Isaiah 55:1-9; Psalm 63:1-8; 1 Corinthians 10:1-13; Luke 13:1-9
Today’s reading from Luke takes up a question that was as important in the days of Jesus as it is now: Why do bad things happen to good people? And today’s reading will lead us in places where we’d rather not go. Today, we will have to face some difficult questions about ourselves and who we are. Otherwise, we run the risk of dying apart from God. We run the risk of being cut down by God. We run the risk of hell fire if we don’t face up to who we are today.
Jesus and the disciples were still walking around Galilee. Jesus was healing people and speaking of the kingdom of God to people. Several people asked Him a question: A group of men from Galilee had been killed in the Temple of God by the Roman Governor Pilate and his soldiers. And so the question was posed to Jesus and His group of Galilean disciples: Do you think these men were terrible sinners, for them to be struck down in the very act of offering a sacrifice?
And we have this idea also, that some people are worse sinners than other people, and that some sins are worse than others and that with a just God bad things will happen to bad people and good things will happen to good people and if bad things happen to good people, then that’s either because the event wasn’t really bad, or the good people weren’t really good.
For example, when a child is diagnosed with cancer and suffers before dying, we are confused. We understand someone who has smoked for fifty years dying of lung cancer, and someone who has been a hard-core drunk for thirty years dying of cirrhosis of the liver, or liver cancer. We understand when a woman vainly tans herself for years and years and ends up with skin cancer. We understand when a race car driver ends up dying in a car crash, we fully understand when a serial murderer dies in a gun battle with police, but we don’t understand when a three year old child suffers and dies with cancer, and so we say “she must have been very, very good and God wanted her with Him”.
And the other way, we think that perhaps the people who died in Hurricane Katrina died because they were from New Orleans and “everyone knows” that people from New Orleans are sinners, or we think that the people of Japan who died in the tsunami died because they were all unbelievers, Buddhists and Shinto, and we think that the people who die in the Syrian War are dying because they are Moslems and haven’t given their life to Christ, and the people who die in drive-by shootings or gang shootings are dying because they must have been involved in something bad, no matter what people tell us about them, because we want to believe in a just God who always treats people fairly.
And our movies and television and our stories reinforce this. The bad guys die at the end in a shoot-out or are killed by their own bombs; the good guys barely escape. The boys-in-blue arrive just in the nick of time to rescue the good detectives; the corrupt politicians admit their crimes in front of a hidden television camera. If the hero dies, it is always a sacrificial death, saving the world or some innocents from danger. And if an accident happens, it is because someone evil has set a trap for someone, profited by cutting corners, hurried to make money, or otherwise sinned and that was why the accident happened.
But Jesus says to those who asked about the Galileans who were killed at the Temple making their sacrifices, “No, they were no worse than anyone else.” And He brings up the collapse of the tower in Siloam – the 18 people that the tower fell upon were no more guilty than anyone else. Accidents happen. Isn’t it interesting – towers are places of safety where people run to in time of danger – yet towers can fall upon people, because, you see, they aren’t the ultimate place of safety. Trusting God is the ultimate and final place of safety.
And when Jesus answers the question about the Galileans and when He brings up the Tower of Siloam that collapsed, Jesus makes an extra point:”But unless you repent, you too will all perish. But unless you repent, you too will all perish.”
You see, we are mistaken when we look at the guilt of people, the sinfulness of people as though we could put sinfulness or goodness on a scale of 1 to 10. We think that some people are better than others, and so some nasty people rate a 2 on the goodness scale, while many people rate a 5 or 6 on the goodness scale, and still others, the nicest people, rate an 8 or 9 on the goodness scale. And perhaps that is just fine, perhaps we are correct that some people are less sinful than others.
But what Jesus is saying to us is that our scale is off, our idea of goodness is off, our entire concept of some people being better than others is a sin in itself, a way to pat ourselves on the back and lift our own impression of ourselves.
In fact, you are either guilty or not guilty. You are either seen by God as a criminal or not, as a rebel or a loyal subject. God does not do like we do and treat shoplifting as a petty crime, robbery as a felony, and serial murder as a terrible crime. To God, every sin is a capital crime, because every sin harms God’s creation and the people in it. You are either a rebel to God or not; You are either sinful or righteous. If you want to put a scale on it, perhaps some people are 2’s, some 6’s, some 9’s on the goodness scale, but a passing grade is nine thousand, five hundred and forty three!
As Isaiah wrote in Chapter 64: “All of us have become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous acts are like filthy rags; we all shrivel up like a leaf, and like the wind our sins sweep us away.” The real meaning of this passage is that our good deeds are like rags that have been used as toilet paper.
You see, if you gossip, you may never go to jail, but you have harmed someone as much or more than if you punched them in the nose. If you tear someone down with your mouth or a roll of your eyes, you hurt someone just as much or more than if you beat their car with a sledgehammer. And there are many cases where Facebook bullying, picking on people, and generally embarrassing people has led them to suicide, and thus the bullies, the jokesters, and those who embarrass others are just as guilty in God’s eyes of murder as those who used a shotgun with their own hands. And you never know when your supposedly harmless flirting with someone will tear up their marriage just as quickly as if you spent the night with them.
To God, all people are guilty of some sin, some crime against God or other people, and need to repent. You see, it doesn’t matter to God whether or not you got caught, because God saw your sin, God saw your crime, God always sees your actions. If God enforced our highway speed limit with fines, how many people would be bankrupt?
No, as Jesus said, we are all guilty and need to repent, to turn around in our ways, to ask for forgiveness and to start on a new path. But too often we look at a situation and say, “They received from God what was coming to them. That shows God’s character, that God is just,” we say.
But you see, the real miracle, the real demonstration of God’s character, the real show of how much patience God has is that this destruction hasn’t already happened to all of us, for we all deserve to be killed with our sacrifices, to have towers fall upon each of us, to be burned and tortured forever in a lake of fire because of the damage we have done to other people.
And we shouldn’t believe we have plenty of time to turn around, to repent, to get right with God. For look at what Jesus says next.
After this discussion about the Galileans and the Tower of Siloam, Jesus immediately launches into a parable. He tells of a fig tree which was planted in a special, protected place in good soil. The tree was planted in a vineyard, a walled area which is cultivated and protected, with soil that was especially good. In ancient times the fig tree represented Israel, today it may represent a church that is planted in a wonderful location, easy to see and easy to reach, a church that is planted among people ready to hear about God. Or the fig tree may represent a person who grew up in the church, surrounded by good people who taught the Gospel in Sunday school classes, by people who protected the person as he or she grew up in the shelter of the church. The fig tree may refer to you.
Fig trees normally bear fruit the second year, and then a lot of fruit the third year. The owner of the tree talks to his gardener and says, “I’ve come by this tree every year for three years and there is no fruit. Zip, nada, none. So why should we even waste the soil on the tree? Cut it down!”
The fig tree has plenty of leaves, it may even have blossoms on it, but there are no fruits – none. As far as the owner is concerned, it is a worthless tree and should be cut down. It isn’t even worth a few square feet of soil.
And so it is with many churches and many people. God puts us in a wonderful place in the world, protects us, allows us time to grow and to develop. And we show lots of activity – we put out many, many leaves, and we do many, many things. We have bake sales and we have clubs, we give money to various Christian organizations, we read our Bibles and we sing in our choirs, we show up every Sunday and we even begin to have blossoms – we develop a good, interesting service, we have in-depth Sunday schools, we have food pantries, we have Vacation Bible Schools with lots of people attending, and we personally learn scripture, we begin to understand God, we feel like we’re becoming more holy, we have blossoms. And so we have leaves – which is activity – and blossoms – we look good to the world and to ourselves.
But where is the fruit?
The fruit is found when all that energy and activity generated by the leaves turns into many, many blossoms, and then when those blossoms turn into ripe figs, new fruit for the owner. And what is fruit in this context?
Fruit is when we actually help a person understand Christ well enough that he or she decides to tell everyone they’ve come to Jesus, when people step forward and are baptized, when mature Christians step forward and declare that they are ready to become pastors, or missionaries, or go into the world in another way to lead people to Christ, perhaps even founding new churches, and when our existing food pantries and youth groups and Pioneer clubs begin bringing people to Christ instead of to food and fun and activities.
In the parable, the owner was ready to cut down the unproductive fig tree. But the gardener said, “Give me another year to dig around it, to spread some manure and fertilizer around it, to invest some time in it and we’ll see if it produces fruit.”
Jesus was talking directly about Jerusalem when He told this parable. You’ll remember that Jesus had told the people that others would have their blood mingled with their sacrifices at the Temple unless they repented. Jesus told the people that others would be killed by falling towers unless they repented. And Jesus was talking about Jerusalem, which had never been as fruitful as God had willed over the centuries that it had been occupied by the Jewish nation.
In 70 AD, about 35 to 40 years after Jesus told this parable, after Jesus, the man Mary imagined to be the gardener outside His tomb a few weeks later, after Jesus the gardener fertilized Jerusalem with His own blood, God gave up on Jerusalem and had it cut down. The Roman legions under Titus destroyed the city and the Temple, killing thousands of Jews in the Temple courtyards and destroying the Temple so that the only remaining part of the Temple still standing is the Western Wall which you will sometimes see on television. The rest of the town was torn down, towers were pulled down, burying people inside, walls were toppled, killing people underneath, and a few decades later, the remaining Jews were ordered out of Jerusalem by the Romans, never to return until the 20th century. For centuries, Jerusalem lay without Jews. The fig tree that was Israel had been cut down.
You have witnessed churches that have failed to be fruitful. Churches that were filled with activity 30, 40, 50 years ago are being closed or being sold today. New, independent churches are being planted and are growing with fruit where the old, unfruitful churches were cut down.
In this charge, our churches have had plenty of leaves, some blossoms, even some fruit, but not nearly as much as our owner wants. Last year Quiet Dell had a total of 10 professions of faith or baptisms, and Monroe Chapel had 2 baptisms. We’re running about 10% - let’s see if we can increase our fruit to 20% this year.
How about you personally? Have you ever led an adult to the waters of baptism, have you ever led someone to follow Jesus Christ? Have you even led a child to this point? I see lots of leaves, I even see some blossoms, but where is your personal fruit?
Tim Keller, who pastors a mega-church in New York City, points out that the real issue for many people is who or what they love most in the world. If you love money, you will have money. If you love kids, you will have kids. If you love art, you will have art. If you love ceramic butterflies, you will have ceramic butterflies. If you love neatness, you will have neatness, and if you love dogs, you will have dogs. But if you love God, you will have God and if you love your neighbor, you will have neighbors. What do you love?
When David was in the desert, he wrote this in our Psalm:
You, God, are my God,
earnestly I seek you;
I thirst for you,
my whole being longs for you,
in a dry and parched land
where there is no water.
Do you thirst for God? Like a man lost in the desert searching for water, only water, ignoring gold and silver and everything else, looking only for life-giving water, do you seek God for yourself and others?
Or are you devoted to everything else in your life, sharing your love of everything else with your love for God, spending your time worrying about your career, your home, your politics, your entertainment?
It is time to face this question and look at ourselves in the mirror. Do you thirst for God – or are you devoted to everything else in your life?
If you are still struggling with loving God, then leading people to Christ is a tough decision, for you really don’t know what you love. And so you need to consider whether or not you love God. Really.
The key to bearing fruit for God, the key to personally leading people to Christ is when you step back and realize that God really loves all these people around you and has asked each of us to lead these people to Christ. If you are devoted to God, then leading these people to understand God is easy, because you will do whatever God asks.
But when you realize that all these people around you in your life whom you love – and many whom you wish you could love if it wasn’t for their issues – when you realize that all these people would be so very much helped – and you would be so very much helped – if you could explain to them how much God and Christ loves them, if you could help them see that they are much stronger and better than they think they are, and if you could bring them to commit their lives also to Christ, it is then that leading people to Christ becomes easy because you will have made the decision to follow Christ no matter what.
Of course, this assumes that you have truly committed your life to following Christ first. It assumes that you love Christ more than anything else in your world. And honestly, most people in most churches love other things more than Christ and want to keep Him “in balance” in their lives. But being able to do this is a myth.
Jesus doesn’t ask you to balance Him in your lives. He asks for your entire life. Jesus doesn’t want you to trade off your kid’s soccer games with your work for Him – He wants you to spend the time at the soccer game talking about Him. Jesus doesn’t want you to make a decision between working for your employer and working for Him – He expects you to be the shining light at your office, the most pleasant, most wonderful representative of Christ you can be, and to lead people at your office to Him. Jesus doesn’t expect you to allow your children to decide what religion they will follow – Jesus expects that you will teach them very clearly about Him and His love for them.
But leading people to Christ and having fruit for Christ also assumes you love other people. Not everyone does. Christians are commanded to love all people. And that is SOOOO difficult! Perhaps you might consider if this is why you don’t have fruit – because you really don’t like more than a handful of people, because you actually can’t stand most people, because you only care about your family and if the truth were to be told, you barely tolerate some of them. Is this why you don’t have fruit? You’re going to Heaven and the devil take the rest?
If so, admit it to God and ask for forgiveness, ask Jesus for help loving other people, begin to pray for the people you don’t like as well as the people you love and see what happens in your life.
And so why should we love Christ?
Because without Jesus to dig around us and fertilize us, we would have been cut down a long time ago to make room for someone else who is more fruitful than us. Without Jesus to garden us, to tend to us, to love us as the gardener loved the fig tree, yes, even to dump manure on us, the owner would have simply lost patience with us and let us fall, cut down to be burnt to a crisp in the spiritual fire pit. Without Jesus who died instead of us, we would be dead, gone, and never able to rise up again, separated from the love of God forever.
But with Jesus and the tremendous love He has shown you and me, we have hope, we often have joy, we are here today with friends in this world who care for us – many of whom are sitting near us today. And Jesus made this all possible for us.
During Lent, on Wednesday evenings at 7 pm at Monroe Chapel I’m going over in detail how to lead someone to Jesus. I’ll also be leading a group in this right here in Quiet Dell on Sunday evenings at 6 pm.
Do bad things happen to good people? Jesus’ answer was chilling – all people are guilty, and we should be thankful that God is patient and hasn’t destroyed us all already for our sins, our crimes.
Consider: How long ago did the owner come to your particular fig tree and threaten to cut you down? Was it earlier today? Or was it a year ago? Do you have plenty of time to bear fruit? Or is your time almost up?
This past week, there was an episode you may have heard about in Kalamazoo, Michigan, a town about twice the size of Clarksburg west of Detroit. A man suddenly began driving around town, shooting random people. Over a half-dozen people died. Consider: Were they all worse sinners than average? The question that was asked about the Galileans killed by Pilate still remains today. Apparently, the shooter did not know any of the victims and wasn’t trying to make any political point. The shooter was just random. Random people were shot – and died.
How much longer do you have, do I have? We don’t know. How much longer until our owner cuts us down? We don’t know.
Or shall we produce fruit, knowing that no matter how long we have we are doing God’s will? Shall we have the wonderful joy of leading another person into eternal joy? Shall we have the joy of knowing that we have done at least one thing in our life which makes an eternal difference?
