Dressed and Blessed

[Here's the message from this past Sunday's worship with the people and friends of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio, as well as live stream video of both worship services.]

Matthew 22:1-14

When Ann and I were first married, her stepfather belonged to the Columbus Männerchor. The Männerchor started as a German singing club. But for those who don’t sing, it’s primarily a social club with a very good restaurant. Members ask their families to have dinner with them there. But, at least in those days, there was a stipulation: Men had to wear jackets and ties to enter. Without a jacket and tie, you were on the outside looking in.

Near the end of the parable Jesus tells us in today’s gospel lesson, Matthew 22:1-14, a king who is throwing a wedding banquet for his son spots one man who, unlike all the other guests, wasn’t wearing the proper wedding garment. At that, Jesus says, “[The king]...asked, ‘How did you get in here without wedding clothes, friend?’ The man was speechless. Then the king told the attendants, ‘Tie him hand and foot, and throw him outside, into the darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.’” (Matthew 22:12-13) The wedding crasher was on the outside looking in.

Jesus’ parable, like many of those He tells, is about the eternal Kingdom of God: His Church.

Jesus’ Word for us this morning, encompassing both the parable and a Word of summary, can be divided into three parts. Together, these three parts tell us: about the sorry history of God’s ancient people, Israel, not to be confused with the contemporary nation-state that bears that name; the sorry history of the whole human race, including Jews and Gentiles; and, most importantly, God’s unwavering desire to save the whole human race, Jews and Gentiles, from sin, death, and eternal separation from God, and to bring all people into His eternal Kingdom!

Jesus tells about a king who plans a wedding banquet for his son. In Jesus’ telling, the king is God the Father and the Son is God the Son, Jesus Himself.

The human race, you know, fell into sin and separation from God, back in the garden of Eden. Each of us has inherited the condition of sin and the desire to be our own gods.

But at the very moment sin entered the human story, God gave a promise. In Genesis, He told the serpent that He would send a Savior born of woman who “will crush your head.” (Genesis 3:15)

God’s desire is that all people will be saved from sin and death. “Do I take any pleasure in the death of the wicked? declares the Sovereign Lord [in Ezekiel 18:23]...Rather, am I not pleased when they turn from their ways and live?”

Throughout the Old Testament, God referred to the Church of those days–the people or the nation of Israel–as HIs bride.

In the New Testament, Jesus and the apostles speak of the Israel of these days–that is, the Church, the New Testament Israel–as His bride.

In Revelation, the apostle John is given a glimpse of the new heaven and the new earth that Jesus will bring from heaven when He returns to earth and is told about the Church, “Come, I will show you the bride, the wife of the Lamb.” (Revelation 21:9)

And for His Church–the fellowship of forgiven sinners eternally wed to Jesus, God has long promised an eternal banquet, as our first lesson for today, from Isaiah, reminded us.

Even today, before we die and before the day when Jesus will raise us from the dead, we can come to the table and enjoy a foretaste of this banquet when Jesus comes to us and says, “This is My body given for you…This is My blood shed for you.”

The ancient Israelites repeatedly rebuffed the invitations of God to feast with Him, to live with Him. They followed other gods, sacrificed their children to false deities, and engaged in injustice.

God, the broken-hearted husband, called them to repentant faith. They would return for short periods of time and then betray God again. The behavior of God’s people in those days (and of many in the Church today), are represented in Jesus’ parable by those who paid no attention to or even killed the Old Testament prophets, the New Testament preachers, and the ordinary Christians of history who have shared Jesus’ call to turn from sin and death and to follow Him and live with God.

A man I know, concerned that a good friend of his hadn’t been in worship for a while asked why. The friend said that while he wanted Jesus and Jesus’ salvation, he didn’t agree with the Bible’s teaching that sexual intimacy is for marriage between a husband and a wife only. He refused his friend’s invitation to come to Jesus in repentance and faith and to come to Christ’s table because he insisted on believing what the world was teaching him rather than what God teaches.

