Lutheran Week Reflections

[Two staff members and I participated in the North American Lutheran Church (NALC) Lutheran Week from August 13 to 18. During the sermon time, the three of us each presented our reflections on the week to the people and friends of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio. This is my portion of the reflections. By the way, it was good seeing so many first-time visitors with us for worship today!]

Matthew 4:19
Early Monday morning, Mark Brennan, our director of worship; Sue Buck, our coordinator of children’s and family ministries; and I flew from Columbus to Denver for Lutheran Week. 

This annual event incorporates theological lectures, a mission festival, and the North American Lutheran Church convocation. Nancy O. joined us later in the week as your lay representative. 

Much of our week devoted to considering the Person of the Holy Spirit. This was our focus because, as Bishop John and others at the event pointed out, the Church and individual disciples can get involved with a lot of things. But if the Church doesn’t tap into the power of the Holy Spirit and pursue its one and only mission, it won’t get done. Not the government. Not social service agencies. Not fraternal organizations. Only the Church. 

We see everything that the Church and that you and I as individual believers are to be about in Matthew 4:19. Jesus is at the sea of Galilee. There, He encounters some fishermen. “‘Come, follow me,’ Jesus [says], ‘and I will send you out to fish for people.’” 

As one of our speakers pointed out, Christians often think that the only thing Jesus calls us to do is follow Him. As a consequence, we turn following Jesus to some vague attitude of mind and heart. 

But at a presentation of the NALC’s Life to Life Discipleship team, one of our speakers said that the words of Jesus in Matthew’s gospel show us that there’s more to being a disciple of the Lord Who saves us by grace through faith in Jesus. 

Jesus gives them in this verse: Follow me, go where I send you, seek to bring other people to know and follow Jesus too. 

Follow. 

Go. 

Seek. 

It’s exhilarating being part of a denomination that is focused on being and doing what Jesus calls us to be and do! 

And it was so affirming to know that I’m blessed to be the pastor of a congregation whose mission of reaching up, reaching in, and reaching out is in sync with the Word and the will of our Lord and with the leadership and the most faithful and forward-looking congregations of the NALC.

We were also given a succinct triple play of discipleship. It happens when, individually and in small groups, we believers not only read God’s Word, but ponder it, letting it soak into our lives and wills. 

The triple play? 

Application, when I ask God to show me how to apply the truth of God’s Word I’ve read that day. 

Accountability, when I gather in groups of two or three others or when one couple gathers with two other couples, and ask one another things like, “What’s God been telling you the past few days?” and we hold ourselves accountable to each other. 

Positive affirmation, when we do things like pray together, encourage one another, care for one another. 

In faithful and growing churches, those “one anothers” encompass not only fellow congregants, but also people outside the church to whom we reach out with friendship, love, and a testimony of how Jesus is the burning center of our lives. (That includes the millennial generation the Church is largely ignoring or denigrating.) 

None of this requires perfection, only faith and authenticity, the willingness to own our imperfections, and point to Jesus as God in the flesh Who died and rose for imperfect people like us and Who gives us our hope.

The disciple’s lifestyle of faith is all made possible by God’s Holy Spirit, Who you and I received the moment at which we were baptized. 

He’s the One Who makes it possible for us to believe in Jesus (1 Corinthians 12:3). 

He’s the One Who fills us with the power of God (Acts 6:3). 

And He’s the One Who makes it possible to share Jesus with others, even if, like the apostle Peter, we’ve always been tongue-tied about sharing Jesus (Acts 4:8).

Neither does any of this require our congregation to add another program or do a flashy ad campaign or get involved with things like politics. These are the things that churches do when they’re no longer following Jesus or relying on the Holy Spirit. 

All we need to do is follow, go, and seek while living a lifestyle of application, accountability, and affirmation, not in our power, but in the power of the Holy Spirit.

The last thing I’ll say is this. Repeatedly this week, pastors and denominational leaders stopped me in conference hallways to say in one way or another, “I just talked with Sue. I just talked with Mark. Wow!” And I often told them, “This is just half of our staff. We also have Trish and Olivia. And they’re wows!” 

