Who Are The Favored People?

[This was shared last evening with the people and friends of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio, during three of the four Christmas Eve worship services. (One of our Christmas Eve service, the Family Service, has no sermon, but a reading of the Christmas history from a children's book.)]

Luke 2:1-20
“Suddenly a great company of the heavenly host appeared with the angel, praising God and saying, ‘Glory to God in the highest heaven, and on earth peace to those on whom his favor rests.’” (Luke 2:13-14) 

It’s these two verses from Luke’s narration of the events of the first Christmas on which I want to focus tonight. 

The question raised by the angels' words recorded here is this: Who exactly are the people on whom God’s favor rests?

Ann and I have a friend who, when we were all in our late-twenties, seemed to have a favored life. 

Her husband, it appeared, adored her. 

Both she and her husband had good jobs that paid them well, allowing them to own a beautiful new home and to take nice vacations. 

They had a healthy child, at that point, aged two. 

Then it happened. 

The husband who adored our friend announced that he wanted out of their marriage; he’d found someone else with whom he felt more compatible. 

There was the custody to negotiate and a divorce to endure and a new way of life to establish. 

Our friend said that the whole experience was like being on a flight for a planned trip to Italy only to learn once the plane landed that she was in Hungary instead. 

The life she’d begun to experience and projected into the future was no more.

Had our friend lost favor with God?

There’s an idea that’s been popular in this world from the moment that Adam and Eve rebelled against God in the garden of Eden, an idea probably even more popular today that it’s ever been. The idea, put simply, is that the most favored people in life are those who enjoy success, happiness. We’re told that life’s most favored people get the best educations, have the best jobs, take the nicest vacations, make the biggest killings in the market. 

Now, there’s nothing inherently wrong with good educations, jobs, vacations, or even “making a killing” on Wall Street. 

But are the people who have these things going on for them God’s most favored people? 

Are they the ones about whom the angels, God’s messengers, told the shepherds, “peace to those on whom [God’s]” favor rests”?

A clue as to what the angels meant (and what God means) when speaking of people favored by God can be found in something another angel, Gabriel, said to Mary, the virgin chosen by God to become the earthly mother of God in the flesh, God the Son, Jesus. 

When Gabriel met Mary to announce God’s plans for her, he said, “Greetings, you who are highly favored!” (Luke 1:28) 

Luke, the gospel writer says that even Mary “wondered what kind of greeting this might be” (Luke 1:29). 

Understandably! Mary had none of the things that the world sees as indicators of being favored. From a worldly perspective, she would come to have even more reason to doubt the angels’ words once the angel told her that, a teenager and unmarried, she was going to give birth to a Son, the Savior of the world. 

It seems that God’s idea of being favored doesn’t conform to our world’s ideas on the subject.

God’s favored ones aren’t necessarily those God picks to know this world’s wealth or good health or the applause of others. In fact, Jesus tells us, having it all can be an impediment to the everlasting life with God He came into the world to give: “...it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle [Jesus tells us] than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God” (Matthew 19:24).  

God’s favored people, it turns out, are those who are obedient to God. 

• They’re like Mary, who told Gabriel, “I am the Lord’s servant...May your word to me be fulfilled.” (Luke 1:38) 
• God’s favored people are like the impoverished shepherds on whom the world looked down, people who were considered to be the low-life, riff-raff of society, who weren’t too busy with the rewards of the world to say to each other after the angels had told them of the Messiah’s, the Christ’s, birth, “Let’s go to Bethlehem and see this thing that has happened, which the Lord has told us about.” (Luke 2:15)

The obedience of the shepherds, as with the obedience of Mary, had nothing to do with the world’s conception of what it means to be religious. As you may have noticed already, it's entirely possible to be scrupulously religious and completely unfaithful as a Christian!

Neither Mary nor the shepherds saw God as some cosmic Santa Claus, “making a list, checking it twice, [figuring] out who’s naughty and nice.” 

While the disciple of Jesus Christ will seek to obey God’s will for his or her life and pay heed to God’s commands, true obedience to God, the obedience that gains us the favor of God, is all about trusting in Jesus Christ alone for life and hope and salvation from sin and death and futility. 

