An Ancient Call to Post-Modern People

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

Ezekiel 33:7-11
God needs lots of Ezekiels today, people like Jon.

Jon is a man I know whose mother died when he was in his early twenties. Jon, his brother, and his sisters were comforted in knowing that their mother had trusted in Jesus Christ. They were confident that because of God’s gracious gift of the crucified and risen Jesus and their mother’s faith in Christ, she was with God for eternity.

But they were all concerned about their father. Though he had been a good husband and father in many ways, he had, years before, wandered from God. As a result of having no relationship with God, Jon’s Dad was shattered and beyond all comfort at the death of the woman he loved.

Christians grieve. But as the New Testament book of 1 Thessalonians puts it, Christians need not “grieve as others do without hope.” Jon’s dad was hopeless and, as a result, he was falling into some destructive patterns of behavior—drinking too much, working too much, staying up all hours watching infomercials. Jon decided he needed to have a heart-to-heart talk with his father.

“Dad,” he said, “I love you and I’m concerned about you. Dad, you’re slowly killing yourself. You’re letting your grief over Mom kill you. And you’re killing yourself too, by relying on beer and work to get you through. I know you don’t want to hear this, Dad, but you need to get right with God. You need to lean on Him.”

Jon’s father began to protest at hearing another religious jaw. “Wait a minute, Dad,” Jon said, “think about Mom. She believed in Jesus with all her heart.” Jon’s dad, tears welling in his eyes, admitted that was true. “Dad, she’s with Jesus, don’t you think?” Again, Jon’s dad agreed. “Dad, I not only don’t want you to be separated from God, I don’t want you to be separated from anyone who has believed in Jesus. I want you to be with Mom again in eternity.”

At that moment, Jon’s dad realized how far he had walked from God and God’s people and how he needed to lay everything aside that he’d been using to make it through his days. Jon’s dad turned to Christ and slowly, started to live again with hope and purpose. When I met him five years later, he was a truly happy man, deeply involved with his church, especially in helping feed hungry people. He still missed his wife. But he had hope.

Jon, a heavy machinery salesman by trade, was used by God in that moment as a sentinel—a guard—warning his Dad of the judgment his father was bringing down on himself, but also showing him the new life that could belong to his dad if he would turn from sin and self-absorption and trust in God alone. The life of Jon’s father was saved for eternity because Jon dared to speak a word of truth to him!

Our first Bible lesson for today comes from the Old Testament book of Ezekiel. I can’t delve too far into the history of this remarkable book, but Ezekiel was a prophet and priest who, for years, had warned the people of Judah, the southern grouping of God’s people whose capital city was Jerusalem, that their continuing reliance on things other than God, their unjust and unloving treatment of others, and all their other sins would lead to the destruction of their country unless they repented and turned in faith to God.

These people—God’s people, the descendants of slaves who had been miraculously brought to a land filled with blessings showered on them by God, had turned a deaf ear to Ezekiel’s warnings. As the 33rd. chapter of Ezekiel begins, God calls Ezekiel again. He has more messages He wants Ezekiel to share with His people. God is about to orchestrate the devastation of Judah by foreign conquerors.

But God doesn't intend for that to be the end of the story. God meant the impending destruction and enslavement of his people in Ezekiel's time to lead a different conclusion.

God wanted Ezekiel to carry a new message to His people.

Now, if I had been Ezekiel, I might have thought, “I’ve had enough of the preaching business. No one wants to hear what God has to say anyway. Why should I waste my breath?”

But it was at precisely this moment that God came to Ezekiel again and, in some mysterious way, God told Ezekiel that just as Ezekiel had earlier prophesied destruction, now Ezekiel was to prophesy restoration. God was going to renew His people, give them back their land, allow them to rebuild their temple.

The key to the fulfillment of the promise of restoration was the same as the avoidance of the earlier (and ignored) threat had been: The people must repent for sin (turn away from sin) and trust in God alone. God told Ezekiel that Ezekiel must share this word with His people. Look at how God puts it in verses 8 and 9 of our first lesson: “If I say to the wicked, ‘O wicked ones, you shall surely die,’ and you do not speak to warn the wicked to turn from their ways, the wicked shall die in their iniquity, but their blood I will require at your hand. But if you warn the wicked to turn from their ways, and they do not turn from their ways, the wicked shall die in their iniquity, but you will have saved your life.”