Thank you for allowing them to go with me to Denver this week. 

And if you think they’re wows too, please thank God and them for their faithfulness to Christ by banging your hands together right now. 

By the way, I think this congregation--all of you--are wows too!

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

Palm Sunday and the Jesus Path

John 12:12-19
Archimedes, the third-century BC mathematician, taught the world that “the shortest distance between two points is a straight line.” That may be true. But often, traveling the straight line between where you are and where you need to be will only leave you lost.

As followers of Jesus, we believe that the only way we can get to where we need to be as human beings by taking the sometimes convoluted path to which Jesus Christ, God-in-the-flesh, invites us when He says, “Follow Me.” Or, “Repent and believe in the good news.”

Jesus was surrounded by a lot of “straight-line” thinking from the moment He began His public ministry.

Out in the wilderness after He underwent John’s baptism, Jesus was confronted by the supreme straight-line thinker, the devil. “If you’re so anxious to prove that you’re the Son of God,” the devil told Jesus, “just go to it, turn these stones to bread.” “If you want everyone to know Who you are, throw yourself off the temple, and let people see your Father prevent you from getting hurt,” the devil said. “If you’ve come to be the King,” the devil had argued, “just worship me and I’ll give every earthly kingdom to you.” The devil was tempting Jesus with straight-line thinking. “Why suffer?” he was asking Jesus. “Why go through rejection from Your chosen people? Why endure the trial of a kangaroo court? Why be beaten and spat upon? Why have nails driven into Your flesh? Why be crucified, humiliated?” the devil asked. “I’m offering you a straight line to what you’ve come to take. No suffering. No cross. No resistance to sin.”

This is exactly how the devil, the world, and our sinful selves still tempt us today: “You want it, don’t you? It looks good, doesn’t it. Go ahead and take it.” This is the devil's message to us all the time.

But Jesus always knew that a Savior Who did not resist the temptation that had drawn humanity into sin and death would be of no use to the sinners He had come to save, you and me.

And so, Jesus refused to take the straight line, the easy path. He took the harder path, the one that requires faith in the midst of things we can’t fully understand nor explain.

Jesus knew the truth of Proverbs 14:12: “There is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way to death.” [ESV]

Jesus’ intention was to go through death, but not end up dead. The straight-line path in this world promises life and may lead to comfort, but always ends in death, separation from God.

Jesus constantly spurned those who tempted him to take the straight line, the easy path.

After He’d fed more than 5000 with a a few fish and scraps of bread, the crowd chased after Him to make Him a king. But Jesus said: “I am telling you the truth: you are looking for me because you ate the bread and had all you wanted, not because you understood my miracles.” [John 6:26, The Message]

The 5000, with their full bellies, wanted Jesus to take the straight line--the shortcut, the easy way--to being the Messiah King they wanted Him to be.

But Jesus knew that doing so would only consign the world, including you and me, to everlasting death and alienation from God.

Jesus could not kill off the power of sin and death over you and me if He did not bear the condemnation for our sins on the cross. For Jesus and for us, the shortest distance between here and the kingdom of God is the way of following God’s plan, no matter where it takes us.

This is why our gospel lesson for today finds Jesus in Jerusalem on the eve of Passover, despite all of the advice given to Him to stay away.

Just before our lesson, Jesus is in Bethany, the place where He had raised Lazarus from the dead. He’s in the home of Lazarus and of Lazarus’ two sisters, Martha and Mary. It’s during this dinner that Lazarus’ sister Mary anoints Jesus’ feet with oil. (Catechism students: Please notice that it was Mary, the sister of Lazarus, not Mary Magdalene, who did this despite how this was portrayed in the excellent movie we’ve been watching together during Lent, Jesus of Nazareth.)

