Christmas Light

[Here you'll find live stream of video of today's Christmas morning worship with the people and friends of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio, along with the text of the sermon presented.]

John 1:1-14

Christmas morning may be both the best and the worst time to have John 1:1-14 as our Gospel lesson.

It’s the best time because it tells the story of the first Christmas simply: “The Word [that is, God the Son] became flesh and made his dwelling among us.” (John 1:14)

It’s the worst time because there is so much richness from God to unpack in these verses. That’s a tough thing to address when so many of you are likely tired from family celebrations and crazy weather. 

So, I’m going to do my best to nutshell these verses.

The lesson, known by scholars as John’s prologue, starts before God created anything. There was just God and uncreated chaos. John shows that while God is one being, He’s also more than one person. “In the beginning was the Word,” John tells us, “and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” (John 1:1) This Word, God the Son, John goes on to say, made the cosmos. He is the Word that God spoke to the chaos–"Let there be light, let there be a vault [the sky], let the dry land appear.” And it all happened!

In this Word, John says, is “the light of all” humanity. 

In other words, the God revealed to us all in Jesus Christ is the One Who can lead us through sin, death, and temptation to life with God. 

“Your word is a lamp for my feet, a light on my path,” the Psalm says. (Psalm 119:105) 

“I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me,” Jesus tells us. (John 14:6) 

According to the Bible, the idea of God being the light of all is to be taken both literally and figuratively. 

When Moses met God, His face bore the radiance of God’s presence. 

When Jesus revealed His divinity to Peter, James, and John at the Transfiguration, pure light poured from Him. 

And according to Revelation 21:23, heaven “does not need the sun or the moon to shine on it, for the glory of God gives it light, and the Lamb [another title for Jesus] is its lamp.” 

God, including God the Son, is pure light, and the darkness of sin, unrighteousness, and impurity isn’t in Him.

The problem is that, as people born of sinners, we want to do whatever we want, no matter how much it may hurt God, others, or ourselves. We like the dark. Jesus says that we love darkness instead of light because our deeds are evil. (John 3:19) 

When I was a kid, I loved to let my parents know what good thing I’d just done for one of my sisters. But I tried like everything to keep them from knowing when I’d done something rotten.

Once I was put in charge of my sisters while my parents went out for a while. "Don't have pillow fights," they told me. Of course, we had a pillow fight. As I raised my arms to wallop one of my sisters with a pillow, I broke one of the glass shades on the living room's overhead chandelier. How was I going to keep this in the dark so my parents couldn't see what happened? 

I remembered that in the attic, there was an extra glass shade. I cleaned up the old, broken one and installed the spare. Then I swore my sisters to secrecy. After all, I told them, they'd been involved in the pillow fight too.

The misdeed and the cover-up worked just fine until the day that another one of the chandelier's glass shades was broken. No problem, my parents thought. "Mark," my dad said, "go up to the attic and get the spare." It was then that a bright light shone on my lie and cover-up. Busted!

On the first Christmas, as we remembered last evening, shepherds, prompted by angels, visited the manger where the baby Jesus lay, then told everyone they encountered that the Word–the Lord, Messiah, and Savior–had been born. “All who heard it were amazed at what the shepherds said to them,” Luke says. (Luke 2:18) 

“Yet we may suppose,” Martin Luther remarks in one of his Christmas sermons, “that with most of them this astonishment was but of short duration.” 

Within a short time after Jesus’ birth, people seem to have totally forgotten about the news the shepherds brought and nobody really wanted a Savior Whose truth or light would show them their sin or guide them off the dark paths of sin and self-worship that they preferred. 

And we too, if we’re honest, prefer darkness. 

Or, maybe we want just enough of God’s light to reach us in order to help us do what we want to do, but not so much that we need to accede to His control over our lives.

And so, John writes in our Gospel lesson of Jesus the Word: “He came to that which was his own, but his own did not receive him.” (John 1:11) That phrase "His own" should not be read ethnically as though the only people who qualified as Jesus' own were His fellow Jews. Every member of the human race, including you and me, is meant by that phrase, "His own." His own didn't want to receive Jesus!

