 15, 2015. As always, it will be helpful for you to read the assigned texts by clicking on or tapping their respective links below before you read the sermon. For those with ears to hear, listen and understand.

Lectionary texts: Numbers 21.4-9; Psalm 107.1-3, 17-22; Ephesians 2.1-10; John 3.14-21.

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

Our readings this morning are full of contrasting themes of light and darkness. They remind us of the reality of the existence of human sin and evil, and God’s mysterious response to it all. In doing so, they remind us what the gospel is all about and how we should respond to both the light of Christ and the darkness that has been defeated by God in and through Jesus, and this is what I want us to look at briefly this morning.

In our epistle lesson, the apostle Paul offers a blunt assessment of the human condition. He tells us that without Jesus we are dead people walking and children of God’s wrath because of our sins and our natural inclination to follow the ways of a world laboring under the control of Satan. The world St. Paul is talking about, of course, is the people and systems that are hostile to God’s good and original intentions for human beings to be his wise image-bearing creatures who reflect God’s glory out into the world and reflect the world’s praise and goodness back to its Creator. Like Adam and Eve, we are not much interested in being God’s wise stewards. We want instead to set ourselves up in God’s place so that we can run the show the way we want, taking matters into our own hands at every turn. The result is that God’s good world has gotten turned upside down and without God’s gracious intervention in our lives, the human condition is characterized by enmity, strife, quarreling, jealousy, fits of rage, dissensions, factions, sexual impurity and a whole host of other nasties (Galatians 5.19-21). As St. John reminds us in our gospel lesson, people love the darkness of their sin rather than the light of God’s healing love.

But St. John also tells us that God loves the world and because he does, God must inevitably judge it to rid it of all traces of evil. We see this entire dynamic played out in our OT lesson this morning. God had rescued his people Israel from their slavery in Egypt, bringing them through the Red Sea in a mighty act of deliverance. Now God’s people find themselves wandering in the desert and they start to grumble. This despite the fact that God had graciously provided for them and led them himself in the pillars of cloud and fire. In other words, there was little objective reason for God’s people to grumble or complain that God had abandoned them. But grumble they did. They became impatient with God’s travel plans and provisions for them. They couldn’t disabuse themselves of the notion that their timeline and travel route to the promised land were superior to God’s. They weren’t able to trust that God really did care for them, especially during this time of uncertainty in the wilderness. And so they quarreled with God through Moses. Some even wanted to return to their slavery in Egypt! Talk about short-sightedness! But of course we do the same when we become impatient with God when things aren’t happening fast enough to suit us or God apparently isn’t giving us the things we want. After all, we know better about our needs than God and expect him to cater to our every desire.

God’s response to his people’s grumbling was swift and terrible. He sent poisonous snakes among them and as a result, many died. As we hear this story, many of us our tempted to wonder if St. John wasn’t seriously delusional when he tells us that God loves the world. This is love? No thank you, God. I’ll pass. But this reaction fails to take into account the bigger picture and the reason why God called Israel into existence in the first place. It is precisely because God does love his good world gone bad that he called Israel to bring his healing love to the world. And of course the balm for all that ails us is to learn how to become faithful and obedient people who love God and trust his good will and judgment in our lives, and who act in accordance with God’s original plans for his image-bearing creatures that we just talked about. But you cannot teach others how to love and trust God and be obedient to his will if you are grumbling and acting like those God called you to help heal. And so when God’s people actively rebelled against God’s rule over them, they incurred God’s just wrath. Remember, if God really does love his world, he cannot countenance evil in it, especially from his own people.

But in addition to God’s wrath, God also showed his gracious love toward his people when they repented (at least temporarily) of their proud grumbling. When they acknowledged their sin to Moses, Moses prayed to God on behalf of his people, the same people who had been grumbling against Moses and his leadership, and God provided a means of protection from the serpents God had sent to afflict his people. God told Moses to make a serpent and put it on a pole so that whenever anyone was bitten, they could look upon the serpent and live. This is a deeply ambiguous command. Moses was to use the image of a serpent, that powerful biblical symbol of evil, as a means to rescue his people. We are not told how this worked, only that it did when God’s people showed enough faith and trust in God to obey his command. 

If we understand this call to look in faith at this strange symbol that bears God’s love for his world and to trust his love and good will and purposes for us, even when we are in the midst of our darkest valley, we are ready to look at the cross of Jesus Christ because it is the ultimate symbol of God’s gracious love for us and his world. As our Lord told Nicodemus, just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must Jesus be lifted up on the cross so that whoever believes in him might have eternal life, starting right now and extending into God’s new world.

Again, we note that Jesus did not offer an explanation of how this works or why. He simply tells us that it does. It is enough for us to know that once we were at death’s door through our own sin and disobedience but that in the cross of Jesus, God has provided us a remedy. And not just any remedy. The remedy, the only remedy. In other words, this passage is about a faith that grasps the God-given solution to the intractable problem of human sin and evil and so is healed by it. But unlike the Israelites who were only healed temporarily when they looked at that other pole, we who look upon the cross of Christ in faith are healed forever. This is why the cross stands as the eternal symbol of God’s great love for us. 

And as St. Paul reminds us in our epistle lesson, God’s plan of rescue in and through the cross of Jesus is offered to us as a sheer act of grace by God the Father, precisely because God loves the world so much. When we put our whole hope and trust in Jesus, we get to share in both his life and death (cf. Romans 6.3-5). We are delivered from death by Christ’s death and made alive by virtue of our relationship with him. And we will be resurrected with him to share in his new life, thereby experiencing his love for us in unimaginably new ways when God’s new world finally arrives in full.

This gracious love shown on the cross is a challenge to us all. It challenges our proud self-righteousness that deludes us into thinking we are worthy of God’s gracious offer of eternal life or that we don’t need to be rescued in the first place. And it challenges those of us who feel unlovable and who truly cannot believe God loves us that much to want to save us in the first place. But it is urgent that we come to grips with the cross because St. John confronts us here with making the ultimate choice: perish apart from God or receive the gift of eternal life offered to us in Jesus. There is no other way. And there is an urgency about making this choice because as St. John further reminds us, those who choose to look at the cross and walk away find themselves already condemned by their decision. When you reject the only God-given path that leads to life, faith in Jesus and his death and resurrection, what other result can there be?

That is why the season of Lent with its emphasis on confession and repentance of all that keeps us hostile toward and alienated from God is an especially appropriate time for us to focus on the cross. Doing so reminds us that God loves us so much that he sent his only Son to rescue us and restore us to a right relationship with him, even when we were his enemies! When we realize the great love and mercy God has for us and his desire for us to be healed, it can only melt our proud hard-heartedness and turn it into grateful humility for such a wondrous gift and love.

The cross also reminds us that God loves the entire world, not just those of us who belong to Jesus’ body, the Church. This means we are to imitate our Lord’s great love by embodying it to those around us, especially those who are hostile to the gospel. We do so because we have been rescued from our sin and death by the blood of Christ shed for us and desire to offer that same love to others with its power to heal. Of course, as St. John reminds us, many will reject that offer because they prefer to live in the darkness of their own sin. And if we truly love others as God loves us, we will find that rejection costly. But this is what it means for us to walk in the way of the cross as we follow the path our Lord Jesus took. Who or what situation in your life needs to be exposed to the costly love of God made known on the cross?

This desire to embody God’s great love in Jesus to others is precisely the reason why St. Paul stresses that Christ rescued us for good works. As the Israelites discovered when they wandered through the desert, it is hard for us to embody the love of Jesus, a self-giving love powerfully manifested on the cross, if we are acting just like those who need to be rescued. When others see us acting in ways that are contrary to God’s good will for us, they can never experience the reality of God’s love for them as it is typically made manifest—through God’s holy people. It is hard to show folks what it’s like to act as genuinely human beings and point them to the Great Physician to be healed when we are acting in sub-human or desperately sick ways, showing no signs of being willing to submit ourselves to the healing love of Jesus. 

And so as we come to this midpoint in Lent, I encourage us all to stop and reflect on this tale of two poles. As Good Friday draws near, let us increasingly turn our gaze toward Calvary. Let us see our Lord dying there so that we might live and let this mysterious love of God thoroughly change us so that we not only rejoice in the incalculable gift we have been given, but also want to share it with others. We do both because we really do believe God so loved the world that he sent his only begotten Son into the world to save it and not condemn it, and we are thankful we have the gracious privilege of living out this Good News that is ours, 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 Lent 4A, Sunday, March 26, 2017. As always, it will be helpful for you to read the assigned texts below before you read the sermon by clicking on or tapping their respective links. This sermon cuts to the Lenten chase because it deals with the sin of Pride. For those with ears to hear, listen and understand.

Lectionary texts: 1 Samuel 16.1-13; Psalm 23; Ephesians 5.8-14; John 9.1-41.

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

Today is Laetare Sunday, the fourth Sunday of Lent. Laetare comes from the Latin word meaning to rejoice. It marks roughly the midway point of Lent with its disciplines of self-examination, confession, repentance, and self-denial, and begins to point us to the joyous celebration of Easter; hence the rose-colored chasuble I wear this morning. So what in our lessons gives us reason to rejoice? In one way or another, each lesson is about seeing life in a different light, the light of God, and this is what I want us to look at this morning, focusing esp. on John.

In the story of Jesus healing the blind man, we are confronted with the age-old question of why bad things happen to people. In typical biblical fashion, John is not much interested in answering the “why” question. Instead, John focuses on the “what”—what God is doing about evil. Jesus tells us as much. This man was born blind so that God’s works can be revealed, and then Jesus proceeded to heal the man. In other words, we are invited to see God working in our midst to bring about fresh acts of new creation. God doesn’t tell us why all the bad things and evil exist in his world. Rather, God promises to right all the wrongs—a much more satisfactory answer in the final analysis—both partly now through God’s Messiah and his people (that would be us), and finally through a mighty act of new creation at our Lord’s Second Coming when God’s victory over evil won on the cross is finally brought to completion in God’s new world, the new heavens and earth. This is not the way the world sees the problem of evil. Those opposed to God are blind to God’s works and look for human solutions to combat evil, solutions that must inevitably fail because the power of evil and the human race’s slavery to Sin is greater than our efforts to overcome them. So what about you? Do you believe in the power of God to bring about his promised new creation, even during your lifetime and through you? If so, you must live your life with hope, even in the midst of all that is so desperately wrong in God’s world. 