This past week, I listened to a podcast interview with Paul McCartney about his song, Let It Be. That song, you know, was inspired by a dream in which McCartney saw his mother, named Mary, come to him and reassure him that everything was going to be OK and he should just “let it be.” McCartney said that some people found a spiritual dimension to his song and that pleased him. He remembered that his mother had seen to his being baptized and that pleased him too, because she cared about saving his soul. But then, McCartney asserted, that all the religions of the world are the same.

If you think only of “the Law,” laws like, ”Do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” McCartney’s statement is true. All religions pretty much agree with what’s right and what’s wrong. But that doesn’t mean that all religions are the same. Rather, it’s a testimony to the fact that God’s Law is written on every human heart.

But we will never love others just by being told to love others. Neither will we ever love God by being told to love God. The Law only tells you what’s wrong with you; it doesn’t tell you how what’s wrong with you can get fixed!

The only religion in the world that can offer a fix to our failure to love God and to love others is Biblical, Christian faith. In this faith, God came to earth and offered His sinless life on a cross to take the punishment for sin that you and I deserve and then engages in what has been called “the happy exchange”: God gives us His righteousness and we give Him our sin; He gives us His life and we give Him our death.

The Gospel only happens through the Christian faith through which the Savior says, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through Me.” (John 14:6) We want to fudge on that and create our own religion and our own righteousness. But if we insist on doing that, we will stand naked in our sin before God on judgment day.

In Jesus’ parable, the King, God, sent his army and had those who rejected His invitation destroy the people who met his invitations to his son’s feast with rejection and murder. This is the fate that will befall all who insist on facing God in their own supposed righteousness instead of taking refuge in Jesus Christ as their God, Savior, and only hope for grace in this life and eternity with God in the next.

But God our King isn’t easily discouraged when it comes to saving us from ourselves, from sin and death. He is the God who “wants all people to be saved and to come to a knowledge of the truth.” (1 Timothy 2:4)

So, He sends out more servants–people like you and me who God sends into the world each week to share the gospel of forgiveness and everlasting life through faith in Jesus Christ–to invite those the world regards as “the bad as well as the good,” to come to His Son’s banquet.

And so Jesus pictures the heavenly banquet hall, filled with people invited by God to know the eternal salvation earned by His Son Jesus when He died on the cross and rose from the dead for sinners: street people, drug addicts, sports heroes, corporate CEOs, celebrities, nobodies, people of every color and from every walk of life, all of whom who have heard the inviting Gospel Word about Jesus with glad and grateful hearts.

These are the people, repentant believers in Jesus Christ, who are in His Church and will be in His Church for eternity.

This is the kingdom of God, which The Small Catechism tells us about when explaining the second petition of the Lord’s Prayer, “Thy kingdom come”: “God’s kingdom comes when our heavenly Father gives us His Holy Spirit, so that by His grace we believe His holy Word...”

We can’t decide to follow Jesus; it’s foreign to our sinful nature to follow anyone or anything other than our selfish impulses.

But, by the power of the Holy Spirit, when the Word of God comes to us in water, in bread, in wine, or in the word heard or read, God creates faith in us, we can become part of the heavenly banquet, the Kingdom of God. This kingdom is what we’re all part of when God’s Word comes to us and by its power and the love, forgiveness, and newness it brings, enables us to say, “I believe in Jesus Christ. I believe that Jesus is my Lord.”

All of which leads us back to the Columbus Männerchor. It turns out that they didn’t want people to be left on the outside looking in. If a man showed up without a coat and tie, as I accidentally did once, they ushered him into a large room with a  collection of coats and ties of various sizes they could wear while they were there.

God is even more gracious than the Männerchor!

He freely gives us the proper dress for entering into His eternal Church, His everlasting Kingdom.

Do you know what that proper dress is?

It’s Jesus.

It is Jesus alone.

Jesus is the One in Whom all who believe will be dressed and fitted for everlasting life with God.

Your good works or fine character won’t get you into God’s Kingdom.

Nor will your good name or your good reputation.

Only Jesus.

