Life for the Wilderness and Beyond

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

Mark 1:9-15
On Friday, I was scanning Twitter for the comments people were making on the recent school shooting in Florida. One woman’s tweet particularly struck me. She said, “I can’t believe in a God Who would let children be killed in school.”

She’s not alone in such feelings. People often feel and say things like this. “My husband/my wife has left me,” someone will say, “How could God let this happen?” “My friend was killed in a car accident, my wife has died from cancer. Where is God?” For many, life on this earth is a savage wilderness and God seems like a distant and powerless being.

As Christians, we can be brutally candid: This world is a wilderness.

As beautiful and breathtaking and wonderful as this life can sometimes be, it’s also a fallen place where bad things happen to unsuspecting and even faithful people.

It’s a place where evil and deranged people prey on others.

It’s a place where death can come to people at early age, where death, weeping, and sorrow exist.

As Christians, we realize that while we live on earth, we’re looking for what the New Testament calls “a city” God has prepared for us (Hebrews 11:16).

We believe God’s promises given in Christ of “a country of [our] own” (Hebrews 11:15).

But for now, we are “foreigners and strangers on earth” (Hebrews 11:13).

Every human being is an alien here, whether they know it or not. We weren’t meant for life in a brutal wilderness. Our very revulsion and questions in the face of tragedy demonstrate that fact.

But as hard as it can be to remember and cling to when the wilderness does its worst to us, we need never be alone!

God has not forgotten us.

And He never will.

Not when you’re at work or school.

Not when you’re at home.

Not when you rejoice in victories.

Not when you die.

God will never forget you!

Today’s gospel lesson finds God affirming this truth. Last week’s lesson from Mark narrated an event that happened near the end of Jesus’ ministry, the Transfiguration. This week’s lesson, Mark 1:9-15, takes us to the beginning of His ministry. The two events are connected in ways that remind us of God’s presence with us and His mission for us in this world, as well as God’s promise of life beyond the boundaries of this wilderness. So, please look at our our gospel lesson.

Verse 9: “At that time Jesus came from Nazareth in Galilee and was baptized by John in the Jordan. Just as Jesus was coming up out of the water, he saw heaven being torn open and the Spirit descending on him like a dove. And a voice came from heaven: 'You are my Son, whom I love; with you I am well pleased.'”

I love how graphic this verse is. After being baptized by John, Jesus looks up to see “heaven being torn open.” The phrase translated into the English as torn open from the Greek in which Mark wrote is σχιζομένους (schizomenous), the root of which is the verb σχίζω (schizo). (Yes, it’s where we get the word schizophrenia for a split personality.) This verb means to split, to cleave, to divide.

This is important!

When Jesus was baptized, God the Father was offering a preview of things to come. Through Jesus, God in the flesh, God was going to tear an opening in the wall that divided our perfect, loving, and holy God from His imperfect, sinful, and fallen human children.

This Jesus accomplished when He died on the cross. Mark 15:38 tells us that when Jesus died on the cross, “The curtain of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom.” The verb translated as torn there is ἐσχίσθη, a past tense form of the same verb in today’s lesson, σχίζω.

The curtain that was torn after Jesus’ crucifixion separated the area where pious Jews had worshiped from the place known as the holy of holies, where God was thought to dwell.

Listen: With the death of the sinless Jesus on behalf of sinful humanity, all that divides us from God was torn down.

Jesus tore an opening to eternity with God for all who repent and believe in Him.

It’s through Jesus that we are privileged to address God as “our Father.”

It’s because of Jesus that we can trust that nothing, not even the wilderness, can separate us from God’s love (Romans 8:31).

And it’s because of Jesus that we can affirm, as we often do after we’ve received Holy Communion, that in the sacrament in which Jesus comes to us, heaven touches earth. Eternity reaches us here in the wilderness, promising God’s forgiveness and presence here and an eternity with God forever!

All of this was foreshadowed when, after Jesus’ baptism, the heavens were torn open in celebration!

And the same thing happens when we are baptized in the name of God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit: Heaven is opened to us as God claims us as His own, which is what happens next at Jesus’ baptism. “You are my Son, whom I love,” the Father says, “with you I am well pleased.”

