Listening: A Consequential Thing

[Below you'll find live stream video from this past Sunday's 8:45 AM traditional and 11:00 AM modern worship services at Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio. Also below is the text of the message. Have a good week!]





Luke 10:38-42

As we begin our consideration of today’s Gospel lesson, Luke 10:38-42, let’s be clear about what Jesus is not saying. Jesus is not telling Martha (or us) that hospitality is a bad thing. The Bible tells us repeatedly that it’s God’s will for us, both as an expression of our love for Him and our neighbor, that we show hospitality to others.

Our Old Testament lesson this morning, for example, recounts how three strangers showed up at the tent of Abraham and Sarah, the father and mother of ancient Israel, and how they bent over backward to welcome and provide for these visitors. Those visitors turned out to be, I believe, God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. It’s this incident that informs the call to we Christians found in Hebrews 13:2, in the New Testament: “Do not forget to show hospitality to strangers, for by so doing some people have shown hospitality to angels without knowing it.” On many occasions, Jesus says that in our hospitality toward strangers, more than anything, we extend hospitality to Him. We welcome Him. And that’s a good thing.

But, friends, there are different ways to welcome Jesus. 

One way is exemplified in today’s lesson by Martha, who is busily involved in seeing to it that everyone is fed, everyone’s glass is filled, and everyone has a place to sleep. 

Another way of welcoming Jesus is exemplified by Mary, who sat at Jesus’ feet and listened to His Word.

There are times and places for us to show each kind of hospitality to Jesus, times to get busy with serving, and times to sit and listen to God’s Word. 

Martha did a good thing by inviting Jesus and His entourage to the home she shared with her sister Mary and her brother Lazarus. 

But Jesus says that Mary did the better thing, chose “what is better,” by sitting at Jesus’ feet and listening to His Word. (Luke 10:42)

Mary seems to understand that when Jesus, the Word of God, came to the place she lived speaking His Word, telling all who will listen that He has brought the free gift of forgiveness and new life for all people and calling all to trust in Him, it’s time to set down the pots and pans, time to forget about the roast, time to forgo even treasured leisure time activities and listen. 

It was time, in the words of Psalm 46:10, to “Be still, and know that [Jesus is] God…”

Martha seems to think–in the same way that we modern Christians, concerned about the apathy or even hostility toward God that exists in our world, sometimes think: that she had to serve Jesus, that she had to prop Jesus up, that Jesus needed her to throw herself into frenzied action. 

But there are times when the greatest act of service and worship we can render to God is to hear His Word, receive the assurance of His love and forgiveness, and receive the bread and wine of Holy Communion. In Mark 10:45, Jesus says: “...the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.” (Mark 10:45) God transforms us from His enemies to His friends and brings His grace into our lives not by what we do for Him, but by what He has done and still doing for us!

Jesus didn’t need a scrap of the food that Martha was preparing for Him; but she needed the Word of life He was serving up as a free gift right there under her roof! So do we…week in and week out.

So what about us? 

Are we too busy to listen to Jesus? 

Are we so involved in activities and projects, at work, at home, even good and laudable ones, that we can’t keep still long enough to hear from Jesus and His Word? The fact that you're here, placing yourself under the Word of God is a very good thing!

That we need Jesus and His Word is a central teaching of the Bible. In the demands of daily life and in the face of overpowering temptation, it can become hard for us to remember that Jesus, God the Son, has already conquered our sins, conquered the power of temptations to separate us from God, and conquered death. It becomes easy when we become absorbed in mountains of activity, some of which may be designed to prove how wonderful we are or even to lift Jesus up to the world that, “Salvation is found in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given to mankind by which we must be saved.” (Acts 4:12) 

At the Mount of Transfiguration, the voice of God the Father told Peter, James, and John (and us), “This is my Son, whom I have chosen; listen to him.” (Luke 9:35) 

Both for our own salvation and to lend the power of God to our witness and service to others, we need to push the pause button on our sometimes frenzied lives to just listen to Jesus and His Gospel Word. “...faith comes from hearing the message [the message that Jesus, God in the flesh, took our punishment for sin on the cross, then opened up eternity to all who turn to Him], and the message is heard through the word about Christ.” (Romans 10:17) 

Listen, friends: It’s the Word of Jesus and the Word about Jesus, not our work or our serving or our good deeds, but the Word of Jesus and the Word about Jesus alone, that creates and sustains and grows the gift of faith in Jesus that saves us from sin, death, and hell and saves us for life with God that never ends.

