Palm Sunday: Welcome Jesus, Welcome Others to Know Jesus

Luke 19:28-40
“Zacchaeus was a wee little man,
And a wee little man was he.
He climbed up in a sycamore tree
For the Lord he wanted to see;
And as the Savior passed that way,
He looked up in the tree,
(Spoken) And he said, ‘Zacchaeus you come down
For I'm going to your house today.
For I'm going to your house today.’”

That's a simple little Bible song about an incident in Jesus’ earthly ministry. Jesus was passing through the city of Jericho, which sets at the lowest point on earth, heading for Jerusalem. A short man named Zacchaeus, climbs into a tree to catch a glimpse of Jesus as Jesus walks by. Zacchaeus had gained his riches by extorting more taxes from people than they owed. He wasn’t popular in Jericho. But Jesus invites Himself to Zacchaeus’ house.

I bring this up because we it helps us to understand Luke's account of Palm Sunday if we first understand what happened between Jesus and Zacchaeus just before Jesus entered Jerusalem on that first Palm Sunday.

Let’s take a look at Luke 19, starting at verse 5. It says that Jesus saw Zacchaeus and said, “Zacchaeus, make haste and come down, for today I must stay at your house.” There's a lot of irony here. A sinner looks down on God in the flesh, Who has come into the world as a servant to all humankind. Yet the scene doesn't play out like that at all. You might think that Zacchaeus’ first impulse would be to tell Jesus to find somewhere else to stay. After all, he had only climbed the tree to see what all the fuss was about. He could see by Jesus’ attire that Jesus was just more Galileean riff-raff. Yet Zacchaeus doesn't react as you'd expect!

All of us have the same choice in this life that Zacchaeus had to make at that moment. We can choose to receive the gift of faith in Jesus or not.

“Listen!” the risen and ascended Jesus is recorded as saying in Revelation 3, “I am standing at the door, knocking; if you hear My voice and open the door, I will come into you and eat with you, and you with me.”

Jesus Christ wants to come into your life, be your Savior, be your best friend.

Jesus, Who died and rose to set you free from sin, death, and a pointless life, is knocking at the door of your will, life, and heart each day? Will you let him in?

Zacchaeus' answer was, “Yes!”

Luke 19:6 says that Zacchaeus hurried down and received Jesus “joyfully.”

When, after a decade of atheism, I received Jesus into my life, I knew a joy I had never experienced. I still had no clear idea of what God wanted to do with my life. Jesus didn’t offer me a life free of adversity or difficulty or death. But I didn’t care because Jesus was in my life and I knew that He was all I needed! I knew that Jesus Christ had saved me, a sinner who had once despised Him!

Sometimes, amid the routines and challenges of life, I forget that. But I have learned the truth of the Christmas hymn by Phillips Brooks: "Where meek souls will receive Him still, the dear Christ enters in." That's true no matter how many times we fall, no matter how far we've fallen!

In Luke 19:9, Jesus, considering how Zacchaeus had received Jesus by faith, declares: “Today [now, this moment] salvation has come to this house, because [Zacchaeus] also is a son of Abraham; for the Son of Man [Jesus refers to Himself in this way] has come to seek and to save that which is lost.”

Whenever you and I get lost, wandering far from God by engaging in unrepentant sin--be it thievery, gossip, fornication, adultery, worshiping other gods, dishonoring our parents, or some other way--God can find us again!

Not everyone was happy about the change that had come to Zacchaeus’ life. Listen: The moment you feel that you’ve been made clean by the forgiveness and grace God gives through Jesus, that's when the devil, the world, and your sinful self will begin grumbling. Bet on it!

"Who are you to receive God’s forgiveness?" the grumblers inside and outside of you will demand. "Who are you to be called one of God’s righteous saints?"

The grumbling that day in Jericho came from some of the crowd who had been shouting for Jesus. Look at Luke 19:7. “But when they saw [Jesus going to Zacchaeus’ house], they all complained [or grumbled], saying, ‘He [Jesus] has gone to be a guest with a man who is sinner.’”

I wonder how we would react if today, we saw Jesus enter the home of a drug dealer? Or an adulterer? Or an extortionist? Or any other sinner, like you or me?

But Jesus will enter any home and any heart that welcomes Him.

The grumblers that tell you that someone doesn’t deserve the forgiveness of God Jesus brings, the grumblers that tell you that you don't deserve the forgiveness that comes from Jesus Christ, completely miss the point.

Here's why: None of us deserves God’s forgiveness. We are all sinners who deserve condemnation and hell. But Jesus died and rose so that we can be with and enjoy God for all eternity! These gifts come to those who gladly receive Jesus.

It’s interesting that Jesus was walking from Jericho to the Mount of Olives as our Gospel lesson begins.

About 1200 years before the birth of Jesus, God’s people entered the Promised Land from the east, crossing the Jordan to face the walled city of Jericho. Jericho had to be conquered so that God’s people could take the land.

The leader of the Hebrews was Moses’ successor, Joshua. His name in the Hebrew language was Yeshua, meaning God saves. It is the same name as that of Jesus. In the Hebrew language, Jesus’ name was also Yeshua. But because the New Testament is written in Greek, where Yeshua becomes Yesus, we call him Jesus.

When the Joshua of the Old Testament prepared to enter the promised land, you’ll remember that he sent two spies into Jericho. Twelve-hundred years later, Jesus needed no spies. He knew everything that was going to happen. He knew where His enemies were.

But Jesus did send two disciples ahead of him. Jesus instructs the two disciples to find a colt in a nearby village, presumably Bethany, where Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead. It would, Jesus tells them, be tied, and would be an animal on which nobody had previously ridden.

That last bit of information is far more important than it may seem: God in the flesh would be the colt's first rider.

This is part of a pattern in Jesus’ life and ministry.

• When Jesus was born, He came from a womb that had never known sexual intimacy. Jesus was the first born of a virgin’s womb. [See Luke 1:26-35; Matthew 1:18-25.]
• When Jesus died, His body was “laid...in a rock-hewn tomb where no one had ever been laid.”  [See Luke 23:53.]

The things of God must always be first, holy, and set apart. Jesus is, as the New Testament book of Hebrews calls Him, our pioneer. He always writes new histories for those who repent and believe in Him on clean sheet of paper. He starts creation over again!

The two disciples find everything as Jesus has told them. They bring the animal back, throw their clothes on it, and set Jesus on it. Jesus begins to ride into Jerusalem. From the depths of Jericho, Jesus and the disciples ascend to the Mount of Olives. One New Testament scholar has written that even today, when you go by car, the culmination of the ascent from earth's lowest depth, Jericho, to the Mount of Olives, brings a sense of relief, the drive up is so steep. And the view, when one arrives, he says, is breathtaking: From the Mount of Olives, you look down into the Kidron Valley, and look across to see Jerusalem.

Jesus no doubt took in this sight, thinking of all that lay ahead of Him. Who can imagine what pangs Jesus felt as He kept His face set toward Jerusalem and the suffering and dying He would undergo for you and me? How alone He must have felt at that moment!

“Then,” verse 37 says, “as He was drawing near the descent of the Mount of Olives, the whole multitude of the disciples began to rejoice and praise God with a loud voice for all the mighty works they had seen, saying, ‘Blessed is the King who comes in the name of the Lord! Peace in heaven and glory in the highest!’”

It’s important to point out a couple of things that are unique about Luke’s account of Palm Sunday.

• First, there’s no mention of palms. Those are in John’s gospel. Branches are mentioned in Matthew's and Mark's accounts of Jesus' entry into Jerusalem on this day. But no palms in Luke.
• Second, he doesn’t mention the crowds shouting, “Hosanna,” an Aramaic prayer meaning, “Save us, pray.” 
• And third, in Luke’s telling, only the disciples welcome Jesus, not the crowds. 

Now, does that mean that there weren’t palms, hosannas, or welcoming crowds? Of course not! It simply means that Luke has some things he wants you and I to notice about the first Palm Sunday, things that he foreshadowed in the events in Jericho surrounding Zacchaeus.

