The Crucified Christ Alone!

[Below, you'll find live stream video of both of today's worship services from Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio, and the text of the message shared during the services. Jesus Christ is all we need! Have a good week.]





1 Corinthians 1:18-31

This morning, I begin with a confession: I have sinned against God and others and violated my ordination vows, though I didn’t realize it at the time.

My sin started innocently enough. I looked at “seeker-sensitive” churches drawing huge numbers of people and commandeered their “secret sauce.” Its foremost ingredient was the preaching of its pastors.

The preachers who drew the crowds, whether they were ultraliberal, ultraconservative, or evangelical/Calvinist, focused on ethics, personal happiness, and how to get ahead in life. They preached messages people called “relevant.”

Some of them told people to be justice-seekers or peace-makers. They preached on passages of Scripture like our first lesson for today, Micah 6:1-8, and gave people step-by-step procedures to being peace-makers and justice-seekers.

Others looked at passages like our Gospel lesson, Matthew 5:1-12, and produce sermon series about nine things people could do to get God’s blessings. I heard one of these preachers give his formula for sermon creation: (1) Tell them what you want them to know; (2) Tell them what you want them to do.

God forgive me, folks, there was a time when I bought into this nonsense.

Only later did I realize that this formula was unchristian. “Do this and you’ll be right with God and others,” was my unspoken and false message.

I preached “sermons” on topics like How to Divorce-Proof Your Marriage, Eight Steps to Success, Raising Faithful Children, How to Foster Friendships. My sermon titles sounded like how-to books by motivational speakers.

But the crucified and risen Jesus was getting pushed to the side.

There are big problems with this approach.

One is that almost everyone would agree about how we’re supposed to live our lives; yet none of us does live fully as we’re supposed to live. How-to preaching will lead us either to despair over our failure to live up to religious dos and don'ts or to pride in how well we think we’re doing.

A second problem with this approach is that it causes people to take confidence in the works they do rather than in the God we know in Jesus Christ. Jesus says, “The work of God is this: to believe in the one he has sent.” (John 6:29) Our justification in the eyes of God and our hope for this life and the next have nothing to do with the things we do. Our hope is in Jesus Christ alone!

I never completely abandoned proclaiming or teaching the truth of Christ’s Gospel. But the Word of God is an all-or-nothing proposition for Christ and His Church. I was effectively preaching a “Christ and these how-to lists” message, as if Jesus Christ wasn’t enough of a Savior.

I was beginning to realize how much I needed to repent when a crisis developed in the Lutheran denominational body of which I was (and many of you were) formerly a part. That denomination was, in its way, turning away from the Word of God, including both the Law that condemns our sin and the Gospel about Jesus that sets us free from condemnation. I was appalled by what was happening.

But as I read God’s Word and prayed, I realized that I was part of the problem.

In the quest for “relevance” and crowds (which never materialized, by the way), I was making the people who heard my weekly versions of “what do I want them to know and what do I want them to do” sermons susceptible to false gospels that tell people to rely on their works, their thoughts, or their emotions rather than on Jesus Christ only! I repented before God and told Ann that I never wanted to preach another “cute” or worldly sermon for as long as I lived.

In today’s second lesson, the apostle Paul says, “Jews demand signs and Greeks look for wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified…” (1 Corinthians 1:22-23)

What Paul is saying is that people in the world have things they demand from the Church in order for them to consider the Christian message “relevant” to their lives. In Paul’s day, his fellow Jews demanded miraculous signs before they would listen to the Church. And the Greeks, a term Paul here uses for non-Jews, Gentiles, demanded the Church be a dispenser of wisdom. Above all, the world of Paul’s time (and our own), wants the Church to tell it exactly what it wants to hear. “Tell us we’re right on our politics, our view of what’s true and what’s not, our take on personal morality, then we might pay attention to you.” But Paul says the Church and Christians must refuse to be “relevant” dispensers of how-to worldly wisdom. “We preach Christ crucified!”

When we hear or when we proclaim the message of Christ crucified, there are two things God reveals.

