Babel and Pentecost

 
[This is the message prepared for worship with the people and friends of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio, yesterday.]

Genesis 11:1-19
Acts 2:1-21

To begin this morning, let me tell you something I used to think and then let me tell you why I was wrong.

Basically, I used to say that in Genesis at the tower of Babel, God confused the common language of the people there so they couldn’t talk with each other anymore, and at Pentecost, fifty days after Jesus’ Resurrection and ten days after His Ascension, He made it possible for people to talk with each other again. I thought that God just changed His mind and I didn’t know why.

But that spin flies in the face of what God’s Word reveals to us about God!

God told the Old Testament prophet Malachi: “I the Lord do not change…” (Malachi 3:6)

And the preacher of the New Testament book of Hebrews says of Jesus, God the Son: “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever.” (Hebrews 13:8)

What this tells me is that while God will spare sinners who repent and believe in Him from judgment–God will change their eternal destiny, God’s essential, perfect, loving nature never changes.

So, what does this all mean for us today?

Let’s consider our first two lessons and see.

Moses, the writer of Genesis, tells the story of the tower of Babel in Genesis 11:1-9, right after telling us about Noah and the great flood. The human race, you’ll remember, had become so consumed by idolatry and sin that God decided to destroy the earth in a flood and start things over with Noah and his family, the only people in the world who trusted in God. After the flood subsided, Noah built an altar to the Lord and God gave a rainbow as a sign of His promise, “Never again will I curse the ground because of humans, even though [after the flood]] every inclination of the human heart is [still] evil from childhood.” (Genesis 8:21) 

Despite God’s grace though, the human race went from bad to worse. The descendants of Noah moved to a plain in a place called Shinar, still filled with sin, heedless of God, worshiping objects, works of fiction and myth, and, most of all, themselves. Which leads us to the tower.

You know the story. The people decided to build a tower to “make a name for ourselves…” (Genesis 11:4)

The tower was to be a monument to their self-sufficiency. It was a declaration of independence from God, an affirmation of a common human delusion that we can and should do whatever we want to do no matter what God says.

The egomania and sin of the builders of the tower of Babel are echoed, if we’re honest, in our own lives.

We daily fail to love God or love our neighbor as we love ourselves.

We put our desires above the will of God and the call to follow Jesus.

Even though Jesus has told us, “apart from me you can do nothing,” we deem ourselves self-sufficient and tell each other to follow our hearts or our inclinations rather than confessing that we are all born in sin and need God’s forgiveness in Jesus and that we are nothing without the God Who made us! (John 15:5)

The people of Babel spoke a common language, enabling them to build the tower. But to save the people from themselves and from the consequences of their sinful delusion of self-sufficiency, God confused their language, confronting them with the reality that they weren’t “all that” and maybe  opening the eyes of some to see their need for God for forgiveness, life, and wisdom. Soon, the construction stopped and the egomaniacs headed for other places.

Fast forward 3000 years or so to the first Pentecost after Jesus had died, risen, and ascended back to heaven.

While the builders at Babylon had worked to erect a monument to themselves, Jesus’ first disciples heeded Jesus’ directive to wait in Jerusalem to receive the power of God, the power of the Holy Spirit, to do the one thing God has called His Church and we individual Christians to do, to be Jesus’ witnesses everywhere (Acts 1:8)

You see what Jesus was telling His Church then and His Church now?

Jesus gives us what is an impossible job if we try to do it ourselves.

If Peter had said, “I have decided to follow Jesus, no turning back,” the Holy Spirit would have reminded Peter of how he said a similar thing on the night of Jesus’ arrest, then, within hours, denied knowing Jesus at all three times.

The powerless misfits who followed Jesus never could make disciples of all nations, could never even have enduring faith in the crucified and risen Jesus, if they undertook to do those things in their own powe.

Neither can you and I.

In other words, whether for our salvation or for our faithfulness to God’s call on our lives, self-sufficiency is completely foreign to Christian discipleship. We need the power of God, the Holy Spirit to live in Christ, to believe in Christ, to have salvation through Christ, and to have a life of purpose and meaning that comes from Christ alone.

And so, I’d misunderstood what the histories of Babel and of the first Christian Pentecost tell us.

