Seeing Our King on Palm Sunday

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

Matthew 21:1-11
I once preached at a church in Germany. I delivered my sermon in English and it was translated for me. But the hardest part of the service came when, at the insistence of the host pastor, I helped lead the congregation in reading the Psalm responsively. I somehow got through the service and afterward, several of the German congregants asked me, since I spoke German so fluently, why I hadn’t given the sermon in German too. I had to explain that I’d spoken the Psalm phonetically and hadn’t really understood many of the words.

It’s possible to know the words we say without knowing what we’re saying. The crowd that welcomed Jesus into Jerusalem on the first Palm Sunday said words that came from Psalm 118. “Hosanna [a word that means Save, please] Hosanna to the Son of David! Blessed is the One Who comes in the Name of the Lord! Hosanna in the highest!” They were the right words to use in welcoming the King of kings. But a few days later, this crowd would turn on Jesus, along with the rest of the world, and cry for Him to be executed on a cross.

In the end, Jesus wasn’t what the crowd was looking for. I wonder sometimes if Jesus is what we’re looking for.

The crowd that welcomed Jesus to Jerusalem on the first Palm Sunday saw Jesus as a means to their ends. They wanted Jesus to lead a rebellion against their Roman conquerors. They wanted some of the money that the extortionist tax collectors were constantly taking from them. They wanted Jesus to be their king, so long as that meant He took orders from them.

But it’s doubtful, at that moment, that many of them wanted Jesus to go to a cross. After all, they would have reasoned, what good would Jesus’ dying do them?

Yet, Jesus’ reason for coming into the world had always been plain. It had been clear to the wise men who came to visit the infant Jesus in Bethlehem. One of their gifts had been myrrh, a resin used to anoint the dead. And Jesus sought to make His reason for entering the world clear to His disciples. The first time He told them that He was going to Jerusalem to be rejected by the world, killed on a cross, and then raised from the dead, Peter rebuked Jesus, saying that this would never happen to Jesus. Jesus hadn’t been very charitable to Peter at that moment. “Get behind Me, Satan,” Jesus had yelled at Peter. “Your ideas aren’t from God.”

Jesus, although He was sinless, had come into our world to take the punishment for sin we all deserve. He came to die. He came to be the Lord of all because He loves all people and wants to bring forgiveness to all people. And He will become the King of any who dare to repent for their sin and believe in Him as their Lord.

That’s good news.

But it also can be hard to accept because it entails things we don't like: surrender, obedience, submission.

It also means accepting that, just like everybody else, we're sinners in need of a Savior.

A few days after Jesus arrived in Jerusalem, the crowds noticed that He hadn’t led an armed rebellion.

He hadn’t taken over the government.

He hadn’t done their bidding.

Instead, He spent His time throwing moneychangers out of the temple, talking about prayer, arguing with the religious authorities, telling stories, talking about love of God and neighbor as the greatest commandment, teaching of the need to be ready for Him to return after He’d died and risen, and, most strangely of all maybe, He prayed, sometimes for hours at a time.

This wasn’t the king they'd been looking for. No wonder then, that by the Thursday after the first Palm Sunday, the crowd was crying for Jesus’ execution.

If we’re honest, Jesus may not be the king we’re looking for. But Palm Sunday convinces me that Jesus is the Savior we need.

I’m convinced of that, first of all, because of the road Jesus took on Palm Sunday. It demonstrates that Jesus is committed to walking through the hardest places with us.

As our Gospel lesson from Matthew begins, Jesus is walking on the road from Jericho to Jerusalem. This is the same road, different direction, on which Jesus set His fictional parable of the Good Samaritan. It was a road on which people were often subjected to violence and robbery. Thugs hid in the rocks and crags of the road. Jesus walked that road.

But, as you know, that wasn’t the hardest road Jesus traveled with us and for us. In fact, as we've said, Jesus’ entire reason for coming to earth was to travel with us the road that each of us must take—the road from birth to death.

That really is the point of some of Paul’s words in our second lesson today. “Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus,” Paul writes, saying that though Jesus was “in the form of God, [He] did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death— even death on a cross.”

“I don’t understand all of this,” a woman whose husband had left her once told me, “but I sure wouldn’t want to go through it without God.”

A king like the one the crowd wanted--and that we may sometimes want: a king who skated above us, untouched by our failings and our difficulties, a king who gave us all we wanted without reshaping our characters into being more loving and more human, couldn’t help us when we’re confused or lost or lonely or grieving. But Jesus can! Like that woman, we learn that, in Jesus, the God of all creation can reach down into our everyday lives, even when we go through tough times.

On Palm Sunday, Jesus also proved that He was the Savior we need by Who He chose to rely on.

When I was in high school, I played hooky to see a President deliver a speech down at the State House. (It was Richard Nixon.) He was surrounded by a phalanx of Secret Service security, necessary to be sure. He also had Air Force One and his presidential limo and cars filled with assistants and the latest communication technology. Back on Air Force One, he had access to every comfort he could want. Wherever presidents go, they look like rulers of the world.


When Jesus arrived in Jerusalem on the first Palm Sunday, He didn’t look like a ruler. According to Matthew, Jesus rode a donkey, trailed by the colt of the donkey. In ancient times, the donkey was a symbol of humble domestic pursuits. Jesus had come into Jerusalem not with a sword, or a fourteen point Contract with Judea, or a retinue of public relations people, or a bevy of yes men. Jesus’ power didn’t and doesn’t depend on the dying stuff of this world. Jesus relied simply and completely on God the Father.

Every king, president, great athlete, and pop star, no matter how exalted dies. Even Elvis has left the building, folks!

Only one king has ever defeated death. It was Jesus and there's only one reason for His victory over death. Even when He hung on the cross, the taunts of the fickle crowds ringing in His ear, the agonies of His wounds besetting Him, the horror of feeling abandoned by all haunting Him, Jesus depended only on God the Father. His resurrection is confirmation that surrender to God is the only path to new life.

Having committed Himself to walking through life’s hardest parts with us and having refused to depend on anything or anyone but the Father, Jesus rose from the dead. But more than that, Paul tells us in the second portion of our New Testament lesson from Philippians, “God also highly exalted him and gave him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bend, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.”

Pastor Joanna Adams says that sometime before World War One, “Germany's last kaiser, Wilhelm II” visited Jerusalem. “His entourage,” she writes, “was so grand that he had to have the Jaffe Gate in the old city widened so that his over-sized carriage could pass through. After the parade had ended, someone climbed up and attached a large sign to the gate. The sign read, ‘A better man than Wilhelm came through this city's gate. He rode on a donkey.’"

On the first Palm Sunday, the most that the crowds would say about Jesus was that He was a prophet from Nazareth in Galilee. But those who paid heed to how He voluntarily walked our hardest roads with us and how He relied completely on God the Father, ignoring the acclaim of the crowd, could see that Jesus was much more than a prophet.

In one week, His resurrection would prove that His is the Name above every name.

When Jesus calls us to repent for sin, to put God higher than anything, and to love our neighbor as we love ourselves, He may not be the King we want. But when we remember His cross and empty tomb, we realize that, no matter what happens, Jesus is always the King we need.

He is the Way, the Truth, and the Life, the One Who reconciles us to God, the One Who erases the power of sin and death over our lives, the One Who makes us whole.

May our faith be more than words we say. By our dependence on Jesus, may it be seen in the lives we lead. Amen

Another Gem

From Charlie Lehardy.

Quote of the Day

“I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set I go into the other room and read a book.” (Groucho Marx)

One and Only Pass at This Sunday's Bible Lessons (March 16, 2008)

[In these passes, I hope to help the members of the congregation I serve as pastor, Saint Matthew Lutheran Church in Logan, Ohio, to prepare for worship. But because the Bible lessons we use are the ones appointed by the Revised Common Lectionary, used in one form or another by Christians everywhere. I also hope others will find them useful.]

The Bible Lessons:
Isaiah 50:4-9a
Psalm 31:9-16
Philippians 2:5-11
2. Matthew 21:1-11

General Comments:
1. We'll be celebrating this coming Sunday as Palm Sunday, rather than as the Sunday of the Passion. We'll remember the Passion in its entirety on Good Friday, when we'll consider John's account of Jesus' Passion (His suffering and death).

2. Still, there is more than a few hints that Jesus will suffer and die in the events of Palm Sunday. The biggest hint is found in the welcome Jesus was given when He entered Jerusalem on the Sunday before His arrest. He was treated like a conquering military hero, something that totally ignored all that He had said about Himself. For people who wanted a political and military messiah who would throw out the Romans and rid them of their tax burdens, Jesus was bound to disappoint. Jesus wanted the people to come to terms with the fact that our biggest problems in life aren't "those people," but them...their sin, their selfishness, their impotence, their rebellion against the God they needed. No wonder they killed Jesus. To this day, we face every day, the same choice confronted by the crowd on the first Palm Sunday...whether to receive Him as the God over our lives or to kill Him.