But the story of Jesus and the blind man quickly leaves the problem of evil behind and we are confronted with yet another kind of evil: Spiritual blindness that results from human pride, and most of us are familiar with this problem. The religious authorities of Jesus’ day reject his healing of the blind man as legitimate. Why? Because our Lord had the audacity to heal on the Sabbath, and for their money this was a sign of godlessness on the part of Jesus. No man of God would violate the Sabbath, even to heal! You see, these religious big shots were so sure of themselves and their interpretation of the Scriptures, that they were blind to the corrective truth Jesus was showing them. They put their trust in themselves and their training. They were learned men. They preached tremendously tepid sermons like Fr. Sang preached last Sunday. They had all the answers so that their minds were closed to the possibility that some of what they believed just might be wrong. And because they were blind to the truth, they ended up adjusting their picture of the moral universe to fit their misguided and sometimes flat-out evil views. But what John wants us to see is that only Jesus gets to define what is right and wrong because only Jesus is God become man. Only Jesus is the light of the world, and only in and through Jesus can we ever hope to have a real relationship with the Father. The blindness of the religious leaders ultimately caused them to strike a deal with death because they rejected Jesus, the Way, the Truth, and the Life. It is a sobering thing to contemplate.

That’s all well and good, you say. But we don’t live in Jesus’ day and we’re not religious big shots. We’re just ordinary losers. True enough. But the pride that existed in the religious leaders of Jesus’ day is alive and well in us today. Here are some test questions to help us assess how pride-infected we really are. Do we put ourselves over the authority of Scripture, over Jesus’ authority as Lord and ruler of this vast universe so that we too are blinded to God’s truth and authority over us? Do we, for example, hold views of sexuality that are consistent with the creation narratives and God’s intention for marriage? Or do we see ourselves as too sophisticated for the antiquated narrative that we find in Scripture? Is our conception of power more like the world recognizes, where we lord it over others to achieve our goals, or do we see power in self-giving love and service for the sake of others? Do we worship the one true God, the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, or do we worship ourselves or money or security or ambition or [insert your favorite idol here]? Anytime we try to rationalize why we don’t follow God’s commands, anytime we seek to be human in ways that are contrary to the ways of Jesus, the one true human, we demonstrate our blindness, especially when we talk about how superior is our knowledge and understanding of the ways of the world and tout our scientific, medical, and technological advances, along with their accompanying worldviews, as reasons why we must abandon or modify the authority of Scripture and our Lord Jesus’ authority over us.

And while most of us are aware of this kind of spiritual blindness, there is another kind of blindness that is also caused by pride, a blindness many of us are not aware of because we have repressed it out of fear of God’s judgment on us. It is a blindness that I personally have struggled with all my life, the blindness of not seeing Sin for what it is and therefore minimizing it. This in turn causes us to reject our radical and desperate need of the cross as the only real antidote to our sin-sickness and alienation from God. When we suffer from this kind of blindness, we are hopelessly and terrifyingly lost and alienated from God, because we have rejected the gift of God’s love, justice, and mercy offered freely to each of us. And deep down we know it because we have the accompanying anxiety to prove that we do.

So here’s another little quiz to help you assess if you suffer from this form of blindness. Do you see your sins as something that you can fundamentally correct if you simply try a little harder so that they can be properly resolved if you just repent of them? Do you see your sins as fundamentally a problem you have with following the rules (e.g., do this, don’t do that)? You know. If you would only make better choices you really wouldn’t have a problem with Sin in your life. If you answered yes to either of these questions, even partially, you have demonstrated your blindness to the problem and severity of Sin as an outside and alien power that holds us all as slaves. That is the essence of the human condition. And if we are slaves, then by definition we do not have the power to free ourselves from its grip. Not only that, we realize that God must do something about the power of Sin over us because it has the power to corrupt and destroy all the goodness in God’s creation and creatures, us included. How can a loving God possibly let Sin go unchecked? What kind of God would allow evil, Sin, and death to reign indefinitely in God’s world to corrupt and dehumanize his image-bearing creatures? Judgment anyone?

This is the power of Sin and this is why repentance, while necessary on our part to address the sins we commit, is not the solution to the problem of Sin in our lives. We are its slaves and without outside intervention, we are all hopelessly lost and under God’s loving and just judgment. I see some of you starting to get fidgety. Fr. Bowser’s eyes have rolled up into the back of his head. The governor’s security team have drawn their weapons. Sang+ has boarded a plane to Kenya. We thought this was Laetare Sunday, dude. You know, rejoice? So what are we supposed to be rejoicing about? You’ve painted an absolutely grim and depressing picture for us. Well, yes I have. I live to depress. To be sure, I have not given a reason for us to rejoice at this point. I’ve described bad news, awful news, not Good News. And I’ve also described what I fear is the condition many of us labor under because many of us are blind to our self-help addiction. If you are one of those folks, it’s time to really hear the Good News of Jesus Christ.

The only way to defeat the power of Sin is to introduce a power greater than it, and that power of course is God. God has indeed dealt with evil, Sin, and death, but God dealt with them in a way that requires us to shed the blindness of our self-love and self-loathing. The Good News over which we rejoice is the NT proclamation that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures (1 Cor 15.3); that Christ died for the ungodly, you and me, while we were still ungodly (Rm 5.6); that on the cross God has dealt a decisive blow to evil to break its power over us (Col 2.13-15), and has given us his Spirit to live in us to empower us to live as the truly hu-man beings God created us to be (Rm 8.1-16). Only when the power of Sin is broken so that it can no longer make us its slaves do we have good reason to rejoice. But that’s exactly the claim of the NT! God loves us too much to let us be held as slaves to the power of Sin and by the time we realize we are its slaves, we also realize that God has already acted decisively on our behalf to break its hold on us. To be sure, we are not fully free from sin until we die (Rm 6.7). But as Fr. John Wesley used to say, for those of us in Christ, while sin remains it no longer reigns over us. 

What I am talking about is the power of God at work on our behalf to free us from the power of Sin and to prepare us to be part of God’s promised new world where we will have new bodies and be free from all sin, evil, hurt, heartache, sorrow, sighing, or separation from God and each other. And astonishingly, God demonstrated this power in the death and resurrection of Jesus. Without having the eyes of faith that are not blinded by our human pride and fear of being judged, we can never appropriate this Good News. But when by God’s grace we realize that God has already acted on our behalf to free us from our slavery to Sin, how can we not rejoice? It means we can abandon our futile attempts at self-help to deal with the problem of Sin. It means we can abandon our doubts that God really does love us and has acted to claim us forever. No wonder Paul resolved to glory in nothing but the cross and Christ crucified! In it is our freedom and release from our bondage to fear, evil, Sin, and death. Do you have the vision of faith to claim this power? 

This is essentially what Paul is talking about in our epistle lesson. He’s not telling us we have to follow a bunch of rules to be saved. He’s telling us just the opposite. He’s telling us to see the world in a fundamentally different way. God has already made us his. So how can we not be his light? How can we not, in the power of the Spirit (and only in the power of the Spirit), behave as people released from Sin’s power by the power of the cross? To summarize and close, then, the Good News of Jesus Christ is that we are freed from our bondage to evil, Sin, and death because God has acted decisively on our behalf to both free us and to put to right all that is wrong with this world. We must wait until Christ returns to see the full benefits of God’s saving act on our behalf. But rest assured, my beloved, it’s a done deal and that is reason for us to rejoice on this Laetare Sunday 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 Lent 3A, Sunday, March 15, 2020. As usual, it will be helpful for you to read the assigned lectionary texts before reading the sermon by clicking on or tapping their links below. For those with ears to hear, listen and understand.

Lectionary texts: Exodus 17.1-7; Psalm 95; Romans 5.1-11; St. John 4.5-42.

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

Today we hold the first of three scrutinies of our confirmands, where we pray for them and show them our love and support as they continue to grow in their relationship with Christ. As such, this sermon is aimed primarily at them, although hopefully we all can benefit from what the Scriptures have to say to us this morning. Specifically I want us to look at what real Christian faith looks like on the ground and how our faith always points to how real our relationship is with Jesus.

Is the Lord among us or not? This was the complaint of the ancient Israelites as they wandered through the desert on their way to the land God promised them. And if you have paid attention to the news of late, it seems many of us are still asking the same question. As infections from the coronavirus continue to spread, we are tempted to doubt whether God loves us or is among us. If God is all powerful and loving, why doesn’t God just protect us by getting rid of this virus?

But as our OT and psalm lessons make clear, we are not to put God to the test like that because in questions like this we are really questioning God’s faithfulness and goodness toward us as well as God’s great love for us. To be sure, our world is full of many things that tempt us to question God’s love for us and his ability to make all things right, the current coronavirus pandemic being the latest example. But that is not what was going on with the Israelites when they asked this question. 

Imagine you had been one of God’s people Moses led out of Egypt. That surely would have been a frightening and anxious time. Would the Egyptians, who were stronger than your people, try to prevent you from leaving by killing you or cutting off your escape route? Would you be better or worse off leaving? But God answered these questions in spectacular ways. You suddenly find yourself crossing the Red Sea, with walls of water piled high on either side of you. How is that possible? Why does the seabed feel like dry ground? And what’s with that pillar of cloud by day and fire by night, always leading the way? Then there was the bread from heaven, the manna, that mysteriously appeared each day so that you and your family wouldn’t starve to death. What’s up with that? Here’s the point. Had you been among God’s people back in the day, you would have seen multiple examples of God’s power, of God protecting you from harm so that his promise to bring you to a new land could be fulfilled. You witnessed all these things first hand! God knows you need to eat and drink and be protected from the desert heat and other dangers, and in some very spectacular ways God demonstrated his love and care for you as he brought you and your people out of Egypt.

Now here you are on your way, wandering in the desert and complaining that God has abandoned you and won’t get you to the promised land. Sure you are anxious and frightened. The wilderness is not for wimps! But God had proven his love for you and his ability to care for and protect you. So why the grumbling now? That was the problem from God’s perspective. He had cared for and protected his people because God called them to be his own. Now when the going got tough (again), the people questioned God’s love, faithfulness, and ability to protect and care for them despite what they had experienced. Apply this to your own life. Think of family or friends you know intimately and who know you just as well. You have demonstrated to them that you love and care for them in what you do for them, in behaving in ways that represent your family name in the best possible ways. Then all of a sudden out of the blue, they question your motives toward them and call your character into question. How would that make you feel? At that point, even though you remain friends and/or part of the family, you have effectively become enemies, at least for the moment.

This is what happened to the human race and God. Before they rebelled against God in paradise, Adam and Eve enjoyed a perfect relationship with God. They knew God was their Creator and Father and that they were his creatures and children. Genesis 3 describes this by telling us God walked constantly in the garden with Adam and Eve, indicating they enjoyed perfect friendship with God, something that is hard for us to imagine because none of us have ever experienced perfect friendship with God or anyone else. But it was different for Adam and Eve because they did what God asked them to and reaped the benefits. They weren’t worried or anxious about anything because they experienced God’s presence and love and goodness first hand. They knew God better than we know those we love the most. Adam and Eve were functioning in the way God intended for them. They reflected God’s goodness and love out into the world to sustain and nourish and refresh it. But that all changed when they rebelled against God and tried to be God instead of his creatures. The Bible calls that sin and every one of us has been infected by it ever since. We’re afraid of the coronavirus right now, but it won’t infect everybody and the worst it can do is kill the body, terrible as that is. But our infection from Sin makes us enemies of God who is the Source of all life and health and goodness, and if something isn’t done about it, we will all be cut off from God (die) forever because God in his great love for us cannot ultimately allow evil to continue.