Judas Iscariot, probably speaking for the entire group is horrified. Judas, ever the straight-line thinker, says, “Why wasn’t this perfume sold and the money given to the poor? It was worth a year’s wages.” [John 12:5]

You see, Judas had the same thought that many Christians have today. They look at problems like poverty, abortion, pornography, or gun violence and say that the Church needs to spend its offerings, develop programs, and do lobbying to solve them.

Ministries of mercy will always be part of the work of the Church, of course. They do the same thing that Jesus’ signs or miracles did: They give credibility to our proclamation of repentance and belief in Jesus as the only way to a life with God.

But the Church is not a social service agency.

We don’t offer people political programs.

We offer people one thing and one thing only: Jesus. 

We’re to make disciples for Jesus Christ. That’s it! 

Programs may make us feel as though we’re accomplishing our mission as Christians and as the Church.

But when, as Christ’s disciples filled with the power of the Holy Spirit, we engage in the long, challenging, one-to-one process of making disciples, we do more than change people’s days or earthly lives, God transforms them for eternity to people, like us, committed to following the God who saves people by God’s grace through faith in Christ.

And so, Jesus tells Judas that the poor will always be around and that if their needs are important to him, Judas will always find ways to address them. But Jesus honors Mary’s extravagance: “It was intended that she should save this perfume for the day of my burial,” He says [John 12:7].

Mary understood what none of Jesus’ other followers nor any of the Palm Sunday crowd nor the religious leaders understood. She knew that the way to God’s kingdom isn’t a straight line that comes by our effort.

The kingdom comes because Jesus died on a cross for us and because the Holy Spirit has given us the gift of faith in Christ and we simply follow Christ. Mary knew that Jesus wouldn’t be the king the crowds wanted. 

Jesus is the King Who would spare no effort--including the offering of His own life on the cross--in order to gain an eternal kingdom in which, He promises, all who follow Him will reign with Him eternally over a new heaven and a new earth. As Paul writes in 2 Timothy 2:12: “...if we endure [in faith], we will also reign with him…” How about that?

And so, we come to Palm Sunday.

Of course, with Passover just days away, Jesus is intent on being the once-for-all sacrifice for our sin, as John the Baptist put it: “the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!” [John 1:29]

But usually the only time that the straight-line thinking world considers sin is when it catalogs all the ways that others have sinned against them. Jesus’ fellow Jews were expert at listing all the very real ways that their Roman conquerors had sinned against them. They want Jesus to be a king who throws the Romans out of their homeland.

As Jesus enters the city, they think less of Passover, more of Hannukah. Hannukah is a mid-winter festival that commemorates the day, in 164 BC, when, under the leadership of a priest, Judas Maccabaeus, the Jews expelled pagan invaders from Jerusalem, then cleansed the temple.

When Judas Maccabaeus and his followers entered the city, people waved palm branches to welcome the conquering hero. They thought that, under the leadership of Judas Maccabaeus, their country was free. They were mistaken: The Romans conquered the Jews in just a few short years and by 70 AD, just as Jesus predicted, the temple in Jerusalem was reduced to rubble.

But on the first Palm Sunday, around 28 to 33 AD, many welcome Jesus as a king who will go straight after the Romans and make everything right, another Judas Maccabeaus.

They welcome Jesus with palm leaves while chanting: “Hosanna [meaning, “Save us]! Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord [A messianic prophecy from Psalm 118]! Blessed is the king of Israel!”

As the disciples watch this, they're clueless about how it all fulfilled Old Testament prophecy. Verse 16: “At first his disciples did not understand all this. Only after Jesus was glorified [after He had been crucified, raised by God the Father, and ascended to sit at the Father's right hand] did they realize that these things had been written about him and that these things had been done to him.”

The Pharisees, who held the upper hand in Jewish religious life, are appalled by the Palm Sunday parade. Verse 19: “So the Pharisees said to one another, ‘See, this is getting us nowhere. Look how the whole world has gone after him!’”

The Pharisees say more than they understand. In the very next verses of John’s gospel, Gentiles--foreigners, non-Jews---will approach one of Jesus’ followers, Philip, and ask if they can see Jesus. Even before Easter, people from other parts of the world starts going after Jesus, following Him.