For years, I used a shallow understanding of science to spurn Jesus. I clung to this nonsense even though a creation must have a Creator. The fact is, there was no room for God in my arrogance. 

Others spurn Jesus because they can’t imagine a loving, omnipotent God presiding over a world in which there are things like child abuse, racism, human trafficking, drive-by shootings, abortions cavalierly used as birth control, war, and injustice. But the very fact that we can be revolted by the darkness of our world should tell us that we know, beyond the limitations of our human reasoning or efforts, that there is a light–the Light–Who shines in the darkness and our darkness cannot overcome it!

When the Light of the world came to us, what did we do? 

We did what the darkness of a world enthralled by sin, death, and the devil led us to do: We killed Jesus, thinking that we really could be in charge of things if we did so. 

We were like the tenants in Jesus’ parable: “This is the heir [the Father’s Son]. Let’s kill him, and the inheritance [the creation] will be ours.” (Luke 20:14) 

Even today, I encounter people who tell me that the world will be a better place when the last vestiges of belief in God or trust in Jesus have been wiped off the planet. 

But no matter how hard we may try, friends, as you’ve heard me say before, Jesus will not and could not stay dead! 

When Jesus offered His sinless life on the cross to destroy the hold that sin and death had on us and He finished the work He had come to do for us, God the Father raised Him from the dead!

And that is exactly what Jesus will do for all who receive Him.

It’s what He will do for you. 

Not because you’re perfect. 

Not because you abide by commandments you cannot keep in your own power. 

But solely because He came into your world and has died and risen for you. 

To make you His for all eternity. 

As John writes in our lesson: “...to all who did receive him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God— children born not of natural descent, nor of human decision or a husband’s will, but born of God.” (John 1:12-13) 

To you, Jesus says: “...My Father’s will is that everyone who looks to the Son and believes in him shall have eternal life, and I will raise them up at the last day.” (John 6:40)

The lights of our altar candles and the lights on your Christmas trees are meant to remind you that you no longer are stumbling in the darkness, forced to fend for yourself in a sinful, death-plagued world. 

All who have received Christ at the font and at the table and in His Word walk in the light of Jesus Christ, the Word made flesh, Who came to us at Christmas to die for us on Good Friday, to rise to give eternity to us on Easter Sunday, to be our light in this life, and to one day return to usher us into the heavenly city where He alone will be our light and where darkness will be no more. 

Merry Christmas, friends! 

Amen

Spectacularly Unspectacular

Here's Maundy Thursday worship from Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio. Below the video is the manuscript of the message for the day. God bless you!



John 13:1-17
The Gospel of John is often called a book of signs. It’s built around a series of signs performed by Jesus. They point to Who Jesus is as God, “the Word made flesh” and the Messiah, and to what kind of life He sets us free to live as we trust in Him.

On this Maundy Thursday, we see Jesus perform another sign. It’s not a spectacular sign like turning water into wine, healing a paralyzed man, giving sight to once-blind eyes, or feeding 5000 men with a few barley loaves and some fish. 

In fact, the sign that Jesus performs on that first Maundy Thursday, during the last supper He ate with the Twelve before His arrest and crucifixion, is spectacularly unspectacular. 

So much so that it offends at least one of the Twelve, Simon Peter, who objects to Jesus performing this sign as strenuously as he objected, according to Matthew and Mark, when Jesus said He was going to suffer and be executed on the cross before rising from the dead.

We’re told about this sign in John 13:3-5. John writes: “Jesus knew that the Father had put all things under his power, and that he had come from God and was returning to God; so he got up from the meal, took off his outer clothing, and wrapped a towel around his waist. After that, he poured water into a basin and began to wash his disciples’ feet, drying them with the towel that was wrapped around him.”

Almost everything you need to know about Jesus Christ for salvation,  eternal life, and everyday life in this world is seen in summary in this incident. In a physical parable, Jesus enacts everything about Himself and all that He will accomplish for us.

John starts His gospel, you’ll recall, by saying, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.” (John 1:1-5)

In the prologue to his gospel, John introduced us to God the Word, God the Son. As the second Person of the Trinity, the Son was present before the universe was created. He is God, the One Who spoke life into being. 