First, we see the depths of our sin and the deadly consequences of them. In the eyes of the holy, righteous God of the universe, the One Who made us, every sin we commit, whether in thought, word, or action, is a capital offense, making us worthy of death. A single lie, one misuse of God’s name, a solitary fantasy of sexual immorality, a passing word of gossip: These, along with sins like idolatry, greed, murder, or the refusal to honor those in authority, warrant the same punishment from God: death, eternal separation from God, everlasting condemnation in hell. We know all of this is true because on the cross, we see Jesus, God the Son, perfect in His sinlessness, dying for our sin. Christ crucified shows us that sin–our sin–is fatal and that, unless something is done for us, Jesus’ prayer from the cross, “My God, My God, why have You forsaken me?” will be our constant cry from hell.

Second, in Christ crucified, we see what God has done to spare us the consequences of our sin. On the cross, Jesus does what we cannot do for ourselves: He offers Himself as the perfect sacrifice for our sins. He takes the punishment we deserve. He does everything needed to make us right with God. We are born sinners with no right to live. But the God unwilling to easily part with us because of His love for us has gone to the cross for us. As Paul writes elsewhere: “God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” (Romans 5:8)

He goes on: “Since we have now been justified by his blood, how much more shall we be saved from God’s wrath through him! For if, while we were God’s enemies, we were reconciled to him through the death of his Son, how much more, having been reconciled, shall we be saved through his life! Not only is this so, but we also boast in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received reconciliation.” (Romans 5:9-11) Dear friends in Christ, you are deeply loved by God. Christ crucified brings this love to you. Christ crucified and risen reconciles you to God now and forever!

Our call is simple then: To turn from our sin and turn to Christ.

So, what about passages like Micah 6?

Or Jesus’ Beatitudes in Matthew 5?

Aren’t these blueprints for our salvation, behaviors we can adopt that will make us acceptable to God and give us the good life.

No, that’s not what they are at all!

If you and I were capable of adopting them, capable of loving God and loving neighbor, Jesus wouldn’t have needed to go to the cross. But like Paul, we are bound to confess, “I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out…” (Romans 7:18)

God’s Law is meant to cause us to see that we are in bondage to sin and cannot free ourselves and assure us that we can turn to Jesus, the One Who sets us free from our bondage and then takes up residence in our lives so that, as we trust in Him, the goodness, love, and obedience to God that is foreign to our natures, begins to be manifest.

Jesus Christ sets us free from our sin and self-absorption and lives in those who are baptized in His name and who trust in Him!

The Christian can say with Paul: “I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I now live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.” (Galatians 2:20)

The world doesn’t need wowing signs or worldly wisdom. Neither do we.

All we need is Jesus Who died and rose again.

Jesus doesn’t promise to make us popular or powerful.

He doesn’t promise to give us health or wealth in this world.

He doesn’t promise us that He’ll cause this life or this world to make sense.

He promises us forgiveness of sin, new and everlasting life with God, and the assurance that He is always with us.

No matter what a confused and dying world (or we ourselves sometimes) may think, the crucified and risen Jesus Christ–and Jesus Christ alone–is all we need.

You can trust in Him!

Amen

Loving Your Enemy?

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

Luke 6:27-38
A number of years ago, a friend of mine, a pastor, was visited by his parents for the first time at the first congregation he served as a pastor. His parents attended worship, then took my friend to lunch. 

“Did you meet John and Mary Smith?” my friend asked his parents. “They’ve been great to me.” “Oh,” his mother answered. “I met them but I wasn’t nice to them because I thought you didn’t like them.” 

My friend was mystified as to where his mom got the idea that he didn't like this couple and then asked her, “Why would you decide to not treat someone well even if I didn’t like them?” 

He said that his mother was stunned by his question, looking at him as though he was from another planet. People who seek to follow Jesus Christ often have that effect on others.

Last Sunday, we looked at the beginning of Jesus’ Sermon on the Plain. In it, Jesus described the blessed life that those who, because they’ve been saved by grace through faith in the crucified and risen Jesus, are citizens of the kingdom of God.