Jesus promises later in John 12: “And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself." [John 12:32]

The Pharisees think that if they can convince the Romans to take Jesus down, to execute Him, they will also take down talk of Him being the King and the Son of God. People will stop following Him. But as we gather on the sacred days of this Holy Week, we will be reminded again that the straight line--the easy path--isn’t the best route to travel to where we need to be.

There is no Easter without paying heed to Maundy Thursday, when Jesus commands us to love our fellow believers as He has loved us and when He first institutes Holy Communion, sustenance, life, and forgiveness for all who dare to follow Jesus.

And there is no Easter without Good Friday, when Jesus accepts our punishment for sin so that we can live with God for eternity.

There is no Easter, no life with God, for you and me unless we learn to repent, trust in Christ, and follow Him wherever He may lead.

In Matthew 7:13-14, Jesus tells us: “Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it.”

A straight line may be the shortest distance between two points. But the surest line to life with God that never ends is to follow Jesus. 

As we prepare for Easter, may we not neglect to follow Jesus on this pathway so that we can celebrate Easter with true gratitude and faith and awe. Amen

[Blogger Mark Daniels is pastor of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio. This is the message from that congregation's Palm Sunday worship earlier today.]

Growing in Discipleship

[This was prepared for presentation during worship with the people and guest of Living Water Lutheran Church in Springboro, Ohio, earlier today.]

1 Corinthians 3:1-2
Matthew 28:19-20

During these weeks in Lent, we’ve been talking about the five building blocks of Christian discipleship and of the mission of Christ’s Church. Today, we come to the fifth building block: Personal growth in discipleship.

Now, this may seem like the least interesting and maybe the least important of the five. But I believe that every time the Church or individual Christians fail to live out the other four building blocks--loving God, loving our neighbors as ourselves, loving our fellow believers as Christ loved us, and making disciples--the root cause of this cluster of failures is that we have failed to grow as disciples.

In his book, Real Life Discipleship, Pastor Jim Putman identifies five stages of spiritual development. The first stage is being spiritually dead. Every human being is born spiritually dead. We are turned in on ourselves. We are born in sin. We are separated from God, the only one Who can give life.

This is why Jesus told Nicodemus: “...no one can see the kingdom of God unless he is born again." The old must die so that the new can rise, which is what happens in Holy Baptism.

This need is why God, not wanting to see the people He created eternally lost to Him, sent God the Son Jesus to die and rise so that all who repent and believe in Him will have eternal life with God.

And this is why God commissioned the Church--you and me--to act as His rescue mission to a world filled with the spiritually dead. The simplest statement of what it means to be a disciple--a follower of Jesus--was made by Jesus Himself when He called the first disciples in Matthew 4:19: “Come, follow me," Jesus said, "and I will send you out to fish for people."

The ultimate goal of discipleship is to grow up and become strong enough in our discipleship that we reproduce ourselves, making new disciples. That’s why I think Putman’s five stages of spiritual development are right on:

• spiritually dead,
• spiritual infancy,
• spiritual childhood,
• spiritual adulthood, and finally,
• spiritual parenthood.  

We don’t like to hear this. I don’t like to hear this. We don't like the idea that God wants us to grow, to change.

We’d prefer to remain spiritual infants, sopping up the grace and love of Jesus with no thought of being changed by grace or of passing it onto others.

We’d prefer to turn our faith into a kind if intellectual transaction: We give assent to Jesus’ lordship and in exchange, He gives us forgiveness for our sins and life with God.

We want to be able to just say: “Thank you very much, Jesus, we’ll see you when I die and now onto the stuff I really want to do in this world.”

Or we want to make discipleship into membership, like belonging to the Kiwanis or the local health club.

But to be a disciple means to submit to the ongoing process of trusting Jesus to, day after day, destroy our addiction to the dying ways of this world and to make us more like Him.