Using the words of Psalm 118, which some New Testament scholars say, was a hymn sung by worshippers as they headed for Jerusalem for festivals like the Passover, the disciples welcomed Jesus to the holy city.

Did the disciples fully understand what was going on? No.

Did some of them think that Jesus was going to start a revolution and set up an earthly kingdom to replace their Roman overlords? Probably.

Did any of them believe that Good Friday and Easter were going to happen? At that moment, I’m sure they didn’t know.

But they knew enough to welcome Jesus. We don’t know what lies in our immediate futures either. We don't know what God has in mind for us. We don't know what valleys or Good Fridays this fallen, sinful world may mete out to us.

Yet if we will welcome Jesus as our God and King, we do know that we have an eternity of Easter Sundays to look forward to!

And we do know that Jesus, Who was tempted, tested, suffered, died, and then rose, will be with us every step of the way!

But don’t expect the devil, the world, or even our inner sinful rebels to take our welcoming of Jesus lying down! Look at Luke 19:39, please. “...some of the Phairsees called to [Jesus] from the crowd, ‘Teacher, rebuke Your disciples.’” “Tell those people to be quiet! They need to can their faith in You!” they were telling Jesus.

There will always be people who grumble about the joy Christians know in Christ.

“Tell my daughter to quit reading the Bible so much, pastor” a mom once said to me. “Why?” I asked. “Religion has its place,” the mom asserted, “but we have to be practical.” Like Mary, the sister of Martha, that woman’s daughter had chosen the better part that could never be taken away from her. That's the part we must choose, too, if we are to have life with God!

The things of this world will die, damned to hell for eternity. As a design engineer who built great buildings and bridges once told his colleagues over dinner, “One day, all of this will burn.” But those who trust in Jesus Christ have life with God, now and forever! They welcome Jesus into their lives. The grumblers, even those who go to church on Sundays but forget about Jesus on Mondays, block Jesus from their lives by refusing to welcome him into every portion of their lives.

Fact is, we all can be grumblers, at least some of the time. The reason for that is simple: If you dare as a Christian to live in daily repentance and renewal, you can count on God to confront you for your sins, even as He embraces you in His grace and love. God loves sinners, but God still hates sin and always will. By His grace, through Jesus Christ, God is committed to removing sin from our lives. But it's a painful truth that none of us likes being separated from our sins. We get comfortable with them. They start to define us. We feel a natural resistance to God's intention to make us new by removing our dependence on our sins from us!

We’ll never be completely free of sin this side of heaven. But the Christian tells Jesus, “Let the old self be crucified, so that the new self can rise today and every day.”

Jesus, of course, refused the Pharisees request. He wouldn’t let His disciples stop welcoming and praising Him. In verse 40, Jesus tells them, “I tell you that if these should keep silent, the stones would immediately cry out.”

I've shared with some of you before that when our son was about eight years old, he said, "Hey, dad, you know how Jesus said that if people stopped worshiping Him, the stones would start worshiping Him instead?" "Yeah," I said. "Well, I know it would be bad if nobody was worshiping Jesus. But it would be kind of cool to hear how stones worshiped."

Listen: Don’t let inanimate stones take your job!

It’s the job and the joy of every Christians to shout and sing and live the praises of the God Who died and rose to set us and all of creation free from sin and death and futility.

It’s our job and our joy to welcome Jesus into our lives and, like Zacchaeus to tell others of our thankfulness that Jesus--God in human flesh--went to Jerusalem, to suffering, to a cross, to hell itself, and than rose from death to set us eternally free.

Welcome Jesus into your life!

Then welcome others to know Jesus!

That’s what Palm Sunday is all about.

Amen!

Americans' Three Favorite Sins

They may not be what you think they are. Thanks to Holly Boardman for tweeting this article my way.

Is Hope Really for "Suckers"?

Not if your hope is in the right Person!

"Biblical hope is unique; it’s a confident trust in God and what He is doing in the world and in our lives." Read the whole thing.

Leadership Tidbit #5

Leaders neither court conflict nor avoid it when necessary.

Neither...Nor

I was writing something earlier today and wondered about the proper use of the words, neither and nor in the same sentence. Grammar Girl helped me out.

By the way, Oxford says that both the words, neither and either, can be pronounced with long e's or with long i's in their first syllables. So, neither you with your long e, nor I with my long i are grammatically incorrect. No need to call the whole blog off.

Leaders and the Opinions of Others

Leaders must take others' opinions of them, as is said, "with a grain of salt."

This doesn't mean that leaders should be heedless of others' opinions. But leaders must realize that assessments of their leadership will tend to gravitate toward one or the other of two extremes, adulation or condemnation. In other words, the people with the most extreme positive and negative opinions are the ones likeliest to speak and each will give leaders a distorted view of their leadership.

Leaders must use a different compass than the crowds.

In 1 Corinthians, the apostle Paul confronts the members of a church he had founded and from whom he had been absent for some time, for their arrogance, among other things. In their arrogance, they had begun aligning themselves behind preachers who had served them, rather than behind the God revealed in Christ that the preachers had proclaimed and the faith in Christ each had commended. Paul took the Corinthian Christians to task in this way:

You should think of us as Christ's servants, who have been put in charge of God's secret truths. Now, I am not at all concerned about being judged by you or by any human standard; I don't even pass judgment on myself. My conscience is clear, but that does not prove that I am really innocent. The Lord is the one who passes judgment on me. (1 Corinthians 4:1-4, Good News Translation)

Ultimately, every person--including every leader--is accountable to the God revealed to the world in Jesus Christ. Christ is the only true compass. Even with Christ as Lord, no leader will ever come close to batting 1.000 in their decision-making.

And leaders, as servants, must be accountable both to God and to others.

But leaders who play to the crowds, be they their employees, their citizens, or their flock, will never lead people anywhere.

Leaders must live with the kind of confidence that Abraham Lincoln possessed and talked about as he led the country through the Civil War: "I do the very best I know how-the very best I can; and mean to keep doing so until the end. If the end brings me out all right, what is said against me won’t amount to anything. If the end brings me out wrong, ten angels swearing I was right would make no difference."

Leaders must take others' opinions of them with "a grain of salt."

Leadership Tidbit #4

Leaders work hard to ensure that those in the organization who have erred have opportunity to reverse course and avoid embarrassment.

5 Ways God Uses Problems in Our Lives

From Pastor Eric Swensson. Great, simple thoughts.

If being funny at 11:30 PM is the issue...

...NBC should have canceled Saturday Night Live years ago. I'm just sayin'.

Me Neither

"I'm not for sale."

"Why It's So Hard to Say Goodbye to Google Reader"

Here.

Leadership Tidbit #3

Leaders understand that they are, above all, servants whose job it is to help everyone in their organization to do their jobs successfully, efficiently, and well.

Are We Paying Attention?

There's a lot to be seen, if we'll do one thing, says Charlie Lehardy: Look up!

Have You Ever Been at Your Wit's End?

Gay Ingram may clear up your confusion.

Leadership Tidbit #2

Leaders understand that every project and initiative will consume more time and energy than they initially think will be required.

Leadership Tidbit #1

One of the most important things for leaders to understand is that they don't know it all and that they can't do it all.

Hold On!

"...know the God of your father, and serve him with single mind and willing heart; for the Lord searches every mind, and understands every plan and thought. If you seek him, he will be found by you; but if you forsake him, he will abandon you forever" (1 Chronicles 28:9, ancient King David's words to his son, Solomon)

“For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life. Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him. Those who believe in him are not condemned; but those who do not believe are condemned already, because they have not believed in the name of the only Son of God" (John 3:16-18, God the Son Jesus' words to Nicodemus and to us all).

God wants to hold us in His arms forever. That's why Jesus took on human flesh, died on a cross, and rose from death. By His dying, He took the punishment for sin we deserve. By His rising, He opens up life with God to us all. 

Even in the bleakest, most horrible of times we encounter in this life, God will not abandon us, though, tragically, we might abandon God.

Hold on tightly to the God we know with certainty in Jesus Christ! [Thoughts inspired by today's installment of Our Daily Bread.]