At Babel, God confused the language of the people in order to get their attention and alert them to the damnation and eternal alone-ness that will come to those who turn from God and believe in their own self-sufficiency.

At Pentecost, God gifted the Church with the power to speak Christ’s saving Gospel and God’s great love in ways that people can understand and receive with faith! The Holy Spirit was at work in Martin Luther when He inspired Luther to write the melody of A Mighty Fortress is Our God in the style of popular German beer-drinking songs. It’s why today we have both modern praise songs and traditional hymnody. We all speak different languages. But God wants to speak the good news that we are only saved and made acceptable to God by grace through faith in the crucified and risen Jesus!

At Babel, God thwarted the communication of human arrogance. At Pentecost, He made it possible for those humbled by life, death, or circumstance to hear what God wants to tell each and every human being.

A week ago this past Thursday, as some of you know, Jim Lopez took me to one of the weekly dinners held at a house run by Whole Truth Ministries. This is a Christian outreach that engages people recovering from addictions in a residential program to help them stay clean and start living productive lives again.

Whole Truth uses a combination of Twelve Step and other addiction recovery approaches, all of which begin with a fundamental insight and admission on the part of the addict: that they are powerless over whatever substance addicts them and that their lives are unmanageable because of their addiction. The second step is coming to believe that a Power greater than ourselves–God–can restore them.

As I spent time with those women and men, it struck me that people who have become addicted to things like alcohol or drugs may have certain advantages over the rest of the human race. The rest of us might be addicted to things like self-righteousness, bigotry, money, power, acceptance, sex outside of marriage, comfort, or self-indulgence, addictions that, just like addictions to drug or alcohol, will drive us away from God and deeper into the cesspool of our own sin. As far as I can see, all addiction is, along with the complicated physiological and psychological elements that are undeniably involved, idolatry, the worship of something or someone as a god that is not God, looking for meaning or comfort or peace or life in something or someone other than Jesus Christ alone. Martin Luther insightfully says, “Whatever your heart clings to and confides in, that is really your God.”

The consequences of being addicted to alcohol or drugs include the possibility of becoming a social pariah, losing one’s job, destroying one’s reputation, or dying. But if you’re addicted to self-righteousness, bigotry, money, and so on, many of which are more or less socially acceptable, you may go all the way to hell without realizing that you’ve wandered away from the God we know in Jesus and the life that only He can bring.

Most addicts I’ve known who are in recovery know what the first Christians who waited for the coming of the Holy Spirit knew: Without reliance on the God we meet in Jesus Christ, we can do nothing, we are people without hope.

So, Pentecost not only calls us to be Spirit-filled witnesses for Jesus. It also calls us to rely completely, like the first disciples on Pentecost did, on Jesus Christ.

To be right with God, ourselves, and the world, to be righteous and whole, we need Jesus Christ.

As we daily turn to Him, He sets us free from our sins and idolatry and replaces our insufficiency with His complete sufficiency.

The Spirit makes it possible for us to believe in Jesus and to proclaim Jesus.

The bottom line, friends: Jesus is our crutch.

No Christian should be afraid to admit that.

Jesus is the only way to life with God, to peace, and to eternal hope.

As Christians, we rejoice in that and want everyone in the world to know Him as Lord, God, Savior, and dearest Friend!

Next week we’ll look at the rest of Peter’s Pentecost sermon.

The Only Opinion That Matters

[This is the journal entry from my quiet time with God this morning.]

Look: “Even with these words, they [Paul and Barnabas] had difficulty keeping the crowd from sacrificing to them. Then some Jews came from Antioch and Iconium and won the crowd over. They stoned Paul and dragged him outside the city, thinking he was dead. But after the disciples had gathered around him, he got up and went back into the city. The next day he and Barnabas left for Derbe. They preached the gospel in that city and won a large number of disciples.” (Acts 14:18-21a)

In Lystra, Paul and Barnabas, commissioned to carry the Gospel to Gentiles and Jews, are the instruments by which the risen, ascended Jesus heals a man lame from birth. The local crowd thinks that Paul and Barnabas are gods. They’re intent on offering sacrifices to the two. Even after Paul and Barnabas explain that they’re not gods and have come with good news of new life from the one true God revealed in Jesus, “they had difficulty keeping the crowd from sacrificing to them.”

