Easter 6, 2024: Acts 10, 1 John 5, John 15

"Can anyone forbid water for baptizing these people who have received the Holy Spirit just as we have?" Peter’s rhetorical question displays the radical hospitality of the gospel. He is talking about the oppressor, the household of Cornelius, the Roman centurion. All are welcome in the capacious house of the gospel, into the new humanity of the children of God. What is that? Or rather, who is that new human? The reading from 1 John spells it out. Everyone who believes that Jesus is the Christ is a child of God… By this we know that we love the children of God, when we love God and obey his commandments. For this is the love of God, that we keep his commandments. Jesus spells out that commandment of joy in today’s gospel: This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. The life of the church into which we enter by baptism is the community formed and ever enlivened by the loving Holy Spirit of Jesus and his Abba-Father. The reality of our new humanity does not depend, then, on worldly status or patronage, popularity or power; none of the polarizations of this world count any longer. Indeed desire for any of these things actually corrupts its reality. Its reality is the Spirit uniting people together in the love of Jesus to the glory of God the Father.

Let us ponder and fully digest that summary statement of our three lessons today on this sixth Sunday of the Easter season. The reality of the church is the Spirit uniting people together in the love of Jesus to the glory of God the Father. Peter recognizes the loving Holy Spirit at work in the amazing fact that these Gentiles were speaking in tongues and extolling God. It’s easy here for us to get hung up by the reported phenomena of speaking in tongues when the point is rather that it is the unclean, the ungodly, the Gentiles who are praising the God of Israel. What this ecstatic phenomena consists in is extolling God. That is the substance of the gift of the Spirit who pours the love of Jesus into human hearts so that in turn they sing love in praise to the God of love.

This Spirit-given love may take as the many forms as there are human cultures and be expressed in as many tongues as there are languages. What is decisive is that all human boasting ceases and instead hearts are lifted up to the Lord in prayer, praise and thanksgiving. That is the sure and certain sign that it is the Holy Spirit who has fallen on hearers of the gospel word. Baptism into the unity of the new humanity of God comes about when we no longer boast of our diverse identities, regarding them as superior to others, giving heed to a lust for domination, but rather in the power of the Spirit united with Jesus and thus to one another, we glorify the God of Israel who has included us in his outreaching love.

This knowledge of the Spirit’s movement provides us with a criterion for discernment, for testing the spirits to see whether they are indeed of God. Any spirit who inspires human boasting of one’s own superiority over others is not the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit of Jesus and his Abba-father is the Spirit who turns us out of our preoccupation with entrenched worldly identities, status, heritage or power towards love for others to the glorification of God. Just this straightening out, this rectification of our human selves, reorienting life in the direction of mutual love is the Holy Spirit at work. And the Holy Spirit does this work by uniting each and every believer to Jesus Christ and through Jesus Christ to every other believer, one and all united in the praise of God. This community of disciples, united in the love of Jesus, is the divine ferment in this world, under the radar of its powers and authorities, of the aborning kingdom of God.

In what does this union with Jesus Christ consist? How are we to recognize it? To begin with, Jesus says today: You did not choose me, but I chose you. See, that is the end of all human boasting – and especially any ecclesiastical boasting – when in true humility we acknowledge that our faith and discipleship does not come about by our own initiative and power, but rather by the great choice of Jesus Christ for us one and all. Today he voices that great choice: Greater love has no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends. This is what Jesus has done in choosing his disciples. So he continues, I have appointed you that you should go and bear fruit and that your fruit should abide; so that whatever you ask the Father in my name, he may give it to you. This I command you, to love one another.

There is a purpose for us, then, in the great and saving choice that Jesus made for one and for all. The promise that prayer will be heard is not a blank check. The instruction is to pray in accord with God’s purpose. The purpose is that his love, which has sought and found and grasped you just as every other believer, should channel through you to unite in love with others for whom this truly good Shepherd has also laid down his life. Believers need to know this purpose of God! They need to know this purpose in the love of Jesus that there joy may be full.  They need to know this because, he says, no longer do I call you servants, for the servant does not know what his master is doing; but I have called you friends, for all that I have heard from my Father I have made known to you.

The servant just follows orders without knowing the purpose or intention. But a friend knows the choice of Jesus and the purpose of Jesus’s choice so that the friend of Jesus, filled with the Holy Spirit, knowingly cooperates in the purposes of God the Father. So, just as the Holy Spirit unites us to Jesus and his love, Jesus refers us back to the Holy Spirit who makes us into his friends, knowing the purpose of God the Father who has sent the Son to us and, then, the Holy Spirit upon us that we intelligently and actively cooperating with the purpose of God to the glory of God and true human good.

Peter asked, "Can anyone forbid water for baptizing these people who have received the Holy Spirit just as we have?" We have heard how 1 John answers: Who is it that overcomes the world but whoever believes that Jesus is the Son of God?  Such remarkable faith issuing in the glorification of God, the Abba Father of this Son Jesus, is the militant work of the Holy Spirit victoriously overcoming the darkness of this world. As born anew by faith, our intelligent and active cooperation in the community of Christian love is imperative – it is a gospel commandment! – in the Holy Spirit’s battle against the malice and injustice, the apathy and lovelessness of the unbelieving world. The community of disciples bound together in self-giving love is both a refuge against the darkness of this world and a beacon-light of witness shining in it to point out the better way.

In just this Holy Spirit light, Jesus’s commandments are not burdensome. They would be burdensome for a mere servant who works by rote, to be sure. How different, however, for those who are born of God! Newly born by the work of the Holy Spirit uniting them with the love of Jesus and through that with love for one another,  just this friend of Jesus, no longer servant, but friend overcomes the world and already tastes the victory that overcomes the world in our Spirit-supplied faith.

Many of us in today’s church are discouraged and alarmed by the decline of our institutions. There are good reasons and bad reasons for this decline which faithful people need patiently to sort through so that we discern the divine criticism of our Christian failures from the hostile attacks of enemies, gleefully kicking us when we are down. The place for that is the meeting room where there can be give-and-take and discussion rather than from the pulpit, where the word of God is to be proclaimed. Yet to all who are discouraged and in dismay about the state of the church, Jesus concludes today, These things I have spoken to you, that my joy may be in you.

The joy of Jesus is this. Baptism is the radical hospitality of the gospel. Baptism is the work of the Holy Spirit converting us from self-preoccupied suspicion and coldhearted lovelessness. Baptism unites us with Jesus Christ, the good Shepherd who laid down his life for the sheep so that there be one flock, one shepherd. The baptized rise up in the power of the Spirit to knowing and active cooperation in the outreaching ingathering purpose of God to create caring communities of Christ’s people, the little yeast that leavens the whole lump of the surrounding world. Our labor in the Lord is not in vain, then, nor is it joyless drudgery. We take to heart and bear in mind: These things I have spoken to you, that my joy may be in you. In this joy we persevere, blessing the tie that binds our hearts in Christian love. Amen, so be it, Amen.

Easter 5, 2024: Acts 8; 1 John 4; John 15

See, here is water! What is to prevent my being baptized? So queries the Ethiopian eunuch upon understanding how Jesus became that suffering servant of the Lord of whom Isaiah wrote, the One on whom was laid the iniquities of us all to free us from them. The story of Philip evangelizing the Ethiopian on a chariot ride is illustrative of Luke's purpose in the Book of Acts; he describes the Spirit’s Easter explosion as early Christianity streamed out to the nations of the earth. Upon hearing Easter’s strange but astonishingly good news of a sheep led to the slaughter, of a silent lamb before its shearer in whose humiliation for our sakes justice was denied, the eunuch asked for baptism. He henceforth wants to be identified with the Lamb who was slain for him by the baptismal sign of death by drowning. He wants to be baptized. What is to prevent my being baptized? he asks. Nothing! No barriers of race, nationality or sexuality block him. He gets to be baptized.

Now, notice that the entire episode in Luke’s telling has been orchestrated by the Holy Spirit. See, no one can say Jesus is Lord except by the Holy Spirit. Whether one looks back at one’s baptism as an infant or as an adult looks forward to baptism, in either case the event of our conversion to Christ is the good and gracious work of the Holy Spirit. That is essential so that even in our own precious personal faith we do not rely on ourselves to put our faith in faith, but rely solely on the gracious work of God the Holy Spirit who binds us to Christ to the glory of God the Father. To be sure, then, the story indicates that there could be something to prevent one from being baptized. Without the Spirit at work in human hearing and understanding the good news of the Christ who lived for all who are poor in power and died for those dead in their sins, and thus in faith wanting this oddly good news to be valid also for oneself, baptism might be withheld on the grounds that it has been reduced to nothing but a human ceremony, shorn of its divine meaning and purpose.

One thinks here of merely ceremonial christenings of newborns. Years ago I remember getting a random phone call from someone I did not know asking me if “he could get his kid done in my church.” Of course, it’s not “my” church but Christ’s church, of which I am a faithful steward as a called an ordained minister. When I said that it’s possible but I require counseling for parents who present their children from baptism, he quickly ended the conversation. I’m suspect he kept looking for easier clergy through the phone book listings. Of course, for many centuries we have baptized little ones brought forward by parents or guardians who solemnly promise that the baptized child will be raised to understand the good news of Christ so that by the time of their confirmation in adolescence, they may affirm by personal and public confession that they indeed want this good news of Jesus crucified and risen to be valid for themselves. The ministry of the church thus has the holy duty to instruct parents and guardians in the promises that they are making on behalf of the child. For centuries prior, the custom had been for confirmands to receive their first communion on this occasion.

There are some outspoken in recent days who in the name of "radical hospitality" advocate offering Holy Communion to anyone who attends the worship service, regardless of faith, baptism, or any other “legalistic,” as they claim, requirement. This is wrongheaded. Holy Baptism is the radical hospitality of the gospel, radical because in it we are spiritually crucified with Christ that we may henceforth and daily die as members bound to the malice and injustice of the old and passing age to rise as members of the body of Christ, harbingers of God’s new humanity. Holy Communion nurtures the baptized in their new Christian lives as disciples of the Lord Jesus. It is meant for the nurture of Christian living. Whenever one communes, indeed, one joins in proclaiming the death of Christ until he comes again. Partaking of Christ’s self-donation of his body and blood, one ever freshly takes the cross of Christ upon oneself for the daily struggle against sin in oneself and for greater righteousness in one's world. One does not "have" to be baptized to commune as if some legalistic hoop to jump through. Rather, it is the baptized who want to commune with Christ and his people. The radical hospitality of the Christian message is on display in the story of the Ethiopian eunuch, who earnestly asked, What is to prevent my being baptized?

These advocates advertise communion as offering "a little taste of grace" to seekers and visitors. In reality, this is grace so cheap they can hardly give it away. Certainly, unbaptized seekers and visitors should be heartily welcomed at the Eucharistic assembly of the faithful in appropriate ways. But this marketing of Holy Communion as a little taste of grace" is a profanation; it is a trivialization because grace is never little.  Grace is always hugely, indeed altogether radically transformative as seen in the story of the Ethiopian. Grace transforms by uniting us with the death of Jesus for us in order that we rise with Jesus to newness of life. Just this is the radical love of God captured by the word "grace." So the First Letter of John testifies today: God is love. In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him. In this is love, not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the expiation for our sins. Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another.

The precious statement that, "God is love," is at the heart of our Christian faith and just so it dare not be trivialized. It is trivialized when “love” becomes a platitude, a cliché really, a religious bromide, a conscience-dulling narcotic, a marketing gimmick that obscures the holy battle of the God of love against our lovelessness, a divine battle engaged in baptism to rescue us from the daunting powers of sin, death and devil. The love of God is trivialized when pulpits offer a clichéd love of mere permissiveness. But all we get in this way is a cheap covering for our sins to produce a deceived but easy conscience, as Dietrich Bonhoeffer famously warned. The point being made in 1 John today is that radical love, the creative love of God's grace, is not cheap but costly. It costs God to love real, not imaginary, but the real sinners of which we and our world consist.

May I convince you? How often in fact are we tempted to give up on this world when we are confronted again and again in dismay and disgust at the sorry spectacle of human malice and injustice. How much more so – think of the formative story of Noah and the flood in the book of Genesis – might our Creator, seeing our human wickedness, resolve to eradicate us as hopeless and beyond repair? Indeed, how much more so might we in our own dismay and disgust be tempted to pull the trigger of eradication on our enemies, perceived and real, which in today's world would surely amount to mutually assured destruction?

Now, the truly radical love of God confronts just this well-justified dismay and disgust by the costly way of Jesus's expiation or our sins. If our Christian love is to bear one another's burdens, the divine love of Christ, which is the root of our little Christian love, is that before God he bore the sin of the world that God might once and for all judge and condemn our lovelessness and bury it forever in his tomb, ever giving us a new and fresh start on life. That is what this word, "expiation," means. That is why at the conclusion of the Eucharistic rite we sang the Agnus Dei, "Lamb of God, you take away the sin of the world, grant us your peace, amen."

And just this proclamation together with Holy Spirit transformative faith, is how the baptized, nurtured at the Lord's Supper, remain rooted in the true vine who is Christ. Here we see again why the “little taste of grace” pitch is so much false advertising, reflecting a sorry false consciousness among its advocates. Today Jesus says something that ought to sober them up – or rather, sober us all up:  I am the true vine, and my Father is the vinedresser. Every branch of mine that bears no fruit, he takes away, and every branch that does bear fruit he prunes, that it may bear more fruit. We play with fire when we cheapen grace. Those who take and eat at this meal, I said, renew themselves in Christ by taking his cross upon themselves. That is what Jesus speaks about under the figure of the vinedresser who cuts out the dead branches and prunes with sharp shears even the fruit bearing ones. You can’t just have a little taste of grace and walk away from it. Because grace is huge and radical and life transformative. Therefore we hear this warning: If a man does not abide in me, he is cast forth as a branch and withers; and the branches are gathered, thrown into the fire and burned. This warning applies more to the hawkers of cheap grace than to the poor souls that they have deceived.

But for us who have wanted to be baptized into Christ, the promises of the text we have heard today from Jesus are far more encouraging. You are already made clean by the word which I have spoken to you. Abide in me, and I in you. For us it is not a threat, but rather a clear and clarifying, thus empowering explanation. As the branch cannot bear fruit by itself, unless it abides in the vine, neither can you, unless you abide in me. I am the vine, you are the branches. He who abides in me, and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit, for apart from me you can do nothing. Nothing at all prevents anyone from being baptized but a willful and stubborn desire to stay at home in the world of malice and injustice. Being baptized, we are united with Christ who is the living source of any righteousness and love that we in fact perform. Truth be told, most of the time we don’t even notice, because the fruit of the Holy Spirit in our lives of righteousness and love emerges organically from the vine, Christ, in whom we are grafted. How utterly natural, then, for baptized Christians to glory in Jesus’s final word to us today:  By this my Father is glorified, that you bear much fruit, and so prove to be my disciples. So by radical grace, we baptized are grafted into the vine who is Christ to bear the fruit of his love and righteousness into the world to the glory of God.

Easter 4, 2024: Acts 4, 1 John 3, John 10

In the joyful confidence of the Easter message of the vindication of the crucified Jesus, let’s face up to some real difficulties today. Namely this, if you would want to cause offense in today’s world, just recite out loud and assert in public the conclusion of Peter’s sermon this morning, And there is salvation in no one else [than Jesus Christ of Nazareth], for there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved.

To be sure, Easter people are not ashamed of the gospel. How could we be? But everything here depends it being the gospel’s offense and on our getting that offense right, not giving offense with an arrogant claim to our religious or cultural superiority. To the contrary, in a social environment where so much is propaganda being spun from every angle, we know that Christ died for all because God wants all to be saved. We want rightly to avoid the hateful appearance of damning to hell sheep not of our fold. We are constrained by a conscientious Christian reservation, concerned that brashly quoting this easily misunderstood word of Peter could be just one more exercise in self-serving propaganda alongside all the others out there. Is our proclamation of the gospel in fact just propaganda? Is evangelism proselytism? I don’t think so and neither should you. But let’s see why. By facing the difficulty, we have occasion to dig deeper for a better understanding of Peter’s claim for no other name and a wiser approach to proclaiming the Easter victory of the Lord Jesus also in today’s world. Our lessons today help us do that.

Some years back the late theologian George Lindbeck proposed a thought experiment. He asked about the ethical conditions in which a claim like Peter’s about no other name could be true or for that matter false, or rather falsified. His point was that the Easter proclamation is not simply an intellectual proposition but also a performance, that is to say an ethical act. For it was God’s ethical act to hand his righteous Son over into the hands of sinners to bear away their sin and the sin of all the world, in this way to find the path forward from the divine judgment of love on lovelessness to the mercy of love for all us unloving ones. This is the divine proclamation of the gospel, both God’s assertion of salvation in Jesus and God’s performance of surpassing love. Just so, we too may speak the Easter word of God.  But we can also falsify it. To illustrate this important point about falsifying, Lindbeck asked about a medieval crusader lopping off the head of an infidel with his sword and crying out, “Jesus is Lord!” The question he asked is whether this statement true under those ethical conditions. Or do those conditions of aggression in fanatical religious warfare betray the content of the statement, Jesus is Lord, and thus make it practically false? Because Jesus is emphatically not that kind of Lord?

Lindbeck’s parable parallels the teaching from the First Letter of John which we have heard today: By this we know love, that he laid down his life for us; and we ought to lay down our lives for the brethren. But if anyone has the world's goods and sees his brother in need, yet closes his heart against him, how does God's love abide in him? Little children, let us not love in word or speech but in deed and in truth. Our joyful Easter faith, so our Gospel lesson today tells, is in the good shepherd [who] lays down his life for the sheep; it is faith in the self-sacrificing, not self-serving love of Jesus that is operative in our corresponding performances of love, taking form in our little echoes of the good Shepherd’s great love in caring for the needy. The proclamation of the saving love of Jesus and the performance of it are a package deal: This is his commandment, that we should believe in the name of his Son Jesus Christ and love one another. One betrays the faith, falsifies faith, even when -- no, especially when-- a statement like there is no other name under heaven, is deployed insensitively, let alone purposely to express one’s own religious superiority, to disrespect or denigrate others as inferiors, let alone to incite hatred instead of love. Rather, we, believers in the divine love named by the name of Jesus are to hate our own lovelessness just as we love all neighbors, even our enemies.

Does this love for others extend to those outside the community of Christian faith? Because it is Jesus, friend of sinners, healer of all in need of a physician, champion of any who are poor in power, Jesus who in final solidarity bore the sin of our entire world on the cross to bear it away to be left behind, buried forever in his tomb, this Jesus, unlike all the rest of us in his self-donating love for lesser and unworthy beings, because it is Jesus who is acclaimed Lord we can truthfully say that there is no other name under heaven given by which we must be saved, where the little pronoun, “we,” includes all and excludes no one from the scope of his saving love.

In this light, let’s take a second look at Peter’s sermon this morning. Peter it is on trial for naming the name of Jesus when he told a crippled beggar that he had neither silver nor gold to give him, but what he did have he would freely share. So, he declared, “In the name of Jesus Christ, stand up and walk!” And the man did. For this naming the name, Jesus, and doing a corresponding act of salvation in its power, Peter is now on trial. Peter is on trial for performing ethically a powerful act of mercy and what is especially disruptive, for giving healing freely as pure gift. These are practices which threaten the lucrative religion business of the temple moneychangers. You see, the Temple establishment in Jerusalem was in theological and political cahoots with the Roman occupiers. They were not interested in something as fantastic in their eyes as “salvation.” Unlike many other Jews of the time, the Sadducees controlling the Temple had no use for the idea of the resurrection and did not look kindly on the little resurrection in their midst in Peter’s healing of a cripple. For them, the only realistic future lay in the physical perpetuation of the temple. If cripples and other broken lives could eke out a meager living by begging in its precincts that was all realistically that could be hoped for. Salvation just was not on the agenda. Indeed proclaiming and enacting God’s healing in Jesus’s name was perceived as a threat, just as the healer named Jesus actually had been, whom they nailed to the tree.