Monday, February 29, 2016
Monday, February 22, 2016
Promises, Promises - God's Promises, Prophets, and Our Holiness
Genesis 15:1-18; Psalm 27; Philippians 3:17-4:1; Luke 13:31-35
We are now in the time of Lent, that 40 day period of preparation for Easter. And our study this year is focused upon preparing ourselves for the great banquet of the Lamb, the end of time when all the church, those who are living and those who have gone to rest already, will joyously celebrate with Christ His return as He promised.
In our gospel reading this week, Jesus is beginning to slowly make His way from the area around Galilee, the northern part of the country, down toward the border between Galilee and Samaria. He will then go down the Jordan River Valley to Jericho, and then climb the great steep road that leads to Bethany and Jerusalem in time to enter Jerusalem a week before the Passover, the time when the Lamb will be sacrificed in Jerusalem, the time when Jesus will be sacrificed in Jerusalem, the time when all the sins of all people will be cleared because Jesus, the divine Son of God, God Himself walking upon this earth, will be sacrificed and will pay the price for my sins and your sins.
But this is weeks in the future. Today, Jesus is walking in Galilee, a land which is ruled by King Herod, a lackey of the Romans.
This is not Herod the Great, the man who rebuilt the Temple some 35 years before, the man who talked with the Magi from the East, the man who sent soldiers to kill the newborn Christ in Bethlehem. No, this is his second son, Herod Antipas, who married his brother’s widow, who was also his niece. John the Baptist condemned this marriage as incestuous, and so Herod Antipas had John arrested and thrown into prison. A few months later, Herod Antipas was the man who had John the Baptist beheaded because Herod’s stepdaughter danced for him and guests and he made a rash promise to do anything she asked. Her mother told her to ask for the head of John the Baptist, the daughter did, and Antipas then had to deliver upon his promise. Be careful of the promises you make!
A group of Pharisees came to Jesus. The Pharisees were strict students of the Law of Moses and most likely did not think too kindly of Herod Antipas, for they would have come to the same conclusion as John had concerning Antipas’ marriage to his niece. And so they decided to try to get in good with the young rabbi from Nazareth, John’s cousin Jesus, in hopes that Jesus would publicly condemn Herod, causing more embarrassment for Herod and removing Jesus, who often said very uncomfortable things to Pharisees about the way they put barriers between people and God, barriers such as how people should dress, or act.
The Pharisees came to Jesus and warned him that Herod wanted to kill Jesus. They told Jesus that He should leave Herod’s territory, Galilee, and go somewhere else. Where? The obvious choice was Judea, the land around Jerusalem which was not ruled by Herod, but was under the control of the Sanhedrin, the Council of Jewish elders, and the High Priest. Of course, the Sadducees, which was the party of the high priest, were not too happy with Jesus either, because Jesus had also condemned them for too much focus upon the Temple building and not enough focus upon God.
32 [Jesus replied to the Pharisees], “Go tell that fox, ‘I will keep on driving out demons and healing people today and tomorrow, and on the third day I will reach my goal.’ 33 In any case, I must press on today and tomorrow and the next day—for surely no prophet can die outside Jerusalem!
Jesus calls Herod Antipas a “fox”. And based upon the Greek fables of Aesop, most Americans think that Jesus was calling Herod a smart, crafty fellow. But the understanding of a fox’s character was different in Palestine. To the Jewish mind of the first century, foxes had much the same feel as the way we might think of an annoying Chihuahua – a little, loud yap-yap that barks much more than it bites, a coward. There was a proverb of the time, “Meet each man with friendly greeting; be the tail among lions rather than the head among foxes" (Matteya ben Heresh,) Rather calling Herod “crafty”, Jesus was terribly insulting Herod and belittling him when he called him a fox. "Tell Herod, that little Chihuahua..."
Jesus continued:
‘I will keep on driving out demons and healing people today and tomorrow, and on the third day I will reach my goal.’ 33 In any case, I must press on today and tomorrow and the next day—for surely no prophet can die outside Jerusalem!
You will notice that Jesus twice uses the figure “today and tomorrow and the third day (or the next day)." Twice Jesus refers to a three-day time span. Let me ask you something – Since today is Sunday, what will you be doing on Tuesday? Can you predict what the world will be like on Wednesday?
Jesus is making the case that for the near future, Jesus will continue to work miracles, doing God’s work of driving out demons and healing people. In a sense, Jesus is dividing the future into three time periods:
Today – what are Jesus’ plans for today? What are your plans for today?
Tomorrow – think of tomorrow as the near future. What are you planning for the near future?
The third day – The far future. What about the far future?
If we plan accordingly, you might have a plan somewhat like this: Today I attend Sunday school. Tomorrow: I am planning on taking the Basic Lay Servant class on April 2. After that, I will begin leading in the church in some manner.
Or perhaps you might have this plan: Today, I will continue working at my job and learning all I can about Jesus while my children are pre-school. Tomorrow, when the kids go to school, I will get more involved in the church, get some formal training, and pay off my debts. On the third day, when my children become teenagers, I will become a missionary.
Of course, the three day time period of Jesus also refers to the upcoming three days in the tomb. On Friday, Jesus was placed in the tomb, Saturday was the second day, and on Sunday he was resurrected, reaching His goal.
Did you notice – Jesus says that a prophet cannot die outside of Jerusalem. A prophet isn’t necessarily one who speaks of the future, although this may happen. A prophet is a man or woman who speaks on behalf of God. Prophets died in Jerusalem - partially due to historical precedent – the prophets tended to be killed in Jerusalem because they usually were upsetting the king and this was what led to the deaths. But there was another reason for Jesus’ comment. At this time, a prophet could be tried only by the Sanhedrin to determine if he was a true prophet or a false prophet. False prophets were to be executed. And furthermore, even the ability to execute had been taken from the Sanhedrin by the Romans, who reserved to themselves the death penalty – a man could only be executed if the Roman governor sentenced him to death. And since the Roman governor sat in Jerusalem, a prophet could not be sentenced to die except in Jerusalem.
Some people who know their Bible will notice that Jesus was actually executed just outside the walls of Jerusalem. But then again, that death didn’t last very long, did it? For Jesus came back to life on the third day.
Our reading finishes with Jesus speaking as God about Jerusalem. It is the cry of a devoted father to his children who continue to turn their backs on Him.
34 “Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those sent to you, how often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, and you were not willing. 35 Look, your house is left to you desolate. I tell you, you will not see me again until you say, ‘Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.’”
God and Jesus both made promises to us. God made a promise to Abram over fifteen hundred years before. God promised Abram that old, childless Abram would have children and grandchildren. "5 He took him outside and said, “Look up at the sky and count the stars—if indeed you can count them.” Then he said to him, “So shall your offspring be.”
And God kept that promise. When the descendants of Abram – Abraham – came out of the Egyptian captivity, there were 600,000 of them who left that day, the day after the first Passover. God keeps His promises - and so does God's Son.
Jesus makes a promise to Jerusalem – Jerusalem will not see Him until the city says, “Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.”
A few months later on the Sunday before Passover, Jesus entered Jerusalem to the words, “Hosanna. Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord. Hosanna!”
Are we like Jerusalem? I’m not asking whether or not the United States is like Jerusalem, but I’m asking whether each one of us is like Jerusalem, who kill the reputation of those who speak on behalf of God and destroy those people who God sends to us?
If someone comes to you and tells you of your bad habits, what is your reaction? Do you listen or do you lash out in anger?
If someone is sent by God to teach you, do you listen or do you walk away?
Do you read the words of the prophets of old, the Word of God which is written in the Bible? Do you really deeply listen and respond to the Word of God, or do you ignore these words, effectively putting the Bible on the bottom of a stack, killing and burying it so you don’t have to hear the words in your mind?
Our Psalm said: .
We are now in the time of Lent, that 40 day period of preparation for Easter. And our study this year is focused upon preparing ourselves for the great banquet of the Lamb, the end of time when all the church, those who are living and those who have gone to rest already, will joyously celebrate with Christ His return as He promised.
In our gospel reading this week, Jesus is beginning to slowly make His way from the area around Galilee, the northern part of the country, down toward the border between Galilee and Samaria. He will then go down the Jordan River Valley to Jericho, and then climb the great steep road that leads to Bethany and Jerusalem in time to enter Jerusalem a week before the Passover, the time when the Lamb will be sacrificed in Jerusalem, the time when Jesus will be sacrificed in Jerusalem, the time when all the sins of all people will be cleared because Jesus, the divine Son of God, God Himself walking upon this earth, will be sacrificed and will pay the price for my sins and your sins.
But this is weeks in the future. Today, Jesus is walking in Galilee, a land which is ruled by King Herod, a lackey of the Romans.
This is not Herod the Great, the man who rebuilt the Temple some 35 years before, the man who talked with the Magi from the East, the man who sent soldiers to kill the newborn Christ in Bethlehem. No, this is his second son, Herod Antipas, who married his brother’s widow, who was also his niece. John the Baptist condemned this marriage as incestuous, and so Herod Antipas had John arrested and thrown into prison. A few months later, Herod Antipas was the man who had John the Baptist beheaded because Herod’s stepdaughter danced for him and guests and he made a rash promise to do anything she asked. Her mother told her to ask for the head of John the Baptist, the daughter did, and Antipas then had to deliver upon his promise. Be careful of the promises you make!
A group of Pharisees came to Jesus. The Pharisees were strict students of the Law of Moses and most likely did not think too kindly of Herod Antipas, for they would have come to the same conclusion as John had concerning Antipas’ marriage to his niece. And so they decided to try to get in good with the young rabbi from Nazareth, John’s cousin Jesus, in hopes that Jesus would publicly condemn Herod, causing more embarrassment for Herod and removing Jesus, who often said very uncomfortable things to Pharisees about the way they put barriers between people and God, barriers such as how people should dress, or act.
The Pharisees came to Jesus and warned him that Herod wanted to kill Jesus. They told Jesus that He should leave Herod’s territory, Galilee, and go somewhere else. Where? The obvious choice was Judea, the land around Jerusalem which was not ruled by Herod, but was under the control of the Sanhedrin, the Council of Jewish elders, and the High Priest. Of course, the Sadducees, which was the party of the high priest, were not too happy with Jesus either, because Jesus had also condemned them for too much focus upon the Temple building and not enough focus upon God.
32 [Jesus replied to the Pharisees], “Go tell that fox, ‘I will keep on driving out demons and healing people today and tomorrow, and on the third day I will reach my goal.’ 33 In any case, I must press on today and tomorrow and the next day—for surely no prophet can die outside Jerusalem!
Jesus calls Herod Antipas a “fox”. And based upon the Greek fables of Aesop, most Americans think that Jesus was calling Herod a smart, crafty fellow. But the understanding of a fox’s character was different in Palestine. To the Jewish mind of the first century, foxes had much the same feel as the way we might think of an annoying Chihuahua – a little, loud yap-yap that barks much more than it bites, a coward. There was a proverb of the time, “Meet each man with friendly greeting; be the tail among lions rather than the head among foxes" (Matteya ben Heresh,) Rather calling Herod “crafty”, Jesus was terribly insulting Herod and belittling him when he called him a fox. "Tell Herod, that little Chihuahua..."
Jesus continued:
‘I will keep on driving out demons and healing people today and tomorrow, and on the third day I will reach my goal.’ 33 In any case, I must press on today and tomorrow and the next day—for surely no prophet can die outside Jerusalem!
You will notice that Jesus twice uses the figure “today and tomorrow and the third day (or the next day)." Twice Jesus refers to a three-day time span. Let me ask you something – Since today is Sunday, what will you be doing on Tuesday? Can you predict what the world will be like on Wednesday?
Jesus is making the case that for the near future, Jesus will continue to work miracles, doing God’s work of driving out demons and healing people. In a sense, Jesus is dividing the future into three time periods:
Today – what are Jesus’ plans for today? What are your plans for today?
Tomorrow – think of tomorrow as the near future. What are you planning for the near future?
The third day – The far future. What about the far future?
If we plan accordingly, you might have a plan somewhat like this: Today I attend Sunday school. Tomorrow: I am planning on taking the Basic Lay Servant class on April 2. After that, I will begin leading in the church in some manner.
Or perhaps you might have this plan: Today, I will continue working at my job and learning all I can about Jesus while my children are pre-school. Tomorrow, when the kids go to school, I will get more involved in the church, get some formal training, and pay off my debts. On the third day, when my children become teenagers, I will become a missionary.
Of course, the three day time period of Jesus also refers to the upcoming three days in the tomb. On Friday, Jesus was placed in the tomb, Saturday was the second day, and on Sunday he was resurrected, reaching His goal.
Did you notice – Jesus says that a prophet cannot die outside of Jerusalem. A prophet isn’t necessarily one who speaks of the future, although this may happen. A prophet is a man or woman who speaks on behalf of God. Prophets died in Jerusalem - partially due to historical precedent – the prophets tended to be killed in Jerusalem because they usually were upsetting the king and this was what led to the deaths. But there was another reason for Jesus’ comment. At this time, a prophet could be tried only by the Sanhedrin to determine if he was a true prophet or a false prophet. False prophets were to be executed. And furthermore, even the ability to execute had been taken from the Sanhedrin by the Romans, who reserved to themselves the death penalty – a man could only be executed if the Roman governor sentenced him to death. And since the Roman governor sat in Jerusalem, a prophet could not be sentenced to die except in Jerusalem.
Some people who know their Bible will notice that Jesus was actually executed just outside the walls of Jerusalem. But then again, that death didn’t last very long, did it? For Jesus came back to life on the third day.
Our reading finishes with Jesus speaking as God about Jerusalem. It is the cry of a devoted father to his children who continue to turn their backs on Him.
34 “Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those sent to you, how often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, and you were not willing. 35 Look, your house is left to you desolate. I tell you, you will not see me again until you say, ‘Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.’”
God and Jesus both made promises to us. God made a promise to Abram over fifteen hundred years before. God promised Abram that old, childless Abram would have children and grandchildren. "5 He took him outside and said, “Look up at the sky and count the stars—if indeed you can count them.” Then he said to him, “So shall your offspring be.”
And God kept that promise. When the descendants of Abram – Abraham – came out of the Egyptian captivity, there were 600,000 of them who left that day, the day after the first Passover. God keeps His promises - and so does God's Son.
Jesus makes a promise to Jerusalem – Jerusalem will not see Him until the city says, “Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.”
A few months later on the Sunday before Passover, Jesus entered Jerusalem to the words, “Hosanna. Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord. Hosanna!”
Are we like Jerusalem? I’m not asking whether or not the United States is like Jerusalem, but I’m asking whether each one of us is like Jerusalem, who kill the reputation of those who speak on behalf of God and destroy those people who God sends to us?
If someone comes to you and tells you of your bad habits, what is your reaction? Do you listen or do you lash out in anger?
If someone is sent by God to teach you, do you listen or do you walk away?
Do you read the words of the prophets of old, the Word of God which is written in the Bible? Do you really deeply listen and respond to the Word of God, or do you ignore these words, effectively putting the Bible on the bottom of a stack, killing and burying it so you don’t have to hear the words in your mind?
Our Psalm said: .
1 The Lord is my light and my salvation—
whom shall I fear?
The Lord is the stronghold of my life—
of whom shall I be afraid?