No sooner had the two explained this than some of their fellow Jews, opposed to the preaching of Christ and from Iconium, convinced the Lystra crowd that Paul and Barnabas should be stoned to death. Paul was so badly pummeled, apparently unconscious and immobile, that the crowd left the apostle for dead. But, after the Christians gathered around Paul, presumably praying, “he got up and went back into the city,” heading off to Derbe with Barnabas so that the two could continue their missionary work.

There are two obvious things about this incident, I think. First, there’s the fickleness of the crowd. Within the span of a short amount of time, they have two conflicting reactions to Paul and Barnabas, both of them wrong. First, they want to worship the two of them. Then, they set out to kill them.

That’s not unlike how we treat the latest celebrated people to enter our lives: At first, we hail them as some kinds of gods; then, disappointed that they’re only human, we tear them down. This cycle is depressingly familiar.

The second thing that strikes me in the passage from Acts is this: Paul and Barnabas are not swayed by the fickle crowd. They don’t play to the crowd. When the crowd wants to make them idols, they’re faithful to Christ. When the crowd wants to kill them, they’re faithful to Christ.

Listen: Years after the incident recounted in these verse, the apostle Paul wrote to a young pastor: “Preach the word; be prepared in season and out of season; correct, rebuke and encourage--with great patience and careful instruction.” (2 Timothy 4:2)

Paul wasn’t asking Timothy to do what he himself wasn’t willing to do. (Or hadn’t done.) The seasons in which the gospel we Christians are called to believe and to share with others change. Sometimes the message of the gospel we carry will reach people and they become disciples of Jesus too. Other times, people will misunderstand the message or us and treat us like we’re “all that.” And at other times, our message and we ourselves will be treated with contempt, sometimes even be subject to persecution.

But neither the God we know in Jesus Christ nor His gospel or our need of Christ and His gospel ever change! “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever (Hebrews 13:8).” Even as we reach out in love to the crowds who need Jesus Christ to be saved from sin and death, we can’t allow their reaction to change the only message that can save them. As the apostles Peter and John said of Jesus shortly after Jesus’ death, resurrection, and ascension: “ Salvation is found in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given to mankind by which we must be saved (Acts 4:12).” (Here, they simply reflect what Jesus says: “ I and the Father are one” and “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.”)

I like to have people accept me. I don’t like confronting those who are hostile. I don’t like offending people, even when the offense is the revealed Word and will of God. By the power of the Holy Spirit Who lives in believers, I need to be more like Paul and Barnabas, faithful to the God revealed in Jesus whether people’s high opinions or low opinions of me don’t match reality; faithful to Christ, whether people like it or not, whether they misunderstand it or not. It’s only this kind of faithfulness that authenticates the gospel, the good news of new life as a gift of grace from God through faith in Jesus Christ alone.

Respond: Lord, help me to resist my desire to take my cues from the world. Open me today to the promptings of Your Holy Spirit seen in Your Word. Help me to remember that Yours is the only opinion that matters. In Jesus’ name I pray. Amen

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

Jesus Christ, the same yesterday and today and forever

Those words, from Hebrews 13:8, are seen on the exterior of the former chapel of Trinity Lutheran Seminary in Columbus.

I pray that Christ's Church will always preach and teach the truth about Jesus found in the pages of Scripture.

Who is the Word of God? Why Should You Read His Book?

[This was shared during worship with the people of Saint Matthew Lutheran Church during worship this morning.]

John 1:1-3, 14
2 Timothy 3:16-17*
As you know, on Ash Wednesday, March 9, we begin a yearlong emphasis at Saint Matthew: Read the Bible in a Year.

The response to the announcement that we were going to read the Bible together in a year’s time has been gratifying! Some of our overachievers have already started reading the Bible. Several people have gotten or are looking at new Bibles, in translations that are more accessible. And I hope that those who, because of the current conditions of their eyes, find reading difficult will be able get an audio edition of the Bible, either through a vendor or at the library. (If you'd like help finding an audio Bible to purchase, let me know, and I'll try to help you with your selection.)