We have now put our finger on the genuine offense of the gospel of the resurrection of the crucified Jesus. The key insight from a more careful look at our passage today is that not everyone is looking for the salvation of which Peter speaks, not even the crippled man expected it. How many people today do you know who are troubled about, looking for, or concerned with salvation? Not many, I venture, excepting those few poor souls who have been traumatized by ruthless, cruel, fire-and-brimstone propaganda posing as preaching in toxic forms of contemporary Christianity. To be sure, many people are looking for some kind of liberation, or therapy, or even justice but they are not looking for these things from God the creator, so inevitably they fall for propaganda marketing some human project of self-salvation. So here comes the genuine offense of the Peter’s proclamation of no other name: Will you be the sinner for whom Christ died? Will you therefore live your life now banking all on the hope of his resurrection?

When Peter affirms that there is no other name under heaven given by which we must be saved, it is a claim composed of two parts: first, that the name, Jesus, refers to the single shepherd of our human history who laid down his life for the sheep and second, that what he gives us in this way is the salvation of God. These two are proclaimed together by Peter as news, good news, hitherto unheard of news. Unexpected because not everyone is asking for the salvation of God and even fewer are expecting to be given the salvation of God as a gift, let alone a gift performed in a self-sacrificing act of love for those otherwise helpless and unworthy. We understand well what we are saying if we repeat Peter’s claim when, and only when, we know ourselves as those helpless and unworthy who have no claim in ourselves to be better than any others but are ourselves the spiritually crippled, begging for wholeness. Why, if I must be saved by the self-giving love of God in Jesus Christ, who am I to exclude any others?? How, then, can I not like Peter freely share what I have received, the saving love of Jesus?

How then are we today to proclaim this very message of Peter’s, particularly after some rather notorious failures of Christianity in our history to live the love which the faith of Christ names? Lindbeck quite intentionally used the historical example of the Crusades in his little parable; as well he could have mentioned colonial depredations of indigenous populations by later day European Protestants and Catholics alike, and many other failures. The great disasters of the 20th century, Hitler, Hiroshima and Stalin, were all perpetuated from the soil of allegedly Christian civilizations. Christians today bear the heavy burden of these historical failures. To be sure, real enemies of Christianity deploy this shameful history in their own propaganda to discredit Christianity. But we dare not respond in kind, perpetuating arrogance with more lies and half-truths. Rather we are to courageously discern through the fog of anti-Christian propaganda the accusation of God against our own failures to believe in the name of his Son Jesus Christ and love one another.  In just this careful discernment we come to our present challenge. How do we publicly proclaim the gospel of the blessed and inclusive finality of Jesus Christ when it can easily sound like more of the same old Christian triumphalism, i.e. as if the Easter victory of Jesus was our victory, the demonstration of the superiority of our civilization or our religion over competitors, rather than God’s astounding victory for all of us ungodly?

By this we shall know that we are of the truth, and reassure our hearts before him whenever our hearts condemn us; for God is greater than our hearts, and he knows everything. Guilt can be paralyzing and troubled consciences don’t have any idea what to do that does not make matters worse. If that guilt blocks arrogant triumphalism, it is the strange fruit but certain work of God. Yet God is greater than his own sharp critique of his own people. Indeed, it is as Christians that we ever need a Savior and receive the salvation of God who is faithful to forgive our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness, if only we confess them. We are given a fresh start every time we pass through the death of divine critique to the newness of life of faith operative in love. Beloved, if our hearts do not condemn us, we have confidence before God; and we receive from him whatever we ask, because we keep his commandments and do what pleases him. All who keep his commandments abide in him, and he in them. And by this we know that he abides in us, by the Spirit which he has given us.

Evangelism? Proclamation of the victory of God in Christ for us all? Here is the key. It is the Good Shepherd who has laid down his life for the sheep who speaks his own good news. It is risen! He who is risen speaks in and through our chastened and humble works of faith active in love, bearing witness to him in word and deed.  The mission is his, this charge I have received from my Father, he says.  He protects the flock, by saving even from their own sins, even betrayals of his name. And it is he who says I have other sheep that are not of this fold; I must bring them also, and they will heed my voice. So there shall be one flock, one shepherd. That is the mission of an evangelism that proclaims the victory of God for all in word and deed. So we do not proselytize but leave it to the Holy Spirit to call, gather, unite and enlighten the people of God on earth, harbinger of salvation. Critically clarified, that is sense of the claim that there is no other name given under heaven by which we must be saved.

As we sing, “Lift high the cross, the love of Christ proclaim, till all the world adore his sacred name.”

Easter III 2018: Luke 24, Acts 3, 1 John 3

Christ is Risen!

“What in the world is that?” That’s the question these astonished, or perhaps astounded, even better, confounded disciples, “startled and terrified” asked when from out of nowhere they were greeted with the words, Peace be with you. Luke tells us what they thought they were seeing—the Greek word is pneuma, the same word we translate as spirit, as in Holy Spirit—Luke tells us that they thought they were seeing a spirit. The New Revised Standard Version translates pneuma here as “ghost”—some of us are old enough to remember when we used to call the Holy Spirit the Holy Ghost. In the case of the Holy Spirit, the word pneuma is appropriate for he comes and goes like the wind, visible only in his effects. By contrast, the mysterious figure appearing to the disciples makes a point of showing them the wounds of crucifixion and while some were still in doubt, asks for and eats some broiled fish, expressly denying that he is a “ghost.” So that’s their question: what in the world is this confounding figure standing before them suddenly appearing in the closed room? What in the world is that?

It’s a pretty natural human question, isn’t it, which we put to unanticipated phenomena; when something new appears for which we don’t have ready categories with which to classify it, and thus comprehend it. That’s how human understanding works, by categorizing things, putting the unfamiliar into a general category or dictionary definition that masters the strangeness and gives us a way of approaching it. So when I was digging in the dirt around an old farmhouse on our property and noticed shiny, gleaming objects catching the sun, I asked, “What in the world is that?” The broken fragments didn’t immediately tell me what they were, but I understood when I recognized ceramic and glass, and said, “Aha, these are shards from pottery thrown out as trash in years gone by.” That’s how human understanding works. Our first question about something novel is, what in the world is that?

The ready category available to the first disciples was that of a spirit or ghost, because you know, dead is dead, buried in the tomb, end of story. What in the world is that? It’s a spirit, a ghost. Wrong! That is not the novelty here. Jesus does not first contradict the disciples’ supposition that what stands before them is a ghost. Rather, he wishes to change the question they are asking. They are asking, What is this? But the right question to ask is instead, Who is this? See, Jesus first asserts, It is I, and to verify his identity shows the scars on his body as the one who had been crucified. The one who is standing before you, in other words, is the very one who had been crucified. That is what is important to apprehend, not, that a dead person now appears—something we would ordinarily regard as a terrifying apparition—but rather that Jesus, friend of sinners, all the way to death, even death on a cross, presents himself with tidings of victory for them, Peace be with you. It is I.

Consequently in our Christian faith, the question who—who is God? Who is Jesus Christ? Who among the spirits blowing through humanity is the Holy One? Who, then, believes truly as a Christian?—the question who comes first and indeed it governs how we ask go on to ask the question, what? Only when we know that it is Jesus who is risen, Jesus who is the vindicated Son of his Abba Father’s love, Jesus who speaks to disciples victory peace and breathes on them his own Holy Spirit, only then can we begin correctly to think about what has occurred. Otherwise we will turn Easter into something ghostly and keep it at a distance when the crucified but risen Jesus rather would come into our midst to bring about a corresponding transformation of who we are.

In historical fact, the first great life and death struggle for the truth of the gospel in early Christianity had to do with some believers who insisted that the risen Jesus is a ghost. Our reading from First John today elsewhere refers to the deviant belief of those who deny that Jesus “has come in the flesh.” They think that the body with scarred hands and feet was at best a kind of masquerade that an otherworldly spirit temporarily adopted, only to discard the body like a shell when it was time for the spirit to go back to heaven. This false understanding of what the resurrection is, and as a result what our salvation brought by the risen Jesus is, happens when we let our natural question, What is it? overrule or disregard the plain text of the New Testament. As we have seen, however, Luke insists on first identifying who it is who is risen, the very One crucified for our sins, as Paul the Apostle would put it, in order that he be raised for our justification. Because we have no natural way of understanding what the risen Jesus truly is, we turn him into a ghost, and even worse, think that the salvation he brings would be for us also to turn into ghosts. But early Christianity rightly regarded this reasoning as a temptation. The salvation Jesus brings is, in the words of St. Paul, the redemption of our bodies. As an early Church Father put it, whatever of our humanity Jesus did not share in, that part would be without healing or salvation. Jesus, as Luther would put it, is and ever remains God deep in the flesh.

Consequently First John today similarly tells us, See what love the Father has given us, that we should be called children of God; and that is [who] we are. See again the priority of the question who. Jesus is risen—so who are you? You are the beloved children of God! We are God’s children now... but what we will be has not yet been revealed. See? The question, what, is not yet answered. It lies in the future, so the letter continues. What we know is this: when he is revealed we shall be like him, for we will see him as he is—in his risen glory.

Likewise today after the healing of the crippled man in the name of Jesus, Peter preaches by telling who Jesus is, what his name stands for. He says, The God of our ancestors has glorified his servant Jesus, whom you handed over and rejected… you rejected the holy and righteous one, and you killed the author of life, whom God raised from the dead.  See, this reversal of his destiny is the real wonder, mystery, and supremely good tiding of Easter, not simply that a dead one returns, however we might try to make sense of that, but instead that this particular one, Jesus, a man holy and righteous, a worker of healing and life, although rejected by this world of malice and injustice, has nevertheless been recognized, vindicated, honored, exalted, glorified by the Abba Father whom he trusted in death as in life. He does not die again, therefore, nor persist merely as a shadowy ghost but lives eternally to reign as one who has conquered real death not only for himself but for all who bodily identify with him and through him become beloved children of God.

Dear Christian friends, when we ask what we are, we can be tempted to pride or to despair. We are tempted to pride when we reduce the question about who we are to some attractive but false notion of what we are. I am a proud boy, boasting of my white supremacy. Or, what is the same,  I am my ethnicity, my language group, my gender, in proud solidarity with others in my class of the oppressed. Either way, I abandon my concrete and actual personhood into some stereotypical definition of what I am or supposed to be. I surrender my mind to some herd mentality and my conscience to the dictates of group think. Closer to painful home in the loneliness of such pseudo-identifications, however, we are tempted to despair if and when we see truly what we are, as such identities fail us: weak, faltering, in the blunt but honest language of a Luther, all too plainly sinful and perishing. If we try to answer the question of who we are with some bogus notion of what we are, we wander in the darkness, evermore alone.

But everything, ourselves too, is bathed in new light, transfigured, if instead we ask whose we are, children of the Father’s love; no, it does not yet appear what we shall be when we see Christ in risen glory.  That must wait. In the interim it suffices for the Christian life of imperishable joy already now to know who Christ is, who made all of us his own, even to death on a cross that we might all belong to Him now and forever. That is whose we are even as what we are is now destined for transformation to life eternal. Amen. Christ is Risen!

Easter 2, 2024 Acts 4, 1 John 1, John 20

An abundance of riches today from the Scriptures, so worthy of devout attention! Where to begin? We begin where Peter and the apostles began, actually where the Christian faith truly began, when with the great power the apostles gave their testimony to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus.

It helps us to know this beginning since apart from Easter morn, the cross would spread no shadow. Apart from Easter morn, the life, teaching, ministry, mission and holy obedience of Jesus would have been lost in the dustbin of history, Jesus forgotten like so many other Jews of his time crushed by cruel Roman crucifixion. Apart from Easter morn, then, there would be no power let loose in the world for living together in the true community of these first Christians, sharing their all with one another. Apart from Easter morn, we would not be gathered here today or on any other Sunday, the day of his resurrection and the dawning of our new creation. Apart from Easter morn, we could not know nor could we trust that God is light and in him is no darkness at all. If we could not trust God in this knowledge of the Easter faith, we would lack orientation and empowerment for living as children of the light in a world still so full of darkness – darkness, which would otherwise easily overcome us.

Indeed, we know from later in the Book of Acts that the early Christian community life was disrupted in fact by the penetration into it of the darkness of our world. There we read about religious hucksters who tried to buy the power of the Spirit and how greed and deceit subverted the sharing of goods in the community. In other words, as the community lived in the world shining as light in the darkness, the darkness struck back, assailed and penetrated it, corrupting it. In the world but not of the world, community in Christ found itself then and ever since on the very battle line between the God of the gospel and the forces of darkness.

That is why we have the striking back-and-forth today in the lesson from the first epistle of John. If we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus his Son cleanses us from all sin. So far so good. But John immediately adds: If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. You might wonder about this. Presumably you have not cussed out your parents today, not murdered nor committed adultery, not robbed a bank. Perhaps you coveted but you managed to keep your envy secret and under cover. So how is it that upright Christians like me and you can be called liars if we say that I have no sin? Alas, I am linked by my body to the structures of this world of darkness where malice and injustice prevail. I participate in them inevitably, whether I like it or not. I am thusly caught up in the tragic conflicts of the world where there is no exit, no escape. Indeed in this conflicted world I am partisan of some faction of contending forces and so I become complicit in its rivalries in malice and injustice. Whether or not I have personally committed a crime, I have certainly failed to love God with my all and to love all his creatures in and under God. I have omitted to do much good that I could. Thus I have sin.

But John continues: If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just, and will forgive our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness. Because we are walking in the light, we see ourselves in its light and thus discover the darkness not only around us but also still within us. This was our painful Lenten self-examination which reveals our continuing need of a Savior even as we now live as blessed, beloved enlightened children of God. So John concludes this back-and-forth discussion with his purpose statement: My little children, I am writing this to you so that you may not sin; but if any one does sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous; and he is the expiation for our sins, and not for ours only but also for the sins of the whole world. The Savior whom we need daily is Jesus Christ, the one righteous man in all our human history, he who loved God above all by loving us, even sinners living in darkmess, to the end. Just so he is the expiation -- that means the One who innocently bore the sin of the world to bury it all in his tomb, death of death and hell’s destruction. This is the great wonder of the resurrection of the crucified Jesus, how our creator sought and found the way to us in our true need in the amazing divine solidarity of creative love for all our tragically conflicted world. We may therefore take great comfort every Sunday when we sang the Agnus Dei at the end of the Eucharistic prayer. As we contemplate the sinfulness of our human world, seeing the darkness in the light of God, and even our complicities in it, we also see how profoundly this God of light has not abandoned nor forsaken us, neither our enemies. Our risen Jesus is advocate with the Father who perpetually intercedes for us one and all.

And so we come to a paradigmatic intercession of the risen Jesus in the well-known story of doubting Thomas – but also how it is so frequently misunderstood, as if what Thomas doubted was news of a miracle, whether a wonder like a corpse coming back to life can really happen. That is not what Thomas doubts. Thomas does not doubt that his fellow disciples have seen something. Thomas does not doubt that in general miracles can happen. What Thomas doubts is that the figure who wondrously appeared to the other disciples was in fact the same Jesus who was crucified. Thomas doubts the identity of Jesus who was crucified with the apparition his fellow disciples claimed to have beheld.

Why should he doubt just this? The world is full of pseudo-prophets and false messiahs who can do wonders to deceive, if possible, even the elect of God. The world is full of apparitions and hallucinations, even if nowadays we imagine exotic visitors from deep space or secret conspirators surveilling us, pulling the algorithm levers to beguile us. That is why Thomas demands to see the scars marking the crucifixion: to confirm that the risen one who had appeared is in fact the same Jesus, the crucified one.

Perhaps you have heard of the apocryphal Gospel of Thomas. While some scholars think it contains material that goes back to Jesus, this book in fact represents a deviant form of early Christianity that disputed the identity of Jesus who was crucified with the risen Christ. They in fact taught that Christ only seemed to be human and was in reality an invulnerable spirit who could not suffer crucifixion but had only used the body of Jesus temporarily as a mouthpiece to deliver oracles privately to a selected few. No wonder this Gospel of Thomas was excluded from the New Testament! It is perhaps the case, however, that the Gospel of John’s concluding story of doubting Thomas is written as a rebuttal to this form of early Christianity which in the name of Thomas denied that Jesus had come in the flesh. So in reply to that, the Gospel of John concludes with Thomas kneeling down before the crucified but the risen Jesus, one and the same person, confessing my Lord and my God! – the very picture of true Easter faith.

The identity of Jesus who is risen with Jesus who was crucified is the linchpin of our salvation. What we need to be saved from is the sin of the whole world of which we are part. What we need to pass through safely is the righteous judgment of God upon the sin of the world which ruins his good creation. What we need to be saved for is the beloved community of God in which sins are forgiven, light shines in the darkness, so that in principle and in power we share our all with one another in love for God above all and all creatures in and under God. This sharing is already the foretaste of eternal life and the fullness of salvation. Christ is risen! Hallelujah!

Easter Sunday 2024: Acts 10:36-43; I Corinthians 15:1-11; Mark 16: 1-8

What a strange ending! So the women went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them: and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid. No appearance of the Risen one? Flight, fear and silence? That’s it? The end? Sure doesn’t sound like Easter to me! Or a proper ending to the Gospel of Mark. Our other two lessons this morning sound far more familiar. Peter in the Book of Acts preaches: They put him to death by hanging him on a tree; but God raised him on the third day and made him manifest,  not to all the people but to us who were chosen by God as witnesses, who ate and drank with him after he rose from the dead. Likewise the apostle Paul: He was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures, and he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve. Then he appeared to more than five hundred brethren at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have fallen asleep.  Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles.  Last of all, as to one untimely born, he appeared also to me. So what gives with Mark’s strange ending where the women fled the tomb and said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid?

It surely did not sound like Easter to early readers of Mark’s Gospel. If you look in your Bibles, you will see long and short endings that early copyists appended to Mark’s strange conclusion, explaining how the story got out anyway. Attempts to fill in the story didn’t end there. Luke begins his Gospel referring to earlier attempts—undoubtedly meaning Mark’s—which told the story of Jesus in a “disorderly” way, which he would now be correcting. And Matthew fills in what’s missing in Mark by telling how it came about that the disciples saw the risen Jesus in Galilee, just as the young man in the tomb had told the women in Mark. Clearly, just as for us, Mark’s ending did not sound like Easter to a host of early readers.

And indeed there is much that is puzzling about Mark’s ending. To begin with, how would Mark ever have known that the women at the tomb fled in terror and said nothing, unless eventually they fessed up and the truth came out?  But why, then, did Mark end his “beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God,” as he titled his Gospel in the very first verse, in this enigmatic way? Let’s do some Easter Sunday detective work, since that evidently is how Mark wants to engage us, like a mystery novel.