Later in the prologue, John says that God the Word came into this world: “The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.” (John 1:14)

Think of what it means for God the Word--perfect, sinless, eternal, omniscient, omnipotent--to enter our world as a human being. It means Jesus laid aside all the advantages of His deity in order to live within the limitations of a single human life. (Yes, Jesus performed miraculous things only God could do. But He never did them to bring Himself advantage. He lived His own human life on earth within the same limits that you and I have.) 

During the last supper, John says that Jesus “got up from the meal, took off his outer clothing, and wrapped a towel around his waist…” Jesus did what, in some households, hosts did in those days for their guests or what, in wealthier homes, the servants did for such guests. 

But first, Jesus laid aside His garment and stripped down to the towel He wrapped around His middle in order to make the Twelve clean. 

The next time that Jesus will be stripped of His cloak is when He’s taken the cross.

And that is precisely what Jesus’ washing of the Twelve apostles’ feet points to, the cross. 

The cross is the place of our cleansing, the place where Jesus offers His sinless life, receiving the wages of death we deserve for our sin so that all who repent and believe in Jesus--Who turn to Him--will have life with God. 

Just as Jesus cast aside His cloak--the garment that brought Him comfort and protection from the hot sun of the day and from the cold of the night, He cast aside all the rightful claims He had the sinless Savior to be exempted from human suffering and death. 

Jesus didn’t deserve the cross; we do. 

But He laid aside all His rightful claims to the advantages that were His as God and Creator of the human race in order to save us!

This is the One of Whom Paul writes in Philippians that, though “being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage; rather, he made himself nothing by taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness. And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to death—even death on a cross!” (Philippians 2:6-8) 

Jesus gave up everything to save you from sin, death, darkness, and eternal separation from God. 

That’s how much you matter to Him. 

That’s how much He wants you to be with Him, now and in eternity.

Because Jesus gave up everything, Philippians says, God the Father has given Jesus the name above every name, “that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue acknowledge that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.” (Philippians 2:10-11) 

And just as in Philippians, Paul introduces these amazing words of praise to Jesus by exhorting Christians to “have the same mindset as Christ Jesus (Philippians 2:5),” Jesus, after washing the feet of the Twelve, tells Peter and us that we must not stand in His way as He washes us through the redeeming power of His death on the cross so that, His salvation will be outs. 

We need to be cleansed by Jesus. 

We need to respond when He calls us to daily repentance and renewal through faith in Him. 

We need to receive the forgiveness He gives to those who humbly and trustingly receive His body and blood in the Sacrament. 

Jesus also tells us that, because “no servant is greater than his master, nor is a messenger greater than the one who sent him” (John 13:16), we are set free, as He was free, to serve others, beginning with our sisters and brothers in Christ, with the same confidence and abandon with which Jesus washed the disciples’ feet and went to the cross. 

We know the confident freedom with which Jesus performed these acts of love, the foot washing and death on the cross: “Jesus knew that the Father had put all things under his power, and that he had come from God and was returning to God…” (John 13:3) 

Jesus could become a lowly servant because He knew that even beyond death, God the Father would not abandon Him. 

Because He went to the cross, Jesus makes it possible for us to live, love, serve, and die with the same assurance with which He lived, loved, served, and died on this earth. 

The God Who loves us so much He sent His only Son so that whoever believes in Him will not perish but have eternal life with Him assures us that if we will cast aside our dependencies on all the things this world says we need to have life or significance or hope, God will honor us too. He will give us life, even beyond the grave. 

There is no ultimate security to be found in the things of this world. 

True security that lasts now and forever can only be found in Jesus. 