We don’t like talking about this because we like to fool ourselves into thinking we can fix ourselves and our problems. We can’t. We might eventually find a cure for the coronavirus but we will never find a human cure for our rebellion against God. Sure, we can work to improve ourselves and with the help of the Holy Spirit who lives in us, we can make good progress in getting rid of things that make us sick. But in this mortal life we will never be totally free from doing the things that makes us enemies of God and that is why some people really dislike the Christian faith because it doesn’t teach self-help and human solutions to the problems that make us most afraid and anxious. And so we keep testing God and asking if he really cares about us or has the power to help us solve problems we care most about because we really want to do things our way. Every one of us has felt this way and when that happens, it demonstrates that deep down we really don’t trust God. And if we don’t trust God, why would we want to act like God wants us to act, especially if we think we know better? Yet the ancient Israelites wanted to return to their slavery in Egypt. We Christians often want to return to our slavery to Sin. This demonstrates they and we don’t know any better!

But here’s the thing. The God who led his people out of Egypt and through the Red Sea is the same God we worship. So what mighty acts of power has God done for us to prove he loves us and has the ability to save us from all that makes us afraid? The death and resurrection of Christ. St. Paul makes an astonishing claim in our epistle lesson from Romans today. He tells us at just the right time, while we were still God’s enemies, Christ died for us to break the power of Sin over us, the very thing that makes us God’s enemies in the first place. St. Paul didn’t say that we had to turn away from our sins or feel bad about them or ourselves before Christ died for us. In fact, as we’ve seen, there’s nothing we can do to rid ourselves from Sin’s infection. No, God acted independently on our behalf, even before we realized we needed help, so that we no longer have to fear being his enemies or be afraid of dying! In other words, God reconciled us to himself on the cross of Jesus. End of story. We did nothing to deserve or earn this life-giving favor. God did it out of his great love for us and his desire that we be reconciled to him so that we could enjoy life to its fullest. The story of the Bible is not about us seeking God, but God seeking us because of God’s great love for us!

Think about the person you dislike most in your life (hopefully he is not preaching to you at the moment). Would you be willing to give your life for that person? St. Paul doesn’t think you would and neither do I. Sure, there might be an exception or two to this rule, but for the most part, what do we do to people who are our enemies? We shun them and have bad thoughts toward them. We don’t wish them well. We hope bad stuff happens to them. Now imagine that person one day acted unexpectedly to save your life and in the process, actually gave his or her life for yours. Would that not change how you feel toward that person forever? Wouldn’t you feel a sense of love and gratitude for that person and desire to act in ways that would honor the person’s memory? 

This is what St. Paul is telling us to do in our epistle lesson. When by the grace of God and in the power of the Holy Spirit, we realize the gift God has given us, the gift of eternal life and release from our slavery to Sin so that we are free to love God and others just like Jesus did for us, we will experience God’s peace, a peace you’ll always want to possess once you’ve experienced it. We no longer have to worry if God loves us. He’s already demonstrated that in Christ’s death for us, despite the fact that we were enemies of God at the time. He gives us his Spirit to continue his healing work in us and to make himself known to us. He invites us to grow in our relationship with him and demonstrate our faith and trust in him to care for us, come what may in this life, by imitating Jesus in our lives. This is what faith on the ground looks like. This is your challenge and ours, my beloved confirmands. Embrace the love of Christ and walk with him everyday. If you need reminded of God’s love for you in Christ, talk with your family and your parish family. We’ll remind and encourage you. And when you stumble along the way, as you surely will, don’t worry. Jesus is always willing to help you to overcome that which sickens you because he created you to be his own forever. Remember that Jesus typically works through other humans, especially those in your family, so trust Christ enough to share your struggles with us so he can use us to help you work through them. We will weep with you and embrace you in your failures and sorrows as well as your happiness and successes. If you allow us this privilege of sharing Christ’s love with you, you will come to know Jesus even more deeply in the process. May the Father always give you the grace to continue to grow in your knowledge of Christ this Lent and throughout your lives. Doing so will help you accept his love for you and strengthen your ability to believe his promise to you that you are his forever. Then you will surely know the truth that God in Christ is your refuge and strength, a very present help in times of trouble. Be of good cheer, my beloved. Christ has overcome the world for you. We who believe in him are his enemies no longer. After all, you are to die for in God’s eyes. 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 Lent 3C, Sunday, March 24, 2019. As always, it will be helpful for you to read the assigned lectionary texts before you read the sermon by clicking on or tapping their links below. For those with ears to hear, listen and understand.

Lectionary texts: Isaiah 55.1-9; Psalm 63.1-8; 1 Corinthians 10.1-13; Luke 13.1-9.

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

Two weeks ago we looked at what it takes to observe a holy Lent. I suggested that observing a holy Lent is not about us or our ability to follow the rules set forth by God. Instead, I suggested that keeping a holy Lent starts with our presence at the foot of the cross of Christ with thankful hearts. It starts by acknowledging the power of God to change us and opening ourselves up to the presence of his life-changing Spirit. Observing a holy Lent is about God’s power working in our lives, not our ability to follow the rules. Many of us need to hear this message on a regular basis because many of us are all about the delusion of self-help. We also need to hear that God loves us and is merciful and gracious to us because many of us have a hard time loving ourselves, so it is natural for us to believe that God doesn’t or can’t love us either. Today, our readings point us in a different direction, one that is not nearly as popular or comforting as the topic of my last sermon. In various ways, our readings warn against the sin of presumption in all its destructive forms and this is what I want us to look at this morning.

We begin by acknowledging our aversion to talking about the power of Sin in our lives. We live in a day and age in which it is simply not acceptable to talk about the seriousness of sin. Doing so lands us in the cultural doghouse and we find ourselves labeled as haters, bigots, and the like. Even those brave enough to dare suggest there is Truth as well as rights and wrongs tend to deflect the topic of human sin by talking about the sins of others. Doing so allows us to avoid having to address our own sins, not to mention our standing before God. Our sin avoidance, especially when it comes to our own sins, is nothing new. We see it alive and well in our gospel lesson when our Lord was asked about those killed by Pilate and who had fallen victim to man-made disaster. What about those people, Jesus? Were they worse sinners than us? We ask these kinds of questions all the time. What about those killed in the recent Ethiopian airliner crash? Were they worse sinners than us? Or what about the victims of the various floods, cyclones, and tornadoes? Were they worse sinners than us? Did they really do stuff that was bad enough to warrant death? Or how about victims of AIDS? Isn’t that God’s punishment on them for their sins? Behind such questions, of course, is the old belief that God punishes us for our sins while “good people”—and we always include ourselves in that category—escape such punishment because, well, we’re good people. Do you see the presumption behind these questions? Some sins are more deserving of punishment than others, especially when we are talking about the sins of others and not our own. We don’t seem to realize that from the perspective of God’s perfect holiness, all sins are abhorrent because all sins corrupt and dehumanize, and because God loves us like he does, this is not acceptable to God. What parent, for example, would always allow his children to tell little white lies, especially if in allowing this pattern, he might teach them to become chronic liars? No, God wants the best for his image-bearers and therefore abhors anything we do that corrupts and chips away at God’s image in us. The problem is that we humans don’t take sin as seriously as God does, especially when it comes to examining our own sins. Our Lord’s message in response to our sin-aversion is pretty stark. You’d better knock that kind of thinking off while you still can and focus on repenting of your own sins. Otherwise you are going to fall under God’s good and just judgment just like they did, whether or not you think your sins are serious enough to be judged.

St. Paul says something equally worrisome in our epistle lesson. Here he is addressing Christian presumption that goes something like this. Hey God, I’m a baptized Christian and I come to Christ’s holy table each week for communion. Therefore I can do whatever I darn well please because you have to forgive my sins since I’m a baptized Christian and take communion and stuff. Never mind that I gossip and speak evilly about my neighbor and those in my parish family (especially those I really dislike). Never mind that I criticize, lie, cheat, or steal. Never mind that I sit in haughty self-righteous judgment over my fellow Christians and refuse to admit I am ever wrong. Never mind that I sneak in an affair or two or am addicted to porn. And me turning a blind eye to human need and suffering, all the while rationalizing my stinginess? That’s OK too because, hey! I’m a baptized Christian and you have to forgive me, God. It says so right there in the rules somewhere. Welcome to Christian presumption at its finest where we presume God must forgive us because we are Christians. While St. Paul firmly believed that baptism and holy communion are necessary for our membership into Christ’s family (the Church) and for our salvation, he never saw them as some kind of magic that guarantees God’s forgiveness and mercy while allowing us to live our lives in ways that corrupt, dehumanize, and lead us to eternal destruction. Again, this is not love on God’s part. How can a loving God desire our destruction? This is our attempt at turning our relationship with God into one of codependency where God enables our fallen desires and pride to run rampant. The season of Lent, therefore, is an appropriate time for us to reflect not only on our own sins (that will keep us occupied for a good long while) but also on the love and mercy of God.

So is there an appropriate form of presumption for us Christians to have? Yes there is and it is implicit in all our readings. It is quite appropriate for us to presume that without God’s intervention and help we will fall under his terrible and just judgment on our sins, irrespective of our level of denial about the seriousness of those sins. This kind of presumption takes sin seriously and acknowledges our utter helplessness to fix ourselves or our standing before God. Many of us balk at this because it makes us feel bad. I’ve heard it a gazillion times. But is it thoroughly bad news when we acknowledge our terrible predicament before a just and holy God? If so, why do we confess each week that we follow too much the devices and desires of our own hearts? Why do we acknowledge that there is no health in us? Is it just to make us feel as rotten as possible and lower our self-esteem? Does God get some kind of delight in calling us out for our sins and making us feel rotten? 

Of course not (and if you think that, now is a good time for you to examine your unholy assumptions about who God is and what God wants). When we presume that our sins leave us without recourse and under God’s good and just judgment, and that we are utterly unworthy of God’s forgiveness, it begins to cultivate the necessary humility in us to accept God’s unwarranted love and forgiveness, and that helps make us ready to spend time at the foot of the cross with a thankful heart. When we realize that we can do nothing to make us right in God’s eyes except for the love of Christ made known supremely on the cross, we are developing a Spirit-led antidote for the kind of unhealthy and unholy presumption we’ve just talked about. God wants to forgive us because God loves us, despite our unloveliness. But God also wants us to be the fully human creatures he created us to be and that means we have to turn from our unhealthy self-love and pride and turn to God so that we can be healed. It’s the kind of mindset we find in our psalm lesson this morning with its hunger and thirst for God and the psalmist’s realization that nothing is more desirable than God’s love and care for him. When we realize there is nothing we can do to earn God’s mercy and love, but that God offers both to us because of who God is, it opens us up to God’s healing power made known to us in Christ, and him crucified, through the power of the Holy Spirit. That’s why we confess our sins—to be forgiven and healed, and because we are confident that God will.