Comments on Each of the Lessons
1. Isaiah 50:4-9a: A little background on Isaiah, from a pass I presented here in late November:

Isaiah was a prophet who lived in Judah (or Judea) during the eighth century BC. (For background information on Judah, the "southern kingdom," go here.)

The Archaeological Study Bible says:

Isaiah's primary ministry was to the people of Judah, who were failing to live according to the requirements of God's law. But he prophesied judgment not only upon Judah but also upon Israel [the Northern Kingdom, whose worship life centered on the city of Samaria] and the surrounding nations. On the other hand, Isaiah delivered a stirring message of repentance and salvation for any who would turn to God.

The authorship of Isaiah is debated by Biblical scholars. Traditionally, the entire book was attributed to Isaiah.

By contrast, some scholars think that Isaiah had very little to do with it, that the writings were produced by a group of prophets who operated in the original Isaiah's "school of thoughts."

A third group of scholars believe that chapters 1 to 39 were written by Isaiah, son of Amoz. They attribute chapters 40-55 to a second Isaian prophet they refer to as "Deutero-Isaiah" and chapters 56-66 to a third author, who they call "Trito-Isaiah." Whatever the truth about authorship, two things should be kept in mind:

• Under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, Christians and Jews have always seen in Isaiah the Word of God.
• Those in the ancient Near East didn't share our views regarding authorship. It was considered perfectly legitimate for an author operating within the tradition established by a prophet or a rabbi to write in the name and the voice of that person.

2. Chris Haslam, who, it should be noted, takes the three-author theory of Isaiah as the truth, has some interesting thoughts on this passage:

The part of Isaiah written in exile (Chapters 40-55) contains four servant songs, sections that interrupt the flow of the book but have a unity within themselves. The first (42:1-7) begins “Here is my servant, whom I uphold, my chosen ...”; in the second (49:1-7) the servant, abused and humiliated, is commissioned anew; in the third (our passage) he is disciplined and strengthened by suffering; and in the fourth (52:17-53:12) even the Gentiles are in awesome contemplation before the suffering and rejected servant. In late Judaism, he was seen as the perfect Israelite, one of supreme holiness, a messiah. In the gospels, Jesus identifies himself as the servant (or slave), the one who frees all people.

In vv. 4-6, God has “opened my ear”; he has commissioned the servant as one who is taught, i.e. like a disciple. God has made him a “teacher” (a prophet) of the “word” of God, to bring God’s comfort to “the weary”, his fellow Israelites – who reject God. He has accepted this command: he is not “rebellious”. They have tortured him (v. 6), as they did prophets before him, but he has accepted their “insult and spitting”. In vv. 7-9a, in courtroom language, the servant says that, because God helps him, he is not disgraced; he confidently accepts the suffering (“set my face like flint”), and will not be put to shame. God will prove him right (“vindicates”, v. 8). He is willing to face his “adversaries”, his accusers – for the godly to “stand up together” with him against the ungodly. He is confident that, with God’s help, none will declare him guilty.

3. As I've indicated before, one good way to get the gist of a passage is to paraphrase it, put it in our own words. Here's how I've paraphrased our lesson from Isaiah this week:

Every day, God wakes me up. "Get up," God says, "There are things you must have down cold so that you can teach others." I listen, so that with a single word from God, I can encourage those with flagging faith and weak wills.

When God wakes me, I don't bury my head on the pillow or wallow in the everyday concerns of life. And I don't yell at God like rebellious children refusing to get up when their parents call them to the breakfast table.

Instead, I became a real rebel, a rebel against the world's ways of doing things. I didn't strike back when the world struck me; I just turned the other way. When people pulled my beard on one side of my face, I gave them the other side. I didn't cover myself when they insulted me or spat on me.

God helps me and so I can incur such dishonor. God helps me and I am intent on doing God's will! God helps me and relying on Him alone for my honor is never a shameful thing!

One day, God will affirm that the course I've followed--the course that the world has scorned and insulted--is the One God set for me, set for all.

Who will adopt this way of life? Walk with me!

Who will stand against me? Let's have it out right now!

No matter what the world says or does, God is my helper! Who will dare to call, "Guilty!" those the Lord calls, "Guiltless!"?

4. Psalm 31:9-16: One of the things that won me over from atheism to Jesus Christ some three decades ago was the Bible's realism. The Bible's men and women of faith--people like Abraham and Sarah, Moses, Naomi, David, and others--weren't perfect. They had crises of faith and they did wrong. Their stories are told without being sanitized.

I also love the realistic wrestling that people of faith engage in on the pages of the Bible. Job lashes out at God for his string of tragic misfortune. Moses doubts God during the wilderness wanderings. Abraham, not once but twice, palms his wife off as his sister, making her the concubine of kings, fearful that if the kings learned he was Sarah's husband, God would stand idly by as he was executed. Peter sticks his foot in his mouth...repeatedly

In the Psalms, we have songs of worship like the one from which our lesson is drawn. Here, the psalmist cries out for help in fearful circumstances. It isn't easy to follow God. But here, the psalmist declares confidence in God's help even in the face of hard times.

5. Philippians 2:5-11: Philippians is one of the most extraordiary books of the New Testament. It's a letter written by the apostle Paul to the church in the Greek city of Philippi. Paul founded the church, with the help of his traveling companions, during his second missionary journey, recorded in Acts 16:11-40. The letter was written in about 61AD in Rome, where Paul was a prisoner for his faith in Jesus Christ.

In spite of Paul's grim circumstances, the letter is filled with joy. That joy is rooted in Jesus Christ, Paul says.

6. In our lesson, Paul urged the Philippians to interact with one another with humility. Humility is a repudiation of selfishness and conceit, an embrace of mutual encouragement and servanthood. "Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit," Paul writes in the verses just before those of our lesson appear, "but in humility regard others as better than yourselves. Let each of you look not to your own interests, but to the interests of others."

This is subversive stuff. We all recoil at the selfishness we see in others. Yet we tend to rationalize that our selfishness is okay. But if everybody always looks out for number 1, chaos ensues, as we see in an American society that puts a high premium on indivdualism.

The call to follow Jesus is a call to think less of me, to think of God and others.

7. And as our lesson demonstrates, in calling us to love God supremely and to love our neighbor as we love ourselves, God isn't calling us to do any more than He Himself has done in Jesus Christ.

8. The words of our lesson probably were the lyrics of a song the early Church sang when it worshiped together.

9. Matthew 21:1-11: It's interesting to note that this lesson begins on the road from Jericho to Jerusalem, the very road on which Jesus set His fictional parable of the Good Samaritan. In that story, Jesus told about what happened to a man who was traveling in the opposite direction. The road was filled with rocky crags and hiding places and thieves often used it to terrorize travelers. It was an ominous place and may suggest, in a literary sense, the "ambush" that awaits Jesus in Jerusalem.

10. Each of the accounts of Jesus' entry into Jerusalem on what we call Palm Sunday differs. For example, only John mentions palms. (Mark does speak of "leafy branches" as well as cloaks. Luke talks only about people's cloaks. Matthew speaks of cloaks and "cut branches.") Irrespective of the Gospels' differences however, Jesus is welcomed like a conquering hero.

11. However, Jesus' mode of transportation should have indicated something of His intentions. If Jesus had martial intentions, He would have entered the city on a steed. Instead, Jesus chose to ride into the holy city on a donkey, a symbol of peace, of the homely pursuits of everyday life untouched by military power plays.

12. The disciples and the crowd hail Jesus as the rightful heir of David. "Hosanna" is a Hebrew word meaning, "Save now." The word was customarily used in the liturgy for the Feast of Tabernacles, the Jewish festival of the harvest. (This is the word found in Psalm 118:25, quoted here by the crowd.)

13. The last verse of the Gospel lesson sets us up for what follows. Despite their acclamations, the crowd still doesn't "get" Jesus. The most they can say of Him as that He is a prophet. They have little notion that He has come to do battle with their sins. They only see Him as the instrument of their selfish, self-centered desires. Their disappointment with Jesus will lead the crowds, in just a few days, to call for His blood.

Quote of the Day

“If a man could have half his wishes, he would double his troubles.” Benjamin Franklin (quoted in Canfield and Hansen, The Aladdin Factor, p.17)

Also, see here.

Thanks for recent links from...

Ivy at Claimed, Gathered, and Sent
Jim at One Eternal Day
Mark at Pseudo-Polymath

Howard Metzenbaum Has Died

The Plain Dealer has a great obituary.

Quote of the Day

“Jesus lived among everyday people, just as we do. He spoke to them of life and death issues in mundane settings. And, He did not wait for people to come to Him. He went to them.” (Richard G. Capen, Jr., Finish Strong: Living Your Faith in the Secular World and Inspiring Others in the Process, p.4)

See here.

