Growing Up

Here's the journal entry for my quiet time with God this morning.

Look: “It was I who taught Ephraim to walk, taking them by the arms; but they did not realize it was I who healed them.” (Hosea 11:3)

Eight-centuries before Jesus’ birth, the prophet Hosea was used by God to call God’s people to repentance and faith. If they refused to respond to God’s grace, their faithlessness, idolatry, and injustice would catch up with them; they would be overrun by powerful enemies and be sent into exile. Ephraim was the largest of the tribes of Israel and was sometimes used, as here, to describe all of God’s people, the entire nation.

God uses different metaphors to describe His relationship with His people. Sometimes, God is portrayed as husband to a faithless wife. Here, God is the nurturing father who raised His people from infancy, who now in their adolescence, have spurned God. They’ve forgotten their father, even if they sometimes still invoke His name (Hosea 11:7). They’ve forgotten that it was He Who taught them to walk, Who brushed them off and cleaned their skinned egos and hearts when they stumbled.

Listen: How easily we forget God when everything is going well. There may be no atheists in foxholes, when adversity and pain target us. We often are prayerful and pious in our desperation. But when things “smooth out,” we forget about the One Who steadied us and set us on the paths to healings of all kinds. We forget about the One in Whom “we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28).

But if we disconnect from the God Who, in Jesus Christ, gives us “life...to the full” (John 10:10), we walk away from life. We walk into death Arrogance and the myth of self-sufficiency sets in. “My people are determined to turn from me,” God says of His people in Hosea 11:7. Then, when hard times come or times when we face the consequences of our idolatry and hard-heartedness, as they do inevitably come in our fallen world, we blame God for not taking care of us. Or we disavow His existence.

But this verse speaks of God’s tender feelings for His people, the same tender feelings that Jesus says God has for all the people of the world (John 3:16). He wants a relationship with us. He doesn’t want us to remain perpetually infants. God wants us to grow in our relationship with Him, in our faith. It’s we who choose either to walk away from God or to remain spiritual infants. God wants to have a grown-up relationship with Him, one in which He empowers us to live in the freedom from sin, death, and idolatry that is our childish default mode, in the freedom He gives to us to love Him and to love all of our neighbors.

To those who have been made God’s people through Jesus, Jesus says, “I  no longer call you servants, because a servant does not know his master's business. Instead, I have called you friends, for everything that I learned from my Father I have made known to you.” (John 15:15)

I talk with my father almost every day. I honor him as my father. I respect him. But now that dad is 88 and I’m 64, our relationship is as much one between two old friends as it is as between father and son. We have many shared memories and interests. We strive to be good to each other. That’s a little bit like the relationship God wants to develop with believers saved through Jesus, I think. God is always God: our Creator Who is infinite, eternal, perfect in love, justice, and power. To honor and worship Him as our only God and King is to give Him His due. But the One Who gives me life also wants to be my Friend. He wants me to get over myself and place myself in His hands and at His disposal so that He can make me over into the adult child of my Father that I’m intended to be.

This process of renewal, which is called sanctification, is a gift of grace from God by which He makes us over in the image of Jesus...if we will only be with Him and let Him love us and change us and show us the way. This is the process that happens, the apostle Paul says, when 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.” (2 Corinthians 3:18)

God wants those to Whom He gives life and gives life again in Christ to grow into the men and women He meant for us to be when He first gave us life. He wants us to be able to say, along with Paul: “When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me.” (1 Corinthians 13:11)

Respond: Today, Lord, help me to grow up: to let go of my hubris and pretended self-sufficiency, to ignore the calls of this world’s false gods: security, acceptance by others, popularity, power, ease, comfort, stuff I don’t need, and a thousand other things I could mention. Help me to keep my eyes, my attentions and my intentions on Christ alone and so have my views of the world and my daily activities changed by the freedom only You give to believers to become all that You make us to be, all that Christ died and rose to set us free to be. In Jesus’ name. Amen  

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

How Can We Bring an End to This Slaughter of the Innocents?

Recently, New York City clergy gathered to address 90,000 deaths that happen there each year, deaths that go unnoticed. That's the number of pregnancies ended by abortion in New York each year, a figure that represents 40% of all pregnancies in the city annually!

The figure in the United States is about half that, but still haunting at 22%!

Increasingly, ours is a violent society that believes it can simply kill off its problems. Abortion is one element of our violent culture.

So too are our popular video games, music, and films which glorify bloodshed, nihilism, and misogyny.

So too are our indifference to the hurts of others and to the agony of gun violence.

 So too, are the violence of a crass culture that urges us to depersonalize those with whom we disagree and that lionizes reality show figures whose only virtues appear to be narcissism and a willingness to mistreat anyone inconvenient to their personal aims.

In the Old Testament, God gave an inviolable and permanent commandment for human beings, literally, "You shall not murder," the Fifth Commandment. The New Testament records that when God came into the world in the person of Jesus Christ, He cited that commandment, then explained its inner meaning and purpose:

“You have heard that it was said to those of ancient times, ‘You shall not murder’; and ‘whoever murders shall be liable to judgment.’ ²²But I say to you that if you are angry with a brother or sister, you will be liable to judgment; and if you insult a brother or sister, you will be liable to the council; and if you say, ‘You fool,’ you will be liable to the hell of fire." (Matthew 5:21-22)

The Bible understands that there may be times when killing is a necessary and horrible option in human interaction, as when defending one's self or loved ones. But murder, the willful ending of another person's life simply because that person's continued existence doesn't suit us, is indefensible. Jesus says that we murder others when we insult or hurt them, objectifying them, robbing them of their humanity.