God called Ezekiel to play for high stakes. He was to tell people to turn to God. If he failed to share that message, the blood of those he feared or hated too much to share it with would be on his hands.

If he shared the message and people still refused to repent and trust in God, their blood would be on their own hands.

Now, folks, this is more than a history lesson. In this history, we see the hand of God and we also see how God still operates to call unrepentant sinners to restored fellowship with Him when they turn from their sin and trust in Him.

We see God operating this way in today's Gospel lesson. There, Jesus lays down a process by which a church member sins against another can be restored to fellowship with God and with the church. If the member at fault refuses to renounce his sin, Jesus says, the Church must excommunicate that person, stripping him of his membership and denying him the privilege of receiving Christ's body and blood. Jesus says that this action must be taken not to bring an end to the story, but to allow the one at fault to understand the full consequences of unrepented sin. When we refuse to acknowledge our guilt, we are separated from God and the life that only God can give. If the one at fault, at the end of the process Jesus lays down in Matthew 18:15-20, will repent, restoration will come. Forgiveness and new life will come.

Jesus lays out this same pattern in his story of the prodigal son. The prodigal was allowed to experience the full consequences of his sin. But when he turned away from his sin and returned to his father, who, of course, represents God, his connection to his family was restored again.

When, six centuries after Ezekiel, God came to the world in the person of Jesus of Nazareth, He gave the same message to the world which, up to that point, God had given to His chosen people. Today, through Christ, eternal restoration and renewal, the new life that Jon’s father grasped that day Jon and he had a heart-to-heart, is what God offers to all who repent for sin and believe in Jesus. Jesus put it this way according to the Gospel of Mark, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the Good News.”

Also today, the call that God gave to Ezekiel, the prophet and priest, is a call that He gives to every believer in Jesus Christ. A passage that has played a critical role in Lutheran history, the basis for the Lutheran theology of "the priesthood of all believers," underscores this. Please take up a pew Bible and turn to page 703 and find 1 Peter, chapter 2, verse 9. Read it aloud with me, if you would:

But you are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, His own special people, that you may proclaim the praises of Him who called you out of darkness into His marvelous light. 

God calls every believer in Jesus Christ to be an Ezekiel, to be a Jon, who shares the life-changing news that all who turn from sin and trust in Christ live with God for eternity.

When we believe in Jesus Christ, God walks with us through every step of this life, giving us strength and peace we can find nowhere else.

We all know that the message about Jesus Christ isn’t something that most people are clamoring to hear today, no matter how desperately they need it. Words like those God instructed Ezekiel to share with His people sound like antiquated nail scratches on a chalk board to modern ears. Read them in verses 10 to 11 of our first lesson:

…say…’Our transgressions and our sins weigh upon us, and we waste away because of them; how then can we live?’ Say to them, As I live, says the Lord God, I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but that the wicked turn from their ways and live; turn back, turn back from your evil ways; for why will you die, O house of Israel?’

In an era in which...

• freedom is institutionalized as selfishness and an excuse for greed, 
• drug addiction right here in Hocking County is epidemic, 
• child abuse and a coarse disregard for the humanity of others can be seen everywhere, 
• sexual promiscuity of all sorts is seen as the inevitable result of irresistible biological impulses rather than the choice of a society that worships at the altar of self, and 
• things like racial bigotry, the unjust treatment of women, and a sense of entitlement pervade our culture, 

the call to turn from sin and believe in Jesus Christ as the only way to live here and in eternity is not welcome. In sharing the message of new life through Jesus Christ, we run the risk of becoming the guests nobody wants to show up at the party!

But, here's a question we must all address:

Whose approval do we want more, that of a world hurtling toward death in its sins or that of heaven, which awaits repentant sinners with open arms? 

The answer, I think, should be obvious. Speaking for myself, I want to be on the side of the One Who will be standing when Jesus returns to claim His final victory over sin and death! And, if I can help convey the message of new life to people who don't know Jesus Christ, I am more than willing to live with the disdain of some.