But even after our baptisms, there is wilderness to go through. And Jesus could only tear open the heavens for us after He had gone through the wilderness too, only after He did successfully for us what God knows we can not do ourselves: Jesus lived in the wilderness without caving into sin or despair. Verse 12: “At once the Spirit sent [Jesus] out into the wilderness, and he was in the wilderness forty days, being tempted by Satan. He was with the wild animals, and angels attended him.”



There’s no way to overestimate the importance of the fact that when God took on human flesh, as He did in Jesus, He faced the same challenges, dangers, everyday joys, and temptations you and I face.

Unless Jesus had been susceptible to the temptations of our wilderness, it would mean nothing to say Jesus is sinless.

If Jesus had been hotwired to resist temptation, it would have taken no dependence on God the Father for Him to say no when the devil and the world tried to lure Him into sin.

Because Jesus could be tempted, He was able to save those who believe in Him when He offered His sinless life on the cross.

It also means that when we face temptations and we cry out to Him, He understands.

And when we have given into temptations and sinned and cry out in His name for forgiveness, He understands and brings God’s forgiveness.

Hebrews 4:15 says: “[in Jesus] 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.” Because Jesus was tempted in the wilderness of this world, He empathizes with us and gives us strength to face evil, whether that evil comes from the world around us or from the fallen hearts inside of us.

Many of you have heard me tell the story of the woman in my first parish who was dying of cancer. It had been a tough slog for her, with rallies and setbacks and finally the word from her doctors, “There’s nothing more we can do.” I asked her as she neared her death if she’d ever gotten angry with God. “At first, yes,” she told me. “But then I remembered, He’s right here with me.” And this same Jesus Who endured the worst this world can do to a human being, also is with all who trust in Him when they pass from this life to the next, leading us to those rooms He has prepared for all who trust in Him (John 14:2).

After Jesus had faced down Satan in the strength God provided to Him, the same strength God can send to us in our wilderness experiences, Jesus still had a mission to fulfill. He still needed to call people to follow Him and to believe in what He was doing for them...and us. Verse 14: “After John was put in prison, Jesus went into Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God. ‘The time has come,’ he said. ‘The kingdom of God has come near. Repent and believe the good news!’”

When Jesus arrived on this earth, the days of this wilderness were numbered. The jig was up for the power of sin, death, the devil, despair, and darkness. Jesus has eternally and definitively conquered their power for all who believe in Him. We don’t know when Jesus will return to this earth. But we do know that we can trust the promised return of a Savior Who guaranteed His promise with His shed blood and His resurrection from the dead.

In the meantime, He stands living and ready to comfort and encourage the grieving and the dying, to give new life and new purpose to the uncertain and the doubting, to fill with strength those who have been knocked down low by life.

The psalmist says of the God we know in Jesus: “You make known to me the path of life; you will fill me with joy in your presence, with eternal pleasures at your right hand” (Psalm 16:11).

Through Isaiah, God promises those who follow Him: “...those who hope in the LORD will renew their strength. They will soar on wings like eagles; they will run and not grow weary, they will walk and not be faint” (Isaiah 40:31).

And Jesus tells us: "Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest” (Matthew 11:28).

If the wilderness seems to have been winning in your life lately, you’ve come to the right place, to worship God in this fellowship of believers. Jesus says that wherever two or three are gathered in His name, He is in the midst of them (Matthew 18:20).

The One Who conquered the wilderness is here today among us and He says, “The kingdom of God has come near. Repent [turn away from the wilderness, its blind alleys, and sin that leads to death] and believe the good news.”

The good news, the gospel, for us today is this: Every person lost in the wilderness who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved (Romans 10:13) and this Jesus can be with you always, even to the end of the age (Matthew 28:20).

Count on Jesus to take you through your wilderness and beyond, to life with God that never ends. Amen

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

Turn to God...and Live!