When we realize that it pleased God to rescue us from our slavery to Sin by way of the cross (1 Corinthians 1.18-25) and to heal us in the power of the Spirit, and that God did so while we were utterly helpless and still his enemies (Romans 5.6-8), we look at God’s gifts of love and mercy through the lens of a grateful and penitent heart instead of through the lens of sinful presumption. This in turn increases our desire to love God for his awesome love for us made known supremely in the cross of Christ, and we are perfectly content to spend time at the foot of our Lord’s cross because we realize it is here, and only here, that we find healing, forgiveness, and salvation. As we continue our Lenten journey, my beloved, may we desire the grace to be bold enough and humble enough to see our sins as God sees them, and to give thanks to God for freeing us from the power behind our sins to make us his own. Then we can come to Christ’s table, rejoicing in our baptism, with a humble and contrite heart, the kind that pleases the Father, and be reminded that we are invited to the Father’s great banquet because we truly are Christ’s own, 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 preached on Thursday, March 5, 2026. As always, it will be helpful for you to read the assigned texts by clicking on or tapping the links below before reading the sermon. Yes, I know this is not a Lenten sermon per se, but death takes no holidays and Lent ultimately points to and prepares us for Easter. It is the only real hope we mortals have if we care about life at all. 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; 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 Sandy’s family. Thank you for allowing me the privilege of preaching at her funeral. I have known Sandy all my life, ever since I can remember. Her family and mine were as close as they come growing up and our two families spent a lot of time together. Her death is deeply personal and my heart aches as I grieve the loss of my longtime friend who was effectively a member of our family. 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 Sandy lived hers well. 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 a rather unexpected death on top of the darkness Sandy and her family had to endure during her final months and years 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 (John 11.38), a preview of coming attractions. Death is our ultimate enemy, the last enemy to be destroyed as St. 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 in the air 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 Sandy who are united with Christ 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, addictions, 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, Sandy’s life and faculties will be fully restored (what better justice for the injustice of her suffering and death related to dementia?) 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 her loss when she 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 (1 Thessalonians 4.13-14). 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 Sandy’s life, 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 Sandy, choose to remember her in her prime, at the peak of her power, not in her later years in her infirmity. Why? Because when Christ raises her from the dead, she will once again be in her 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 Sandy was afflicted as she was. I don’t know why she and her family had to endure it all as it unfolded. None of it had to go that way, yet it did. But I do know this. Sandy has been washed clean by the blood of the Lamb shed for her on the cross and made fit to stand in God’s holy Presence forever. She will be clothed one day with a new body patterned after the body of her Lord Jesus and set free to love and use her talents in spectacular new and old ways that honor God and others forever. I know that on the cross, her 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 her faith in Christ who loves her and who has claimed her from all eternity, we can have confidence that Sandy is enjoying her 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 Sandy, 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 Lent 2C, Sunday, February 21, 2016. As always it will be helpful for you to first read the assigned texts below by clicking on or tapping their links before reading the sermon. For those with ears to hear, listen and understand.

Lectionary texts: Genesis 15.1-12, 17-18; Psalm 27.1-17; Philippians 3.17-4.1; Luke 13.31-35.

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

Today we enter the second full week of Lent with its emphasis on self-examination, confession, repentance, and self-denial. So how are you doing with your Lenten disciplines? Me too. You recall that on Ash Wednesday I outlined the reason for Lent within the broader scriptural story of God’s rescue plan for his broken and hurting world and his image-bearing creatures. Knowing the Big Picture of Scripture can help bring meaning and purpose to our Lenten disciplines so that we don’t engage in them just because it’s Lent and we think we need to do something to make us right with God. Doing a Lenten discipline for its own sake is never a good reason to do it. So today, on the outside chance that you may have forgotten my Ash Wednesday sermon (heaven forbid!), I want to remind us all exactly what the prize is for which we strive as Christians and why Lent should matter to us.

In our OT lesson, we see God making a whopping big promise to Abram (later to be renamed Abraham by God). When we hear promises made, even when they come from God, if we are honest with ourselves, we tend to be a bit skeptical about those promises being fulfilled because we’ve all been the victim of broken promises and have all broken a few ourselves. So let’s just say it. When we hear promises we have our serious doubts. And apparently Abram had his too because God had failed to produce on his promises up to that point. Almost eleven years had passed since God promised Abram offspring and now Abram was 86, hardly a spring chicken, if you catch my drift! So when God once again promised Abram an offspring, Abram showed his disappointment in God by telling God that his slave would be his heir, not the promised son.

But God wouldn’t have any of Abram’s pity party. Nonsense, God tells him. Go outside and look at the stars. Count them if you can. Their countless number will be indicative of how many descendants you’ll have. And why was it so important that God deliver on his promise? Because approximately 11 years earlier God had made this promise to Abram:

“Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and the one who curses you I will curse; and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed (Genesis 12.1-3).

Here we see the beginning of God’s plan to rescue his world and its creatures from the ravages of evil, sin, and death that our first ancestors’ rebellion had caused. Genesis 3.1-11.9 is a litany of the cascading effects of human sin and the evil it unleashed on God’s good creation: pride, folly, increasing violence and murder, unfaithfulness, and chaos of all kinds, to name just a few, just like the stuff we see regularly on the news channels 24/7 these days. And here is God, surprisingly, even shockingly, calling a wandering nomad from his home country to go to modern-day Israel so that God could use his family to bring God’s love to the world to heal it and us. No wonder God would remind Abram a second time that a son was on the way!

And despite Abram’s doubts, fears, and skepticism, we are told that Abram believed God’s promises and God counted Abram’s belief as righteous. But what does that mean? The Hebrew verb for believed indicates something that is active and ongoing. It was more than just a one-time intellectual assent. In other words, Abram’s belief in God’s promise affected how Abram lived and interacted with God. Throughout his story, Abram’s behavior was always characterized by his prompt obedience to God’s commands. And despite the fact that approximately 11 years had passed since God had first promised Abram an offspring, Abram believed God’s promises so that God considered him to be righteous. In Scripture, righteousness signifies the fulfillment of the demands of a relationship, and basic to the righteousness in our relationship with God is trust in his plan and God’s working out of that plan. Unlike Adam and Eve, whose lack of trust in God’s goodness and ability to guide and provide for all their needs got us kicked out of paradise in the first place (Genesis 3.1-19), Abram accepted God’s promise and believed that God would fulfill it. That constituted his faith, his trust, and that trust made him acceptable in the eyes of his God.

To be sure, Abraham’s faith and trust in God was not perfect. Twice while he wandered in this new land Abram lied about his relationship with his wife, Sarah, to save his own skin. And shortly after this episode, Abram and Sarah took matters regarding their promised son into their own hands, literally, and Abram had a son via one of Sarah’s slaves. This is hardly an airtight or perfect faith on display here! But God does not demand perfect faith because God knows we are broken creatures and life gets very messy. No, God tells Abram that because of his faith, i.e., because of his overall trust in God’s promises, Abram was made right (or justified) in God’s eyes. Here we see the first instance in the Bible of justification by faith. Faith is trusting God’s promise and acting as if it will be fulfilled. Throughout the Bible, God makes many promises. For example, in the NT God promises that, “I am with you always” or “whoever lives and believes in me shall never die” or “I will not leave you desolate; I will come to you.” Genuine biblical faith clings to God’s promises and acts as if they are true. Despite his sometimes messy faith, Abram believed God’s promises and acted accordingly overall. Do you?

This faith thingy is no small matter for us as well because we are part of Abraham’s family by virtue of our faith, hope, and trust in Jesus Christ. We believe that God initiated the conditions to restore us to a right relationship with him by becoming human and dying on a cross so that he could deal with our sins without destroying us. In our gospel lesson, Jesus tells the Pharisees that he is about doing kingdom work by casting out demons and bringing healing of all kinds to people like you and me, activities that are sure signs of God’s love for us and his desire to restore us to our full humanity. And how do we know this is true? How do we know that on the cross Jesus dealt with our sins and destroyed the power of evil over us? He tells us himself. On the third day, God would raise him from the dead to usher in the beginning of God’s promised new world, the ultimate fulfillment of God’s promise to bring blessing and healing to God’s broken and hurting world and its peoples. To be sure, God’s new creation has not yet come in full. But because God raised Jesus from the dead and promises to do the same for all who put their whole hope and trust in Jesus, we have a real basis to believe this most unbelievable of all God’s promises. God never asks us to whistle through the graveyard. He always gives us a real and historical basis for his promises, starting with Abraham, who had the promised son, Isaac, when Abraham was 99 years old and Sarah was 100. If God can call things into existence that do not exist, and give life to the dead (Romans 4.17), is there anything too hard for God?

And as St. Paul makes clear in our epistle lesson, our faith in Jesus and the healing power of the cross is the only way we can expect to inherit God’s promised new world. The challenge for us is to overcome everything within us that wants to make us not believe in the power of Jesus’ death and resurrection, so that we follow our own selfish and disordered appetites and remain hostile to God and outside his forgiveness because we refuse to repent of our proud and selfish appetites of all kinds. Those who refuse to put their trust in Jesus are doomed to destruction, warns St. Paul, and if we have any good sense about us, we will heed his warning.

But in heeding his warning, we had also better heed the lesson of Abram. The point of giving our lives to Jesus is to trust in him and to act in ways that please him. We don’t do this to get our ticket punched. We do this because we love Jesus and believe him to be trustworthy and true, and we want to please him because he has literally saved us from eternal destruction. He didn’t do that because we are deserving of his love and mercy and grace any more than Abram was when God called him out of Ur (Iraq) to go to Canaan (Israel). No, God became human for our sake so that he could rescue us and use us to be his faithful image-bearing creatures in the manner he created us in the first place, thanks be to God! Like Abram, we won’t live out our faith perfectly. What is necessary is to love and trust God consistently and to root out all that is within us that prevents us from becoming more like Jesus. And now we are back to Lent with its disciplines of confession, repentance, and self-denial. We do these things so that God can help us put to death all that is within us that dehumanizes us and causes us to be stubborn and rebellious. Of course, we will never be successful in putting to death entirely those things that keep us hostile toward God. But God knows our hearts and honors our efforts to become more like him. In fact, God sends us his Spirit to help us in our endeavors. It’s a messy process, but it boils down to this. Despite setbacks and difficulties and the messiness of life, do we believe God’s promises to use us as Jesus’ people to be a blessing to his world, i.e., to embody and bring to bear God’s great love and mercy to all people, even (or especially) our enemies?