With Read the Bible in a Year coming in so short a time, I’m departing from my usual practice of preaching on the appointed lessons and instead today, focusing on two important passages of Scripture. I hope that they’ll help motivate and inspire you to join in reading the Bible this year. My aim is to do that by talking about two important questions:

• First, what do we Lutheran Christians mean when we speak of “the Word of God”? 
• And second, why should we bother reading the Bible?

So, let’s get to it. Please pull out a pew Bible and turn to page 611. There, you’ll find what’s known as the Prologue to John’s Gospel, John 1:1-18. We’ll consider just a few passages of the Prologue, verses 1 to 3 and verse 14. Read along with me silently, please.

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through Him, and without Him nothing was made that was made.” [Now, slide down to verse 14.] “And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we beheld His glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth.”

Long before the universe was created, there was the Word of God. This Word of God is not an “it.” Unlike an impersonal force, the Word of God can be known in the same way you know your family or your friends or your neighbors.

That’s why John says of the Word of God, “He was in the beginning with God” and “All things were made through Him, and without Him nothing was made” and “We have beheld His glory.”

I’m not emphasizing the maleness of those pronouns. What I am emphasizing is that the Word of God is a Being with passions and preferences and a personality.

It’s this Personality that the Old Testament book of Genesis tells us spoke to chaos and brought the universe into being: “’Let there be light’ and there was light.” It was the Word of God that made the light and you and me and everything else.

The New Testament book of Colossians says of the One John refers to as the Word of God: “In Him all things in heaven and on earth were created, things visible and invisible…all things have been created through Him and for Him.” And it says that in Him “all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell.” 

This Word of God, the One Who created the universe, took on flesh and, as John’s Prologue says, “dwelt, lived” among us.

The Bible confesses that Jesus is the Word of God.

God, it turns out, is the Great Communicator. He used His Word to communicate all that was needed to bring the universe into being.

And from the very beginning, He has communicated with His personal favorites, the apples of His eye, the pinnacles of creation, the only beings made in His image: the human race.

We human beings have often turned a deaf ear to the Word of God, of course. But God has never tired of communicating with us.

The Word of God ultimately came to us when He took on flesh, became one of us, bore our sin on the cross, and rose from the dead so His Word of forgiveness and new life could come to all who repent and believe in Jesus.

When we Lutheran Christians speak of the Word of God, we mean first and foremost, Jesus, the Second Person of the Trinity, Who sits on the right side—the power side—of God the Father. The Word of God is, above all, God the Son.

Some people claim to see a different God in the Old Testament than they see in Jesus in the New Testament. Lutherans never have seen such a difference.

And for good reason. When Jesus walked on this earth, He said that He and the Father were one. He quoted Old Testament Scripture and He said that He came not to abolish God’s Old Testament law, but to fulfill it. Everything He did and said was consistent with the Personality of God revealed in Old Testament times. The New Testament writers show how the law and the grace that Jesus communicated for all the world, Jews and Gentiles, was precisely the same law and grace God communicated to His people Israel in the Old Testament. The preacher of the New Testament book of Hebrews says of Jesus, the Word of God made flesh: “[He] is the same yesterday and today and forever.”

As Lutheran Christians, we believe that God speaks and has spoken to people with the same simple message through the centuries, one composed of two parts: Law and Promise.

The Law is the moral law as embodied in the Ten Commandments, which God has never rescinded, revoked, or amended.

The Promise is God’s promise of forgiveness and new life to all who will repent and believe in Him.

God has personalized that promise for the whole human race in Jesus. This is why Jesus has given us the great commission to make disciples of all the world.

It was in response to Jesus' great commission and to help people know the Word of God personally and so, have the chance to repent and believe in Jesus, that John wrote his Gospel. “Jesus did many other things in the presence of His disciples, which are not written in this book,” John writes near the end of his Gospel. “But these are written so that you may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing you may have life in His Name.” 

Jesus is the Word of God and the Bible is the Word of God because, through the Holy Spirit, the Church has learned that the Bible perfectly reflects the message the Word of God has been communicating since Adam and Eve: Turn from sin, trust in Me, and live. The Bible is God speaking law and promise to us: the law to drive us to Him, the promise to reconcile us to Him for eternity.

So, if the Bible’s message can be summarized in a few minutes, why spend a year reading it?