Do you treat the Lord and his promises as your light and your salvation, as your stronghold – or do you treat Him and His words as just a parachute under your seat, as I once heard Ken Hamm ask? Let me explain:
Imagine that you get on a charter airplane for a trip to Tahiti. As you get on the plane, you are told that there is a parachute under your seat in case the plane were to go down early and how to use that parachute. And so, you probably sit there, daydreaming about your beach side hotel you plan to stay at. And you leave the parachute under your seat, ignoring it, but if there is a rough spot in the flight, you remember that that parachute is under the seat, and you relax and smile. Is this how you treat Jesus, as a parachute under your seat for possible future emergencies?
But instead, imagine that as soon as you get into the air, the pilot tells you that there is a problem and that the plane will crash when he tries to land, but that the crash will probably be in a few hours and that there is a parachute under your seat which you will use and the flight attendants will explain how to use. I suspect that you would get that parachute out from under your seat, put it on the seat beside you, read the directions over every 10 minutes, ask the flight attendants several pointed questions about the operation, test the straps, and generally act like you are planning to use that parachute to save your life – which it will. I expect that over the next few hours you would study that parachute closely, become an expert on that parachute, learning everything you possibly can about it, what it can do and what it can’t do, knowing exactly what you need to do for this to work, because you knew that you would be using that parachute very soon. When you have to jump, you want to know it works.
Jesus said, “I am the way, the Truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” Another promise. If you plan to have eternal life, there is only one way – Jesus Christ. He is the only parachute we have and He is the only door into Heaven. If you want to survive the plane crash that is life, you will need to understand Jesus, what He asks of you, and what He will do for you.
Jesus told his disciples to Go to all people, baptizing them and teaching them all that He has commanded. And He would be with them to the end of the age. Another promise He made. But a conditional promise. We do these things and He is with us. It is conditional.
If the disciples have been commanded to baptize people and teaching them Jesus’ commands, these must be important. Have you been baptized? Do you know and follow all the commands of Jesus? Why do you suppose those commands are there? Are they optional? Why do you think the Bible includes all of these commands we see about how to live a holy life if they are optional?
The answer: They are important. Jesus wants followers, not people who keep a parachute under their seat. You see, God’s plan was to change the entire world, not just to give you eternal life. And we have been invited to join in that mission, to change the world, to help recreate a world which is filled with followers of Christ. Imagine, God has invited you and me to change the world – we provide the physical bodies, God provides the power. That’s what it means to be a follower of Christ! It means God works through us and changes things!
You know, I worked at some interesting jobs and I worked at some jobs that were plain dull. But nothing beats the Boss I’m working for today, because God gives me the freedom to work on really important problems, with great people, and God backs me up with all the resources I need – as long as I’m doing what God wants done. And God is always there in the form of the Holy Spirit to give me advice when I need it. What better Boss could you ever have? What better job could you have?
And God will train you to be holy through your work for God. Because making the world holy is part of the work – perhaps the most important part of the work. And making the world holy only happens when people follow Jesus and begin to act holy like He did.
Ask yourself this question: Would you rather live out your old age and have your children and grandchildren live in a world that was run by ISIS? Or would you rather have a world that is filled with people devoted to following Jesus, to imitating Jesus, to loving their neighbors, to lifting each other up?
Who do you want working in your nursing home? People who are working there because it is a job – or people who are there because they have a Holy Spirit-given calling for old people, because when they were young, they learned about God and Jesus and they learned to read the Word of God and listen to the Holy Spirit because they saw your holiness and decided that they wanted that peace and joy and beautiful niceness that radiated from you?
“But Pastor, becoming holy is hard work and I’m not holy.”
Of course it is hard work. Of course you're not holy. So what? It is what Christ asks of us.
whom shall I fear?
The Lord is the stronghold of my life—
of whom shall I be afraid?
Do you treat the Lord and his promises as your light and your salvation, as your stronghold – or do you treat Him and His words as just a parachute under your seat, as I once heard Ken Hamm ask? Let me explain:
Imagine that you get on a charter airplane for a trip to Tahiti. As you get on the plane, you are told that there is a parachute under your seat in case the plane were to go down early and how to use that parachute. And so, you probably sit there, daydreaming about your beach side hotel you plan to stay at. And you leave the parachute under your seat, ignoring it, but if there is a rough spot in the flight, you remember that that parachute is under the seat, and you relax and smile. Is this how you treat Jesus, as a parachute under your seat for possible future emergencies?
But instead, imagine that as soon as you get into the air, the pilot tells you that there is a problem and that the plane will crash when he tries to land, but that the crash will probably be in a few hours and that there is a parachute under your seat which you will use and the flight attendants will explain how to use. I suspect that you would get that parachute out from under your seat, put it on the seat beside you, read the directions over every 10 minutes, ask the flight attendants several pointed questions about the operation, test the straps, and generally act like you are planning to use that parachute to save your life – which it will. I expect that over the next few hours you would study that parachute closely, become an expert on that parachute, learning everything you possibly can about it, what it can do and what it can’t do, knowing exactly what you need to do for this to work, because you knew that you would be using that parachute very soon. When you have to jump, you want to know it works.
Jesus said, “I am the way, the Truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” Another promise. If you plan to have eternal life, there is only one way – Jesus Christ. He is the only parachute we have and He is the only door into Heaven. If you want to survive the plane crash that is life, you will need to understand Jesus, what He asks of you, and what He will do for you.
Jesus told his disciples to Go to all people, baptizing them and teaching them all that He has commanded. And He would be with them to the end of the age. Another promise He made. But a conditional promise. We do these things and He is with us. It is conditional.
If the disciples have been commanded to baptize people and teaching them Jesus’ commands, these must be important. Have you been baptized? Do you know and follow all the commands of Jesus? Why do you suppose those commands are there? Are they optional? Why do you think the Bible includes all of these commands we see about how to live a holy life if they are optional?
The answer: They are important. Jesus wants followers, not people who keep a parachute under their seat. You see, God’s plan was to change the entire world, not just to give you eternal life. And we have been invited to join in that mission, to change the world, to help recreate a world which is filled with followers of Christ. Imagine, God has invited you and me to change the world – we provide the physical bodies, God provides the power. That’s what it means to be a follower of Christ! It means God works through us and changes things!
You know, I worked at some interesting jobs and I worked at some jobs that were plain dull. But nothing beats the Boss I’m working for today, because God gives me the freedom to work on really important problems, with great people, and God backs me up with all the resources I need – as long as I’m doing what God wants done. And God is always there in the form of the Holy Spirit to give me advice when I need it. What better Boss could you ever have? What better job could you have?
And God will train you to be holy through your work for God. Because making the world holy is part of the work – perhaps the most important part of the work. And making the world holy only happens when people follow Jesus and begin to act holy like He did.
Ask yourself this question: Would you rather live out your old age and have your children and grandchildren live in a world that was run by ISIS? Or would you rather have a world that is filled with people devoted to following Jesus, to imitating Jesus, to loving their neighbors, to lifting each other up?
Who do you want working in your nursing home? People who are working there because it is a job – or people who are there because they have a Holy Spirit-given calling for old people, because when they were young, they learned about God and Jesus and they learned to read the Word of God and listen to the Holy Spirit because they saw your holiness and decided that they wanted that peace and joy and beautiful niceness that radiated from you?
“But Pastor, becoming holy is hard work and I’m not holy.”
Of course it is hard work. Of course you're not holy. So what? It is what Christ asks of us.
The hardest part about becoming holy is recognizing that our personal holiness is both necessary and that we cannot become holy without bending the knee to Jesus. Getting down on your knees is the hardest work in the world – much harder than getting up off your knees.
Is your language coarse? Pray to Jesus to help you control those words.
Are you brutally honest with people? Pray to Jesus to give you words that are more effective, still honest, and which don’t hurt people.
Do you gossip or say negative things about people behind their backs? Pray that Jesus will make you aware of when you start down that path and that He will help you shut up!
Do you lose your temper easily? Pray that Jesus will show you how to pity those you are angry at.
Do you have an unhealthy habit? Ask Jesus to take away your need for that drug, that food, that behavior.
Jesus will grant these prayers – if you truly desire them – for Jesus has promised to help us to live lives that are not only eternal, but abundant, full of blessings, and it is when we follow Christ and begin to live a holy life that we become blessed. Following Jesus leads to holiness. Holiness leads to an abundant life. And it is only because He loves us so much – that He loved us so much he died for us – it is only because of this that we can become holy.
This is how we become holy- by asking Christ for help. And that is how we follow the commands of Jesus – by asking Christ for help. And that is how we one day find ourselves living in a world filled with people who “stand firm in the Lord”. This is how we find that God turns us from people who hear about Jesus to people who volunteer for Jesus’ work and then into people who God trusts to carry on God’s work part-time and then full-time and then one day we find that God is letting us work on God’s mission full-time and ow we are doing the most joyful, most fulfilling, happiest work in the world even though we were once students and homemakers and workers and farmers!
And now about you. Are you ready to let go, believe the promises of God and Jesus that you will be given an abundant life, and let Jesus lead you to holiness so you can help change the world? Are you ready to become a true follower instead of a person with a parachute? Are you ready for an abundant life?
Is your language coarse? Pray to Jesus to help you control those words.
Are you brutally honest with people? Pray to Jesus to give you words that are more effective, still honest, and which don’t hurt people.
Do you gossip or say negative things about people behind their backs? Pray that Jesus will make you aware of when you start down that path and that He will help you shut up!
Do you lose your temper easily? Pray that Jesus will show you how to pity those you are angry at.
Do you have an unhealthy habit? Ask Jesus to take away your need for that drug, that food, that behavior.
Jesus will grant these prayers – if you truly desire them – for Jesus has promised to help us to live lives that are not only eternal, but abundant, full of blessings, and it is when we follow Christ and begin to live a holy life that we become blessed. Following Jesus leads to holiness. Holiness leads to an abundant life. And it is only because He loves us so much – that He loved us so much he died for us – it is only because of this that we can become holy.
This is how we become holy- by asking Christ for help. And that is how we follow the commands of Jesus – by asking Christ for help. And that is how we one day find ourselves living in a world filled with people who “stand firm in the Lord”. This is how we find that God turns us from people who hear about Jesus to people who volunteer for Jesus’ work and then into people who God trusts to carry on God’s work part-time and then full-time and then one day we find that God is letting us work on God’s mission full-time and ow we are doing the most joyful, most fulfilling, happiest work in the world even though we were once students and homemakers and workers and farmers!
And now about you. Are you ready to let go, believe the promises of God and Jesus that you will be given an abundant life, and let Jesus lead you to holiness so you can help change the world? Are you ready to become a true follower instead of a person with a parachute? Are you ready for an abundant life?
Monday, February 15, 2016
No Shame - Thoughts on Personal Holiness and Salvation
Deuteronomy 26:1-11; Psalm 91:1-2, 9-16; Romans 10:8-13; Luke 4:1-13
And so we begin the time of Lent, the time of preparation for Easter, the joyous celebration of Christ’s resurrection – which is the foretaste, the appetizer for the great harvest of souls at the end of time, when all the people who have decided to trust in the power of God will join together in the great banquet and feast of the bridegroom, who is Jesus Christ. It will be a day of great celebration, a day of music and feasting and praise and worship when we arrive alive again to speak with one another, a chance to see those friends and family who have died before us in the Lord, and to see how our descendants have grown up over the years and decades. And we will have the opportunity to meet our Savior face-to-face. What a day of Rejoicing that will be, when we all see Jesus and shout the victory!
But meanwhile, until that time arrives, we must travel through this life, a time of preparation for the banquet to come, a time when we must spiritually prepare ourselves in the same way that we would prepare ourselves for a fancy banquet or dinner with important guests.
Now, I know that most of you have been married for years, and some of you are not married, but I’d like you to go back in time, go back to a time when you were single and dating a special person, a person you have fallen in love with, a person you want to marry very badly.
Now imagine, for instance, that you have been asked by your boyfriend or girlfriend to come to dinner on Valentine’s Day. You will meet his or her parents and grandparents and brothers and sisters for the very first time. And you have an idea that if you measure up, the next step will be an engagement and then marriage, and this is your hope, your dream, your greatest desire. How would you prepare?
I suspect that you would start by asking yourself, “Is all this preparation and nervousness really worth it?” And then you would think about your boyfriend or girlfriend, and their smile and their face and how good it will be when you finally are married and I expect that you would say yes, and then you would take a shower or bath.
Think about how we prepare for someone we love. We want to be clean, we want to look just right, we want to put on our best clothes. After our shower, we’d brush our teeth, we’d brush or comb our hair just right, the ladies would get that makeup perfect – not to heavy, just a bit of highlights there – and the guys would shave exactly, getting the hair to lay just right on their foreheads.
You’d put on your best clothes, whether they were dressy jeans or a fancy outfit would depend upon who and where you were going to meet. You’d make sure your clothes were clean, you’d check your clothes with a lint roller, you make sure you had on deodorant, you’d make sure your breath was fresh, and you’d be ready on time, and you might even practice saying, “Nice to meet you, Mr and Mrs Zwickelpinger”, for that was their last name and you wanted to get it just right.
In short, you’d work to become as perfect as possible to make that first impression on your future spouse’s family, that you wanted to make sure that you would have no shame because your shoes were muddy or your clothes were wrinkled, you didn’t want to shrink because your breath smelled like garlic or ramps or your underarms stank, you didn’t want to be embarrassed because you forgot their family name or you kept them waiting because you were late, and you sure didn’t want your black clothes to announce to them that you have a white Persian kitten that loves to climb on your lap. And you surely aren’t the type to just show up at a fancy restaurant in dirty, ripped and stinking clothes, fresh from four-wheeling in the mud with a six-pack, having finished off a salami and onion sandwich with so much mustard that the stains are still on your sleeves where you wiped it off your mouth.
And is it the same way with the banquet of Jesus? Have you begun preparing for that banquet? Or do you plan to come as you are?
“But Pastor, doesn’t Jesus accept me ‘just as I am’?
Yes, indeed, He does. Jesus puts no requirements in front of you to declare loyalty to Him and the Kingdom of God. You can indeed walk right in off your muddy four-wheeler, toss the empty cans at His feet, burp, wipe your nose with His robe, let off a string of four-letter words, light up a joint, introduce Him to your three partners, and ask Him to accept you. As our reading from Romans says,
9 If you declare with your mouth, “Jesus is Lord,” and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. 10 For it is with your heart that you believe and are justified, and it is with your mouth that you profess your faith and are saved.
Jesus will simply say, "We're cool! Now, are you ready to truly follow me?” and if you agree, you are in, accepted and loved by the Son of God, forgiven of everything you have ever done wrong. He really does love you just the way you are!
But once you have done this, you might want to look at taking a shower. In fact, taking a bath is the first step after you have been saved from God’s wrath. We call it baptism. Your sins are washed away. The spiritual dirt and grime and odors of your sin disappear. You make a new start – a start that puts you on the holiness path, for becoming holy yourself is how you are saved from your own foolishness and desires.
Let me be clear. Believe in your heart that Jesus was resurrected and declare with your voice that you believe that Jesus is Lord, and you will be saved from God’s wrath. But you will need to become holy to save yourself from your own foolishness. You will need to clean up your act.
You see, sin is slavery. A slave cannot do whatever the slave wants. If I am a slave, I cannot travel freely, I cannot work for wages, I cannot marry who I wish, I cannot live a life of freedom. It is only when I admit that I cannot get free from this slavery myself that I give Jesus the chance to set me free. And the first step in this is declaring that I will follow Jesus.