This call to be a blessing never changes because God’s promise to Abraham and his family to be a blessing to the world never changes. The ultimate son of Abraham is Jesus, God himself, and he calls us to follow him in living out his promise to use us as God’s people to bring God’s blessing to his disordered and sin-sick world. This is what St. Paul meant when he talked about us being citizens of heaven. The logic is to bring the values of our real home, heaven’s values, God’s values, to bear on the world, just like we would bring the best of American values to a foreign land where we settled. We can’t very well do that if we are fundamentally hostile to God. So whatever it is within you that needs to die, ask the Lord to help you put it to death and struggle with it during this Lenten season and beyond. Do so because you believe the promises of God to rescue and restore his good world, yourself included, and give thanks that God honors you enough to ask you to be part of that rescue plan! Do it because you believe God really is for you, that God is like a mother hen who longs to bring you under her wings to heal and love and cherish you all the days of your mortal life and then throughout all eternity. Jesus himself promised this and so we remember that it is therefore God the Father’s promise to us through God the Son. This is why we do Lent, because we are eager to love the Father in return for his great love for us and because we believe the promises of God, that through Jesus our Lord we are part of Abraham’s family and therefore part of God’s promise to heal and bless God’s world. That, folks, means we have work to do in the Lord’s name right here and now. It also means 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 Lent 1B, Sunday, February 22, 2015. As always, it will be helpful to read the assigned texts by clicking on or tapping their links below. For those with ears to hear, listen and understand.

Lectionary texts: Genesis 9.8-17; Psalm 25.1-9; 1 Peter 3.18-22; Mark 1.9-15.

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

On Ash Wednesday you recall that I urged us to believe the gospel, the Good News of Jesus Christ, instead of believing in good advice as sadly many Christians do. News, you recall, is about something that has happened and as a result everything changes, either for good or ill. We saw that in the case of the gospel, the Good News is that God has returned to his good but sin-corrupted world to defeat evil, sin, and death on the cross and usher in the beginning of God’s promised new world with the resurrection of Jesus. As a result, we no longer have to live in fear or worry that God has abandoned us. And so this morning I want to continue to work out this theme of why the Good News of Jesus is so critical for us as Christians as we enter this season of Lent (and beyond). Specifically, I want us to examine this theme through the lens of our lessons this morning to see how they can further instruct us.

The first thing we notice in our readings is the presence of mysterious and unseen dark powers and forces actively at work in God’s world to corrupt it and God’s creatures. We don’t like to talk about this dimension of reality much these days because we are afraid that we will be labeled as some kind of weirdo losers who are ignorant or “prescientific” or superstitious or worse. After all, we really have no way to directly observe or measure these forces other than what our bones tell us and so we’ve been told to discount them. But we shouldn’t because as our readings warn us, they are real and they are often the real power behind the human agents of evil. Peter talks about Jesus making proclamation to the spirits in prison. Who are those spirits and where is this prison? More about that in a moment. Mark talks about the Spirit driving Jesus into the wilderness for 40 days where he is tempted by Satan himself, with the wilderness, of course, being a common biblical metaphor to describe all that is desolate and evil and threatening to God’s people (think Exodus). And while the writer of Genesis does not mention the dark powers and principalities explicitly, the context of the story of God making a covenant with Noah and his descendants certainly does. The whole reason God brought a flood to destroy the inhabitants of earth in the first place is because of the increasingly wicked behavior of his image-bearing creatures as outlined in Genesis 4.1-6.8 as well as the mysterious wicked angels we read about in Genesis 6.2ff who took human wives for themselves and mated with them. All this helped corrupt God’s good world and its creatures so badly that God looked at the evil humans had done to his world and was grieved to his heart that he had made his image-bearing creatures in the first place, probably the most terrifying statement in all Scripture.

All this should make us stop during this Lenten season and reflect soberly on evil. When we dismiss the reality of the dark powers in our world and their influence on us, it makes it much easier for those powers to operate in God’s world to corrupt and sicken us, and to use us as their unwitting agents to commit evil. This, combined with the innate human wickedness that led to the flood, should remind us that our own sin and rebellion also help to corrupt and defile God’s good world as well as ourselves. As I have said before, every time we sin it makes us sick.

So far there’s not much Good News to be had here. It’s news all right, but not of the good kind. And we get that. We look at the world around us with its wondrous beauty and see all kinds of evil being perpetrated. We look at our own bodies as we grow older and more infirm and realize that growing old isn’t for the faint of heart. We know in our bones that things should not be this way but we also know that we do not have it in our own power to fix it.

Having been confronted about the reality of evil, the corrupt nature of the human heart, and the effect each has on God’s good world (and us), we are now ready to look at the Good News found in our lessons this morning. We see it first in Genesis. While God regretted that he had created humans, the good news is that he did not destroy our race entirely and in our OT lesson we see God graciously making a covenant with Noah to never again judge the world with a flood. Despite human wickedness and rebellion against him, despite being grieved to his heart over us, God remained faithful to his creation and the human creatures he made to rule over his good world. Notice too that in making the covenant with Noah, God did not require anything from humans. The promise stemmed from the very heart and love of God. Think carefully about this amazing love and faithfulness of God during the 40 days of Lent. It will do your heart good.

The psalmist also recognized the wondrous love of God for his sinful and rebellious creatures. In our lesson this morning from one of my favorite psalms, David almost desperately relies on the love, mercy, and faithfulness of God to forgive his sins and rebellion against God so that David could find healing and hope and freedom to live as a truly human being. The good news is that God acts decisively in David’s life (and ours) to make known his love for and forgiveness of David (and us) so that David’s life (and ours) will be changed forever.

And in Mark we see the Lord himself announcing the Good News that the time to repent had come because the kingdom of God was breaking into the midst of God’s people Israel to free them (and ultimately the entire world) from their captivity to sin and evil. And as all the gospels make clear, Jesus showed what happens when the kingdom of God breaks in on earth as in heaven. People are healed of all kinds of illness and released from all kinds of slavery. Relationships are healed and restored. Forgiveness is offered to one and all who have the good sense to accept it. The dead are raised and justice is restored. This is what happens when the kingdom of God breaks through to confront the evil and sin that corrupt and destroy us. This is why believing must always accompany repentance. If we don’t really believe that in Jesus God has broken the power of evil decisively, freed us from our slavery to sin and death, and ushered in the beginning of his new creation, there is little reason for us to change our lives and pattern them after Jesus with his cross and suffering, which both our Lord and Peter call us to do.

But of course the ultimate victory over evil, sin, and death was accomplished with Jesus’ death and resurrection. It was on the cross that Jesus, the very embodiment of God, allowed all the forces of evil, both spiritual and human, to do their worst to him. And when they did, an astonishing thing happened. It wasn’t Jesus who was defeated. It was the powers who found themselves defeated because they no longer had any real power over us. In Jesus’ death, our sin and the evil behind it was also condemned so that God would not have to condemn us. And in Jesus’ resurrection, the power of death, the ultimate enemy, was broken and will be fully destroyed when our Lord comes again to finish his rescue operation of us and his world (cf. 1 Corinthians 15.20-26). This was the proclamation Jesus made to the spirits in prison that Peter talks about in our epistle lesson. They are the dark powers behind all the evil that corrupts our world. And after his resurrection, Jesus made the definitive announcement to them that by his death they had been judged and their power broken (thus their imprisonment), thanks be to God! He could do this because as Peter reminds us, Jesus is now Lord of all.

To believe this, of course, takes great faith on our part because while the powers are defeated they are not yet vanquished. But that is part of what it means to grow up as Christians. We must first learn to develop eyes to see as best we can the reality of heaven and earth, much the way Jesus saw the heavenly reality open up to him at his baptism, and then have the faith to access this power in and through the presence of the Holy Spirit in our lives. Think about it. Jesus’ didn’t run from the wilderness. In fact, the Spirit drove him into it where he was desperately tempted. But Jesus didn’t face his temptations alone. He did so in the power of the Spirit and because he knew he had the help of angels to assist him in his fight against Satan. None of this made Jesus’ struggle with Satan any easier. But it gave him the power he needed to prevail. God grant us the grace and mercy to avail ourselves of this same help as we confront the evil in our world and ourselves with eyes wide open, and focus this Lenten season on putting to death the body of sin that weighs us down and keeps us from enjoying God’s peace and reconciliation that is ours in and through the blood of our Lord Jesus Christ shed for us.

This repentance and turning from our ways to God’s can be tricky business and it involves us dying. This is hard to do and we will possibly face scorn and ridicule from others when they see us turning away from our old self and turning toward Christ. But we can take heart because Jesus has overcome the forces that hate us and want to destroy us, and he is now Lord of the cosmos to help us in our struggle against evil. Suffering is indeed hard and nobody likes it. But the whole point of our epistle lesson is that it is better to suffer for doing good than for doing bad. You won’t believe this one second if you don’t believe in the Good News of Jesus’ death and resurrection. But if you do, well that’s an entirely different story!

And if we really do believe the Good News that Scripture proclaims but wonder just how God can possibly love us and want to include us in his kingdom to the point where we begin to lose heart, let us pay attention to Mark’s and Peter’s focus on baptism. By the waters of baptism we are brought into God’s family and made Jesus’ people. So listen closely to the voice Jesus heard at his baptism because what God said to Jesus he says to us, precisely because we are Jesus’ people: You are my beloved in whom I am well pleased. Let that really sink in. Believe it. Rejoice in it because strictly on our own merit none of us would ever hear God say he is well pleased with us. But we are not our own. We are the Lord’s. And because we are, this is our present status and future hope. This is why we must embrace the Good News—because it is a life-changer when we finally believe it. Our faith and trust in Christ opens us to the power and presence of the Spirit so that we truly can live as people of power, even when we are weak.

Whatever it is you need to turn away from or confront this Lent, whatever it is you are working on, remember God’s words to you as you do. You are my beloved in whom I am well pleased. Let God’s love for you made manifest in Jesus and the Spirit strengthen you and encourage you as you do the hard work of dying to yourself. Yes, the work is hard. But the reward is so much more fantastic. God’s kingdom has come, ushered in by God himself in Jesus Christ. Evil and sin are defeated, even if they are not yet fully banished. Jesus is with us now in the Spirit to help and guide us, and life, wholeness, healing, health, and happiness are our future, all because of God’s great love for us made known in Jesus our Lord. That, folks, is 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 Lent 2C, Sunday, March 13, 2022. As always, it will be helpful for you to first read the assigned texts below by clicking or tapping on their links before reading the sermon. For those with ears to hear, listen and understand.