The apostle Paul tells us to “clothe yourselves with the Lord Jesus Christ, and do not think about how to gratify the desires of the flesh…” (Romans 13:14)

Friends, I want to give you a tip. You remember in the parable when the king confronted the man not wearing wedding clothes, asked him how he’d gotten into the banquet hall, and the man had nothing to say.

Ann and I have our burial plots purchased at Sunset Cemetery in Columbus. When Jesus comes back, He’s going to raise us and all the dead. He’s going to judge the living and the dead. The new heaven and the new earth will descend to heaven and only those dressed appropriately will be able to enter this place of eternal life with God.

Friends, when Jesus raises you from the dead, looks at you, and wonders if you’re wearing the right attire, this is what you can say, “Jesus. I am not worthy myself to be in your eternal banquet. But Jesus Christ has claimed me at the font, He has fed me with His Word, He has fed me His body and blood, and He has covered me with His righteousness and grace and Christ is eternally worthy! Jesus is my wedding garment!”

And all who are clothed in Jesus Christ will enter eternity with God. You can trust that to be true.

Amen

[PS: I'm grateful to God for the inspiring exegetical work done on this text by Steve Paulson, John Hoyum, Jeffrey A. Gibbs, Rick Serina, and John Wohlrabe, Jr.]

Tonight's Weeknight Bible Study of the Gospel of Matthew, Chapter 4

Martin Luther King, Jr.

I vividly remember the night of April 4, 1968.

I was fourteen and watching TV when a special bulletin interrupted the programming to say that Martin Luther King, Jr. had been assassinated in Memphis.

1968 was a year haunted by violence that started in January with the bloody Tet offensive in Vietnam, resulting in the deaths of thousands, including Americans engaged in a war that not even its chief prosecutor, President Johnson, thought could be won.

Two months after King's death, Senator Robert Kennedy, an opponent of the war trying to regain political ascendancy after Senator Eugene McCarthy's performance against the incumbent president in the New Hampshire primary hinted that the Democratic nomination could be wrested from the Johnson, would be gunned down in a Los Angeles hotel.

Throughout the year, tensions over civil rights and the war led to sometimes violent confrontations between demonstrators and the police on American streets. The Kerner Commission, appointed by Johnson to look into what led to the bloodshed in Chicago during the 1968 Democratic National Convention, concluded it was the result of "a police riot," the first time I remember ever hearing that term.

It seemed to me sometimes in 1968, that America was losing its mind.

But towering above that bloody year, despite the imperfections he shared with the rest of the human race and that had cut him down in the spring, stood Martin Luther King, Jr.

Historically, King was the descendant of Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, and the Union Armies of the Civil War. Like them, he insisted that the American compact, embodied in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, distantly descended from the truths of the Bible, was built on a simple principle. That principle King summarized in a single sentence: "No man is free until all men are free."

True freedom is built on reciprocity with and mutual accountability to my neighbor. When I enslave others--physically, spiritually, economically, or in any other way, I also enslave myself. When I set others free, I am free myself. When I voluntarily cede my "right" to hold others down, I lift them and myself up.

If I insist on enslaving my neighbor, treating him as my inferior, or being indifferent to his yearning for freedom from fear, discrimination, or violence, I am enslaving myself...to ways of life that retain my status at the expense of others, to moral putrefaction, to constant fear that my sins will catch up with me, knowing, deep in my soul, that there must be a reckoning, to the disintegration of the lives of each and every one of us.

King called whites and blacks and all Americans away from the selfishness that would enslave all so long as they failed to recognize and pursue this foundational tenet of the American creed that King had crystallized:

No man is free until all men are free.

No citizen is free until all citizens are free.

No human being is free until all human beings are free.

Over the past several weeks, my wife and I have re-watched Ken Burns' beautiful documentary on the Civil War and, last night, Stephen Spielberg's Lincoln. It struck me as I watched these two works that America's Civil War has never ended. 

After Appomattox, the war has taken its casualties and deaths: Lincoln, King, the thousands lynched in the South while the North turned the other way, and countless others. 