Today, as He continues the sermon, Jesus tells us how we who are in His kingdom, but still in a fallen world, are to live. Jesus does so in a stunning command, unlike any that appears in any other religious or ethical system in the world. Jesus sets us free to live differently toward the Johns and Marys in our lives, whether their ill treatment toward us or the people we care about is real or imagined.

So, let’s take a look at today’s gospel lesson, Luke 6:27-38. Verse 27: “But to you who are listening I say: Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you.”

I love how Jesus begins “to you who are listening.” When I was a boy and a vacant look would cross my face as my mother was telling me something, she’d ask me, “Mark, are you listening?” It’s possible for us to hear someone without listening to them. Jesus is saying, “This is for you who are listening to what I’m saying about the kingdom of God.” 

And then, Jesus gives those of us blessed to know Him a single command, expressed in four different ways: Love your enemies. Do good to the people who can’t stand you. Be blessings to those who condemn you. Pray for the people who are cruel to you.

The word in Luke’s original Greek text that we translate as enemies is ἐχθροὺς. It describes someone who is openly hostile to us, someone animated by a deep-seated hatred for us. It’s these kinds of people that Jesus says we are to love. 

And, just in case we're inclined to look for an escape hatch, the word for love Jesus uses is Ἀγαπᾶτε, from the word you may be familiar with, agape. It’s a verb that means to take pleasure in, to wish well. Agape love wishes another person well even when that other person hates them. 

This is the kind of love that God has for us, a love that caused God the Father to send Jesus into the world for us. Paul says in Romans 5:8: “...God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” It’s with this kind of love that Jesus commands us to love the people who hate us!

And so He tells us, starting at verse 29: “If someone slaps you on one cheek, turn to them the other also. If someone takes your coat, do not withhold your shirt from them. Give to everyone who asks you, and if anyone takes what belongs to you, do not demand it back. Do to others as you would have them do to you.”

This is the point at which I (and maybe you) want to tell Jesus, “But, if you only knew what that person did to me, what this person said about me, how annoying so and so is…” 

It seems we all have people we think God will understand us loathing. 

But to our rationalizations and excuses, Jesus asks three questions, starting at verse 32: 

“[One] If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? Even sinners love those who love them. 

"And [two] if you do good to those who are good to you, what credit is that to you? Even sinners do that. 

"And [three] if you lend to those from whom you expect repayment, what credit is that to you? Even sinners lend to sinners, expecting to be repaid in full. 

"But love your enemies, do good to them, and lend to them without expecting to get anything back. Then your reward will be great, and you will be children of the Most High, because he is kind to the ungrateful and wicked. Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful.”

That last line of Jesus gets me every time: “Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful.” When other people hurt me or those I love, I find it so easy to write them off as forever damned and irredeemable. But, if God refuses to withhold His mercy from me, then who am I to withhold my mercy, my understanding, my love, or my willingness, in the words of The Small Catechism, “to put the most charitable construction” on what my neighbor does or who my neighbor is, from any human being? 

Even when the God I know in Jesus disapproves of what I do, He never stops loving me, never stops offering grace or the possibility of forgiveness. 

In gratitude for God’s grace, I owe my neighbor nothing less.

In seminary, I had a New Testament professor who made me crazy. In his lectures, he seemed to drone, then flit from subject to subject. I wrote off him and the textbooks he required us to read. I figured I would skate through the course and never have to mess with this prof again. 

The final was a set of essay questions and I always did well with essay questions. I was stunned when I saw my final grade: F!

I confess that at that moment and for a few years after that, I regarded that professor as my enemy. I was sure he was out to get me. I was sure that he didn’t like me, didn’t like my piety. I convinced myself that he probably wasn’t really a Christian and was trying to sabotage me from being ordained. 

A year later, I took the class again, this time with a different professor. I got a B. I felt vindicated and was tempted to go to the first professor's office and dance a victory jig. 

The next year, Ann, our baby son, and I were in Michigan for my internship. When I returned for my last year of classwork, I realized that I needed one more course on a New Testament epistle to graduate. There was one that worked with my other classes and my schedule: First Peter. Guess who taught it? My enemy, the professor who had it out for me. I gritted my teeth and signed up for the class.