Quote of the Day

“Christians, like snowflakes, are frail, but when they stick together they can stop traffic.” (Vance Havner, quoted in Rick Warren, The Purpose-Driven Life: What on Earth Am I Here For?, p.275)

Check out Ecclesiastes 4:12.

Q-and-A: How Can We Build and Sustain Our Faith on a Daily Basis?

[The broadcast of the Sunday worship celebrations of Saint Matthew Lutheran Church in Logan, is the longest continuing live radio show in Ohio. I'm the pastor of Saint Matthew and thanks to the efforts of a Saint Matthew member, Tony Funk, we broadcast live again yesterday in spite of a Level 3 snow emergency which had necessitated the cancellation of worship. At the beginning of the broadcast on which the Bible lessons were read and I shared the sermon, we asked listeners to email any questions they might have. This is one of the questions that came in.]

The first thing to realize about faith is that it's a gift from God. "No one can say 'Jesus is Lord' except by the Holy Spirit," Paul writes in the New Testament (1 Corinthians 12:3).

It's God Who builds and sustains faith in us. But God only does this in particular kinds of people. To understand what "kinds of people" I'm referring to, think of a baseball or softball outfielder. The outfielder has no control of the pitch thrown from the mound or how the batter hits the ball. But to field hit balls, outfielders can position themselves to receive them. In just the same way, we can position ourselves to receive faith in Jesus Christ or to grow in that faith.

Among the ways we do this are daily prayer and daily reading of the Bible, God's Word for us. Another way to position ourselves to receive faith or growth in faith is to participate regularly in worship with other believers (even if they sometimes rub us the wrong way). And, we should receive the Sacrament of Holy Communion. That's because, as He promises, Jesus is truly present in the bread and wine of Communion. In the Sacrament, Christ actually enters us and in some mysterious way, builds up our faith.

Prayer, God's Word, worship, the fellowship of the Church, and Holy Communion, along with Holy Baptism, among other things, are what we call means of grace, tools God uses to give faith to those ready to receive it.

I would advise that we pay attention to these means of grace and not worry too much about how large or small our faith is. One of my favorite prayers in the New Testament involved a father who approached Jesus for help with his son, who was filled afflicted with a demon.

The father's faith was small and tentative. "If you are able to do anything," he says to Jesus, "have pity on us and help us.”

Jesus responds, "“If you are able! —All things can be done for the one who believes.”

With an honesty that touches me every time I read his words, the father tells Jesus, “I believe; help my unbelief!”

What's noteworthy here is that Jesus doesn't demand a bigger or deeper faith of the man. Jesus doesn't tell the man to come back when he trusts Jesus more. Jesus sees that the man trusts as much as he is able and, as it turns out, his tiny faith in a big God is all that's needed. Jesus honored the man's prayer, offered from an admittedly small faith, and the boy was healed. (Mark 9:14-29)

Jesus once said, “If you had faith the size of a mustard seed, you could say to this mulberry tree, ‘Be uprooted and planted in the sea,’ and it would obey you.cast out the demon.'" (Luke 17:6)

Don't worry about the size of your faith. Little faith in the great big God of the universe is all you need. And, as you position yourself to receive faith and to receive growth in faith, both of them gifts from God, God will increase your faith, often without your even realizing it. Be attentive to the means of grace and God will build and sustain a growing faith in Jesus within you.

Quote of the Day

"We should pray with few words but with deep, meaningful thoughts. The fewer the words, the better the prayer. The more the words, the worse the prayer. Few words and deep meaning are Christian. Many words and little meaning are pagan." [Martin Luther]

See Jesus' words in Matthew 6:7-8.

Our Greatest Privilege...and Responsibility...as Christians

[Today, worship at Saint Matthew Lutheran Church in Logan, Ohio was canceled because of the Level 3 Snow Emergency here. But thanks to Saint Matthew member, Tony Funk, acting as emcee and engineer, our congregation's weekly radio program, which usually presents our Sunday worship service, was on the air. I presented the Bible lessons and my sermon, then answered emailed questions. Here's the sermon I presented this morning.]

Ezekiel 37:1-14
Psalm 130
John 11:1-45
In his book, Good to Great, author Jim Collins, tells about his interview with the late Admiral James Stockdale. Stockdale, unfortunately, got tagged with the reputation of being something of an oaf after his 1992 run as Ross Perot’s vice presidential running mate. It’s an undeserved reputation, though.

While being held as the the highest-ranking US officer in the so-called Hanoi Hilton prisoner-of-war camp, where he was tortured more than twenty times in eight years, Stockdale applied his brilliance and self-discipline and courage to survive and to help others do the same.

When Jim Collins met Stockdale, the Admiral was doing some studies in the field of Philosophy at Stanford University, where Collins taught. In preparation for their meeting, Collins read Stockdale’s memoirs of his POW experiences.

“As I moved through the book,” writes Collins, “I found myself getting depressed. It just seemed so bleak.” And then he thought, “If it feels depressing for me [to read about it], how on earth did he deal with it when he was actually there and did not know the end of the story?”

When Collins met Stockdale, he asked the admiral about that. “I never lost faith in the end of the story,” Stockdale replied. “I never doubted not only that I would get out, but also that I would prevail in the end and turn the experience into the defining event of my life, which, in retrospect, I would not trade.”

Collins let that astounding statement sink in for a while and then asked Stockdale who, of his fellow prisoners, didn’t make it out. “Oh, that’s easy,” he said. “The optimists.” That seemed to contradict what Stockdale had just said about never doubting the end of the story. Confessing his confusion, Collins asked Stockdale to explain. Said the admiral: “The optimists...They were the ones who said, ‘We’re going to be out by Christmas.’ And Christmas would come, and Christmas would go. Then they’d say, ‘We’re going to be out by Easter.’ And Easter would come and Easter would go. And then Thanksgiving, and then it would be Christmas again. And they died of a broken heart.”

Writes Collins: “Another long pause...Then he turned to me and said, ‘This is a very important lesson. You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end--which you can never afford to lose--with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.’” I’m going to repeat that last sentence: “You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end--which you can never afford to lose--with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.”

Here’s the point of my sermon this morning: The primary privilege and the primary responsibility of every person who claims to follow Jesus Christ is to hope. You see, God has come into our lives in the Person of Jesus Christ, shared human life with us, gone to a cross where He took the rap for our sins, and then rose from the dead, promising that all who repudiate and walk away from their sin and hold onto Him as their only God and Savior will live in joy with Him forever. Following Jesus brings hope because, through Him, we live in the certainty that we know how the story ends.

But we aren’t called to be what Stockdale called optimists. In my thirty-two years as a Christian and twenty-four as a pastor, I’ve seen those kinds of Christians, the optimists, come and go. They’re like firecrackers. When a firecracker is first lit, it’s a beautiful thing. The colors and the noise and the spectacle are dazzling. And you think, “Wow!” But firecrackers always burn out as quickly as they light.

Christian firecrackers are those people who get all excited about having God in their lives and love the warm and fuzzy feelings they get as they first fall in love with Jesus. They feel like they could climb the highest mountains without rest stops. But then they hit snags. The snags can be as small as “not getting anything out of worship today,” as though worship was about them. But worship is about our praising God, not God or the preacher or anybody else entertaining us. Or the snags can be the tragedies to which all of us who live in this imperfect world are subject.

Authentic Jesus-Followers are more like the fire in our winter fireplaces. They may burn with varied intensity over time and they may sometimes need to be stoked. But unlike the firecracker Christians who, like “rah-rah, team!” optimists, act as the source of their own flames, the fireplace Christians know that it is Jesus Christ Who sets their faith on fire and keeps it going. The Christians who keep on living with the hope that is the right of every follower of Jesus are the ones who understand that life on this planet may sometimes be brutal, but we still know how the story ends. It ends with the followers of Jesus being with God in a forever kingdom of peace.

Our Old Testament lesson for today records a vision God gave to the prophet Ezekiel. Ezekiel’s ministry as a prophet took place from 597 to 571 B.C. Long before Ezekiel was born, God’s nation of Israel had torn in two. The northern kingdom, called Israel or also Samaria, for its capital city, had long ago been conquered by the Babylonians, a people who lived in what is today Iraq. Then, in about 587 B.C., the nation of Judea, the southern kingdom, with its capital city of Jerusalem, and the nation from which Jesus would come many centuries later, was also conquered by the Babylonians. The common practice in those days was that a conquering nation would capture the conquered country’s ablest and most prominent citizens and send them back to the conquering nation to be slaves. This is what happened to Ezekiel.