Repentance (Part 11, The Augsburg Confession)

John 12:1-8

This morning, as we continue to consider what it means to be a Lutheran Christian, I want to talk with you about a teaching of the Bible which, in these days, is either hated or ignored. It’s the teaching about repentance.

We’re closing in on Holy Week. As we do, it’s a good time to introduce two men as “case studies” who had important roles in the events leading up to Jesus’ death and resurrection.

One teaches us what repentance isn’t.

The other shows us what repentance is.

Our first study is of Judas Iscariot. Judas, of course, was one of the twelve apostles, that group among Jesus’ disciples whose job it was to be His “sent ones,” those who would carry the good news of new and everlasting life for all who repent and believe in the crucified and risen Jesus as God and Lord into the world.

Beyond that, Judas is an enigma. Even the meaning of the second name by which he’s usually designated, Iscariot, is a mystery. One theory is that “Iscariot” was derived from scortea, leather bag, making Judas, “the man with the leather bag.”

That designation would, in fact, underscore one of the few things we do know about Judas. Turn to John 12:6, please.

You know this incident well. In Bethany, Jesus is at the home of the sisters Mary and Martha and their brother, Lazarus, after Jesus had raised Lazarus from the dead. Martha, as always, is busily serving the meal--old habits die hard, you know--when Mary comes into the room and takes a pound of costly ointment and uses her hair to soothe the ointment into Jesus’ feet.

Today, we can’t imagine how socially inappropriate this action would have seemed. Men and women weren’t to touch one another unless they were husband and wife, mother and child. Only servants were to touch the feet of guests; for a woman to touch a man’s feet was considered, at the least, sexually suggestive. And a woman’s hair was considered sacrosanct.

Probably all of the disciples were taken aback by Mary’s gesture of gratitude and reverence for Jesus. (And Mary's reverence was understandable! Jesus had make clear that He was the resurrection and the life and that all who believe in Him will have life with God forever, then proved His deity and His power over death and life by raising her brother from death.) But John makes clear that Judas’ response was less about religious or social scruples than it was about what was important to him.

Judas asks indignantly why, instead of this wastefulness, the ointment hadn’t been sold, the proceeds used to care for the poor? Then we’re told: “This he said, not that he cared for the poor, but because he was a thief, and had the money box; and he used to take what was put into it.”

Historians and scholars have often speculated as to why Judas later betrayed Jesus for a measly thirty pieces of silver. Was he politically motivated? Was he a zealot who thought that he could spur Jesus into leading a revolution if the Romans tried to arrest him? John seems to say Judas betrayed Jesus for the cash.

You know what happened. In the hours after Jesus instituted Holy Communion, He went to the garden of Gethsemane to pray. That was a spot to which Jesus and the disciples apparently went often and that’s where Judas knew he could lead the temple police to arrest Jesus, under cover of darkness, far from the crowds who, just the Sunday before, had hailed Jesus as the Messiah, the Christ, God’s Anointed One.

And what happened to Judas after Jesus' arrest? Turn please, to Matthew 27:3. This comes after the Jewish temple leaders took Jesus to the Roman governor Pilate. It says: “Then Judas, [Jesus’] betrayer, seeing that [Jesus] had been condemned, was remorseful and brought back the thirty pieces of silver to the chief priests and elders, saying, ‘I have betrayed innocent blood.’...[verse 5] Then he threw down the pieces of silver in the temple and departed, and went and hanged himself.”

What accounts for Judas’ tragic end?

Doesn’t Matthew tell us that Judas was remorseful?

Doesn’t that mean that Judas was repentant?

Shouldn’t that have cleaned his slate with God and given Judas a clear conscience?

Why, even after he had given back the money he had taken to betray Jesus, did Judas take his own life?

The key to answering those questions is in the word remorseful.

You see, to be repentant for a sin, a wrong we have perpetrated against God or others, doesn’t just mean to be remorseful.

Judas realized that what he did was wrong. “I have betrayed innocent blood,” he said. So, he felt bitter regret. He understood that by his action, he was bringing about the death of an innocent person. He understood that his betrayal of Jesus was an offense against God.

And he no doubt was afraid of what God would do to him. But as the Bible points out repeatedly, “the fear of the Lord is” only “the beginning of” wisdom or knowledge. (See here.) When we are sorry for our sins, that's just the beginning of repentance. There are no good works we must perform. No acts of penance are required. But sorrow for sin is not all there is to repentance.

We see that in our second case study, the one that shows us what repentance is.

Our subject is Peter. Peter, of course, was another one of the apostles. We know a lot more about Peter than we do about Judas.

But when you think about it, Peter was as guilty of betraying Jesus on the night of Jesus‘ arrest as Judas had been.

You remember what happened. During the last supper, Peter proclaimed his undying loyalty to Jesus. Then Jesus told Peter that on that very night, Peter would deny even knowing Jesus three times before the rooster crowed in the wee hours. Peter didn’t believe it. But of course, everything happened just as Jesus had foretold. Matthew 26:75 tells us what happened after Peter had denied Jesus a third time and heard the rooster crow. “And Peter remembered the words of Jesus Who had said, ‘Before the rooster crows, you will deny me three times.‘ So he went out and wept bitterly.”

In the Greek language in which Matthew and all the New Testament writers originally wrote, the adverb translated as bitterly, carries the meaning of an emotion that is harsh, painful. It’s used by one ancient writer to describe the oppressive rule of a dictatorial leader.

If you have ever sobbed with regret over some wrong you realize that you have done (I have), then you have some feeling for what Peter felt at that moment. He bitterly regretted what he had done. He felt remorse that he had let Jesus down.

But, unlike Judas, Peter lived and went on to become a leader of Christ’s Church, the one chosen by Christ and the Holy Spirit in the first Christian Pentecost, to deliver the good news that all who repent and believe in Jesus have God in their lives now and in eternity.

Both Judas and Peter were sinners. Both had betrayed their Lord. So, what was different about them to account for the very different ways in which their lives played out after the night of Jesus' arrest?

Here’s the difference: Peter had faith in the God he knew in Jesus Christ.

Peter understood that Jesus Christ was more than a nice man or a good teacher or a rousing leader of the masses and more than an itinerant advocate for justice or a miracle worker, who got killed on a cross.

Peter understood that Jesus was the Lord of all creation, the conqueror of sin and death, Who had always shown forgiveness to sinners who turned from sin and trusted in Him.

Peter remembered that Jesus had told stories (parables) to demonstrate how God responds to repentant sinners who trust in Him, stories like the ones Jesus told about:

• a shepherd who searched for his lost sheep, 
• a widow who scoured her home for a lost coin, and 
• a loving father who welcomed an impudent son who had scorned his love with a bear hug of love.

Each of the primary actors in those stories--the shepherd, the widow, the father, were fictional stand-ins for the very real God of the world Peter had come to know in Jesus. And each of them threw parties when the lost--the lost sheep, the lost coin, the lost son--was found.

Peter had heard Jesus say that heaven throws a party every time a sinner turns from sin and trusts in the grace of God that Christ came to give.

Sinners who are sorry for their sin and trust in Christ as their God, Savior, and King, are forgiven. No ifs, ands, or buts!

Peter trusted that the God he had seen and known in Jesus would meet his remorse for his sin with a forgiveness he did not deserve. That God made known only in Jesus Christ is willing to meet our remorse for sin with a forgiveness none of us deserves!

This is a Biblical truth underscored in Article 12 of The Augsburg Confession, which appears on pages 14-15 of the buff and brown edition in the pew racks. Please pull one out and look at it. It says:

 “Our churches teach that there is forgiveness of sins for those who have fallen after [their] Baptism whenever they are converted. [That is, whenever, their minds are changed and they see the wrong in their sin.] The Church ought to impart Absolution [the assurance of forgiveness from God] to those who return in repentance...Now, strictly speaking, repentance consists of two parts. One part is contrition...terrors striking the conscience through the knowledge of sin. The other part is faith, which is born of the Gospel [the Good News about Jesus] or the Absolution and believes that for Christ’s sake, sins are forgiven. [Repentance] comforts the conscience and delivers it from terror. Then, good works are bound to follow, which are the fruits of repentance...” 