The war is no longer regional and not just racial. You will find whites and blacks and others in all regions of the country anxious to keep faith with America's freedom creed. You will find others in all regions of the country rebelling against that creed.

There still are the haves and the have-nots, the marginalized and the beautiful people, the accepted and the disdained. We are still, in this great American experiment, finding out whether any nation "conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal" "can long endure." 

Much of what is happening in America today--the fissures, the overt hatred, the refusal to be confused by facts--is an extension of the Civil War, battles to be added to the bloody list of Antietam, Gettysburg, Ford's Theatre, and the streets of Charlottesville in 2017. Each stand as witness to the very treason against the American compact exhibited when the first Rebel cannonball was shot at Fort Sumter. And it was this same treason, embedded deeply in the American soul, that caused James Earl Ray to murder Martin Luther King, Jr.

As a Christian, I have no illusions that the Kingdom of God in which there is perfect harmony between God, the human race made in His image, and God's creation, can be ushered in through political activism, laws, or wars. 

The Kingdom of God is only experienced when sinners (like me), daily turn from sin and daily entrust their lives to Jesus Christ. As the man for whom King was named, Martin Luther writes in The Small Catechism of the petition of the Lord's Prayer taught by Jesus--"Thy kingdom come":

The kingdom of God comes indeed by itself, without our prayer, but we pray in this petition that it may also come to us.

And:

God's kingdom comes when our heavenly Father gives us his Holy Spirit, so that by his grace we believe his holy Word and live a godly life now and in eternity.

It's Jesus and only Jesus Who can bring the Kingdom of God into this world, in the hearts and lives of His disciples, even as the world swirls madly in violence and hatred around us. We know this from Jesus Himself: "No one comes to the Father except through me" (John 14:6). Even if we don't accept Jesus' Word for it, history and human experience make clear that all human attempts to establish a kingdom of harmony between God, humanity, and the Creation fail. Only God can bring His kingdom to us.

But God doesn't leave us stranded in complete chaos. God's Word is clear that God establishes governments in this fallen world awaiting the final consummation of God's Kingdom given through Christ. God does this because it's inborn to we human beings to only refrain from self-worshiping violence when there is a coercive force to rein in human thuggery. 

Governments are meant to ensure simple justice. This is what King called the government and the society of his day to do. That call cost him his life. It's a call that still needs to be heard and heeded. 

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

How do I live in God's Kingdom TODAY?

Most days, I try to begin the morning in quiet time with God. You'll see an explanation of how I approach quiet time here. Below is the journal entry for today's quiet time.

Look: “Now after John was arrested, Jesus came into Galilee, proclaiming the gospel of God, and saying, ‘The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent and believe in the gospel.’” (Mark 1:14-15)

Jesus brings the kingdom of God. He embodies it. He is its king. Jesus is saying here, I think: “You’ve been looking for the kingdom of God. Here it is. And if you want to be part of it, you need to do two things. First, turn away from your sins and trust in the forgiveness I bring from God. That’s what it means to repent. Second, trust in or believe in the gospel. The gospel is the good news that all who trust in God’s Son, crucified and risen for us, is part of God’s kingdom.”

And when is someone part of God’s kingdom? NOW. The kingdom will come in its fullness, of course, when Jesus returns to the earth, closing down this old creation, and those who have trusted in Him rise to be with Him eternally in His new creation (2 Corinthians 5:17). But the kingdom has already come to us. When we repent and believe in Jesus, we are in the kingdom now.

Jesus says in John 5:25: “Truly, truly, I say to you, an hour is coming, and is now here, when the dead will hear the voice of the Son of God, and those who hear will live.”

And He says in Luke 17:21, that “...the kingdom of God is in your midst."

Listen: How do I live in Your kingdom now, Lord?