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

Jeremiah 31:7-14
Listen to this little scenario, taken from the main reading book our Catechism students are using right now:

Imagine that it is Christmas morning and you are in church. You’ve had a good Christmas Eve and received many presents. The church is beautifully decorated and everyone seems…happy…Suddenly, in the middle of the sermon, a stranger that you have never seen before gets up and starts yelling at the pastor. He runs down the center aisle to the front of the church… The stranger begins to preach. But it is not sweet talk about the baby Jesus. Rather, he points his finger and says we ought to be ashamed of ourselves for spending so much money on Christmas presents when there are people starving to death in our community. He says that God is angry with us because we are concerned only about ourselves. We are phonies and God will not listen to our prayers or songs until we take care of those who are lonely or poor or jobless. His message is, "Repent and return to God.”

This, folks, is what life with the prophets of Old Testament times was like for God’s people, the Jews!

By the time God sent the great prophets whose names give titles to some of the Bible’s most important books, God’s people had settled into life in the promised land. The mortgage was paid on the temple dedicated to worshiping and offering sacrifices to God and, for the most part, things were going well. God’s people were on cruise control.

But the prophets reminded them that even if they sang pretty songs and did everything exactly as the hymnbooks told them when they worshiped, yet still treated others unjustly, things were not going well.

If they celebrated religious holidays, but still ignored the revealed will of God for their relationships, their finances, their possessions, their business dealings, their bodies, or their sex lives, things were not going well.

In the original Hebrew in which most of the Old Testament is written, the root word for prophet means called (by God). Prophets were called by God to remind Israel of uncomfortable truths, truths that people on cruise control would rather not hear.

Most especially, they were to remind God’s people of a truth put well by a contemporary Christian composer, Randy Stonehill. He sings:

You'll be tempted, tried and tested
There'll be wars the devil wins
But God's love is not a license to lie there in your sins
He understands the human heart
His mercy is complete
But His grace was not intended
As a place to wipe your feet. 

To flout or ignore the will of God, as we are prone to do even in the contemporary Church, where we often treat God less as our Lord than as our buddy, is dangerous. We Christians, as Martin Luther reminds us in The Small Catechism, are to drown our sinful selves in daily repentance in Jesus’ Name.

When we fail to repent regularly, we give sin and the devil toeholds in our lives, we turn Christ into a doormat, and we risk spending eternity in hell.

Centuries after the Old Testament prophets preached and taught, after God had entered the world in the person of Jesus Christ, the apostle Paul would act on the prophetic impulse when he wrote,

Don't be misled: No one makes a fool of God. What a person plants, he will harvest. The person who plants selfishness, ignoring the needs of others—ignoring God!—harvests a crop of weeds. All he'll have to show for his life is weeds! But the one who plants in response to God, letting God's Spirit do the growth work in him, harvests a crop of real life, eternal life. So let's not allow ourselves to get fatigued doing good. At the right time we will harvest a good crop if we don't give up, or quit. (Galatians 6:7-9, The Message)

The ancient prophets were sent to present God's message to His people, “Don’t quit! Don’t quit turning to me for life. Don’t quit loving God and loving neighbor. Don’t quit living in the truth that only comes from Me.”

We North American Christians could spend some time in this new year paying special heed to the words of the prophets.

Like ancient Israel, we can be materialistic and selfish.

We too can think the world should revolve around us.

We too can take God for granted.

We too can look, act, and sound more like the world than like people of God.

We too, fall into error, justifying sexual behaviors God calls sin.

Maybe the most challenging of the Old Testament prophets was Jeremiah, the writer of our first lesson. Jeremiah lived about 600 years before the birth of Jesus and had a ministry that lasted some forty years. He told his countrymen that unless they repented, turning away from their injustices to others, their religious hypocrisy, and their unethical behavior, God would cause their Babylonian neighbors to the north to sweep down on them. Babylon would conquer them, destroy their armies and their temple, and turn the citizens into vassals.

God's people refused to heed Jeremiah’s warnings. When Babylon conquered Judah in 587BC, many of God's people were taken prisoner and sent back to Babylon as slaves. The eyes of the king were gouged out and he was sent in utter humiliation to Babylon. Through Babylon, God punished His people for their continued defiance of His will. In the years before these events unfolded, this was precisely what Jeremiah had warned would happen.

You can imagine how welcome Jeremiah’s sermons were! When you’re on cruise control, you don’t want God getting in the way.

