The Resurrected Life

[This message was shared with the people and friends of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio earlier today.]

Luke 20:27-40
In Romans 10:17, in the New Testament, the apostle Paul says that “faith comes from hearing, and hearing through the word of Christ.” Every Sunday in most churches at worship around the world, in this century as it’s been during the twenty centuries that came before, after God’s Word is proclaimed, pastors and priests, confident that this Word from God about Christ has the power to bring or deepen faith in Christ within those who hear it, invite worshipers to confess their faith.

In the Apostles’ Creed, we say that we believe “in the resurrection of the dead.”

In the Nicene Creed, we say that we “look for the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come.”

And in the barely used Athanasian Creed, we say that at Jesus’ return to this word, “all people shall rise bodily to give an account of their own deeds.” (The only “deed” that will matter, of course, is whether we have believed in Jesus. As Jesus Himself puts it, “The work of God is this: to believe in the one he has sent [that is, to believe in Jesus] (John 6:29).”)

But for all this talk of the resurrection life with God that you find in the New Testament or in the Church, there are few passages of Scripture, except maybe in Daniel and Revelation and a few other scattered places, that talk about what that resurrected life with God will look like.

That’s undoubtedly as it should be.

For one thing, our call is to trust that anywhere Jesus is will be wonderful. Period.

Our call is to turn to Jesus and trust Him to take care of both the journey and the destination.

As Jesus told Nicodemus, “Just as Moses lifted up the snake in the wilderness [This refers to when, in the Exodus, God instructed Moses to forge a bronze snake like the ones that were biting and killing the people, so that the people could, in looking on the bronze representation, acknowledge their sins and look to God for forgiveness and life.], “so the Son of Man must be lifted up, that everyone who believes may have eternal life in him." (John 3:14) Our call is to turn to Christ when His Word calls us to faith in Him and live, knowing that He’s got us in His hands even beyond death. “I am the resurrection and the life,” Jesus tells us. “The one who believes in me will live, even though they die; and whoever lives by believing in me will never die.” (John 11:25-26)

When you live in a world in which death seems to have the final word though--when you listen to the sin and death of the world more than you listen to the Word of Christ--belief in the resurrection of the dead can be hard. I have even heard church-goers say things like, “When you die, you die.”

The second-largest bloc of Jewish believers in Jesus’ day, the Sadducees, thought in just this way. Jesus encounters them in today’s gospel lesson, Luke 20:27-40. Like the Pharisees, who, unlike the Sadducees, believed in the resurrection of the dead, the Sadducees were concerned that Jesus’ popularity, demonstrated in the welcome He had received on what we now call Palm Sunday just a few days before our lesson takes place, would cause the Romans to come down hard on all of God’s people. The Pharisees and the Scribes have gone up against Jesus, hoping to discredit or even kill Him, just before our lesson begins. Now it's the Sadducees' turn. Take a look at the lesson, please.

Verse 27: “Some of the Sadducees, who say there is no resurrection, came to Jesus with a question. ‘Teacher,” they said [In Luke’s gospel, the only people who call Jesus teacher are enemies who use the term sarcastically or to butter Jesus up with fake respect.], ‘Moses wrote for us that if a man’s brother dies and leaves a wife but no children, the man must marry the widow and raise up offspring for his brother. Now there were seven brothers. The first one married a woman and died childless. The second and then the third married her, and in the same way the seven died, leaving no children. Finally, the woman died too. Now then, at the resurrection whose wife will she be, since the seven were married to her?”

The Sadducees only accepted the first books of the Old Testament--Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy, the Pentateuch, all thought to be from Moses--as God’s Word. So they loved to appeal to Moses whenever they were engaged in religious debate. And the Sadducees are right here: The law God gave to Moses, concerned with ensuring that every one of God’s ancient people received their inheritance in the promised land, said that if a husband died before he and his wife had a son who could be an heir, the next unmarried man in the deceased husband’s family was obligated to marry his sister-in-law. Their first son would become the heir of the dead man. But, trying to ridicule notions of a resurrected life beyond death, the Sadducees create an absurd scenario of a woman who has married seven brothers. Then they ask Jesus, in the resurrection Jesus talks about, whose wife will this poor woman be?

