Going Where I'm Sent...Obediently

[This the journal entry from my quiet time with God earlier today.]

Look: “But the Lord said to Ananias, ‘Go! This man is my chosen instrument to proclaim my name to the Gentiles and their kings and to the people of Israel…’” (Acts 9:15)

A Christian in Damascus named Ananias receives a vision from God that a man named Saul is in his city and needs his help. Ananias is appalled at the whole idea. “‘Lord,’ Ananias answered, ‘I have heard many reports about this man and all the harm he has done to your holy people in Jerusalem. And he has come here with authority from the chief priests to arrest all who call on your name.’” (Acts 9:13-14)

That’s when the Lord gives His simple imperative to go and take care of Saul, who has encountered the risen and ascended Jesus on the road to Damascus and now is blinded and helpless at a house in the city.

It’s not as though the Lord says, “Go, because it’s what I told you to do.” He could have pulled that number, a favorite of exasperated parents through the centuries. And He would have been justified in doing so. After all, if anyone has the authority to tell us what to do, it’s the Lord.

He does assert His authority when He tells Ananias, “Go!” But He also explains why He’s telling Ananias to go to a street called Straight, to the house of Judas, where he’s to ask for Saul (Acts 9:11-12): The Lord had plans for Saul to be a preacher of the good news of new life through faith in the crucified and risen Jesus Christ to Gentiles and to kings. The Lord also wants to reveal to Saul, soon to be renamed Paul, that he was going suffer for being faithful to Christ. (Acts 9:15-16)

How does Ananias respond? Acts 9:17 says, “Then Ananias went to the house and entered it. Placing his hands on Saul, he said, ‘Brother Saul, the Lord—Jesus, who appeared to you on the road as you were coming here—has sent me so that you may see again and be filled with the Holy Spirit.’”

Listen: I suppose people could have a debate as to exactly why Ananias obeys the Lord and goes to Saul. (1) Is it the simple imperative, “Go”? (2) Is it the explanation the Lord gives to him as to why he needs to get Saul? (3) Is it a combination of the two?

All of those factors are in play, I suppose. But it boils down to this: Ananias is a disciple who trusts in Christ and by the power of the Holy Spirit, he is able to be obedient to a command that he doesn’t really want to obey.

Because of the relationship Ananias has with and his receptivity to Christ, he hears Christ’s command to go and he goes.

It makes me wonder how much of what God may want to do through me am I missing through my failure to listen for Him as I read His Word and interact with people who may have needs God could take care of through me?

The things that God may want to do through me won’t necessarily lead me to grand gestures or sacrificial martyrdom. In the grand scheme of things, Saul/Paul is the “important” figure in this passage, the one who will be used by God to plant Christ’s Church throughout the Roman Empire, proclaim the good news to kings, and then die a martyr’s death. Ananias is a bit player. But his simple responsiveness to the Lord was pivotal!

After telling Saul that Jesus has sent him so that Saul can be filled with the Holy Spirit, we read: “Immediately, something like scales fell from Saul’s eyes, and he could see again. He got up and was baptized, and after taking some food, he regained his strength.” (Acts 9:18-19) It appears to me that Ananias baptized the apostle Paul!

God could have chosen someone other than Ananias to “Go!” to Saul, of course. But Ananias was obedient.

This inspires me! I want to be a disciple of Jesus who, however frightening or insignificant or pointless it may seem to be, is willing to, “Go!” when God tells me to to go.

Everyday in God’s Word, I encounter commands from the One Who has saved me from myself and done so as a free gift of grace through Christ, to go, to take Christ to others by my words and actions. Everyday, I’m convinced, as I go through my life, Christ is calling me to follow His lead in some way or another. But I’m so busy with getting the next thing I think that I need to get to that I’m often deaf to  opportunities to be useful for God’s purposes.

Respond: I think that a useful thing for me to do today (if I can remember it) is to ask You, Lord, “What do You want me to do or say in this situation, in this appointment, in this meeting, in this time of study today, Lord?”