In the high priestly prayer offered in the garden before His crucifixion, Jesus prayed to the Father: “I have given them your word, and the world has hated them because they are not of the world, just as I am not of the world. I do not ask that you take them out of the world, but that you keep them from the evil one.” (John 17:14-15)

It’s Jesus’ will for His disciples to live in the world while not being of the world. We are to be cordial and loving toward the world, but when its worship, values, actions, thoughts, and approach to justice conflict with those of God’s kingdom, we’re to stand with Christ. To manifest the kingdom of God today, we must be in but not of the world.

This is hard.

But I have several important resources to rely on when it comes to being in but not of the world.

Jesus mentions one of them in this petition of the prayer: God’s Word. Spending time in God’s Word is essential. Otherwise, my brain gets addled and I go to the default position of my sinful, human nature. Spending the first hours of my day Fox and Friends or Morning Joe will help me live in the kingdom. (Help me to remember this, Lord.)

But this will only happen, I think, if my reading of God’s Word is begun, filled with, and supported by the very thing that Jesus did in the garden. He prayed. I must pray. Prayer is a conversation in which I connect with God. When I ask God to show me what I need to see in His Word, I find that I see lots more of God and His will for my life than I would if I approached it as a reading assignment.

These are two private resources God gives to us to buttress kingdom-living, to foster our own growth as disciples.

But God also makes me part of the body of Christ, the indispensable Christian community.

People who profess faith Christ but don’t want to have anything to do with the messy business of being part of His family, the Church, are at risk of becoming lost sheep who wander away from Christ and His kingdom. “If anyone says, ‘I love God,’ and hates his brother, he is a liar; for he who does not love his brother whom he has seen cannot love God whom he has not seen.” (1 John 4:20)

We are made for life in the body of Christ (1 Corinthians 12:27). When the kingdom of God comes fully, we will be part of an eternal kingdom that lives out the great commandment, a fellowship in which we love God and love others.

Other Christians may annoy us, offend us, even harm us. But we need Christ’s body, the Church.

It’s in the body of Christ that we hear God’s Word, not always as we want to hear it, but as read and proclaimed; we receive the sacraments, in which God claims us as His own (Holy Baptism) and which renews us and fills us with Christ’s very life (Holy Communion); we commit ourselves to mutual care and accountability.

Respond: As I think about how I can manifest my citizenship in God’s kingdom right now, I ask, Lord, that You will help me:

1. Express love for my fellow citizens of the kingdom today.

2. Look for opportunities to share Christ with those who seem to live outside of the kingdom.

3. Seek justice for those who are abused or left behind by the world’s system of warped values.

4. Treat others with simple decency.

Help me in these ways, Lord Jesus, to live as one saved by Your gospel and so prove to be an ambassador in this foreign land in which I live on this side of the resurrection (1 Peter 2:11-12; 2 Corinthians 5:20-21)

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

"You're not the Placater-in-Chief" (Quiet Time reflections)

These are reflections from my morning quiet time with God. (For more on how I spend my quiet time with God, see here.) I had never previously noticed the thematic cohesion in Matthew 20, until today's quiet time. It's amazing how God can keep speaking to us in fresh ways when we take the time to pay attention to His Word.

Look: Matthew 20 begins with Jesus telling a parable about God’s right to give the same level of generous grace to all, no matter when they come to believe in and follow Him. Jesus says that in the kingdom of God, the last will be first and the first will be last and their standing will have nothing to do with how the world sees things.

Later, James, John, and their mother approach Jesus, asking Him to assure them that, when Jesus comes into His kingdom, James and John will be his right- and left-hand men. The mother who voices this request isn’t particular about which one is higher than the other, but she does want the boys to be one and two in Jesus’ kingdom. But Jesus says: “...to sit at my right or left is not for me to grant. These places belong to those for whom they have been prepared by my Father.” (v.23)

Later still, two other men, blind and unaccompanied by their mommies, call out for mercy to Jesus. Jesus had asked James, John, and their mother, “What do you want?” (v.21). Jesus now asks the blind men, “What do you want me to do for you?” (v.32) The blind men ask to be sighted and Matthew writes: “Jesus had compassion on them and touched their eyes. Immediately they received their sight and followed him.” (v.34)

Listen: While James and John were apostles and would have a special part to play in the kingdom of God, Jesus’ answer to their request (their prayer) was different from the one given to the two blind men.