If the Sadducees with their tall tale here appear to have vivid imaginations, Jesus shows them they’re not vivid enough. They can’t imagine what the resurrected life God has in mind for His people will be like. Like most people in the history of the world, from the ancient Greeks, Romans, and Egyptians, the Mayans, Buddhists, and Hindus, right on through to modern people who bury their loved-ones with six-packs of beer and money, when the Sadducees imagined a resurrected life, they imagined it as being pretty much like this one.

Jesus’ response to them shows that, for the disciple of Jesus Christ, the resurrected life is in some ways beyond our imagining. (Which may be another reason why Jesus and the Scriptures spend so little time telling us what it will look like.)

Verse 34: “Jesus replied, ‘The people of this age marry and are given in marriage. But those who are considered worthy of taking part in the age to come and in the resurrection from the dead will neither marry nor be given in marriage, and they can no longer die; for they are like the angels. They are God’s children, since they are children of the resurrection.’”

Marriage won’t be a thing in the resurrected life, Jesus is saying. God instituted marriage in this world, in part so that mortal humans could live on in their offspring. In an eternity composed of people “considered worthy of taking part in the age to come” because they believed in Jesus Christ, there will be no chance that his new human race, made new and eternal by grace through faith in Jesus, will ever die out. Marriage, in that sense, will be unnecessary.

In the resurrection, the raptures of marital intimacy, sometimes plagued by difficulties, disagreements, and griefs, will be replaced in by the eternal ecstasies of immediate intimacy with God and His everlasting kingdom of perfection.

In the Old Testament, there are hints about life in the resurrection that Jesus brings.

• Job, the man who suffered much but kept trusting in God says centuries before Abraham and Sarah “I know that my redeemer [God] lives, and that in the end he will stand on the earth. And after my skin has been destroyed, yet in my flesh I will see God; I myself will see him with my own eyes--I, and not another. How my heart yearns within me!” (Job 19:25-27) 
• Also in the Old Testament, Daniel 12 gives a vision of the resurrection of the dead. 

But, since the Sadducees only believed in those first five books of the Old Testament, Jesus decides to show them that the resurrection is real by referring to Moses.

Verse 37: “[Jesus says] But in the account of the burning bush, even Moses showed that the dead rise, for he calls the Lord ‘the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.’ [that’s Exodus 3:6] He is not the God of the dead, but of the living, for to him all are alive.”

The living God of the universe isn’t the God of dead people, but of people made alive by grace through faith in Him, the One revealed to us even today in Jesus.

The living God is the God of the resurrected life.

While those imperfect old saints--Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob--haven’t yet risen from the dead, they are alive in the presence of the God in Whom they believed.

They’re like Moses and Elijah, who could confer with Jesus on the mount of Transfiguration though centuries dead.

They’re like the thief on the cross who begged repentantly to be part of Jesus’ eternal kingdom and was told by Jesus, “Truly I tell you, today [not tomorrow or some day] you will be with me in paradise.” (Luke 23:43)

They’re asleep and dead to this world, but awake and alive to God, and one day bound to rise when Jesus closes down this tired old creation and brings the new one in its fullness.

The resurrected life we who daily persist in turning from our sin and trusting in Christ are going to one day enjoy will be, in the apostle Paul's phrase, “immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine” (Ephesians 3:20).

But even now, the resurrected life, the fully burgeoning and consummated Kingdom of God that Jesus gives to all who believe in Him has invaded our world and give our lives God’s hope, peace, and joy. Wherever the Word of Christ is heard and believed, wherever the sacraments are administered and received, that invasion takes place.

In His high priestly prayer, offered to God the Father on the night of His betrayal, Jesus says, “Now this is eternal life: that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent.” (John 17:3) If you trust in Jesus, the resurrected life He died and rose to bring to sinners like you and me has already begun. The “resurrection of the body” is just around the corner!

For that, you can trust Jesus, the risen One. Amen

[I'm the pastor of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio.]

"Take up your cross and follow Me"

Matthew 16:21-28
[This message was shared during the worship services of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio, on September 3, 2017.]

Our gospel lesson for today, Matthew 16:21-28, begins in this way: “From that time on Jesus began to explain to his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and suffer many things at the hands of the elders, the chief priests and the teachers of the law, and that he must be killed and on the third day be raised to life.”