Could You help me to remember to do that, Lord? And could You help me then remember to do what You, in Your purposes, seem to want me to do?

What do you want me to say or do right now, Lord?

In Jesus’ name I pray. Amen  

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

The Importance of How We Receive Our Gifts

[Reflections from my quiet time this morning.]

"Jesus answered, 'It is the one to whom I will give this piece of bread when I have dipped it in the dish.' Then, dipping the piece of bread, he gave it to Judas, the son of Simon Iscariot. As soon as Judas took the bread, Satan entered into him." (John 13:26-27)

I've probably written about this before, but that last bit, verse 27, has always struck me. Jesus has been asked, first by Peter and then by John, who among the twelve apostles would betray Him, leading to His arrest and crucifixion.

Jesus' foreknowledge of His betrayer's identity doesn't strike me as odd. After all, Jesus is God in the flesh.

What gets me is this: Judas took the bread offered by Jesus and immediately Satan entered into Judas.

This is the opposite of what happens to Christians who, in the sacrament of Holy Communion, receive the bread. "This IS my body, given for you," Jesus tells us and in ways we can't fully understand, Jesus, His very life, and His grace enter us.

In non-sacramental ways, the Christian knows about receiving blessings through Jesus and experiencing gratitude, being overwhelmed by grace.

But here, in the upper room during the Passover Seder that Jesus had with the apostles on the night of His arrest, Judas receives bread from Jesus' hand and, instead of reacting with gratitude or a new appreciation for Jesus, Satan, the Evil One, entered into Judas.

I've thought about this and concluded that we can receive all sorts gifts from God (and do)--earthly life, relationships, work, homes, and even the gift of new and everlasting life through the crucified and risen Jesus, but still not acknowledge the gift or the Giver. And God isn't stinting in His gifts to us, even if we human beings find ways to selfishly grasp for those gifts, keeping them from others.

HOW we receive the gifts of God in Christ is really the key. It seems to me that when we receive them with openness, the Holy Spirit can use that openness to create things like gratitude and faith within us. ("No one can say, 'Jesus is Lord,” except by the Holy Spirit..." [1 Corinthians 12:3). But when, like Judas, we receive God's gifts as ho-hum matters or as only our due, the devil, the world, and our sinful selves pounce on us, robbing us of relationship with God, turning us away from God.

I pray that today I will receive all of God's gifts in Christ, no matter how inconsequential they may seem, with the openness that the Holy Spirit can turn into deepened gratitude and deepened faith.

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

Choosing the Right Kingdom

[This message was shared during worship with the people and friends of Living Water Lutheran Church, 667 Miamisburg-Centerville Road, Centerville, Ohio, yesterday. We have worship on Sundays at 8:45 and 11:00 am.]

[Here's the audio of the message.]

Matthew 21:33-46
In last Sunday’s gospel lesson, you’ll remember, Jesus told a parable about a father and his two sons. The father asked each to work in the vineyard. One son said he wouldn’t and did. The other son said that he would work in the vineyard and didn’t. Jesus asked His original hearers which of the two sons had obeyed their father. The answer, of course, was the one who obeyed despite his earlier refusal.

As mentioned last week, that parable works for us as a reminder to live out the faith we confess on Sunday mornings. But it also would have had a far more pointed meaning to Jesus’ first hearers. In case they missed it though, Jesus tells another parable on this Monday of Holy Week, which comprises the bulk of today’s gospel lesson. It has a similar pointed meaning for us.

So, let’s look at our lesson, Matthew 21:33-36: “[Jesus says] Listen to another parable: There was a landowner who planted a vineyard. He put a wall around it, dug a winepress in it and built a watchtower. Then he rented the vineyard to some farmers and moved to another place.”

Every one of Jesus’ fellow Jews would have been familiar with the Old Testament scripture to which Jesus refers here. He borrows from Isaiah 5, which is where our first lesson for this morning comes from.