To James and John, Jesus gave a nuanced no. Jesus tells them that they will, as they so confidently and ignorantly say they can do (v.22), drink the cup that Jesus is about to drink: They would drink of death because, after Jesus’ death, resurrection, ascension, and the arrival of the Holy Spirit, James and John would faithfully exercise their particular callings as apostles, telling others about the way of new life with God through Jesus. They would lose their lives for their faithfulness.

But Jesus told them that only the Father could or would decide where they would be seated in the kingdom of God.

On the other hand, we have no further record of the blind men given sight by Jesus here. They asked for their sight and they followed Jesus. That’s all we know of them.

Maybe they already were followers (disciples) of Jesus when they cried out for mercy. Now, with sightedness, they could physically follow Jesus along with the other disciples. We don’t know.

But several things are clear:

1. The blind men asked for sight, not for power. It’s not just unseemly to ask for power; it's a sin. To crave it. To need it. Jesus asks: “What good is it for someone to gain the whole world, yet forfeit their soul?” (Mark 8:36)

2. Matthew avoids indicating what status in the kingdom of God might belong to the now-sighted men or what their status might later have become. He only tells us that they followed Jesus.

This is important. It’s a dangerous business trying to guess other disciples’ status with God. We can’t know the depths of their prayer life or the breadth of their faithfulness. We can’t know the secret sacrifices they may make to follow the Lord. We can’t know all of the temptations and sins with which other believers may wrestle in order to keep following Jesus. Only God knows and only God sees the true nature of a person’s discipleship or the disciple’s place in His kingdom.

Because of all of this, there's a good chance that any judgment we might make about a believer's status in the kingdom would be wrong. God told Samuel not to anoint young David’s handsome older brother: “Do not consider his appearance or his height, for I have rejected him. The Lord does not look at the things people look at. People look at the outward appearance, but the Lord looks at the heart.” (1 Samuel 16:7)

3. Even if James and John occupied a special, revered office in Christ’s Church on earth, which they did, it doesn’t mean that the blind men don’t enjoy higher status in the kingdom of God. The only One Whose judgment counts when it comes to evaluating our lives is God. He loves all equally. Christ died and rose for all. All who repent and believe in Christ have a share in His kingdom. Status, place, is entirely God’s decision. Period. For each Christian, it should be sufficient knowing that we belong to the God we meet and trust in Jesus. Everything else is self-absorption.

Rather than trying to outguess the sovereignty of God, our call is simply to follow and go where Jesus sends us. I’m a sinner saved only by the grace of God given to those who trust in Jesus.

By grace through faith in Christ I’m granted a place in God’s kingdom. Who am I to argue over the seating arrangements?

Or to concern myself with whether others regard me as a great disciple, faithful, upstanding, wise, smart, important, worthy, exalted, or anything else?

Whatever place I am given in the kingdom of God is more than I deserve and infinitely better than having no place in His kingdom. “I would rather be a doorkeeper in the house of my God than dwell in the tents of the wicked.” (Psalm 84:10)

Respond: You take the lead today, Lord. I will follow. Wherever You want to put me, I will accept. I’m not the leader; You are. You’re not the follower; I am. You’re not the caterer to my desires, the Placater-in-Chief; You are my Lord and my God. Today, help me to treat You that way. In Jesus’ name. Amen

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

Hell's Disruption of Marriage and Relationship

It's an alternative universe from the kingdom of God. That alternative universe appears very much to be the world in which we live today. From the informed imagination of C.S. Lewis, contained in the classic, The Screwtape Letters:

Screwtape reveals Hell’s intentions for human marriage: The Enemy’s demand on humans takes the form of a dilemma; either complete abstinence or unmitigated monogamy. Ever since our Father’s first great victory, we have rendered the former very difficult to them. The latter, for the last few centuries, we have been closing up as a way of escape. We have done this through the poets and novelists by persuading the humans that a curious, and usually shortlived, experience which they call ‘being in love’ is the only respectable ground for marriage; that marriage can, and ought to, render this excitement permanent; and that a marriage which does not do so is no longer binding.