All of the twelve step programs such as Alcoholics Anonymous, Smoker’s Anonymous, Narcotics Anonymous are in agreement – your first step is when you admit that you cannot break free by yourself. The Second step is to realize that Jesus has the power to set you free – and if you believe that He was resurrected, it only follows that He has the power to set your free, and then you must choose to follow Him. Declaring that Jesus is your Lord to someone else is that vital point where you have finally decided to follow Him.
A guilty plea and a true desire to change is all that is needed for Jesus to forgive you. A holy life is your reward for truly following Jesus.
We baptize infants to put them under Christ’s protection at an early age, to give them the Holy Spirit to guide them. But at some point, they must decide if this is their path, if they will confirm that they are followers of Christ. Have you done this?
But there is still the process of becoming holy. You have been invited to the banquet, but you will be more comfortable and less embarrassed at the banquet if you clean yourself up. Following Jesus means you will need to take action - you don't just stand there, looking at Him.
But Satan intentionally forgot the important part in that Psalm 91 quotation:
If you say, “The Lord is my refuge,”
and you make the Most High your dwelling,
10 no harm will overtake you,
no disaster will come near your tent.
11 For he will command his angels concerning you
to guard you in all your ways;
12 they will lift you up in their hands,
so that you will not strike your foot against a stone.
And Jesus responded with more scripture: Deuteronomy 6:16 "Do not put the Lord your God to the test."
And so we see Jesus remain holy through these three trials, because in each case Jesus responded with holy scripture. Scripture is a guide to help us become holy. And so reading scripture, learning scripture, stopping and thinking about scripture and discussing it with other people is one key way we can learn to be holy, to follow the path of holiness that leads us out of foolishness and stupid mistakes into a world of wisdom and peace and joy.
Earlier I said that Jesus always performed His miracles for others, never for Himself. You might think, “but what about when Jesus came back to life? Wasn’t that for Himself?” And to a certain extent, you might have a case. Until you realize that it was only because He did this, demonstrating Who He is, God Himself on this earth, it was only because of His resurrection that we have any hope of a resurrection, it was only because of this key miracle that we know that we can live forever, and it was only because of this that we can be saved from both God’s wrath and our foolishness. For you see, the Resurrection was simply the other half of the greatest miracle, that God Himself would come to earth, to live and walk and teach as an ordinary man for over 30 years, would allow Himself to be tortured and killed as a sacrifice to pay the price for the crimes we have committed, the sins against God and each other, and that this All-Powerful Being, when faced with this unjust death, would say on the cross, “Forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.”
It is only because of that miracle that we have any hope at all. And it is because of that miracle that we are gathered here today, to worship God the Father, God the Spirit, and God the Son who died and was resurrected.
It is only because of what Jesus did that one day we will be able to stand in front of the final judgment, and know that we have no shame, for Jesus paid all of our debts, all of our penalties, and we can hold our heads high, for we know that God the Son loves us and that is enough, that is more than enough, for that is all we need to walk the path of holiness and be saved from our own foolishness and stupidity with Christ's help.
And so we begin the time of Lent, the time of preparation for Easter, the joyous celebration of Christ’s resurrection – which is the foretaste, the appetizer for the great harvest of souls at the end of time, when all the people who have decided to trust in the power of God will join together in the great banquet and feast of the bridegroom, who is Jesus Christ. It will be a day of great celebration, a day of music and feasting and praise and worship when we arrive alive again to speak with one another, a chance to see those friends and family who have died before us in the Lord, and to see how our descendants have grown up over the years and decades. And we will have the opportunity to meet our Savior face-to-face. What a day of Rejoicing that will be, when we all see Jesus and shout the victory!
But meanwhile, until that time arrives, we must travel through this life, a time of preparation for the banquet to come, a time when we must spiritually prepare ourselves in the same way that we would prepare ourselves for a fancy banquet or dinner with important guests.
Now, I know that most of you have been married for years, and some of you are not married, but I’d like you to go back in time, go back to a time when you were single and dating a special person, a person you have fallen in love with, a person you want to marry very badly.
Now imagine, for instance, that you have been asked by your boyfriend or girlfriend to come to dinner on Valentine’s Day. You will meet his or her parents and grandparents and brothers and sisters for the very first time. And you have an idea that if you measure up, the next step will be an engagement and then marriage, and this is your hope, your dream, your greatest desire. How would you prepare?
I suspect that you would start by asking yourself, “Is all this preparation and nervousness really worth it?” And then you would think about your boyfriend or girlfriend, and their smile and their face and how good it will be when you finally are married and I expect that you would say yes, and then you would take a shower or bath.
Think about how we prepare for someone we love. We want to be clean, we want to look just right, we want to put on our best clothes. After our shower, we’d brush our teeth, we’d brush or comb our hair just right, the ladies would get that makeup perfect – not to heavy, just a bit of highlights there – and the guys would shave exactly, getting the hair to lay just right on their foreheads.
You’d put on your best clothes, whether they were dressy jeans or a fancy outfit would depend upon who and where you were going to meet. You’d make sure your clothes were clean, you’d check your clothes with a lint roller, you make sure you had on deodorant, you’d make sure your breath was fresh, and you’d be ready on time, and you might even practice saying, “Nice to meet you, Mr and Mrs Zwickelpinger”, for that was their last name and you wanted to get it just right.
In short, you’d work to become as perfect as possible to make that first impression on your future spouse’s family, that you wanted to make sure that you would have no shame because your shoes were muddy or your clothes were wrinkled, you didn’t want to shrink because your breath smelled like garlic or ramps or your underarms stank, you didn’t want to be embarrassed because you forgot their family name or you kept them waiting because you were late, and you sure didn’t want your black clothes to announce to them that you have a white Persian kitten that loves to climb on your lap. And you surely aren’t the type to just show up at a fancy restaurant in dirty, ripped and stinking clothes, fresh from four-wheeling in the mud with a six-pack, having finished off a salami and onion sandwich with so much mustard that the stains are still on your sleeves where you wiped it off your mouth.
And is it the same way with the banquet of Jesus? Have you begun preparing for that banquet? Or do you plan to come as you are?
“But Pastor, doesn’t Jesus accept me ‘just as I am’?
Yes, indeed, He does. Jesus puts no requirements in front of you to declare loyalty to Him and the Kingdom of God. You can indeed walk right in off your muddy four-wheeler, toss the empty cans at His feet, burp, wipe your nose with His robe, let off a string of four-letter words, light up a joint, introduce Him to your three partners, and ask Him to accept you. As our reading from Romans says,
9 If you declare with your mouth, “Jesus is Lord,” and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. 10 For it is with your heart that you believe and are justified, and it is with your mouth that you profess your faith and are saved.
Jesus will simply say, "We're cool! Now, are you ready to truly follow me?” and if you agree, you are in, accepted and loved by the Son of God, forgiven of everything you have ever done wrong. He really does love you just the way you are!
But once you have done this, you might want to look at taking a shower. In fact, taking a bath is the first step after you have been saved from God’s wrath. We call it baptism. Your sins are washed away. The spiritual dirt and grime and odors of your sin disappear. You make a new start – a start that puts you on the holiness path, for becoming holy yourself is how you are saved from your own foolishness and desires.
Let me be clear. Believe in your heart that Jesus was resurrected and declare with your voice that you believe that Jesus is Lord, and you will be saved from God’s wrath. But you will need to become holy to save yourself from your own foolishness. You will need to clean up your act.
You see, sin is slavery. A slave cannot do whatever the slave wants. If I am a slave, I cannot travel freely, I cannot work for wages, I cannot marry who I wish, I cannot live a life of freedom. It is only when I admit that I cannot get free from this slavery myself that I give Jesus the chance to set me free. And the first step in this is declaring that I will follow Jesus.
All of the twelve step programs such as Alcoholics Anonymous, Smoker’s Anonymous, Narcotics Anonymous are in agreement – your first step is when you admit that you cannot break free by yourself. The Second step is to realize that Jesus has the power to set you free – and if you believe that He was resurrected, it only follows that He has the power to set your free, and then you must choose to follow Him. Declaring that Jesus is your Lord to someone else is that vital point where you have finally decided to follow Him.
A guilty plea and a true desire to change is all that is needed for Jesus to forgive you. A holy life is your reward for truly following Jesus.
We baptize infants to put them under Christ’s protection at an early age, to give them the Holy Spirit to guide them. But at some point, they must decide if this is their path, if they will confirm that they are followers of Christ. Have you done this?
But there is still the process of becoming holy. You have been invited to the banquet, but you will be more comfortable and less embarrassed at the banquet if you clean yourself up. Following Jesus means you will need to take action - you don't just stand there, looking at Him.
The path to holiness is the path toward cleaning yourself up for the banquet, for during our lives there are many times when we make a choice to do something stupid and foolish and it harms us. The difference between a believing, baptized Christian and an unbeliever is that the unbeliever does not have a choice, the sin has them enslaved, while you, the believing, baptized Christian are free to be stupid and foolish and hurt yourself – or to be holy.
Have you ever noticed that you hurt yourself by your actions or words? I have. Do you ever say things that you regret, things that cause you to have trouble down the road, things that create problems in your relationships? I have. Perhaps you have an addiction that is causing you problems in your relationships, in your work, with your family?
Have you ever noticed that you have certain bad habits that hurt you and the people around you from time to time? Have you ever noticed that you are short on money because you overspent, or short on time because you aren’t organized or short on temper because you didn’t get to sleep early enough the night before?
These are examples of what I mean when I say you hurt yourself. At first glance, there is little difference between a new Christian and an established sinner. But as a free, believing Christian, you are no longer stuck in the rut of sin. Instead, you are free to ask for help, to draw upon the God power of Christ, to pull in the advice and wisdom of the Holy Spirit to solve these problems.
The biggest problem we have as Christians is – we don’t have the willpower or the interest to become holy. And since it is the time of Lent, the time of preparation for Easter, it is time for us to begin to focus upon our own holiness. This is the time of year when we focus upon our holiness – not the lack of holiness of other people, but our own lack of holiness – and we ask Jesus for help doing something about it.
Our culture doesn’t want us to become holy, either. There’s a lot of money involved in unholiness, so many advertisements work against us becoming holy and instead encourage us to spend money in unholy ways. Holy people are portrayed by the culture as being mean, nasty, troublemakers who are always judging others. But those people aren’t very holy by Christian standards etiher.
So perhaps I ought to explain what holiness is. Holiness is following Jesus Christ in action, word, and deed. Imitate Christ for the right reasons and you will be holy. Follow Christ’s commands and you will be holy.
But you will not become holy by yourself. Becoming holy is not a matter of hard work by yourself, it is not a matter of self-discipline, it is not a matter of moral strength. Becoming holy happens when we recognize that it takes Christ’s strength, the moral character that only Jesus has, the power and wisdom of God’s Son to walk away from our bad habits and our failings. If you just try to “be better”, you will fail. If you ask Jesus to help you avoid eating that 3rd donut or that 2nd beer because you recognize that you can’t stop – He will help you. If you just try to “be better”, you will chew out your co-worker. If you ask Jesus for help, you will keep your mouth shut or say something kind and gentle which will help your co-worker.
Let’s look at some examples of this holiness.
Let’s look at some obvious examples. Much of the world thrives off of conflict and drama. The world wants us to be angry, to fight, to argue, to fight about trivial things. But Christ asks us to turn the other cheek, to be meek and mild, to love our neighbor as ourself. How does this play out in practice?
It is obvious that the world wants us to fight other countries and other people. And it is clear that most of the presidential candidates want us to be angry at groups of people – Trump and Cruz want us to be angry at immigrants, Sanders would have us be angry at the wealthy, Clinton would have us be angry at Trump and Cruz and Sanders and men and gun owners, etc, etc. The rest of Republicans want us to be angry at the Democrats or Trump, the Democrats want us to be angry at the Republicans. In fact, I would argue that you can tell a lot about a candidate by who he or she is angry at... Christ only showed His anger when faced with people who were keeping other people from God.
Furthermore, this desire for conflict goes even further. Our television shows are based upon conflict, for that is what drives the interest in our shows – think about the conflict inherent in Survivor. Even our sports shows look to generate conflict – the Steelers or the Browns, the Broncos or the Panthers, the Pirates or the Reds?
And we are supposed to become holy by loving all people. But it is difficult to love someone who is taunting you because the Mountaineers lost to their favorite team, isn’t it? Saundra and I lost great respect for a woman who was extraordinarily mean and nasty and partisan about her high school team a few years ago.
Let’s take another aspect of holiness. Our body is to be a temple of the Holy Spirit – yet we harm ourselves continually by eating foods and drinking drinks and smoking cigarettes that are bad for our body. And what is the effect after years and years of self-abuse upon our health? And when we run into someone who needs to see Christ and to hear Christ and to be led to Christ – we don’t have the energy because our body is failing us.
Or we can gradually work to get into shape. We can spend a half-hour every couple days in gentle exercise, and we can cut back on our abusive habits by praying and asking for help from Christ and the Holy Spirit and our Christian friends. And then, we can be ready when Jesus sends us someone to lead to Him. Plus, we won’t spend so much time in doctor’s offices as we age.
If you want to understand holiness and how to achieve it, the New Testament is full of passages about Holiness. But perhaps today we should start with Jesus’ example when He was tempted off the path of holiness:
Jesus had just been baptized. The Holy Spirit led Him to go into the wilderness, to be alone, to fast, and after 40 days without eating, Jesus was hungry. And it was at that moment of weakness that Satan came to Jesus and suggested that He turn a stone into a loaf of bread.
Satan recognized the very real power that Jesus had. But Jesus also understood that giving into his physical hunger would be falling for Satan. For you see, part of the beauty of Jesus is when you notice that every miracle that Jesus performs is for someone else, every miracle helps someone else, but none of the miracles are for the benefit of Jesus – part of what makes Jesus so sinless, yet so holy is that He limited himself to only the normal powers of human beings, He did not cheat by using His God power for Himself, and so today we can say that Jesus became just like any man, living life, and yet did not need to sin. And that means that when we look at Him, we know that imitating Him is possible if we have the faith in God that Jesus showed us, with His help.
And so Jesus did not turn the stone into bread, and He quoted scripture, He quoted the Old Testament, He quoted Deuteronomy 8:3 “He humbled you, causing you to hunger and then feeding you with manna, which neither you nor your ancestors had known, to teach you that man does not live on bread alone but on every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord.”
And then, when tempted a second time with power, Jesus once again fell back on scripture, this time Deuteronomy 6:13 "Fear the Lord your God, serve him only.”
And then Satan attempted to lead Jesus into heresy, a false teaching by taking out of context other scripture,
Have you ever noticed that you hurt yourself by your actions or words? I have. Do you ever say things that you regret, things that cause you to have trouble down the road, things that create problems in your relationships? I have. Perhaps you have an addiction that is causing you problems in your relationships, in your work, with your family?
Have you ever noticed that you have certain bad habits that hurt you and the people around you from time to time? Have you ever noticed that you are short on money because you overspent, or short on time because you aren’t organized or short on temper because you didn’t get to sleep early enough the night before?
These are examples of what I mean when I say you hurt yourself. At first glance, there is little difference between a new Christian and an established sinner. But as a free, believing Christian, you are no longer stuck in the rut of sin. Instead, you are free to ask for help, to draw upon the God power of Christ, to pull in the advice and wisdom of the Holy Spirit to solve these problems.