God does not want us to get too comfortable with life in this world. He wants our whole way of life to be alien to this world. That’s why 1 Peter tells Christians: “Beloved, I urge you as aliens and strangers [to this world] to abstain from fleshly lusts which wage war against the soul. Keep your behavior excellent among the Gentiles, so that in the thing in which they slander you as evildoers, they may because of your good deeds, as they observe them, glorify God in the day of visitation [the day when Jesus returns to the earth].”

Keep so growing in your faithfulness, Peter is saying, that when unbelievers observe you, they’ll have every reason to follow Jesus themselves and then, on the day He judges the living and the dead, join you and all of Christ’s people in glorifying God in eternity because, through you, they too will be disciples.

Often, when I talk with people about the importance of growing in faith, they tell me I’m ignoring Jesus’ call to childlike faith. “All I need is faith as a child,” they say. “I don’t need anything more than that.”

But Jesus never called Christians to be infants. Paul echoes Jesus’ implicit teaching on this subject when in 1 Corinthians 14:20, he writes: “In regard to evil be infants, but in your thinking be adults.”

And the fact is, if we are not growing in our faith, we are dying. If we are not growing closer to Christ, we are, by default, falling away from him.

Under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, the early Christians understood the importance of growth in discipleship. Turn please to 1 Corinthians 3:1-2 (page 794 in the sanctuary Bible). Paul is confronting first century Christians in Corinth. He laments that they weren’t spiritually mature enough for him to speak to them as he needed to. He writes: “Brothers, I could not address you as spiritual but as worldly--mere infants in Christ. I gave you milk, not solid food, for you were not yet ready for it.”

Paul was saying if there is no spiritual growth, Christians aren’t really ready to do Christ’s mission for them. They aren’t ready to be who Christ died and rose to set them free to become!

So, how do we grow as disciples?

Theologians call the process of growing in discipleship sanctification, the process by which God makes us over in Jesus’ image. Paul says that, “...we all, who with unveiled faces contemplate the Lord's glory, are being transformed into his image with ever-increasing glory, which comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit.” In other words, as we lay our lives open to Christ each day, God is remaking us, deepening our faith and our discipleship. We let the Holy Spirit call, gather, enlighten, and work on us as we seek to follow Christ. That’s how we grow as disciples.

But how do we do that exactly? How do we keep still and let God make us over as disciples?

When I was learning how to play in the outfield as a little leaguer, I realized that I had no control over what pitch the pitcher threw or how fast. I had no control over how hard or high or where the batter hit the ball. But if I positioned myself right in the field and used my glove and throwing arm in the right ways, I could catch balls hit to my field. In that conversation with Nicodemus, Jesus said that the Holy Spirit blows where it will and we have no control over it. But if we position ourselves spiritually, we can receive the growth God wants to give to us. We can breathe in the Holy Spirit and grow as disciples. That often can be painful and we will frequently not understand what God is trying to accomplish in our lives. Growing as Christ's disciple isn't easy. But it is the way of life.

Here are a few ways we can breathe in the Spirit and grow.

First of all, ask a person you know who is more spiritually mature than you are to meet with you periodically--once a week, once a month, once every two weeks--and informally. Make sure it’s someone you trust and who isn’t a gossip. Talk about your struggles, spiritual and otherwise. Read Scripture together. Pray together. Make yourself accountable to this person and keep your  appointments. God will meet you as you meet and you will grow.

Second, read God’s Word and pray regularly on your own, with your spouse, or with your family. God’s Word has power. Isaiah says God’s Word never returns empty. Even when we don’t perceive it, as we submissively read and consider God’s Word, the Potter is molding His new creations, you and me.

Third, worship and receive the sacrament regularly with your church family. Hebrews 10:25 says that when Christians worship together, we not only praise God, we also encourage one another and prepare one another for the day we see Jesus face to face.

Fourth, get involved with a small group Bible study. You might want to join us for the studies we’re beginning on Mere Christianity and on discipleship itself after Easter. We gain insight from studying God’s Word together that we can’t gain on our own.