We Christians have read and heard those words (or words like them) so many times in our lives that we may hardly notice them. Or give them a second thought. But when Jesus spoke them to His original hearers, the twelve apostles, their effect must have been not just jarring, but volcanic!

A few moments before, we read in Matthew, Peter had confessed his faith in Jesus as God’s anointed King, the Messiah or the Christ, as well as God in the flesh, which is what the phrase "the Son of the Living God" means. Peter was saying that Jesus was the Son of God, the very reflection and embodiment of God Himself!

Jesus had commended Peter’s confession, which He said, had come to Peter not from human beings, but from God Himself, the way our faith always does (1 Corinthians 12:3).

And Jesus said that it was on this strong confession made by Peter that “I will build my church, and the gates of Hades [or hell] will not overcome it” (Matthew 16:18).

Peter’s confession of Jesus and Jesus’ affirmation of it must have been an incredible moment for the twelve. For centuries, their people, the people of God, had been waiting for the Messiah promised by God. And here was Jesus confirming what Peter (and probably many of the other disciples) had come to believe. The wait was over. The Messiah, Who would make all things right, had arrived.

The problem was that in the four-hundred-some years since God had given the last book of the Old Testament to His people and the moment of Peter’s confession, an enormous gap between what God means by making all things right for us and what God’s people meant by making all things right had developed.

This gap was caused by the failure to understand on the part of God’s peoplewhat their real problem was.

God’s people had come to see their problem as the Romans. And before that, the Assyrians and the Babylonians. Each had been foreign conquerors. The problem, as God’s people had come to see it then, was these foreigners who had come and taken over their country.

God said that His people’s basic problem wasn’t the people who had conquered them through the centuries. It was that they had forgotten Who their God was.

They worshiped idols.

They worshiped the things of this world.

And because they did, they perpetrated grave injustices against each other and the strangers that were among them, violations of God’s holiness that God had adamantly and repeatedly forbade many times in His Word. It was because of all of this sin that God had allowed His people to be conquered.

To God’s people, including the disciples, the biggest problem they had was all of those other people who made their lives miserable. But God knew that the real problem wasn’t with all those other people.

And the only way that God could make all things right for His people and the whole world was not to give them a strongman king, the people’s version of a Messiah, the Messiah they wanted, who would boot out the foreign conquerors. Why? Because even if the strongman king was successful in routing the Romans and filling the people’s fevered desire for fat pocketbooks, the success of such a king would still only leave God’s people dead in their sin.

The only way that God could make all things right for His people and the world was to send a Messiah Who would deal with the sin into which every one of us--Jew and Gentile--is born.

Our greatest enemy in the world isn’t someone else: It’s not our spouse, our family, our boss, our government, or any of those “other people.” It’s not even the devil, although he hates us and wants us eternally separated from God.

Our greatest enemy is us. It’s us--you and me--who need to be dealt with. We and our sin must be conquered before they kill us off for all eternity.

But this isn’t something we like to hear or wrestle with. Who wants to be forced into saying, “It’s my fault”? Most of the time, those words stick in our throats.

Peter was just like us in that way. Verse 22 tells us that Peter is horrified at the idea of the One he had just confessed as Messiah going to Jerusalem, to be rejected and crucified. Matthew says that Peter rebuked Jesus. “That will never happen to You, Lord,” Peter says to Jesus, telling Jesus, the One he had just confessed to be God that Jesus was wrong. Peter was telling Jesus how to be the Messiah. He was giving Jesus "God lessons"!

In fact, as my son Philip pointed out to me last night, the word used to describe Peter's words to Jesus--rebuked--was in the Greek Septuagint translation of the Old Testament with which Jesus would have been familiar only used of superiors upbraiding or chastising people beneath them in class or authority. Peter is treating the One he has confessed as God and Messiah like an underling!

Look what happens next, starting at Matthew 16:23. “Jesus turned and said to Peter, ‘Get behind me, Satan! You are a stumbling block to me; you do not have in mind the concerns of God, but merely human concerns.’”

Jesus calls Peter, Satan! The very name means enemy or adversary. At this moment, Jesus is calling Peter an enemy of God! This is a serious matter.

To try to stand in the way of God and the will and purpose of God makes a person an enemy of God. So, when Jesus uttered this condemnation of Peter, you can imagine how mystified Peter must have felt.