The biggest problem we have as Christians is – we don’t have the willpower or the interest to become holy. And since it is the time of Lent, the time of preparation for Easter, it is time for us to begin to focus upon our own holiness. This is the time of year when we focus upon our holiness – not the lack of holiness of other people, but our own lack of holiness – and we ask Jesus for help doing something about it.
Our culture doesn’t want us to become holy, either. There’s a lot of money involved in unholiness, so many advertisements work against us becoming holy and instead encourage us to spend money in unholy ways. Holy people are portrayed by the culture as being mean, nasty, troublemakers who are always judging others. But those people aren’t very holy by Christian standards etiher.
So perhaps I ought to explain what holiness is. Holiness is following Jesus Christ in action, word, and deed. Imitate Christ for the right reasons and you will be holy. Follow Christ’s commands and you will be holy.
But you will not become holy by yourself. Becoming holy is not a matter of hard work by yourself, it is not a matter of self-discipline, it is not a matter of moral strength. Becoming holy happens when we recognize that it takes Christ’s strength, the moral character that only Jesus has, the power and wisdom of God’s Son to walk away from our bad habits and our failings. If you just try to “be better”, you will fail. If you ask Jesus to help you avoid eating that 3rd donut or that 2nd beer because you recognize that you can’t stop – He will help you. If you just try to “be better”, you will chew out your co-worker. If you ask Jesus for help, you will keep your mouth shut or say something kind and gentle which will help your co-worker.
Let’s look at some examples of this holiness.
Let’s look at some obvious examples. Much of the world thrives off of conflict and drama. The world wants us to be angry, to fight, to argue, to fight about trivial things. But Christ asks us to turn the other cheek, to be meek and mild, to love our neighbor as ourself. How does this play out in practice?
It is obvious that the world wants us to fight other countries and other people. And it is clear that most of the presidential candidates want us to be angry at groups of people – Trump and Cruz want us to be angry at immigrants, Sanders would have us be angry at the wealthy, Clinton would have us be angry at Trump and Cruz and Sanders and men and gun owners, etc, etc. The rest of Republicans want us to be angry at the Democrats or Trump, the Democrats want us to be angry at the Republicans. In fact, I would argue that you can tell a lot about a candidate by who he or she is angry at... Christ only showed His anger when faced with people who were keeping other people from God.
Furthermore, this desire for conflict goes even further. Our television shows are based upon conflict, for that is what drives the interest in our shows – think about the conflict inherent in Survivor. Even our sports shows look to generate conflict – the Steelers or the Browns, the Broncos or the Panthers, the Pirates or the Reds?
And we are supposed to become holy by loving all people. But it is difficult to love someone who is taunting you because the Mountaineers lost to their favorite team, isn’t it? Saundra and I lost great respect for a woman who was extraordinarily mean and nasty and partisan about her high school team a few years ago.
Let’s take another aspect of holiness. Our body is to be a temple of the Holy Spirit – yet we harm ourselves continually by eating foods and drinking drinks and smoking cigarettes that are bad for our body. And what is the effect after years and years of self-abuse upon our health? And when we run into someone who needs to see Christ and to hear Christ and to be led to Christ – we don’t have the energy because our body is failing us.
Or we can gradually work to get into shape. We can spend a half-hour every couple days in gentle exercise, and we can cut back on our abusive habits by praying and asking for help from Christ and the Holy Spirit and our Christian friends. And then, we can be ready when Jesus sends us someone to lead to Him. Plus, we won’t spend so much time in doctor’s offices as we age.
If you want to understand holiness and how to achieve it, the New Testament is full of passages about Holiness. But perhaps today we should start with Jesus’ example when He was tempted off the path of holiness:
Jesus had just been baptized. The Holy Spirit led Him to go into the wilderness, to be alone, to fast, and after 40 days without eating, Jesus was hungry. And it was at that moment of weakness that Satan came to Jesus and suggested that He turn a stone into a loaf of bread.
Satan recognized the very real power that Jesus had. But Jesus also understood that giving into his physical hunger would be falling for Satan. For you see, part of the beauty of Jesus is when you notice that every miracle that Jesus performs is for someone else, every miracle helps someone else, but none of the miracles are for the benefit of Jesus – part of what makes Jesus so sinless, yet so holy is that He limited himself to only the normal powers of human beings, He did not cheat by using His God power for Himself, and so today we can say that Jesus became just like any man, living life, and yet did not need to sin. And that means that when we look at Him, we know that imitating Him is possible if we have the faith in God that Jesus showed us, with His help.
And so Jesus did not turn the stone into bread, and He quoted scripture, He quoted the Old Testament, He quoted Deuteronomy 8:3 “He humbled you, causing you to hunger and then feeding you with manna, which neither you nor your ancestors had known, to teach you that man does not live on bread alone but on every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord.”
And then, when tempted a second time with power, Jesus once again fell back on scripture, this time Deuteronomy 6:13 "Fear the Lord your God, serve him only.”
And then Satan attempted to lead Jesus into heresy, a false teaching by taking out of context other scripture,
Satan said, ““If you are the Son of God,” he said, “throw yourself down from here. For it is written:
“‘He will command his angels concerning you
to guard you carefully;
11 they will lift you up in their hands,
so that you will not strike your foot against a stone.’
“‘He will command his angels concerning you
to guard you carefully;
11 they will lift you up in their hands,
so that you will not strike your foot against a stone.’
But Satan intentionally forgot the important part in that Psalm 91 quotation:
If you say, “The Lord is my refuge,”
and you make the Most High your dwelling,
10 no harm will overtake you,
no disaster will come near your tent.
11 For he will command his angels concerning you
to guard you in all your ways;
12 they will lift you up in their hands,
so that you will not strike your foot against a stone.
And Jesus responded with more scripture: Deuteronomy 6:16 "Do not put the Lord your God to the test."
And so we see Jesus remain holy through these three trials, because in each case Jesus responded with holy scripture. Scripture is a guide to help us become holy. And so reading scripture, learning scripture, stopping and thinking about scripture and discussing it with other people is one key way we can learn to be holy, to follow the path of holiness that leads us out of foolishness and stupid mistakes into a world of wisdom and peace and joy.
Earlier I said that Jesus always performed His miracles for others, never for Himself. You might think, “but what about when Jesus came back to life? Wasn’t that for Himself?” And to a certain extent, you might have a case. Until you realize that it was only because He did this, demonstrating Who He is, God Himself on this earth, it was only because of His resurrection that we have any hope of a resurrection, it was only because of this key miracle that we know that we can live forever, and it was only because of this that we can be saved from both God’s wrath and our foolishness. For you see, the Resurrection was simply the other half of the greatest miracle, that God Himself would come to earth, to live and walk and teach as an ordinary man for over 30 years, would allow Himself to be tortured and killed as a sacrifice to pay the price for the crimes we have committed, the sins against God and each other, and that this All-Powerful Being, when faced with this unjust death, would say on the cross, “Forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.”
It is only because of that miracle that we have any hope at all. And it is because of that miracle that we are gathered here today, to worship God the Father, God the Spirit, and God the Son who died and was resurrected.
It is only because of what Jesus did that one day we will be able to stand in front of the final judgment, and know that we have no shame, for Jesus paid all of our debts, all of our penalties, and we can hold our heads high, for we know that God the Son loves us and that is enough, that is more than enough, for that is all we need to walk the path of holiness and be saved from our own foolishness and stupidity with Christ's help.
Tuesday, February 9, 2016
You Will See Truth - Thoughts on the Face of Moses and the Transfiguration of Christ
Exodus 34:29-35; Psalm 99; 2 Corinthians 3:12-4:2; Luke 9:28-43
When you raise five kids, you develop a certain ability to discern things, an ability to listen carefully and get to the heart of the matter. In short, you get very good at determining which child is telling the truth and which child is setting up the next one to take the fall. Oh, you’re never perfect – each of our kids tried to pull the wool over our eyes as they were growing up, and sometimes they succeeded. But there were other times that we let them succeed – at least as far as they thought – and many, many times we called them on the contradictions we had found in their stories.
And so a pastor with five kids gets good at finding the truth in a situation. That’s important, because in many ways, Christianity is the story of how people find Truth hidden behind the veil of lies that the world puts between us and that Truth. While it is true that “the Truth shall set you free”, it is also true that sometimes the Truth is difficult to bear. And frankly, most people don’t want to hear or see the Truth. Most people would prefer to stick with the comfortable lies that they know rather than make the changes necessary to our lives when we see the Truth.
In our first Reading today, Moses has gone up on the mountaintop to meet with God. The first stone tablets have been broken, the first copy of the Law that God had given Moses because the people had made a golden calf to worship. And so Moses went back up to the mountaintop to meet with God, to prepare another set of tablets – and while Moses was there, the glory of God came and stood in front of Moses. Moses saw part of God that day.
When Moses came down from the mountain 40 days later, his face shone in radiance. Apparently, some of God’s glory had been picked up by Moses’ face. This was very unsettling to the men who met him – so unsettling, he began to wear a veil to cover his face. Knowing the Truth, having even part of the Truth, being close to God can be very unsettling for people who are farther away from God.
And our culture, the world around us, encourages us today to stay far from God. How often on television or in the movies is the religious person seen as wacko? How often is the preacher on television put forth as dangerous? How many times do you see the person who understands God a bit more than the average person portrayed as a fanatic, as the criminal, as someone we do not want to be seen as? It is so often that as soon as we find out the character is Christian, we know that they will be the criminal or the bad guy or the stupid, comedic character on the show, the one who isn’t to be trusted. And so our culture encourages us even today to stay far, far away from God, hiding behind a veil. Even in the church, people sit as far away from the altar as possible, because up here there is something mysterious and frightening, a Someone who cannot be controlled by us. And so we try to stay away from God as much as possible.
And we see this concept of the veil which protects people from God’s glory being repeated in several places throughout the Bible. For example, the tabernacle, the portable temple that the Israelites carried with them, shielded people from the glory of God with several layers of curtains. Only the high priest was allowed within the innermost layer of curtains.
And then, when the Temple of Solomon was built, much the same thing was done, except this time solid walls were used for most of the layers, with the veil reserved for the innermost area, the Holy of Holies. And later, when the Second Temple was built by King Herod, once again walls were used to divide the outsiders from the Jews, the women were kept outside the second wall, those who were not priests were kept outside the third wall, and only the selected priest was allowed inside the veil.
One day, when the disciples and Jesus were in the most northern part of Israel, Jesus took His inner circle – Peter, John, and James – three men for in Jewish law all truth is established by the testimony of two or three witnesses – He took the three up to the top of Mount Hermon, the tallest mountain in what we call today the Golan Heights. On the way up they climbed past other makeshift altars and temples, temples made from what you could carry up a mountain, not even decent shacks, for people had made these temple-shacks to other gods for centuries. Finally, they get to the top and Jesus begins to pray to God.
29 As he was praying, the appearance of his face changed, and his clothes became as bright as a flash of lightning. 30 Two men, Moses and Elijah, appeared in glorious splendor, talking with Jesus.
Jesus begins to glow with the glory of God, because He was God walking upon the earth. And Moses and Elijah appear. Notice that Moses, the man most associated in Jewish history with going up on top of a mountain, is there. Moses, the man with the face that glowed because he had talked with God – he is there. Remember - Moses’ body was never found. Legend had had it that he was taken directly to Heaven, and now he was standing before the disciples, talking with Jesus!
And there was Elijah, the great prophet, the man who had also seen God pass by him while he was on a mountain, the man God hid in the cleft in the rock to protect him from God’s glory, the man who returned to Heaven in a fiery chariot, Elijah was there, standing before the disciples, talking with Jesus, and Jesus was glowing with the glory of God!
And Jesus and the two prophets were speaking about his departure from earth, the upcoming visit to Jerusalem where He would enter the town as a hero, be betrayed, be arrested, tried, and executed for the crime of claiming to be God, where he would die as a sacrifice for all the crimes against God that all the people of the world had committed or would ever commit, the sins of you and of me – and then He would arise from the dead to prove that He was indeed God on this earth. Jesus who was glowing with the glory of God, talking to the two greatest legendary prophets of Jewish history, the men who had supposedly never died, the three of them were standing in front of the disciples and it was very clear which one was most important, for Jesus was glowing!
And so Peter, quick to speak and slow to think, blurts out that the disciples should honor Jesus and the others by building temple-shacks for each one of them, three temple-shacks – one for Moses the Law-Giver, one for Elijah the great prophet, and one for Jesus, their leader. Peter was thinking that he would honor each of them by building a little temple to each of them, treating them each as gods.
And history records Peter as the man who was told by God to “shut up!”
34 While he was speaking, a cloud appeared and covered them, and they were afraid as they entered the cloud. 35 A voice came from the cloud, saying, “This is my Son, whom I have chosen; listen to him.”
God reminded Peter that Jesus was God’s son – and the other two were just men. And Peter shut up. For Peter and John and James were profoundly affected by what they had seen, they would never see Jesus the same way again, even when they went back to the world below them, they now knew beyond any doubt that Jesus was special, that Jesus was frighteningly special, that Jesus was claimed by God as God’s Son.
And so they didn’t say a word to anyone. For they had seen the Truth and they respected Jesus, and they were truly in awe of Him now. No longer was He just a teacher to them, now He was divine, they were in the presence of God whenever they were near Him, and this was both wonderful and disturbing. They needed time to work out what it meant, they needed time to think about the meaning, they needed time to figure out what it meant for their view of everything. You will notice that while the Gospels record much of what Jesus said and did, and how the disciples behaved, they do not record the disciples getting “chummy” with Jesus. There was something a bit too frightening, a bit disturbing, a bit unworldly about Him. His godliness kept showing through in the way he didn’t behave the way rabbi’s are supposed to behave. And so the disciples followed – but they kept their distance from Jesus.
When they went back down to the foot of the mountain, it was back into the daily business of healing people. A man brought his demon-possessed son – the disciples who had remained behind had tried to drive out the demon, but those disciples could not heal the boy, so Jesus threw up His hands and asked how much longer He had to put up with people who did not believe, and then Jesus rebuked the demon and the boy was healed. “And they were all amazed at the greatness of God”.
You see – sometimes you need to know the Truth to set others free. And Jesus knew the Truth – and now Peter, James, and John knew the Truth. And as the Truth gradually spread out to the other disciples and the crowds, and then to the authorities, the truth that Jesus was claiming to be God on earth, people left Him, and eventually He was arrested and executed for the crime of claiming to be God. And he was placed behind a wall of stone so we could not see His glory. Once again the veil was in place.
Three days later, Truth triumphed. For Jesus came back alive from the dead. He walked out from behind the wall of stone, He left the veil behind. What better proof of the essential God-nature of Jesus could you find. The Truth had won out – and what better freedom could you find than to know that Jesus had proven He was God and had promised that His followers would have eternal life?
And furthermore, on that morning when Jesus came back from the dead, there was a great earthquake and the veil in the Temple was ripped from top to bottom, for no longer would God be hidden away from men and women, no longer would God hide behind a veil, but God would walk with people, God would ride in His follower’s hearts, God the Holy Spirit was in the world connecting together all believers and God and Jesus Christ was the sewing needle that had stitched us all together!