It’s difficult for us to imagine how shattering this experience was for the people of Judea. Judea was more than just their homeland. It was also the center of their worship. They always believed that God’s presence on earth was to be found in the Holy of Holies tabernacle at the Temple in Jerusalem. When they prayed to God, they did so facing that tabernacle wherever they were in Judea or in their synagogues. Now that the Temple was all-but-destroyed and they were far from it in an unholy land, could God hear their cries? Did God care what happened to them? Was God out of their lives forever? Could God reach out to them with His compassion and power?

The optimists of Ezekiel’s day all died of broken hearts. They didn’t remember that they belonged to the God Who has charge and always has had charge of the ends of our stories. Like us, the people of Ezekiel’s day needed to be reminded of that. So, God showed Ezekiel a vision.

In a valley (or maybe on a plain, because it can be translated either way), God put Ezekiel in the midst of dead, dry bones. “Okay, Zeke,” God said, “start reminding these people of how the story ends for people with faith in Me. Remind them that death and humiliation are not the ends for those who follow Me. Proclaim My Word of hope to them!” You know how the story ends: “Dem bones, dem bones, dem dry bones” sprang to life again.

God is still in the hope-giving business. A man I knew came to my house in Cincinnati one evening. We’d been acquainted, but I didn’t really know him. Nor did I know what he wanted to see me about. He was successful, financially well-off, handsome, articulate. But as we spoke, he began to weep. “Three weeks ago,” he told me, “I watched my sister nearly die. She thinks she was saved by the medicine. They helped, I’m sure. But that wasn’t all. I watched my parents and others pray. For the first time in my life, I really saw God.” And, he reported, it wasn’t just because his sister had recovered that he was sure he’d seen God. You see, he’d seen God most in the depths, in the valley of dry bones, in Lazarus’ tomb where the stench of death was its worst. He’d seen the hope that comes from God. He’d seen how God gives life when all seems lost. He’d seen the end of the story and so, been given an inexplicable hope even as he acclimated himself to the possibility that his sister’s earthly life would soon end. My heart pounded in my chest as I listened to this man’s story. “What do you want now?” I asked him. “I want to give my life back to Christ,” he told me. And in the living room of my house, this man who had been baptized as a child and like a prodigal son, had wandered from God, surrendered to Christ once again. God gave new life and new hope to dry bones.

Belonging to Christ doesn’t mean that we are insulated from the realities of life. Christians still weep as Jesus did that day in Bethany recorded in today’s Gospel lesson. They wrestle with the seeming absence of God as surely the people of Judah did during their Babylonian exile. But Jesus, the God-Man, Who went to a cross and rose from the dead is our surety that we have a hope that can never be destroyed. He is, as He says, “the resurrection and the life” and all who believe in Him, even if they go down to the dust in this world, will never die. The primary privilege and the primary responsibility of every person who claims to follow Jesus Christ is to hope. Amen

Snowed In

Logan, county seat of Hocking County, the rural wonderland that sets about fifty-minutes southeast of Columbus, wasn't as hard-hit as the capital city has been by the snow storm of the past twenty-four hours. But we've been under a Level 3 alert, meaning that only emergency vehicles could be on the roads.

In Columbus, over 20-inches of snow fell. Here, we got about half that. I spoke with my dad, who lives in Columbus, little more than an hour ago, and he says that, at this point, he can't even really open the door of his house. Fortunately, he and mom are stocked up.

Worship and all other Sunday activities have been canceled at Saint Matthew Lutheran Church, where I'm privileged to be the pastor. But because our Sunday worship celebrations appear on a local radio station (and carried on the local cable TV access channel), I will be sharing the Bible lessons and the sermon on the air. A member of the congregation, a former radio personality, has also said that he wants to interview me. We'll see how that goes. (Coincidentally, it'll be the second time I'm being interviewed on radio his week.)

Getting snowed in can occasionally be fun. But I am definitely ready for this winter to move on.

By the way, the Columbus Dispatch weather blog is great. Its coverage of the storm has, I think, been better than that appearing in either The Cincinnati Enquirer or The Cleveland Plain Dealer.

Q-and-A: Is It Wrong for Christians to Become Angry?

[This is the first part of an ongoing series of posts I intend to present, based on questions I get in my everyday life as a pastor.]

Q: Is it wrong for Christians to become angry?

A: For some people, anger is a way of life. Filled with a sense of personal inadequacy, unable to cope with life, they lash out at others, usually spouses or children. Through outbursts of anger, they think that they can control their lives.

But anger isn't always bad. This may come as a surprise to some people, Christian as well as non-Christian.

If you are a Christian, you may have had the experience of becoming angry with a family member or co-worker and then hearing them indignantly say, "And you call yourself a Christian?"

The Christian may feel ashamed, thinking that they've given a bad witness of their faith because they lost their cool.

But they may have no reason for shame. An interesting passage in the New Testament tells us, "Be angry but do not sin." The very phrasing of that admonition should tell us that there's nothing inherently wrong or sinful about getting angry. It's possible to be angry without engaging in sin.

One clearly legitimate reason for being angry is when we see an injustice.

Once, Jesus entered the temple in Jerusalem. It was the center of Judah's worship life, the place where Jesus and His fellow Jews said that the presence of God lived in a place called "the holy of holies." One of the ongoing activities of the place was the sacrificing of animals or, in the case of extremely poor believers, cereals, on the altar. Most people came to the temple without sheep, doves, or cereals to be used as sacrifices. Those would have been purchased at the temple. But those purchases could only have been made with special temple currency. Set up in the temple then, were various "money changers," who would exchange whatever currency worshipers might have for the temple money, apparently at exorbitant rates. After securing the temple money, the faithful would then have to purchase the objects of sacrifice, again for exorbitant sums of money.

The entire business was unjust. Playing on the piety of sincere worshipers of God, the temple merchants made a killing. This enraged Jesus! No wonder He upset the tables where the business was done and set the animals there to be sacrificed loose.

As Christians, we believe that Jesus was both God and human and that our salvation depends on Him having led sinless life above reproach. Only a sinless Savior could be the perfect sacrifice for our sins.

If anger were always a sin, Jesus' ability to work forgiveness of sin in our lives would be forever negated. But anger can lead us to sin.

We can also be angered when a person treats us inconsiderately. Is that wrong? Not, apparently, if we use our anger as an occasion to work things out with the other person. "Be angry, but do not sin." Anger can lead to sin when we nurse it, feed it, and allow it to cause us to be sanctimonious or to be disrespectful of the person with whom we're angry. It's a sin to be self-righteous or hateful.

The same New Testament verse that advises, "Be angry but do not sin," says that when we do get angry we shouldn't let "the sun set on [our] anger." In other words, resolve your differences.

Jesus, in fact, gives a process by which conflicts can be resolved among believing people, one which I think contains principles for resolving differences among all people. In Matthew 18:15-20, Jesus says that we should first go to the person we feel has treated us unjustly, confronting them directly rather than gossiping about them. If no satisfactory resolution results from that confrontation, a disinterested third party, another believer, should be asked to, in effect, mediate, offering a solution. If the confronted party still refuses to deal with matters, an authoritative group within the Church should be brought in to mediate.

If this process looks cumbersome and not worth the trouble, that may mean that the situation that has made you so angry may not be a big enough deal to warrant such treatment. If that's the case, then you should simply ask God to help you forgive and then go on. The last thing you want to do is to continue harboring anger.

It's this harbored anger, I believe, that Jesus has in mind when He says, "“You have heard that it was said to those of ancient times, ‘You shall not murder’; and ‘whoever murders shall be liable to judgment.’ But I say to you that if you are angry [some of the ancient manuscripts insist that Jesus adds here, "without just cause"] 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 5:20-22).

Much of our anger is unjustified. And it could be avoided if we would remember Paul's admonition in the New Testament book of Philippians: "Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility regard others as better than yourselves. Let each of you look not to your own interests, but to the interests of others" (Philippians 2:4). Chances are, 95% of our anger would go away if we followed this advice.

Anger isn't always wrong. Some people say that we should count to ten before expressing anger. That's not bad advice, especially if during that ten-second interval we ask, "Lord, am I justified in feeling anger? Let me know one way or another and then, whatever may be true, tell me how to deal with it."

Quote of the Day

"Millions of us ordinary people must pour an incessant white light of prayer upon our world leaders, day after day. We must lift the heads of those leaders toward God so that they will hear Him and will obey His will...Enough people praying enough will release into the human blood stream the mightiest medicine in the universe, for we shall be the channels through whom God can exert His infinite power." (Frank C. Laubach, Prayer: The Mightiest Force in the World [1960 paperback edition], p.21)

[Laubach, founder of a worldwide adult literacy movement, was also a missionary. The literacy movement was born in prayer.]

[See more on Laubach here and here.]

When to Pray About Temptation and Sin

Martin Luther once considered David's great prayer of confession, Psalm 51, composed after he had committed adultery and murder.