It starts: “I will sing for the one I love a song about his vineyard: My loved one had a vineyard on a fertile hillside. He dug it up and cleared it of stones and planted it with the choicest vines. He built a watchtower in it and cut out a winepress as well. Then he looked for a crop of good grapes, but it yielded only bad fruit.” (Isaiah 5:1-2)

In Isaiah’s song, the “loved one” is God, Who had called His ancient people Israel into being and showered them with grace, provision, and love, only to find that the people sinned, rebelled against God, and treated their neighbors unjustly, failing to love God or neighbor. In other words, they produced bad fruit. This all lay in the background of what Jesus is about to say.

He continues the parable at verse 34: “When the harvest time approached, [the landowner] sent his servants to the tenants to collect his fruit. The tenants seized his servants; they beat one, killed another, and stoned a third. Then he sent other servants to them, more than the first time, and the tenants treated them the same way. Last of all, he sent his son to them. ‘They will respect my son,’ he said. But when the tenants saw the son, they said to each other, ‘This is the heir. Come, let’s kill him and take his inheritance.’ So they took him and threw him out of the vineyard and killed him.”

Just as God had sent prophets to the people of Israel to tell them to turn from their sin and turn in faith to God so that they could live, the owner of the vineyard in Jesus’ story keeps sending representatives to collect the good fruit that they should be willing to give to the owner, in simple gratitude for all that the owner provided for them.

This is not a parable about giving offerings, by the way. While it's the aim of every Christian disciples to give a percentage of their income--a tithe of 10% is the Biblical model--to God's work in the world, that's not what this parable is about. The God we know in Jesus Christ isn't interested in just 10% of any part of our lives.

And the aim of every Christian disciple is to give 100% of their lives--100% of their time at work, 100% of their time at home, 100% of their whole selves--to God.

As God the Son gave Himself unstintingly for us on the cross, the response of faith in Christ is to give ourselves back to God. God's grace in Christ, saving us from sin and death for all eternity, deserves our total surrender to God in return!

You’ve heard me tell about the couple we knew in Cincinnati who, when asked why they joined a congregation that seemed to have little to offer them, said, “We were looking for a place to serve.”

The tenants in Jesus’ parable were looking to take the whole vineyard for themselves and get the owner completely out of their lives. Like Adam and Eve, they wanted to be their own gods. That’s why they decided to kill the landowner’s son, just as the whole world, Jews and Gentiles alike, decided to kill the Son of God on the first Good Friday, just four days after Jesus told this parable.

Jesus continues in verse 40: “Therefore, when the owner of the vineyard comes, what will he do to those tenants?”

Jesus, at this point, has the chief priests and the elders right where He wants them. He wants them to make a judgment about the proper punishment for the tenants in His parable, people who represent the priests, the elders, and all of Jesus' fellow Jews in their rejection of God's authority over their lives...in their repudiation and murder of the landowner's son, who clearly represents Jesus.

The chief priests and elders respond: “He will bring those wretches [In the Greek in which Matthew writes, the word translated as “wretches” carries the meaning of “people as totally evil as is possible.Think, Adolf Hitler, Idi Amin, Mao Zedong, Stalin, Putin, that evil, that wretched.] to a wretched end,” they replied, “and he will rent the vineyard to other tenants, who will give him his share of the crop at harvest time.”

To understand what comes next, we have to delve into another passage from the Old Testament, Daniel, chapter 2.

Here's the situation: It’s seven centuries before the birth of Jesus. Daniel, a Jew, is held in captivity in Babylon. Babylon had conquered God’s people, Israel, and taken some of Israel's best and brightest in chains back to Babylon. The king of Babylon has a dream. Relying not on his own cleverness, but on God, the imprisoned Daniel tells the king, Nebuchadnezzar, both the content of his dream and its meaning.

The dream, in a nutshell, was this: At the dream's outset, there was an enormous statue made of iron, silver, clay, and gold. It was spectacular. Nearby, a rock is quarried from the ground close to the statue. The rock is small at first.

Then this small rock strikes the statue and the statue crumbles into tiny particles that blow away.