Jesus tells us who God favors in a simple passage in John’s gospel: "The work of God is this: to believe in the one he has sent." (John 6:29) 

God’s favored people are those who seek, however imperfectly, to welcome His Son, Jesus, with faith, whether the world considers them blessed or successful of favored or not.

Put another way: This work of God, the obedience of faith, of forsaking everything else in order to bet our lives on Jesus Christ each day through lifestyles of daily repentance and renewal is what brings us God's favor. 

It’s what brings us the peace from God the angels proclaimed on the holy night of Jesus’ birth. It’s a peace that can’t be achieved or striven for, but a peace that simply must be believed and received. It’s what Saint Paul calls “the peace that passes all understanding,” the peace that God gives to those who daily trust in the Christ Who bore the shame of our sin on a cross and rose from the dead to give eternity to all who turn from their sin and trust in Him to be their Savior.

In the midst of her pain and uncertainty, our friend came, gradually, to turn to Jesus as her God and Savior. She moved from valuing the favor above all else of the world to valuing the favor of the God we meet in Jesus. 

There are some people who would say, “She needed a crutch and that’s when she turned to Christ.” Exactly!

Listen: It’s a sign of maturity and self-awareness to realize that, in fact, we all desperately need the crutch that is Jesus Christ. 

• Only Jesus gives us the power to face this life with joy and hope and peace. 
• Only Jesus gives us the power to turn away from the world’s selfish ways and to embrace God’s command that we love God with our whole being and to love our neighbor as we love ourselves.
• Only Jesus gives us the power to look death in the eye without fear, knowing that nothing, not even death, can separate us from God’s love, God’s favor. 
• Only Jesus gives us the confidence to see Him face to face, despite our imperfections and our sins and His perfection and sinlessness, knowing that this same Jesus, by grace through our faith in Him, covers us with His holiness and perfection, fitting us to live in His kingdom. 

You see, Christmas tells us that God wants to favor people with His grace now, in the midst of this imperfect, sometimes painful, inexplicable world, and in eternity, a realm with no pain or tears, no regrets and no goodbyes, a world in which obedience is no grim obligation, but simple faith in the Christ Whose birth among us we celebrate tonight.

Sisters and brothers in Christ, God’s favored ones, keep entrusting your lives to Jesus. 

And then, like the shepherds long ago, “...spread the word concerning what [has been told you] about this child” (Luke 2:17) so that others will come to believe and know the life of God’s eternal favor you and I have in Christ tonight as bring worship to Jesus!

Merry Christmas! Amen

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

The Right House

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

Mark 3:20-35

The words of Jesus in today’s Gospel lesson are as likely to offend us as they did the first people to hear them in first-century Judea. In a few short verses, Jesus turns His back on His family from Nazareth and on the scribes, who stand as representatives of His homeland. He says that His ultimate loyalty in life does not go to His family, nor His country. 

The clincher comes in Mark 3:34-35, where we’re told: “Then [Jesus] looked at those seated in a circle around him and said, ‘Here are my mother and my brothers! Whoever does God’s will is my brother and sister and mother.’”

We’re going to dig more deeply into this passage. But first, we need to understand the context in which Jesus says these words. 

What was going on before the set of personal encounters in which Jesus said these things? 

In Mark 3:13-19, Jesus, we’re told, went up on a mountain and called twelve people to be His apostles. Jesus was going to train these men for the time after His death, resurrection, and ascension when He would send them to lead the Church in spreading the good news of new life for all who turn from sin and believe in Jesus as God and Savior. 

The apostles, like the twelve sons of Jacob in Old Testament times, are to be the founding fathers of a new community of faith, the Church, a new creation, that lasts for all eternity.

After Jesus calls the apostles, Mark 3:20 tells us that Jesus and His new founding family of faith, go into a house. 

Some translations say "His house,” which would make sense because we know that by this point in His life, Jesus had left Nazareth and was living in a house at Capernaum, on shores of the Sea of Galilee. 

But this seemingly insignificant word, house, is really important for what comes in our gospel lesson. In it, the confrontation between the house of Jesus and the house of Satan comes into full view, as does a shocking revelation of who lives in those two places. 