It’s simple, really. The crush of life—what The Small Catechism calls, “the devil, the world, and our sinful selves”—can turn us into amnesiacs. We can forget all about Jesus, the Word of God, hurtling through our lives without a clue of how to live or what to do.

But in the Bible, God helps us to remember. God knows we need reminding.

That’s why Luther said that the born-again Christians of his day weren’t born-again enough. They thought of repentance and faith in Christ as a one-and-done deal. But Luther said, rightly I think, that if we don’t keep coming back to God each day to repent and be renewed in His forgiveness and love, we can drift away from God and from eternity with Him.

Reading the Bible regularly can help correct our courses through life.

That leads to a second passage of Scripture I’d like to ask you to look up in the New Testament, 2 Timothy 3:16-17. It’s on page 690 in the pew Bibles. It says:

All Scripture is given by inspiration of God [literally, it says all scripture is God-breathed; God invests His very life into the pages of this book!] and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness, that the [person] of God may be complete, thoroughly equipped for every good work. 

In the Bible, the Word of God—Jesus—gives us a treasury of tools by which God empowers us to live with faithfulness and to share God’s Word of law and promise that can bring eternity to all who believe in Jesus.

True story. Monique Govender grew up in a Hindu home in Durban, South Africa. Her family regularly worshiped numerous idols.

Then, in the space of twenty days, two of her siblings died. Monique’s mother became fearful and, maybe just to cover all her bases, began going to a church to secretly pray to the One the Christians said was the one and only God of the universe revealed in Jesus.

Monique’s father, an alcoholic and a physical abuser of his family, hated Christians. Maybe he’d met the kinds of counterfeit Christians who give Christianity a bad name. However it happened, he misunderstood Christian teachings.

Over the course of her childhood though, Monique encountered the Word of God at different times, each time having an impact on her. Once, at age four, she attended “a memorable church activity.” At seven, buying booze for her dad, she saw street performers do two skits: one about Jesus’ parable of the ten wise and foolish virgins and the other about Joseph, the son of Jacob from Old Testament times. Most influential of all was when she learned that her grandparents, lifelong Hindus, had come to faith in Jesus Christ and joined a local church.

At age 15, Monique herself came to faith in Christ. Then, her brother, after reading a Bible he had been given, came to believe in Jesus.

At first, Monique’s father was angry at his two children and refused to let his daughter worship at church. But, trusting in Jesus, the Word of God, Monique began to pray for her family, asking God to let her worship with other Christians and to help her father recover from his alcoholism and to stop being an abuser. “Eventually, she was allowed to go to church, and [amazingly] in time both her parents came to know Christ as well.”

Monique reflects on the goodness of God. “I am not sure of what God’s thoughts were for me, but in looking back, it seems like He’s been thinking about me. And it’s [amazing] to think that I was just an unknown girl…[But] God knew me, and even as a little child, I could feel that God was there with me.”

Jesus is the Word of God. The Bible is His book, written so that, no matter how “unknown” or alone or adrift or overwhelmed you may sometimes feel, God loves you.

God wants to be in relationship with you.

He wants to give you an abundant life here and in eternity.

He wants to guide you with His wisdom and love.

Read the Bible every day and let Jesus, the Word of God, speak His grace and truth into your life all the days of your life!

*The renderings of these two passages, as linked here, are from the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV) of the Bible. The Bibles in the pew racks of the Saint Matthew sanctuary are the New King James Version (NKJV). 

Understanding Revelation, Part 6 (Revelation 22:12-21)

[This was shared during worship with the people of Saint Matthew Lutheran Church in Logan, Ohio, this morning.]

Revelation 22:12-21
There’s a simple scene enacted in millions of homes and other places across the country every single day.

It may involve a family with children, sitting before a freshly cooked, multi-course meal together with extended family.

It may entail a single person with a frozen dinner they’ve just microwaved.

Or it might play out among a group of friends grabbing a fast food meal on the road.

In each scene, heads bow and either silently or aloud, a prayer is said: “Come, Lord Jesus, be our guest and let these gifts to us be blessed.”

I bet you’ve been part of a similar scene yourself many times. It’s likely that you too have said that prayer yourself countless times.

In fact, say that prayer with me again right now: “Come, Lord Jesus, be our guest and let these gifts to us be blessed.”