The rock meanwhile, becomes a huge mountain and fills the entire earth.

The meaning, Daniel said, was simple: The great kingdom of Babylon was doomed to fail, as were later kingdoms built by human beings. Superpowers come and superpowers go.

But the kingdom of God, represented by the rock in the king’s dream, endures forever!

God will have the last say over the life of this world: not kings, not presidents, not corporations, nor the arrogant, or not even you and me.

If we set out to oppose God or His kingdom of love, we will be on the wrong side of history for all eternity! We will be fools!

All of this lay behind what Jesus says next, starting at verse 42, quoting Psalm 118:22-23: “Have you never read in the Scriptures: ‘The stone the builders rejected has become the cornerstone; the Lord has done this, and it is marvelous in our eyes’? Therefore I tell you that the kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a people who will produce its fruit. Anyone who falls on this stone will be broken to pieces; anyone on whom it falls will be crushed.”

The prophets of ancient Israel came to understand the stone in Nebuchadnezzar’s dream not just as the kingdom of God, underestimated in this world, but also the One Who would bring the kingdom of God into this world, the Messiah.

Like the son in Jesus’ parable of the landowner and the tenants, the Messiah would be “the stone the builders rejected,” Whose power and importance would be disdained and underestimated, but who was and is the King of all kings.

And, by the way, this is exactly how Jesus understood Himself. We try to turn Jesus into a wimp we can control, a kewpie doll we can pull out of our lives' back pockets when we need Him to do our bidding, but stash away when we think that we've got things under control. But the Savior Who overcame death can't be so easily manipulated or taken for granted!

You’ll remember that, after telling the teacher Nicodemus that because God so loved the world that He sent His Son so that all who believe in Him will not perish--will not be crushed by their rebellion against God--but have everlasting life, Jesus also said: “Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe stands condemned already because they have not believed in the name of God’s one and only Son.” (John 3:18)

According to Mark’s gospel, Jesus brought a simple message, that with Him, the Kingdom of God, had arrived: ““The time has come. The kingdom of God has come near. Repent and believe the good news!” (Mark 1:15)

Jesus is the Rock on which eternity is to be built. 

We must either embrace Him as our God or be crushed by our own arrogance. There are no other choices.

At the end of our lesson for today, we’re told that the chief priests and the elders knew that Jesus was talking about them. (Duh!)

That’s because they had built their own kingdoms in which they reigned over the spiritual and civic life of Judea, apart from God. They worked hand-in-glove with the Romans and had cushy lives at the spiritual and economic disadvantage of the people. Jesus was warning them that their days were numbered.

They needed to receive God when He came in their midst--Jesus--or be crushed by their own insolence.

It’s at this moment that the chief priests and elders decide, not to follow Jesus, but that they have to kill Jesus.

So, what does this all have to do with you and me?

Just this. We all have a tendency to work at building our own kingdoms.

We build our careers.

We get the nice house.

We work to get stuff for our kids that they may or may not need.

We pile our 401k’s and 403b’s with reserves.

We guys build our man caves.

Intentionally or not, we find ourselves working to live in and protect our own personal “kingdoms of me.”

But, in truth, the kingdom of me, no matter how big it gets, is destined to crumble. 

Our caskets may be lined with silk and gold. Yet we'll still be just as dead when our bodies are set inside of them.

But there’s another kingdom, the kingdom into which Jesus invites us.

These days, it may seem to have been supplanted by the kingdoms of this world: nations, ideologies, religions, sports, politics, leisure activities.

We may see all of these things and think that Christianity is on its way out and that no one will ever revere Jesus again.

That would be a mistake.

None of the kings or kingdoms of this world has ever done or will ever do what Jesus has done for us.

None can do for us and in us what Jesus can.

Jesus, God and sinless, became human so that He could bear the weight of our sin and death on His humble shoulders. When He died, He took the punishment we deserve for sin. When He rose, He made it possible for us to live with God forever. All who turn from sin and trust in Him with their whole selves have life with God, now and always.

Jesus makes all who trust in Him new!