Do we stand in the way of God and His will for our lives?

Are there times when we try to turn Jesus into the king of our dreams, the king who will even go along with us when we’re being selfish or hurtful?

Are there times when we expect Jesus to overlook our sins while we stand in judgment over others for theirs?

Are there times when we insist that the problems in our marriages, our families, or our lives are exclusively the fault of others and not us?

Absent repentance and trust in Christ, if our answer to any of those questions is yes, then Jesus’ words of rebuke and their intrinsic call to repentance and renewed trust in Him, first leveled at Peter apply to you and me too. I know that Jesus' call applies to me many times, too.

But there is good news! King Jesus has come to set us free and make us right. 

Look at what He says, starting at verse 24: “Then Jesus said to his disciples, ‘Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me will find it. What good will it be for someone to gain the whole world, yet forfeit their soul? Or what can anyone give in exchange for their soul? For the Son of Man is going to come in his Father’s glory with his angels, and then he will reward each person according to what they have done.’”

Jesus could have been the king that Peter, the other disciples, and God’s people in Judea wanted. He had the power to do it.

When Jesus was later arrested in the garden of Gethsemane, He said that He had at His disposal “twelve legions of angels,” 60,000 angelic soldiers ready at the direction of Jesus. He could have been a warrior king.

When Satan met Jesus in the wilderness, it was to be precisely this kind of king that he tried tempting Jesus into being. Satan knew that if Jesus relied on raw power, coercive force, to make Himself king, Jesus would have been as guilty of sin as Adam and Eve had been when, in their desire to “be like God,” they ate the fruit God told them not to eat.

And had Jesus been this kind of king, He wouldn’t have been trustingly relying on His Father and His plan, but on violent force.

Our lives could never have been made eternally right had Jesus gone that route.

We could never have been set eternally free from sin and death. Jesus had to go to the cross to take our punishment for sin so that, in rising, He could set free all who turn from sin, that is repent, and surrender trustingly in Him, that is believe in Him.

In the way Jesus chose, He could be King, not of a worldly nation, all of which eventually fail and fall from the weight of their arrogance, sin, and injustice, but the King of a new creation.

Jesus didn’t enter the world to conquer all the armies of the world while leaving everyone in this world dead and separated from God. Jesus came to conquer us with His love and so, give us life that never ends.

The only way for us to appropriate the victory won for us by Jesus on the cross and from the empty tomb is to first, take up our cross--meaning, to acknowledge, in Pogo’s famous words, “We have seen the enemy and he is us.” We need to own the fact that we need a Savior, Someone Who will save us from our sins and ourselves and to save us to be all that God intended for us to be. 

And we need secondly, to follow Jesus. Even when it’s inconvenient. Even when it’s the last thing we want to do. Even when it’s less than popular. Even when it costs us money, time, or our lives.

Taking up our crosses and following Jesus. We Lutherans have always called this a lifestyle of “daily repentance and renewal.” This is the content of the faith in Jesus that Peter, just a few verses before our gospel lesson, confessed: a faith that believes in Jesus as the King that makes all things right, the God Who opens up infinitely more than “we can ask or imagine” (Ephesians 3:20) to all who dare to surrender to Him.

And how can we know this is true?

That’s the question from the disciples that Jesus seems to anticipate in the last verse of our lesson.

“Truly I tell you,” He says. “some who are standing here will not taste death before they see the Son of Man coming in his kingdom.”

Is that true?

Did the disciples see the coming of Jesus’ kingdom?

I mean, didn’t Jesus teach us to pray, “Thy kingdom come”?

The first disciples did see the kingdom of God come when Jesus rose from the dead, “the firstborn of the dead” as the New Testament calls Jesus (Colossians 1:18; Revelation 1:5) and the “pioneer and perfecter of faith” as He’s called in Hebrews 12:2. The disciples saw the kingdom of God when they saw the King after He had died and risen.

And we see--we experience--this kingdom when we too, take up our cross and follow Jesus.

May that be how we live.

How we die.

And, by the grace God bears for all who trust in Christ, may it also be how we will all rise again.

Amen

[Blogger Mark Daniels is pastor of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio.]

God Will Carry You!

Five years ago, a remarkable young member of the congregation I serve as pastor, Sarah, underwent the first of two bone marrow transplants (BMTs).