God tells Ezekiel that He takes no pleasure when people spurn Him and follow the way of death rather than following Him. God still takes no pleasure in that. He wants to welcome all into relationship with Him.

Jesus, God in the flesh, demonstrated this same sentiment on the Palm Sunday before His arrest and crucifixion. You'll remember that Jesus was given a hero's welcome to Jerusalem. Later on that same day though, knowing all that awaited Him in the week to come, Jesus wept over the city. The days would come, He told this place that housed God's temple, that they would be crushed because they had failed to see that in Him, God had visited them and offered new and everlasting life to all who repent and believe in Him.

Today, there are people in our community—people in your own personal circles of acquaintance—who, right now, at this moment, are condemning themselves to eternal separation from God and who need you to be their sentinels.

They need you to warn them of the destruction to come for those who refuse Jesus’ outstretched hand of grace and forgiveness and of the new life that can be theirs if only they will quit struggling to be self-sufficient, self-contained, and self-driven and surrender to the only love that lasts forever, the love given to all through Jesus Christ.

Fine, you may say, I’m called to share Christ with others; how do I do that?

Well, it isn’t a matter of what you do. It’s a matter of who you are. As I've said before, God made you a human being, not a human doing.

By Baptism, you are already a child of God. Your belief in Jesus confirms that fact.

So, be a child of God. Live out the privilege of that.

Without apology or self-doubt, be the forgiven, free, and hopeful child of God Christ has already made you.

Ezekiel was a believer God used as a conduit for His message: repent and believe. If you and I try to make believers of others by our efforts or with our own messages, we will fail.

I used to be the kind of Christian and preacher who thought I could, by use of a program or a method or clever word games, win converts to Christ.

But the message I shared came from me, not God, and it was about me, not God.

I’ve never won anyone to Christ by being clever. But Christ has won people to Christ through me when I’ve gotten out of the way and let Christ live in me. He can do the same through all believers!

In Psalm 44, the writer remembers how God gave the promised land to His people: “…not by their own sword did they win the land, nor did their own arm give them victory; but Your right hand, and Your arm, and the light of Your countenance…”

God needs lots of Ezekiels today, people who will listen to the Word about Jesus Christ and then, in the power of the Holy Spirit, trusting that Christ is living in them (and He lives in all believers!), open their mouths to spread that Word to others.

That’s nothing other than being a Christian. That’s depending on God to be who we were made to be as children of God. That’s who Jon was. That’s who Christ can help us to be, who God made us to be, and who everyone of we know needs us to be: people who listen to God’s Word and then pass it on.

May we all be Ezekiels!

Amen!

Listening to Jesus

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

Luke 9:28-36
Transfiguration Sunday
One of my favorite preachers, Gerald Mann, tells a joke about a televangelist who went skiing. He had never been skiing before, but he was full of himself and, stupidly, simply strapped on some skis, climbed onto a ski lift, and headed up a mountain.

He passed the green and blue stations, spots where inexperienced and intermediate skiers, respectively, were to have gotten off the lift. Instead, he rode all the way up to the black station, confident that despite his inexperience, he would do well.

When he reached the top of the mountain, he jumped off the chair and down the hill he went, end over end through the first turn. He flew over a cliff into a gorge.

About ten feet down, he grabbed a tree branch. There he held on tightly, suspended over certain death. He yelled out, “Is anybody up there?”

It just so happened that a minister who the televangelist constantly criticized in his broadcasts had seen the whole thing. The minister stayed out of the televangelist’s line of vision and called down to him, “Yes, there’s someone up here. It’s I, the Lord your God. The time of your testing is at hand. If you really believe as you’re claiming to believe all the time, let go and I will catch you.”

There was a pause from below. And then the televangelist asked, “Is anybody else up there?”

That’s not a true story, of course. But there is a lot of truth in it. As Mann writes after telling it in his book, When the Bad Times Are Over for Good, “We would all like to really let go and trust God…But we’d like something more than a disembodied voice.”