David, Luther noted, prayed as soon as the prophet Nathan had confronted him with sin. This contrasts with those who fail to approach God because they feel that their sins--even their temptations--make them too objectionable to come into the presence of God.

"At precisely the moment when you feel the strongest temptation and are least prepared to pray," Luther says, "go to a place where you can be alone. Pray the Lord's Prayer or any other prayer you can think of to defend against the devil and his temptations. Then you will feel the temptation decrease and Satan will run away...Waiting [because you think you're too impure to approach God] is an unchristian approach to prayer. It's a teaching that comes from the devil..."

As David's confessional psalm shows us, we need to approach God as soon as we're aware that we have sinned as well. Luther writes, "The time when you feel your sins the most is exactly the time when you most need to pray to God."

Jesus, when asked why He spent so much time with notorious sinners, explained that it wasn't those who were well who needed Him as their physician, but those who were sick with sin.

Similarly, if you and I wait to be "clean" of sin or its allurements to approach God, we never will come to God and only grow sicker. The time to go to God for protection from temptation is when it's hitting you hardest. The time to approach God for forgiveness is the very moment you've come to your senses with the realization that you've sinned.

One and Only Pass at This Sunday's Bible Lessons (March 9, 2008)

[In these passes, I hope to help the members of the congregation I serve as pastor, Saint Matthew Lutheran Church in Logan, Ohio, to prepare for worship. But because the Bible lessons we use are the ones appointed by the Revised Common Lectionary, used in one form or another by Christians everywhere. I also hope others will find them useful.]

The Bible Lessons for This Week:
Ezekiel 37:1-14
Psalm 130
Romans 8:6-11
John 11:1-45

General Comments:
1. There is an overarching theme that connects this week's lessons. Each make the common affirmation that God's Word, whether spoken by God Himself or through others, has the power to give hope in hopeless situations.

2. Ezekiel was a priest and a prophet who lived in the sixth century-BC. Scholars, in fact, can nail down when Ezekiel was active with fair specificity. As Howard Wallace notes:

His prophecies can be dated according to the book itself to the years 593-571 BCE. The book is a literary work, with tidily arranged sections, indicating the work of a literary editor. Ezekiel himself is obviously an ‘oral’ prophet, prefacing his prophecies with ‘Thus says the Lord God’. Possibly his sayings remained ‘oral’ until his death, when they were written down for preservation. In any case, the structure of the book includes four ‘visions’, all introduced by the phrase ‘the hand of the Lord was upon me’, indicating the beginning of a trance-like state common in ancient Near Eastern prophecy...

3. Like many other citizens of Judah (the Southern Kingdom), Ezekiel had been dragged off to Babylon after the Babylonians had conquered their country and desecrated the temple in Jerusalem. But, as the talented Presbyterian preacher Craig Barnes explains, this exile wasn't marked by conventional enslavement:

When the promising young Hebrews were dragged into exile in Babylon, they were not kept in prisons or even camps. They were free to marry, build homes, plant crops and exchange goods. Some became quite wealthy. They were also free to assemble, elect leaders and worship. But the Hebrews had a hard time worshiping in exile because they never got over the destruction of their holy city and temple in Zion.

They were not where they wanted to be, or where they were supposed to be. So they lived with a sadness that ran down to their bones. And they refused to "sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land."

The Babylonian captivity of God's people created a crisis of faith in at least two ways:

• (1) Because they had always associated God with the promised land, they didn't know if God was still God in a foreign land. Had God abandoned them? Was God powerless?
• (2) Did they really need God when, in modern terms, they had all the steaks and flat screen TVs they could want? It isn't the hard times that keep people from believing in God or from hoping. It's having all that you think you need. Ezekiel addressed people whose affliction wasn't deprivation, but a lack of hope.

The Babylonian conquerors of God's people made the same bet that such modern-day tyrants as Vladimir Putin in Russia and the ruling elite in China are making. Give people the stuff they crave, such rulers reason, and people will gladly submit to imprisonment. But imprisonment to material wealth and "freedom on the edges" kills the human spirit. It leads to the death of hope.

As Philip Yancey points out in his discussion of the Old Testament book of Ecclesiastes, the cynicism and hopelessness of that book, not to mention the works of existentialist writers, was born not of impoverished people, struggling to live, but took hold among people who had plenty to eat and much to keep them entertained. It's only people who have all that the world has to offer who doubt God. When you have nothing but God, you have nothing to fear. When you have everything but God, you fear everything. Most of all, you fear that the stuff that has become your god, the means by which you measure your value and the things on which you rely for life, will be taken away from you.

The dry bones in Ezekiel's vision are the people of Judah whose hope had died because they no longer wanted to return to Jerusalem and no longer believed that God could offer them anymore than the "bread and circuses" that their Babylonian captors gave them.

4. Psalm 130 is one of the "song of ascents," sung by religious pilgrims as they climbed Mount Zion in Jerusalem, home of the temple. It's an expression of hope in the midst of despair. Though I am in a dry bone in a valley, the psalmist effectively says, I will wait for you to come and speak Your Word, O God, and I will live. The psalm ends with a call to Israel to "hope in the Lord" Who even forgives the sins of His people.

5. In Romans 8:6-11, part of just what may be the greatest chapter of the Bible, the apostle Paul sets flesh off against spirit. Here, flesh is the world system, the world's way of thinking. The flesh represents this dying world. He says that it's futile and a bad bet to place the weight of our hope and trust on flesh. Rather, we need to bet on spirit, the things of God.

Life in the spirit, which is the life we lead when we let Christ in as the authority, Lord, and Savior of our lives, animates us with the life of God, like the dry bones of Ezekiel's vision, like the once stinking corpse of Jesus' friend Lazraus from our Gospel lesson.

The believer in Jesus lives beyond death because of Christ. The same Spirit Who raised Christ will raise those in whom Christ lives.

6. The Gospel lesson, John 11:1-45, presents yet another lengthy lesson from the fourth Gospel, like those we've had over the past several weeks. It's understandable that the lessons from John over the past several weeks have been so lengthy. Each present long narratives of individual events, not easily broken down.

Yet, it's also a shame in way. John is the most accomplished artist of the Gospel writers. Each incident he recounts is filled with multiple layers of significance. It makes preaching on the text extremely difficult. What does a preacher (or a teacher) leave out this time?

7. John 11 tells what happened when Jesus' friend Lazarus died. Jesus called from outside of Lazarus' tomb and brought His friend back to life.

8. This is not a tale of resurrection. The resurrected Jesus, after all, still lives and will return to the earth in bodily form. Lazarus though, presumably died again.

But like all of Jesus' miracles, especially those in John's Gospel, referred to as "the gospel of signs," Jesus' calling Lazarus back to life is a sign. It points not to itself, but to Jesus. It points out that He has power over death and life and that He can make good on the claim He makes to Lazarus's sister:

I am the resurrection and the life. Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die.

I Love March!

I'm taking a day off. Earlier today, taking advantage of the temporary respite from winter weather, I went for a walk. I just got done working out on my aerobic stepper. Earlier, I was able to spend some time with my wife before she headed for work and do my daily devotions at a leisurely pace, then read more from Philip Yancey's great book, The Bible Jesus Read, which I highly recommend.

All of that's great, but it isn't why I love the month of March. Quite simply, March is my favorite sports month. College basketball reaches its peak this month, culminating in March Madness. And exhibition baseball begins! What a joy it is, as I work out and prepare to do my taxes--and maybe take a nap, to see the Boston Red Sox take on the Los Angeles Dodgers. It's a game with all sorts of great story angles for fans to watch:

• I don't remember a World Series team in the free agent era to return the following spring with so much of their roster intact. Sean McDonough reported just prior to the first pitch that the Sox are returning 23 of last year's 25-man roster. Stability can be a real advantage, especially when rosters shift so much.
  
• But it's an "advantage" than may be of limited value. That raises a question: Can the Red Sox fight the advancing years of their aging team to make another run for an AL pennant?
  
• I'm happy to see former Reds "mayor" Sean Casey playing first base for the Red Sox. Casey is a classy guy and one of the hardest-working pro athletes in the country. He'll be a good fit in Boston, which along with Saint Louis, can credibly claim to have the most passionately knowledgeable baseball fans around.
• Joe Torre will seek to work his calm magic on the Dodgers. I've not liked the Yankees since the Maris-Mantle days. But I have always liked Torre. It's true that his prospects for managerial success have been bolstered by the mega-revenue and mega-spending of the New York club--don't get me started on the need for more revenue-sharing in Major League Baseball, Torre is nonetheless a great manager. He not only knows how to use his personnel, he knows how to relate to them as human beings, no small skill in such big-market, big-ego franchises like the Yankees and Dodgers.

So, if you're at home right now, snap the TV on, then sit back and relish the fact that spring is almost here. It's March!

By the way, my second-favorite sports month? November. College basketball gets its start and Ohio State plays Michigan in football.