Like other well-known prayers we say, this one may have been nearly bleached of personal meaning for us by constant use. But we say this prayer and teach it to our children and grandchildren mostly, I think, because, as we eat and drink and, maybe, visit with others over our meals, we want Jesus to be at that table with us.

A simpler prayer on which this one is based, goes all the way back to the first Christians. Paul offers this it in his first letter to the Corinthian Christians, breaking away from the Greek in which it and the whole rest of the New Testament was written to use a phrase from Aramaic. (Hebrew was a dead language by the time Jesus was born and Aramaic was the language that He and all the people of Judea used back then.) Paul prayed, “Marana Tha,” (Maranatha), meaning, “Come, Lord.”

But I wonder, as we pray this simple prayer, how much do we mean it when we ask Jesus to come to us?

An old joke has a man telling a friend: “I was praying last night and when I did, I sensed God giving me two messages: good news and bad news. Which would you like to hear first?” “The good news, I guess,” the friend answered. “OK, here's the good news: Jesus is coming back soon,” the man said. His friend was excited. “If that’s your good news,” the friend said, “I can’t imagine any news being bad enough to make me unhappy. What’s the bad news?” The first man answered: “Jesus is really ticked off.”

When we think about the words of that old dinnertime prayer, “Come, Lord Jesus…,” we may wonder that if Jesus really answers it, whether we'll like what happens?

No doubt, we’re sincere in our invitations to Jesus when things are going badly in our lives: When we’re facing health issues, when a teenaged son or daughter is driving home on a stormy night, when we get an audit notice from the IRS. The old saying is true, I think: “There are no atheists in fox holes.”

But when things are going well—when we’re healthy, the kids are home safe, and the tax refund is safely deposited in our account with no questions asked, we may not think too much about Jesus, let alone inviting Him to be our guest.

In fact, having Jesus as our guest may be the last thing that we want. When I was in college, I worked as youth coordinator in an acquaintance’s campaign for the State House of Representatives. I spent a lot of time with Bob*, a guy whose stint in the Army and impending tour of duty in Vietnam were ended when he got into a motorcycle accident that required the amputation of a leg. I was an atheist in those days and Bob told me that he believed in God.

“But,” he told me once, “I don’t want to get too close to God. I don’t want to have to change any of the things I like to do. The way I figure it, I’m going to live it up, do whatever I want to do. And then, when I’m on my deathbed, I’ll ask God to forgive me of my sins—accept Jesus or whatever, and then go to heaven.”

Even then, as an eighteen year old, I remember thinking that a man who’d lost a limb in a motorcycle accident should know that the opportunity for making peaceful deathbed confessions of faith are guaranteed to no one. In this fallen and dying world, anything can happen and it often does, without our plan or approval.

The writer of our second lesson for this morning, John the Evangelist, writing in the New Testament’s last book, Revelation, knew well how nothing in this world can be taken for granted. When he wrote the letter we call Revelation to the Christian churches of western Turkey, John was without freedom, a manacled prisoner exiled on the Mediterranean island of Patmos.

And the believers in Jesus to whom John wrote also knew that life may not go as planned. By the time John's letter had come to them, they had already felt the sting of harassment and pressure from authorities of the Roman Empire demanding that they renounce their faith in Jesus, which those in power saw as a threat to the Roman way of life. Some of these early followers of Jesus had been imprisoned for their faith. And some knew church members who had been killed for believing in Jesus. Their lives were hard. The empire under which they lived was evil. Their prayers for Jesus to come to them or to come to bring down the curtain on this world had an urgency that you and I seldom feel when we pray, “Come, Lord Jesus, be our guest.”

It was for Christians like these—to give them comfort, hope, and strength—that Jesus, already crucified, risen from the dead, and ascended to heaven, revealed to John the visions that make up much of Revelation.

Jesus wanted His people to know that all who repent for their sin and trust in Him have all that they need in this life and the next.

The last verses of Revelation that make up our second lesson today find Jesus repeating this promise--the promise that is at the heart of Revelation--to John, to those early Christians, and to us: “See, I am coming soon…”

But I’m convinced that even when Christ seems to be far away, He is already with us. There are times when we find that hard to believe. But if we will, as Psalm 46, the psalm whose words inspired the lyrics of Martin Luther's 'A Mighty Fortress is Our God,' tells us, “be still and know that” God is God, we may be surprised by the ways in which Jesus comes to us.