Interestingly, there is a disembodied voice in our Gospel lesson today. It comes from a cloud that has descended to a mountain. And this voice, which we can take to be God the Father, tells us that God is more than a disembodied voice. We all would like to trust that. But can we? And if so, how?

Throughout this Epiphany season, which began on January 6, we’ve said that the Gospel lessons on these Sundays have all presented epiphanies, manifestations of Who Jesus is and what He can be for us when, by faith, we let Him be.

In Epiphany, our picture of Jesus has been unscrambled and we have seen that He is more than a man, more than a great moral teacher, more even than King of the Jews or Savior of the world.

But you and I have the benefit of hindsight. We live on the other side of Good Friday and Easter. We know that, though the world tried to kill Him off on Good Friday, Jesus rose from the dead on Easter, guaranteeing the truth of His promise that, “Those who believe in me, though they die, will live.”

The three disciples who Jesus took with Him to the top of the mountain in our Gospel lesson probably had no clear idea of why they had followed Jesus in the first place or why they were now on this mountain with Him.

Peter, the one quickest to speak of the twelve apostles, had, just a few verses before today’s Gospel lesson, made a confession about Jesus. When Jesus asked the twelve, “Who do you say I am?” Peter said simply, “The Messiah [that means, the Christ, God’s anointed king]…The Messiah of God.”

But those may have been simply disembodied words for Peter, which is probably why Jesus responded to his confession by telling Peter and the other apostles: “The Son of Man must undergo great suffering, and be rejected by the elders, chief priests, and scribes, and be killed, and on the third day be raised.”

These words of Jesus would not have computed in the minds of the twelve apostles. The Messiah to suffer in the holy city of Jerusalem? The Messiah rejected by the very religious leaders who should have hailed him as king? The Messiah killed? Those thoughts would have been so mind-numbingly confusing to them that they would hardly have taken notice of the most incredible claim of all, that after being murdered, the Messiah would rise again.

But on this Saint Valentine’s Day, it’s important to remember that love is more than words, especially the love God has for us. And so, God gives the three disciples closest to Jesus more than words. He will show them how the Messiah can be both God of all and servant of all, crucified like a criminal yet the King Who brings life.

In our lesson, while Jesus prays, He blazes with the very fire of heaven. Peter, James, and John couldn’t have helped but remember reading from the book of Exodus about the time when God had called Moses to Mount Sinai and covered the mountain with a cloud. After seven days, God had called Moses out of the cloud and, we’re told, “the appearance of the glory of the Lord was like a devouring fire…”

At the Transfiguration, in the presence of Peter, James, and John, 1300 years after Moses had encountered God on Sinai, Jesus was soon joined by Moses, who had died about 1240BC, and Elijah, whom God had taken to heaven in about 840BC. They discussed Jesus’ departure—literally Jesus’ exodus*—His impending death and resurrection.

Thinking that he could bottle up the glory of this moment, Peter suggests that three booths should be built, one each for Moses, Elijah, and Jesus.

At that suggestion, the cloud of heaven’s presence overshadowed and terrified Peter, James, and John, and the voice from cloud said, “This is My Son, the Chosen; listen to Him!”

God is more than a disembodied voice. God is embodied in carpenter from Nazareth Who, sinless, willingly sacrificed Himself on a cross so that all who disavow their sin and entrust their lives to Him, receive the power to live this life whatever the circumstances and a new life that goes beyond the grave in an eternal kingdom with God.

But these free gifts do not come to us without a price. They cost Jesus suffering and death on a cross. And they call us to die to sin, to die to all our human desires for importance or power, and to simply draw our life from the crucified and risen Savior. The voice from heaven told the disciples and that voice tells us today, “Do you want to know Who God is? Do you want to know God as more than a disembodied voice? Get to know Jesus. This is God the Son. Listen to Him. Listen only to Him.”

And what will we hear when we listen to Jesus’ life, teaching, death, and resurrection?

We will hear, first of all, that God loves us and seeks relationship with us. In one of Jesus’ most famous parables, He tells the story of a father who leaves all dignity behind in order to run to a son who had become lost in sin. He kisses his boy, puts new clothes on him, and rings on his fingers and throws a party. Just so, Jesus says, God throws a party in heaven every time one of us realizes our sin and our need of God and turn to Him for forgiveness and life.