This is why God created the Sabbath day for His ancient people. God wanted them to hear His Word of Law that reminds us of His will and His Word of Gospel by which, through the crucified and risen Jesus, He saves us from the consequence of our complete inability to keep His Law. God commanded ancient Israel in the Third Commandment: “Remember the Sabbath day by keeping it holy.” (Exodus 20:8) 

Even though today Jesus has liberated the Sabbath so that the grace and new life He brought into the world on the first Easter Sunday is ours every single day of the week, we still need, like Mary, to sit at Jesus’ feet to hear His Word. Regularly.

Being in worship regularly when we could be tailgating at a Bengals game, sleeping in (like I did in the early years of Ann's and my marriage when, she would go to worship, and I'd stay at home worshiping at Saint Mattress of the Springs), or catching up on chores around the house can seem onerous. 

But one pastor pushes back on all that with a little scenario. Imagine, he says, that you’re part of a family that’s had a long day without the time to eat. You’re famished. Then, back home, a family member takes the time to go to the kitchen and fix a meal. Eventually, you’re told, “Come and get it.” It’s unlikely that you’d say, “Do we have to eat again? I ate yesterday.” No, you’d gladly come to eat up the food offered to you because you know you need it to live! At one level, the call to "Come and get it!" may be a law, a command: "You need food. Here it is. Now start eating." But in reality, it's a gracious word of promise, of good news: "Here's the food that I've prepared for you to give you strength and good health." That's why the Sabbath call to worship with God's people and to welcome the Word and Sacraments isn't onerous, but life-giving!

No matter what else happens in your week, you know that on at least one day of the week, Jesus will come to you and His Church just as He came to the home of Martha, Mary, and Lazarus. 

And, as was true then, He will come to you through His Word: read, proclaimed, and even imparted to us in, with, and under simple elements like water, bread, and wine. 

He invites us to feed each week on His grace, forgiveness, and love. 

This is why in his explanation of the Third Commandment–to keep the Sabbath day holy–Martin Luther writes not of a day of grim obligation, but of a day of stillness and humble receptivity to Jesus. “We should fear and love God,” Luther says, “so that we do not despise His Word and the preaching of it, but acknowledge it as holy, and gladly hear and learn it.” 

When we worship with God’s people as often as circumstances allow, whether here in our home church or at another church when we’re on vacation, we join the apostle Peter who once said to Jesus, “You have the words of eternal life.” (John 6:68)

Friends, let’s be fair to Martha. 

There are times for the kind of hospitality she wanted to exercise the day Jesus visited her home. 

But every Sunday, in the Word and the Sacraments, Jesus comes to His Church to call them, “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. “ (Matthew 11:28) 

In His Word, Jesus works the gift of faith in Him within us. 

He gives us rest in Him. 

He gives us the assurance that He has died and risen for us. 

He announces that He has already done everything needed for our eternal salvation. 

In the end, there is only one thing we really need–Jesus and His Gospel. 

We need His Word and His Sacraments. 

Sunday worship may not seem like much to an unbelieving world. Sometimes, it may not seem like much to us. But, friends, joining our sisters and brothers to sit at Jesus’ feet and welcome Jesus and His Word into our hearts and minds and wills each Sunday is the most consequential thing we can do during this and every week we live in this world. Martha’s sister Mary knew that. May we always know it too. Amen

Seeing Beyond 'Dissonance and Doubt'

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

Matthew 11:2-15

One of the stories my brothers-in-law like to tell is of the holiday years ago for which Ann decided to bake something special. 

She asked me to pick up the ingredients while I was at the grocery store for other items. I picked up everything that Ann needed, arrived home, and, as Ann did things in the kitchen, pulled them out. 

Imagine my surprise when Ann gasped as she pointed to the coconut I’d just bought. “You got a coconut?” “Yeah,” I told her, “It was on the list.” “No,” she said, “I’m baking. I needed coconut flakes. Not a whole coconut!” I’m sure that Ann had said “coconut flakes” when I jotted down “coconut.” But all I could see was the main staple of the diets of the castaways on Gilligan’s Island.

That little embarrassing incident illustrates dissonance, which the Merriam-Webster dictionary defines as the difference “between the truth and what people want to believe.” When I saw coconut flakes on my list, despite what Ann had told me I was looking for, I started looking for the fruit. I was in the dark, living in dissonance from the truth.