'The Miracle of Restraint'

That phrase, coined by Fyodor Dostoevsky, used in The Brothers Karamazov, is the title of this excellent reflection by journalist Philip Yancey at today's Our Daily Bread. It's definitely worth the few minutes it will take for you to read it. You'll find it here.

Listen to Rick Moore's 'HolyCoast.com ON THE AIR'

Rick interviewed me on his Internet radio show. We talked about the Ohio primary and how Christians might think about this year's presidential race. Thanks, Rick, for inviting me to be with you. It was fun!

To listen, click here.

Life in the Light

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

Ephesians 5:8-14
When I was growing up, we neighborhood kids played a game in the later hours of the night right before our parents called us in to take our baths and go to sleep. It was ‘Flashlight Tag.’ In Flashlight Tag, one person was “it” and tried to expose those who hid in the darkness. I remember that it always brought a sinking feeling when the person with the flashlight found me. I didn’t like it at all!

The Bible, you know, describes Jesus as “the Light of the world.” We like that when it means that Jesus lights our ways through life and shows us that He is the way to heaven. But sometimes, when His light is cast on us, we see the darkness that resides within our souls--the sin, the selfishness. Truth is, we don’t like that any more than I liked being found in a game of Flashlight Tag.

The book of Ephesians, from which today's second lesson comes, is divided by scholars into two main sections.

The first three chapters deal with the issue of exactly what Jesus Christ’s death and resurrection mean for the relationship of Jewish believers in Jesus and non-Jewish (what the Bible calls Gentile) believers in Jesus.

Many of the Jewish Christians looked at the Gentile believers as "johnny-come-latelies" to faith and wondered whether these believers in Jesus really were part of God’s kingdom. It may have been to them that Ephesians’ most famous passage was directed: “For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God—not the result of works, so that no one may boast. For we are what He has made us to be, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand.” (Ephesians 2:8-10)

Whether you’re a Jew or a Gentile, you aren’t saved from sin and death and futility by the good works you do. You’re saved as an act of God’s charity—what the Bible calls God’s grace--toward those who believe in Jesus Christ. On the cross, Jesus did everything necessary for us to be acceptable to God. We simply must believe—or trust—in Him.

Thankful that God has loved us in spite of our sin, our mission in life is to do the good works God made for us to do centuries before we were even born.

That leads, naturally enough, to the theme of the final three chapters, the second great division, of Ephesians. It answers the question, “Now that we’ve been saved by God’s grace, how do we go about living our lives?”

Our lesson for today begins by giving part of the answer to that question. Listen: “For once you were darkness, but now in the Lord you are light. Live as children of the light—for the fruit of the light is found in all that is good and right and true. [Then it says that we should spend a good deal of time in our lives on a particular mission:] Try to find out what is pleasing to the Lord. [And then it says:] Take no part in the unfruitful works of darkness, but instead expose them.”

To tell you the truth, whenever I read that last line, telling us to expose darkness, I get uncomfortable. Are we Christians supposed to go around pointing out others’ faults? I hope not because when Christians act this way, we can be awfully ugly!

A classic fictional account of the ugliness of Christian moral finger-pointing is The Scarlet Letter, by Nathaniel Hawthorne. It’s the story of Hester Prynne, an unmarried woman in colonial Boston, Massachusetts, who becomes pregnant. The town is scandalized and forces her to wear a scarlet A, standing for adultery, on her clothing. The father of her child, the local pastor, gets off scot free for years. While Hester owned her sin and became a wonderful person and a wonderful mother, the pastor became more and more miserable, something of which the solemn believers in Salem never were aware.

There will be times, of course, when Christian love will demand that we point out others’ faults. A few weeks ago, while visiting a hospital, a man, who was visiting his mother, saw that I was wearing a clerical collar and asked if we could speak. He told me that his son was so deeply involved with alcohol that he couldn’t keep a job, couldn’t do anything. What could he do?

I suggested that he and the other members of his family get a local counselor to help them put together an encounter group that would confront his son. Though painful for all involved, until the young man was forced to see that the abuse of his body, mind, life, and relationships was a soul-endangering sin, no healing could come. I told this man that I thought he and his family must ask God for the courage to cast a strong light on his son’s sins.

I believe that my advice was Biblical. But such overt confrontations over sin aren’t always the best way to help others. (Besides, we’re sinners too, you know.)

When I think of how deeply God has to dive into the slime of my sin and selfishness in order to reach me with the forgiveness and hope He offers through Jesus Christ, I conclude that as Christian, I'm called not to harshly judge others but, like Jesus, try to compassionately meet them where they are.

Bill Hybels is the senior pastor of a large congregation near Chicago. He once had a neighbor, a hard-living, cigar-chomping businessperson who had done very well financially, but didn't have God in his life. The guy was gruff and Hybels liked him a lot.

After developing a friendship with the guy, Hybels invited him to attend worship at his church some weekend. The guy came to one of the church's services and later, Hybels thanked him and asked him what he'd thought. The neighbor told Hybels he'd enjoyed it a lot. "And," he told Hybels, in language I must clean up for Sunday morning radio, "that was a heckuva sermon."

The compliment wasn't couched in dainty church language. Some Christians might have blasted the guy. Or spoken badly of him later. But Hybels recognized that the man was expressing appreciation for what God had said to him through the worship service as well as he could at that point and instead of correcting him, simply thanked his neighbor. He met the guy where he was in order to show him the love and goodness of the God we know in Jesus. You and I need to do the same thing.

I think that our lesson from Ephesians isn’t, for the most part, talking about us exposing the sins of others. It’s about something else, I think.

Annually, for years now, I’ve gone for a physical exam at my doctor’s office. I do that so that I can learn about any problems that need addressing and to avoid future difficulties. As “children of” God’s “light,” you and I are to volunteer each day to let God give us a thorough spiritual examination.

One of my favorite psalms, Psalm 139, concludes with the prayer, “Search me, O God, and know my heart; test me and know my thoughts. See if there is any wicked way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting.”

Cast your light on my sins, the psalmist is praying, so that I can see them, turn from them, and walk with You, Lord! When that happens, we can seek God's power to correct those sins that might be blocking God’s power from our lives and so, be prepared for doing the assignments God has in mind for each of us every day we live.

When I was a boy, my throat sometimes became sore. I’d try to conceal this from my parents because I knew that they might make me see our doctor. That didn’t appeal to me: I didn’t want the doc shining a flashlight down my throat, poking around, looking for problems. If he did find a problem, I knew, he’d likely prescribe medicine for me. And I hated that, too!

It isn’t always pleasant to have our sins exposed, any more than it’s pleasant when, at our physical, the doctor finds some health issue that needs to be addressed. God's prescription for us may be difficult to swallow. God will want us to get rid of our sins. Because we tend to fall in love with our sins, parting with them can be very difficult.

The sins we love can be many different things—taking too many deductions off of our income tax, sexual intimacy outside of marriage, acting holier-than-thou with coworkers or family members, giving money first-place in our lives, wanting to keep up with the Joneses, boozing it up, cutting others off in conversations or in traffic, or a thousand other ways that sin can grab hold of our souls.

But whatever sin we specialize in, when God points our sins out, we have two choices and two choices only: (1) Keep on sinning and walk away from God; or, (2) Turn from the sin and ask God to help us live life God’s way.

When we make that second choice, we’re really living the words of an ancient church song that comes at the end of our lesson from Ephesians: “Sleeper, awake! Rise from the dead and Christ will shine on you!”

And it’s this choice—the choice of turning from sin and asking God to help us to live life His way—that allows the bright light of Christ to shine on us and helps us to wake up to all the positive possibilities in our lives on earth and all the great things heaven holds in store for followers of Jesus.

As we continue to move through Lent, this time of spiritual renewal, may we all keep asking God to wake us up, to shine His light on those habits of which we may not even be aware that are keeping us from enjoying the close relationship with God He wants all of us to have.

Ask God to shine a light on your path so that the joy of Christ fills you and your whole life expresses thanks to God for the new life God has given you through Jesus Christ! Amen

Farewell, Mike Smith

Mike Smith, lead singer and keyboardist with the Dave Clark Five, has died. After the Beatles, the Dave Clark Five were my second-favorite British band, featuring compelling melodies with great hooks, unique instrumentation, great harmonies, driving rhythms, and R&B-tinged vocals from Mike Smith himself. The last years of Smith's life were dogged by suffering.

Here, here, and here are three previous posts about Smith.

[UPDATE: More here from Mike Smith's official site.]

"Give us this day our daily bread"

[During this Lenten season, Saint Matthew Lutheran Church in Logan, Ohio, is involved in a series of midweek worship services with several other area congregations. The focus is on the Lord's Prayer. Tonight, Saint Matthew hosted the service and our theme was the fourth petition, "Give us this day our daily bread." Below is my sermon for the evening.]