Peter’s faith in Christ was warranted. He received confirmation of God's forgiveness in one of the moving scenes in all of Scripture.

After Jesus rose from the dead, you’ll remember, Jesus asked Peter three times if he believed in Jesus, had faith in Jesus. Each time, Peter said yes. In this interview, Jesus reversed the three denials Peter made on the night of His arrest and assured Peter not only that he was forgiven, but that Jesus also had plans for him. "Feed my lambs" Jesus told Peter. "Tend my sheep."

Peter had acknowledged his sin to God and he had trusted that the crucified and risen Christ is big enough, gracious enough, powerful enough, loving enough to forgive the repentant.

When you and I repent for our sin, we too can be absolutely certain that, as was true for Peter, God forgives us and has plans for us, eternal plans!

They’re plans that begin to unfold here in this world, as we follow the Lord Who promises to be with us always.

And they’re plans that will come to the final, full flower when, in eternity, all our sins, suffering, and dying will be in the past and we will walk with God and all the saints who have trusted in Christ forever. Amen

[This was shared during both worship services with the people and guests of Saint Matthew Lutheran Church in Logan, Ohio.]

I Don't Want to Be Normal

The nurse from my doctor's office called to tell me the results of blood work done during a recent physical. She rattled off the numbers, then said, "All I can say is that you're just normal."

"You know what?" I said, "This may be the first time anyone's ever called me normal." She laughed and told me, "Then maybe I should have said, 'As far as your blood goes, you're normal.'"

Sometimes, being normal is a great thing. That's true of health tests. Normal, in those circumstances, means all is well.

But sometimes, being normal--whether the designation at the time means typical, average, or like everybody else--may not describe a desirable state of being.

And there's one way in which I think I never want to be normal: I don't want to approach life with cynicism.

Cynicism, one online dictionary tells us is "an attitude of scornful or jaded negativity, especially a general distrust of the integrity or professed motives of others."

Cynicism seems to be today's "normal."

Ever since the deceptions created by Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon during their presidencies, giving us Vietnam and Watergate, cynicism has taken hold in the United States. We seem to find it hard to trust anyone or anything.

Cynicism also seems to be prevalent among people around my age. (I'm nearing 60.) I can't tell you how often the speech of my contemporaries degenerates into throwing verbal brickbats at societal trends, people in power, the media, celebrities. It's depressing to hear them talk. And I wonder how they stand living with themselves.

People are cynical, I think, for two basic reasons:

(1) One is that they've had overblown ideals about how other human beings should act.

For decades prior to the Vietnam War, for example, more than 70% of the American people consistently told pollsters that their national leaders would never lie to them. That was completely unrealistic idealism. So, when we learned about the deceptions of Johnson and Nixon, the numbers flipped. Now people are more likely to assume that the government always lies.

Cynicism is an unrealistic overreaction to the failure of some leaders all of the time and of all leaders some of the time, to live up to our unrealistic expectations of them.

It's unfair to have unrealistic expectations of others. No matter how great you thought the person to whom you are married or for whom you voted in the last election, may have seemed to you. They're still human beings...like you. That means they're not perfect.

"Put not your trust in princes,...in whom there is no help," says Psalm 146:3.

This doesn't mean we're to repose zero trust in others. It means: "Don't trust human beings to be like God."

The only one worthy of our total trust is the God we know in Jesus Christ. Sinless, Christ went to a cross, where He died for our sins, both yours and that person you don't trust.

The Old Testament tells us that God is patient with human beings because He "remembers that we are dust."

And Jesus teaches us that before we condemn the small splinter in the eye of another, we need to remove the log implanted in our own.

There would be a lot less cynicism in this world if we would seek the power of the Holy Spirit in fulfilling the second part of Jesus' great commandment for the world, which echoes the last seven of the Ten Commandments given by God to Moses: Love your neighbor as yourself.

(2) Another reason for cynicism, I think, is disappointment with our own progress in life.

We look at people we deem more successful than ourselves and, secretly believing that we don't measure up, infer that there must be something false about the other person's progress. We doubt that their progress is for real, dismissing it as PR. Or, we cast aspersions on the integrity with which they achieved their "progress."

It should be said that others' money and material well being aren't the only things that spur this cynicism. A happy family, a good marriage, true friendships, educational attainment, or almost anything we observe in others can be an excuse for the person who feels inferior to be cynical. "Yeah, they look happy," the cynic says, "but that's window-dressing." He may even start spewing unsubstantiated gossip about the person to build himself up, while tearing the other person down.

This strain of cynicism is often rooted in envy. And envy is really rooted in self-loathing. The cynic often feels compelled to knock others because, in his secret self, he hates himself. He feels that his life is inferior.

Or, he knows of deficiencies, bad decisions, or sins that keep him from experiencing some of the things he yearns for. Overcoming this form of cynicism involves opening up our eyes and realizing that we are blessed in our own ways.

One of the things I have had to get over as I've grown in years and in my faith in Christ, is my disappointment in the ways in which God has blessed me. "Those blessings you've given me, Lord, are nice, but I want to be blessed in other ways. I want to be like So-and-So," I tell God. But as I read the Bible, God's Word, God seems to tell me, "But you aren't So-and-So. I've created a package of blessings custom-made for you. Not for So-and-So, but for you."

Isaiah 45:9 says "Woe to those who quarrel with their Maker, those who are nothing but potsherds among the potsherds on the ground. Does the clay say to the potter, 'What are you making?' Does your work say, 'The potter has no hands'?"

I'm learning to let the Potter form me as He chooses.

This isn't fatalism. It's faith.

I may be a plain clay pot. But to give glory to the One Who made me and then gave me new life in Jesus Christ, I am intent on being, through His grace and power, forgiveness and love, the best clay pot I can be.

Of course, I will only ever fulfill my intention by relying completely on the Potter, the God Who came into the world in Jesus, died on a cross, and rose from the dead for imperfect clay pots like me.

You may not measure up in your own eyes. But you were worth the suffering and death of God, all of which He went through so that when He rose again on the first Easter Sunday, you could have life with God.

And the new life Christ gives those who believe in Him, doesn't start after your earthly death, as though this life were just heaven's waiting room.

The new life Christ gives can begin "the hour you first believe."

And it can belong to you in all the everyday moments of this life: While you do your job, love your spouse, relate to your kids, strive for your dreams, pray, enjoy your friends, read God's Word, take out the trash, mow the lawn, do the laundry.

"If anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation," 2 Corinthians 5:17 says.

If you have faith in Christ, you have eternity. You have God standing by you as you strive to be your best, to achieve, and to live. No reason to feel envious. None.

Whatever its source, if cynicism is your normal, get rid of it. Trust in Christ.

You'll be more able to forgive others as God has forgiven you.

You won't trust people or things to give you what only God has it to give.

You'll trust only God to be God.

That's when you'll stop being normal and your cynicism will start to evaporate.

The Power of Weakness, the Wisdom of Foolishness

In his letter to the first century church in the city of Corinth, the apostle Paul constantly comes back to four words (and their cognates):

• weakness
• power
• foolishness
• wisdom

Worldly people, with shrewdness and cynicism, have their ideas about where wisdom and strength lie.

The worldly believe in themselves as the ultimate arbiters of what's best for them, looking out for their own interests above all, and being comfortable.

The worldly place their highest hopes in the things they can see, acquire, touch, or use. If they ever consider the God Who made them, their accountability to Him, or the needs of others, it's only in fits and spurts.

Such considerations leave them uncomfortable and they move to push them out of their minds.

From a worldly perspective, it's total foolishness to believe that a Savior Who died on a cross, a condemned man, could do anything to change my life, my perspective, my eternity. When you die, you die, the worldly say. Crosses bring an end to the human "pursuit of happiness." Until death comes, they strive to "build large barns" (think: self-storage units, pole barns, and junk rooms and rooms junked up with stuff) and say to themselves, "Soul,...relax, eat, drink, be merry," never dreaming that, at any moment, God could say to them, "You fool! This very night your life is being demanded of you. And the things you have prepared, whose will they be?" (See Luke 12:13-21)

The worldly extol what Jesus calls "making provision for the flesh," by which He means, I think, pursuing more than what we and our families need--Jesus calls it "our daily bread"--to pursue what we want.