Our gospel lesson for this morning, Matthew 11:2-15, finds John the Baptizer living in dissonance from the truth. The man who had faithfully prepared the way for the Messiah to be revealed was now in prison. 

When John pictured the Messiah, the Christ, God’s anointed King, in his mind, he saw a king who would take an ax to the tree, that is the person, not bearing the fruits of repentance. He saw a king who would baptize with the Holy Spirit and fire and pull out his winnowing fork to separate the wheat and the weeds. He saw the Messiah taking control of God’s fallen creation, bringing judgment to those who walked away from God and new life who turned God the Father and to the Messiah. John was fed up with the sin of the human race and longed for the Messiah to make things right.

The picture in his mind that John saw of what the Messiah would bring about wasn’t wrong, any more than my picture of what a coconut looks like was wrong. 

The problem was that John wasn’t seeing the whole picture. What he saw was incomplete. He was forgetting what else the Old Testament prophets meant when, under the inspiration of God’s Holy Spirit, they spoke of the coming of the Messiah. 

For example, in our first lesson for today, the prophet Isaiah says of Messiah: “...the eyes of the blind [will] be opened and the ears of the deaf unstopped. Then will the lame leap like a deer, and the mute tongue shout for joy.” (Isaiah 35:5-6) The King of kings would also, Isaiah and the other prophets tell us elsewhere, suffer, die, and rise before bringing judgment and before God’s new, eternal kingdom would fully come into being.

From his place of dissonance and uncertainty, John the Baptizer sends some of his disciples to ask Jesus, “Are you the one who is to come, or should we expect someone else?” (Matthew 11:3) 

Jesus tells John’s disciples to be witnesses of all that they hear and see for John: “The blind receive sight, the lame walk, those who have leprosy are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the good news is proclaimed to the poor.” (Matthew 11:5). These are the things that the prophets said the Messiah would do. 

And then Jesus says, “Blessed is anyone who does not stumble on account of me.” (Matthew 11:6) John, Jesus is saying, don’t stumble in your faith. Don’t get tripped up by the incomplete picture you have of God in your mind when the whole picture is there to be seen, there to be believed for everlasting life. Don’t wallow in darkness when the Light of the world has come to be the Way, the truth, and the life.

What pictures of God do we keep tucked in our minds that keep us from fully living in the light of Who God really is?

Do we see God as an angry Judge, just waiting for us to stumble so that He can pounce on us and dispatch us to hell? 

God’s Word tells us that “there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus,” who trust their sins and themselves to Jesus. (Romans 8:1)

Do we see God as removed from our struggles and griefs? 

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

Do we see God as being tardy in bringing His kingdom fully into being with Jesus’ return? 

God’s Word says, “The Lord is not slow in keeping his promise, as some understand slowness. Instead, he is patient with you, not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance.” (2 Peter 3:9) Jesus hasn’t yet returned to the earth do that all will have the time to turn to Him and to invite others to do the same.

Do we see the God we know in Jesus as belonging especially to our race, our country, our denomination, our family? 

Jesus says that God so loved the world that He gave His only Son so that whoever believes in Him--whoever turns from sin and trusts in Him as God and Messiah--will have everlasting life with God. (John 3:16)

Do we see the mess our world is in and wonder when and if Jesus is going to act? 

Jesus tells us in one place not to worry about the times or seasons and then says to we Christian disciples, “I am with you always, to the very end of the age.” (Matthew 28:20)

Of John, Jesus says in our gospel lesson, “among those born of women there has not risen anyone greater than John the Baptist.” 

But then he says, “...yet whoever is least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he.” (Matthew 11:11) 

That’s you Jesus is talking about. 

You: the baptized believer in Jesus Christ. 

You: the One Who is being saved and daily transformed by the living Word, Jesus Himself. 

Unlike John when he sat in prison, you know that Jesus died on a cross for your sins. 

Unlike John, you know that Jesus rose to tear open eternity and a personal, eternal relationship with God for you and the whole Church. 

Unlike John, you received the Holy Spirit when you were baptized. 

Unlike John, as a believer, Jesus has taken up residence in your life to protect you from temptation and sin and to empower you to live in the peace of God that passes all human understanding. John could only look ahead in anticipation of what the Messiah would do. 

You and I live in the certainty of what He has already done and know that our lives, our futures, our eternity can rest in a no more certain place of love, life, and forgiveness than the hands of Jesus. 