And it forces us to ask, where do we live each day, in the house of Jesus or in the house of Satan, which is the house where things other than the one true God is worshiped, where things like family, tradition, security, and country hold a higher place than the God we know in Jesus?

Verse 20, the first verse of our Gospel lesson, says that a huge group of people crowded around Jesus’ house. This, of course, had been going on since Jesus began His public ministry. By this point though, Jesus' family is starting to freak out. Look at verse 20: “...when his family heard about this, they went to take charge of him, for they said, ‘He is out of his mind.’” 

You’re reading that right. Jesus’ own family turned against Him, including, as we’ll see, His mother, Mary.

They want to try to get Jesus out of the house, away from the apostles and the crowd, and presumably back to Nazareth. 

The passage says that they wanted to “lay hold of Him,” a phrase that translates the word, kratese, from the Greek in which Mark originally wrote his gospel; it also means arrest and it’s the same word that Mark used of the arrest of both John the Baptist and Jesus Himself.  

Jesus’ family want to stop Jesus from continuing His ministry. They want to arrest Jesus' ministry. 

They say that Jesus is “out of His mind,” literally “beside Himself.” In those days, mental illness, being out of one’s mind, was equated with being possessed by a demon! This is what Jesus' mother and brothers think of Jesus!

Why would they think that? 

Probably because, as one pastor wrote several years ago, Jesus is violating “the family script.” In first century Judea, loyalty to family was equated with loyalty to God and country. There were certain things family members were expected to do. For example, the oldest son was expected to inherit the lion’s share of his father’s estate, take his widowed mother into his home, and continue the family business and way of life. 

But Jesus had violated all those expectations. Jesus broke theworld's script to fulfill God's Scripture. He’d left Nazareth, forsaking the family business and while we know that He would later provide for the care of His mother, Mary, by entrusting her to His friend, John, He didn’t have Mary living with Him in Capernaum. 

Maybe when Mary so faithfully accepted that her firstborn was going to be the Messiah, she hadn’t thought it would entail His leaving His family behind and being so radically committed to doing His Father’s will. 

In any case, one can easily imagine the conversations of Mary and the rest of Jesus’ family: “Jesus has gone out of His mind, mother." "We have to get him away from all those people. He's making a fool of Himself and endangering Himself and everyone else.”

Sometimes, our families are the people who will work the hardest to keep us from Jesus Christ. 

A pastor in Brooklyn reports that among the biggest obstacles his congregation faces in reaching out to young people involved in selling drugs is the pressure the kids get from their parents. 

Selling drugs can bring a lot of money into a household. When a young person involved in that trade wants to know more about Jesus Christ, their parents become concerned about the possible loss of income. The parents will tell their kids things like, “Stay away from those Christians. Why do you want to become a religious fanatic? Why do you want to turn your back on your family?” 

Less dramatic, but more subtle was my own personal experience with family pressure working against the living out of faith. I remember the reaction of my mother after I had come to faith in Christ and told her that, on Christmas Eve, we would be arriving for the family gift exchange after we’d gone to the Christmas Eve service. You’d have thought I’d just told them I’d joined the Mafia! Why would I want to disrupt the family’s Christmas celebrations by going to worship on Christmas Eve? 

This was the kind of opposition, taken to the nth degree, that Jesus faced from His own earthly family as He pursued the will of God.

But they weren’t the only ones against Jesus’ pursuit of the will of His Father. In verse 22, the scribes, guardians of Jewish religious faith, the Jewish nation, and Jewish patriotism, come after Jesus, too. Look, they say of Him, “He is possessed by Beelzebul! By the prince of demons he is driving out demons.” Satan, the scribes claim, possesses Jesus and it’s through the power of Satan that Jesus is able to cast out demons.

In verses 23-25, Jesus responds to their accusations: “How can Satan drive out Satan? If a kingdom is divided against itself, that kingdom cannot stand. If a house is divided against itself, that house cannot stand.”  