I wondered what I would have to do to pass this class and what kind of grief this professor would give me. To my surprise, the class was fantastic. And the prof couldn’t have been fairer. 

Just before the end of the term, I got a note from him, asking me to meet with him. I braced myself. “Mark,” he told me when we connected, “I have a class I’m teaching next term, Theology of the New Testament. It’s done seminar-style. I know that you don't need the class to graduate, but you’re so good at engaging people in helpful discussion, I wonder if you’d do me a favor by enrolling in the class?” 

I could hardly believe it. I stammered that I’d be happy to take the course. I thoroughly enjoyed it too. The last two classes I took from that prof brought As, something I wouldn’t have imagined possible three years earlier. 

A few weeks before our last class, at the end of my Master of Divinity program, the same professor I thought had hated me told me that I should consider getting a doctorate in New Testament studies. “I think you could make very useful contributions,” he said. 

I never felt called to be a New Testament professor and have always believed that the parish is where I belong. 

But to this day, I’m moved when I remember that dear man’s vote of confidence. He had never been my enemy at all. I only thought so in my sinful, selfish mind. And even when he must have known how much I disdained him, he still showed me mercy. He still loved me.

Did my prof do that because he was such a great guy or because there was something loveable about me? You know the answer to the second question already. But I will tell you that the answer to both questions is the same: No! 

But the professor belonged to Jesus and Jesus works in the lives of those who belong to Him. 

The Savior Who loved the human race even when we tried to kill Him and put Him away, empowers believers in Christ to love others even when we would rather do something different. 

The first martyr in Christian history was a man named Stephen. The book of Acts tells us that when Stephen’s very real enemies were hurling the stones at him that would bring his death, he looked to heaven and prayed, “Lord, do not hold this sin against them.” And then, “When he had said this, he fell asleep.” (Acts 7:60) Stephen’s final words echo Jesus’ words on the cross: “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.” (Luke 23:34) It’s as though Jesus had taken up residence in Stephen. 

And so He had! Christ lives in everyone who turns to Him in repentance and faith. Like the apostle Paul, we who daily seek to live in our baptismal covenant can say, “I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I now live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.” (Galatians 2:20)

If I were to set out to love my enemies in my own power, first of all, I wouldn’t want to do it. Who but a person who knows that they’re a sinner saved by grace through the crucified and risen Jesus would choose to love an enemy? To the world, any talk of loving an enemy is insane!

And even if I wanted to love my enemy, I couldn’t do it in my own power. As often happens any time I set out to do the right thing, my sinful nature would get in the way.

But when Jesus is living inside of us, when we turn to Him each day and He fills us up again and again with His Holy Spirit, Jesus loves others through us. 

And when our enemies receive our love, all sorts of good things happen. 

Forgiveness happens. 

Grace happens. 

Life happens. 

We experience the kingdom of God that Jesus speaks of in the final part of our gospel lesson, a kingdom in which we “do not judge” the worthiness for salvation of any human being, knowing that Christ has saved us in spite of our unworthiness, and a kingdom in which God gives eternal blessings to us “a good measure, pressed down, shaken together and running over...poured into" our lives, now and forever.

Let’s pray. Lord Jesus, fill us up with You, Your love, Your gospel, Your Holy Spirit and love others through us so that they too can live in Your kingdom. Amen

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

Who's the greatest?

This summarizes what God seemed to be trying to teach me during my quiet time with Him today. To see how I structure these intimate encounters with God, look here.

Look: “A dispute also arose among them as to which of them was considered to be greatest.” (Luke 22:24)

Before this verse appears, Jesus has just instituted the Sacrament. He then tells the twelve apostles that someone among them is going to betray Him and that condemnation will fall on the one who does this.

According to Luke, the apostles then shift into a debate as to who among them the betrayer could be.

But just as quickly, their short attention spans showing, they move to a different argument: Which of them is considered to be the greatest?

I checked on the Greek here for several key words.

The first is dispute. In the Greek in which Luke first wrote his book, the word is φιλονεικία (philoneikia). That’s a compound word, the first part of which means love, like in philadephia (brotherly love). Philoneika literally means lover of strife. It seems to refer to people who just like to argue.