When the worldly pursue what they want, whatever it is, they foolishly crowd out the only God, revealed in Jesus Christ, Who can give meaning to our lives here on earth and life with God beyond death.

Jesus' crucifixion proves how horrific and destructive the worldly life--sin--is. On the cross, Jesus experienced the death and condemnation that awaits anyone who insists on living this life on the basis of their own supposed wisdom and strength, by their own wits. Jesus died bearing our sinful worldliness. The Bible says that, "For our sake [God] made [Jesus] to be sin who knew no sin, so that in Him we might become the righteousness of God" (2 Corinthians 5:21).

Jesus paid the price for human worldliness. "For the wages of sin is death," the Bible says, "but the free gift is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord." Through what the world consider His foolish submission to the cross, Jesus, sinless human and perfect God, paid the debt each of us owes for our worldliness and opens the way to eternity to all who will renounce their worldliness (repent for their sin) and believe in (or surrender their lives in trust to) Jesus.

When we come to faith in Christ, there begins an ongoing process that the worldly consider foolish, that those who rely on their own strength deem weak: Ongoing submission to Christ. It can be a painful process, bringing our sinful self to God to be crucified by God as we confess and trust in Christ for forgiving grace. But it's the only way to life!

Of course, we are all born worldly. We're all born looking out for number 1. Our human inclinations will always be to do what we want to do. We will even argue that a behavior that God has called sinful must be OK because we were, we claim, "born that way." It seems foolish to us to turn from behaviors that we were born inclined to pursue.

But Jesus Christ came to justify sinners, transforming those who surrender to Him from enemies of God to God's friends. Jesus did not come to justify our sins.

The God we meet in Jesus Christ is not an indulgent uncle who covers our selfish pursuits with a veneer of heavenly approval.

The only way we sinners will be justified, counted innocent and set free from the slavery of worldliness, is to submit daily to the crucifixion of our old sinful selves, so that the new self--foolish and weak in the eyes of the world, but redeemed, eternally alive through God's power and wisdom--can rise to live with God.

Through Christ and His cross and the daily crucifixion and repentance we undergo as we submit to Him as Lord, we live and see God "through a glass darkly" in this world, but perfectly on that day when, with all the risen in Christ, will see Jesus face to face.

In eternity, the difference between wisdom and foolishness will be on full display. And we will see that the lifestyle of daily repentance and renewal that the Lord Who set His Church to "turn the world upside down" commands of and commends to us, is the way of the only life worth living. "I am the way, and the truth, and the life," Jesus says, "no one comes to the Father except through Me."

And He says, "If any want to become My followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow Me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose it for My sake will find it. For what will it profit them if they gain the whole world but forfeit their life?" (Matthew 6:24-26a)

That's why in 1 Corinthians, part of God's inspired Word in the Bible, Paul spends a lot of time setting us straight on the difference between our wisdom and God's wisdom, between our strength and God's strength.

God's wisdom and strength, he insists, is seen in Christ, the man of tears well-acquainted with grief, and in His cross, where He bought back from sin, death, and the devil all who believe in Him.

Paul says, for example: "...the message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God" (1 Corinthians 1:18).

In the next verse he remembers God's promise from Isaiah in the Old Testament, "For it is written, 'I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and the discernment of the discerning I will thwart'" (1 Corinthians 1:19).

And then, "...since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, God decided through the foolishness of our proclamation to save those who believe. For Jews demand signs and Greeks [by which Paul here means Gentiles, all non-Jewish people] desire wisdom, but we proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling block to the Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those who are called, both Jesus and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God" (1 Corinthians 1:21-25).

My experience is that wisdom and power are more likely to be seen at the deathbed of a person who trusts Christ than they are in the halls of economic or political power, or displays of military conquest, or the ringing words of idealists touting the so-called rights of human beings.

God's power and wisdom are seen in those who are humble enough to own that they are imperfect, worldly sinners whose only hope for this life and the next is Jesus Christ.

A friend of mine, Chris Wissmann, has written her autobiography, My Life: A Testimony of His Love. There, she recounts something I've shared before about visits I paid to her husband, Sig, as he lay dying at Good Samaritan Hospital in Cincinnati. She recalls that many of us, friends of Sig and Chris, "did not want to leave because it was so peaceful. The atmosphere was God's atmosphere..." She remembers me telling her, "I don't want to leave; it is so holy in here."

Holiness is the opposite of worldliness. That person is holy who has believed in Jesus Christ. They entrust their sins, their desires, their pretensions to perfection, their arrogance to Christ, trusting that not only will He no longer hold those things against us and allow us to be eternally condemned for them, He will set us free from all the compulsions of this sinful world.

Those compulsions place demands on us. They tell us to perform, to be, as I've said in a phrase I stole from somebody, human doings, rather than human beings.

They even (always) come disguised as good things, like good works done for the applause of others instead of the glory of God; like sex to placate a pressuring partner rather than the expression marital fidelity between a husband and wife it was intended to be; like working hard to make a comfortable mark in the world instead of providing for the needs of our families and ourselves while dedicating some of the income to the work of God in the world.

True power and true wisdom is seen in Jesus and His cross. True power and true wisdom is experienced by those who follow the Christ of the cross and surrender their sins and their whole beings to Him and to the crucifixion of our inborn worldly passions and desires.

It was so that none of the people in Corinth with whom he first shared the good news, the Gospel, of Jesus, would be confused about what's truly important in the message about Jesus that Paul made a firm resolution:

"...I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and Him crucified...I came to you in weakness and in fear and in much trembling. My speech and my proclamation were not with plausible words of wisdom, but with a demonstration of the Spirit and of [God's] power, so that your faith might rest not on human wisdom but on the power of God" (1 Corinthians 2:2-5).

Yesterday, in a homily delivered during Mass with the College of Cardinals, the new pope, Francis 1, said,

"When we walk without the cross, when we build without the cross and when we proclaim Christ without the cross, we are not disciples of the Lord. We are worldly." 

"In the cross of Christ I glory, tow'ring o'er the wrecks of time!" a Christian hymn proclaims. Follow the crucified and risen God of all creation, Jesus. Learn the power in admitting your weakness, the wisdom in acknowledging your foolishness. See how God gives the foolish and the weak His wisdom and His strength.

Thrilled by Francis' Call to Mission

Words spoken by the new Roman Catholic leader, Pope Francis 1, in an informal homily delivered to the College of Cardinals today, thrilled me. (Thrilled is not one of my usual verbs. But that's exactly how I felt.) From The Los Angeles Times account of the Mass at which Francis preached:

Stressing the power of prayer, Francis told the cardinals, "He who does not pray to the Lord prays to the devil. When we don't proclaim Jesus Christ, we proclaim the worldliness of the devil, the worldliness of the demon."

"When we walk without the cross, when we build without the cross and when we proclaim Christ without the cross, we are not disciples of the Lord. We are worldly."

He added, "We may be bishops, priests, cardinals, popes, all of this, but we are not disciples of the Lord."

Francis issued a strong warning to the cardinals, telling them the Catholic Church risks becoming a compassionate nongovernment organization unless it sticks to its spiritual path.

Building a solid Church, he added, was vital to stop it from crumbling like a "sand castle" built by children.

Wow! This is exactly the message that not only Roman Catholic Christians need to hear, but we Lutheran and other Christians need as well.

There is no point to the Church's existence if we don't keep on the mission given to us by Christ Himself:

"Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you. And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.” (Matthew 28:19-20)

We Christians, as part of the larger Church (the Body of Christ, in Biblical terms), each have our missions. In fact, Peter, the man Roman Catholics say was the first pope, that Christ has saved us from sin and death not only as a gift for us to enjoy, but as a gift to share with others:

...you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s own people, in order that you may proclaim the mighty acts of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light. (1 Peter 2:9)

Peter also tells Christians this:

Always be ready to make your defense to anyone who demands from you an accounting for the hope that is in you; yet do it with gentleness and reverence. Keep your conscience clear, so that, when you are maligned, those who abuse you for your good conduct in Christ may be put to shame. (1 Peter 3:15-16)

It displays a profound lack of faith in Christ when church bodies or congregations give up on fulfilling the mission Christ commands and the Holy Spirit empowers us to do to, instead pursue political or social agendas. In these pursuits, they impatiently attempt to coerce others into living under their versions of the kingdom of God, rather than sharing the Gospel as Christ commands and letting Him reign, do His will, and build His Church.