Many years later, the Apostle Paul wrote to the church at Corinth. In the 3rd chapter of his 2nd letter, he wrote of the veil that covers our hearts and keeps us from knowing Truth. Paul said it much better than I can say it, so let me read his words:
13 We are not like Moses, who would put a veil over his face to prevent the Israelites from seeing the end of what was passing away. 14 But their minds were made dull, for to this day the same veil remains when the old covenant is read.
Paul is talking about scripture being read, particularly the Old Testament. Scripture is very hard to understand if you don’t know Christ. He continues about the veil.
It has not been removed, because only in Christ is it taken away. 15 Even to this day when Moses is read, a veil covers their hearts. 16 But whenever anyone turns to the Lord, the veil is taken away.
Paul is saying that the veil keeps us from truth, but when you turn to the Lord, we can see clearly now with our hearts.
17 Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. 18 And we all, who with unveiled faces contemplate the Lord’s glory, are being transformed into his image with ever-increasing glory, which comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit.
Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit are one and the same substance, and they are both the same substance as God the Father. The Spirit, seen directly, heard directly, with no veil, puts us directly in touch with God.
At the Last Supper, Jesus told us that He would send us the Holy Spirit, and that Spirit would lead us to all Truth. And, as you have heard, the Truth will set you free.
As you grow in your Christian walk, learn to listen to that still small voice that speaks to you, the still small voice that Elijah heard when he was on the mountain after the fire and storm and wind passed by, the still small voice of God the Holy Spirit. And the Spirit will lead you into all Truth. And the Truth will set you free from your slavery to sin, from your ancient injuries from days gone past, from your fears.
When you are afraid, when you are hurting, when other people have injured you, when you are alone, when you are upset, when you are afraid, ask the Spirit to speak the Truth to you and listen.
Now, knowing Christ, you can see without a veil over your heart, and you can know the Truth. The are no barriers between you and the Truth. But you must have the courage to look at the Truth. Will you look at the Truth? Or will you put your own veil of self-deception back in place to block your view? Will you listen to what the Spirit tells you about what you have done, what others have done, and what Jesus Christ did to fix your problems once and for all? Or will you put fabric in your ears so you will not hear? Let your hearts be healed through the Truth of Jesus Christ.
Read the Word, pray to God through the Spirit, listen to the Spirit and see the Truth.
When you raise five kids, you develop a certain ability to discern things, an ability to listen carefully and get to the heart of the matter. In short, you get very good at determining which child is telling the truth and which child is setting up the next one to take the fall. Oh, you’re never perfect – each of our kids tried to pull the wool over our eyes as they were growing up, and sometimes they succeeded. But there were other times that we let them succeed – at least as far as they thought – and many, many times we called them on the contradictions we had found in their stories.
And so a pastor with five kids gets good at finding the truth in a situation. That’s important, because in many ways, Christianity is the story of how people find Truth hidden behind the veil of lies that the world puts between us and that Truth. While it is true that “the Truth shall set you free”, it is also true that sometimes the Truth is difficult to bear. And frankly, most people don’t want to hear or see the Truth. Most people would prefer to stick with the comfortable lies that they know rather than make the changes necessary to our lives when we see the Truth.
In our first Reading today, Moses has gone up on the mountaintop to meet with God. The first stone tablets have been broken, the first copy of the Law that God had given Moses because the people had made a golden calf to worship. And so Moses went back up to the mountaintop to meet with God, to prepare another set of tablets – and while Moses was there, the glory of God came and stood in front of Moses. Moses saw part of God that day.
When Moses came down from the mountain 40 days later, his face shone in radiance. Apparently, some of God’s glory had been picked up by Moses’ face. This was very unsettling to the men who met him – so unsettling, he began to wear a veil to cover his face. Knowing the Truth, having even part of the Truth, being close to God can be very unsettling for people who are farther away from God.
And our culture, the world around us, encourages us today to stay far from God. How often on television or in the movies is the religious person seen as wacko? How often is the preacher on television put forth as dangerous? How many times do you see the person who understands God a bit more than the average person portrayed as a fanatic, as the criminal, as someone we do not want to be seen as? It is so often that as soon as we find out the character is Christian, we know that they will be the criminal or the bad guy or the stupid, comedic character on the show, the one who isn’t to be trusted. And so our culture encourages us even today to stay far, far away from God, hiding behind a veil. Even in the church, people sit as far away from the altar as possible, because up here there is something mysterious and frightening, a Someone who cannot be controlled by us. And so we try to stay away from God as much as possible.
And we see this concept of the veil which protects people from God’s glory being repeated in several places throughout the Bible. For example, the tabernacle, the portable temple that the Israelites carried with them, shielded people from the glory of God with several layers of curtains. Only the high priest was allowed within the innermost layer of curtains.
And then, when the Temple of Solomon was built, much the same thing was done, except this time solid walls were used for most of the layers, with the veil reserved for the innermost area, the Holy of Holies. And later, when the Second Temple was built by King Herod, once again walls were used to divide the outsiders from the Jews, the women were kept outside the second wall, those who were not priests were kept outside the third wall, and only the selected priest was allowed inside the veil.
One day, when the disciples and Jesus were in the most northern part of Israel, Jesus took His inner circle – Peter, John, and James – three men for in Jewish law all truth is established by the testimony of two or three witnesses – He took the three up to the top of Mount Hermon, the tallest mountain in what we call today the Golan Heights. On the way up they climbed past other makeshift altars and temples, temples made from what you could carry up a mountain, not even decent shacks, for people had made these temple-shacks to other gods for centuries. Finally, they get to the top and Jesus begins to pray to God.
29 As he was praying, the appearance of his face changed, and his clothes became as bright as a flash of lightning. 30 Two men, Moses and Elijah, appeared in glorious splendor, talking with Jesus.
Jesus begins to glow with the glory of God, because He was God walking upon the earth. And Moses and Elijah appear. Notice that Moses, the man most associated in Jewish history with going up on top of a mountain, is there. Moses, the man with the face that glowed because he had talked with God – he is there. Remember - Moses’ body was never found. Legend had had it that he was taken directly to Heaven, and now he was standing before the disciples, talking with Jesus!
And there was Elijah, the great prophet, the man who had also seen God pass by him while he was on a mountain, the man God hid in the cleft in the rock to protect him from God’s glory, the man who returned to Heaven in a fiery chariot, Elijah was there, standing before the disciples, talking with Jesus, and Jesus was glowing with the glory of God!
And Jesus and the two prophets were speaking about his departure from earth, the upcoming visit to Jerusalem where He would enter the town as a hero, be betrayed, be arrested, tried, and executed for the crime of claiming to be God, where he would die as a sacrifice for all the crimes against God that all the people of the world had committed or would ever commit, the sins of you and of me – and then He would arise from the dead to prove that He was indeed God on this earth. Jesus who was glowing with the glory of God, talking to the two greatest legendary prophets of Jewish history, the men who had supposedly never died, the three of them were standing in front of the disciples and it was very clear which one was most important, for Jesus was glowing!
And so Peter, quick to speak and slow to think, blurts out that the disciples should honor Jesus and the others by building temple-shacks for each one of them, three temple-shacks – one for Moses the Law-Giver, one for Elijah the great prophet, and one for Jesus, their leader. Peter was thinking that he would honor each of them by building a little temple to each of them, treating them each as gods.
And history records Peter as the man who was told by God to “shut up!”
34 While he was speaking, a cloud appeared and covered them, and they were afraid as they entered the cloud. 35 A voice came from the cloud, saying, “This is my Son, whom I have chosen; listen to him.”
God reminded Peter that Jesus was God’s son – and the other two were just men. And Peter shut up. For Peter and John and James were profoundly affected by what they had seen, they would never see Jesus the same way again, even when they went back to the world below them, they now knew beyond any doubt that Jesus was special, that Jesus was frighteningly special, that Jesus was claimed by God as God’s Son.
And so they didn’t say a word to anyone. For they had seen the Truth and they respected Jesus, and they were truly in awe of Him now. No longer was He just a teacher to them, now He was divine, they were in the presence of God whenever they were near Him, and this was both wonderful and disturbing. They needed time to work out what it meant, they needed time to think about the meaning, they needed time to figure out what it meant for their view of everything. You will notice that while the Gospels record much of what Jesus said and did, and how the disciples behaved, they do not record the disciples getting “chummy” with Jesus. There was something a bit too frightening, a bit disturbing, a bit unworldly about Him. His godliness kept showing through in the way he didn’t behave the way rabbi’s are supposed to behave. And so the disciples followed – but they kept their distance from Jesus.
When they went back down to the foot of the mountain, it was back into the daily business of healing people. A man brought his demon-possessed son – the disciples who had remained behind had tried to drive out the demon, but those disciples could not heal the boy, so Jesus threw up His hands and asked how much longer He had to put up with people who did not believe, and then Jesus rebuked the demon and the boy was healed. “And they were all amazed at the greatness of God”.
You see – sometimes you need to know the Truth to set others free. And Jesus knew the Truth – and now Peter, James, and John knew the Truth. And as the Truth gradually spread out to the other disciples and the crowds, and then to the authorities, the truth that Jesus was claiming to be God on earth, people left Him, and eventually He was arrested and executed for the crime of claiming to be God. And he was placed behind a wall of stone so we could not see His glory. Once again the veil was in place.
Three days later, Truth triumphed. For Jesus came back alive from the dead. He walked out from behind the wall of stone, He left the veil behind. What better proof of the essential God-nature of Jesus could you find. The Truth had won out – and what better freedom could you find than to know that Jesus had proven He was God and had promised that His followers would have eternal life?
And furthermore, on that morning when Jesus came back from the dead, there was a great earthquake and the veil in the Temple was ripped from top to bottom, for no longer would God be hidden away from men and women, no longer would God hide behind a veil, but God would walk with people, God would ride in His follower’s hearts, God the Holy Spirit was in the world connecting together all believers and God and Jesus Christ was the sewing needle that had stitched us all together!
Many years later, the Apostle Paul wrote to the church at Corinth. In the 3rd chapter of his 2nd letter, he wrote of the veil that covers our hearts and keeps us from knowing Truth. Paul said it much better than I can say it, so let me read his words:
13 We are not like Moses, who would put a veil over his face to prevent the Israelites from seeing the end of what was passing away. 14 But their minds were made dull, for to this day the same veil remains when the old covenant is read.
Paul is talking about scripture being read, particularly the Old Testament. Scripture is very hard to understand if you don’t know Christ. He continues about the veil.
It has not been removed, because only in Christ is it taken away. 15 Even to this day when Moses is read, a veil covers their hearts. 16 But whenever anyone turns to the Lord, the veil is taken away.
Paul is saying that the veil keeps us from truth, but when you turn to the Lord, we can see clearly now with our hearts.
17 Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. 18 And we all, who with unveiled faces contemplate the Lord’s glory, are being transformed into his image with ever-increasing glory, which comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit.
Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit are one and the same substance, and they are both the same substance as God the Father. The Spirit, seen directly, heard directly, with no veil, puts us directly in touch with God.
At the Last Supper, Jesus told us that He would send us the Holy Spirit, and that Spirit would lead us to all Truth. And, as you have heard, the Truth will set you free.
As you grow in your Christian walk, learn to listen to that still small voice that speaks to you, the still small voice that Elijah heard when he was on the mountain after the fire and storm and wind passed by, the still small voice of God the Holy Spirit. And the Spirit will lead you into all Truth. And the Truth will set you free from your slavery to sin, from your ancient injuries from days gone past, from your fears.
When you are afraid, when you are hurting, when other people have injured you, when you are alone, when you are upset, when you are afraid, ask the Spirit to speak the Truth to you and listen.
Now, knowing Christ, you can see without a veil over your heart, and you can know the Truth. The are no barriers between you and the Truth. But you must have the courage to look at the Truth. Will you look at the Truth? Or will you put your own veil of self-deception back in place to block your view? Will you listen to what the Spirit tells you about what you have done, what others have done, and what Jesus Christ did to fix your problems once and for all? Or will you put fabric in your ears so you will not hear? Let your hearts be healed through the Truth of Jesus Christ.
Read the Word, pray to God through the Spirit, listen to the Spirit and see the Truth.
Tuesday, February 2, 2016
What Part are You? - Reflections on the Body of Christ
Nehemiah 8:1-10; Psalm 19; 1 Corinthians 12:12-31; Luke 4:14-21
Last weekend, when more than 2 feet of snow covered us and forced us to cancel church, our dog Brownie was very confused by the snow. She wanted to go out for her walk, and so we opened the door and she saw this numbing, cold, soft blanket of white outside the door. And she looked back at us, with an expression that said, “What have you done with Reality? Where is the world outside?”
And so Saundra and I took turns digging a path through the snow along the sidewalk with Brownie running back and forth behind us in the deep canyon of snow that she was too small to climb out of. It took hours, because we did not want to end up calling 911 because of a heart attack, but finally, we broke through to the parking lot and Brownie was able to run free in the world. And she was so excited to be free again!
Approximately 450 years before the birth of Jesus, the Jewish nation largely lived in Babylon, stuck there in slavery. Because of a prophecy through Jeremiah, the emperor Cyrus was led by God to order that the Jews should return to Jerusalem to rebuild the Temple of Solomon. They did so, The Temple was rebuilt.
A second wave of people returned a few years later, led by Ezra, a teacher of the law, who was appointed as governor. Later still, Nehemiah was made governor, and Ezra became a leading teacher and priest.
Nehemiah’s task was to protect Jerusalem by rebuilding the walls of Jerusalem. He did so. And when those walls were rebuilt, the Jewish people broke free.
And when the walls were rebuilt, on the first day of the seventh month, Nehemiah and Ezra assembled the people in front of the Temple, and Ezra read the Law of God to them, the Law which Moses had given to the people, He read from early morning until noon and various priests translated and explained the difficult parts.
This first day of the seventh month was in the fall of the year, since the Jewish religious calendar began at Passover, around the time of our Easter celebration. This day was known as the Feast of Trumpets, and also became known as Rosh Hashanah, the agricultural New Year. On this day, the ram’s horn, the shofar, was blown in short bursts to announce that it was time to prepare yourself for Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement that would be coming up in a couple of weeks.
In the tradition of the rabbi’s, the first day of the seventh month was a very important day, because it was the day that Adam was created. And according to the rabbi’s, it was also the day that Adam and Eve ate the fruit of the forbidden tree, the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, and the day they were judged by God. And since it was the first Day of Judgment, it only followed that this day would also be the day when the final Day of Judgment would occur.
On this particular day, Ezra read the Law of God to the people, and the people listened from daybreak until noon and they wept. They listened to all the things that God had done for them, they listened to all the great wonders that Moses and Aaron and Miriam had seen, they listened to the story of the Exodus, and they listened to the Law that Moses had brought down from God on the mountain. And they wept because they remembered, and they saw in their minds the beauty of what God had done for them, and they realized their own guilt and shame and sin, and how they had wasted their years and trivialized their lives when they could have been living for God, doing things with eternal meaning, living with the wonder and the love and the friendship of God, but they had spent their time in vain pursuits, doing worthless deeds, and it touched them to their hearts and they wept.
Even today, we weep when we think of our lives and what God has done for us, how many times God has carried us through the water that would sweep us away, how many times God has lifted us out of fiery furnaces, and we remember how ungrateful we’ve been and we weep.