Lectionary texts: Genesis 15.1-12, 17-18; Psalm 27; Philippians 3.17-4.1; St. Luke 13.31-35.

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

Since I announced my retirement last week, I realized that my opportunities to preach the Good News to you are rapidly coming to a close and so I resolved this week to at minimum double the length of my sermons from now on. I am sure you are as thrilled at this prospect as I am. In today’s lessons we are reminded in various ways that there are lots of things in life that make us afraid. In fact, the most repeated command in all Scripture is to not be afraid. So how can the season of Lent help us in our fight not to be afraid? This is what I want us to look at this morning.

We all can relate to Abraham in our OT lesson this morning. He had just finished risking a dangerous fight with the local kings in his region to rescue his nephew Lot, powerful kings who had a reputation for wreaking vengeance on their enemies, and Abraham had become one by defeating and humiliating them. Then he had done the most inexplicable thing. He refused to take any spoils of war, choosing instead to give a tenth of the spoils to the local priest, Melchizedek, and to restore Lot and his family. You can read about that in Gen 14. This is hardly the way of the world and surely Abraham had to wonder how that would all turn out. And now here is God, coming to Abraham, apparently in a very powerful night vision, making him even more afraid.

And like Abraham, there are lots of things in our world that continue to make us afraid. There are wars in Africa that are slaughtering hundreds of thousands of innocents, wars that rarely get reported in our country. There is war in Europe that does get a lot of press, not all of it accurate, a war that has the potential to explode into another world war, only this time the belligerents have the capacity to annihilate each other with nuclear weapons. There is the very real threat of a cyberattack on our country’s most critical infrastructures, attacks that could cripple our nation if successful. We are enduring rampant inflation driven by exploding fuel costs. Then of course there are the usual tiresome voices denouncing all for which America stands and striving to fundamentally change our values. As we become an increasingly godless nation these voices become more strident and the rancor and strife they create becomes more intense. Abraham would surely have understood.

Then of course there are the personal fears and demons we all carry around. We worry about our health, about our kids or parents (or both), about our bank accounts and career choices. We worry about finding a mate if we are single or about our marriages if we are married. Many of us worry (needlessly) about our standing before God. And of course in the back of our minds we worry about and fear Death. Oh, most of us do a fine job repressing and deflecting and denying this reality. We delude ourselves by thinking that we’re not bad people so that God really isn’t all that concerned about our sins and foolishness and folly. That’s reserved for the really bad folks. You know, anyone but us. They are the ones who need to be concerned. But death is universal. It comes to every one of us, even the best of us, because all have sinned and death is its chief wage. Here too, Abraham would surely have understood. There is a lot in our world and lives that make us afraid.

Yet here is God, telling Abraham not to be afraid because God is his shield. Trust me, God tells Abraham and us, nothing will happen to you because I am your shield. I’ll prove it by giving you the offspring and land I promised. Notice what is happening here. First, God promised to give Abraham offspring before Abraham believed God. God’s promise wasn’t contingent on Abraham’s faith. God promised this to his fearful servant out of sheer grace and love for Abraham. Only after the promise was made did Abraham believe God, making Abraham right with God and showing us how to do likewise. And this is critically important because it is in our alienation from God that all our sicknesses and fears are rooted. Think about it. Before our first ancestors sinned against God in paradise, they enjoyed perfect communion with God. God walked with his beloved image-bearers daily in the garden and as a result, Adam and Eve enjoyed perfect health and happiness. Who among us would not enjoy perfect health and happiness living in the direct presence of our Creator and God? Only after human rebellion and sin ruptured our relationship with God and caused us to be alienated from God—Adam and Eve hid from God in the garden, God didn’t hide from them—did we become anxious and afraid and lonely and isolated. Our rebellion has cost us dearly.

But God did not give up on us. He did not destroy humans and his good creation. No, God called Abraham to be God’s vehicle to restore his good creation and creatures gone bad to their right minds and right order. And it wasn’t until God became human as Abraham’s descendant, Jesus, that God’s plan was fully realized. So here in our OT lesson, we see the power of God at work to rescue humanity and creation from Sin’s ruin. All Abraham had to do was to trust God’s promise. That was what that strange ceremony was all about. Abraham had nothing to fear because God’s word is true and God’s power is completely efficacious—it always produces the desired results.

Sounds good, right? Trust God. Have faith in God’s promises. But here’s the problem. That is easier said than done! Abraham needed continual reassurance and so do we, precisely because we live in a sin-sick and God-cursed world, and we lack the power and perspective of God! So how do we learn to strengthen our trust in God? The short answer is that we learn to see the power of God at work in our lives and his world so that we have a basis for trust. Nowhere does Scripture ask us to have a blind faith. Faith by definition cannot be proved. But faith needs a basis for the related trust that is part and parcel of it. So how do we learn to see the power of God at work in our lives?

First, we have to know what that power looks like and what it promises. In other words, we have to keep our eyes on the prize. God reminded Abraham that his promise to be Abraham’s shield was trustworthy. Otherwise, how could Abraham eventually have countless descendants? Abraham of course was skeptical because he laughed at the promise when God approached him about it the second time later in this story (Gen 17). But God is God, the God who spoke this vast cosmos into existence and who raised Jesus Christ from the dead. Nothing is too hard for God. Nothing. Giving Abraham offspring when his loins and Sarah’s were as good as dead was one way for God to show this to his trusting but skeptical servant.

For us, the prize is new creation, God’s new heavens and earth, where we will get to live forever in God’s direct presence with all of the benefits Adam and Eve enjoyed in the garden and more. Death will be abolished as will evil and suffering and sorrow and all the things that make us afraid and anxious. Sheer beauty. Sheer life. We will be restored to the fully human beings God created us to be and given the sacred and holy privilege of running God’s world to the glory of God the Father. This prize is worth more than all our lesser prizes and idols combined. It is worthy of our supreme loyalty and striving, or to use St. Paul’s language, it is worthy of our citizenship in heaven whose values we are called to model here on earth, and it is made possible only by the saving Death of Jesus Christ. Forget this prize and we lose our way. That’s why Scripture repeatedly urges us to remember the power of God. For ancient Israel, that meant remembering the Exodus. For us, it means remembering Christ’s Death and Resurrection and the new creation to which the Resurrection points. When we remember the power of God at work in Scripture, it makes it easier for us to recognize the power of God at work in our daily lives, even if that work is nowhere near as spectacular. If we believe God really did speak this universe into existence and raise Christ from the dead, why would it be hard for God to be intimately and actively involved in our lives? Christ died to reconcile us to God and break Sin’s power over us so that we could be citizens of God’s new world as St. Paul reminds us in our epistle lesson. Why then would God abandon us to schlep around in our daily lives without his help? God knows we need him. If he became human to die for us while we were still his enemies, why would he abandon us now that we are reconciled to him?

To be sure, this act of faith is not always straightforward. We believe that Christ died to break Sin’s power over us yet we continue to sin. Why is that? We all know people who have loved the Lord but who died untimely or awful deaths. How was God a shield to them? We see wars and injustice swirl around us. If God is in control, why does God allow this? It appears that increasingly the patients are running the asylum in this county, i.e., more and more people try to convince us that wrong is right and right is wrong, and it makes us afraid. But that does not negate the promise, no matter how dark things look! We are called to live with the apparent disconnect, unanswered questions, and ambiguities. If we could have told Christ’s disciples that first Good Friday that things were gonna turn out all right, they would have looked at us in disbelief. They knew better. Dead people didn’t rise up from the grave. That’s why we must also persevere as we remember. The outworking of God’s redemptive plan requires a marathoner’s thinking and perspective, not a sprinter’s.

That is why it is critical for our faith to remember God’s power when things look bad, and we are called to remember together. As the psalmist reminds us, we need to keep coming into God’s presence as his people and worship him, especially in the midst of our fears, so that God can heal our fears, and where we can find people who know how to live out their faith well and who are willing to mentor us as St. Paul reminds us. God knows we need the human touch and worshiping together and enjoying fellowship together in the Risen Lord’s Presence are critical ways God uses to support and strengthen and inspire us when we are afraid. Let us therefore resolve to use these gifts, these means of grace, to strengthen our faith in trust. After all, as Christ reminds us in our gospel lesson, we worship a God who loves us and wants to mother us in the best possible sense. This reality is also an integral part of the prize on which we must keep our eyes. Great mothers protect, defend, instruct, and love their children, giving them freedom to grow and learn despite their foibles and rebellion. How much more does God our Father love and support and protect us? For you see, whatever happens to us in this world, for good or for ill, is only temporary, only partial. That is why we must keep focused on the truly good and eternal things, the things of God.

And this is where our Lenten disciplines come into play because they are designed to help us do just that. Lent is a season that helps us recall what life is really all about. It helps us focus on God’s beauty and love and power and forgiveness, reminding us the true joy involved in being reconciled to God so that we can truly be God’s image-bearing creatures. It points us to our deepest longings and desires as humans and God’s image-bearers, to be loved and to love, to pursue mercy and goodness and beauty and truth. Lent exposes the shallowness and falsehood of our disordered longings and desires to be selfish and ruthless and cruel, with all the accompanying fear and anxiety. It reminds us our lust for power, sex, money, security, status, and hedonistic pleasure is all a sham and will eventually lead to our eternal destruction as St. Paul warns us in our epistle lesson. None of these things can give life or provide real security because Death is universal and makes these disordered desires a sham and delusion. Lent reminds us what is real and what has real worth. It gives us the opportunity to examine ourselves in the light of God’s judgment and mercy and to develop the holy habits that will help us to remember the power and love of God through prayer, repentance, self-reflection, worship, Bible reading and study, and regular participation in the Holy Eucharist where we feed on the Bread of Life, the very bread that gives us life forever, Jesus Christ crucified and risen from the dead. There is indeed much to make us afraid in this world, but we have the power to overcome our fears, a power that is not our own, the power of God who loves us more than we dare love ourselves. Let us therefore not throw these pearls to the swine, my beloved. During this season of Lent, let us renew our commitment to Christ who has the power to take away our fears 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 Lent 1C, Sunday, March 10, 2019. As always, it will be helpful for you to read the assigned texts below before reading the sermon. For those with ears to hear, listen and understand.

Lectionary texts: Deuteronomy 26.1-11; Psalm 91.1-2, 9-16; Romans 10.8b-13; Luke 4.1-13.

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

Today is the first Sunday of Lent and our assigned gospel lesson always deals with the temptations of Jesus in the wilderness. If you saw the title of this sermon and wondered if I were going to have us sing some good old Motown music in the name of Jesus (apologies to those of you too young to remember or even know about the Temptations), you will be sadly disappointed. I’m not. Rather I want us to reflect seriously this morning on what it takes to observe a truly holy Lent (and beyond).