Christ has said that new life comes only to those who turn from sin and believe in Him and the Good News, the Gospel, that His death and resurrection have unleashed in the world. Sharing this Good News is our mission and it is not of Christ for us to get sidetracked for human agendas. Whenever the Church forgets to keep the main thing the main thing--sharing the Gospel through Word and Sacrament--you can be sure that the devil cackles with delight. There's nothing he likes more than the Church going off-target!
 
Many of his fellow Christians won't agree with Francis on everything. For example, I have profound disagreements with the Roman Church on relying on the intervention of dead saints, such as Mary, when we are privileged to approach God directly through Jesus Christ, God in the flesh.

But I am excited that leading the largest Christian body in the world is a person who is challenging His flock to focus on the mission Christ commands all His people to pursue and trust that, as we do so, the lives of those who receive Christ by faith will be so transformed that they spend their doing justice, loving mercy, and walking humbly with their God (Malachi 6:8).

My prayer is that God will help me to live such a life: a life of repentance for my sin, of gratitude that Christ died and rose for a sinner like me, of the purpose that belongs to those live life in the company of Christ, and of hope for eternity with God.

Confession of Sin (Part 10, The Augsburg Confession)

Today, as we continue to look at what it means to be Lutheran Christians, we’re going to talk about confession. This subject is so important that The Augsburg Confession, one of the basic statements of our Lutheran understanding of Biblical faith, devotes two of its 28 articles to them, Articles 11 and 25.

There are several ways in which the word confession can be used, of course. But today, we’re talking about the confession of sin. Confessing our sin is essential to being a Christian. As Christians, we must let go of our sin in order to grab hold of the forgiveness of sin which the crucified and risen Jesus offers to all who turn from sin and believe in Him.

The confession of sin is so important that in His model prayer, Jesus teaches us to pray, “forgive us our trespasses.” That’s because to continue in sin even after God has clearly shown us that we’re violating His will by doing so is to place ourselves under judgment, to separate ourselves from God, and to refuse God’s grace.

A Lutheran bishop I once knew told me how the guys in his barracks when he was in the Army would say to him and some of the other soldiers there, "You Lutherans and Catholics are all alike. You think that you can do whatever you want on Saturday nights, then say a few words of confession on Sunday mornings, and everything will be OK." The bishop told me that it's true that some Christians, even some Lutheran Christians do take such a lackadaisical attitude about their violations of the Ten Commandments and of the meaning of confession. And it's true: Some who call themselves Christians take forgiveness for granted and see it as license to do whatever they want, when they want.

But to any Christian intent on following Christ, living for Him, and receiving the blessings He reserves for those who trust in Him, such attitudes are unthinkable! To members of the first century church at Rome who wouldn’t acknowledge their sins against others, Paul wrote: “Do you not realize that God’s kindness is meant to lead you to repentance? But by your hard and impenitent heart you are storing up wrath for yourself on the day of wrath, when God’s righteous judgment will be revealed” (Romans 2:4-5).

God is love, 1 John 4:8 teaches, meaning that everything God does is done from His self-giving love. 
But God’s love does not mean (and cannot) mean that He will force His forgiveness and the gift of life with Him on people who refuse those gifts.

Unless we lay our lives before God in confession of sin, we block the Holy Spirit access to our lives, keeping Him from convicting us of sin or of convincing us of the forgiveness that God wants to give to us through Jesus Christ. (This is what the Jesus calls the sin against the Holy Spirit.)  

If we want life with God, we must confess our sins to God, seeking forgiveness through Jesus, Who died and rose to set sinners free from sin and death. Since God came to earth in the Person of Jesus, belief in Jesus is the only way to life with God. (See John 3:16-18 and John 14:6, for example.)

When the evangelical reformers of the Sixteenth-century, led by Martin Luther, began their work, they did so amid a Church that wasn’t teaching in accordance with Scripture regarding the confession of sin.

You see, starting in 1215, official Church teaching was that believers were required to go to their local priest every year and confess every sin they had committed in the preceding year. If they didn’t or couldn't do so, they couldn’t receive Holy Communion. The priest could then tell the parishioner what "good works" they needed to do to make up for their sins.

The reformers looked at these practices and raised two objections.

First, they said, it’s impossible for human beings to know all their sins. They pointed to Psalm 19:12, which says: “Who can understand his errors? [Then the psalmist offers this prayer:] Cleanse me from secret faults.”

Second, the reformers said, the priest’s job is not to make up good works for a repentant sinner to do in order to be worthy of receiving Christ’s body and blood, but to declare God’s forgiveness to anyone who authentically seeks forgiveness through faith in Jesus Christ. Good works are an essential part of Christian living, of course. They're the outgrowth of faith in Jesus. But good works aren’t necessary to gain God’s forgiveness.

Originally speaking to believers in Ephesus (and now to all who believe in Christ, like you and me), Ephesians 2:8-9 say: “...by grace you have been saved through faith, and that not  of yourselves; it is the gift of God, not of works, lest anyone should boast...”

The Lutheran reformers were saying: You can’t tell a repentant believer in Jesus that their repentance and belief isn’t good enough. To do so is to render Christ’s suffering and death and His promise of forgiveness and new life to all who believe in Him irrelevant. By adding non-Biblical conditions for a repentant believer in Jesus to have forgiveness, you actually poor contempt on the cross on which Christ died and the empty tomb from which He physically arose.

The Lutheran reformers were also saying: You also can’t tell repentant sinners that they have to do good works proscribed by a human being in order to receive God’s forgiveness. To put a human being--be it a priest, a pastor, or some self-appointed holy person--above Christ, denying God’s word of forgiveness to a repentant believer, the Lutheran reformers held and we who are Lutheras today hold, was and is an abuse of the “office of the keys.”

You remember the office of the keys, right?

Just to refresh your memory, turn to Matthew 16:19. To set the stage, Peter has just confessed his belief that Jesus is both the Messiah (or the Christ), the anointed king for whom God’s people had been waiting, AND “the Son of the living God,” a phrase meaning that the Holy Spirit had led Peter to believe that Jesus was (and is) God in the flesh. Then Jesus explains a power and a responsibility that He will give His whole Church:

“I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.”

What this means is that it’s the job of the Church to tell the whole truth about the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

The Lutheran confessions insist that there are two elements in the Word of God about Jesus that the Church must faithfully proclaim:

• First, we must proclaim the Law, God’s moral commandments embodied in the Ten Commandments, and explained elsewhere in both the Old and New Testaments, and 
• Second, we must proclaim the Promise, the truth that in spite of our sin, all who repent for sin and believe in Jesus Christ, are saved from sin and death, given forgiveness of sin, and life everlasting with God. 

That means that the Gospel truth every unrepentant sinner needs to hear in order to have life and peace with God is that their sins are not forgiven, that they’re still dead in their trespasses, yet that can have life and forgiveness through Christ alone. It’s the Church’s responsibility to bind the unrepentant in their sin with the hope that they will confess their sins and trust in Christ.

The Gospel truth every repentant sinner needs to hear is that their sins are forgiven for the sake of Jesus Christ, Who died and rose for sinners, and that they do have life with God.

But the Reformers said, the power of the Keys, this responsibility to speak the truth in love to both repentant and unrepentant sinners is not an authorization for priests, pastors, or anyone else to impose a regimen of required good works on a repentant sinner.

Every Christian is authorized by Christ to exercise the office of keys, but they dare not add to or take away a letter or a syllable from God’s Word. As Proverbs 30:5-6 say: “Every word of God is pure; He is a shield to those who put their trust in Him. Do not add to His words, lest He rebuke you and you be found a liar.”