When we listen to Jesus we also hear that God’s expectations of us as human beings has not changed. God still hates the sin while loving the sinner. Jesus affirms that to build our lives on anyone or anything other than God is sin. Neither our families nor our countries, neither material acquisitions nor influence are strong enough foundations to sustain our lives; only the God we know in Jesus Christ is!

You know, I wish that we had the same attitude and understanding of God's commands, as succinctly stated in the Ten Commandments, that the ancient Jews had. We have the same feeling toward God's law as we're likely to have toward the skunk who crashes the party. We think they mean God is a spoilsport.

But the ancient Israelites understood that God's commands are gifts. "Within the parameters of this commands," God says, "there is life and happiness and relationship. Transgress them and you walk away from relationships with others, with your true selves, and from Me."

Jesus said that He came into the world not to overthrow the law, but to fulfill it.** But God's laws still function as a mirror for us all, showing us our need of God and, as was true of the son in Jesus' parable, to run go back to the Lord Who runs to His children.

But we also hear this when we pay attention to Jesus: We can be forgiven. We can be made new.

True story: He had been going his own way for a long time. He had joined a small startup company with a newly minted Masters of Business Administration degree and, as the business had grown, so had his prosperity and prestige. He had become a big shot and he knew it. Later, he revealed that there had been some fudging along the way, little deals that might have gotten him in trouble were it not for the fact that he counted prosecuting attorneys, police chiefs, and even a state attorney general among his friends.

But it was all good, he told himself if ever he had second thoughts about his ethics. He had everything he wanted: the nice house, the new cars, the sumptuous vacations, the beautiful wife, the 2.1 perfectly coifed and orthodontistized children. All went well.

Then near-tragedy struck. A twin brother to whom he was close nearly died. He watched his brother’s family through the long months of hospitalization and realized that, in spite of their lower middle class lifestyles, they had something he didn’t have. They didn’t have the answers. They didn’t have an unimpeachable promise of a trouble-free life. But they had a lifeline to the God of the nail-scarred hands. They had Jesus Christ. And even though he knew it meant dying to the power of all of the things for which he had lived and striven all his life, this man grabbed hold of Jesus. Today, he and his wife strive to ensure that in everything they do, they strive to honor God.

Being a Christian isn’t about being perfect. (If you want confirmation of that, look at me. At the top of my blog, in my personal profile space, I say that, "I am an imperfect sinner." A few weeks ago, a guy wrote to me and said, "Mark, I bet if you worked at you could be a perfect sinner.") Being a Christian isn't about being perfect.

It’s about listening to Jesus.

It’s about hearing that God wants nothing more than having a relationship with Him.

It’s about dying to sin and making what God wants for us more important than what we want for us.

It means knowing that even when we fail to love God and love others as we love ourselves, we can be forgiven.

God isn’t a disembodied voice. God has come to us body and blood in the person of Jesus Christ with a simple message: Turn from sin, follow me and learn to live as I made you to live, as My child, as My son, as My daughter, now and forever. Amen

*The exodus, recounted in the Old Testament book that bears that name, is the central event of Israel's history: God's miraculous deliverance of ancient Israel from slavery in Egypt. Jesus' death and resurrection play a similar role in the New Testament. It is through Jesus' crucifixion and resurrection that He is able to lead all who follow Him out of slavery to sin and death. Whereas, the Old Testament exodus is foreshadowing, through His chosen people, of "coming attractions," Jesus' exodus is of cosmic significance. Jesus' exodus has brought the inevitable establishment of a new heaven and a new earth which His followers only experience dimly at best today, but will come in fullness when Jesus returns at the end of history.

**Jesus also says that He came to fulfill the word given by the prophets, an interesting and important point when considering that the two ancient Hebrews who met Him on the mount of Transfiguration were Moses, the one to whom God first gave the moral law, and Elijah, the greatest of the ancient prophets.