At this dramatic moment, when their Lord has just told the twelve that He is going to be betrayed and die, their love for Him isn’t stirred. Instead, their first reaction is to see who they can pin the blame on for the betrayal. Then they indulge their love of dispute to argue over which of them is the greatest.

The greatest is with them, Jesus. Yet here they are, glorifying themselves. “I’m number one.” “I’m the greatest.”

It’s all so hollow. In a matter of hours, the one Jesus has already designated to lead this lot of losers, Peter, will deny any association with Jesus. Among those to whom he denies following Jesus is a powerless servant girl whose testimony is toothless in that ancient sexist world.

But neither Peter nor the other apostles mind pounding their chests with pride when they don’t feel threatened. They love a good argument when the risk is low. (They’re like moderns who battle with strangers on the Internet, but are loathe to confront or resolve conflicts face to face in their own daily lives.)

The other word I was interested in was considered. In the Greek, the word is dokia, meaning thought. The idea here is that the twelve were interested in how others perceived them. The question wasn’t really who was the greatest, but who people thought was the greatest. Rather than striving to be the greatest, they were aiming at being perceived as the greatest. (And we think that the whole desire to look good more than to be good is a new phenomenon.)

But Jesus, both by word and example, points the twelve to a different measure of greatness: “The kings of the Gentiles lord it over them; and those who exercise authority over them call themselves Benefactors. But you are not to be like that. Instead, the greatest among you should be like the youngest, and the one who rules like the one who serves. For who is greater, the one who is at the table or the one who serves? Is it not the one who is at the table? But I am among you as one who serves.” (Luke 22:25-27)

It’s true, as Proverbs 22:1 says that: “A good name is more desirable than great riches; to be esteemed is better than silver or gold.”

But a true good name cannot be conferred by the world. The world is fickle. The world is confused, often confusing bombast and violence, wealth and possessions, for greatness.  True greatness, Jesus says, isn’t about celebrating oneself, pushing one’s self forward, bullying others, or even being seen as the nicest person in the room.

Looking great isn’t the same as being great. And we have to know the difference.

According to Jesus, true greatness=true servanthood. Just as Jesus came among us as One Who serves, we are to be servants.

So, Philippians 2:5-11 says: “Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.”

In God’s Kingdom, Jesus has the greatest name because He is the greatest servant of all.

He descended deep into the sin, violence, and darkness of our world and then deep into hell itself, in order to, respectively spare those who trust in Him from sin and death and to proclaim God’s victory over evil to the demons.

Jesus emptied Himself of all the advantages of deity and became a servant to all for the sake of all.

His was the greatest act of service ever rendered, not just because He was and is God, but also because He was and sinless, yet bore our sin on the cross.

“Very rarely will anyone die for a righteous person, though for a good person someone might possibly dare to die. But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” (Romans 5:7-8)

If we would have truly good names, names written in the book of life, we must daily give up our pretensions to greatness, we have to quit trying to be “all that,” whether among our families, churches, co-workers, etc., and seek, in the power of the God we meet in Jesus, to be servants.

Not servile.

Not suck-ups.

Servants: People who seek each day to be lovingly useful to God and to others. People who know where the real power is, emptying ourselves and letting the power of God’s Holy Spirit unleashed in believers in Jesus, be given expression and to take control of us. “...for Christ's sake, I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties. For when I am weak, then I am strong” (2 Corinthians 12:10).

My ambition is to have a faith like Paul’s, as expressed in Galatians 2:20: “I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I now live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.”

Listen: All I need is Christ. Christ alone. Through Him, God has given me life (Colossians 1:16). Through Him, God has given me new life 2 Corinthians 5:17; 1 John 5:11-12). Through Him, God provides daily bread (although we human beings can be stingy about sharing it). Through Him, we know that more than daily bread, we need Him, the living bread from heaven.

When I’m full of myself or afraid or apprehensive or resentful or sad, I must remember that Christ is all I need.

Response: God, help me to act boldly with faith in Christ, knowing that You will empower me to do exactly what You want me to do. Help me to remember that when I give myself away to You and to those who need me, there isn’t less of me, there’s more of You and become more like the person You created me to be. Help me to live for Your glory, not my own. Help me to seek Your will, not my own. In Jesus’ name I pray.