This idea is our parody of an idea that came from the Enemy. The whole philosophy of Hell rests on recognition of the axiom that one thing is not another thing, and, specially, that one self is not another self. My good is my good and your good is yours. What one gains another loses. Even an inanimate object is what it is by excluding all other objects from the space it occupies; if it expands, it does so by thrusting other objects aside or by absorbing them. A self does the same. With beasts the absorption takes the form of eating; for us, it means the sucking of will and freedom out of a weaker self into a stronger. ‘To be’ means ‘to be in competition’.

From The Screwtape Letters
Compiled in A Year with C.S. Lewis
The Screwtape Letters. Copyright © 1942, C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. Copyright restored © 1996 C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. All rights reserved. Used with permission of HarperCollins Publishers. A Year With C.S. Lewis: Daily Readings from His Classic Works. Copyright © 2003 by C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. All rights reserved. Used with permission of HarperCollins Publishers.

One of My Biggest Mistakes: Running for Political Office

One of the biggest mistakes I've made as a pastor came when I ran for political office nearly a decade ago.

I have come to believe that pastors should never run for political office. And most of the time, we (I)  should keep our mouths shut on political matters.

A study we've been doing at Saint Matthew Lutheran Church, looking into The Augsburg Confession, a basic statement of the Lutheran understanding of Biblical Christian faith, has underscored what a bad mistake it was for me to run for office.

As mentioned in last Sunday's sermon, the Bible teaches that God rules the world in two ways, through two kingdoms.

One kingdom is the kingdom of God, a kingdom whose citizens have been transformed from enemies to friends of God by God's grace granted to all with faith in Jesus Christ.

Authority in this kingdom is wielded through what Jesus calls "the Office of the Keys," through the use of the "weapons" of the Word and the Sacraments (Holy Baptism and Holy Communion). These weapons are misused when exercised in the pursuit or maintenance of worldly power. In this kingdom, power is exerted not by coercion, but by grace, by the declaration of forgiveness to the repentant and the withholding of that declaration from the unrepentant.

The other kingdom over which God rules is the kingdom of the world. In this kingdom, power is coercive. It includes governments and their powers to make war, police, and enforce laws, codes, and regulations.

Pastors, called to the ministry of Word and Sacrament, should refrain from political engagement except when governments command idol-worship or when they act unjustly.

Even then, pastors (and the Church) should not presume to take control of political power nor even attempt, even by lobbying or by political activism, to impose their own versions of God's kingdom on a pluralistic society. (Only God can usher in the full expression of God's kingdom, by His devices and according to His timing, anyway.)

When I ran for the State House of Representatives, I tried to make clear that I wasn't running as a Christian candidate for office. I also made every effort to point out to people that all of my opponents were Christians too.

Yet, I'm sure there were some people who voted for me because I was a Christian pastor. This in itself was a misuse of my authority as a pastor, seeming to imbue my views on things like school funding (the issue that most motivated me to run), with God's stamp of approval.

More significantly, my candidacy was a tacit laying down of the superior authority of God's eternal kingdom in favor of the inferior time-bound authority of the kingdom of this world.

Except in the instances mentioned above--command to idolatry or injustice--the Church should stay out of politics.

To me, it's breaking faith with God when we do.

When bishops and pastors, in essence, throw in the towels and endorse political candidates, pieces of legislation, or particular budget figures for appropriations by government or run for offices themselves, we tacitly say, "We no longer have faith that God can transform lives through preaching God's Word about Jesus Christ or by administering the Sacraments. We no longer accept the power of the Holy Spirit to change lives by the simple witness that sin, death, and the devil have been defeated for us for all eternity by the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Instead of patient faithfulness to God's call to make disciples, we instead are taking up worldly authority and will try to coerce people into living Christian lives."