Faith Tidbit #30

It's important to notice that the Ten Commandments don't actually begin with a command. In fact, they begin with a promise: "I am the Lord your God..." Here, God underscores that a relationship with Him cannot be earned by adherence to His revealed will in the commandments. God promises to be our God without strings or preconditions. Relationship is God's gift to us. We may spurn that gift. But God offers it nonetheless. To understand this, consider the love of most parents for their children. Children may spurn parental love, opting out of a relationship. But this won't alter the parents' love for them. Jesus, in fact, told a parable or story which conveyed this truth about God's stubborn grace toward His children, as well as about God's respect for the choices we make regarding what to do with His offer of relationship.

The Christmas Story: The Word Made Flesh

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

John 1:1-18
This morning, as we consider our Gospel lesson, I need to ask you to do a big favor for me.

I’m going to ask you to puncture the Sunday morning fog, to leave the New Year’s celebrating behind, and to even forget the fact that the Buckeyes CAN win the big ones and instead, put on your thinking caps.

God gave us brains and sometimes our faith is deepened when we use them to consider the amazing, life-changing truths God presents to us in Scripture. So, please pull out the Celebrate inserts, where the Gospel lesson is printed and sort of follow along this morning.

It starts, “In the beginning…” Now, the first thought that hits us when we read that phrase is of Genesis 1:1, the first chapter and verse in the first book of the Old Testament. There, we’re told that, “In the beginning,” God created the heavens and the earth.

But today’s Gospel lesson takes us to before that beginning, before God created anything, back when all that existed was God. And with three occurrences of the verb “was,” we’re told a lot about this God. Or, at least, we’re told about one person of God. It says, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” This Word existed back when all that existed was God. So, if the only thing that existed was God and the Word was around, then the Word was God.

Now, that sounds pretty strange to us. We think of words as things that come from our mouths or that we read on a page or a computer screen. Words may describe something, we think, but they don’t actually live, do they? Don't they?

Let me ask you a question. Feel free to be un-Lutheran and shout out an answer. Do our words—our measly human words, I mean—have power? They sure do. Walk up to a person and tell them, “You’re stupid!” and I guarantee you will get a reaction of some kind. Words have power.

If that’s true for us, think how much more true that must be for God. God’s word must have power.

And in fact, when you think back to Genesis again, you find that we’re not told anything about the mechanics of how God created. It doesn’t say, “God took a teaspoon of hydrogen and mixed in some oxygen…” It says, “God said, ‘Let there be light!’; and there was light…God said, ‘Let the earth bring forth living creatures…’ And it was so.”

God spoke; things happened.

For God, there is no distinction between words and actions.

For God, words are actions. Powerful actions!

In the Old Testament book of Isaiah, God affirms this: “My word [God tells us]…shall not return to me empty, but it shall accomplish that which I purpose, and succeed in the thing for which I sent it.”

We believe that God’s Word still does what God sends it to accomplish. When a person is brought to the baptismal font and water is poured over her or his head in the Name of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit, we believe that the water connected with the Word of God brings them new life. God declares the baptized as His own. “You are sealed by the Holy Spirit and marked with the cross of Christ forever,” we say for God.

And we believe that the only way in which the baptized person’s bonds with God can be broken is if the baptized person herself or himself unrepentantly sins and chooses to walk their own way, rather than God’s way. (And even then, it won't be God Who breaks the bonds, only us.)

When God created, His Word did exactly what it set out to do. God’s Word created a perfect world.

But we know what happened next. Humanity rejected God. We decided to go our own way.

Unless God intervened, God knew that His whole creation, including the pinnacle of His creation, the apex, the ones created in the “image of God”—you and me—could be lost for all eternity. God is willing to allow us to choose separation from God. God lets humanity choose hell. But God refused and God still refuses to let us go without fighting for us.

And so, centuries ago, starting with a couple named Abraham and Sarah and their descendants, God began to speak His Word to us again.

God knew that we don’t always wear our thinking caps.

God knew that He would have to use many active words to gradually penetrate our skulls and our wills in order to get through to us.

God spent centuries wooing the human race, helping humanity to get to know Him as a God of perfect love and perfect justice, as God with a will—expressed in the Ten Commandments—and a desire to forgive our failure to keep those commandments.