But why would God let people who worshiped Him and claimed to be believers be subjected to slavery and exile?

The answer is simple: While you and I are interested in lives of comfort and ease; God is more interested in shaping our characters.

While we’re interested in getting advantages in this fleeting life, God is concerned with righting us for eternal life.

When the pursuit of happiness becomes believers’ primary end, our characters are destroyed and we slog comfortably toward hell, away from God.

But when our lives are turned God-ward, comfort, pleasure, and happiness, along with things like purpose, hope, self-discipline, and joy, are byproducts, even when life in this imperfect world is difficult, challenging, or even, tragic.

Psalm 111 says, “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom; all those who practice it have a good understanding.” Would that you and I would build our lives on the wisdom of a fearful respect of God!

Yet in the midst of Jeremiah’s stern prophetic oracles, we find a section of his book called the book of consolation or book of comfort. Our first lesson is drawn from this section of Jeremiah. In it, God reminds His people of His ultimate purpose for them, the reason behind His chastening, behind His orchestration of their humiliation at the hands of the Babylonians. Punishment would not be the end of their story!

Pull out the Celebrate inserts, please, and look at our lesson, Jeremiah 31:7-14. Scholars tell us that the text can be divided into three sections:

• Verses 7-9 are addressed to the Israelites who have been scattered by their conquerors. God promises that He will bring them back to the promised land, including the blind, the lame, and pregnant women, those often overlooked by a hurried world. There is nowhere that God’s love, forgiveness, and help cannot reach us! Listen: When we place ourselves in the hands of God, no adversity is too great, no mountain is too steep. God’s love is bigger than anything you and I will confront in this life or the next! 
• Verses 10 to 12 are addressed to the nations of the world. The power of God’s Word stretches to the farthest reaches of the universe, from the Pakistani woman imprisoned for her faith in Christ to any member of this congregation confronting illness or uncertainty. God bears favor for those who trust in Him, wherever they may be!
• Verses 13 to 14 describe the rejoicing that will happen when God restores the fallen. For we Christians, it’s a preview of what heaven will be like, when all who have repented and believed in Christ, enduring in faith, as God welcomes us home!

God is intent on making things right with us, on helping us to be the joyous children of God we were made to be. I hope that you believe that this morning!

Let me assure you that you can believe in God’s good will for you today!

True story: Amalia was a woman who had been through hell and back, from growing up in a violent home in which her father molested her to drug addiction, from alcoholism and poverty to being a negligent parent herself.

Yet God found Amalia! She heard the good news of the Savior Jesus, Who died and rose to set sinners right with God. She repented for her sins and trusted in Christ for His forgiveness and, despite all the temptations and old habits that dogged her, got off to a great start on her Christian life. Then, one Sunday, Amalia didn’t show up for worship. Her pastor, Jim Cymbala, was concerned. He silently prayed, “O God, watch over Amalia.”

The next Sunday, Amalia was back in worship. After the service, Cymbala asked where she had been the previous week. She’d had something to take care of, she said. She had to go to the man who had set her life down its hellish path, her father.

She had found him living in upstate New York. What did she say to this man? Amalia explained that she forced her father to put down his beer and speak seriously with her. She said she’d been thinking about those years when he abused her. “Oh, don’t worry about that,” he tried butting in. “That was a long time ago. We don’t need to talk about that now.” Amalia insisted that they did need to talk about it.

“It really hurt me," she told him, "and I wanted to kill you many times. But I came here this weekend to tell you that I’m a Christian now. I gave my heart to the Lord, and he changed my life…what you did was wrong. But I forgive you! God can change your life and forgive you, too…"

Amalia’s father squirmed in his chair and quickly changed the subject to superficial things. He didn’t want God to make him feel uncomfortable. But for Amalia, the weekend had been a triumph. She had let go of past hurts she didn’t earn or deserve and she was liberated to live!

God wants to liberate you to live, too!

Elsewhere in Jeremiah’s book, God says, “I know the plans I have for you..plans for your welfare and not your harm, to give you a future with hope.” In 2011, take God up on that promise for you!