May that be the truth He teaches us tonight on this Maundy Thursday. Amen



[Man of No Reputation is a song written by the late Rich Mullins. He planned to include it in a collection for which he had recorded demos just prior to his death. Afte he died, musician friends of Mullins, including members of his Ragamuffin Band and, in this case, Rick Elias, who sings the lead vocal, recorded and released The Jesus Album. Jesus chose to spectacularly unspectacular, a man of no reputation in the eyes of a murderous, self-centered, rejecting world. And yet this man of no reputation, God in the flesh, has won new and everlasting life for all who follow Him rather than the world.}

The Powerful Word of God

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

Luke 5:1-11

One of the recurring themes in the Bible is the mysterious, life-changing power of the Word of God. The preacher in the New Testament book of Hebrews speaks of this: 

For the word of God is alive and active. Sharper than any double-edged sword, it penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit, joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and attitudes of the heart. Nothing in all creation is hidden from God's sight. Everything is uncovered and laid bare before the eyes of him to whom we must give account. Therefore, since we have a great high priest who has ascended into heaven, Jesus the Son of God, let us hold firmly to the faith we profess. For we do not have a high priest who is unable to empathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are--yet he did not sin. (Hebrews 4:12-15) 

The Word of God has the power both to lay us open, showing us our sin and limitations, and to give us the new life that God the Son, Jesus, died and rose to make possible for those who believe in Him.

This Word of God, imparted in the Scriptures, the sharing of the Gospel, the fellowship of the Church, and the sacraments of Holy Baptism and Holy Communion, creates faith in Christ within us. Not anything we do, only the Word of God. 

This is why the great commission, Jesus’ call to every Christian, to make disciples by sharing the Word of God--the Word of Jesus--is central to who we are as God’s people. Romans 10:13-14 reminds us, 

...'Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.’ How, then, can they call on the one they have not believed in? And how can they believe in the one of whom they have not heard? And how can they hear without someone preaching to them? 

Every Christian is called to share the Word, to be a preacher or proclaimer of the Word.

In today’s Gospel lesson, Luke 5:1-11, we see how the Word of God, ultimately Jesus Himself, the Word, God in human flesh, creates faith. 

It takes place back in Capernaum, the setting of last week’s lesson. Take a look at what happens with me now, please.

“One day as Jesus was standing by the Lake of Gennesaret, the people were crowding around him and listening to the word of God.” (Luke 5:1) 

One of the things I’ve learned in doing premarital counseling through the years is that people like hearing the Word of God. 

I’m not talking about the rote recitation of passages of Scripture, though that may sometimes come into play. I’m talking about letting people see the heart of God through our own encounter with God’s Word, including our own personal relationship with Jesus. 

Whether they know it or not, people are hungry for this Word. Peter speaks for others who encounter the Word when he says to Jesus, “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life.” (John 6:68) 

By the Lake of Gennesaret, also known as the Sea of Galilee or the Sea of Tiberias, crowds are hanging on Jesus’ every word. But they’re crowding Jesus, making it hard for everyone to hear.

The lesson goes on: “He saw at the water’s edge two boats, left there by the fishermen, who were washing their nets. He got into one of the boats, the one belonging to Simon, and asked him to put out a little from shore. Then he sat down and taught the people from the boat.” (Luke 5:2-3) 

On the shore near Capernaum, there is a series of inlets that create natural amphitheaters. Even today, I've read that a person can go out into one of the inlets and, speaking in a normal voice, be heard clearly by people on the shore. Jesus commandeers a boat owned by Simon, the fisherman in whose house He had earlier taught and healed Simon’s mother-in-law and sits down to teach.

Then Luke says: “When he had finished speaking, [Jesus] said to Simon, ‘Put out into deep water, and let down the nets for a catch.’” (Luke 15:4) 

Peter was an expert fisherman. He knew that the comb fish, the only large fish that swam in the shoals of these waters, couldn’t be caught in daylight hours. That’s why he and others who fished in this lake went out to do their work at night. 

Now, it’s generally true that only a fool fails to listen to experts. When my mechanic tells me that I need a new part for my car, I usually listen. When my doctor tells me I need a test, I listen. 

Jesus was no expert fisherman, but Simon listened to Jesus anyway. It seems that after hearing and observing Jesus on a few occasions, he’s beginning to think that Jesus is worth listening to and obeying.

Verse 5: “Simon answered, ‘Master, we’ve worked hard all night and haven’t caught anything. But because you say so, I will let down the nets.’” 

The word translated as master from the Greek in which Luke wrote his gospel is Ἐπιστάτα (epistata). It can mean things like commander or chief and carries the meaning of someone who has a higher status. Jesus, you’ll remember from last Sunday’s gospel lesson, taught as someone with authority. 