In other words, Jesus is saying, if Satan is setting out to destroy his own kingdom--the household of Satan--by giving Jesus the power to cast out demons, Satan’s house wouldn’t stand for long. Jesus cuts the Scribes' argument to pieces--clearly demonstrating that He isn’t out of His mind or filled with a demon. I love the way Eugene Peterson renders verse 26 in The Message: “If Satan were fighting Satan, there soon wouldn't be any Satan left.” So, Jesus is saying, whether I am sent by God or by Satan, the jig is up for Satan. Satan’s kingdom--His household--is being destroyed.

But in reality, Jesus says in verse 27, something else is happening: Someone stronger than Satan, God Himself, is entering the house of Satan and stealing away those who have been kidnapped by Him through sin and death and giving new and everlasting life to Jesus, the stronger one. 

What Jesus says next is critically important. Neither His family nor the scribes believed in Jesus for one simple reason: They refused to heed the witness of the Holy Spirit and the simple evidence before them.

You see, Jesus was doing all that the Old Testament prophets had revealed hundreds of years before that the Messiah, God’s anointed King, would do. But instead of believing the witness of God’s Holy Spirit about Who Jesus was, Jesus’ family and the scribes accused Jesus of having a demon. This is why Jesus says, beginning in verse 28: “...people can be forgiven all their sins and every slander they utter, but whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit will never be forgiven; they are guilty of an eternal sin.”

The New Testament teaches that the Holy Spirit has two major functions: (1) to convict us of our sin that brings only death and (2) to convince us of the grace He bears for we sinners and how through repentant faith in Christ, He forgives us our sin and gives us new and everlasting life with Him. 

The Spirit teaches that through Jesus and our faith in Him, we leave the household of Satan, where people live in bondage to sin and cannot free themselves, and enter the household of God. When people willfully refuse to heed what the Holy Spirit teaches about Jesus, they erect a wall between God and them. The free gift of new life offered by Jesus can to any person who believes in Jesus Christ. But that new life will not come to those who refuse to believe the witness of the Holy Spirit about Jesus, the Son of God.

Many things in this world can work to drive a wedge between Jesus and us. We see some of them in today’s lesson: families, friends, careers, and country. But, as important as those things are, none of them can bring us life with God, peace with God, or the hope of eternity. Only life with Jesus can bring us these things and much more. 

When the world--even the people closest to us who we love the most--tries to put anything ahead of Jesus and the will of God that we believe in Him, we must learn from Jesus and resist that pressure. 

When we do that, Jesus says, He will keep a promise to us, a promise sealed by His death and resurrection: “...the one who stands firm to the end will be saved.” (Matthew 24:13)

So stand firm!

Amen

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

Clash of Households

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

Mark 3:20-35
The words of Jesus in today’s Gospel lesson are as likely to offend us as they did the first people to hear them in first-century Judea. In a few short verses, Jesus turns His back on His family from Nazareth and on the scribes, who stand as representatives of God’s people, Israel. He says that His ultimate loyalty in life does not go to His family, nor His country.

Please pull out a Bible and turn to Mark 13:34-35, the last verses of our lesson. We’re told: “And He [Jesus] looked around in a circle at those who sat about Him and said, ‘Here are My mother and My brothers! For whoever does the will of God is My brother and My sister and mother.’”

We’re going to dig more deeply into this passage in a moment. But first, we need to understand the context in which Jesus says these words. What was going on before the set of personal encounters in which Jesus said these things?

In Mark 3:13-19, Jesus, we’re told, went up on a mountain and called twelve people to be His apostles. Jesus was going to train these men for the time after His death, resurrection, and ascension. At that time, they would be sent to spread the good news of new life for all who turn from sin and believe in Jesus as God and Savior. Ancient Israel, God’s people, you remember, were founded on the twelve sons of Jacob, who became the ancestors of the twelve tribes of Israel. In Jesus, God is now extending the offer of new and everlasting life with God to all people--Jews and Gentiles--who believe in Jesus Christ. The apostles are to be the founding fathers of a new community of faith, the Church, a new creation, that lasts for all eternity.

After Jesus calls the apostles, Mark 3:19 tells us that Jesus and His new founding family of faith, go into a house. Some translations say "His house,” which would make sense because we know that by this point in His life, Jesus had left Nazareth and was living in a house at Capernaum, on shores of the Sea of Galilee. But this seemingly insignificant word, house, is really important for what comes in our gospel lesson. In it, the confrontation between the house of Jesus and the house of Satan comes into full view, as does a shocking revelation of who lives in those two places.