Let’s look at the clues. First, on the way to the tomb the women are wondering who will roll away the great stone that covers the entrance to the tomb. Careful readers of Mark will recall that this question reflects exactly how this Gospel characterizes God, namely, as the One for whom all things are possible, hence, as the One who becomes manifest when human possibilities are at their end, who makes a way out of no way all the way back to parting the Red Sea for the cornered Hebrew slaves to escape the pursuing slavemasters. When the rich young man went away sad, and the disciples wondered who could ever be saved, if it were easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of God, Jesus sharply replied: “With human beings it is impossible. But not with God. With God all things are possible.” And in the Garden of Gethsemane, when Jesus in prayer surrendered to His Abba Father’s strange will that he be delivered into the hands of sinners to drink the bitter cup, Jesus had addressed him precisely as the one to whom all things are possible, hence trusting in the promise of the resurrection. From this, careful students of Mark’s Gospel see that the women’s perplexity about rolling away the stone is asking the single great question about God whose possibilities begin to manifest where human possibilities come to their natural or historical end, who makes a way out of no way.

Now some more clues. The young man in bright array, who greets the women at the tomb, certifies that they were seeking the body of Jesus who was crucified. He points to the place where the corpse was laid. This is an revelatory act of identification. Son of God, Christ, the Risen One – these are not free-floating titles that can apply to just anyone. Imagine if I preached something like this: “I’ve got good news. Someone’s risen from the dead, and conquered death. He’s on the move. He’s coming to finish the work, and his name is….Joseph Stalin!” Would that be good news? I don’t think so!

Everything depends on identifying the Risen One as Jesus of Nazareth, as Luke attests, anointed with the Holy Spirit and with power who went about doing good and healing all that were oppressed by the devil, for God was with him, who was crucified for our sins, as Paul says today, according to the Scriptures; that this Jesus is risen, friend of sinners and the hurting all the way to cross and grave -- that is good news indeed. Since he lives we are no longer dead in our sins! Since he lives, we too shall live and be healed of all our hurts! Good news for time and eternity.

The next clue. The young man in dazzling array addresses a message through the women to the disciples, singling out Peter. Peter, we had just learned in Mark’s Gospel, was the one who vowed to go to death with Jesus, but in the hour of trial denied his Lord, and wept bitterly. If you think about Peter’s leadership role in following Jesus all through Mark’s story, this denouement seems to be saying something like this: in one’s human power, it is impossible –and not only for the rich-- impossible to follow Jesus. Like the disciples, we too in human power are poor; we too betray, abandon, and deny Him who calls us to follow in the Spirit’s freedom and divine power. How remarkable, then, that the lead denier, Peter, is singled out on Easter morn as if to say, “Now, Peter, because of the life I lived for you and the death I died for you,  now you can rise up in divine power truly to follow me.” And so Peter would in the Spirit follow Jesus, as early church tradition has it, to his eventual death as a martyr at the command of the emperor Nero in Rome.

Next clue. It is not just geography, then, when the angel tells the women that they will see Jesus in Galilee. In Mark’s Gospel Galilee stands for this groaning earth, this sorrowing creation, where the anti-divine powers of sin and death cruelly dominate a captive humanity. This is the region into which Spirit-endowed Jesus first broke in to bind up the strong man, namely the devil, and recapture his goods, namely suffering humanity. This is where the risen Jesus is risen to be, not to be absent far away in some idle heaven, but to be present as the very man on the mission that he was and is and always will be – in the Galilee of your life too, then, as in mine!

Final clue. The readers of Mark’s Gospel have known from the first verse the mystery of Jesus’ identity as the Son of God. They have been made privy to the divine voice’s pronouncement at His baptism, “You are my beloved Son.” They have watched as the demons, exposed and threatened by His presence, cry out, revealing His secret, “You are the Son of God. You have come to destroy us.” They have witnessed how ineptly human beings in their own power identify Jesus -- how even the disciples who walked and talked with Jesus on the dusty byways continually got it wrong. Indeed, in Mark’s Gospel the only human being who correctly identifies Jesus as the Son of God is the executioner, upon seeing how Jesus died. This uncanny recognition is not, then, some clever human insight, but a divine disclosure, a revelation or apocalypse. Nor is it by accident that Mark mentions at just this moment that the veil of the temple separating the Holy of Holies from the profane and sinful world was torn in two. So the secret is disclosed: Jesus in true divine Sonship has laid down his life as a ransom for many, as if to say, “Dear reader! If you don’t get it here, at the cross, you won’t get it at all –even if you should see a risen One!” But the Risen One is and forever remains Jesus who once and for all was crucified, truly Son of God.

Mark’s readers, and we too, already believe in the Risen One. Indeed, Mark already has told a resurrection story, if you will, a resurrection appearance, though he has placed it in the middle of his Gospel at the Transfiguration. Here precisely the identity of Jesus, who knowingly and obediently heads to Jerusalem to suffer, to die, be buried, and to be raised again as the glorious Son of God, beloved delight of His Abba Father, has already been enunciated. The burning question Mark puts to us is not whether there is a Risen One somewhere, but whether the Risen One is Jesus who was crucified, hence the One who ever comes to meet us in the Galilees of this life.

I’ve got good news. Someone has risen from the dead, and conquered death for us. Now He is on the march to Galilee. He is coming to finish the job in Galilee. And his name is…Jesus.

Thanks be to GOD, Christ Jesus is risen.

The Sunday of the Passion: Homiletical comments on the Passion according to Mark

[In my youth “Palm Sunday” was some kind of strange celebration of the onset of Spring, a warm-up for Easter Sunday to come. Liturgical renewal came to the realization that the passion of Christ was eclipsed in this fashion and slowly the name of the Sunday has been changed to “The Sunday of the Passion.” It is typical now to read the passion narrative as a whole on this day. But I do not think it is good to read it without interpretive proclamation. Our parishioners are not monks in the monastery suited for “divine reading.” The law and the gospel need to be proclaimed from the text for them. On this day such proclamation should be short, sweet and to the point as I hope the following illustrates.]

The Conspiracy

It was two days before the Passover and the festival of Unleavened Bread. The chief priests and the scribes were looking for a way to arrest Jesus by stealth and kill him; for they said, "Not during the festival, or there may be a riot among the people."

The lethal conflict is with the temple establishment. The cleansing of the temple was the provocation that triggered the conspiracy. The issue is the true worship of God. In Holy Week we ask about ourselves: Is our house of worship a place of prayer for all peoples or have we turned it into a business or a private club?

Annointed beforehand for Burial

While he was at Bethany in the house of Simon the leper, as he sat at the table, a woman came with an alabaster jar of very costly ointment of nard, and she broke open the jar and poured the ointment on his head. But some were there who said to one another in anger, "Why was the ointment wasted in this way? For this ointment could have been sold for more than three hundred denarii, and the money given to the poor." And they scolded her. But Jesus said, "Let her alone; why do you trouble her? She has performed a good service for me. For you always have the poor with you, and you can show kindness to them whenever you wish; but you will not always have me. She has done what she could; she has anointed my body beforehand for its burial. Truly I tell you, wherever the good news is proclaimed in the whole world, what she has done will be told in remembrance of her." Then Judas Iscariot, who was one of the twelve, went to the chief priests in order to betray him to them. When they heard it, they were greatly pleased, and promised to give him money. So he began to look for an opportunity to betray him.

The person of Jesus is our priceless treasure wherever the church is neither a business nor private club. Because Jesus is our priceless treasure, we show kindness to the poor for which there is ongoing and ample need. When we turn church into a business, even in the name of charity, we betray Jesus just as Judas did. But spiritually we anoint Jesus in anticipation of his self-sacrifice to his God and Father on our behalf. In so doing we identify with the unnamed woman who stands for all little or forgotten but true Christians through the ages.

The Passover Meal

On the first day of Unleavened Bread, when the Passover lamb is sacrificed, his disciples said to him, "Where do you want us to go and make the preparations for you to eat the Passover?" So he sent two of his disciples, saying to them, "Go into the city, and a man carrying a jar of water will meet you; follow him, and wherever he enters, say to the owner of the house, 'The Teacher asks, Where is my guest room where I may eat the Passover with my disciples?' He will show you a large room upstairs, furnished and ready. Make preparations for us there." So the disciples set out and went to the city, and found everything as he had told them; and they prepared the Passover meal. When it was evening, he came with the twelve. And when they had taken their places and were eating, Jesus said, "Truly I tell you, one of you will betray me, one who is eating with me." They began to be distressed and to say to him one after another, "Surely, not I?" He said to them, "It is one of the twelve, one who is dipping bread into the bowl with me. For the Son of Man goes as it is written of him, but woe to that one by whom the Son of Man is betrayed! It would have been better for that one not to have been born."

Observing the Passover meal in Jerusalem locates Jesus inextricably within the people Israel. The great act of salvation of the enslaved Hebrews is commemorated and brought forward into the present at this meal. But not all Israelites are true Israelites. Jesus goes as the 53rd chapter of Isaiah tells, the suffering servant of God on whom was laid the iniquities of us all. But woe to the traitor. With whom do we identify?

The Lord’s Supper Instituted

While they were eating, he took a loaf of bread, and after blessing it he broke it, gave it to them, and said, "Take; this is my body." Then he took a cup, and after giving thanks he gave it to them, and all of them drank from it. He said to them, "This is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many. Truly I tell you, I will never again drink of the fruit of the vine until that day when I drink it new in the kingdom of God." When they had sung the hymn, they went out to the Mount of Olives. And Jesus said to them, "You will all become deserters; for it is written, 'I will strike the shepherd, and the sheep will be scattered.' But after I am raised up, I will go before you to Galilee." Peter said to him, "Even though all become deserters, I will not." Jesus said to him, "Truly I tell you, this day, this very night, before the cock crows twice, you will deny me three times." But he said vehemently, "Even though I must die with you, I will not deny you." And all of them said the same.

The self-questioning about false discipleship continues. It brackets the institution narrative of the Lord’s Supper. The self-giving of Jesus is bodily. Like us, Jesus is his body and blood. But uniquely his is poured out for many, even false disciples who will desert and deny him. It is as the risen and vindicated one who drinks the fruit of the vine new in the kingdom of God, that Jesus will regather the scattered and restore even the denier. So by grace we are saved; it is not of works lest anyone should boast. This self-understanding is the test of true discipleship.

The Agony in the Garden

They went to a place called Gethsemane; and he said to his disciples, "Sit here while I pray." He took with him Peter and James and John, and began to be distressed and agitated. And he said to them, "I am deeply grieved, even to death; remain here, and keep awake." And going a little farther, he threw himself on the ground and prayed that, if it were possible, the hour might pass from him. He said, "Abba, Father, for you all things are possible; remove this cup from me; yet, not what I want, but what you want." He came and found them sleeping; and he said to Peter, "Simon, are you asleep? Could you not keep awake one hour? Keep awake and pray that you may not come into the time of trial; the spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak." And again he went away and prayed, saying the same words. And once more he came and found them sleeping, for their eyes were very heavy; and they did not know what to say to him. He came a third time and said to them, "Are you still sleeping and taking your rest? Enough! The hour has come; the Son of Man is betrayed into the hands of sinners. Get up, let us be going. See, my betrayer is at hand."

The terror of torture and death compounded by the desolation of abandonment, not only by disciples, but by his God and Father who asks him to drink this bitter cup, falls upon Jesus as he is fallen on the ground to pray. Yet the resolve to do his Father’s will in the obedience of faith prevails. What a contrast is painted for us here: agonized Jesus wrestling to do God’s will while disciples are nodding off. So defenseless Jesus is handed over into the hands of sinners presuming to have him in their power. With whom do we identify?

The Betrayal

Immediately, while he was still speaking, Judas, one of the twelve, arrived; and with him there was a crowd with swords and clubs, from the chief priests, the scribes, and the elders. Now the betrayer had given them a sign, saying, "The one I will kiss is the man; arrest him and lead him away under guard." So when he came, he went up to him at once and said, "Rabbi!" and kissed him. Then they laid hands on him and arrested him.  But one of those who stood near drew his sword and struck the slave of the high priest, cutting off his ear. Then Jesus said to them, "Have you come out with swords and clubs to arrest me as though I were a bandit? Day after day I was with you in the temple teaching, and you did not arrest me. But let the scriptures be fulfilled." All of them deserted him and fled. A certain young man was following him, wearing nothing but a linen cloth. They caught hold of him, but he left the linen cloth and ran off naked.

The conspiracy works in secrecy aided by the traitor who singles out the victim with a treacherous kiss. A disciple reaches for his sword and strikes but Jesus rebukes those who work in darkness because their deeds are evil. He has borne witness publicly against the corruption of the Temple establishment. But now the Scriptures must be fulfilled. At this all the disciples flee, one of them naked and ashamed.

The Trial

They took Jesus to the high priest; and all the chief priests, the elders, and the scribes were assembled. Peter had followed him at a distance, right into the courtyard of the high priest; and he was sitting with the guards, warming himself at the fire. Now the chief priests and the whole council were looking for testimony against Jesus to put him to death; but they found none. For many gave false testimony against him, and their testimony did not agree. Some stood up and gave false testimony against him, saying, "We heard him say, 'I will destroy this temple that is made with hands, and in three days I will build another, not made with hands.'" But even on this point their testimony did not agree. Then the high priest stood up before them and asked Jesus, "Have you no answer? What is it that they testify against you?" But he was silent and did not answer. Again the high priest asked him, "Are you the Messiah, the Son of the Blessed One?" Jesus said, "I am; and 'you will see the Son of Man seated at the right hand of the Power,' and 'coming with the clouds of heaven.'" Then the high priest tore his clothes and said, "Why do we still need witnesses? You have heard his blasphemy! What is your decision?" All of them condemned him as deserving death. Some began to spit on him, to blindfold him, and to strike him, saying to him, "Prophesy!" The guards also took him over and beat him.

The disciples have fled. They have not confessed their adherence to Jesus. Now Jesus is alone and on trial before the Temple establishment. Jesus makes no reply to the false accusations, silent like a sheep being led to the slaughter. He does not speak until the high priest raises the only accusation that matters: "Are you the Messiah, the Son of the Blessed One?" We recall that hitherto Jesus has suppressed any acknowledgment of his true identity throughout the gospel of Mark. Only now, when the confession of this identity will incriminate him, does Jesus answer, “I am.” And he points to his future vindication even though it means presently mockery, torture and death.

Peter’s Denial

While Peter was below in the courtyard, one of the servant-girls of the high priest came by. When she saw Peter warming himself, she stared at him and said, "You also were with Jesus, the man from Nazareth." But he denied it, saying, "I do not know or understand what you are talking about." And he went out into the forecourt. Then the cock crowed. And the servant-girl, on seeing him, began again to say to the bystanders, "This man is one of them." But again he denied it. Then after a little while the bystanders again said to Peter, "Certainly you are one of them; for you are a Galilean." But he began to curse, and he swore an oath, "I do not know this man you are talking about." At that moment the cock crowed for the second time. Then Peter remembered that Jesus had said to him, "Before the cock crows twice, you will deny me three times." And he broke down and wept.

So the self-incriminating confession of Jesus’s identity is bracketed by the flight of the disciples beforehand and now by Peter’s denial after. Jesus confesses himself, his followers deny him. Who are we in this story?

Jesus Condemned, Barabbas Set Free

As soon as it was morning, the chief priests held a consultation with the elders and scribes and the whole council. They bound Jesus, led him away, and handed him over to Pilate. Pilate asked him, "Are you the King of the Jews?" He answered him, "You say so." Then the chief priests accused him of many things. Pilate asked him again, "Have you no answer? See how many charges they bring against you." But Jesus made no further reply, so that Pilate was amazed. Now at the festival he used to release a prisoner for them, anyone for whom they asked. Now a man called Barabbas was in prison with the rebels who had committed murder during the insurrection. So the crowd came and began to ask Pilate to do for them according to his custom. Then he answered them, "Do you want me to release for you the King of the Jews?" For he realized that it was out of jealousy that the chief priests had handed him over. But the chief priests stirred up the crowd to have him release Barabbas for them instead. Pilate spoke to them again, "Then what do you wish me to do with the man you call the King of the Jews?" They shouted back, "Crucify him!" Pilate asked them, "Why, what evil has he done?" But they shouted all the more, "Crucify him!" So Pilate, wishing to satisfy the crowd, released Barabbas for them; and after flogging Jesus, he handed him over to be crucified.

Mob violence is rarely the innocent uprising of the oppressed. Mob violence may rationalize itself this way. Surely Barabbas had so thought about his insurrectionary violence. But mob violence is more often motivated and manipulated by those in power who use its threat of chaos to reinforce their own power. In any case, that is what has happened here. “The chief priests stirred up the crowd…” So we have presented to us the contrast between the rebel guilty in fact of violence and Jesus who has incriminated himself for the deed of cleansing the temple with the claim of messianic authority to have done so. And the mob chants that he be crucified.

Jesus Mocked

Then the soldiers led him into the courtyard of the palace (that is, the governor's headquarters ); and they called together the whole cohort. And they clothed him in a purple cloak; and after twisting some thorns into a crown, they put it on him. And they began saluting him, "Hail, King of the Jews!" They struck his head with a reed, spat upon him, and knelt down in homage to him. After mocking him, they stripped him of the purple cloak and put his own clothes on him. Then they led him out to crucify him. They compelled a passer-by, who was coming in from the country, to carry his cross; it was Simon of Cyrene, the father of Alexander and Rufus. Then they brought Jesus to the place called Golgotha (which means the place of a skull). And they offered him wine mixed with myrrh; but he did not take it. And they crucified him, and divided his clothes among them, casting lots to decide what each should take. It was nine o'clock in the morning when they crucified him. The inscription of the charge against him read, "The King of the Jews." And with him they crucified two bandits, one on his right and one on his left.  Those who passed by derided him, shaking their heads and saying, "Aha! You who would destroy the temple and build it in three days, save yourself, and come down from the cross!" In the same way the chief priests, along with the scribes, were also mocking him among themselves and saying, "He saved others; he cannot save himself. Let the Messiah, the King of Israel, come down from the cross now, so that we may see and believe." Those who were crucified with him also taunted him.

The ignominy of cruel death by crucifixion is compounded by the mockery of the crucifiers. The spiritual suffering of Jesus is as real and tangible as the physical. He is shamed. Every pretension of being of the beloved Son, the coming Son of Man, the Messiah of Israel, the King of the Jews is met with abuse and mockery and taunting. The whole human world has turned against him.

Jesus Dies Forsaken by God

When it was noon, darkness came over the whole land until three in the afternoon. At three o'clock Jesus cried out with a loud voice, "Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani?" which means, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" When some of the bystanders heard it, they said, "Listen, he is calling for Elijah." And someone ran, filled a sponge with sour wine, put it on a stick, and gave it to him to drink, saying, "Wait, let us see whether Elijah will come to take him down." Then Jesus gave a loud cry and breathed his last. And the curtain of the temple was torn in two, from top to bottom. Now when the centurion, who stood facing him, saw that in this way he breathed his last, he said, "Truly this man was God's Son!"

Jesus dies screaming his abandonment by his God. This is the bitter cup which he has now drunk to the bottom. The foolish onlookers misunderstand his quotation of Psalm 22 and think he is calling out now at last to be delivered supernaturally by the prophet Elijah from of old. In reality, the curtain in the temple separating the Holy of Holies from sinful humanity is rendered in two. This is the apocalypse of the gospel of Mark. It is the revelation that resolves the secrecy of Jesus’s identity by asserting the mystery of it. So the executioner, seeing how Jesus has died forsaken by all pronounces on his identity. Jesus is the crucified Son of God and just so has given his life a ransom for many.