Fifth, get involved with mission and service and evangelism projects. We have lots of them at Living Water. And we’re going to be doing more with our regular Kindness Outreaches in the near future. These outreaches can change both your life and the lives of those you touch. In both of my previous parishes, we did kindness outreaches. In Cincinnati, we committed more than 12,000 individual acts of kindness in five years--giving away cold water or Coke on summer days; cans of soup in the winter; money off at a local gas station; and our youth group loved going to local businesses to clean toilets. And with each act, we handed out a card or were able to verbally tell the recipients, “We’re doing this to share the love of God in a practical way.” Whether others are nudged closer to faith in Christ or not, when you serve others in Jesus’ Name, your discipleship grows.

Sixth, cultivate friendships with people you think are spiritually dead. They’re all around us. We meet them every day. They need to know Jesus. Pray for them. Invite them to your house. Truly befriend them. And then, in Peter’s words from 1 Peter 3:15: “...be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have [in Christ]...” Be willing to be a mentor and faith guide to a co-worker, classmate, or friend. Growing disciples are mentors as well as mentees. It's how we grow.

In Matthew 28:19-20, Jesus gives the great commission. Let’s look at it one more time (page 698). Jesus says: “Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I commanded you; and lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the age.”

It’s God’s plan that we who make up Christ’s Church will be His hands and feet in this world. More than that, it’s His plan that we--His sheep--not the Good Shepherd--Jesus Himself--will make other sheep. As Dan and Trish have both pointed out this past week, there is no Plan B. God is counting on us to play our parts in calling the spiritually dead to new and everlasting life with God through faith in Jesus Christ.

We have no control over the message of the Gospel. That has been set by God.

And we have no control over how others will respond to the Gospel, whether they receive Jesus and live or reject Jesus and choose death.

But we do control whether we will allow Jesus use us to live the Gospel through the five building blocks of loving God, loving others as we love ourselves, loving fellow disciples as Christ loves us on the cross, making disciples, and growing as disciples.

As we position ourselves to receive the life and power God gives to those who are “all in” for Jesus, our lives will be built on the solid foundation of Jesus and we will fulfill our one and only purpose in life: to have and to be Christ’s disciples. Amen

The Kingdom of Heaven is Here, Now!

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

Matthew 13:31-33, 44-52
There was a Coast Guard station in the community on Lake Michigan where I did my seminary internship. One day, the commander of the station stopped by the church office and we chatted. He was excited because in a matter of weeks, he would be retiring. “Are you staying here or moving elsewhere?” I asked. “I would never live here or anywhere in the North,” he told me. He went on: “If you drew a line across the continental United States, you’d have to say that everything North is a moral cesspool, a mission field where God can’t be found.”

Apparently not interested in being a missionary to we heathen Northerners, he was intent on heading south, where he was convinced, all the Christians lived.

The five parables Jesus tells in today’s Gospel lesson are a warning to anyone who thinks they’ve figured out who’s right with God and who isn’t, who’s decent and who’s not, where God is and where He can't be found.

To understand these parables, you have to go to the last verse of our lesson, where Jesus says, “Therefore every scribe who has been trained for the kingdom of heaven is like the master of a household who brings out of his treasure what is new and what is old.”

The parables in this lesson are all designed to show us that, whatever people may think—be they opponents of Christianity or, like that Coast Guard captain, snobby, self-righteous Christians--the kingdom of heaven is active and growing in places where many people can’t (or won’t) see it.

In these parables, Jesus, the master of His household—the Church—brings out of His treasure old images, familiar things and places, to show us the new things God is up to…even in the lives of people the world might dismiss or ignore.

Jesus here affirms the power of ordinary lives like yours and mine in which Jesus and His kingdom are present and growing.

In the first parable in our lesson, in verses 31 and 32, Jesus says that the kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed that grows into “the greatest of shrubs and becomes a tree” in which birds make their nests.