Matthew 6:25-34
I spent a long time as a student: thirteen years in public school, four years in college, four years in seminary. Somewhere around the end of my twentieth and the beginning of my twenty-first and final year as a student, I figured something out. Do you want to know what it was? It was this: If the teacher repeats something, it’s probably important.

Now, I bring this up for a reason. Jesus’ words to us tonight come from the Sermon on the Mount in the Gospel of Matthew. Ed Markquart, a wonderful Lutheran pastor in Seattle, has calculated that in the four gospel books of the New Testament--Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John--”there are 60 teachings, 40 parables, and 25 miracles of Jesus.” And the Sermon on the Mount contains a whopping twenty-five of Jesus’ sixty teachings. They come at us at such a furious pace in chapters 5, 6, and 7 of Matthew’s book, that you think Jesus would hardly have the time to repeat Himself in order to highlight what’s important.

But He does repeat Himself in the ten verses that make up our Bible lesson. In fact, Jesus punches home the same teaching three times in these verses. And then, to underscore His teaching, He asks seven rhetorical questions, all with the same message: DO NOT WORRY!

Jesus also gives us plenty of good reasons for heeding that imperative. He says that life is more than food or clothing and that if God the Father takes care of the birds, He’ll take care of us. He says that worrying won’t add a single second to our earthly lives and that to be consumed with these things is to be as futile in our thinking as the Gentiles with no knowledge of God.

You and I know that Jesus is right. We shouldn’t worry. We know that God cares about our every moment. We know that we’re in the palms of God’s hands, that God hears our prayers. We know too, that all with faith in Jesus Christ belong to God eternally. Even non-believing people realize the silliness of giving our minds over to worry. The writer Mark Twain, an atheist, once said, “I am an old man and have known great troubles, but most of them never happened.”

So, why exactly do we worry? And what does this all have to do with the fourth petition of the Lord’s Prayer, “Give us this day our daily bread”?

We worry, let’s face it, because we’re control freaks. Adam and Eve were lured into sin because the serpent told them that when they ate the fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, they would “be like God.” It bothers us that while, unlike all of God’s other creatures, we can project and to some extent, predict, what the future will bring, we can’t control what happens to us. This reality can play itself out in ways that are anywhere from annoying, such as when we get caught in a traffic jam on US 33, to life-threatening, as when the doctor tells us that we or a loved one has cancer.

Yet we persist in stewing over things over which we have no control. It’s good for us to make plans and it’s good for us to be engaged in trying to solve problems. But we need to realize that worrying about things solves nothing. The number one fact of the universe is that God is God and we’re not. So, make your plans and when the time comes, willingly move on to Plan B.

Jesus puts it this way: “So do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will bring worries of its own. Today’s trouble is enough for today.” Pastor Gerald Mann summarizes Jesus’ imperative this way: Wait to worry.

So, worrying is a bad thing. But what’s it got to do with “Give us this day our daily bread”? Just this: No matter how facile you may be at multitasking, there are two things that are very difficult to do simultaneously. Though you may be able to do them both at the same time for awhile--maybe decades--eventually, one will win out over the other and become the prevailing habit of your life. You can’t keep worrying and be thankful to God at the same time.

Worrying represents unbelief and the other faith in God. Each moment of our lives is a contest between worry and thankfulness, unbelief and faith.

In the end, worrying is a form of self-worship. Even though we may express our worry by saying things like, “What am I going to do?,” seemingly confessing helplessness, the underlying assumption is that my immediate problems and, by extension, the long-term good of the known universe, depends on me.

Thankfulness, on the other hand, takes an inventory of our lives and asks, “What has God already done?” How has God already blessed us, starting with our eternal salvation through the cross and resurrection of Jesus Christ? The remembrance of these blessings leads to thankfulness and that leads to something else. Thankfulness, you see, is a byproduct of faith. It gives us the capacity to face whatever life may bring to us.

One of my enduring memories as a pastor is of my visit with an elderly farmer shortly after I was ordained twenty-four years ago. “You know, Pastor,” he said, “if you’re a farmer, you have to have faith or you won’t last long.” He went on to explain that you could pick the best seeds for your crops and be diligent about cultivation and weeding. But farmers know that they have no control over the sun or the rain or temperatures that if not just right, could scorch or freeze their crops. What this farmer discovered is that over his long life, God could be trusted. Thankfulness displaced worry. Faith supplanted anxiety.

And, even when life is hard or when we suffer, we followers of Jesus have much for which to be thankful. During the Holocaust, when the Nazis put people in concentration camps, they would work the imprisoned until they could no longer do anything. Then, they would execute them.

One family was composed of a father, a mother, and their two children, one of whom suffered from a physical disability. Every day, the mother and two children were taken to one work site and the father was shipped to another. And every night, the father checked on his family. One night though, the father found only his one son. "What happened?" he asked. The surviving child said that the brother with the disability had no longer been able to work. And so the guards had taken him to be executed. He clung to his mother's skirt, sobbing. She picked him up and, holding him close to her, said, "Don't be afraid. I'll go with you." And so she did.

That's akin to the God we have through Jesus Christ. In Christ, God stands with us in the darkest and the worst of times--even in death--so that all who trust in Him will be ushered into eternity with Him! For that, we can be the most thankful of people.

Having heard me say how bad worry is and how important thankfulness is, you all have a right to know whether I worry or not.

Well, I do. But if I worry, then I suppose that I fit right in with the rest of the Church. It’s been my observation that the Church is Jesus Christ’s community of recovering control freaks. We’re learning to replace our worry over tomorrow with gratitude to the God Who tells all who believe in Jesus, “You belong to Me for eternity!”

Years ago, I learned about a man who had a “worry tree.” He had a stressful executive position and every night, before he walked through the front door of his house, he touched a tree close to the porch and said, “God, all these worries I’ve been stewing over, I’m giving to you here now at the worry tree. I’ll pick them up from You tomorrow if You seem to be telling me there’s anything I can do about them. Otherwise, I’m turning them over to You...and thank You!”

When you think about it, every time we pray, “Give us this day our daily bread,” we’re leaving our worries at the worry tree. Or, more accurately, we leave them with God. That’s because, as Luther wrote in The Small Catechism of this petition (I’m reading an older translation here):

God indeed gives daily bread to all.., even to the wicked, without our prayer, but we pray in this petition that [God] would lead us to acknowledge our daily bread as His gift and to receive it with thanksgiving.

The opposite of faith, as I say, isn’t unbelief. The opposite of faith is worry. May we live in the assurance that God provides our daily bread and so, free from worry, glorify the God Who gives us everything! May thankfulness supplant fear. When we do worry, may God help us remember all His blessings, including our crucified and risen Lord. And may we, instead of worrying about tomorrow, learn to be thankful for God’s provision today. May we learn to pray, “Give us this day our daily bread” and remember that every good and perfect gift we enjoy comes from the loving hand of God. Amen

One and Only Pass at This Sunday's Bible Lessons (March 2, 2008)

These passes are designed to help the people of Saint Matthew Lutheran Church in Logan, Ohio, where I serve as pastor, to prepare for worship. Others are invited to come along for the ride, since we use the same appointed lessons as most Christians in North America and throughout the world. (See here.)

The Lessons:
1 Samuel 16:1-13
Psalm 23
Ephesians 5:8-14
John 9:1-41

General Comments:
1. While there are several themes shared by some of the lessons, one underlying theme informs them all: the utter reliability of God for those who trust God completely.

This isn't to say life with the God revealed on the pages of the Old and New Testaments is easy. In Psalm 23, David speaks of traveling through a dark valley, which can represent anything from despair over our mortality to a tangle with death itself. In the Gospel lesson, John 9:1-41, we read about the experience of a blind man given sight by Jesus, whose trust in Jesus earns him the condemnation of good religious folks. (He's even excommunicated, which is what the text is talking about when it says that the man was driven out. The word in the Greek of the New Testament is ekballo.)

Yet all four of the texts, in the face of life's realities, are filled with an affirmation of God's reliability. "I shall not want!" the psalmist declares. "Lord, I believe," the once-blind man says as he worships Jesus.

2. The theme of God's reliability is presented in a different way in the first lesson. Samuel, an Old Testament prophet and judge, had, at God's instigation, anointed Israel's first king, Saul. Saul's reign turned out badly. That's because Saul, as happens with many leaders, began depending on himself rather than on God. (He did this even when he defended his actions with pious explanations.) This made Samuel understandably depressed.

While Saul was still in power, some years before he died, God instructed Samuel to go to the town of Bethlehem, specifically to the home of a man named Jesse. Once Samuel was there, God said that He would reveal who Samuel should anoint to become Saul's successor. Seven of Jesse's sons were brought to Samuel. God told him not to anoint any of them, though apparently each looked like a king.