Jesus Dead and Buried

There were also women looking on from a distance; among them were Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of James the younger and of Joses, and Salome. These used to follow him and provided for him when he was in Galilee; and there were many other women who had come up with him to Jerusalem. When evening had come, and since it was the day of Preparation, that is, the day before the sabbath, Joseph of Arimathea, a respected member of the council, who was also himself waiting expectantly for the kingdom of God, went boldly to Pilate and asked for the body of Jesus. Then Pilate wondered if he were already dead; and summoning the centurion, he asked him whether he had been dead for some time. When he learned from the centurion that he was dead, he granted the body to Joseph. Then Joseph bought a linen cloth, and taking down the body, wrapped it in the linen cloth, and laid it in a tomb that had been hewn out of the rock. He then rolled a stone against the door of the tomb. Mary Magdalene and Mary the mother of Joses saw where the body was laid.

The women disciples were onlookers, although from a distance, only because as women they were not regarded as insurrectionary threats like the male disciples. Even so, it was a man, Joseph of Arimathea, a member of the Temple establishment, who secured the body of Jesus for burial as the women looked on. As the Sabbath day rapidly approached, the burial customs would have to be delayed until Sunday morning. And so the silence of a real death leaves us hanging. What will his God and Father do at the sight of his beloved Son, shrouded in death by the sin of the world, having faithfully obeyed and drunk to the dregs the bitter cup of his solidarity with us? Who then are we?

Lent 5, 2024: John 12, Hebrews 5. Jeremiah 31

For the last several weeks our Lenten journey has taken us through the remarkable Gospel of John. The ancient church regarded the gospel of John as the spiritual gospel which interpreted the previous Gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke. By this name, “spiritual,” meant that the Holy Spirit used the Gospel of John to unveil deeper significance for us and our salvation of the story of Jesus culminating in his passion. The deeper meaning is what the passion of Jesus means not only for us, but also for God. We see a remarkable instance of this unveiling in today’s reading from John 12 as we approach the Holy Week of the Passion.

First of all, it is the inquiry of some Greeks in the Temple precincts that occasions Jesus’s prediction of his impending suffering and death. You may recall that in the other Gospels this prediction occurs three times to the disciples on route to Jerusalem. But in John it is an inquiry of those from outside the range of the Jerusalem Temple who are seeking Jesus that triggers this stranger version of Jesus’s prediction of his suffering, humiliation, death and burial. Stranger, I say, because Jesus names the hour of his approaching passion as his hour of glorification! And what is this strange glory? It is the glory, he says, of a grain of wheat falling into the ground to die so that from it new life will emerge. And the new life will include the ingathering of the outsider Greeks into a new and spiritual temple, who is the crucified-glorified Jesus in person drawing all people to himself.

Now it’s also very interesting to observe that in John’s telling there is no episode of the Garden of Gethsemane, you remember from the other Gospels, where on the eve of his death Jesus prays in agony to be delivered from drinking the bitter cup. Nor is there any account of the Transfiguration in John. But in the next several verses, John retells these stories; first of Gethsemane: Now is my soul troubled. And what shall I say? `Father, save me from this hour'? No, for this purpose I have come to this hour. Notice that John does not deny the anguish of Jesus. His soul is troubled just as in Gethsemane. But John accentuates Jesus’s final, firm resolve, just as in Gethsemane “Thy will be done!” The effect is to portray Jesus’s fidelity to his calling, his obedience of faith to his mission, his willing surrender to his Father’s will overriding his natural human desire to be spared. He has come to this hour for this very purpose that lifted up upon the cross he will draw all peoples to himself.

The reading today from the letter to the Hebrews supplements John’s account: In the days of his flesh, Jesus offered up prayers and supplications, with loud cries and tears, to him who was able to save him from death, and he was heard for his godly fear. Although he was a Son, he learned obedience through what he suffered. That spells out the astonishing thought! The divine Son of God is humble, willing as truly human to learn obedience! Yes this humility to be human and to learn obedience is, neither for John nor for Hebrews, no diminution of his almighty deity but actually it’s true and proper expression! Jesus learned obedience through suffering, showing himself this way truly to be the Son of God.

So, returning now to the Gospel of John, having thus pronounced himself and confirmed his divinely appointed purpose, Jesus prays, Father, glorify thy name." Then a voice came from heaven, "I have glorified it, and I will glorify it again. Notice that like John’s retelloing of the Garden of Gethsemane and the passion predictions, here also this next event take place in public, on the grounds of the temple in Jerusalem, and not only in the presence of a few select disciples. So in John’s distillation, the Transfiguration episode occurs right here, not on a remote mountain but in the courts of the Jerusalem Temple. And yet with another twist. In John it is not so much revealing that Jesus is the beloved Son to whom we are to listen, for in John Jesus has been openly declaring himself as the Son all along and indeed has been walking on this earth as already the transfigured One. But in John it is rather that heavenly voice sounding in the temple precincts declares the God of Israel, of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, of Mount Zion and the and the throne of David, this very God of Israel answers publicly to confirm Jesus’s address to him, Father. The bewildered people, just like the bewildered disciples on the Mount of Transfiguration, wondered what had just happened. Jesus explains: This voice has come for your sake, not for mine. Now is the judgment of this world, now shall the ruler of this world be cast out; and I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all men to myself.

As it is the glory of the Son to come down to the depths and to be exalted or lifted up, not upon some royal throne of this earth, but upon the imperial stake, so it is also true that in just this way the Father’s judgment falls upon the world which crucified him – and just so the evil usurper of the kingdom of God on this earth is dethroned. How can this be? How can the cross be an enthronement, the humiliation of Jesus his exaltation, this profoundest weakness an all the more profound display of divine power exorcizing the forces of darkness?

 On the grounds of the Jerusalem temple that will be destroyed within a generation by the siege of Roman legions, just here Jesus becomes himself the tabernacle of God in whom the nations are gathered to worship in Spirit and in truth. As the letter to the Hebrews today comments: So also Christ did not exalt himself to be made a high priest, but was appointed by him who said to him, "Thou art my Son, today I have begotten thee"; as he says also in another place, "Thou art a priest forever, after the order of Melchizedek." And being made perfect he became the source of eternal salvation to all who obey him, being designated by God a high priest … Jesus is the high priest of the new “spiritual” temple, for he offers not a substitute, not a scapegoat, but himself. He gives himself, the righteous for the unrighteous, the worthy for the unworthy, the beloved Son for disgraced prodigals who have made a ruin of their inheritance. And this self-giving suffices once and for all, not repeatedly as in the animal sacrifices of the old temple, but persists as an everlasting intercession which may be presented again and again as accomplished and sufficient to us in our need. So it is that Jesus is lifted up upon the cross to draw all people to himself. And just this eternal intercession of our great high priest is how the evil ruler of this fallen world is cast out.

Or, are we too proud to be drawn into the crucified Savior as our only tabernacle in life and in death? Too proud to glory in the cross of Christ towering over the wrecks of time? Too proud to live by the grace of his intercession as our great high priest? Too proud to give away our status and power under the evil ruler of this fallen world?

Consider: what real power has this evil ruler? Biblically, Ha Shatan, literally, the accuser; he is not God’s equal, but a usurper. He is some kind of corrupt creature maliciously doing what it can to undo God’s purpose to redeem all that he is made – precisely from the ruinous sinful pride of which this Satan does repent. So what power really does the proud and malicious devil, a liar and murderer from the beginning, have? Only this: to entice us to vanity in its own proud image and then, when our vanity fails, as surely it does, and we come to our senses and want a new start, the malicious devil doubles down to prosecute, accuse, lash us with bitter reminders of our proud failures to love God above all and our neighbors as ourselves. And so he would confirm us in sinful pride making us too proud to receive the humble Son of God given in our place, too proud to tabernacle at the cross, too proud to give up the status and power of our sins. That is the sum and total of the demonic power.

Yet this malicious pride of the devil has in reality been undone by the astonishing humility of the divine Son of God. Just this one who did not exalt himself but has come as our faithful friend and is now made our intercessor, a true priest who pleads for us ceaselessly to comfort us as the Lamb of God who really takes away the sin of the world. So we may in truth and power prevail against the evil ruler of this world, if only we pour contempt on all our pride before the humble Son of God. One little word defeats him: “I am Christ’s and he is mine. He is written by the Holy Spirit on my heart so you have no power over me.”

Thus, according to our testimonies today from the Gospel of John and the Letter to the Hebrews, to know these marvelous things is to possess priceless treasure in life and in death. We are not talking here merely about intellectual knowledge, some item of information that we can store in our memory banks, call up and use as the need may be. We are talking about the kind of knowledge which lovers have, the empowering knowledge of new life together. So the prophet Jeremiah gave voice to the word of the Lord, speaking of all of us in the figure of his people Israel, us who he took by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt. [Yet] my covenant they broke, though I was their husband, says the LORD. See, the Lord knew his people, but his people did not know the Lord. And thus they proved faithless. The Lord does not respond in kind but resolves to give his people the very knowledge of him that they lack with the new covenant:  I will put my law within them, and I will write it upon their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. And no longer shall each man teach his neighbor and each his brother, saying, `Know the LORD,' for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, says the LORD; for I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more.

Lent 4, 2024: Numbers 21, Ephesians 2, John 3

How we Lutherans love this statement today from the letter to the Ephesians: For by grace you have been saved through faith; and this is not your own doing, it is the gift of God -- not because of works, lest any man should boast. Perhaps, however, we don’t emphasize as much what follows organically and immediately: For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them. And truth be told, I don’t think we hear much at all anymore about what precedes and provides the background for the wonderful statement about grace: You were dead through the trespasses and sins in which you once walked, following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience.  Among these we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, following the desires of body and mind, and so we were by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind. Whoa! What a downer! Who wants to hear that?

We could say the same about our other two equally unsettling texts this morning. We have heard our much loved John 3:16, For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life. But we have also heard that men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil. For every one who does evil hates the light, and does not come to the light, lest his deeds should be exposed. And what about the murmuring of the children of Israel complaining of hardships on their path to freedom: And the people spoke against God and against Moses, "Why have you brought us up out of Egypt to die in the wilderness? For there is no food and no water, and we loathe this worthless food." What a strange tension throughout these texts! It’s almost as if there is a battle going on within our texts between the attractive statements about divine self-giving love which saves by unconditional grace providing a source of healing on the one hand, and on the other hand, dark diagnoses of the human condition, loving darkness rather than light, being spiritually dead, by nature children of wrath, ever and again backsliding from the divine call to freedom.

But what we are presented with in our Scriptures today is not just a problem of cognitive dissonance, of mental confusion about apparently contradictory statements. The tension is not merely between contradictory ideas but contradictory realities Which is it? The God loves unconditionally? Or the God who hates with holy hate the evil that hates the light to prefer the darkness as cover for its evil deeds? If we say, as we should, that the truth is both/and and not either/or, we are saying that the problem is not cognitive dissonance about contradictory theological ideas but rather the troubling two-sided truth about us and about God on which we focus throughout the season of Lent.

Let me put it this way, God’s unconditional grace is for the sinner – only the sinner. God’s surpassing love is for the dying – only the dying. God’s liberating and redeeming power is for the prisoner – only the prisoner. That little word “only” drives home the point of all three of our texts today. We receive in reality the unconditional grace, the surpassing love, the liberating power of the God of the gospel only as we truly know ourselves as those in such need. True knowledge of God and true knowledge of self are correlative, they go together hand in glove. Knowing in truth our need and God’s unimagined supply is exactly what we devote ourselves to in this season of Lent.

Actually, just such self-knowledge is what Martin Luther meant by faith when he lifted up the doctrine of justification by faith as the chief doctrine of Christianity. In faith I say something about myself and about God. I say in faith that I am the sinner of God’s forgiving, the sheep of his gathering flock, the prisoner of his liberating, the dying of his eternal embrace. Moreover, I say that just this true knowledge of self and of God in faith is not my own doing of which I might boast, but the astonishing gift of God bringing me out of the darkness of self-deception into the light of God’s penetrating scrutiny from which no one can hide. In this way faith says the truth both about God and about ourselves.

This difficult and double-sided truth matters immensely. If we try to avoid the real tension, not just a mental confusion, but the real tension of this inseparable combination of judgment and grace which justifies only the ungodly and only by faith, our Christianity becomes saccharine, Pollyanna-ish, untrue to real life, a self-serving religious fiction, an ecclesiastical ideology, a bromide marketed in the religion business.

In our real lives in this troubled world we participate in powerful systems of malice and injustice. We take comfort in the propaganda that slanders our enemies and flatters our own self-righteousness. We are pleased when our enemies fail and distressed when our partisans lose. We are complicit and cannot extract ourselves from the cycle of human violence, both verbal and physical. That is our dark human reality. Every time I switch on the lights or turn on the computer, I use the electricity created by the burning of fossil fuels that is cooking the planet. Every time I rejoice in my portfolio rising in value, I take profit from corporate powers that monopolize and exploit. Every time I lift myself from depression by going on a spending spree, I fail to feed the hungry and cloth the naked. Every time I passively abide the bullying, the shaming, the pervasive cruelty of daily life, I submit again and again to the domination of anti-divine powers. Shall I go on? Elsewhere St. Paul asks, why do we desire our own subjugation? We must know this about ourselves. Not superficially, as if I could pass a checklist like the 10 Commandments which to my knowledge I have not transgressed today, or this past week, Gee, for quite a while. But in reality, I have not loved the Lord my God with my whole heart nor my neighbor as myself. I have omitted much good that I could and should have done. In reality, I am in bondage to sin and cannot free myself. Consequently in this self-awareness of profound life-changing repentance, I can never act with fanatical zealotry as if I were some kind of savior. Rather, in a fitting even dignified humility I know that I must be saved in the same way as all the others, including my opponents, need to be saved.

True, and crucially true. For just so our three texts today tell us about the act of power which is the grace of God not limited or restricted or conditioned by this vert truth about ourselves. They tell about the surpassing love of God for the very world in darkness which flees God and prefers to remain in darkness because its deeds are evil. The God who works costly redemption by lifting up his own beloved Son on the imperial gibbet of Rome for our healing gaze. Here in the midst of our human darkness the event of surpassing divine love takes place. Consequently, you he made alive, when God, who is rich in mercy, out of the great love with which he loved us raised us up with him, and made us sit with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, that in the coming ages he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus. Yes, you, you he made alive, just you who were dead to God, you whose gaze has been shifted from your complicity in the world sinfulness to the righteousness of another who has lived and died for you in our midst. As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of man be lifted up.

In faith knowing that we are the children of Israel smitten with the consequences of our own deep complicity in the darkness of the world, turning back from the hard path to freedom, rebelling against the liberating intention of our maker and Redeemer, we nevertheless in the same faith look upon the saving cross so that whoever believes in him may have eternal life. So in our Lenten faith, we received wisdom and power to live in the tension of the Christian life, at the same time sinful and righteous, not superior to any other of our common humanity in whose complicity with evil we inevitably share, but boasting only of the cross of Christ in which we glory, for our salvation but also for the salvation of all those others, however deplorable they may be. For God sent the Son into the world, not to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through him. Just so, we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them. This is what it means to say that the light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it.

Lent 3, 2024: Exodus 20: 1-17; 1 Cor. 1: 18-25; John 2:3-22

Our Lenten journey continues, summoning us to draw near to the Lord who drew near to us once and for all on his path to Calvary. Today already we find him in Jerusalem, already in the Temple driving out beasts sold for sacrifice and the money-changers there. That is because today we find ourselves in the peculiar gospel of John. John is different. In Matthew, Mark and Luke, this story, traditionally called the cleansing of the Temple, comes at the end. But in John it comes at the beginning. In the others, it is last thing Jesus does which provokes the authorities to take action against him. In John, it is the first provocative thing Jesus does. What is going on here? It is as if John wanted to signal: this is what it is all about! This is what the whole story of Jesus is about.

It is, in other words, it’s all about worshipping God in spirit and in truth. It is not about a mountain top in Jerusalem or Samaria or Mecca or Rome or Wittenberg or anyplace else but about the community of disciples who abide in Jesus’ word, as children in truth sharing in his own true relation to God as his heavenly Father in the powerful love of the Holy Spirit. It is not about buildings made with hands, not about buying and selling the relationship to God; it is not about the religion business. It is about what Jesus did on the cross once for all people, therefore the free gift of new life in his name. As Paul tells today: Jews demand signs and Greeks seek wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. Let’s look and see!

            The Passover of the Jews was near… Passover, you recall, was the annual holy day commemorating the escape of the children of Israel from slavery in Egypt. To remember their salvation, once a year in the Spring Jews slaughtered a lamb for a feast, recalling that dreadful and awesome night long before, when the angel of death passed over those houses signed with the blood of the slaughtered lamb but slew the first born of the slave-masters in all the rest. Thus Jesus, like generations of Jews before him, went up to Jerusalem to worship this judging and liberating God of Israel, who casts down the mighty from their thrones but exalts them of low degree. But what does he find? What’s going on in the Temple?

Does he find a community gathered around the Word of the Lord, studying his liberating commandments that they might also be instruments of God’s righteousness in the world, setting free the oppressed? We have heard this morning the two tables of the divine law of love, spelled out concretely in the 10 Commandments of Moses, telling us how to love God above all and all God’s creatures in and under God. We need to hear this instruction and study it! Indeed, nothing would be more fitting in the season of Lent than to recite the 10 Commandments publically for self-examination along with the Catechism’s explanations of the meaning. Or are we otherwise like the temple that Jesus cleansed? Where the last thing occupying the people was such study of the Torah of God?

 In the temple Jesus found people selling cattle, sheep, and doves, and the money changers seated at their tables.  He found what, alas!, we so often we find in the history of humanity: the idolatrous, the blasphemous religion business, buying and selling the relationship to God. Those traveling into town from afar to worship could hardly bring along animals for sacrifice, you see, so a lucrative tourism industry developed. It was rigged. They had to change their foreign currency for special coins valid only on the precincts of the Temple. Thus the money-changers. What a racket!

Making a whip of cords, he drove all of them out of the temple, both the sheep and the cattle.  The whip is meant for the animals, to drive them out. Nonetheless we have no picture here of a mamby-pamby, teddy bear Jesus. He is angry. He takes righteous action. He also poured out the coins of the money changers and overturned their tables. He told those who were selling the doves, "Take these things out of here!” The opposite of love, friends, is not anger, you see, but apathy which does not care. Anger can be righteous. Anger can be love opposing what is against love. “Stop making my Father's house a marketplace!" Here is clue to his righteous anger.

It is love for his Father, the very God of Israel, love for this One who is truly God creator of all, thus love for his Father’s house as a house of prayer for all people, love for all people who need to know the free grace of God and thus to be set free from the worst of all illusions, the very illusion cultivated by the religion business: that God can be manipulated like magic with religious works, animal sacrifices, silver and gold. That is why his disciples remembered that it was written, "Zeal for your house will consume me." The zeal of liberating love drives Jesus into action.

Naturally enough, the people of Jerusalem whose livelihood was affected by the dramatic protest action of the virtually unknown prophet from backwoods Galilee were not impressed. The buying and selling had been business as usual for centuries. It was time honored tradition. It was a system that met the needs of locals for labor and out of towners for services. It was, in short, good business. So they asked the angry prophet: "What sign can you show us for doing this?" They are asking for a divine confirmation of the claim hidden in Jesus’ action, a claim that in all the hub-bub of cattle stampeding and doves flying and sheep baying and coins flying we might have overlooked. Jesus referred to the temple as his Father’s house. It is as a true Son coming into what is rightfully his inheritance, zealous for his own Father’s name and reputation, that Jesus has cleansed the temple. That is what they want to know about. By what right, with what authority, man, what are your credentials?