This world may grind us down. The kingdoms of this world in which we may be inclined to trust will be reduced to powder.

But Jesus, the stone which the builders rejected, is the cornerstone on which our eternal lives can be built.

Only He can make us whole.

Only He can give us life.

Only He can give us purpose.

So, today and every day, ask the Holy Spirit to help you build your life on Jesus Christ alone.

• Every single day. 
• Every time you read God’s Word. 
• Every time you receive the sacrament. 
• Every time you pray. 
• Every time you go to work.
• Every time you make a decision.
• Every time you're with your spouse or child or friends.
• Every time you go to a ballgame, a party, or a concert.

Every time you and I dare to veer away from the dead paths of the devil, the world, and our sinful selves, may we follow Jesus.

Always follow Jesus. Amen

[Blogger Mark Daniels is the pastor of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio.]

A good ambition to have...

...is to aim always at doing good for others and not getting caught at it...and not giving the good we do a second thought, as if to say, "What a great person I am."

Our giving should be a reflexive response to what a great God Who loves and saves those who trust in Christ to live as human beings made in God's image, has done for us.

And it should be done as anonymously as possible, so that the beneficiaries of the good we do won't be made to feel they owe us and we won't get puffed up, failing to remember that "every good and perfect gift"--even those gifts for which we've used every ounce of our brain and brawn to earn--comes from God, not from us.

I pray that God will help me to live with such un-self-conscious gratitude and generosity.

The best Christian person I know is also the most generous person I know, who, at the very designation of "best person I know" comes at me with firm denials.

But then, you wouldn't expect a person who routinely lives with gratitude toward God and generosity toward others to be conscious of how exceptional they are.

If they were conscious of their exceptional characters, they couldn't be notable for their gratitude and generosity. In other words, if you think that you're "all that," you're clearly not.

The key, I suppose, is to keep turning to Christ in "daily repentance and renewal," giving Him carte blanche to change us from the inside out and to live in our attitudes, actions, and thoughts. (We need to become, in Martin Luther's phrase, "the Holy Spirit's workshop.") When that happens, the Holy Spirit lives more firmly in us and we fulfill the picture of gratitude and generosity Jesus paints in these words from His sermon on the mount: 

"Be careful not to practice your righteousness in front of others to be seen by them. If you do, you will have no reward from your Father in heaven. So when you give to the needy, do not announce it with trumpets, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and on the streets, to be honored by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward in full. But when you give to the needy, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing..." [Matthew 6:1-3]

Reasons for Thanks

This morning was humbling.

The congregation I serve, Living Water Lutheran Church in Springboro, Ohio, decided to mark the thirtieth anniversary of my ordination.

I was talking with someone the other day and mentioned that the chief significance of this anniversary is that it shows how God has put up with me for thirty years. "No," this church member said, "He's put up with you a lot longer than that."

 True. Thanks, praise, honor, and glory belong alone to the God made known in Jesus Christ for His grace, love, and patience with a sinner like me. In light of this, it seemed appropriate to keep the entire day low-key.

During worship, Dan Mershon, with whom I work here, gave a thought-provoking sermon on the Gospel lesson, Matthew 22:15-22.

Folks from previous parishes were in attendance and it was so nice visiting with them during the luncheon.

Thanks to the people of Bethlehem Lutheran Church (Okolona, Ohio), Friendship Lutheran Church (Amelia, Ohio), and Saint Matthew Lutheran Church (Logan, Ohio) for sharing this journey with my family and me, for the inspiration you have given to me, for forgiving my faults, and for living your faith in Jesus.

And thanks to the people of Living Water, who made this a special day of honoring God and thanking Him for His goodness.

What's your theme for 2012?

Charlie has chosen "gratitude." At the start of the second month of this still new year, with your resolutions possibly in tatters, you might want to read this post Charlie Lehardy wrote a few weeks ago.

Saying thank You...

...reminds me of all for which I have to be thankful.

That truth made me really appreciate this piece from today's Our Daily Bread devotion.