But even when such political endeavors--whether by conservative or liberal Christians--are successful, the fact remains: Changing people's external behaviors will not change their internal attitudes or their eternal destinies. For the latter changes to happen requires the grace of God, given through Jesus Christ to those who turn from sin and trust in Christ as their God, Lord, and Savior.

Besides, the surer path to greater justice in any society is not through the Church being in charge. History adequately demonstrates that, I think.

The surer path to justice is to preach and teach the Word about Christ and to administer the Sacraments, unleashing the Holy Spirit's power to create and sustain faith in Christ, encouraging people in a life of daily repentance and renewal whereby they seek to live out their faith in Christ in their daily lives, including the ways in which they view society and politics, the ways they vote.

I can't say with any certainty what specific policies God may want to institute in government to further His aims for people's lives. My politics are my politics and I have no right as a Christian or as a pastor to implicate God in political views that are undoubtedly riddled with my faults, sins, and blind spots as a human being.

It's a mistake for the Church to not keep its eye on our only mission: making disciples of Jesus Christ.

And it was a huge mistake for me as a pastor to run for political office, for giving up on God in that way, and for, in effect, taking His Name in vain by, however unintentionally, presenting myself as God's spokesperson in the political arena.

Thank God for the forgiveness I have in Jesus Christ.

Follow Jesus Into the Future (Good Friday Reflections)

Each year, Good Friday comes as a brutal dose of reality for those prone to living in the pretend world of a perfect past.

The phrase "nostalgic Christian" is an oxymoron.

In fact, believers in Jesus want to jettison the past, living with Christ in the now and looking ahead with excitement and anticipation to the perfect future ahead for all who believe in Jesus.

"Forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead," the apostle Paul wrote, "I press on toward the goal for the prize of the heavenly call of God in Christ Jesus" (Philippians 3:13-14).

Good Friday reminds us of the bad old days from which Jesus Christ wants to set us free.

From the moment that Adam and Eve bit into the fruit God had warned them not to eat, the human race has been, collectively and individually, plunged into sin: alienated from God, from one another, from the creation God gave us to manage and tend.

Sin entered into the human gene pool, passed along from generation to generation.

It was to eliminate the condition of sin from us and our slavery to sin and to restore our relationship with God that Jesus, God in the flesh, came into our world. He took death, the punishment for sin that you and I deserve, onto Himself. God the Father made Jesus "to be sin who knew no sin, so that in Him we might become the righteousness of God" (2 Corinthians 5:21).

Jesus entered into death. Then He rose from the grave to claim new life, a perfect future for all who follow Him. 

It wasn't "bad Romans" or "bad Jews" or aberrant representatives of the human race who put Jesus on the cross. It was you, me, our parents, and our grandparents and the common human desire to "be like God," to flush God from our lives or considerations, going all the way back to Eden, that drove the nails into Jesus' flesh on the first Good Friday.

Different expressions of our sinful nature go in and out of style.

But in the morality department, we're no better or worse today than past generations were.

Good Friday shows us that.

But it also shows us that sin, the human race's ancient and ongoing alienation from God and the life only God can give, does not have to be the last word over our lives.

God has acted.

In Christ, God is reconciling Himself to all who confess their sins and entrust their lives to the rule of Jesus, the King of kings.

It's a lie to believe in some perfect past. It never existed.

But when we trust in Christ, the Savior Who died and then rose to give us life, our present is invaded by the presence, power, and love of God.

And if we remain steadfast in following Him, our future will be more perfect than we could ever imagine.

On the Sunday after Jesus' crucifixion, some of the female disciples went to anoint Jesus' dead body. But they were met by a "young man, dressed in a white robe" who told them that Jesus was not dead, but risen. "Go," he told them, "tell his disciples and Peter that [Jesus] is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see him, just as he told you" (Mark 16:7).

Jesus has broken out of the dead past.

He's blown our nostalgic notions to bits.

He's ahead of us, making a way for us through this life and opening up eternity to us.

Don't pine for the past. Follow Jesus into the future!