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

The Sacrifice for Sin (Maundy Thursday)

John 13:1-17, 31-35
During Sundays in the Lenten season as we bring our offerings to the altar, we often pray: “Almighty God, you gave your Son both as a sacrifice for sin and a model of the godly life…”

Of course, what’s most important about Jesus is not the life He models. You and I could repeatedly resolve that we are going to live like Jesus...and repeatedly fail.

Not that people haven’t tried. In his Autobiography, Benjamin Franklin, a deist who didn’t really believe in the God revealed in Jesus, decided to live his life around a set righteous virtues he had identified. Franklin wrote each of these virtues on the top of a piece of paper and gathered them in a small book. His plan was to conquer one virtue, then move to the next, conquering it, and so on. He never conquered the first one.

Without realizing it perhaps, Franklin had learned the truth of the apostle Paul’s words in Romans 7: “I do not do the good I want to do, but the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing.” (Romans 7:19) Paul concludes: “Now if I do what I do not want to do, it is no longer I who do it, but it is sin living in me that does it.” (Romans 7:20) In other words, we cannot live a godly life in our own power.

When we try, we seem to get in the way.

Some of you know that last year, I was losing the weight I needed to shed. But more recently, I’ve been eating too much and putting weight back on. God’s Word says that our bodies are “temples of the Holy Spirit” (1 Corinthians 6:19). That means that the abuse to which I subject my body is a spiritual issue. It’s a sin issue.

Right now, I must report, that as it relates to the food I’m putting into my body, sin is winning out.

And why has this happened? Because I took my eyes off of Jesus.

To be sure, I took Jesus as an example of the godly life because Jesus was always self-disciplined in the use of His mind and body. I also became subtly proud of my virtuous self-discipline.

I forgot what Jesus tells all who want to follow Him: “I am the vine; you are the branches. If you remain in me and I in you, you will bear much fruit; apart from me you can do nothing. If you do not remain in me, you are like a branch that is thrown away and withers; such branches are picked up, thrown into the fire and burned.” (John 15:5-6)

The point? If we see Jesus only or even primarily as our example as we set out to lead virtuous lives, we will fall on our faces every time.

We need help.

We need Jesus.

We need Him infinitely less as a model of the godly life than we need Him as the definitive sacrifice for our sin.

We need His righteousness because we are completely unrighteous.

We need His goodness, because God alone is good.

That’s why Jesus does and says things in the order in which He does and says them in tonight’s Maundy Thursday gospel lesson.

John is the most sacramentally minded of the four gospel writers. He begins his account of Jesus' earthly ministry with Jesus' first miracle, turning water into wine, pointing to the two sacraments, Holy Baptism and Holy Communion. He draws the curtain on Jesus' pre-resurrection earthly ministry with a soldier piercing Jesus' side and water and blood emanating from the wound, again pointing to Holy Baptism and Holy Communion.

Yet in recounting events on Maundy Thursday, John doesn’t talk about Holy Communion, which Jesus instituted on that night. Instead, he focuses on three things from the events of Maundy Thursday:

• Jesus washing the feet of His disciples; 
• Jesus telling the disciples to serve each other similarly; 
• Jesus giving a new commandment, the only new commandment Jesus ever gave. 

Let’s look at each one of these.

During the course of the meal, Jesus ate with His disciples, got up, stripped down to nothing but a towel wrapped around His waist, and prepared to wash the disciples’ feet, starting with Peter’s. You’ve lived through enough Maundy Thursdays to know that washing people’s feet in the first century AD was the work of servants. It seems to get mentioned in every Maundy Thursday sermon.

But feet were seen predominantly in two ways in that culture.

One was to look on them with revulsion, encrusted as they were with dirt from walking in sandals through the sand and rocks of Judea.

The other was to regard feet as euphemistic representations of the most private places of the human body. This is what’s behind the otherwise cryptic passage of Ruth 3:14, which tells us that: “So [Ruth] lay at [Boaz’s] feet until morning, but got up before anyone could be recognized; and he said, ‘No one must know that a woman came to the threshing floor.’"