You are greater than John because, as you receive God’s Word and the sacraments, God is tearing down what the poet and Anglican priest Malcolm Guite calls our “dissonance and doubt.” Jesus has already made you part of His kingdom! (The Six Days World Transposing in an Hour)

This Advent season, as we prepare for Christmas and for the day when Jesus will return to this world, once more listen closely to His Gospel Word, humbly receiving it each day and as we worship together where we hear, taste, and see it. Dissonance, darkness, and doubt will flee when you allow yourself to hear and see what Jesus has done at manger, cross, and tomb. You will see Him again for Who He is: the Messiah, our Savior, our King, our Lord, our God. 

And in the seeing, you will know to Whom you belong no matter what. Amen

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

Why Pray?

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

Luke 18:1-8
The widow in the parable Jesus tells in today’s gospel lesson is desperate and helpless. She needs vindication. The culture in which Jesus lived during His time on earth gave no legal standing to women. Yet, this widow incessantly seeks vindication anyway: Whatever her standing in society, she knows that she cannot survive or live without a judge vindicating her, justifying her.

The judge is a particularly corrupt and nasty human being. Precisely because widows had no standing in the ancient world in which God raised His people Israel into being, God repeatedly commanded the Jews to care for widows, as well as for orphans, foreigners, and those the world often marginalizes, ignores, or leaves behind. But the judge had no concern about the will of God or the niceties of the law.

The meaning of this parable is underscored in part, by what Jesus has to say just before He tells it. At the end of Luke, chapter 17, Jesus talks about what His disciples, including you and me, are to expect from life in this world until, on the last day, the crucified, risen, and ascended Jesus returns to this world to judge the living and the dead and to make all things right. This world, the world as it is between Jesus' ascension and His return is the one in which you and I have lived our entire lives. As it progresses, we are called to be about God's business: trusting in Christ for life and forgiveness, living in love for God and the world, and in fellowship with His Church.

This is a dangerous time.  

It’s a time in which believers in Christ are subject to the possibility of rejection, even persecution, of course. 

But more certainly, it’s a time in which we may be lulled into thinking that this world and its rewards are all that we need, that there is nothing better that God can offer us than the baubles this world so values. Or that because we endure hardships and grief, God must be absent and His gospel false. 

Listen: The central truth of human history is that despite our sins, God, the lovesick Father Who sent the Son Jesus to die as the perfect sacrifice for our sins and to lift the burden of sin, death, and darkness off of our shoulders for all eternity, then raised Him from death to kick down the door to eternal life with God for all who believe in Jesus, and even now, sends His Holy Spirit to create faith in Jesus when God’s gospel Word comes to us, has never and will never give up on us! He has never given up on you! 

That’s why Jesus preached, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent and believe in the gospel.” (Mark 1:15)  

That’s why Jesus also said, in a passage you’ve often heard me cite, “...the one who endures [in faith in Christ] to the end will be saved.” (Matthew 24:13) 

The disciple of Jesus is called to cling to Christ, Who has endured everything you and I have ever or will ever endure, including death, yet rose. We are to cling to Christ, knowing through Him that God will never leave us and never forsake us. 

He will walk with us through all the valleys of the shadow of death we experience in this world and at the end of the ages, He’s going to call out to us in our graves and say, “Rise!” 

And He will tell us, “Come, you who are blessed by my Father; take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world.” (Matthew 25:34) 

All who turn from sin and trust in Jesus as their God and Savior will experience eternal vindication for their faith in Him.

But how are we to live now, in these dangerous times? Jesus tells us how in the parable that makes up today’s gospel lesson, Luke 18:1-18. Take a look at it with me, please. 

Verse 1: “And he told them a parable to the effect that they ought always to pray and not lose heart.” 

The word used here for lose heart in the Greek in which Luke wrote his gospel is ἐκκακέω. It’s a compound word literally meaning called out from. A good definition might be to be overcome on the outside--in our actions and thoughts--by the weariness that we feel on the inside. 

Jesus says that we need to avoid allowing ourselves to be so wearied by the things we experience in this world that we stop trusting in Him and in the promises He has guaranteed by His death and resurrection. 

God knows that life in this world can be wearying.

It’s why Jesus tells us, “Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.” (Matthew 11:28) 

It’s why we’re told in Isaiah 40:31: “...those who hope in the Lord will renew their strength. They will soar on wings like eagles; they will run and not grow weary, they will walk and not be faint.” 