God told Samuel, "The Lord does not see as mortals see; they look on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart.”

Finally, David shows up, the youngest of the lot. "The Lord said, 'Rise and anoint him; for this is the one.'” That's exactly what Samuel did.

David, who would go on to be both a great king and a notorious and repentant sinner, is described elsewhere in the Bible as "a man after God's own heart." And this--his dependence, his commitment to following God even when God told him things he didn't want to hear--was the source of David's greatness. David, apparently, didn't look like a king. The runt of Jesse's litter, his father hadn't even asked him to come to the feast that the town was preparing when the famous Samuel arrived in Bethlehem. Somebody had to take care of the sheep; inconsequential David was the choice. But the inconsequential shepherd boy would become the greatest king of Old Testament times, not because of anything intrinsic to him, but because of his utter reliance on God.

The blind man given sight by Jesus depended on Him, in spite of the rejection of his fellow Judeans, including even his own parents. This may have seemed like particularly subversive act because Jesus didn't look like a king. But through the eyes of faith, this man saw that Jesus was the King of kings!

3. David, the shepherd boy turned king anointed in our lesson from 1 Samuel, would later write Psalm 23. It begins, "The Lord is my shepherd. I shall not want."

In the ancient near East, the term shephed was applied to kings. Here, the psalmist is saying that God is king. This would have been, and remains, a political statement, as is the blind man's impolitic confession of Jesus as the God worthy of his worship.

In this political season, when pols promise much and people get swept up in the excitement of supporting this or that candidate, it's good for us to remember that the Lord we meet in Jesus Christ is our only true shepherd, our only worthy king, the only One Who can lead us through the valley of death's shadows into the sunshine of eternity.

4. The motif of light and darkness also runs through three of these lessons.

Those who have Christ in their lives are light, according to our lesson from Ephesians. Because of the light of Christ in us, God gives the power to discern what is true and good, sometimes by showing us what is false and wrong, often in us.

God guides those who dare to follow trustingly through the valley of the shadow of death.

The once blind man was given the ability not only to see physically, but to see Christ as His one and only hope.

Just some thoughts. Please pray that our Catechism class goes well on Saturday and that we have a safe and fun experience with the Bible Bowl on Sunday afternoon.

The God Who Knows Us...and Loves Us Anyway

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

John 4:5-42
In the movie, Return to Me, a young widower, at one point, is set up on a blind date with an obnoxious woman. In her one scene in the film, which takes place in a restaurant, the obnoxious woman insults their waitress, while ordering a particular brand of bottled water. Tap water makes her nauseous, the obnoxious woman claims. She goes on at some length about the superiority of her bottled water over what you get from the tap. The waitress leaves to put in the order and get the woman’s water. But, fed up with the treatment to which she’s been subjected, the waitress pours out the precious special water the obnoxious woman wants and replaces it with tap water. When the woman opens up and tastes her bottled water, she raves about it.

Water, of course, is pretty much water wherever it comes from, one of the most common elements in the universe. But it’s also essential for our living. It's so important, that doctors tell us that we should drink about eight glasses of water every day.

I bring all of this up, of course, because of our Gospel lesson. There, we find Jesus and His disciples traveling through a Samaritan village called Sychar. You know the Samaritans. They were a population once part of God’s people, the Hebrews, Israel. But after the reign of Solomon, the nation split in two. A northern nation, called Israel, with its worship life focused in a city called Samaria, went one way. The southern nation, with a greater claim to faithfulness to God, called Judea, went another. Its worship life centered on Jerusalem. Jesus was a Judean.

Judeans looked down their noses on Samaritans. They regarded them as idolaters, people who worshiped other gods. And, in fact, as Jesus intimates in the lesson today, the Samaritans did try to hedge their bets when it came to their religion. They claimed to worship the God of the Bible. But at the same time, up on Mount Gerizim, not far from Sychar, the Samaritans worshiped the puny false deities of at least five other cultures.

When Jesus’ party gets close to Sychar in today’s Gospel lesson, the disciples enter the village to buy some food. They leave Jesus sitting by a well. That’s when a Samaritan woman arrives to draw water.

Ordinarily, we would expect that she would have drawn the water while Jesus sat in stony silence. Men and women not married to each other weren’t supposed to speak together in public in those days. And Jews never spoke to Samaritans. But Jesus asks the woman to give Him water. One thing leads to another, culminating in Jesus telling her, “If you just ask, I’ll give you living water.”

Of course, Jesus isn't talking about ordinary water. This water yields more than passing refreshment or even vital fluids for the functioning of physical bodies. This water is the very presence of God in our lives. It’s forgiveness for the repentant sinner. It’s new life that never gives out for all eternity.

A woman facing death once asked me, “What can I do?” It struck me as odd that a person flat on her back in a hospital bed, unable to move, and near death thought that there was something she could do to get into heaven.

I told her that it was simple. She needed to turn her life, even her sin, over to God and believe in Jesus. She needed to do the hardest thing in the world for us to do: She needed to do nothing, to simply let Christ take her in His arms, forgive her, and guide her. Jesus is the source of living water, of life that lasts forever. All we have to do is ask for it and receive it.

And this water doesn’t just help us in the sweet by-and-by. It can bring us life today! In one of his books, the late missionary, evangelist, and author E. Stanley Jones, a friend and confidante of Mahatma Gandhi, talks about a woman of his acquaintance.

Her marriage ended and whose life was a mess. Then, she came to believe in Jesus Christ. New hope came to her. She became so certain of the new possibilities that life with Christ brought her, that she enrolled as a student at a local university, paying her way through school by working as a full-time secretary. She graduated cum laude with her Bachelor’s degree. She then went on to graduate school, where she received all A’s. She later wrote to Jones:

Wasn’t God amazing? I don’t know why any Christian should discard miracles. I believe in miracles. [Jesus] healed me. What could be more miraculous than the forgiveness of sins? Or the taking away of all bitterness, all resentment? And the peace and joy that follow are indescribable. The laughter that comes bubbling up at most unexpected times, in me who thought a few years ago that I would never laugh again...it rises from a well of living water that will never cease. I am grateful beyond words.

Jesus doesn’t promise, of course, that when we follow Him, all our troubles will go away. But He promises to be with us, to help us forge through life with hope and joy and, above all, the very life of God filling them with a vitality that belies our years, our scars, our regrets, and our biographies.

Shortly after her conversation with Jesus, the Samaritan woman to whom Jesus had promised living water ran into town. Literally, she says to the other villagers from Sychar, “He cannot be the Messiah, can he?” That’s hardly a ringing endorsement of Jesus’ lordship. It's sort of like saying, "Meet my new husband. He can't possibly be a good guy, can he?"

But what the woman said was the most her faint, embryonic faith could muster at the time. What’s more, it was enough, more than enough, to turn an entire village to Jesus Christ!

What’s really interesting to me, though, is that it wasn’t the promise of living water that turned this woman into one of the unlikeliest evangelists ever! It was something else about her encounter with Jesus.

An old saying tells us, “A friend is someone who knows all about us and loves us anyway.” Through Jesus, the Samaritan woman came to experience that God gives the ultimate expression to that kind of friendship.

Jesus knew all her. But He didn’t preach at her. He didn’t scold her. He didn’t even tell her to repent. He just displayed a knowledge of her life story and reached out to her anyway. That was what turned her into a witness for Jesus.

On the day after Easter, you know, I’ll begin offering a five-session class called Witnesses for Christ. It’s designed to help all of us who believe in Jesus to be more confident in inviting others to get to know Jesus. I hope that lots of folks will be part of the class.

But, you know what? The Samaritan woman in our Gospel lesson never took Witnesses for Christ. In fact, some might say that she didn’t even do a very good job of witnessing.

Instead, she met Jesus sort of like you and I are this morning and then, amazed that God loved her and wanted her just as she was, invited others to get to know Him, too.

Near the end of today’s lesson, we see that her townspeople, having responded to her tentative witness and met Jesus for themselves, tell her, “It is no longer because of what you said that we believe, for we have heard for ourselves, and we know that this is truly the Savior of the world.”

Jesus Christ knows all about you and me and He loves us just as we are. He knows our regrets. But He wants us forever. He wants us right now. He wants to erase our sins. He wants to fill us with living water that erupts into new life for us today and always.

That’s good news for us. And it’s good news just as worth telling in Logan, Ohio on February 24, 2008 as it was in the ancient village of Sychar in Samaria two thousand years ago.

Maybe, like the woman at the well, you too could tell someone you know here in Logan, “I don’t know everything there is to know about Jesus. But you can meet Him next Sunday morning with me.”

Who knows what might happen if you and I tell others about the giver of living water who knows all about us and loves us any way. All of Logan might suddenly bubble with the living water of new life from Jesus Christ. I don’t know about you, but I would love to see that happen!