The answer of Jesus gives contains one of those double meanings we find so often in the Gospel of John. Jesus answered them, "Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up." Later, at his trial on the night the Jewish court called the Sanhedrin met to condemn Jesus to death as a blasphemer, this statement was thrown up in Jesus’ face. Not knowing who Jesus really is, this Son of the Father, not understanding his holy passion, the righteous zeal, the Torah-instructed love which drives him, how else can they take his words? They take them as a threat that he, who had attacked the business in religion going on in the Temple, would now go on to tear down the Temple building to rebuild it according to his own desires. So they object literalistically. "This temple has been under construction for forty-six years, and will you raise it up in three days?"

Such are the double-meanings which abound in the gospel of John. Jesus says something spiritually and he is misunderstood literally. They have asked for his right, his authority, his credentials to act in his Father’s name as a true Son. He answered "Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up." But he was not speaking of their building made with hands under construction since the time of King Herod the Great 46 years ago. He was speaking of the temple of his body which they would destroy on the cross and bury in the grave, hoping thusly to obliterate. He was speaking of the temple of his body, that is even more profoundly, the church, the community of his disciples, of all who believed in him after his resurrection. And so he is talking about you and me who in his name worship the Father in Spirit and in truth.

Dear friends, we are not to be in the religion business, buying and selling the most precious thing of all: the relationship with God. We are not to market it like a commodity, advertise it like a good deal, fleece the gullible, bargain with the skeptical, hawk and cajole and in general propagandize, proselytize, in order to profiteer. Martin Luther, after whom our tradition of Christianity takes its name, was filled with Jesus’ own holy zeal for his Father’s name and reputation in the world when he saw the poor throwing away their money on worthless scraps of paper superstitiously promising relief for loved ones burning in purgatory. If the church really has such power, he demanded in a single question which overturned all these new moneychangers, why in the name of love don’t we just give the indulgences away? Our Father’s house is to be a house of prayer for all people!

Dear friends, we are in the gospel business of just giving it away because Jesus gave it all away once and for all in his sacrifice at the cross. We are in the gospel business of proclaiming the free grace of God  which cannot be bought or sold but only feared, loved and trusted above all things. We are in the gospel business of building up a caring community of disciples, a temple of the Holy Spirit, the body of Christ gathered not around our would-be sacrifices to God as if to buy his favor or somehow bribe him, but around this holy meal of the Eucharist, commemorating his sacrifice once and for all to win us back to his Father’s grace and favor. We are in the gospel business that others might see truly good works, works of holy zeal and true love, and so give glory to our Father in heaven.

For the glory of our God is to give. God so loved the world, as we will hear from this gospel of John next Sunday in our Lenten journey, God so loved the world that he gave his only Son. His house therefore is to be a house of prayer for all people, where this gift is given and received, from whence the praise of God arises in hearts sincere and true. Let this be our Lenten resolve: that the holy zeal of Jesus take hold of us and put us to work, cleansing the Temple which is you and me and our life together in Christ, making it a house fit to sing the praises of God’s free grace. The Lord grant it to us here. Amen.

Lent 2, 2024: Mark 8, Rom 4, Gen 17

            Our Lenten journey continues, the Scriptures asking us to draw near to the Lord who drew near to us, once and for all. Today Jesus tells the disciples for the first time that the Son of Man must undergo great suffering, and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again. Peter does not like that. He does not think that is any way for a Messiah to be thinking. He rebukes Jesus as if the devil had gotten hold of him. But Jesus shoots right back: Get behind me, Satan! For you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things. Incomprehensible as Jesus’s path of suffering is to Peter, it is the path God has in mind for Jesus. And not only for Jesus, but also for all who follow him: Those who want to become my follower, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.

Now a perplexity arises. Why then would anyone ever want to – follow Jesus? What’s the deal? Isn’t Christianity supposed to be a good deal – believe a few things, live a good life and go to heaven when you die? What’s going on here? Even worse, Jesus continues.  For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it.  Whoa! That sound like what a poker player calls upping the ante. Or an investment advisor warning that you’re pricing yourself right out of the market! Not only is this beginning to sound like a real dealbreaker – believe in Jesus and you get to suffer too—now the stakes have been raised to eternal life and death. For what will it profit to gain the whole world and forfeit life? Indeed, what can one give in return for life? Pie in the sky in the sweet bye and bye? So it may seem: Jesus is talking about true life, the life of the resurrection, life with God in his coming kingdom, the pearl of great price, the one thing needful. Are you willing then to give up everything else here and now, to let go of present goods in hand for the sake of an unseen future in someone else’s power? Bad deal, bad odds. Not a few have on reflection, said: Forget it!

            Indeed so it seems to any one of us when we, like Peter, are setting our mind not on divine things but on human things. Paul calls it the stumbling block of the cross, the foolishness of what we preach: Christ crucified. To the usual human mentality based on law and common sense, not grace and faith, the gospel of Christ crucified can only sound like a bad deal with bad odds. But that is just the point. To come to faith, our mentality has to be changed – to a mind set not on human but on divine things. Paul explains this change in mentality by reminding the Romans of father Abraham: For the promise that Abraham would inherit the world did not come to him or to his descendants through the law but through the righteousness of faith. If law, faith is null and the promise is void. See what a total contrast Paul makes here? It is a basic alternative between two ways of thinking and living: the mentality of law, performance, reward or punishment or the mentality of grace, promise and faith. The contrast is at root very simple: the law gives us what we deserve on the basis of works we have done, visible for all to see, something to boast about it. But the promise gives us what we do not deserve on the basis of God’s promise of what he will do, not visible until he fulfills his promise, thus something present only in faith which through the Holy Spirit grew strong, Paul says, as Abraham gives glory to God, being fully convinced that God was able to do what he had promised -- setting his mind not on human but divine things.

            But how are we to get this new mentality? Aren’t we all just like Peter who takes offense at the counterintuitive wisdom of God? Paul tells us that Abraham, at least, did not weaken in faith when he considered his own body, which was already as good as dead (for he was about a hundred years old), or when he considered the barrenness of Sarah's womb. Where does his new mentality come from? How did Abraham get that faith, Paul calls it, hoping against hope meaning that it was not worldly optimism based on a rational calculation that things will work out well, but hope in God, who gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist. Where does this conviction come from, that beyond all my own possibilities, beyond all possibilities in the world that I can see or imagine, with God nothing is impossible, with God new possibilities are given, with God not even death ends the story, with God new worlds come into being???

            Friends such faith with its new way of thinking is not a human work. Faith is not a human work at all. That would make faith into life under the law all over again, a human act which is my part of a bargain with God. Then faith would be focused on me all over again. Do I waver, do I doubt, do I want it purely, earnestly, sufficiently? Do I pray enough, suffer enough, deny myself enough, worry enough? Then faith would be something I could boast about, and the gift of God would become the reward I merit. No, no, no. We get this new mind of repentance and faith in hope against hope as God the Holy Spirit works out the cross and resurrection of Jesus in our lives, putting that legalistic old Adam to death and raising up in his place the new person in Christ, with the new mind full of faith, hope and love. Talk about a change in mentality!

            How did Abraham get that faith? The LORD appeared to Abram, and said to him, "I am God Almighty; walk before me, and be blameless. And I will make my covenant between me and you…” The Word of God comes and lays claim on Abraham. How does Paul get that faith? The gospel Word of God came to him on the road to Damascus and laid its claim on him telling of Jesus who was handed over to death for our trespasses and was raised for our justification. The Word of God is spoken and elicits faith, true faith which puts the focus on the Lord, no longer own ourselves, so that we being changed give God the glory for all his rich mercy in Christ, trusting him to bring his promises to pass, taking up the cross to follow Jesus through the cross to the promised life of the resurrection.

The Holy Spirit works repentance and bestows faith by the preaching of Christ crucified! When we hear indeed that out of unfathomable love for us innocent, holy Jesus, setting his mind on divine things, walked the way alone to death for our trespasses; when we hear how God the Father, seeing that total love of Jesus to the bitter end for us as his very own, raised him for our justification, the human mind is turned upside down and inside out and all; its rational calculations of reward and punishment based on what is visibly performed fall to pieces. For Almighty God in reckless, extravagant grace hides all his glory under suffering and shame to reach us, trapped as we are in our petty, legalistic mentalities, full of envy, greed, strife, jealousy, contempt, pride. For the law brings wrath.  But astonishing grace brings the end of that old mentality when it tells of the humble Son of God who is given into the hands, yet also for the sake, of the proud creature and just so delivers even us to the clean, fresh air of faith.

            Though we stumble on the way of faith, though we be not heroes of faith like never wavering Abraham, though we often wander, still by baptism we share Abraham’s faith, which "was reckoned to him as righteousness." So Paul quickly adds that the same righteousness will be reckoned to us who believe in him who raised Jesus our Lord from the dead. For in either case it is really all about God who makes all things new. Bad deal? Yes, for that old Adam faithless, hopeless, loveless it is the worst of deals! It’s a death sentence!  Bad odds? No, not for the new person in Christ, full of faith, hope and love who has experienced a downpayment of that promised future spiritually in dying at the hands of the Holy Spirit and rising with Christ. In any case, you can’t have a resurrection without first a death.

That’s what our Lenten season of self-examination is about: not giving up candy or something trivial like that, but giving up that old person figured in Peter who rebuked the Lord, instead taking up our own cross – this means whatever trouble, adversity, handicap, burden laid on you in life, like Abraham’s old body or Sarah’s barren womb, whatever it is that afflicts you—taking up the cross in active faith, as new people who do not yet see but nevertheless trust, as new people who do not lash out but rather turn out-ward to others in need to form the caring community of Christ’s people, as new people who hold one another up in life difficulties and hold out in hope against hope for a new world in which all affliction, oppression and violence shall cease, as new people with new minds formed by grace, promise and faith, as new people who give God all the glory for all his rich mercy in Christ. A bad deal? The best of news!

Lent 1, 2024: Genesis 9, 1 Peter 3, Mark 1

Our Lenten journey to Jerusalem in the footsteps of the Lord has now begun. Not literally but spiritually. You would have to get into some science fiction time machine and fly back to the dusty highways and byways of Galilee to follow Jesus literally. Thankfully that’s not necessary. Indeed, it would not help us in any way. Rather, for our true good, we need to follow Jesus right here and now, every day in every way. And we get to do that because the Holy Spirit, the same Holy Spirit who descended on Jesus in the figure of the dove at his baptism and then drove him into the wilderness to do battle with Satan; the same Spirit who after John was arrested and removed from the scene brought Jesus back from the wilderness into the towns and villages of workaday Galilee, there to proclaim that the time of waiting was over, that God the King was on the march and drawing near to end the usurper’s dominion and set imprisoned people free; the very same Spirit who then prepared people for the coming of the one who is truly God by working in them an about-face in orientation, a change of heart and change of mind, turning away from pathetic resignation and complicity rather now to anticipate, yearn for, even take risks for the coming of the Lord – the very same Spirit calls you here and now by the gospel, enlightens and equips you with  divine gifts for following Jesus Christ into the liberation battle for the oppressed and groaning earth.

We should really call him the holying Spirit, the Spirit who holies people -- meaning that he makes them sick of sin and rather yearn for God, righteousness and life; the holying Spirit who makes followers trust in forgiveness by showing the glory of Jesus, the merciful friend of sinners. He is the holying Spirit, because just as he drove – did you notice the strong word? drove!—just as he drove Jesus into the wilderness to battle Satan, he drives you and me too, to battle, through many trials and tribulations at last  to arrive in the Father’s waiting arms of mercy. That is what it is to be made holy – to land forever in God’s arms never to be lost again, holy to God, precious to God.

And do you know what? As each follower of Jesus arrives at last forever into the arms of God the Father in the power of that same Spirit, they bring with them the cosmos. For each one of us is a microcosm of the whole cosmos. Joni Mitchell wrote these words, later to be sung by Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young: “We are stardust. We are golden. And we've got to get ourselves back to the garden.” This longing for the redemption of the earth, of the very matter which composes you and me, by which each one of us is a representative of the whole creation, a microcosm of the macro cosmos, would be the fulfillment of the covenant God made with Noah, symbolized by the rainbow: When the bow is in the clouds, I will look upon it and remember the everlasting covenant between God and every living creature of all flesh that is upon the earth. So we do not follow Jesus in the power of his Spirit just for me myself alone, but we follow Jesus in the power of the same Spirit as representatives of the entire oppressed creation. We follow on behalf of the inanimate creation and we follow for the sake of unbelieving humanity still lost in darkness under the dominion of the usurpers of the earth.

            Therefore, we don’t need a time machine if we have the Holy Spirit at work to make Jesus real to us by making us believers, to make us believers holy by leading into Jesus’ narrow path through the cross to the crown. We should carefully notice the two movements of the Holy Spirit and always bear in mind the sequence in which they happen. For what happens to Jesus at his baptism prefigures what happens also to us. Indeed, in so far as we are baptized into Christ, we are baptized, so to say, into his baptism so all that happened to him now also applies to us. The holying Spirit makes us holy in a two-step operation.

First: And just as Jesus was coming up out of the water, he saw the heavens torn apart and the Spirit descending like a dove on him. And a voice came from heaven, "You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased." See, before Jesus has done anything for God, here at the beginning of his ministry as Jesus is publicly indistinguishable from any of the multitude of penitents surrounding the River Jordan who had heeded John’s the Baptist’ urgent demand that they wash up as a sign of repentance – now the Spirit seizes the initiative, descending on Jesus as the voice of from above, tearing back the heavenly veil, announces love and good pleasure and favor in the this beloved Son. See, the first thing the Spirit does confirm the divine declaration of the favor and good pleasure of the heavenly Father which makes holy. Clearly, this communication of dine good pleasure comes not by virtue of anything Jesus has done, but, of God’s delight laying its precious claim on Jesus. This word of God the Father’s good pleasure is the basis of the public life Jesus now goes on to live as the Christ, the Spirit-anointed Messiah of God, just as it also is for us Christians baptized into him, we little Christs who follow Jesus. God’s favor is not some uncertain goal. God’s favor is the starting point of this new life, and so it remains valid every step along the way which Jesus now proceeds with we disciples in his train.

How important that is for you and me – this absolute priority and all sufficiency of God’s free grace lavished on us in the Holy Spirit pouring into our hearts the love of God! St Paul tells us in Romans 8 that just so we have not received a spirit of timidity to fall back into fear but a spirit of sonship, crying Abba, Father – how could it be otherwise? It is the very same Spirit, the holying Spirit of Jesus sent upon him once and for all at the beginning of his journey to Jerusalem, the same Spirit who makes us holy. If the word, “holy,” makes you nervous with joyless puritanical vibes, see that it means first of all precious, beloved, those in whom the God of grace delights, just because they are recipients of God’s unmerited favor. You are holy because you, no matter what you have been, are loved without measure.

Now, second. Notice then what happens next. And the Spirit immediately drove him out into the wilderness. He was in the wilderness forty days, tempted by Satan; and he was with the wild beasts; and the angels waited on him. Those whom God loves discover very quickly that there is an enemy of love whom the earlier I described as the usurper of the earth, this dreadful figure of the Satan. Those whom the holying Spirit makes holy by sheer grace of unmerited favor quickly find out that there is an unholy spirit, a spirit of jealousy, envy, greed, malice which hates all that God loves and works to destroy all that God creates. He is personified in Scripture as the Satan. His name in the Hebrew language means the Adversary, the Prosecutor, who attacks the creation from without in catastrophes of every sort, but attacks God’s people from within by questioning, by testing, by trying. Look, the Spirit does not leave Jesus waiting around for this to happen. Mark says the Spirit drove Jesus into direct and immediate confrontation. Mark does not spell out the temptations which we are familiar with from Matthew and Luke: the thrice repeated satanic test question, “If you are the Son of God…” as Jesus had heard at his baptism. Mark wants us to understand that the entire life of Jesus lived henceforth in grip of the holying Spirit is one long, uninterrupted, immediate confrontation with Satan, indeed, one in which Jesus seems finally to be defeated. Yes, that’s what I said: that’s how it looks in Mark. In the end, alone, betrayed, abandoned, denied, rejected, Satan wins when dying Jesus admits that he has been forsaken by God, that he was wrong and deluded to think himself God’s beloved Son whom his favor rested. Shocking, yes. But so it seems.

Truth be told, however that’s also how our Christian lives as would be followers of Jesus also seem to be under constant attack. What kind of Christian are you! Surely you are dreaming if you think God loves you or cares about you! Let me count your sins and spit them in your face, let me wake you in the night and make you sleepless with your doubts, you fool who dares to think the Holy Spirit has poured God’s love into a heart as foul as yours or there remains. Delight in you? God abandons you. Friends, this is the very voice of Satan who makes us doubt God’s word of grace and favor by accusing us of our sins and rubbing our faces in our unworthiness. And at no point do we feel more the great distance between holy Jesus on whom the holying Spirit came and dwelt and us poor Christians, so weak and wavering in our discipleship.

Yes, there is a difference. There is a reason why Jesus is the author and pioneer of our faith and we are only followers: 1 Peter today tells us that Christ also suffered for sins once for all, the righteous for the unrighteous. It only seemed that Satan had triumphed over Jesus when he perished as a sinner in the eyes of all the world, we know, for on the third day God vindicated Jesus’ awesome life act of obedient love for us unworthy; an act of astounding love that was hidden under that shameful death, but this way in order to bring us to God. It was the holying Spirit in fact who led Jesus into this depth of commitment to us and solidarity with us at the cross, the righteous with the unrighteous, in order to bring us to God. Peter goes so far as to tell us that the costly, holy love of Jesus for the unworthy indeed reaches right into the depths of hell, binding up the strong man, robbing Satan of his captives: He was put to death in the flesh, but made alive in the spirit, in which also he went and made a proclamation to the spirits in prison, who in former times did not obey. Nothing in all creation, not even Satan’s lair, can stop the victorious love of Christ. So Peter likewise tells us that in our baptism into Christ he now saves you-- not as a removal of dirt from the body, but as an appeal to God for a good conscience, through the resurrection of Jesus Christ, who has gone into heaven and is at the right hand of God, with angels, authorities, and powers made subject to him. Jesus is victorious Lord, our saving Lord. So when Satan assails with his doubts and fears and despairs, the Christian rebukes him with one mighty word: your quarrel is not with me but with my saving Lord Jesus Christ, who has won me a poor lost sinner and made me his own. I am worthy and holy because of him.  Begone. And I will follow Jesus, bringing my world with me, into the eternal arms of the heavenly Father, no matter what outrages you still perpetrate.

So back to work! For the holying Spirit wants to draw us, beloved by God’s free grace and favor, after Jesus into this world of hurt around us to heal the sick, pardon the guilty, gather the scattered. The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.

Transfiguration, 2024: 2 Kings 2, 2 Corinthians 4, Mark 9

The story of the Transfiguration is baffling in many respects. First of all, it seems like an Easter story, a revelation of the glory of the risen and victorious Lord. There is even a hint of this at the end, as the few, selected disciple-witnesses descend the mountain, Jesus commanding silence about what they have seen until he should rise from the dead. To boot, these uncomprehending disciples deliberate what that would mean. The disciples were in fact baffled by what they had seen.

So could we be baffled also. Isn’t the story totally out of order here? The vision of Jesus bathed in heavenly glory granted to Peter, James and John appears in the middle of his earthly journey; indeed, it comes at the critical turning point in it. Jesus has resolutely turned his face to go up to Jerusalem, there to be rejected, to suffer and die and be buried and at last raised again. What are we to make of this perplexing order of events?