The Roman Catholic theologians of the 16th-century read what the Lutheran theologians were saying about confessing sin and were horrified!

They even accused the Lutheran Reformers of doing away with private confession of sin, which is something they never did. Nor, by the way, have we who call ourselves Lutherans in 2013 done away with private confession either. As a Lutheran Christian in 2013, we are bound by our confessions and by the teachings of the Bible to believe in private confession too!

Take a look at the first article about the confession of sin in The Augsburg Confession, one of the basic statements of we Lutherans’ understanding of Biblical Christianity. It’s Article 11:

Our churches teach that private absolution [that is, the private proclamation that sins are forgiven] should be retained in our churches, although listing all sins is not necessary for Confession....

While the Lutheran reformers certainly wanted everything to be done “in good order"(they were Germans, after all), they also wanted to set all Christians, clergy and laypeople, free to do their ministries, including the exercise of the office of the keys.

There’s good reason for allowing laypeople to exercise the power of the keys. You see, not everyone feels comfortable going to talk with their pastor about their sins. This is why the Lutheran confessions retain private confession, but don’t say that pastors are the only people to whom Christians can confess their sins.

Of course, we all can confess our sins to God in the Name of Jesus in personal prayers that don’t involve other human beings. In fact, we should confess our sins in that way every day, often.

But it’s good sometimes to have people who are devoted Christians to whom we can confide our sins and receive from them the Word about Christ’s forgiveness. It’s too easy for us to go solo as Christians, telling ourselves either that our sin is too big for God to forgive or that our sin is too insignificant to matter. But private confession and absolution can help us to see the truth and know God’s guidance in our lives.

I remember once when I had unintentionally fallen into a bad habit that I only realized after a time was a sin. One day over breakfast, I confided my sin to a friend. He heard me out, pointed out what I had done wrong. I was sad about my sin. There was a long silence as I sat there, running my fork around the surface of an empty plate, feeling sorrow for sin and wanting to be reconciled to Jesus. And then, seeing my repentance and my belief in Jesus, my friend told me, “Your sin is forgiven, Mark. Be at peace with that.”  My friend hadn't just tapped me in the should and said, "Oh, that's OK." But, like the father in Jesus' parable of the prodigal son, he let me experience the full depth of my sorrow for my sin and let me express that sorrow in confession that also included regret that I had hurt the feelings of the God Who made me and gone to a cross for me. When he saw authentic confession of sin coming from me, he knew that as a Christian, it was time to loose a sinner from the straitjacket of sin and set me free to be Christ's child once more.

But there are times when we must be willing to use the office of the keys to announce that God has not forgiven a person. Several years after the incident I recounted, a woman of a former congregation came to me in tears and confessed a sinful relationship with a married man in which she had been involved for decades. “I know it’s wrong,” she told me. “But I also know that if he phones me tonight, I’ll go to him and sin again. I’m not forgiven, am I?” It would have been an abuse of the office of the keys for me to have lied to her. But I tried to put a positive spin on things. I told her, “You can be forgiven. Jesus died and rose so that you can be forgiven. But no, at present, you’re not forgiven because you don’t believe in Jesus enough to lay this sin at God’s feet and ask for forgiveness in Jesus’ Name.” I had to bound that sinner in hopes that, like the prodigal son in Jesus' parable, she would come to herself, confess her sin, and receive the assurance of God's forgiveness!  

But why, we may wonder, is it necessary for Christians to keep confessing their sins? "If we tell God once that we're sinners," we may reason, "what more can he expect of us?"

The answer is simple. None of us is perfect. I keep a written prayer journal. I now type it out on my computer, according to the ACTS formulation: A for Adoration; C for Confession; T for Thanksgiving; and S for Supplication or prayer requests. Personally, when I look back on my confessions of sin that I offered one year ago or two years ago, I find myself confessing the same stupid sins to God now. I may be bring those same sins and same sinful inclinations before God for forgiveness for as long as I live. The only time I should get worried is if I stop confessing that sin, even if that sin is still something I turn to. I'll need God's forgiveness and help in seeking to live a life pleasing to Him as long as I'm on this earth.

When we confess our sins to God, we confess that we are in bondage to sin and cannot free ourselves. We confess, “God, this sin is bigger than me. But You are bigger than my sin. Cover my sin in the forgiveness Jesus bears for those who repent and believe in Him.” The God Who took on flesh, died on a cross, and rose from the dead in the Person of Jesus Christ is always glad to answer that prayer!


But when we confess our sins in the presence of other Christians, whether in private confession with one trusted Christian or during public worship, God helps those of us who walk by faith and not by sight (2 Corinthians 5:6-7), to hear Christ’s words of forgiveness that we can’t hear when we're just praying to God personally on our knees.

Words like: “In the mercy of almighty God, Jesus Christ was given to die for you, and for His sake God forgives you all your sins. To those who believe in Jesus Christ He gives the power to become the children of God and bestows on them the Holy Spirit.” They’re good words to hear!

In Psalm 32, David says that before he confessed his sins, his “body wasted away...for day and night [God’s] hand was heavy upon him..” But then, he tells God, “I acknowledged my sin to you...I did not hide my iniquity...and You forgave the guilt of my sin.”

Whenever we confess our violations of God’s will--in our personal prayer time, in confidence to a trusted Christian friend, or in public worship--confession is the road to the healing of relationship with God that God wants all of us to know.

[This was shared during worship with the people of Saint Matthew Lutheran Church in Logan, Ohio, and our friends and guests on Sunday.]

"I came to Harvard seeking Veritas. Instead, he found me."

A one-time atheist describes her journey in faith in Christ.

I don't want to gain the whole world...

...and lose my soul.


Here's the original recording, featuring Kirk Franklin:

Open Our Eyes, Lord

How God's Grace Frees Us to Love God's Law

Lutheran Christians, as you may know, love to say that we are saved by God's grace through our faith in Jesus Christ and not by good works. It's a truth that is freeing!

But some take this Biblical truth to mean that God's law, the ten commandments and all the places that amplify and explain them in the Bible, is a bad thing.

But not according to Martin Luther, whose teaching and preaching started the Lutheran movement and the Reformation.

In his newest book, Lutheran Slogans: Use and Abuse, Robert W. Jenson points out Luther began both The Small Catechism and The Large Catechism (the first for laypersons, the second for clergy, with a discussion of the law.

And Luther talked about the commandments in his Large Catechism explanation of the Apostles' Creed, where this statement appears:

The faith...makes us pious and pleasing to God; for through this confession we acquire a desire and affection for all God's commandments.

Says Jenson:

...according to Luther, the reason faith makes us pleasing to God is that it lets us love the law. Faith does not excuse us from the commandments, it makes obeying them a joy, such as is expressed in so many psalms and such as God likes to see in his creatures.

I doubt very much that Luther would be on board with the contempt for God's commands that is in vogue in many contemporary mainline denominations in North America and western Europe.

The denigration of God's moral law, seeing it as irrelevant, inoperative, or even bad, is, so far as I can see, an old false teaching that seems to always be cropping up in Christian circles. The name of this heresy is antinomianism. It argues that because of Christ, Christians are exempt from keeping God's law, even though many of the letters of Paul, the apostle of grace, argues against it.

God's Law, the moral commandments of God, are not the vestiges of a primitive religion, as some smarty pants argue today, but the statement of God's will for all human beings who live on earth until the day of the risen and ascended Jesus' return.

Happily for us, Jesus, perfect God and perfect human, obeyed God's Law perfectly and by His death and resurrection, has erased the Law's power to condemn those who repent and receive the gift of faith in Him.

And when we have faith in Christ, the law, which once only served to hem in our sinful inclinations or to show us, by our inability to obey its commands, how desperately we needed the grace that comes from Christ alone, is transformed for us.

Through Christ, the Law becomes a delight to us, freeing us to spend each day in repentance and renewal through Jesus Christ, as we seek to live according to the Law by which human beings were made by God to truly and fully live!

So, think about that: We are justified by grace through faith in Jesus Christ...because faith in Christ plants a love for God's Law that makes us acceptable to God.