The way to observe a truly holy Lent is to start with Jesus and this leads us to our gospel lesson this morning. We note that just before today’s lesson on our Lord’s temptations, St. Luke has given us another one of those strange genealogies that are interspersed throughout the OT (Luke 3.23-38). In this particular genealogy, by its arrangement he tells us that Jesus is the Son of God who is descended from Adam, our first human ancestor. In arranging his material this way, the evangelist surely wants us to see that where our first ancestors failed when tempted by Satan, thereby allowing Evil and Sin to enter and corrupt God’s good creation and creatures, our Lord succeeded in resisting Satan’s wiles; the tide is turning. Evil has met its match. 

Put another way, St. Luke does not want us to separate the cross of Jesus Christ, which signaled the defeat of Evil, from his initial temptations because it is in the wilderness that our Lord begins to successfully engage the power of Evil to defeat and ultimately destroy it when God’s new creation comes in full. The challenge for us is to recognize what Jesus does as success instead of failure. While that is easy to do when we read about Christ’s exorcisms and healings of possessed and sick people, possession and sickness being two manifestations of the power of Evil, it is less intuitive for us to look at Christ’s passion and death and see the Victory won over Evil by the Son of God. Our Lord’s victory over Satan in the wilderness matters because we too are subjected to the devil and his minions’ power, i.e., Evil, every day of our lives the same way he was. Take a look around you. Look at the increasing vitriol and polarization in politics and on social media. Every day we are bombarded with all kinds of bad news from murder to abuse to addiction to you name it, and it wears us out. Much of this happens because we give in to the temptations our Lord resisted. If we are ever to have any real hope of rescue from Evil, we need to know from where our help comes (more about that in a bit).

Before we look at what else St. Luke has to tell us in our lesson, we need to say a word about the devil. In our day and age with all its “sophistication” and other forms of human-invented baloney, it can be pretty dangerous for us as Christians to acknowledge we believe in the existence of Satan and his minions (the dark powers and principalities). We’re liable to be mocked as fundies for starters and it will go downhill from there. While we should not look for Satan under every rock, if you are one of those poor souls who steadfastly refuses to believe in the devil, you are to be pitied, because Evil is real and it’s personal, and your refusal to believe in the reality of Evil personified as the devil assures that you will ultimately succumb to his power and he will eventually destroy you because of your delusions. If you are one of those folks, I would humbly suggest that the starting point for you to observe a holy Lent is to repent of your foolishness and acknowledge the terrifying reality of Evil in this world and our lives. 

Having dispensed with the background info needed for us to look at our Lord’s wilderness temptations, it is time to look at each temptation to see what St. Luke is inviting us to learn. We begin by noting that faithfulness to God does not always involve taking the easiest road; in fact, it usually is quite the opposite. The devil and his minions will come after us with a vengeance as they do not want us to live godly lives. The only way for us not to be overcome by Evil, and our only hope to be healed and made whole by the love of God, is for us to have the Holy Spirit living in us, just like Jesus had in the wilderness, to give us the power to trust in God’s power, not our own, and to heal us one inch at a time. 

We see this issue emerge in the first temptation because it questions God’s care and provision for us. Satan’s declaration to Jesus, “If you are the Son of God…,” which assumes he is, subtly appeals to Jesus to use his power to end his famished state. We all get this because most of the time when we are in dire straights we frantically try to meet our own needs. We plot, devise schemes, threaten, bully, etc., to make sure we get what we think we need. The assumption behind our behavior, of course, is that God is either incapable or unwilling to provide for us, which makes our good words about God look like a farce. What good Father will let his children go in need? So here Satan tempts Jesus by appealing to him to act to provide for himself rather than relying on God. Jesus responds by telling Satan that humans don’t live by bread alone. Here our Lord demonstrates his understanding that our well-being depends on much more than us being well-fed. If we do not stop trying to be God, no matter how well- fed we are, we will still be desperately broken, lonely, alienated, and under God’s terrible judgment. 

In the second temptation, we see Satan inviting Jesus to engage in false worship by appealing to the natural human tendency to grab power to achieve our selfish needs and ends. Here we see how Satan’s half-lies work. Satan tells our Lord that the kingdoms of the world have been given to him to give to anyone he pleases. We look around at the wreckage of human leadership from Hitler to Pol Pot to Stalin and other mass murderers and we are tempted to believe Satan is telling the truth. But it’s a half-lie because only God is sovereign over the nations and only God does with nations what God is gonna do with them, not the devil. The latter has power only to the extent God allows, mysterious and enigmatic as that is for us to contemplate. The point here, though, is for Jesus to worship the means of the world like we do: power, coercion, force, brutality, threats, tyranny, injustice, corruption (and the Evil behind them), to name just a few, to achieve his calling as Lord of the world. But Christ would have none of it. He would become Lord and Savior of the world by obeying God and going to the cross to defeat the power of Evil and our slavery to Sin. If you don’t get this point, you’ll never get Jesus at all.

The third temptation is similar to the first one. Here the devil seems to be saying to Jesus, before you begin your work as God’s Son and Messiah, you’d better make sure God will take care of you by clearing the way to protect you. Right. The way of the Son is the way of the cross. In his death we find life and freedom, forgiveness and health. We see this temptation echoed at Calvary when the mocking bystanders challenged Christ to come down from the cross to save himself. As St. Luke subtly reminds us, although beaten in this first round, the devil would continue to show up to tempt Jesus all the way to the cross. In defeating the devil by not succumbing to these temptations, our Lord shows us that while he is fully God, he is also fully human. Each one of us has been tempted likewise and each of us has failed. This realization reminds us that contrary to popular belief, Jesus didn’t just waltz through life with no afflictions because he was and is the Son of God. Instead, this reminds us that our Lord probably experienced afflictions with temptations to a degree none of us could ever really imagine.

And now we are ready to get to the point of how to keep a holy Lent. If you are expecting me to say that if you want to observe a holy Lent, do like Jesus did, you are going to be disappointed even more with this sermon than you already are because I am not going to tell you that. I have learned over the years that it really is quite unsporting of preachers to tell their peeps to do something that is impossible for them to do. The gospels don’t tell us the story of our Lord’s wilderness temptations so that we can copy him and find his success. While it is always good to copy our Lord, we will not be able to do what he did. If we were able to overcome temptations as he did, Christ would not have had to die for us as Paul reminds us in our epistle lesson. Jesus is our Savior precisely because he accomplished what we could never do, even on our best, holiest days, and if you don’t really believe that, you’ll never have a holy Lent, no matter what stuff you give up and other disciplines you establish. So we shouldn’t read this story with the delusional thinking that we can successfully imitate our Lord and resist every temptation that afflicts us the way he did. We can’t. We are too corrupt, too sick, too power hungry, too selfish, too hostile and alienated from God and each other for that to happen. In other words, we are too infected by the power of Sin to fix ourselves. So trying to observe a holy Lent by doing like Jesus did to overcome temptation is an exercise in futility. Don’t misunderstand. I am not suggesting we should shrug our shoulders, give up, and wallow in our slavery to Sin. Doing so would be celebrating our eternal damnation and that’s never a smart thing for us to do. Nor am I suggesting we shouldn’t try to imitate Jesus. We absolutely should, always relying on the power of the Spirit. Just don’t expect to achieve the results Christ did! Neither should you hear me telling you that because of all our hopeless brokenness you are beyond hope and such a wretch that you are beyond salvation and cannot become Christlike in your behavior. While we all are wretches, none of us is without hope because it has pleased God to rescue us by sending his Son to die on our behalf so that when God sees us, he sees a five star beloved child in a five star evaluation system, despite our sins and wickedness. He sees us this way because we are washed clean by the blood of the Lamb, who died for us to break our slavery to Sin, albeit incompletely in this mortal life. So let’s stop kidding ourselves about our ability to overcome the power of Sin. None of us can on our own and that’s the point.

The place to start in observing a holy Lent is on our knees at the foot of the cross, lamenting that we helped nail Christ to it but also, and equally important, to rejoice and give thanks to God for his great and undeserved love for us made known in Christ Jesus. When by God’s grace we realize that we are so hopelessly broken and beyond rescue except by the love and mercy of God the Father made known in the death and resurrection of God the Son and affirmed in our hearts and minds by God the Holy Spirit, we must have a heart bursting with joy, gratitude, and thanksgiving that God has rescued us forever from his right and terrible judgment on our sins and made us worthy to live with him forever starting right now. Our thanksgiving for this precious and profound gift will have at least a two-fold effect on us. First, it will lead to genuine sorrow on our part for responding to such great love so selfishly and corruptly. True thanksgiving will help motivate us to want to become more like Christ, not because we are told to or think we are supposed to, but because we want to become like our Savior who is the epitome of life. After all, if we are grateful to surgeons who by their skill have alleviated our illness, why would we not be grateful to God for rescuing us from his terrible judgment on our evil and eternal death? This, in turn, tends to help create in us generous hearts in the manner of our OT lesson, although generosity certainly isn’t restricted to just giving money. It involves giving ourselves in ways that reject the systems of the world that are controlled by the dark powers, i.e., by our rejecting power and domination as a means to achieve our ends, and by having a completely different set of ends in the first place. 

If you really want to observe a holy Lent (and beyond), start at the foot of the cross with a thankful heart for God the Father who loves you enough and has the power to overcome your unlovability. God rescued you in and through Christ, not because of your good deeds or because you deserve being rescued or any of that other baloney, but rather because it pleased God to do so as St. Paul pointed out in 1 Corinthians 1.18-25. Observing a holy Lent means realizing first and foremost that God is God and we are not, and to rejoice in the gift he freely offers to us. Put another way, it means learning to trust the goodness and mercy of God, not our own clever devices. May we all observe a holy Lent this year (and beyond), my beloved, because when we do, no matter how badly we observe it, we know we truly have Good News and are participating in it, now and for all eternity. We have this Good News, not because of who we are, but because who God is. 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 delivered on Ash Wednesday, 2021. As always, before you read the sermon, read the assigned texts below by clicking or tapping on their links. For those with ears to hear, listen and understand.

Lectionary texts: Joel 2.1-2, 12-17; Psalm 51; 2 Corinthians 5.20b-6.10; John 8.1-11.

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

Today is Ash Wednesday, the beginning of the 40 day season we call Lent. It is a time for self-examination, penitence, self-denial, study, and preparation for Easter. Our Commination Service earlier today reminded us that something is terribly amiss in God’s world and our lives, that without the love, mercy, goodness, justice, and power of God, we remain hopelessly alienated from God and each other because we are all slaves to the power of Sin, that outside and malevolent power that is too strong for any of us to resist on our own power. And if we are not reconciled to God, we are undone forever in ways too terrible for us to imagine. Lent therefore is a time for us to focus not so much on ourselves but on the power of God manifested most clearly in the cross of our Lord Jesus. So tonight I want us to look at the dynamic of forgiveness and reconciliation that God the Father makes available to all through the work of God the Son and God the Holy Spirit, the interaction of grace, guilt, and gratitude. Until we understand this dynamic and what we are up against, we can never hope to observe a holy Lent (and beyond).