Corrie ten Boom, the Dutch Christian who, along with her family, were imprisoned by the Nazis during World War Two because they helped Jews escape their occupied country, is one of my heroes. During one four-month stretch of her imprisonment at the Ravensbruck Concentration Camp, Corrie was placed in solitary confinement. The cell was dark and there was dirty standing water on the floor. At times, she heard the cries of other prisoners and knew that she too could be tortured by the Nazis. Once, terrified beyond all bearing, she cried out to God, “Lord, I’m not strong enough to endure this. I don’t have the faith.”

At that moment, Corrie looked down to see an ant. She noticed that the moment the ant felt water on the floor, it went straight back into its hole in the wall. Corrie realized that when the ant confronted something too big or overwhelming, it went to its hiding place. “Corrie,” God seemed to tell her, “don’t look at your weak faith...I am your hiding place, and you can come running to Me” the way that ant went to its hiding place. When we’re desperate enough to truly mean it when we pray, “Come, Lord Jesus,” we may take it as a matter of faith that Christ will come to us!

And one day, Jesus will come back in the flesh to bring the old earth and old heaven to an end and the new earth and the new heaven into being. But what will Jesus do when He comes back?

The answer to that question is found in the first verse of our lesson. After promising that He is coming soon, Jesus says, “My reward is with me, to repay according to everyone’s work.”

Now, every good Lutheran knows, of course, that we are saved not by what we do—by our works—but by the gracious gift of new life God gives to those with faith in Jesus, Who died on the cross and rose from death for us.

So, what does Jesus mean saying that He’s going to repay us according to our work? Is He changing the rules of the game? If He is, we’re in trouble.

No, Jesus isn’t changing the rules. Jesus, the Lamb of God Who takes away our sin, is, as the book of Hebrews tells us, “the same yesterday, and today, and forever.”

For those of us who live in the in-between times—the times between our own births and deaths, the times between Jesus’ resurrection and His return to the world, between the mysteries of this life and the triumphant answers of the world to come, the work that Jesus rewards is well-known. Jesus put it this way in words recorded in John’s Gospel: “This is the work of God, that you believe in Him Whom [God] has sent.”

Trusting submission to Jesus is the work of the Christian. Allowing ourselves to be washed of all our sin and death in the blood of the Lamb of God: That is the work we do to enter eternity. We are saved by God’s grace through our faith in Christ; that’s our work.

We began this series of sermons on Revelation five weeks ago with the idea of simplifying a book of the Bible that people love to complicate. When all is said and done, the message of Revelation is simple. No matter what trials or uncertainties we may deal with in this life, when we turn from sin and trust in Christ, we have strength for today and hope for tomorrow.

Christ can come to us even now as he did to John on his island of exile. And Christ promises that once our lives here end, He will come to us again. Toward the end of our lesson, near the end of Revelation, Jesus says again, “Surely I am coming soon.” John responds, “Amen. Come, Lord Jesus!”

May that be our prayer through all the moments of our lives. And when that is our prayer, we can be sure that the blessing that ends Revelation will be ours every day: “The grace of the Lord be with all the saints. Amen!”

Come, Lord Jesus!

*Not his real name.

A Bit About Jesus' "New Commandment"

In two days, Christians all over the world will celebrate Maundy Thursday. Together, we'll read and hear the account from the Gospel of John about the dinner Jesus had with His disciples on the night of His betrayal and arrest.

In the passage, after washing the feet of His disciples, Jesus says that all His followers--the Church, are to "do as I have done to you." Then, Jesus says, "I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another."

The latter verse, in fact, is where it's thought that the name Maundy comes from. It's the Middle English version of the Latin term, mandatum, in modern English, mandate or command.*

But what's new about this commandment? Isn't Jesus' "new commandment" just another way of expressing God’s will for humanity from the beginning, expressed in the two tables of the Ten Commandments and summarized by Jesus as the Great Commandment: to love God completely and to love our neighbors as we love ourselves?