The people of Jesus’ day were familiar with mustard plants. They saw them as useless weeds, as welcome in their fields as crabgrass or poison ivy are in our lawns today.

On top of that, every one of Jesus’ original listeners would have known that a mustard plant can never grow into a tree.

Most people would have scratched their heads at Jesus comparing a weed to the kingdom of heaven. But for believers in Jesus, the image brings inspiration.

In the days after Jesus told this parable, He was arrested and executed. His followers scattered for fear that they would be killed for their allegiance to Jesus. The unbelieving world—Jew and non-Jew alike—believed that in crucifying Jesus, the weed of faith in Him as the Savior of the world had been destroyed, that there was no need to repent and believe in Jesus or to acknowledge Him as God. Life could follow its same old path of sin, death, and dog-eat-dog ethics.

But believers know better!

They know that Jesus changed everything when He conquered death on the first Easter. They know that the kingdom has come to all who believe.

They know—we know—that Jesus is in the process, day by day, of transforming us from weeds, sure to be rounded up, into mighty Redwoods rooted in Christ’s love, grace, and power.

As we pray, worship, receive forgiveness for our sins and the Lord’s Supper, and serve in Jesus’ Name, we grow together in Christ’s family, the Church, in ways we sometimes can’t even see ourselves. God is at work in our lives and we know it, even though we can't always articulate it.

We’re like the backwoods Christian I’ve mentioned before who said, “I ain’t what I wanna be and I ain’t what I’m gonna be. But through Jesus, thank God, I ain’t what I was!”

In verse 33, Jesus says the kingdom of heaven is like yeast a woman mixed in with three measures of flour until all was leavened.

In those days, leaven was seen as a symbol of moral corruption which like leaven mixed in with flour, could infect families, communities, and nations.

Adding further scandal to Jesus' parable was the fact that the person adding the yeast of God's kingdom was a woman. In the patriarchal societies of Jesus' day, men were seen as pure and women as impure. 

Yet, here was Jesus saying that God’s kingdom is like leaven mixed into flour by a woman!

Jesus was saying that even in the midst of what we may think is rotten or small or worthless or inconsequential, His kingdom can be present.

In my life—and I’m not kidding when I say this—I have never been able to see a thing through a microscope. Not in junior or senior high school nor during college nor at any time since. But I take it on faith that there is an almost infinite variety of life in this world too small to be detected by the naked eye (or by a clueless preacher looking through a microscope). The kingdom of heaven is like those tiny life forms: alive even when the world doesn’t see it, or is too incompetent to see it, or doesn’t want to see it!

In 1886, the first Lutheran missionaries went to Papua New Guinea. Over the next thirteen years, numbers of missionaries, each sharing Christ by words and deeds were sent to work in different parts of Papua. But it wasn’t until 1899, thirteen years after the first Lutheran missionaries arrived, that the first two Papua New Guineans were baptized.

Some looking at what seemed thirteen years of futility on the part of those missionaries might conclude that nothing had been going on, that the missionaries were lazy or unpersuasive or ineffective, that God had been absent.

But it would be wrong to sneer, because in those first thirteen years God was at work, mixing the leaven of his kingdom into the flour of Papua New Guinea’s life. And that would be true even if the Lutheran Church there didn’t today include 900,000 believers in Jesus Christ!

The next two verses of our Gospel lesson—44 and 45—underscore just how precious the kingdom of heaven is for those who see it.

It’s like treasure found by someone in a field, Jesus says. He’s so excited to have the treasure that he sells everything he has in order to buy the field.

The kingdom of heaven is also like fine pearls found by a merchant. He too, will sell everything he has to buy the pearl.

You and I know that citizenship in the kingdom of heaven is a free gift from God. It can’t be bought. Jesus died as the perfect sacrifice for our sins so that all who repent and believer in Him will gain a share in what He won when He rose from the dead, eternity with God.

But we can’t grasp Jesus’ offer of forgiveness and new life for those who repent and believe in Him if with the rest of our lives, we’re trusting in other things to see us through.