If we ever hope to be reconciled to God our Father so that we can live with him forever, we must first acknowledge our utter helplessness to fix ourselves so that we are no longer alienated from God. This means that we must first have the wisdom and humility (signs of God’s grace) to acknowledge the fact that we are all slaves to the power of Sin, that malevolent power that was unleashed in God’s good world when our first human ancestors rebelled in paradise. Too often we speak of our sins and think of them as misdeeds or acts of wrongdoing, the root cause of our alienation to God. This diminishes the problem of Sin to an absurdly reductionist level. This thinking implies that we can get right with God by simply adjusting our behavior or changing our thinking on certain things or making better choices—the current darling of excuses for our feel good culture. This is a fatal mistake on our part, however, because it implies that we can fix ourselves and our problems, that if we repent of our bad choices or thinking or behavior, our sin problem with God goes away. But the whole of Scripture makes very clear that there is something vastly more sinister going on. There is something desperately wrong in the world and our lives and we know it in our bones if we have the courage to be honest with ourselves. We don’t have the ability to defeat the power of Sin in our lives and we delude ourselves if we think otherwise. Don’t believe me? How are you doing with your new year’s resolutions seven weeks on? Or how about those sins you confess? I bet you never do them again after you confess them, do you? Or how about your resolution to do better in your life? How is that working out for you? Try as we may, if we are honest with ourselves, we must acknowledge that our efforts matter very little when it comes to turning away from our sins. Why? Because we are up against a power that is far greater than us, a power that seeks our destruction and undoing as God’s image-bearers, a power that must ultimately lead to our permanent death. The sins that we focus on are not the root cause of our alienation from God. Rather, just as a fever is a symptom of a larger problem, not the problem itself, our sins reflect our slavery to the power of Sin, again defined as an outside and malevolent force that has enslaved us. We acknowledged this very starkly in our Commination Service this noon when we acknowledged that without the cross of Jesus Christ and his presence in our lives, we are condemned to utter and complete destruction forever. This should both humble us and scare the hell out of us—literally. Until we get our thinking straight on this, we will surely have and live out a half-hearted faith (at best) because we live under the delusion that we can fix ourselves so that we are pleasing to God and set ourselves up for a self-righteousness complex. When we think like this, we inevitably dismiss the cross of Jesus Christ and the life-saving gift God the Father offers us all in and through his Son. But when we understand that Sin is a power we cannot overcome on our power and there is nothing we can do or say that will change our status before God, we are ready to hear the Good News of Jesus Christ, crucified and raised from the dead.

This calls for us to be sober in our thinking about the power of Sin and see it as God sees it—a force that corrupts and destroys God’s precious image-bearers and good creation. This is why God hates Sin and this is why we can expect to receive God’s wrath on our sins: they are symptoms of the problem that God hates. God is first and foremost a God of love and if that is true, God must also be a God of justice. Why? Because God cannot and will not ultimately allow anything or anyone in his creation to continue corrupting it and his image-bearing creatures. God loves us too much to allow us to be victims of injustice and all the evil that flows from the power of Sin. Since we are powerless to break Sin’s grip on us, and since God is the only person who can free us from our slavery to it, God must intervene to destroy Sin and set things right, the very essence of justice. Otherwise, we would be doomed to be forever in Sin’s grip, catastrophically and permanently separated from God’s eternal love for us and excluded from God’s great heavenly banquet he has prepared for us so that we can enjoy him forever. It means that we would forever be trapped in our worst selves and that violence, greed, selfishness, cruelty, rapacity, suffering, hurt, brokenness, and alienation would continue to rule unchecked in our lives and God’s world. If God really is love, God cannot let this state of affairs go on forever, and when we understand this we can begin to see God’s justice as a positive thing. If we are going to follow God, we have to be sure that God loves us enough and has the requisite power to put all things to rights. To be sure, punishment is involved in this making-right process, but the overall thrust of God’s justice is restorative and healing because the heart of God is merciful, kind, generous, and loving. God does not create us to destroy us (What parent looks at his/her newborn baby for the first time with the intent of destroying it? The notion is absurd. If we fallen humans don’t think like this, why would God? Makes no sense!!); God created us so that we can enjoy him and rule his world faithfully and wisely on his behalf. 

This knowledge will also help us think clearly about the dynamic of repentance and forgiveness. As we have seen, because we are helpless to free ourselves from our slavery to the power of Sin, our repentance is not enough to reconcile us to God because we will continue to sin even with repentance. Repent or not, unless our slavery to Sin is broken, we are doomed to continue living in the power of Sin. This is the guilt part of the dynamic or repentance and forgiveness. We see this clearly in our OT and gospel lessons tonight. The prophet calls God’s people together to collectively repent of their sin of idolatry, the worship of false gods that inevitably leads to all kinds of sins that will provoke God’s anger and wrath (idolatry is a primary sin because sooner or later we become what we worship). If God’s people turn away from (or repent of) worshiping false gods and turn to the one true God, then there was hope that God might relent on executing his wrath on his sinful people. Here we are reminded that we dare not presume God’s mercy on us, that God is free to show us wrath or mercy quite independently of what we resolve to do (or not do). In other words, God’s mercy is not contingent on repentance. The prophet believes God will be merciful because God has revealed his character to his people: God is gracious and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love. If God relents on punishing his people for their idolatry, it will be because of who God is, not because God’s people have repented. 

Likewise in our gospel lesson. Notice that our Lord forgives the adulterous woman before calling her to repentance (go and sin no more). In this case God the Son showed mercy before the woman changed her behavior, reflecting the heart and character of his Father. This is the grace part of the grace, guilt, and gratitude dynamic of forgiveness and reconciliation between God and humans. Grace—God’s undeserved blessing, goodness, bounty, mercy, and forgiveness on us—precedes our awareness of sin, not vice-versa. This is because God’s character is eternal, preceding our slavery to Sin. In fact, without God tugging at our heart and mind, we would be unaware that we are alienated from God and stand under God’s just condemnation of our sin. Why? Because sin is a theological concept. People whose lives are devoid of God have no awareness that their behavior is offensive to God and that they are slaves to Sin’s power. Don’t believe me? Just check out Twitter or listen to the extreme rhetoric of self-righteousness that accompanies the sense of warped justice that invariably accompanies human thinking and behavior without the intervention of God. Simply put, if the Holy Spirit is at work in us he will make us aware of our awful unmediated state before God and our own sinfulness, our awareness of his Presence not withstanding. But here’s the thing. The moment we become aware of our sin captivity, we are already standing in God’s grace, ready to receive God’s healing love, mercy, and forgiveness because of God’s eternal nature! We see this dynamic expressed powerfully in the old favorite hymn, Amazing Grace. John Newton, who wrote the hymn, was a slave trader whose eyes were opened to the wickedness of his sin by God’s grace. He was a wretch who was saved, a man lost but now found, by the grace of God that preceded his evil deeds, a grace that called him to repentance. God’s grace always precedes our repentance because God and God’s character always precede us. God makes us aware of our slavery to Sin and the chasm it creates so that we will turn to him and let him heal and rescue us from our slavery.

And how did/does God do this? In the cross of Jesus Christ as St. Paul reminds us in our epistle lesson. Here is the essence of the Good News of Jesus Christ. God became human to suffer his own just and right punishment on our sin and wickedness himself so that God could spare us from suffering his wrath and eternal condemnation that would lead to our destruction. In the process the power of Sin is broken in us, only partially in this life but fully in the next (a topic for a different day and sermon). Our knowledge of the power of Sin and our slavery to it makes us realize that we don’t deserve this kindness and mercy. None of us do. But it is ours for the taking if we only have the humility and wisdom to believe it to be true, despite the fact that we cannot fully explain how God accomplished this all in the cross of Christ. But because we believe that Scripture is the word of God, we believe the promise to be true. God’s undeserved mercy, grace, love, and forgiveness lead us to a sense of profound and deep relief and gratitude because we realize we are no longer under God’s just condemnation and there is not a thing we did to deserve it. This is the gratitude part of the dynamic of God reconciling us to himself in Christ. We see it powerfully illustrated in our gospel lesson and we should take our cue from it. Imagine you are the woman who was dragged before Christ. You know your sin because you know God’s law; God has made himself known to you through it. And so you expect the worst, a death sentence for your sin of adultery. You are braced to feel the stones strike your body, slowly and painfully killing you (not unlike our sin does to us over the course of time). And then comes a remarkable surprise. Jesus pronounces you not guilty, despite that fact the he and you both know you are guilty of an awful sin. You have experienced God’s mercy and forgiveness, not because of who you are, but because of who God is. How would you feel? Stunned? Relieved? Grateful? All of the above and more, no doubt! He tells you to go and sin no more (he calls you to repent of your adultery), but his forgiveness is not contingent on that. Certainly the vast majority of us would be grateful for this reprieve and our gratitude would likely serve as ongoing motivation for leaving the adulterous life. She, like us, would certainly have to recall her sin and the great gift of forgiveness because life, well, gets in our way and distracts us so that we forget. That’s why we recall our sins and God’s mercy shown to us in Christ, not to make us feel bad (although that is really unavoidable on occasion), but to make us remember the love, mercy, grace, and faithfulness of God applied to our wickedness. When the woman remembered Christ’s intervention on her behalf, was she grateful? Did her gratitude help motivate her to repentance? We aren’t told, but our own experience suggests that it can and does, and this is what God desires from us. In this story, Christ does not tell us to suspend moral judgment by challenging those who brought the woman to him. Instead, he was exposing their hypocrisy and evil intent to trap him. In doing so, he was able to show mercy to the woman caught in adultery, calling her to repentance and giving her the motivation we all need to live our lives in imitation of our Lord and Savior, the essence of repentance and faithful living. 

This is what it means to observe a holy Lent and beyond, my beloved. We are called to reflect on the fruit of the dynamic of repentance and forgiveness in our lives. We are called to understand that to be reconciled to God means trusting in the power, mercy, love, and character of God revealed supremely in Jesus Christ and not our own perceived (and often delusional) abilities to make ourselves right with God. It means we see clearly the truth about the human condition and our standing before God without the intervention of Christ. We needn’t fear the truth because the truth always sets us free to love and serve the Lord, thanking him for his love and kindness and justice, and asking his mercy and forgiveness when we miss the mark as we attempt to imitate him in the power of the Spirit as we live out our lives together. May we all observe a holy Lent and sing God’s praises with grateful hearts forever and ever. 

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