Jesus tells us that we will not grow weary in following Him in these in-between times when we pray.

Verse 2: “[Jesus] said: ‘In a certain town there was a judge who neither feared God nor cared what people thought. And there was a widow in that town who kept coming to him with the plea, “Grant me justice against my adversary.” For some time he refused. But finally he said to himself, “Even though I don’t fear God or care what people think, yet because this widow keeps bothering me, I will see that she gets justice, so that she won’t eventually come and attack me!”’ And the Lord said, “Listen to what the unjust judge says. And will not God bring about justice for his chosen ones, who cry out to him day and night? Will he keep putting them off? I tell you, he will see that they get justice, and quickly.”

The judge in Jesus’ parable is as unlike God as it’s possible to be. 

• God the Son Jesus, as we see from His cross, divested Himself of His power to become a servant to the human race, selflessly cleansing us of the filth of sin and the rot of death by His innocent blood. This God wants nothing more than to vindicate us, to justify us, simply for trusting in Christ. 
• By contrast, the judge is vain, self-centered, corrupt, and, it would seem, likelier to give justice to the high and mighty than to lowly people like this widow. Yet even this judge, Jesus says, will get around to bringing justice to the widow simply because she will not stop petitioning for vindication and justice.

How do we stay faithful to Jesus in a world that largely ignores Him? 

How do we stay faithful when we experience stress and challenges, the monotonous demands of everyday life, the drudgery of inglorious tasks, the pain of suffering, grief, rejection, conflict, uncertainty, and death? 

Like the widow, desperate and helpless, we turn to the Judge, not a corrupt judge like the one in Jesus' parable, but to God, the Lord of all creation. 

We pray to the God in Jesus’ name. We find in this God we meet in Jesus a Father who will not delay in vindicating our faith--even in the midst of the in-between world in which we live. 

As we meet Him in prayer in Jesus’ name--as well as in His Word and in the sacraments we share in the fellowship of believers--the righteous Judge of all will assure us once again, as His Word promises, that nothing can separate us from the love of God given to us in Christ Jesus. “I know that Jesus is right here with me” is a message I have heard from more than one dying Christian over the years.

When I was young and strong, I deluded myself with the idea that I was strong enough to take on any challenge...before breakfast. 

I thought that I was, “faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive, able to leap tall buildings in a single bound.” 

I thought that I was virtuous and deserving. 

I believed these things deep down even after I had come to faith in Christ and had been ordained as a pastor and should have known better. 

I didn’t realize I thought those things, but they were there and still remain as part of my sinful nature from which I will only be finally free after I have died and rise with Christ on the last day. 

I am older and weaker now. And, if I live into the future on this earth, I will be older and weaker still. It has become untenable for me to pretend to be Superman or that I’m self-sufficient, or virtuous or deserving. 

I am none of these things. 

I am an undeserving sinner made a saint only by the grace God gives to those who acknowledge their sin, their weakness, and their desperation and fall in faith into the arms of the One Who died and rose for people like me. 

It is only sinners who turn to Christ, like the helpless widow, who are vindicated by the God of all creation Who is anxious to grace us with His forgiveness, His love, His life.

So when you feel defeated, pray that God will lift you up. 

When you feel victorious, pray that God will keep you honest about who and what you are. 

When you feel accosted by temptation, pray to God to confess that you are too weak to resist the sin that would otherwise drag you into hell. 

When you sin, pray to God in the name of the Son Who died for sinners like you and me and you will be forgiven. 

When you face decisions or are called to do things beyond your capacity, pray and God will guide you and do through you what you cannot do in your own power. (I know this to be true because I’ve been doing a job I am incapable of doing for thirty-five years now.) 

Whatever your circumstance, when you go to the Father in prayer in Jesus’ name, He will always vindicate you. Even after you have died, the God Who died and rose for you will vindicate your trust in Jesus and welcome you into His eternal embrace.

At the end of our lesson today, Jesus asks, “Nevertheless, when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?” 

We are saved from sin and death not by anything we do. 

We are saved by a faith given to us by God the Holy Spirit that recognizes the helplessness and desperation of our human condition and, by the powerful Word of God, empowers us to believe that as we call out to Jesus, we are saved. “Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved,” God’s Word tells us. 

So, keep calling on the Lord. 

Pray in Jesus’ name. 

Whether now or in eternity or both, Your faith in Christ will be vindicated. Amen

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