You know, it's been my observation that most of the things people value in life can be compared to illegal drugs. We might trust in real estate or ice cream, antiques or computers, music or books (my weaknesses), cars or clothes, sex or power, our families or human potential, prestige or money.

There’s nothing wrong with any of those things. But when we start to depend on them to measure our own worth and value as human beings, we’re in trouble.

We develop needs for them, the way an addict needs heroine.

We give up everything to taste, touch, or keep our obsessions of choice.

They give us a buzz that’s here today and gone tomorrow.

And then these things—none of which can give us life—leave us dead.

Jesus is the only obsession that can give us forgiveness, life, purpose, or joy.

Jesus says that His kingdom is so great that, if we’re wise, we’ll be willing to part with all the temporary pleasures of this dying world in order to grab His offer of eternity.

People will think we’re crazy for putting our whole lives at the disposal of Jesus, to bet our whole eternity on Him.

They’re right! “We are fools for Christ,” the apostle Paul once boasted of his ministry team and himself.

The men in Jesus' parables who gave up everything for the treasures they found would have been seen by Jesus' first listeners as foolish. Financial advisors today tell us how foolish it is to forgo diversified investment portfolios by betting everything on one single investment.

But believers in Christ know it’s foolish to invest one’s whole life in anything but a relationship with the Lord of heaven and earth! At another point in Jesus' ministry when many were beginning to desert Him, Jesus turned to the twelve apostles and asked if they wanted to leave, too. Peter, still figuring things out about Jesus and in the same fog I confess myself to be in many times, said that wasn't an option. "Lord, to whom can we go? You have the words of eternal life. We have come to believe and know that You are the holy One of God." If we want a life with God here in the challenges of life and a life with God beyond the grave, investing our lives in Jesus is the only choice that makes sense!

One of the best questions we Christians can ask ourselves from time to time is this: “What really foolish thing have I done for Jesus Christ lately?” “What tangible thing that the world values—that we value—are we willing to lay aside in order to grasp more tightly and dependently on Jesus?”

Ask those questions and you might end up doing something really foolish—and find yourself enveloped by the joy of God’s kingdom!

Drawing from another old familiar scene from daily life, Jesus tells a fifth parable. It reminds me of the parable of the wheat and the tares we looked at last Sunday.

The kingdom of heaven, Jesus says, is like a net thrown into the sea. Fish of every kind were caught. But once on shore, the fishermen sorted the good catch from the bad, putting the good in a basket, throwing out the bad.

Just so, Jesus says, God will one day deputize His angels to separate the righteous, those made clean by Christ and their faith in Christ, from the evil. The latter will be thrown into the furnace of fire--hell, Jesus says, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth—eternal regret for having spurned the new life that comes to those who repent and believe in Jesus. You can bet that Jesus’ first listeners would never again look at old fishing nets in the same way.

For all who confess Jesus as God and Savior, the implications of this last parable should be clear. Jesus calls and commands His Church to be “fishers of people” or, "fishers of men." We’re to push out into our daily lives and strive to bring all into the gracious embrace of Jesus, to invite them to be with us in worship to hear the call to repentance and the good news of new life for all who surrender all to follow Jesus.

Jesus has welcomed us into the kingdom of heaven and now sends us out to bring more to Him, one person, one friend, one family member, one classmate, or one co-worker at a time.

It’s not glamorous. It’s not flashy. It won’t grab headlines.

The world may not notice it, may even disdain it.

They won’t see how God’s kingdom is, right now, right here, making old things new in and through people like us.

But this is how the kingdom of heaven comes to us all: through parents and family members and friends who care enough to share the most precious thing anyone could ever own, citizenship in the kingdom of heaven.

And, long after all the new things we human beings have devised have died and been forgotten, the kingdom of heaven and all who follow Jesus will be ever alive, ever rejoicing, ever new!

In the meantime, allow yourself every day, to live as a citizen of God's kingdom and celebrate the fact that Jesus’ kingdom has come to you, that by His grace, you belong to Him now and forever! Amen