Here’s a clue. The Transfiguration is observed by the church on the last Sunday of the Epiphany season. It concludes our remembrance of Jesus’ ministry of healing and forgiveness in Galilee, a world hurting with world of hurt, how he dwelt there to reveal God’s glory as the Great Physician of human body and soul. In the church’s year, the Transfiguration thus marks the transition from the action of Jesus as healer to his suffering as one afflicted, by torture and fatal wounds, yes, but also by betrayal, denial and abandonment; from his merciful words of forgiveness to his condemnation as blasphemer and rebel; from adulation to rejection, climaxing in the death of the holy One of God in our unholy midst hung upon the shameful cross. This passion of the Lord we call to mind in the season of Lent beginning on Ash Wednesday, three days hence. The Transfiguration thus marks this turning point in Jesus’ story. The mighty Son of God who like Joshua or David of old came as deliverer from the anti-divine powers of devil, death and sin ends up hanging forlorn, truly dying on a Roman stake, finally defeated, laid lifeless in a tomb. What a turn of events!

To understand this turn of events, we need to recall that Jesus’ mighty action as the One who heals in God’s name provoked opposition which questioned his authority. Why? The healthy have no need of a physician, he says. I have come to call sinners, not the righteous. And so he excludes the self-righteous who see no need of healing and despise mercy. He proclaims the nearness of God to the godless; he makes fellowship with lawless people before they ever change their ways; he embraces those filthy with contagious disease; he sovereignly overrules the very Law of God, not to mention the laws of nature, in order to show mercy to frail and needy humanity; he silences the shrieking devils but elicits the loud, unquenchable thanksgivings of those whom he has delivered from their cruel grip – who is this Jesus? Who in his every deed, with his every step, provokes the question: Where have you come from? By what authority do you do these things? Are you a true prophet or a pretender? Do you cast out devils by the prince of devils? Who are you, you stranger come into our midst? You man of grace, you man of mercy, you man of healing – what are you doing in this dog-eat-dog world of ours!?

In the Transfiguration story, the curtain draws back to show not my opinion about Jesus or yours or any other human’s, whether friend or foe. These great questions about Jesus are now being answered. Answered not by not by disciples, nor by evil spirits under assault, not even by Jesus himself. But on this mountain top, in an act of divine revelation, our eyes too are made with the disciples to focus on Jesus alone, singled out from Moses and Elijah, Jesus on whom the heavenly spotlight shines, brilliant with divine light. Are you looking now? Do you hear -- the command of the heavenly voice: This one to whom Moses and Elijah bear witness, this one is my beloved Son! Give ear to him!

This command from heaven validates the preceding ministry of Jesus against the opposition, which had questioned his credentials. But it also corrects the misapprehension of disciples who were thinking of a Messiah without a cross. They might naturally expect then that Jesus, fortified in this glorious moment of divine accreditation, will descend from the mountain, gather himself an army, call down the angels and march on Jerusalem to bring in God’s kingdom by force. Such were, don’t you know, the typical messianic expectations of that day and age.

But Mark’s story takes a surprising twist. Jesus indeed heads for the capital city, where the crowd greets him as the new David entering his soon to be restored capital. Yet as quickly becomes apparent, Jesus’s purpose is not to take the throne by force, but rather to cleanse the Temple. That twist bring things to a head. Delivered by the will of God into the hands of sinners, submitting to God’s uncanny purpose, silently he goes to his cruel fate. All the greater our bewilderment when we recall the Transfiguration, realizing then the Lord who lays aside divine glory, who leaves behind the divine light in which he was bathed on the mountain, who descends from that high point down into the dark valley of the shadow of death, obedient even to death on a cross. For He has come not to be served but to serve and lay down his life a ransom for many.

If we are perplexed by this, brothers and sisters, it is a God-intended, spiritually fruitful perplexity. From glory to ignominy. From light to utter darkness. From adoration to revilement. Why, why, why? Deeply to ponder this question is precisely the point of the Lenten season. It is a salutary, saving perplexity.  It leads us to several significant insights into our own lives of Christian discipleship.

First, to know who this beautiful Savior really is, is not and can never be some clever human insight. As Paul reminds us today, It is the God who said, "Let light shine out of darkness," who has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ. Our faith to see Jesus as the beautiful Savior is always the sovereign gift of God, the light of the Spirit shining into darkened minds that we too  see Jesus truly, just like that light which shone on Jesus unexpected from above on the mountain. True faith that turns to the Lord Jesus, true faith that follows the Lord Jesus, true faith that bears one’s own cross because of the Lord Jesus’s cross comes from the enlightening of the Holy Spirit so that we come to see Jesus as the lamb provided for our deliverance. “I believe that I cannot by my own reason or strength believe in my Lord Jesus Christ or come to him. But the Holy Spirit has called me by the gospel…” So Luther taught us to understand. Whoever believes does so in the strength of his or her own little Transfiguration, namely, the Holy Spirit making Jesus alive, real, glorious, and beautiful in human eyes.  

In the second place, Transfiguration give us the confidence that everything Jesus once did in Galilee is valid still and also for us, when through the gospel he comes into our lives and we in faith welcome him into our sufferings of soul and body as our great Physician. So the addict delivered of her addiction knows in faith that Jesus still expels the demons; and the sick restored to life knows that Jesus still heals; and those reconciled after bitter fighting know that Jesus still releases troubled hearts from the crippling power and terrible burden of guilt for their offences and defenses; and the one preserved from calamity knows how the Lord who calms the waves and stills the wind is with us too in our every stormy hour, this watchman of Israel who never sleeps.

There is a third valuable instruction for us in the story. Are we to pipe up like nervous Peter with some cockamamie plan of action? No, for here in the Lenten time now approaching the Word of God must accomplish everything decisive. What we are to do is nothing but to watch and see, nothing but to hush and be still, simply, reverently, patiently, quietly give our attention to the passion of our Lord. Cease and desist with merely human speculations, nervous chatter and anxious interventions. Let the Transfiguration light shine and focus on the Son of God so that you follow him on his way to Golgotha and are changed by the sight of his passion for us and for all. Do nothing. Just be quiet. Just listen to him, watch and see.

Then we will be ready to ask: What was this thing which took place on the mountaintop before the eyes of baffled Peter, James and John who so ineptly stuttered in response to it? When the form of Jesus’ was changed, so that even his clothing glowed as purest light? Up until this moment in Jesus’ ministry people come to him, not for his own sake because of who he is, but for their own sakes, because of what they need and think to get out of him. If all we want from Jesus is his gifts, however, we do not want Jesus. We may then make up an attractive but false Christianity in which Jesus  helps us get our way, rather than to be changed by true and repentant faith by which the Spirit of holiness gets hold of us and changes us and makes us God’s own people by way of union with Jesus’ awesome act of self-giving love for us. This is his true and divine glory; the glory of the God who comes down to the depths, into our dark valley and the shadow of death, there to find us, lay of hold us and never let go. So Paul wrote to the Corinthians who are thus being changed by this Spirit-given, life-changing sight of glorious Jesus:  And we all, with unveiled faces, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being changed into his likeness from one degree of glory to the next. In a true Christianity, it is we who are being changed.

In the glorious light that shone that day, God the Father celebrated his Son’s free decision, for our sakes, to lay down his life for ours as the ransom that sets us free. The revelation reveals Jesus’ unique personal act, a free and uncoerced resolve of spontaneous and undeserved love to do far more for others than any law could ever have required or extorted. So in divine light we see God’s delight in his own Son, further God’s delight in all those for whom his Son gives himself. God’s joy in Jesus and through Jesus God’s delight with us all for whom he lived and died and rose again! The veil of unfaith, fear, distrust, and darkness of death which covers us is pealed back in this glorious moment. We see into our true future, a beautiful new harmony of love that will last forever when we too with Elisha of old will cry out in jubilation, the chariots of Israel and its horsemen! That rapture of praise for the victory of the God of love is the mystery of the Transfiguration which we perceive in our beautiful savior and celebrate today.

Epiphany 5 – 2024: Isaiah 40; 1 Corinthians 9; Mark 1

Is it not striking that the ministry of Jesus, enacting the reign of God on this earth, begins with his mission of healing? He heals in both body and soul, both the blind and the lame and those possessed by ungodly forces. Oddly Jesus calls this ministry of healing preaching. The disciples found him and said to him, "Everyone is searching for you."  And he said to them, "Let us go on to the next towns, that I may preach there also; for that is why I came out." And he went throughout all Galilee, preaching in their synagogues and casting out demons. Jesus says that he has “come out,” indicating that he has been sent on this mission, as we said, to preach healing. It is his calling, his holy vocation, anointed with the Spirit as the beloved Son and sent by the Heavenly Father to go into hurting Galilee preaching healing. He does so with authority. For it is the good and gracious will of God, the heavenly Father, Almighty Creator, that all his creatures be healed and restored to their holy vocations, no longer impaired by disabling pain in body or soul. God’s Reign takes place, God’s kingdom comes, when this will of God is done on earth as it is in heaven. In the authoritative preaching of Jesus, this saving event of healing occurs in word and deed.

Now it might be typical of us modern skeptics or of us postmodern cynics to ask, “Well, Jesus, what have you done for us lately?” And we know how certain kinds of Christians are quite insistent that the healing miracles of Jesus happen today if only we have enough faith. But that is all wrong. Little faith, great faith, or no faith, Jesus’s preaching, doing God’s will for healing, is for the sake of faith, not on account of faith. In other words, these Epiphany wonders of healing are meant to instruct and inspire humanity, in our world still full of sickness and despair, revealing what is the good and gracious will of God to be done on earth. The healings are Epiphany revelation of our Great Physician, meant both to inspire and to instruct disciples to follow him by taking up the holy vocation of healing. As Jesus sends disciples out to continue this mission, we are instructed also to be little healers in the employ of this Great Physician. So we in our skepticism and cynicism should hardly blame God for our own failure to do what is revealed in Jesus and empowered by his Spirit as our human task, particularly as his disciples! We are to be healers in all that we do. It is part and parcel of our baptismal vocation. To be sure, it is a job that none can accomplish alone but only together as the living body of Christ on the earth.

Now, on the other hand, this commission to be followers of the Great Physician can in the course of events forget that it is the mission of proclaiming the reign of God. In fact we can become so narrowly focused on the good works of healing which are in principle only temporary that we  can forget that these such good works are signs that point away from themselves to our Maker and Redeemer in whom our great and final healing rests.  Have you not known? Have you not heard? The LORD is the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth. He does not faint or grow weary, his understanding is unsearchable. He gives power to the faint, and to him who has no might he increases strength. Even youths shall faint and be weary, and young men shall fall exhausted; but they who wait for the LORD shall renew their strength, they shall mount up with wings like eagles, they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint. So the prophet reminded the discouraged of Israel in exile who drew back in fear at the prospect of traversing the desert to journey from splendid Babylon back to the ruins of Zion in Jerusalem. They feared -- journey to healing seemed to them worse than the disease of exile.

Fear not! The prophet’s preaching of the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth as our ultimate healing, I repeat, does not depend on faith but rather is said for the sake of faith, just as faith in such a God is taking courage for the journey to final healing in the mission of healing on our way. In the words of Paul Tillich, courageous faith in God is trust in the power of being overcoming nonbeing, in life overcoming death, in righteousness overcoming sin. Courageous faith in this One who is truly God is the spiritual healing needed and freely given over and above any temporary healing of body and soul on our journey to final healing. All of the persons healed in the gospel stories and restored to life nevertheless died one day. We shall all die because in God’s economy you cannot have a resurrection without first having a death. But we have the courage to face our own hurts along the way and final death knowing that in eternity as in time they who wait for the LORD shall renew their strength, they shall mount up with wings like eagles, they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint. In this faith we rest in peace to rise in glory!

Woe to me if I do not preach the gospel! So we have heard today from the pen of Paul the apostle. I hope by now you are feeling the same and wondering how this missionary gospel of Jesus preaching healing, in time for eternity, might actually be our own today. The first thing to ask about our following of the Great Physician is not, “What would Jesus do?” but rather, “What is Jesus doing?” as he lives and reigns, and continues to do the proclamation of healing in our stricken world. It happens in every gathering around word and sacrament. Much of its abundant fruit, however, goes under the radar in the lives of ordinary Christian people who are alert in their daily lives to the healing word or touch they may lend, collectively in their social ministries which feed the hungry and clothe the naked and build homes for the homeless. And it is right that these good, that is, healing works are done simply for the sake of a hurting neighbor in need and not instrumentalized for purposes of religious or ideological proselytism. Such humility in doing good is fitting; and we do not boast of our good works because we know that, good as they are, the healing is only temporary, a small sign in an ocean of need, pointing then to the great and final healing promised when the reign of God comes in fullness and power.

Consequently the question presses upon disciples about how we today participate in the missionary practice of Jesus’s proclamation of the approaching reign of the LORD, the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth who does not faint or grow weary, whose understanding is unsearchable. I have often pondered this question as I have reflected on the seeming incapacity of our churches to do gospel proclamation to the community outside of the Sunday gathering of the faithful, in the workaday world of Galilee, so to speak, as I have also worried culturally that the church of Jesus is in retreat, losing the spiritual battle for the hearts and minds of people. If we connect the scary word “evangelism” properly to the evangel, the good news, the gospel of the reign of God in Jesus’s proclamation, how do we do evangelism today? Paul’s example of the aforementioned humility is instructive: To the weak I became weak, that I might win the weak. I have become all things to all people, that I might by all means save some.  I do it all for the sake of the gospel, that I may share in its blessings. We too accept people just as they are in the knowledge that just like ourselves they are hurting seeking healing even as we have found healing enough to share.

Now Jesus enters the synagogues to preach and teach and heal. We learn from Luther that it is the Holy Spirit who brings people into the community of faith where the Spirit can preach the gospel of God’s reign to them. And sure enough that is often how it happens. Folks, if I may put it this way, motivated in various ways, wander into the church, checking thing out, not even sure what they’re looking for. This is good, if we are the welcoming people of Christ where they can taste the beloved community of God that they really need for true and final healing. But Jesus didn’t only go to synagogues; he went into the highways and byways and marketplaces of the towns, taking for granted the human hunger for healing in the brokenness of this sad world.

Everyone, just like you and me, is in some way looking for healing. Whether they know it or not, they are good creatures of God but skeptical, even cynical because of lost connections, disabling life -- as we are all in need because we have lost the ultimate connection which gives meaning to the soul and hope to the body. So my suggestion is that we dust off the Lutheran Book of Worship’s neglected Service of the Word for Healing and make it a community outreach event.

No offering other than slips of paper with prayer requests. A brief catechetical instruction on the ABCs of the Christian faith. If the congregation can musically support the gathering including presumably unchurched folks, singing The Great Litany serves to introduce liturgical worship and reinforces the message of healing. Invited, a procession comes forward to the altar for the laying on of hands and anointment with oil with pastor and lay ministers available for personal counsel and prayer. And that’s it! Perhaps an offering of refreshments afterword. But emphatically, no proselytism, just the Jesus proclamation and offering of God’s healing, leaving the harvest to the only one competent, God the Holy Spirit.

The point is that as a community of faith we offer healing publicly in this way just as individually we are disciples of the Great Physician who offer healing of body and soul to every wounded neighbor laid in our path and finally consolation in Christ in the hour of death. All this as the confident proclamation that they who wait for the LORD shall renew their strength, they shall mount up with wings like eagles, they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint.

Epiphany 4, 2024 – Deuteronomy 18, 1 Corinthians 8, Mark 1

Much like these United States in 2024, Capernaum of Galilee at the time that our Lord came into it long ago was not a happy place. It was, as our story today shows, the haunt of demons, lurking even within the houses of worship. The region of Galilee lay in the dirt-poor hinterlands to the north, racially and religiously divided, occupied by foreigners with the local rich folks in cahoots with them, the poor, living off the land, taxed up to the gills for little in return.  “North of Richmond” territory! This Galilee of history is a living emblem of the human predicament: a place oppressed by the absence of God, ungodly, godless, a place ruled by other, anti-divine powers: idols and demons in the imagery of those times, compulsive greed and insatiable envy in our language today. Greed for far more than one’s fair share, envy toward whatever little success or status any another had acquired. No freedom, no community, little love but for self and one’s own. All this misery we need to have in mind when we hear from Mark the Evangelist today that Jesus and the disciples “went into Capernaum” of Galilee.

Jesus came into Galilee. Not imperial Rome with its splendid marble monuments built on the backs of slave labor. But Jesus came into Galilee, not Jerusalem recently rebuilt in lavish imitation of Rome’s splendor by the collaborator King Herod. Jesus, we might say today, came into backwoods Appalachia, poor, ignorant, backwards, fentanyl addicted, hurting with a world of hurt.

We heard last week the story immediately following Jesus’ entry into Galilee proclaiming the nearness of God. It tells about the calling of Simon Peter and his brother Andrew, then the sons of Zebedee, James and John. We might think that leaving our jobs, our places in society, with our thick web of responsibilities and obligations and duties, is what is being asked of us here. In past ages, hermits thought that way. They thought that to be a true Christian, one had to leave the world after the model of John the Baptist. Perhaps even today some are still called to enter into intentional communities of Christian discipleship in such a way. But we would miss the crucial point that it is Jesus, not John, who calls us to follow Him, into Galilee, then, not out of it. Nor then is discipleship something special and extraordinary, for elite Christians, for super-dooper believers but rather for working folk, for common people. The deeper truth is that what disciples of Jesus are to abandon is not their workplace. It is something far dearer to and far harder to give up.

What we are to abandon with true repentance is our greed, our envy, our lovelessness. See, that is how the apostle Paul diagnoses the issue of eating meat offered to idols in Corinth. He does not take the idol literally. But he takes the sin of idolatry seriously. He does not demand that Christians abandon the eating of meat, which in those days was only available in the city at the markets of the temples, where animals had been brought for sacrifice. What he demands of those “in the know,” namely, that “an idol has no real existence,” is that they abandon the idolatry in their hearts, namely, their smug self-assuredness and sense of intellectual superiority rather to respect the conscience of the weaker, perhaps ignorant ones, for whom Christ died.

You know, we could only follow Jesus literally if we got into some science-fiction space machine and flew back in time to the dusty by-ways of Galilee some two millennia ago. We cannot follow Jesus at all in this woodenly literal fashion. We follow Jesus, if at all, by His own Spirit, the Spirit poured out on Him at His baptism, the Spirit who drove Him into the wilderness to be tested by the Evil One, the Spirit who now brings Him into Galilee on His mission of mercy in God’s name. It is by this same Spirit, lavished on you at baptism that you too follow Jesus into Galilee, not the literal one of long ago but the one here and now, the Galilee of your own life and times, where also idols enthrall and demons haunt.

By the Spirit you follow Jesus into Galilee here, now, when you give up envy and renounce greed and therefore refuse to go along any longer with the corruption, when you resolve no longer to be conformed to this world which is passing away but rather be transformed by setting heart and mind on the true God, His coming kingdom and true righteousness. By the Spirit you follow Jesus into Galilee here, now, when you surrender your apathy and crucify your despair and enter in to the clean, fresh air of faith in God, who wills immeasurably more good for us all than we dare hope or imagine. By the Spirit you follow Jesus into Galilee here, now, when you abandon business as usual and go to work in the mission of mercy who is Jesus, this Man for others. When you too include the excluded, when you too encourage the distressed, when you too sorrow with the sorrowing, when you too share bread with the hungry, when you too make peace between the estranged, in all these things and more you too are following Jesus into Galilee, here and now, on the job, in school, within the home, on the playing field, in the market. In whatever Galilee God has placed you in, there you too can and may follow Jesus as once did Andrew and Peter, James and John.

No wonder then that the demon shrieks in recognition: “Have you come to destroy us, holy One of God!?” Did you catch that? The evil spirit, who has taken grim possession of a poor human being, recognizes Jesus as the holy One of God. In other words, its question is: what are you doing here, in our unholy place? It’s like a home invasion from the demon’s perspective. “This is our turf,” it imagines; “these tortured human souls belong to us. What have you got to do with us? I know who you are, holy one of God, you have come to destroy us and set our oppressed ones free.”