Simon recognizes that authority. But he doesn’t yet seem to fully understand who Jesus is. He understands enough though, to ignore that Jesus is no expert fisherman and simply take Jesus’ word as a command. So the nets are let down.

Verse 6: “When they had done so, they caught such a large number of fish that their nets began to break. So they signaled their partners in the other boat to come and help them, and they came and filled both boats so full that they began to sink. When Simon Peter saw this, he fell at Jesus’ knees and said, ‘Go away from me, Lord; I am a sinful man!’ For he and all his companions were astonished at the catch of fish they had taken, and so were James and John, the sons of Zebedee, Simon’s partners.”

Listen: Even if you know that because of God’s deathless love for you, Jesus has come to save you from sin and death as a free gift you cannot earn and don’t deserve, encountering Jesus will still always bring with it awe and fear and a sense of the distance between you (or me) and Him. 

• Jesus is perfect; we’re not. 
• Jesus is omnipotent; we’re not. 
• Jesus is eternal; we’re not.
• Jesus is sinless; we’re not. 

No wonder after seeing Jesus command yet another impossible event into being, Simon fell at Jesus’ feet and begged Jesus to go away. Simon knew that as a human being, he had no intrinsic right to stand in Jesus’ presence or even to live.

Don’t you sometimes feel just this way? I know that I do. I read God’s Word or I pray, coming into God’s presence and realize again how unworthy I am of His love or attention or forgiveness I am, how small I am before the Creator of the universe. The Word of God--spoken, enacted, tasted, seen--can do that to us. 

As the preacher in Hebrews reminds us, it can lay us bare before the scrutiny of God and show us that we are wanting, that left to ourselves and our own devices, we are eternally dead in our sins, eternally separated from the God Who loves us and makes us.

But, this same Word can heal us and call us to new life. In Jesus, as that passage from Hebrews about the Word of God I mentioned earlier says, we “have a high priest who is [able] to empathize with our weaknesses,” Who has led a sinless life and died on a cross in order to be able to cover us with His goodness and eternal life. He gives us lives moving in a new direction, an eternal direction, lives infused with His grace and mercy. 

At the end of today’s lesson we read: “Then Jesus said to Simon, ‘Don’t be afraid; from now on you will fish for people.’ So they pulled their boats up on shore, left everything and followed him.” (Luke 10b-11)

Friends, the Word of God has come to us again this morning to tell us not to be afraid because Jesus has given us new lives and new missions, new reasons for waking up in the morning and facing the world with hope from Christ. 

No longer do we have to march to the world’s tune; Jesus sets us free to follow Him to life with God. 

No longer do our lives need to be marked by the futility of dying people looking out only for ourselves and our own; grace blows our hearts open to God and to our neighbor. 

Knowing that we are eternally in Christ’s hands, we can concern ourselves with the spiritual and physical needs of our neighbors, including those in our own homes, schools, or places of work.

Simon and the others who left their nets to follow Jesus had no idea what lay ahead. They didn’t yet know the truth that Dietrich Bonhoeffer identified in The Cost of Discipleship: “When Christ calls a man, He bids him come and die.” 

They didn’t know that the repentance and faith in Jesus that leads to new life which they experienced on the lakeshore that day would be their lifestyle until God raised them to life in eternity. 

The Word of God sets us free to die to concern for ourselves knowing that we have resurrection life with Jesus that cannot be taken from us. 

This Word might also make us willing to commit ourselves to doing things that will bring us little or no apparent benefit, like 

• going to Haiti on mission trips, 
• tutoring at Chevy Chase, 
• participating in Upward Sports, 
• inviting friends to participate in small groups, or 
• constructing a multipurpose facility to welcome the people of our community--the spiritually disconnected, the poor, the poor in spirit, those hungering and thirsting for God's righteousness--to encounter the Word of God, Jesus.

Simon Peter learned (and would have to learn again and again, just like us) that the Word of God, Jesus Himself, gives us new lives, lives with eternal purposes. May we, in the words of The Small Catechism*, always “gladly hear and learn” the Word of God. Amen

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

*The Small Catechism is one of the basic statements of the Lutheran Christian understanding of Biblical faith. It appears in The Book of Concord, also known as Concordia.