God kept speaking His Words to humanity, particularly to Israel, until He was ready to invite the whole planet back into the eternal intimacy He has always wanted to share with all of us.

Let me try to illustrate to you what I think this centuries-long project of God has been like. Very soon after Ann and I started dating, I knew that I loved her. But I didn’t tell her right away. I waited a while. I knew that she wasn’t ready to hear that. In words and actions, I built up to the point when I could finally say, “I love you.” Even then, I didn’t know either if I would convince her of my love or that she would respond by loving me back.

When I remember the moment when I first told Ann that I loved her, I recall that—whether it was true for Ann or not—my words had power for me. My palms sweated. My heart raced. And I can tell you that those words were more than mere abstract representations of my emotions. When I said, “I love you,” I put myself out on the line. My words weren’t just words. They were me.

Look again to our Gospel lesson. Let your eyes move to the first few verses: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.”

The word which we translate from the original Greek of the New Testament as overcome, is katlambenon. It can be translated as comprehend or understand, instead of overcome. I think it should be translated that way, meaning that the passage tells us that those mired in the darkness of sin or life without God may not comprehend or understand God’s love and will for them…Not because they’re stupid, but because they've let the sin of the world, the sin in themselves, and the sin that comes from the devil himself take their capacity for thinking away from them. They live in a fog. They refuse to hear when God is speaking to them. They refuse to see when God’s light breaks the darkness.

And make no mistake about it, on the first Christmas, when Jesus was born, God was speaking His definitive word to us all.

Christmas is more than a date on the calendar.

It is the cosmic equivalent of D-Day. On that date, God stormed the beaches of resistant human sin and darkness—our love of independence, our desire to be our own masters--and on a silent night shouted that He doesn’t intend for His fallen children to experience desperation and disappointment in this world or death and hell in the next.

Verse 14 tells us the Christmas story, “The Word became flesh and lived among us” and then John says, “we have seen His glory.”

God’s Word is more than just God’s power. God’s Word is God and we know Him as Jesus, the Christ Child…Jesus, the Crucified Savior…Jesus, the Risen Lord.

The New Testament book of Hebrews starts out with these words, “Long ago God spoke to our ancestors in many and various ways by the prophets [God was building up to telling us and showing us how much He loved us], but in these last days he has spoken to us by a Son, whom he appointed heir of all things, through whom he also created the worlds. He is the reflection of God’s glory and the exact imprint of God’s very being, and he sustains all things by his powerful word.” [Hebrews 1:1-3]

When I first started seminary, I resumed something I hadn't done for about five years; two days a week, I substitute taught. One day, I was teaching a sixth grade English class when a student came in with a note from the office. Ann had left a message with the secretary there. It said that our happy suspicions were true; we were going to be parents.

I believed this word and yet, the first break I had, I called Ann to get her assurances that it really was true.

The Word was made flesh and has lived among us. God the Word—God the Son, Jesus—has lived on this earth and lived this life. He has died for our sin and risen from the dead. Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection tell us Who God is—“God the only Son, who is close to the Father’s heart,” or lesson says, “had made [God] known.”

And our good news is that all who receive Jesus, who trust in Him as their only hope in an otherwise dark and hopeless world, are given the power to be the children of God. The Word of the Bible, all sixty-six books of it, is designed to assure us of this truth: All who repent and believe in Christ are saved as a gift of grace from God.

We are in a time of crisis in the Church and in the world. Both Church and world are mired in darkness, unable to trust in the Word made flesh, or in the Word of the Bible. We need reassurances that the Bible’s strange witness about God is true. That’s why John’s words for us today are important. God calls us to receive Jesus. If we can receive Him, God's Spirit will make it possible for us to believe in Him. If we truly believe—trust--in Him, our faith will be more than words we speak. They will be words we live—God’s Word made flesh in us. God's Word, Jesus Christ, will live in us.

This year, welcome Jesus every day. Receive Jesus and God’s Word—law and gospel—the stuff we like and the things we don’t want to even think about or consider—as God’s Word to us and for us. Trust in God’s Word. That is more than our heritage and theology as Lutherans; it is the only way to life forever with God. Amen