Verse 20, the first verse of our Gospel lesson, says that a huge group of people crowded around Jesus’ house. People had been crowding around Jesus from the moment that He began His public ministry, telling people: “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand. Repent, and believe in the gospel.” By this point though, Jesus' family is starting to freak out. Look at verse 20: “...when His own people [that is, Jesus’ family from Nazareth] heard about this, they went out to lay hold of [Jesus], for they said, ‘He is out of His mind.’”

No, you’re not misreading this passage. Jesus’ own family turned against Him, including we’ll see, His mother, Mary.

They want to try to get Jesus out of the house, away from the apostles and the crowd, and presumably back to Nazareth.

The passage says that they wanted to “lay hold of Him,” a phrase that translates the word, kratese, from the Greek in which Mark originally wrote his gospel; it means arrest and it’s the same word that Mark used of the arrest of both John the Baptist and Jesus Himself.  Jesus’ family want to stop Him from continuing His ministry. They say that Jesus is “out of His mind,” literally “beside Himself.” In those days, mental illness, being out of one’s mind, was equated with being possessed by a demon! This is what Jesus' mother and brothers think of Jesus!

Why would they think that? Probably because, as Pastor Meda Stamper writes, Jesus was violating the family “script.”

In first century Judea, loyalty to family was equated with loyalty to God and country and there were certain things family members were expected to do. For example, the oldest son was expected to inherit the lion’s share of his father’s estate,  take his widowed mother into his home, and continue the family business and way of life.

But Jesus had violated all those expectations. He’d left Nazareth, forsaking the family business and while we know that He would later provide for the care of His mother, Mary, by entrusting her to His friend, John, He didn’t have Mary living with Him in Capernaum.

Maybe when Mary had so faithfully accepted that her firstborn was going to be the Messiah, she hadn’t thought it would entail His dropping everything, leaving His family behind, and being so radically committed to doing His Father’s will.

In any case, one can easily imagine the conversations of Mary and the rest of Jesus’ family: “Jesus has gone out of His mind, mother." "We have to get him away from all those people.”

Sometimes, our families are the people who will work the hardest to keep us from Jesus Christ.

A pastor in New York City reports that one of the biggest obstacles his congregation faces in reaching out to young people involved in selling drugs is the pressure they get from their parents. You see, selling drugs can bring a lot of money into a household. When a young person involved in that trade finds himself wanting to know more about Jesus Christ, wanting to hear how through Christ, God can forgive their sins and give them new lives, their parents become concerned about losing all that income. So, the parents will tell them things like, “Stay away from those Christians. Why do you want to become a religious fanatic? Why do you want to turn your back on your family?”

I remember the reaction of some of my extended family members after I had come to faith in Christ and made it clear that, on Christmas Eve, Ann and I would be arriving for the family gift exchange after we had worshiped at the Christmas Eve service. You’d have thought I had just told them I was planning to rob a bank. Why, one of them wondered, would you want to disrupt the family’s Christmas celebrations by going to celebrate Christ’s birth with Christ’s family, the Church? This was the kind of opposition to His faithfulness to God the Father Jesus faced from His own family.

But they weren’t the only ones against Jesus’ pursuit of the will of His Father.

In verse 22, the scribes, guardians of Jewish religious faith, come after Jesus, too. Look, they say of Him, “He has Beelzebub [another name for Satan]” and “By the ruler of the demons He casts out demons.” Satan, the scribes claim, possesses Jesus and it’s through the power of Satan that Jesus is able to cast out demons.

Look at verse 23 to see how Jesus responds to their accusations. “How,” Jesus asks, “can Satan cast out Satan? If a kingdom is divided against itself, the kingdom cannot stand.” In other words, if Satan is setting out to destroy his own kingdom--the household of Satan--by giving Jesus the power to cast out demons, Satan’s house wouldn’t stand for long.