A second one happened two months after I became her pastor, in January, 2008.

Both procedures involved long hospital stays and accompanying complications. Through it all, Sarah and her wonderful family--Mom Becky, Dad Bryan, and Brother Stephen--have displayed faith and tenacity. They are heroes of Christian faithfulness to me!

Putting it in the only terms I can understand, Sarah's second BMT was 93% successful. This means that she will continue to need treatments always, but that she can lead a normal life. (Whatever a normal life might be!)

In 2009, Sarah was the Logan High School Homecoming Queen. She graduated near the top of her class. (Sarah was inducted into the National Honor Society while in a hospital intensive care unit.) She's now in her sophomore year of college, a psychology major with aspirations of working with young oncology patients in hospitals. (I can't imagine anyone more qualified by temperament, experience, or faithfulness to Christ to do such work.)

Last week, Sarah contracted pneumonia and struggled to breathe. Years of chemotherapy have significantly weakened her immune system. The quickness with which the pneumonia struck, at a point when everything was going so well for her, was stunning for everybody, especially for Sarah and her family.

They all had to hit "battle stations" again.

For Bryan and Stephen, that entails not just visits to the hospital and lots of praying, but also exhausting errand-running and schedule-juggling, among other things.

For Sarah's mother, Becky, a professional person just like Bryan, this means remaining with Sarah 24/7, acting as her advocate, prayer partner, intermediary, and "pal." It's a role that Becky plays well and includes a healthy respect for the fact that Sarah is now a young woman of 19.

Becky says that the day before Sarah was taken to the hospital, they had been to a massive expo in Louisville. There, they saw the reproduction of a painting showing a cowboy carrying a calf on his shoulders. Beneath it was a passage of Scripture, the very one Becky said she needed to face the new challenge which, unbeknown to her, she would face the next day. (It's amazing how God works that way, isn't it?)

Thank God, Sarah is doing well! Last night, she didn't require oxygen. She isn't on oxygen today. The regimen of treatments, buttressed by the prayers and love of Bryan, Becky, and Stephen, along with the pleading of an army of prayer warriors, has been used by God to turn away this latest assault on an incredible young woman. Sarah is to go to a regular care unit today and may be discharged tomorrow, in time to spend a very happy Thanksgiving with her parents, brother, and extended family!

During a phone conversation a little while ago, Becky revealed to me for the first time, that she has a new favorite Bible verse. Throughout Sarah's previous hospitalizations, Becky grasped hold of Psalm 46:10, which says, "Be still, and know that I am God!" That's a great passage, part of the psalm that inspired the lyrics of Martin Luther's hymn, A Mighty Fortress is Our God. It's been a touchstone passage for her for several years.

Becky says that, over the past week or so, she's been holding onto words God revealed to the prophet Isaiah, words inscribed at the bottom of that print of a cowboy she found little over a week ago:

Even to your old age, I am He, even when you turn gray I will carry you. I have made you; I will bear; I will carry and will save (Isaiah 46:4)

God makes hundreds of promises in His Word, the Bible. Someone has said that all of those promises are like blank checks, just setting there for believers to "cash in." The God Who has never broken a promise is ready and willing to answer His promises to us. Of course, maturing believers realize that God takes an eternal perspective on things. This is why Paul says, in 1 Corinthians 15:19, "If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied." We often want the things we pray for to happen immediately; God knows that He has an eternity to provide for us "far more than all we can ask or imagine" (Ephesians 3:20). But we know that God's promises--God's Word--are absolutely sure and completely reliable!

In Becky's new favorite passage from Isaiah, we see a promise from God for all believers who are exhausted and who know that the burdens on our shoulders are too huge for us to carry. God will take our burdens and carry them for us, just like Jesus, God incarnate, already took the weight of our sins to the cross.

We have an incredible God! 

He wants to bear the burdens you and I were never meant to carry. 

Peter talks about this in the New Testament: "Humble yourselves therefore under the mighty hand of God, so that he may exalt you in due time. ⁷Cast all your anxiety on him, because he cares for you" (1 Peter 5:6-7).

God cares for you!

So, when the things you're carrying get too heavy--even before they get too heavy--remember to do two things:

• Keep on praying!
• Keep following Jesus! 

God can carry you.

If you let Him, God will carry you!