As the people stood there listening and weeping, Nehemiah and Ezra said to all the people:
“This day is holy to the Lord your God. Do not mourn or weep.” Nehemiah said, “Go and enjoy choice food and sweet drinks, and send some to those who have nothing prepared. This day is holy to our Lord. Do not grieve, for the joy of the Lord is your strength.”
Nehemiah understood that the Lord wanted people to turn their concerns from their own guilt and brokenness to the strength and love of God, that if they were to weep, they should weep for the joy that God loves each person, that God loves you deeply and wonderfully, that God’s strength is yours to call upon and so be joyful, be filled with a wonderful, beautiful joy, because your God loves you and takes care of you and so you should celebrate!
And then they cheered up and they celebrated and they had a feast and a wonderful afternoon and evening. The next day, the leaders of the people came to Ezra, they discussed the Law and they found in the Law that they were to make temporary shelters for the next couple of weeks, tents and huts to remember the time they had lived in the wilderness, and so they commanded all the people to do so and they did this and the Bible tells us that “Their joy was very great!” And so a great revival broke out in Jerusalem that month, as the Festival of Tabernacles was celebrated and Jerusalem, which had been sent into exile in Babylon almost a century before, now was rebuilt, with a Temple, with walls, and was now standing strong again, the people were once again with God and all was well with the people of God.
And every week, they gathered together in small groups, in the synagogues and read some of the Law, the Prophets, and the Psalms and talked about what it meant. From early in the morning, men would read the scrolls of the Law, the Prophets, and the Psalms, and then they would debate the meaning. Every adult man who could read took his turn reading. Sometimes they read of the history of the people of Israel. Sometimes they read of the wonderful things God had done for them. And sometimes they read of things that would be, things that had not yet come to pass, things prophesized to happen in the future, and they would wonder – when will these things happen? And after the reading, the man who read would sit back down and perhaps he would speak first, perhaps another would speak first. But they would speak and talk and discuss and argue, and that was how they learned about God’s will, because Ezra and Nehemiah read the Law to the assembled people that morning in Jerusalem, and the hearing of the Law changed people that day, for they realized now how important God should be to them.
And so, over 450 years later, a man walked into a synagogue in Nazareth near the Sea of Galilee one Saturday morning. “He stood up to read,17 and the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was handed to him. Unrolling it, he found the place where it is written:
18 “The Spirit of the Lord is on me,
because he has anointed me
to proclaim good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners
and recovery of sight for the blind,
to set the oppressed free,
19 to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”
It was something they had heard dozens of times. From Isaiah’s scroll, they had heard this read many Saturday mornings and wondered what it meant, who it referred to, when it would happen. But the poor were still poor and starving, the prisoners were still in the Roman prisons and galleys, the blind were still blind, and all of Israel and Judah were still under the control of the oppressive Romans. It would happen sometime in the far, distant future, at the end of time, after all, no one really understood what it meant, no one understood that the poor were the poor in spirit, the prisoners were the prisoners of sin, the blind were those who could not see the reality of God’s love, the oppressed were oppressed by their fears and the lies of the devil. And because they did not understand, they looked around them and hoped that something would happen, maybe sometime in the far future, that Messiah, the Savior would come and set people free.
Just like now, today, when we sit in this room and we read scripture, we don’t really see that it means anything to us, to our children, or affects us in this world, because our culture has taught us that everything involving Christ is a myth, almost a legend like Santa Claus, a story we’ve heard so many times it has lost any impact upon us and we sit here and listen and wonder when or if things will ever change, for the rich still control the government, the prisons are filled with more people than ever before, and we still work hard to survive, and nothing much that is said has anything to do with us, We don’t understand that the poor means the poor in spirit, the prisoners are the prisoners of sin and addiction, the blind are those who cannot see the reality of God’s love, the oppressed are oppressed by their fears and the lies of the devil. And so we still come to this building on Sunday mornings, because that’s what we do on Sunday mornings, we listen and talk and discuss and our friends are here, and so we are here, and we listen to the story again and it seems so distant from us and our life.
20 Then he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant and sat down. The eyes of everyone in the synagogue were fastened on him. 21 He began by saying to them, “Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.”
Everyone looked at him. “Such a good way of reading,” they thought. “He was so clear in his speech, and gracious,” one whispered to another. Then, it began to dawn upon them what He had said. And the arrogance of it began to hit them. For when he said that “Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing,” he was claiming to be God’s anointed, he was claiming to be the Messiah, he was claiming to be the savior of the people of Israel. And yet, they had seen him grow up, they had seen him read the first time about 15 years ago, they had given him money to fix their plows and tables and chairs, for he was old Joseph’s son, the carpenter, Mary’s boy, Yeshua bar Joseph, Jesus of Nazareth, a smart kid, a smarter man, but he was one of us, he grew up in this town, and people from this town never, ever change the world!
And he was claiming that the end times were upon us, he was claiming that the myth was becoming reality, he was claiming that the world was beginning to change and he would change it and so he was dangerous, and everyone began to shout and men grabbed him and pushed him, “we need him to get out of here”, "he’s dangerous", we don’t want our world to change", "kill him", "throw him off the cliff edge", and then they stopped for a moment on the edge of the cliff and he walked right through them and left them behind forever...
We don’t like the idea that our world might change. While we like to toy with the idea that Santa Claus might really come down the chimney, our reaction to meeting the man himself in our kitchen would probably be violent:
Last weekend, when more than 2 feet of snow covered us and forced us to cancel church, our dog Brownie was very confused by the snow. She wanted to go out for her walk, and so we opened the door and she saw this numbing, cold, soft blanket of white outside the door. And she looked back at us, with an expression that said, “What have you done with Reality? Where is the world outside?”
And so Saundra and I took turns digging a path through the snow along the sidewalk with Brownie running back and forth behind us in the deep canyon of snow that she was too small to climb out of. It took hours, because we did not want to end up calling 911 because of a heart attack, but finally, we broke through to the parking lot and Brownie was able to run free in the world. And she was so excited to be free again!
Approximately 450 years before the birth of Jesus, the Jewish nation largely lived in Babylon, stuck there in slavery. Because of a prophecy through Jeremiah, the emperor Cyrus was led by God to order that the Jews should return to Jerusalem to rebuild the Temple of Solomon. They did so, The Temple was rebuilt.
A second wave of people returned a few years later, led by Ezra, a teacher of the law, who was appointed as governor. Later still, Nehemiah was made governor, and Ezra became a leading teacher and priest.
Nehemiah’s task was to protect Jerusalem by rebuilding the walls of Jerusalem. He did so. And when those walls were rebuilt, the Jewish people broke free.
And when the walls were rebuilt, on the first day of the seventh month, Nehemiah and Ezra assembled the people in front of the Temple, and Ezra read the Law of God to them, the Law which Moses had given to the people, He read from early morning until noon and various priests translated and explained the difficult parts.
This first day of the seventh month was in the fall of the year, since the Jewish religious calendar began at Passover, around the time of our Easter celebration. This day was known as the Feast of Trumpets, and also became known as Rosh Hashanah, the agricultural New Year. On this day, the ram’s horn, the shofar, was blown in short bursts to announce that it was time to prepare yourself for Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement that would be coming up in a couple of weeks.
In the tradition of the rabbi’s, the first day of the seventh month was a very important day, because it was the day that Adam was created. And according to the rabbi’s, it was also the day that Adam and Eve ate the fruit of the forbidden tree, the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, and the day they were judged by God. And since it was the first Day of Judgment, it only followed that this day would also be the day when the final Day of Judgment would occur.
On this particular day, Ezra read the Law of God to the people, and the people listened from daybreak until noon and they wept. They listened to all the things that God had done for them, they listened to all the great wonders that Moses and Aaron and Miriam had seen, they listened to the story of the Exodus, and they listened to the Law that Moses had brought down from God on the mountain. And they wept because they remembered, and they saw in their minds the beauty of what God had done for them, and they realized their own guilt and shame and sin, and how they had wasted their years and trivialized their lives when they could have been living for God, doing things with eternal meaning, living with the wonder and the love and the friendship of God, but they had spent their time in vain pursuits, doing worthless deeds, and it touched them to their hearts and they wept.
Even today, we weep when we think of our lives and what God has done for us, how many times God has carried us through the water that would sweep us away, how many times God has lifted us out of fiery furnaces, and we remember how ungrateful we’ve been and we weep.
As the people stood there listening and weeping, Nehemiah and Ezra said to all the people:
“This day is holy to the Lord your God. Do not mourn or weep.” Nehemiah said, “Go and enjoy choice food and sweet drinks, and send some to those who have nothing prepared. This day is holy to our Lord. Do not grieve, for the joy of the Lord is your strength.”
Nehemiah understood that the Lord wanted people to turn their concerns from their own guilt and brokenness to the strength and love of God, that if they were to weep, they should weep for the joy that God loves each person, that God loves you deeply and wonderfully, that God’s strength is yours to call upon and so be joyful, be filled with a wonderful, beautiful joy, because your God loves you and takes care of you and so you should celebrate!
And then they cheered up and they celebrated and they had a feast and a wonderful afternoon and evening. The next day, the leaders of the people came to Ezra, they discussed the Law and they found in the Law that they were to make temporary shelters for the next couple of weeks, tents and huts to remember the time they had lived in the wilderness, and so they commanded all the people to do so and they did this and the Bible tells us that “Their joy was very great!” And so a great revival broke out in Jerusalem that month, as the Festival of Tabernacles was celebrated and Jerusalem, which had been sent into exile in Babylon almost a century before, now was rebuilt, with a Temple, with walls, and was now standing strong again, the people were once again with God and all was well with the people of God.
And every week, they gathered together in small groups, in the synagogues and read some of the Law, the Prophets, and the Psalms and talked about what it meant. From early in the morning, men would read the scrolls of the Law, the Prophets, and the Psalms, and then they would debate the meaning. Every adult man who could read took his turn reading. Sometimes they read of the history of the people of Israel. Sometimes they read of the wonderful things God had done for them. And sometimes they read of things that would be, things that had not yet come to pass, things prophesized to happen in the future, and they would wonder – when will these things happen? And after the reading, the man who read would sit back down and perhaps he would speak first, perhaps another would speak first. But they would speak and talk and discuss and argue, and that was how they learned about God’s will, because Ezra and Nehemiah read the Law to the assembled people that morning in Jerusalem, and the hearing of the Law changed people that day, for they realized now how important God should be to them.
And so, over 450 years later, a man walked into a synagogue in Nazareth near the Sea of Galilee one Saturday morning. “He stood up to read,17 and the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was handed to him. Unrolling it, he found the place where it is written:
18 “The Spirit of the Lord is on me,
because he has anointed me
to proclaim good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners
and recovery of sight for the blind,
to set the oppressed free,
19 to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”
It was something they had heard dozens of times. From Isaiah’s scroll, they had heard this read many Saturday mornings and wondered what it meant, who it referred to, when it would happen. But the poor were still poor and starving, the prisoners were still in the Roman prisons and galleys, the blind were still blind, and all of Israel and Judah were still under the control of the oppressive Romans. It would happen sometime in the far, distant future, at the end of time, after all, no one really understood what it meant, no one understood that the poor were the poor in spirit, the prisoners were the prisoners of sin, the blind were those who could not see the reality of God’s love, the oppressed were oppressed by their fears and the lies of the devil. And because they did not understand, they looked around them and hoped that something would happen, maybe sometime in the far future, that Messiah, the Savior would come and set people free.
Just like now, today, when we sit in this room and we read scripture, we don’t really see that it means anything to us, to our children, or affects us in this world, because our culture has taught us that everything involving Christ is a myth, almost a legend like Santa Claus, a story we’ve heard so many times it has lost any impact upon us and we sit here and listen and wonder when or if things will ever change, for the rich still control the government, the prisons are filled with more people than ever before, and we still work hard to survive, and nothing much that is said has anything to do with us, We don’t understand that the poor means the poor in spirit, the prisoners are the prisoners of sin and addiction, the blind are those who cannot see the reality of God’s love, the oppressed are oppressed by their fears and the lies of the devil. And so we still come to this building on Sunday mornings, because that’s what we do on Sunday mornings, we listen and talk and discuss and our friends are here, and so we are here, and we listen to the story again and it seems so distant from us and our life.
20 Then he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant and sat down. The eyes of everyone in the synagogue were fastened on him. 21 He began by saying to them, “Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.”
Everyone looked at him. “Such a good way of reading,” they thought. “He was so clear in his speech, and gracious,” one whispered to another. Then, it began to dawn upon them what He had said. And the arrogance of it began to hit them. For when he said that “Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing,” he was claiming to be God’s anointed, he was claiming to be the Messiah, he was claiming to be the savior of the people of Israel. And yet, they had seen him grow up, they had seen him read the first time about 15 years ago, they had given him money to fix their plows and tables and chairs, for he was old Joseph’s son, the carpenter, Mary’s boy, Yeshua bar Joseph, Jesus of Nazareth, a smart kid, a smarter man, but he was one of us, he grew up in this town, and people from this town never, ever change the world!
And he was claiming that the end times were upon us, he was claiming that the myth was becoming reality, he was claiming that the world was beginning to change and he would change it and so he was dangerous, and everyone began to shout and men grabbed him and pushed him, “we need him to get out of here”, "he’s dangerous", we don’t want our world to change", "kill him", "throw him off the cliff edge", and then they stopped for a moment on the edge of the cliff and he walked right through them and left them behind forever...
We don’t like the idea that our world might change. While we like to toy with the idea that Santa Claus might really come down the chimney, our reaction to meeting the man himself in our kitchen would probably be violent:
“WHO ARE YOU and WHAT ARE YOU DOING IN MY KITCHEN!”
“Ho, Ho, Ho, I’m Santa Claus!”
“Right, buddy!. I’m calling 911 right now, so don’t try anything.”
Deep down, we don’t really want excitement. We like what we are doing – and what we aren’t doing, because our lives are pretty comfortable and our culture encourages us to be comfortable. We would prefer to sleep in our spiritual journey, because climbing spiritual mountains is hard work. It is as though we are living in a spiritual dream, where the real world of work and television, and Mountaineer basketball and school and housework and home repairs are the dream we see in front of us, our life flows by us and we are standing apart from it, detached like we are in a dream – and yet somewhere, somehow, we know that there is an even more real world of angels and demons and God and devil and souls trapped in despair and oppression and we hold the keys to setting all of them free, but our dreamworld of reality keeps us from doing anything. And that dreamworld of reality is so inviting, for it is like walking through the world on codeine, we go through each day and everything is predictable, the world doesn’t change much, and we don’t ever do anything to change the world around us. And that is inviting and comfortable.
And our culture helps us to know our place in the world, we know who we are, we know what we are able to do – and we know that we decided a long time ago who we would never be. And so we sit here on Sunday mornings, ready to put some money in a basket if I ask you to, or perhaps we’ll even come to a special Bible study, but only if it seems particularly interesting, and we don’t like being made uncomfortable, because, after all, we’re just ordinary people and that’s all we’ll ever be until we die, and we don’t want to be anything else. And then when we die, Amos-Carvelli or Burnside Funeral Home will come and get us, a hundred or so people will visit with our family one evening later that week, and we’ll be buried at Floral Hills or maybe cremated because we don’t want to be a financial burden on our family.