So, Jesus washing the feet of His disciples was not just an act of selfless servanthood, but also one of loving intimacy, the Bridegroom serving His Bride, the Church.

And Jesus points to His washing of the disciples’ feet as symbolizing the great act of servanthood and love that He’s about to accomplish at the cross. “You do not realize now what I am doing, but later you will understand,” Jesus tells Peter who, at first protests Jesus’ intention of washing the disciples’ feet.

Hebrews 10 tells us that through Christ’s act of servanthood and love on the cross, all who believe in Him “have been sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all.” (Hebrews 10:10)

And, Hebrews says that, through this sacrifice, we have an advocate for eternity: “...when Christ had offered for all time a single sacrifice for sins, he sat down at the right hand of God, waiting from that time until his enemies should be made a footstool for his feet. For by a single offering he has perfected for all time those who are being sanctified.” (Hebrews 10:12-14)

Baptized believers in Christ are washed clean of their sin. That's why Jesus says that we don't need to be completely rewashed of our sin again and again; once we have been born as children of God in Baptism, we only need to come again to God in the name of the Lord in which we have been baptized to repent and be renewed as God's people.

Each time we repent and trust Christ with our sins and our lives, remembering that we are baptized into His death and resurrection, Jesus cleans us again from the grime of sin and death that’s always dogging us and attaching itself to us in this life.

Jesus is the perfect sacrifice for our sin and when we trust in Him, He takes up residence within us. We experience what Paul talks about in Galatians 2:20: “I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I now live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.”

Martin Luther may have had this passage in mind when he said: "When [the devil] comes knocking at the door of my heart, and asks, ‘Who lives here?’ Jesus goes to the door and says, 'Martin Luther used to live here, but he has moved out. Now I leave here.'”

After pointing to His cross, Jesus gives us two commands, one a re-expression of the Old Testament law regarding hospitality, the other a totally new law with Jesus.

Command one: “Now that I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also should wash one another’s feet.” (John 13:17) In other words, Jesus is telling us, “Serve as I have served you. Without thought to your status in the world, or to how humbling it may be.”

Command two: “Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.” (John 13:34-35) In other words, Jesus is telling us, “Love your sisters and brothers in the faith sacrificially just as I have loved you.”

It’s no accident that Jesus gives these two commands after pointing to the cross, because it’s only after taking up residence in our lives through our faith in Him that Jesus can change the ways we live, the ways we respond to our neighbors.

Jesus may be an example for godly or wholesome living to the whole world, Christian and non-Christian alike; but unless Jesus lives in us and powers us, we cannot lead godly lives.

On Monday, I drove to Cincinnati, where God allowed me to administer Holy Baptism to Jameson, the little guy for whom we’ve been praying through his three years of life, and his older brother, Jackson.

After getting back to Dayton, I went to Columbus to be with my mom and my family at a hospital ICU, where mom died on Tuesday morning.

To tell you the truth, my thoughts weren't prone to focus on the homeless guy standing at the freeway off-ramp that day.

And the Old Mark battled with the Lord Jesus Who has taken up residence in my life. “Who knows if he’s really homeless,” I argued. “Besides, I’m out of the McDonald gift cards I keep for situations like this. And on top of that, I’m busy, I’m tired, I’m concerned about my family. Is this guy really that big a deal, God?”

But Jesus won the argument. (He usually does when you start talking with Him!)

I pulled out a five-dollar bill and handed it to the man at the ramp.

Listen: I would not have done that had I relied on my own reasoning. If I'd only been arguing with myself, I would have easily convinced myself to drive on by. Instead, because Jesus lives in me and I have the assurance that no matter how much duping, using, or humiliation this world may subject me to, I still belong to the God we meet in Jesus, Jesus set me free to part with a little of money.

It was, for all its simplicity and humanity, a divine moment that wasn’t done by me, but by Jesus living in me.

I’ve gotten to the point where I believe the line in the old Amy Grant singalong song: “If there’s anything good that happens in life, it’s from Jesus.”