In one way, yes, Jesus’ new commandment is no different from the Great Commandment that God has always given to us. And who could expect otherwise? God is unchanging in His goodness, strength, and will. In Malachi 3:6, God says, “For I the Lord do not change…” And Hebrews 13:8, says of God the Son, “Jesus is Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever.” The God Who created us out of love and His desire to give that love away, wills that we not only love Him, but also love all the people He loves. And that’s everybody. So, at one level Jesus’ new commandment isn’t very new at all.

Yet, at another level, it is new. Jesus' washing of the disciples' feet was a kind of visible parable for what He meant when He used the term, love.

For Jesus, love is more than compassion or consideration of others, more than respect or regard. When Jesus washed those filthy feet, He did a menial task which all first-century Judea agreed to be beneath someone hailed by many as a teacher (rabbi) or Lord. In this action, Jesus was just beginning to re-image lordship and greatness, ultimately, deity itself.

Of course, Jesus definitively re-imaged love on the cross. There, He lived a love so passionate that it laid aside dignity as the world sees it, to reclaim humanity from sin and death.

This is what Paul is talking about in citing what many scholars believe was a hynm sung by early Christians, when he writes that "though [Jesus] was in the form of God, [He] did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied Himself, taking the form of a slave...He humbled Himself and became obedient to the point of death--even death on a cross." (Philippians 2:6-8)

This is love as Jesus defines it, a love so great that it willingly dies for the beloved, even when the beloved is contemptuous of the lover. Another word for it is passion, which is why we refer to Christ's crucifixion as His passion.

But, wait. It gets even more difficult and countercultural!

Remember that Jesus says to His followers, "You also should do as I have done to you." Jesus' new command is that we are to love with the same reckless disregard for the reactions of others that Jesus displayed. This is what Paul is talking about when he introduces that hymn in Philippians by saying, "Let each of you look not to your own interests, but to the interests of others. Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus..." (Philippians 2:4-5)

Can Jesus be serious? Can Paul?

When Jesus gave His brand of love to the disciples, washing their feet, it didn't change their actions in the ensuing hours. They abandoned, denied, or betrayed Jesus.

And when Jesus offered Himself as the forgiving, eternity-granting Servant King to the Roman and Jewish authorities, they nailed Him to a cross.

And Paul himself, spending his life to spread the good news of Jesus, ended up on the wrong side of Roman "justice," a martyr for the faith.

Why would anybody want to love like that? What exactly is in it for us?

That last question, one we all ask if we're honest, actually has things backwards. Restating it with its implied premise, it might be expressed, "If I love like Jesus loves, what do I get out of it?"

The answer, of course, is that we don't love like Jesus (or, strive in our imperfect, sin-marred human way, to love like Jesus) to get anything out of it. We strive to love like that because we already have been loved like that, because when Jesus died and rose, He opened up new life and eternity to those who believe in Him. As John writes elsewhere in the New Testament, "We love because He [God] first loved us" (1 John 4:19).

We don't love to get anything. We love because through Jesus, we've already got everything--forgiveness, eternity, hope, purpose, love. The game has been won, the A already been given. Because Jesus went through the cross, even death has lost its sting.

Following Jesus doesn't mean we don't suffer in this world. In fact, we may suffer more than non-Christians precisely because we follow Christ. But we feel motivated and empowered to love like Jesus because in Christ, we're freed to love without regard to consequences.

It's fair for anyone reading this to ask me, "Do you love like Jesus? Do you love without regard to consequences? Do you serve selflessly?"

No, I don't love like Jesus. But I pray and hope that by God's grace that I will grow up as a Christian to do so. I ask God to help me obey Jesus' new commandment.

Thank God we're graded on a curve. The curve is called grace, God's charity, and it belongs to all who confess their powerlessness over sin and trust in Jesus Christ to love them into eternity.

With Christ in your life, even when you fail, you can not fail.

*"According to a common theory, the English word Maundy in that name for the day is derived through Middle English, and Old French mandé, from the Latin mandatum, the first word of the phrase "Mandatum novum do vobis ut diligatis invicem sicut dilexi vos" ("A new commandment I give unto you, That ye love one another; as I have loved you"), the statement by Jesus in the Gospel of John (13:34) by which Jesus explained to the Apostles the significance of his action of washing their feet." (See here.)