But yet – every once in a while, one of those Bible readings gets into our heart. Like maybe the one today about us each being a part of Christ’s body. At first glance it’s a nice metaphor, a figure of speech, a nice way to feel part of the church, a way for us to each understand that we each have a role to play, blah, blah, bland, but what if there is something a bit more there. What if there is something just a bit deeper in all that talk about us being part of Christ’s body? What if there is something intensely real about it?
For you know, there is more to it. At the Last Supper, Jesus talked for quite a while about the Holy Spirit, and one of the things He said was that He had to go away for the Holy Spirit to arrive and the Spirit would guide us into all truth. And if you think about that for a while, you begin to realize that it means that in some way, the Holy Spirit and Jesus Christ are one and the same substance, and that is what the early church fathers concluded and every significant theologian since then, that God the Son and God the Holy Spirit are part of the same substance that is shared by God the Father. The Holy Spirit is made of God-stuff.
And that means, if we are part of Christ’s body, the church, then since we share the Holy Spirit from our baptisms, we are now partly made of God-stuff, and this body metaphor is more than just a figure of speech, and there is something real to this idea that we are all parts of Christ’s body, and when you add in the effect of eating Jesus body and drinking His blood every month, perhaps there is something very real to this idea. Because Jesus was God walking on earth and He sent His Holy Spirit to us to replace Him on earth and we took Jesus into our hearts when we received the Holy Spirit – WOW! That means that there is now a part of God working inside of us and we aren’t just ordinary people anymore and WOW! We have some of the power of God to create new realities inside us!
And sometimes, when part of our body is dragging under the load, just as Jesus’ back was bent under the load of the cross, other parts of the body have to step up and help out, as His legs helped out His back that day. And that means that as long as we belong to His Body, we are never, ever alone, for all the other members of the Body are here to surround us and lift us up.
Our world’s culture has bound us down. We are told we need to have a large house, two cars, a debt load, to work to make money, to have expensive phones, to have a retirement plan, to have health insurance. We are told this by every advertisement we see, by every article we read, by every politician that panders to us and promises us that we can live a better life with a better income if only you will vote for him or her, and we are told that the television show or the Facebook page or the movie or the video game or earning money is the way to spend our time. And the result is that we have gradually, gradually gone to sleep in our spirit, we have bought the entire story about what reality is supposed to be like, that this life is the end-all and the be-all of existence, that what we see around us, especially what we see in the world of entertainment and the struggle for money is the reality that we should aspire to, and we have bought the whole story and our spirits have gone to sleep in this dreamworld that was created by Hollywood and the advertising people and the networks and the people who sell things. And so the reality of God’s beauty has become a dream and the dream of Hollywood has become our reality and our spirit has gone to sleep. Zzzzzzzz.
And so perhaps we need to stop spiritually sleeping. Perhaps we need to wake up this part of Christ’s body and begin to seriously do some work for God’s Mission because we have part of God working inside of us! And some parts of this body are doing good work. But we’re always tired, we like the dreamworld, and the REAL reality of God’s beauty would require us to radically change the way we live, like my friends who tithe 50% of their income, or my other friends who left their comfortable home in Ohio and moved to Mexico even though they didn’t speak Spanish just because every time they asked God what they should do, they were told, “Move to Mexico and become missionaries” and they did and they have brought thousands of people to know the Lord. They woke up to the REAL reality of God’s beauty, that they can tap into the power of God.
Or my friends who opened up their home to two homeless people, who live with them and share their cats. Or our former babysitter who, after getting married and having several small children, went with her husband to Afghanistan not because of military reasons, but because they wanted to share the love of Christ in that country with the people there. Or my other friends who sold their home, moved to North Carolina, and who fix up donated computers for missionaries. They want to wake other people up!
Or another friend who travels to Liberia every year and installs solar powered refrigeration systems in medical clinics because the power is so unreliable it can’t keep the vaccines reliably refrigerated. Or still another friend who repairs airplanes for Jungle Aviation and Radio Service so the missionaries can receive supplies in New Guinea. Or another who writes Christian electronic books in Spanish to bring children to know Jesus. And there’s a guy I know who heard another fellow in his church needed a kidney, so he was tested and he was a match, so he donated his kidney, part of his body, to the other guy, but of course, they were both part of the same Body of Christ. One part supports the other part.
Or another guy who goes to Haiti once a year because what he saw there broke his heart and so he puts aside $400 a month so he can visit every year for a week and help out. Or the woman I know who buys the food and cooks and feeds about 50 people at her church one Saturday morning a month because she can do it, and then there are her friends who speak to the people about what Jesus has done in their lives: "Wake up!" and they have all tapped into the Real reality that God the Holy Spirit is working inside them and God wants them to act like Jesus would act because they are the Body of Christ on this earth, changing the world into something wonderful, and that living in the dreamworld of the culture isn’t what they were created to do, even though they were once ordinary people just like us.
For you see folks, there are a couple of ways to look at that reading from Isaiah that Jesus gave in the Nazareth synagogue so many years ago. You can look at it as almost a myth, part of the story of Jesus, part of the story about Him who came from heaven, who ministered for three years when he was thirty years old, and then He returned to Heaven, the Messiah having arrived, acted, and left, to return again someday, as almost a dream.
Or you can look at that reading as Jesus standing up in front of the entire world and telling the entire world that these things will begin to happen on that morning in Nazareth, but they will continue to happen around the world, that the world has changed, that His sacrificial death and resurrection changed things, that Messiah did not leave the earth but only changed His form, that His body changed from being the physical body of one man to being the composite body made of dozens and hundreds and thousands and millions of people, including you and me and everyone in this room. And if you look at the reading that way, then it becomes something beautiful and powerful and eternal and tells us today what we should be doing when we awaken from our reality dream and look at the world as it truly is, the Real reality of God’s immediate and present existence upon this world, because God is with us, standing right with us in this room right now, God’s Holy Spirit is moving amongst us, and the bells of your alarm clock are going off, wake up, wake up, wake up!
And so let me ask you to join me as we awaken from our reality dream from under those warm flannel sheets of comfort and awaken to the spiritually true meaning of this world, as we rub the sleep from our eyes and look at the REAL world, as we stand up out of our seats and stand together with Jesus Christ, who is present in this room today and read what Isaiah prophesied, together as different parts of the Body of Christ:
“The Spirit of the Lord is on me,
because he has anointed me
to proclaim good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners
and recovery of sight for the blind,
to set the oppressed free,
to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”
Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.
For you were the poor in sprit who needed to hear good news.
You were the prisoners who were bound by sin and your own comfort.
You were the people who were blind who now can see,
And you were the ones who were oppressed by the culture of this world.
This IS the year of the Lord’s favor, for you have awakened.
Are you awake? With Christ’s help, will you go forth and break free from the dreamworld, like our dog Brownie breaking free from the soft cocoon of snow around your house or the Jews breaking free from their Babylonian captivity? Will you spread the Good News about the freedom that Christ gives?
Play your part, do your part, be your part of Christ body, and it will happen.
“Ho, Ho, Ho, I’m Santa Claus!”
“Right, buddy!. I’m calling 911 right now, so don’t try anything.”
Deep down, we don’t really want excitement. We like what we are doing – and what we aren’t doing, because our lives are pretty comfortable and our culture encourages us to be comfortable. We would prefer to sleep in our spiritual journey, because climbing spiritual mountains is hard work. It is as though we are living in a spiritual dream, where the real world of work and television, and Mountaineer basketball and school and housework and home repairs are the dream we see in front of us, our life flows by us and we are standing apart from it, detached like we are in a dream – and yet somewhere, somehow, we know that there is an even more real world of angels and demons and God and devil and souls trapped in despair and oppression and we hold the keys to setting all of them free, but our dreamworld of reality keeps us from doing anything. And that dreamworld of reality is so inviting, for it is like walking through the world on codeine, we go through each day and everything is predictable, the world doesn’t change much, and we don’t ever do anything to change the world around us. And that is inviting and comfortable.
And our culture helps us to know our place in the world, we know who we are, we know what we are able to do – and we know that we decided a long time ago who we would never be. And so we sit here on Sunday mornings, ready to put some money in a basket if I ask you to, or perhaps we’ll even come to a special Bible study, but only if it seems particularly interesting, and we don’t like being made uncomfortable, because, after all, we’re just ordinary people and that’s all we’ll ever be until we die, and we don’t want to be anything else. And then when we die, Amos-Carvelli or Burnside Funeral Home will come and get us, a hundred or so people will visit with our family one evening later that week, and we’ll be buried at Floral Hills or maybe cremated because we don’t want to be a financial burden on our family.
But yet – every once in a while, one of those Bible readings gets into our heart. Like maybe the one today about us each being a part of Christ’s body. At first glance it’s a nice metaphor, a figure of speech, a nice way to feel part of the church, a way for us to each understand that we each have a role to play, blah, blah, bland, but what if there is something a bit more there. What if there is something just a bit deeper in all that talk about us being part of Christ’s body? What if there is something intensely real about it?
For you know, there is more to it. At the Last Supper, Jesus talked for quite a while about the Holy Spirit, and one of the things He said was that He had to go away for the Holy Spirit to arrive and the Spirit would guide us into all truth. And if you think about that for a while, you begin to realize that it means that in some way, the Holy Spirit and Jesus Christ are one and the same substance, and that is what the early church fathers concluded and every significant theologian since then, that God the Son and God the Holy Spirit are part of the same substance that is shared by God the Father. The Holy Spirit is made of God-stuff.
And that means, if we are part of Christ’s body, the church, then since we share the Holy Spirit from our baptisms, we are now partly made of God-stuff, and this body metaphor is more than just a figure of speech, and there is something real to this idea that we are all parts of Christ’s body, and when you add in the effect of eating Jesus body and drinking His blood every month, perhaps there is something very real to this idea. Because Jesus was God walking on earth and He sent His Holy Spirit to us to replace Him on earth and we took Jesus into our hearts when we received the Holy Spirit – WOW! That means that there is now a part of God working inside of us and we aren’t just ordinary people anymore and WOW! We have some of the power of God to create new realities inside us!
And sometimes, when part of our body is dragging under the load, just as Jesus’ back was bent under the load of the cross, other parts of the body have to step up and help out, as His legs helped out His back that day. And that means that as long as we belong to His Body, we are never, ever alone, for all the other members of the Body are here to surround us and lift us up.
Our world’s culture has bound us down. We are told we need to have a large house, two cars, a debt load, to work to make money, to have expensive phones, to have a retirement plan, to have health insurance. We are told this by every advertisement we see, by every article we read, by every politician that panders to us and promises us that we can live a better life with a better income if only you will vote for him or her, and we are told that the television show or the Facebook page or the movie or the video game or earning money is the way to spend our time. And the result is that we have gradually, gradually gone to sleep in our spirit, we have bought the entire story about what reality is supposed to be like, that this life is the end-all and the be-all of existence, that what we see around us, especially what we see in the world of entertainment and the struggle for money is the reality that we should aspire to, and we have bought the whole story and our spirits have gone to sleep in this dreamworld that was created by Hollywood and the advertising people and the networks and the people who sell things. And so the reality of God’s beauty has become a dream and the dream of Hollywood has become our reality and our spirit has gone to sleep. Zzzzzzzz.
And so perhaps we need to stop spiritually sleeping. Perhaps we need to wake up this part of Christ’s body and begin to seriously do some work for God’s Mission because we have part of God working inside of us! And some parts of this body are doing good work. But we’re always tired, we like the dreamworld, and the REAL reality of God’s beauty would require us to radically change the way we live, like my friends who tithe 50% of their income, or my other friends who left their comfortable home in Ohio and moved to Mexico even though they didn’t speak Spanish just because every time they asked God what they should do, they were told, “Move to Mexico and become missionaries” and they did and they have brought thousands of people to know the Lord. They woke up to the REAL reality of God’s beauty, that they can tap into the power of God.
Or my friends who opened up their home to two homeless people, who live with them and share their cats. Or our former babysitter who, after getting married and having several small children, went with her husband to Afghanistan not because of military reasons, but because they wanted to share the love of Christ in that country with the people there. Or my other friends who sold their home, moved to North Carolina, and who fix up donated computers for missionaries. They want to wake other people up!
Or another friend who travels to Liberia every year and installs solar powered refrigeration systems in medical clinics because the power is so unreliable it can’t keep the vaccines reliably refrigerated. Or still another friend who repairs airplanes for Jungle Aviation and Radio Service so the missionaries can receive supplies in New Guinea. Or another who writes Christian electronic books in Spanish to bring children to know Jesus. And there’s a guy I know who heard another fellow in his church needed a kidney, so he was tested and he was a match, so he donated his kidney, part of his body, to the other guy, but of course, they were both part of the same Body of Christ. One part supports the other part.
Or another guy who goes to Haiti once a year because what he saw there broke his heart and so he puts aside $400 a month so he can visit every year for a week and help out. Or the woman I know who buys the food and cooks and feeds about 50 people at her church one Saturday morning a month because she can do it, and then there are her friends who speak to the people about what Jesus has done in their lives: "Wake up!" and they have all tapped into the Real reality that God the Holy Spirit is working inside them and God wants them to act like Jesus would act because they are the Body of Christ on this earth, changing the world into something wonderful, and that living in the dreamworld of the culture isn’t what they were created to do, even though they were once ordinary people just like us.
For you see folks, there are a couple of ways to look at that reading from Isaiah that Jesus gave in the Nazareth synagogue so many years ago. You can look at it as almost a myth, part of the story of Jesus, part of the story about Him who came from heaven, who ministered for three years when he was thirty years old, and then He returned to Heaven, the Messiah having arrived, acted, and left, to return again someday, as almost a dream.
Or you can look at that reading as Jesus standing up in front of the entire world and telling the entire world that these things will begin to happen on that morning in Nazareth, but they will continue to happen around the world, that the world has changed, that His sacrificial death and resurrection changed things, that Messiah did not leave the earth but only changed His form, that His body changed from being the physical body of one man to being the composite body made of dozens and hundreds and thousands and millions of people, including you and me and everyone in this room. And if you look at the reading that way, then it becomes something beautiful and powerful and eternal and tells us today what we should be doing when we awaken from our reality dream and look at the world as it truly is, the Real reality of God’s immediate and present existence upon this world, because God is with us, standing right with us in this room right now, God’s Holy Spirit is moving amongst us, and the bells of your alarm clock are going off, wake up, wake up, wake up!
And so let me ask you to join me as we awaken from our reality dream from under those warm flannel sheets of comfort and awaken to the spiritually true meaning of this world, as we rub the sleep from our eyes and look at the REAL world, as we stand up out of our seats and stand together with Jesus Christ, who is present in this room today and read what Isaiah prophesied, together as different parts of the Body of Christ:
“The Spirit of the Lord is on me,
because he has anointed me
to proclaim good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners
and recovery of sight for the blind,
to set the oppressed free,
to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”
Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.
For you were the poor in sprit who needed to hear good news.
You were the prisoners who were bound by sin and your own comfort.
You were the people who were blind who now can see,
And you were the ones who were oppressed by the culture of this world.
This IS the year of the Lord’s favor, for you have awakened.
Are you awake? With Christ’s help, will you go forth and break free from the dreamworld, like our dog Brownie breaking free from the soft cocoon of snow around your house or the Jews breaking free from their Babylonian captivity? Will you spread the Good News about the freedom that Christ gives?
Play your part, do your part, be your part of Christ body, and it will happen.
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