Live each day in repentance and trust in Jesus Christ and watch how God turns your mourning into joy, your gladness into sorrow, and your doubts into unshakeable faith in the One Who died and rose to make you new and to give you an eternal future with God! Amen!

The Lord of the Dance

[This was shared at a funeral today.]

A few lines from the book of the Old Testament prophet, Jeremiah:

Then shall the young women rejoice in the dance, and the young men and the old shall be merry. I will turn their mourning into joy, I will comfort them, and give them gladness for sorrow. [Jeremiah 31:13]

Juanita loved to dance. Whether jitterbugging in the early days with her husband or by herself with a straw hat and a cane, I’m told, she loved to dance.

In the Bible, dancing is, so far as I know, always associated with joy, with worshiping and praising God. Jeremiah’s message I just read was written to God’s people, the Hebrews, whose land had been overrun by a foreign empire and most of whom were living as slaves working in exile. Through Jeremiah, God tells His people that God had heard their cries of regret for past sins and their desire to live with God at the center of their lives again.

God would let them have their land back and on that day, God said, they would rejoice.

They would praise God.

They would dance.

We live in a fallen, imperfect world. We age and because of it, even people who were sterling athletes no longer run. Dancers no longer dance. And families and friends are left to grieve the loss of loved ones. At least, that’s how it is in this world.

But we can have hope!

God has taken pity on all of His children. God has overcome the power of sin and death over our lives. God did that through Jesus Christ.

Jesus made no bones about telling those who were interested that He was not just a carpenter from Nazareth, a man who spent almost His entire life in a town much smaller than Laurelville, but also God.

And Jesus—true man and true God—took all of our burdens—all our sin, all our aging, all our death, all our separation from God, the life-giver—and bore their weight on the cross. He died alone and rejected for us. Jesus lived and died the same life that you and I live and die.

But then, as more than five-hundred people saw, on the Sunday after His death, Jesus rose from the dead. Death could not contain the God-man Jesus. Suffering couldn't destroy Jesus. Sin couldn’t rob him of life.

An old Christian folk song calls the God we know in Jesus, The Lord of the Dance. Listen to some of its words:

I danced in the morning when the world was begun
I danced in the Moon & the Stars & the Sun
I came down from Heaven & I danced on Earth
At Bethlehem I had my birth…

Then, later on, these lines:

I danced on a Friday when the sky turned black
It's hard to dance with the devil on your back
They buried my body & they thought I'd gone
But I am the Dance & I still go on!

They cut me down and I leapt up high
I am the Life that'll never, never die!
I'll live in you if you'll live in Me -
I am the Lord of the Dance, said He!

Jesus told one of the sisters of his dead friend, Lazarus, “I am the resurrection and the life. Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die.”

Another time, Jesus told an old teacher of religious law, “For God so loved the world that He gave His only Son [that’s Jesus], so that everyone who believes in Him [that means, to trustingly give our whole lives to Jesus] may not perish but may have eternal life.”

It is hard to dance when the devil, when sin, when aging, when strokes, when loss, and when the burdens of life, are on your back. But when we renounce sin’s power over our lives and trustingly place ourselves in the hands of the God we see in Jesus Christ, we’re set free. We know that Jesus can be with us now. And we know that He will be with His followers, freed from the sin and death and limitations of this world, in eternity too. Jesus tells all who follow Him, “In my Father's house there are many dwelling places…I go to prepare a place for you…”

As those of you who knew and loved Juanita best take her earthly remains to the cemetery, I feel certain that she would want me to tell you that your dance need not end at the grave. The God Who promised to restore His people to their homeland and give them reason to dance can give you reason to dance, to rejoice, to praise God. And the God Who died on a cross and rose from death can give you freedom from sin and death and give you life with Him forever. The Bible says, “Everyone who calls on the Name of the Lord shall be saved.”

In its chorus, that old folk song summarizes God’s promises to all who believe in Him with these words:

Dance then, wherever you may be
I am the Lord of the Dance, said He!
And I'll lead you all, wherever you may be
And I'll lead you all in the Dance, said He!

May God comfort you and may you allow God to lead you in the dance that lasts forever. May Jesus Christ be your guide and your Lord now and always. Amen