God takes our humanity very seriously. It's time we did too!

I'm not addressing abortion or our culture of violence as political issues. Although I think that the ruling in Roe v. Wade was unconscionable and ought to be overturned, for example, overturning it won't change a culture that finds the disposal of unborn fetuses acceptable.

The American culture of violence presents us with profound moral and spiritual issues. We resort to violence to impose our own wills on others, to be in control, to be gods.

But there is only one God, revealed as the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. He came to earth in the person of Jesus Christ and He calls us (commands us) to repent for our sins and to trust in Him alone, to love God completely, and to love others as we love ourselves.

Surrendering to Christ as our God will bring the power of God into our lives so that we can think and act more creatively than we do when we resort to violence to solve our problems.

How can this slaughter of the innocents end?

It will not happen with new laws, constitutional amendments, or court rulings, laudable and appropriate as any of those may be.

The end of the slaughter of the innocents will only begin when we hit our knees, repenting of our sins and asking Jesus Christ to make us new from the inside out. It will only begin when we surrender all to the One who formed as in our mothers' wombs and aims to have us live in a fellowship of love with God and others for all eternity.

In Christ, we can be forgiven of our sins and we can be made new. Turn to Him and live. Then, share this new life with others. Please.

How Can We Keep From Serving?

[This, the last of a series of midweek Lenten sermons for 2009, was shared during worship with the people of Saint Matthew Lutheran Church in Logan, Ohio, earlier this evening.]

Ephesians 2:1-10
Each year, Jewish believers celebrate something called the Feast of the Tabernacles or the Festival of the Booths.

It remembers the forty-year period during which the ancient Hebrews, freed by God from slavery in Egypt, wandered in the wilderness before finally arriving in the land that God had long ago promised their ancestors.

During those forty years in the wilderness, they mostly lived in temporary booths or huts. (Another word for these structures is tabernacle, which basically means tent.) The purpose of the annual Festival of the Booths is to remind modern believers that God cares about aliens and strangers and that for people of faith, our only home is with God. To this day, many Jewish believers erect tents or huts in their yards to celebrate the Festival of the Tabernacles.

A prominent German scholar of the New Testament, Joachim Jeremias, once visited a Jewish friend in Israel during this festival. The friend led Jeremias to his backyard to show off the family’s festival tent. There was nothing distinctive about it except for two signs, one posted on the left and the other on the right side, of the opening. One sign said, “From God.” The other read, “To God.”

Those two signs, with just four words, describe the wilderness wanderings in which you and I and everyone we know are living right now. The Bible says that we were formed by God in our mother’s wombs. It also tells us that one day, every one of us will stand before God. We move from God to God.

The Bible affirms that you and I are on that same journey. That could fill us with fear. The New Testament book of Hebrews affirms that, “it is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.” Even those certain of their places in eternity and of God’s love would agree that only a fool or a misinformed person wouldn’t be a bit weak in the knee about coming face to face with the omnipotent, perfect God of the universe.

Yet, fear need not have the last word in our relationship with God.

In our Bible lesson for tonight, the apostle Paul writes to the first century church in the Asia Minor city of Ephesus. Before coming to faith in God, many of the Ephesian Christians had little notion that they were on this journey from God to God. Ephesus was a place with lots of idol worship and especially heavy-duty worship of the world's favorite god, the almighty buck.

At the beginning of our lesson, Paul reminds them of their former life, when they were mired in sin, ignorant of God, and going nowhere.

But Christ changed all that. When they’d heard the Good News of new and everlasting life for all who renounce their sin and entrust their lives to Jesus, God enacted a midcourse correction in their eternal journey, turning their lives around, back to God and eternity with God.

“By grace you have been saved through faith,” Paul reminds the Ephesians, “and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God.”

Christians should never be blasé about God’s passionate desire to change the courses of our lives and eternal destinies. We always have reason to celebrate and to wonder!

Just this afternoon, I got a telephone call from a woman who was a member of the first parish we served in northwest Ohio. I’m presiding at the wedding of one of her daughters this summer and she asked if, at the rehearsal, I could also baptize her two grandchildren.

We also chatted. “You know,” she told me, “God is hard to understand sometimes. I never considered myself a great Christian. I believed and I tried my best. But I always thought my husband was the committed one and I was sort of along for the ride. If you had told me seven years ago that I’d start and own a Christian bookstore, I would have told you that you were crazy. Yet God led me every step and opened every door.”

And then she said, “But sometimes, I ask God, ‘Why?’”

You see, God’s grace and the way of life he made for this woman beforehand were things she never would have guessed. Now she's walking in the life that God had in mind for her, a gift more fulfilling than she could have ever imagined. And all she can do is offer back a life of service in Christ’s Name.

And this is where servanthood, the topic of our Lenten midweek services begins and ends: In the God from Whom we first received life and in the God Who gives us new life in Jesus Christ.

I don’t know why God loves me. I find myself much less lovable than God apparently does. And yet, God does love me and you.

Once our lives were going nowhere. But, in Christ, God claims us as His own and changes us for all eternity. As Paul writes later in Ephesians, “now in Christ Jesus you who were once far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ.”

In the face of such undeserved love, grace, and favor, how can we not be servants?