And when you know that, in the words of the late Baptist pastor, Gerald Mann, through Christ you have "God's cosmic okie-dokie," the humiliations meted out by this world become less important to you. You know that the world cannot rob you of you dignity, because by God's grace through faith in Christ, your life is imbued with an eternity dignity.

I don’t have to know whether the ramp guy spent those five bucks on cigarettes, alcohol, drugs,  lottery tickets, or food.

I don’t care to know whether he was, from the standpoint of the world, “worthy” of my help.

But I do know two things.

First, I know that on the night of His betrayal, even though He knew what Judas was going to do, Jesus washed Judas’ feet. Jesus gives grace to all, worthy in the world’s eyes or not. Think of that!

Second, I know that, in the eyes of heaven, I’m not worthy of the grace, forgiveness, and love God makes available to us through Christ.

I’m a sinner. So, who am I to withhold from another person any smidge of grace God puts it in my power to give away?

Despite my sin, Christ served, loved, and died for me anyway. Romans 5:8 reminds us that, “...God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.”

Christ is the “sacrifice for sin and a model of the godly life.”

But Maundy Thursday reminds us that if we would live a godly life, a useful life, a life that even unbelievers would acknowledge to be a life filled with goodness, it doesn’t begin with any of us trying to be good. 

It begins and continues only with Christ loving us, serving us, dying for us, rising for us, and our day in, day out, letting Him into our lives so that God’s will becomes our will, God’s love for others becomes our love for others. 

It begins and ends with Jesus alone!

Jesus’ message for us tonight is simple. Don’t try to be a good person on your own steam. Let Jesus into your life, let Jesus live in you, and He will lead you in the godly life, empowering you to love and serve today and preparing you to joyfully love and serve for all eternity. Amen

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

About that "America is great because America is good" line

Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton received a rousing response to a line in her acceptance speech on Thursday night: "America is great because America is good."

The statement alludes to, but is not a direction citation of, a line in Alexis de Tocqueville's famous observation in his 1835 book, Democracy in America.

The full quote, as usually cited, is: "America is great because America is good, and if America ever ceases to be good, America will cease to be great."

The Frenchman who traveled and studied the US in the early-nineteenth century said this in reference to the importance of Christian faith to Americans and how it impacted the way they conducted their personal and communal lives.

It's impossible to be great if you are not good. Hitler, for example, wielded great power; but he was not great. Being great has something to do with the good one does for others. (And with self-surrender.)

No Christian would claim that the good they may do comes from them. It comes from Christ living in them. Galatians 2:20 says, "I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I now live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me."

When, by faith, I submit to the daily crucifixion of my old sinful self, I make room for Christ to live within me. Whatever good I do comes from Christ, not from me, but from Christ alone.

Anything I do in my own wisdom will always be tinged by my intrinsic sinfulness. But when I let Christ in to daily destroy the old and create the new Christ-me, Christ impacts how I live my whole life. The Bible says that I bear good fruit.

De Tocqueville observed how important faith in Christ was to the people of the young republic and concluded that the American constitutional system could not survive without the goodness which God fosters in Christian people.

The French observer was not saying that the American people were intrinsically good. The way white Americans were treating Native Americans and African-American slaves alone would have argued against that.

But the fledgling, imperfect republic had the makings of goodness and the evidence of some level of goodness in a society steeped in Christ's death, resurrection, and words. Americans in those days were often communitarians, joiners, neighbor-helpers. Christ preached and trusted in and lived out was what accounted for whatever goodness that de Tocqueville observed, a contrast to the cynicism and self-interest that characterized French life at the time.

There is no human goodness apart from Christ. As Jesus, God in human flesh, said, "No one is good—except God alone" (Mark 10:18). And if we are to do anything good, it will require a faith connection to Jesus Christ. But we have this promise from Jesus: "I am the vine; you are the branches. If you remain in me and I in you, you will bear much fruit; apart from me you can do nothing" (John 15:5).

America is good and human beings are good only when we let Jesus Christ into our lives. And then it's not our goodness but the goodness of God living in us. And that's what accounts for what greatness exists in us and in our country. Nothing else.

I ask you to consider letting Christ into every part of your life today and everyday.