Jesus cuts their argument to pieces--clearly demonstrating that He isn’t out of His mind or filled with a demon. I love the way Eugene Peterson renders verse 26 in The Message. There, Jesus says: “If Satan were fighting Satan, there soon wouldn't be any Satan left.” So, Jesus is saying, whether I am sent by God or by Satan, the jig is up for Satan. His kingdom--His household--is being destroyed.

But in reality, Jesus says in verse 27, something else is happening: Someone stronger than Satan, God Himself, is entering the house of Satan and stealing away those who have been kidnapped by Him through sin and death and giving new and everlasting life to Jesus, the stronger one.

What Jesus says next is critically important. Neither His family nor the scribes believed in Jesus for one simple reason: They refused to heed the witness of the Holy Spirit and the simple evidence before them.

Jesus was doing all that the Old Testament prophets had revealed hundreds of years before that the Messiah, God’s anointed King, would do. But instead of believing the witness of God’s Holy Spirit about Who Jesus was, Jesus’ family and the scribes accused Jesus of having a demon.

So, Jesus says, beginning in verse 28: “Assuredly, I say to you, all sins will be forgiven...and whatever blasphemies they utter [blasphemy is showing contempt for or insulting God] they may utter; but he who blasphemes against the Holy Spirit never has forgiveness, but is subject to eternal damnation.”

The New Testament teaches that the Holy Spirit has two major functions. He convicts of sin, showing us that we deserve separation from God, and He convinces us of God’s grace, God’s charitable love and forgiveness, offered to all with faith in Christ.

The Spirit teaches that through Jesus and our faith in Him, we leave the household of Satan, where people live in bondage to sin and cannot free themselves, and enter the household of God.

When people willfully refuse to heed what the Holy Spirit teaches about Jesus, they erect a wall between God and them. The free gift of new life offered by Jesus can penetrate any heart and make any person new. But not if they refuse to believe the witness of the Holy Spirit about Jesus, the Son of God.

In his book, Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis points out that there are three ways we can view Jesus.

We can say that Jesus is a lunatic, which is what Jesus’ family said of Him. Jesus claims that He and God the Father are one, an assertion which, as Lewis says, a bit like a man claiming to be a poached egg. Yet, all you have to do is consider the coherence of arguments like the ones Jesus offers in our gospel lesson and know that Jesus was not crazy.

We can say that Jesus is a liar, which is what the scribes said, claiming that Jesus was really an agent of Satan. But the miracles He never performed in His own interest, but for the well being of others, and His resurrection from the dead are strong indicators that when He claimed to be God and Savior of the world, Jesus was telling the truth.

The evidence then, indicates that Jesus was neither lunatic nor liar. So, Lewis says, if Jesus is neither of these things, He must be precisely Who He claimed to be: the Lord God in human flesh, “the way, and the truth, and the life,” the only way to everlasting life with God!

Turn for a moment, if you would, to John 6:29.  Jesus says: “This is the work of God, that you believe in Him Whom He [the Father] sent.” We become part of the only family that will outlast this fallen, dying world, the household of Jesus Christ, by believing in, staking our whole lives on, Jesus and no one and nothing else. This is the will of God for every human being.

And if you believe in Jesus, His words in Mark 3:35 should give you comfort and power every day you live. Read them with me now: “For whoever does the will of God is My brother and My sister and mother.”

Many things in this world can work to drive a wedge between Jesus and us: Our families, friends, careers, and country, to name just a few. But none of those things can bring us life with God, peace with God, or the hope of eternity. Only life with Jesus can bring us these things and much more. When the world--even the people closest to us who we love the most--tries to put anything ahead of Jesus and the will of God that we believe in Him, we must learn from Jesus and resist that pressure. When we do that, Jesus says, He will keep a promise to us, a promise sealed by His death and resurrection: "The one who endures to the end [keeps believing in Christ] will be saved."

When you and I believe in Jesus, we are the brothers, sisters, and mothers of Jesus, members of the family of Jesus. And when we remain as steadfast members of Jesus' household, by the power of the Holy Spirit, resisting the world's attempts (and the devil's attempts) to tear us from the hands of Christ, we have life with God today and forever. That’s good news!

But don’t keep it to yourself: Tell others about the new and everlasting creation of which they can be a part when they believe in Jesus. Invite them to become part of God’s eternal family too. Amen