This demonic response to Jesus is typical in the Gospel of Mark. Always the unclean spirits recognize Jesus and start to reveal the secret of his identity before Jesus rebukes and silences them. Notice that Jesus never disputes or argues with the unclean spirits, but simply silences them authoritatively with a rebuke before expelling them, releasing the captive human being from their tyranny. You see, this powerful new teaching of Jesus is not merely instruction about the Kingdom of God, which someday will come. It is, in its pronouncement, effectively the approaching reign of God, rolling back the usurpers of the earth, those anti-divine powers that capture and control human lives. The new teaching of Jesus says what it does and it does what it says. That is why the people in the synagogue exclaim, “What is this, a new teaching with authority; He commands even the unclean spirits, and they obey him.”

The biblical word for such authoritative speech is prophecy, which is authoritative just because and only because it gives voice to the very word of God. In this respect Jesus is the new Moses, as we can see today from the first reading from the book of Deuteronomy. Here the Lord says, "I will raise up for them a prophet like you from among their brethren; and I will put my words in his mouth, and he shall speak to them all that I command him.” Such prophecy begins in the household of God. Judgment begins in the house of God. We dare not look down on the synagogue in Capernaum as if it were some other place than our own. The ambiguity of religion , then as now, is that it can be a place where the word of God is spoken and at the same time be a place where demons are in hiding waiting to ensnare and captivate. Entering into the troubled world of Galilee, it is striking but also revealing that the first encounter of Jesus with an evil spirit takes place in the sphere of religion. Maybe that should not surprise us. The theologian Paul Tillich once wrote that "the battle for the kingdom of God first of all takes place in the churches which are its representatives."

Our story today foreshadows something that Jesus will say in a few chapters: no one can enter a strong man’s house and plunder his goods unless he first binds the strong man. Jesus binds the strong man by rebuking the demons, expelling and exposing them for the unholy usurpers they are. This is the Holy Spirit’s struggle of good against evil as Mark represents it in his telling of the beginning of the Good News of Jesus. What is that beginning? Galilee is not just literally an ancient place on the earth. It was the ancient place on the earth in which the Good News of Jesus began. But at the end of the Gospel of Mark the angels pointedly instruct the women at the tomb that they are to tell the disciples to meet Jesus in Galilee. See, Galilee is not just a literal place defined by its physical boundaries in distinction from other places, it is every place where demons lurk and spread darkness and tyrannize and oppress into which the risen Jesus continues to go that we may follow. Such then is the beginning of the Good News according to Mark. Speaking new teaching with authority, Jesus has entered into Galilee.

Epiphany 3, 2024: Jonah 3, I Cor. 7, Mark 1

Good news: the reign of God is on the march and fast approaching! The present form of this world is passing away! For the Lord has repented of the threatened evil and the day of pardon and peace dawns! Therefore: turn around! About face! Re-orient yourselves, so that you join the victory march of the God of love and are not rather left behind in soon to be forgotten darkness! So Jesus enters into the workaday world of Galilee and announces.

This announcement stands over everything that he goes on to say and do. For He himself, this man on a Spirit-driven mission, is advancing in his words and works the very reign of God, penetrating into the workaday world, into the midst of family ties and familiar bonds and mundane concerns of common people. As an annointed king he speaks here with authority; his word commands and is obeyed. He seeks out, he fastens his eye, he chooses: You, drop everything! You, follow me! And just so Andrew and Peter, James and John are conscripted, enlisted, and drafted. A revolution is underway.

Heaven knows we need a revolution. A real revolution, in which the present form of this world with its wars and rumors of war, its Holocausts and Apartheids, its pandemics and famines is passing away. Only let it be the real revolution, not just one more turn of the same old wheel of human lust for power and domination. Let it be the revolution of God!

The gospel call of Jesus is, and it effects, this revolutionary power of God. Jesus brings the true revolution. It is not the French revolution collapses into Napoleon’s military dictatorship; it is not the Russian Revolution with its Lenin and Stalin who grimly drive the people to happiness with an iron fist; it is not even the American revolution, which, in spite of noble aspirations, left the suffering children of African descent to remain under the slave master’s lash. This is a revolution that is qualitatively better. It is not fought with sword and steel, but with Word and Spirit. It does not avenge itself upon enemies but mercifully redeems them, if only they execute the “about face” of soul-searching repentance. It does not derive its energy from hate, but from love excelling, beyond all telling.

            Dear Christian: this revolutionary power of God overthrows the tyrannies of this sinful world and brings in God’s reign of freedom, justice and love; therefore it has nothing to do with a phony piety which runs away from daily life in the world. Jesus’ calls to you today, as to Andrew and Peter, James and John of old to follow, but he does not lead you from your place in life, in this present form of the world. Jesus is not like John the Baptist who stands on the border, calling people to come out as if to leave the dirty world behind. But Jesus comes right into the dirty world, right into the midst of an unclean people, right into my life and your life with all our confusions and failures, compromises and hypocrisies. Jesus comes into the Galilee of your life and mine. There he seeks us and there he finds us and there he summons: You, about face! You, follow me!

And where are we to go? Deeper into Galilee, so to speak, in pursuit of all the others still bound by slavish fears of nonconformity to the present form of this world which is passing away! “Follow me,” he says to these fishermen, “and I will make you fishers of men.” His is a redemptive revolution, this coming of God’s kingdom. Here is a merciful justice, this coming of God’s reign. This revolution gives life for death, righteousness for sin, the Spirit of God in exchange for our deathly, fleshly self-reliance. Those called themselves become callers for God. Those chosen themselves become God’s inviters, welcomers, with arms wide open for others. Participating in Jesus’ own mission, see, Peter and Andrew, James and John, you and me -- we are ourselves transformed, made into new beings, who more and more bear the image of the God of love which we see in Jesus who by his own Spirit revolutionizes peoples’ lives.

Now a revolution is not pain-free. Transformation of our lives involves a real, often wrenching turnabout. “Jesus bids a man to come and die,” wrote the German Lutheran pastor, theologian and martyr under the Nazis, Dietrich Bonhoeffer,” and in so dying to find his true life.” Do you know his story? Although he lived in extraordinary times, he was a mortal human like you and me, like Peter and Andrew, James and John; he felt and loved the ordinary bonds of life: love of homeland, love of safety and comfort, love of a beloved fiancée, love of his budding career, love of his own physical life with its creature comforts. These indeed are all real treasures of human life on this earth. To lose any one of them is to lose something of real value. In 1939 Bonhoeffer spent the summer in the USA. A prestigious academic post was available for him. American friends urged him to stay here in safety. Returning to Hitler’s Germany and wartime life would mean certain suffering, probably death. Indeed, life and safety in America would mean the opportunity further to develop his ideas and have a positive influence on the future.

As he wrestled through these questions, one Sunday he happened to walk into a rather conservative and old fashioned Presbyterian Church in NYC. He listened to these words from our Gospel lesson today and he heard the call of Jesus saying, Dietrich, Follow me. Follow me deep into Galilee, into that land of gathering darkness, into the midst of an unclean people, right there where Satan seems to reign. And so he did. He died on the gallows in a concentration camp just days before the Allied army would have rescued him. His last words to a fellow inmate were: “For me this is the end, but really it is the beginning.”

            Jesus bids a man to come and die to the present form of this world which is passing away, and in dying to find true life. I judge it unlikely that you and or I shall be called to make this extraordinary witness of martyrdom, though Christians throughout world today are so called and do so obey: in Nigeria, in Nicaragua, in China and many other places. We should know more, and care more, about these persecutions. No one in their right mind aspires to suffering and the Lord himself teaches us to pray: Save us from the time of trial! There is nothing lovely about suffering and persecution or hanging on a Nazi gallows. Nevertheless, the extraordinary life of the martyr of Christ like Bonhoeffer illumines the ordinary witness that every disciple of Jesus makes in everyday life even in ordinary times where, hidden or visible, the form of this world is passing away.

Are you prepared to drop everything and follow Jesus when cruel language and hateful talk vilifies and degrades those who are vulnerable in our world? Are you prepared to drop everything and follow Jesus when office politics and personal power plays corrupt one and all on the job? Are you prepared in this society whose cathedrals are the malls, and whose values are ever more debased by insatiable binges of self-indulgence, to let all that glitter pass away, in order to follow Jesus in valuing the valueless of our Galilees, in loving the unlovable, in treasuring those who have no treasures in this life?

You are prepared if indeed Jesus is the One who is preparing you, you are able if indeed it is his Spirit who from baptism day to resurrection day is revolutionizing your life. People come to church looking for help with their personal problems, of course; God’s revolution really helps. But it does not help you to adjust to the present form of this corrupt world, which is passing away. It does not help you to go along in order to get along. That would be to cure the sickness with more sickness. But God really helps you by summoning you to leave behind the petty problems entrapping you in the present form of this world, by getting you involved with the mission and ministry of Jesus for others. Self-forgetting Jesus love for others is what really (dis)solves our personal problems. The real self-care is other-care in the context of the beloved community of God where we bear one another’s burdens and so fulfill the law of Christ. The social form of God’s revolution takes is to make a community of self-forgetting love in the midst of Galilee; this is the missionary church, a caring community of Christ’s people where the call of Jesus is sounded in sermon and sacrament every Sunday, manifesting the dawning day of resurrection and the new creation. Here ordinary people are step by step changed into the likeness of Jesus.

Our God is in it for the long haul. He is the patient revolutionary. The progress of his kingdom ebbs and flows, though its victory is certain. Now is the appointed time. Today is the day of revolution. God’s kingdom is on the march and calls us to join in. For Jesus has stepped into Galilee. Therefore, the present form of this world is passing away. Game on! The true revolution has begun. Amen.

Epiphany 2, 2024: 1 Samuel 3, 1 Corinthians 6, John 1

In this season of the Epiphany we turn attention to those notable events of the ministry of Jesus which reveal the mystery of his person: his baptism in the river Jordan, his proclamation of the nearness of God’s reign, the authoritative call to discipleship, healings of the broken in mind and body putting the Evil One and his minions to flight, the parables he told of God’s amazing mercy, the pronouncement of the double love commandment demonstrated then – of all things!-- in dining with tax collectors and sinners as in a wedding feast, all of this culminating in the Transfiguration when the glory of Jesus as the Son of God is revealed to Peter, James and John.

We have a big advantage in all this. Unlike the characters inside the gospel story, we already know the secret of this ministry of love. Unlike Phillip and Andrew and Peter and Nathaniel, we already know the mystery of the man Jesus, this son of Joseph from Nazareth. The Gospel of John has already told us in its first verses that what we are about to witness as the narrative unfolds. We will see the eternal Word of the Father become flesh, that is, being spoken here and now into our time and space by the Gospel’s living color portrait, so to speak, of this man on a mission. Jesus from dusty, insignificant Nazareth, known by his workingman father’s name, Joseph, this rare man of mercy among us calculating men and women, is shown to us the very Son of God. The fourth evangelist tells us at the end of his gospel that he has recorded all these stories about Jesus in order that we may believe that Jesus is the Son of God and that believing, we too may have life in his name.  ERGO, Come and see! Indeed, let’s look and see!

Notice first today how Jesus is the One who takes the initiative. He comes into Phillip’s life unexpected as also into ours, whether we are looking for him or not, and with authority commands, You! Follow me! You! Pay attention! Later in the Gospel of John, Jesus will therefore remind these very disciples, “You did not chose me, I chose you.” And this holds true for all believers. In the preaching of the gospel, the risen Jesus Christ is the One who is coming into our lives, disruptively, calling us out by name also to arise and follow him. He takes the initiative. He calls with authority. He commands our attention, our allegience, our faith. He seeks and finds us.

Notice next how we who are called characteristically misunderstand and get it backwards from the start. We just heard that it is Jesus who seeks and finds. But what does Phillip say to Nathaniel? Does he say, I was lost but now am found? I blind but now I see? No, he says to Nathaniel, We have found him of whom Moses prophesied. We have found him, we have done it! Our insight, not God’s revelation! But of course such a merely human claim is eminently debatable. Nathaniel, with good cause, replies by challenging the claim, I’m from Missouri, he says. Show me! Skeptically he asks, Can anything good come out of nowheresville Nazareth? From the son of a rude workingman, the guy Joseph whom we know? What a silly idea! To his credit Phillip does not now argue. Challenged, he realizes that his merely human claim avails nothing. If he is really speaking about the One sent from God, the Messiah who takes the initiative and establishes his own divine claim on us as a true and merciful Lord taking hold of his own lost and perishing creature, he cannot argue anyone to faith, let alone on his own authority just say it is so. He can only bear witness and invite. So Phillip simply replies, Come and see!

Come and see! Come to think of it, isn’t that why we don’t get bored with the old, old story which remains ever good and ever new? Come and see Sunday on Sunday with your mind’s eye the One whom we get to know in these down to earth stories of a life of loving service and final sacrifice for one and all on the cross – just as if this One were not dead, but alive and active, just as if the son of Joseph from Nazareth from long ago were indeed the Son of the living God, alive, active, present! Indeed! Therefore, even today: Come and see – him! Come and discover what he is doing! Don’t wonder, as the well-meaning slogan has it, what Jesus would do. No, come see what Jesus is doing! Come and see and hear him! So that we become again as little children, attentive like the child Samuel of old, with open mind and heart, saying: Speak, Lord, for thy servant heareth.

So it happens in our story today, which now shifts focus from Phillip to Nathaniel. Nathaniel indeed comes to see Jesus who greets him with a statement that utterly disarms him. He addresses Nathaniel as a genuine, true Israelite, without guile, that means, not a deceiver or a cheat. This puzzling, surprising greeting indicates that here too Jesus takes the initiative, revealing Nathaniel. Thus it elicits from Nathaniel in turn the astonished response, How do you know me? When Jesus replies in the apparently irrelevant way, I saw you under the fig tree, Nathaniel the seeker and inquirer suddenly turns into an extravagant confessor, heaping praise and acclamation that seem all out of proportion: Rabbi you are the Son of God, the king of Israel! What’s going on here? How does this instantaneous conversion of Nathaniel come about?

We have to recall the Old Testament the story of the patriarch Jacob to understand. Jacob, you may recall, was a rascal and cheat, full of guile, whom God nevertheless chose, blessed and in the long course of his life finally transformed to be given a new name, Israel. Jacob fled away, having stolen his brother Esau’s paternal blessing by deceiving his sick, blind, bedridden father Isaac. When he fell asleep exhausted from the flight, he had a dream of the ladder to heaven, where the angels ascend and descend. There again, later, after many years, returning to make peace with brother Esau whom he had defrauded, Jacob wrestled with the Angel of the Lord all night till dawn. He would not let go until he was blessed. That wrestling match is the origin of the name, Israel – a new, second name given to Jacob; it means, the one who strove with God, who sought and fought in faith for God’s promised blessing in spite of his sins. Jacob full of guile and deceit is therefore renamed Israel, man of faith who holds onto God’s promise of blessing, not on the basis of his own insight or righteousness, let alone his conniving, but purely on the basis of God’s gracious choice and call. As Luther would’ve put it, in Jacob’s all night wrestling match Jacob was “rubbing God’s ears in his promises.” Thus in being renamed Israel, Jacob strove with God and prevailed. The self-reliant way of guile, deceit and trickery in the process was washed out of him.

This great narrative of Jacob the cheat turned into Israel, man of embattled faith, is in the background of Jesus’ greeting to Nathaniel. He calls Nathaniel a genuine, true Israelite, one who strives with God for his promised blessing, but, unlike the old Jacob, one in whom there is no guile, no deceitfulness or conniving. Even though he is skeptical that the Messiah comes from Nazareth, even though he does not simply accept Phillip’s human claim to have found him, he is willing to come and see because, as a sincere Israelite, he seeks in faith the promised blessing of God. He is an authentic seeker; although he knows not whom or what he seeks, he is looking for blessing of life that comes from God. He is not a scoundrel, a cheat, a deceiver, a phony, like the old Jacob who uses God for his own sinful purposes, who loves the Giver only for the sake of the gifts. He is really seeking God and his kingdom and righteousness; he is the true Israel. Nathaniel is astonished at Jesus’ greeting because it penetrates to this deepest truth about himself. Nathaniel at once realizes that through all his seeking for life and blessing, he has been drawn to this moment of truth, of revelation, of encounter with Jesus.

Jesus concludes the episode by telling Nathaniel that he will yet see “greater things,” just like the patriarch Jacob in his dream long ago saw the heavens opened and the angels ascending and descending. But this time not on a upward ladder but upon this Son of Man, this Jesus from Nazareth, the son of Joseph. Jesus in person comes as the stairway to heaven, the gateway to heaven, the threshold of heaven, and Nathaniel the seeker who has come to see Jesus will henceforth see indeed that in Jesus God opens wide the door to heaven, the door to life, true life, abundant life, eternal life. Henceforth he knows, as the apostle Paul teaches us today, that he is no longer his own, but has been bought with a price that he may glorify God in the body

Dear Christian friends, the gospel story is always old because it is always about this same old Jesus from Nazareth and what he once and uniquely did for us all. But it is always new, because it is also about each and every Phillip into whose life Jesus comes and commands: Follow me! Each and every Phillip who bears witness and invites: Come with me to see Jesus! It is about each and every Nathaniel and Jacob-turned-to Israel; the old, old story is just as much about our being drawn to Jesus, our coming to see but therewith being discovered and known, welcomed and converted, until we to exclaim and proclaim him who has sought and found us and led us through the wide open door of mercy into the presence of the God of love. The old, old story of Jesus and his love is always new because the gift of eternal life and blessing of God is simply lavished there upon us and upon all who come and see. This is what Jesus is doing today and every day when his people gather around his Word, blessed Epiphany! To God all the glory for all his rich mercy in Christ. Amen.

Baptism of our Lord – 2024 Genesis 1, Acts 19, Mark 1

Today we mark the beginning of the Epiphany season by observing the Baptism of our Lord. In the Gospel of Mark, Jesus’s baptism in the river Jordan tells us something about Jesus before it goes on to show Jesus in action. The knowledge of who Jesus is precedes knowledge of what Jesus does. The important reason for this precedence is that we rightly understand the works of Jesus only in light of the identity of Jesus. This precedence in knowing who Jesus is over what Jesus does was a major insight of the German martyr theologian, Dietrich Bonhoeffer. He lectured on the identity of Jesus in 1933 at the University of Berlin under the dark shadow of Hitler’s rise to power.

Many in that time, also in the church, were hailing Adolf Hitler as their Führer, virtually as their new Messiah. They did so because they judged on the basis of his visible works: uniting the people, putting down the dissenters, restoring pride and power, liberating the nation from oppression, promising greatness to come. Only 12 disastrous years later would they learn who Hitler really was. Bonhoeffer was teaching to the contrary that Christians do not look for messiahs in politicians, because they already have one. Nor do they judge on the basis of visible works which can be deceptive. Much later in the Gospel of Mark, Jesus says that many will come doing wonders so as to deceive even the elect. But Christians, knowing in the Spirit the Messiah whom they have in Jesus the beloved Son of his Abba Father, the God of Israel, have learned that the genuinely creative and redemptive work of God in the world comes by Jesus surprising way of humble service and self-giving, the way of the cross.

Such lifelong Christian learning, the discipleship of our minds, happens to us this year of the Gospel of Mark as we in the Spirit follow Jesus on his life’s way through the cross to his glory. Our learning is inaugurated here in the beginning at the baptism of Jesus. He is identified by the heavenly voice as the beloved Son, that identification simultaneously making that heavenly voice to be that of Jesus’s heavenly Father. This mutual identification of the Father and the Son is then confirmed as the Spirit, in the figure of the dove, alights upon Jesus, picking him out from the crowd for us to focus on. This anointing with the Holy Spirit, moreover, makes Jesus the beloved Son the anointed one whom Israel awaited, which is what the word Messiah (in Hebrew) or Christ (in Greek) means.

When we continue with Mark’s story in several Sundays, the Spirit who has anointed Jesus will compel Jesus into the wilderness to be tested by an enemy, the Unclean Spirit who opposes the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit thus inaugurates the Epiphany combat of Jesus which follow as Jesus enters Galilee to expel the demons, heal the sick and forgive sinners. We are shown in this way that the grace of God enacted in Jesus is a militant grace. It goes to battle against the forces of darkness. It breaks into the strong man’s house and binds him up in order to plunder his goods, which are suffering human beings addicted to power or pleasure or, even perversely, addicted to pain, desiring their own subjugation as weighed down by failures, burdened with guilt. Or, alternately, high on their own sense of righteousness and power, unfree in any case to live as joyful children of God in the workaday world of Galilee.

So Mark wants us to know from the outset who it is that we are dealing with, the beloved Son on whom the Holy Spirit abides, each sent by the heavenly Father, the God of Israel. Knowing this from the get-go, we will properly understand all that Jesus does and suffers on his life’s way. And knowing this, we will be equipped as disciples ourselves to follow him in the power of the very same Spirit through the cross to the crown.

So we should notice that all three of our Scripture lessons today are bound together by specifying the work of the Holy Spirit. Our short excerpt from the very first verses of the Bible in Genesis shows us that the Word of God and the Spirit of God go together, distinct but inseparable, in acts of creation and new creation: The earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep; and the Spirit of God was moving over the face of the waters. And God said, "Let there be light"; and there was light. Genuine acts of creation are reserved to God alone. We human beings can be creative since we are made in the image and likeness of God, but being creatures, we do not summon into being that which does not yet exist, out of something without form and void, sheer absolute darkness. Rather, when we creatures are creative we work with existing materials, fashioning and reshaping them according to our intelligent design and moral purpose. But God alone creates, as we say in theology, out of nothing: light out of darkness, order out of chaos, life out of death, life-giving righteousness out of death dealing sin, and so on. God so creates by his Word and Spirit, his Word which commands and his Spirit which animates and enlivens.

We Lutherans, descended from the Reformation, have historically been very good on the Word of God, which we sing as our great heritage. But we haven’t been so great on the Word’s own testimony to God’s Spirit, whom the creed tells us is the Lord and giver of life. The word of God proclaims the identity of Jesus as the beloved Son given for us but it is the Holy Spirit who instills in us the confident trust in the man Jesus such that he really is our own in whom we too are beloved and well pleasing to God. Thus in another place St. Paul tells us that the Holy Spirit bears witness to our spirits, against all discouragement and despair, that we are indeed the children of God. We need to know about this precious gift of the divine Spirit, the Lord who gives us true life by grasping hold of our heart of hearts, because otherwise we put a terrible and false burden on ourselves, whether or not we really believe. Oh no! Confident trust in the Word of God is the pure gift of grace by the Holy Spirit literally inspiring us to believe in spite of our unbelief, just as the Spirit first inspired Messiah Jesus at his baptism to go into battle for us.

So you notice that that what applies to the Christ at his baptism is reapplied to his Christians, that our baptism is a baptism into his baptism. Here in the sacrament, daily to be remembered with a hearty “amen,” the same heavenly voice announces our adoption as beloved children of God, sending into our hearts the same confident trust which is the Holy Spirit. So our second lesson today from the Acts of the Apostles testifies. Let’s listen to the chief part again: Paul asks, Did you receive the Holy Spirit when you believed?" And they said, "No, we have never even heard that there is a Holy Spirit."  And he said, "Into what then were you baptized?" They said, "Into John's baptism." And Paul said, "John baptized with the baptism of repentance, telling the people to believe in the one who was to come after him, that is, Jesus." On hearing this, they were baptized in the name of the Lord Jesus. And when Paul had laid his hands upon them, the Holy Spirit came on them; and they spoke with tongues and prophesied. Practically speaking, I wonder how many modern Christians, other than the Pentecostals, have never even heard that there is a Holy Spirit! No wonder, folks are tormented about whether or not they truly believe and wanting relief from this torment, decide that Christian belief is beyond them, over their paygrade. So in reality it is. Luther taught us to confess, “I believe that by my own reason or strength I cannot believe in my Lord Jesus Christ or come to him, but the Holy Spirit has called me through the gospel, enlightened me with his gifts and united me with his faithful people.”

Luther’s teaching is verified today by the comparison made between  John’s baptism and baptism in the name of Jesus, the beloved Son, together with his anointing Spirit and the Father in heaven speaking love. As Paul explains, John’s baptism was a human act signifying repentance and hope for the forgiveness of sins when Messiah comes. I repeat, a human act. A good human act, but a human act subject to all the uncertainties of any human act. Even John the baptizer, according to Paul, redirected the question of belief away from himself to the one to come, the mightier one who would baptize with the Holy Spirit. And notice, on hearing this word of God, Luke tells us, something happened to these folks in Ephesus. They did not do something, something happened to them: they were baptized, passive voice, hands laid upon them, passive voice, and the Holy Spirit was given, passive voice, so that they burst out – now at last active voice! –, in the confident praise and proclamation of hearts born anew into a living faith. Who you are as newborn Christians by baptism, precedes what you do as Christians! See again as well the collaboration of the Word and the Spirit, each distinct but inseparably operating together. Knowing who they are, consequently or rather, now knowing whose they are, these folks in Ephesus burst into action, giving all the glory to God for all his rich mercy in Christ.

So if you are wondering where today is this outpouring of the Spirit which Scripture witnesses to us here and now, look around you and see! Simply recognize the spiritual reality that occurs every time we gather around gospel word and sacraments which follows us thereafter, so to speak, into the workaday world of our own Galilee or Ephesus. For you, like these folks at Ephesus, are made the temple of the Holy Spirit; you each become a prophet, that is, mouthpieces of the Spirit to speak the word of God in the community of Christ, voicing praise and thanksgiving, sharing comfort and consolation, lending the courage to the discouraged, simply being faith operating in love. When you do not fall for the hucksters, but rather when you build up the community, accompany the grieving, clothe the naked, visit the prisoner, feed the hungry, forgive the trespasser, love the enemy, make peace, rejoicing in all that is good and beautiful – in short when you are the little Christs, anointed with the same Holy Spirit, of the great Lord Jesus Christ by your baptism into his baptism, then hearts, your own and those around, are touched with the assurance that we are indeed the beloved children of God. So the Holy Spirit brings the word of God home to create what had not been, the beloved community of Christ and his people, harbinger of God’s new humanity, a light in the darkness which the darkness has not overcome. This is who you are, whose you are, you, the baptized, in whom the Father’s Word, now in flesh appearing, is spoken into the world in the power of the Holy Spirit.

Christmas I – 2023: Isaiah 61:10--62:3, Galatians 4:4-7, Luke 2:22-40

Happy New Year! It is a happy new year every Sunday, the day of the Lord’s resurrection. This day marks the passing of the old aeon and the dawning of the new time of God’s grace. Happy New Year! It is a happy new year because when the time had fully come, God sent forth his Son, born of woman, born under the law, to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption. Just because Jesus was born into solidarity with us in the old and perishing age –born of a woman and born under the Law-- the happy new year of God’s grace, set in motion by his coming to us in the old, means that, you, newly adopted children of God…You shall be a crown of beauty in the hand of the LORD, and a royal diadem in the hand of your God. Happy New Year!

It helps us to appreciate and reverently to celebrate God’s happy New Year when we understand how it came to pass that God’s Son, born of a woman, born under the law, just so worked our redemption and adoption as children of God. Understanding this requires us to think in a twofold way about what it means to be “under the law” – namely, as those instructed by the law, the Torah of God, and as those criticized by it.

On the one hand, being “under the law” means that Jesus grew up under the Torah’s instruction in order that he fulfill of Israel’s ancient hope for righteousness on the earth. If, as we have heard in Advent-tide, that we are with Israel to hope in, and fervently pray for, and so live in anticipation of a world in which righteousness is at home, we see in the coming of God’s Son into solidarity with us his life-deed of righteousness in our world, sign and seal of all God’s promises. This is the primary meaning of being born under the law, the meaning particular to ancient Israel and its hope for a Messiah, a true son of David who would bring about righteousness on the earth. We especially see this in Luke’s stories of the infant Jesus, brought to the Temple in Jerusalem, where the aged saints Simeon and Anna rejoice in the fulfillment of God’s ancient law taking shape in the child Jesus, just as Luke concludes today: And the child grew, and waxed strong in spirit, filled with wisdom: and the grace of God was upon him.

So Jesus grew to live out a whole life of obedience to the double love commandment, namely, that we should love God above all and all creatures in and under God.

This life of righteousness is what marks Jesus out as the Christ, the Messiah of Israel, and teaches us how to think about the salvation that He brings, which is not any old thing we might want. I might want a Lexus convertible in 2024, but that is not the salvation of righteousness that Jesus brings as the Messiah of Israel. I might want personal power such that the Boss fears me, the spouse is wrapped around my little finger, and my kids are living duplicates of good ol’ me. But that’s not the salvation of righteousness that Jesus brings as the Messiah of Israel.  Rather, let us learn what the salvation of righteousness is from Simeon today (in the elegant old language of the King James version): Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace, according to thy word: For mine eyes have seen thy salvation, which thou hast prepared before the face of all people; a light to lighten the Gentiles, and the glory of thy people Israel. Such is the salvation of righteousness that Jesus brings about, the glory of Israel whose law, now fulfilled and so illuminated in the life of love that Jesus led, enlightens all the peoples of the earth, showing them love of God above all and all creatures in and under God. We need to be under the law, then, in the sense of being taught this righteousness as our truly human vocation.

There is, however, a second meaning of being born under the law, namely this, that as the law of God speaks a commandment of righteousness as love, it speaks against us who are not so loving. You see, love, if it is not sheer sentimentality, must be against what is against love. “Love what is good, hate what is evil,” thunders Israel’s great prophet Amos. “Let love be sincere,” Paul admonishes the Romans, “hate what is evil.” God’s love is zealous and holy, active in all things like a prosecuting attorney. In righteous indignation, according to the testimony of Scripture, God judges what is against love, to cast down the mighty from their thrones but exalt them of low degree. And that is why in another place Paul the apostle says that all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God, that there is none, no not one, who is righteous, no one who actually loves God above all and all creatures in and under God —until God sent forth His Son, born of a woman, born under the law, to redeem those who were under the law.

So this is a second meaning of “under the law,” which is not exclusive to ancient Israel, but in fact is the experience of all creatures under the sovereignty of the one who is truly God. Under the law here means that in our historical experience, in all the mysterious and often dark twists and turns of our journey, we meet God, our Creator as critic. In this part of the letter to the Galatians, Paul names the Law, with a Greek word that comes into English, as pedagogue, literally a servant who guides the footpaths of a schoolchild. In Paul’s Greek world, however, this was not a happy role. The pedagogue was not simply an instructor but a taskmaster who harshly forced the children to study and behave. Paul compares God’s governance of a fallen and wayward humanity through the Law to such a pedagogue. That is why our Lutheran Confessions remind us lex semper accusat: the Law always accuses. Because in this second sense the Law works on us as a pedagogue, chastising us to love and disciplining what is against love. In this sense, we need to be freed from being under the law, to pass from the old life of slavish fear of threats and proud claims to merit deserving of reward to the glorious liberty of new-born children of God – those who now freely and willingly love God above all and all creatures in and under God. How does this wondrous passage to the happy new year of life under grace transpire?

The deepest mystery of the Christian faith tells how Jesus, who purely proclaimed Israel’s Torah as the great double love commandment, fell under the Law’s accusation of those who are not so loving or righteous. How so? On account of his solidarity with us. For, born of a woman, born under the Law, He loved us children of earth who fall short of the glory of God. Indeed, He was notoriously the friend of sinners, even scandalously of tax collectors, hated collaborators with the Roman occupiers. Likewise, scandalously he proclaimed the forgiveness of their sins in the name of God. This forgiveness was not a magic trick. He did not wave of a magic wand and disappear the sins he forgave into thin air. But he took responsibility for us; he took on himself the sin he took away from others. And thus at the culmination of His life He had to drink the bitter cup, the consequences of His life of love in God’s name for those not so loving or righteous. Martin Luther called this culmination of Christ’s life, born of a woman, born under the law, “a strange marvelous duel…the Law battling the Law in order to become liberty for me.”

You see, the mystery of the cross as the culmination of the righteous life deed of Christ is that the Law as God’s own will to love came into conflict with the Law as God’s own conflict with us not so loving nor righteous. And God’s will to love prevailed in this marvelous duel, finding a new way forward of mercy. Mercy that redeems those under the Law and effects their adoption as beloved children of God so that it is really true to say of those whose being in Christ is now under grace,  “You shall be a crown of beauty in the hand of the LORD, and a royal diadem in the hand of your God.”

Just as the birth of God’s Son of a woman under the Law was an event in history, then, so also it is an event—let’s call it God’s ever-ready New Year celebration of grace—when by the proclamation of this the Holy Spirit makes it an event in your history, too. God’s love is not a lifeless idea or timeless principle, but God seeking, finding and delighting in those sought and found. Behold, if anyone is in Christ new creation! The old has passed away – happy New Year!

Christmas Eve, 2023: Isaiah 9, Phil. 2, Titus 3, Luke 2

Martin Luther characteristically preached on this festival: “It does you no good that Christ was born in Bethlehem if Christ is not also born in you.” Have we, however, in our post-Christendom culture converted Christmas into something else? Is the  meaning of our Christmas feast being hijacked and turned on its head in this consumer culture of malice and envy, this entertainment culture of wayward passions and false pleasures, swallowed up by the miserable, scarcely veiled secret of too many contemporary lives: hating and being hated. All the more so it bears repetition for emphasis: Christmas is about our conversion, the Holy Spirit’s change of the very loves of our hearts:  “O holy Child of Bethlehem, descend to us we pray,” we sing in one of our beloved carols. “Cast out our sin and enter in, be born in us today!” Have we converted Christmas into something else, or does Christmas convert us?

“Be born in us today!” -- this is the earnest prayer of every Christian, who knows Christmas, not as indulgence in physical gluttony or spiritual sentimentality, but as our holy day remembering when first the kindness and love of God our Savior appeared in this dark, dark world of wars and rumors of wars, of refugees and persecutions, so that we too would have this mind that was in Christ Jesus, who, being in the form of God did not consider his equality with God something to take advantage of, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant  The message is that God turns to us all in unfathomable mercy in the Babe of Bethlehem – this is the first and literal Christmas. Our hearts in reply are reborn in Christ by the Spirit to God – this is the second and spiritual Christmas, since it does you no good that Christ was born in Bethlehem if Christ is not also born in you this night!

Maybe, just maybe this year of an ever darkening world situation, amid all the words, words, words of foolish advertisements from the mouths of disobedient hucksters, deceiving us and enslaving us by all kinds of passions and false pleasures, maybe just maybe we will take to heart the one Word which are to hear and obey in life and in death with new hearts to trust the message of Christmas which is truly trustworthy: [God the Father] saved us through the washing of rebirth and renewal by the Holy Spirit, whom he poured out on us generously through Jesus Christ our Savior, so that, having been justified by his grace, we might become heirs having hope of eternal life. This is the word from God concerning our conversion, our own spiritual Christmas, which does not trick us into buying yet another toy we don’t truly need, but rather works in us new devotion to doing what is good, excellent and profitable for all.

            So we are here tonight to proclaim that Word of the first and literal Christmas: Unto you is born this day in the City of David a Savior, who is Christ, the Lord. Of the increase of his government and peace there will be no end. He will reign on David’s throne and over his kingdom, establishing and upholding it with justice and righteousness from that time on and forever. The kindness and love of God our Savior appeared not wrapped in bows, as we have heard, but in swaddling clothes, strips of rag that a poor woman used to warm her newborn; not fulfilling false expectations of greed and malice, but rather laid in a lowly animal trough, since there was no human place available – all this, to fulfill God’s purpose that this little Child save us. From what? From this very culture of greed and malice which has no room in the inn the poor, the homeless, the refugee! On what grounds does God purpose to save us through this child? Not because of righteous things we had done, since we were rather all caught up in unrighteousness, but because of his mercy – mercy which melts ice-cold hearts, mercy which convicts in order to convert and so opens our small, closed minds to the Father’s wide open arms and all-embracing purposes. To what end? To reign over us in peace and justice, that means, by our own conversion from the false loves of greedy beings enslaved to sin, our conversion as those devoted to doing what is good, excellent and profitable for all.  This is the second, spiritual Christmas, that we be changed through the washing of rebirth and renewal by the Holy Spirit

            We need this spiritual Christmas, for the loves or desires of the human heart motivate us in everything we do. We do what we do because of something we want, in order to get it. This is the law of our nature. We are creatures, not creators. We do not have life of ourselves, but must constantly seek life. But what do we want? Alas, we seek false goods, eating food that does not satisfy, drink that does not quench. So endlessly unsatisfied we become ever more greedy: our desires turn into envy of those who have more, jealously over what little we have, malice lashing out at others as competitors against us. Love we must, but humab loves are false, until our hearts are made new through the washing of rebirth and renewal by the Holy Spirit, persuading us that we are indeed beloved children of God for Jesus’ sake, working in our hearts in reply the new, true love for God with all his people. Such rebirth and renewal is our own spiritual Christmas!

See how the whole Trinity appears in our text to accomplish it:  God [the Father] saved us through the washing of rebirth and renewal by the Holy Spirit, whom he poured out on us generously through Jesus Christ our Savior, so that, having been justified by his grace, we might become heirs having hope of eternal life. When we were baptized in the name of the Triune God, that washing of rebirth and renewal signed the in-pouring of the Spirit into our hearts bearing witness that we are indeed the beloved children of God, the very same Spirit who first brought Jesus Christ our Savior to birth in Betlehem and thence led him through life and death to resurrection. And we needed this rebirth and renewal, just as much as we did not deserve it, because we were caught up in false loves and unworthy desires of wayward hearts of creatures lost in darkness. But our heavenly Father, rich in mercy, determined to straighten us out, leveling the mountains of vain pride, lifting up the valleys of faithless despair, by his grace, that means, by his own free and awesome decision to love us notwithstanding, to stick with us in spite of everything, to regain us for himself no matter what the cost. Cost God it did, in the fullness of time: the birth in the manger anticipating burial in the tomb, swaddling clothes foreshadowing burial linens, the homeless Child’s holy body grown up to be pierced and broken – all this  to seek and find us who were dead to God.

That is God’s costly grace which justifies us, regarding us and making us beloved children and heirs of God, having hope of eternal life. For nothing less than the eternal life of the Father and the Son in the Holy Spirit, our blessed holy Trinity, will still restless hearts, grant true peace that this world can neither give nor take away, and so at last deliver our wayward desires from false and deathly loves. This is the hope of the heart converted! Nothing less! Renewed by the Spirit, united with the Son, to live to God our heavenly Father, now and forever! So it is Christmas that converts you, not you who convert Christmas into something less, something cheap, something false and ruinous. But by the Father’s grace Christ would be born in us this day that we too may sing in the Spirit with the choirs of heaven: Glory to God in the highest, peace on earth to those with whom He is pleased.