Through faith in Christ, God sets out to sync our hearts, wills, and minds with the heart, will, and mind of God and like the psalmist, we can say: "Happy are those...[whose] delight is in the law of the Lord, and on His law they meditate day and night" (Psalm 1:1-2).

"Hotter Than All the Fifty Shades of the World"

A "holy tension": The wonder and the meaning of God's gift of sexual intimacy to husbands and wives.

Megan Hill writes:

When our marriage bed sinks low, barely visible under crumpled laundry and half-read books, the Evil One [the devil] scores a victory. So we meet the challenge. We persist in writing tender notes, and giving gifts, and making love: strategic maneuvers against the Devil's drift. We hold the marriage bed high, honoring our pleasurable commitments there, to buttress ourselves against marital malady and nothing less serious than its death.

And:

For non-Christians, the ultimate meaning of these symbols is love itself. Love: part emotion, part fantasy, part pleasure. A passionate equivalent to the iTunes Cloud, to which all human love songs and poetry and feelings are collectively entrusted.

For Christians, the symbols mean so much more. This mystery is profound.

In the tenderness, the holy jealousy, the delight, we mean to show Christ and his church. In the oneness, the sacrifice, the nourishing and cherishing, our weak symbols become something greater.

Read the whole thing.

"Keep Calm and Carry On"

Eric Swensson links to a short, beautiful video about the simple image and words from a World War Two-vintage poster that was never used then, but is having such an impact on people today.

Confused by Seth Godin

Internet guru Seth Godin is a smart guy, I'm told. And I've got no reason to doubt it.

But this post by Godin, The worst feedback is indifference, struck me as funny.

In it, he says that those who generate social media content, like blog posts, shouldn't dread "the cutting remark, the ad hominem attack." "No," he says, "the worst sort of feedback is no feedback at all. That means we've created nothing but banality."

But if feedback is so good, why doesn't Godin's blog allow for comments?

I'm confused.

The Future

Remember The Population Bomb? It was published in 1968 and was not only popular, but accepted as irrefutable truth by many thoughtful people during my college years, 1971-1975. The book's thesis was, as a Wikpedia article on the subject says, that there would be "mass starvation of humans in the 1970s and 1980s due to overpopulation, as well as other major societal upheavals." Because of this impending crisis, the book "advocated immediate action to limit population growth."

But, guess what? The "population explosion" didn't happen. Wednesday's Harvard Business Review Daily Stat delves into why the dire predictions of shortages resulting from overpopulation didn't come about.

MARCH 6, 2013

Whew! How We Dodged the Bullet on Global Starvation

How did the world survive the 20th-century population explosion, which many had expected to lead to mass starvation? Agricultural innovation contributed to a 10% rise in per-capita food production from 1961 to 1980, and greater global trade and a population shift to cities helped the world absorb billions more people, David Lam of the University of Michigan writes in Demography. The population boom was triggered by rapidly falling death rates, but the subsequent global decline in birth rates means that the world's population, now at 7 billion, may soon stabilize and may never reach as high as 12 billion, Lam says.

Source: How the World Survived the Population Bomb: Lessons From 50 Years of Extraordinary Demographic History

Casey Stengel was right: It's difficult to make predictions, especially about the future.

Does that mean that scientists--social as well as physical--should refrain from speculating about the implications about ongoing trends? Or that we should stop paying attention to them?

Of course not!

But I think that we shouldn't ascribe infallibility to pronouncements about the future made by any human being, no matter how well trained, thoughtful, and credible they may be.

As a Christian, I want to make responsible decisions about my life, my actions, and my votes.

So, when I hear what knowledgeable people tell me about the federal debt and its implications for the future or what climatologists say about global warming, to name two examples, I don't stick my head in the sand or go into panic mode. I consider, do what I can, and move on with my life.

This is possible because as a believer in Jesus Christ, I'm assured that I belong to the God Who is in the process of making a new future for His creation. And, because of the grace of God received by all who believe in Jesus, I get to be part of it!

Even with all my sin, faults, and imperfections, God is teaching me to pray with King David:

...I trust in You, O Lord;
I say, "You are my God."
My times are in Your hand...

[Psalm 31:14-15] 

Baseball's Greatness Captured

Lots of people tell me they don't like baseball because it's "too slow," "not enough action," "boring."

To me, that's all hooey!

I know that it's just a TV commercial, but this new ad from Dick's Sporting Goods, well captures the greatness of baseball. To those who have fallen in love with the game, every single pitch of every game packs all the drama and tension, each pitch calling for the sudden, thunderous action of a basketball overtime or football sudden death.

That's true even when there are no runners on the base paths. It's even true when teams are way behind their opponents in the late innings. You can never tell what might happen in a game in which the defense has possession of the ball!

Baseball is, in my book, the greatest game ever invented. THE. MOST. EXCITING. GAME. And I am so excited that spring training games are already being played!

Strange

I'm not sure what to make of this research at all. Does it add up to you?

MARCH 5, 2013

To Improve Your Math-Test Score, Write About Your Emotions First

Female research participants who were instructed to write about their current emotions for five minutes subsequently got an average of 15% more math problems right than other women, say Kathleen C. Burns of the University of Wisconsin and Stacy L. Friedman of the University of Massachusetts. The finding is in accord with past research showing that emotional expression has broad positive effects. It's unclear whether simply talking about feelings—as opposed to writing about them—before taking a test could also improve performance, the researchers say.

Source: The benefits of emotional expression for math performance

"Come Acropper"

Writer Gay Ingram blogs about the derivations of everyday expressions. Here, she tells us where the phrase, come acropper, comes from. You'll fall for it head over heels.

Holy Communion (Part 9, The Augsburg Confession)

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

This morning, we continue to consider what it means to be a Lutheran Christian. Our topic today is what we Lutherans believe about Holy Communion. To understand what Lutherans confess about Communion, it helps to consider how we have historically read the Bible.

The entire Lutheran movement is rooted in taking the Bible’s witness about God, including both the Old and New Testaments, seriously. Martin Luther, the Roman Catholic priest and scholar whose work with the Bible led him to discover anew the truth that human beings are saved from inevitable sin and death by God's grace through their faith in Jesus Christ alone and to the Reformation and the Lutheran movement wrote:

No violence is to be done to the words of God, whether by man or angel; but [the Scriptures] are to be retained in their simplest meaning wherever possible, and to be understood in their grammatical and literal sense unless the context plainly forbids it. 

More than one Lutheran pastor and theologian through the centuries has said that Lutheran Christians take the Bible as it comes, seeking to avoid imposing the preferences, prejudices, and prevailing philosophies of their own times on God’s eternal word.

So, for example, when a Lutheran views passages that say, “The mountains skipped like rams,” or “Let the hills sing for joy,” Lutherans don’t believe that mountains skipped or hills sang. Clearly, the Biblical writers in these instances were speaking metaphorically.

And the Bible “comes at us” with many forms of literary expression: history, poetry, song, wise adages, prophecy, and strange apocalyptic literature, to name a few.

There are passages of Scripture that are clear works of fiction, as in Jesus’ parables, stories Jesus made up to make important points. That’s why a Lutheran traveling in the Holy Land would never fall for the advertising of a hotel between Jerusalem and Jericho claiming to the be the inn at which the good Samaritan deposited the wounded man from Jesus’ parable about what it means to love one’s neighbor.

But Lutheran Christians have also historically believed that when the Bible witnesses to events with seriousness and consistency in places that don’t purport to be metaphor or parable, the plain sense of a passage is always to be preferred. This is why Lutheran Christians have historically never shied away from confessing that Jesus was born, miraculously, of a virgin’s womb; that He performed miracles as signs of His being God, with dominion over life and death; that He died on a cross for our sins; that He actually physically rose from the dead; and that faith in this Lord of heaven and earth is, as Jesus insisted repeatedly during His earthly ministry, the only way to forgiveness of sin and eternal life with God.

The documents we Lutherans have always said express our understanding of what it means to be Christians--from the Apostles’ Creed to The Augsburg Confession, from the Small Catechism to the Smalcald Articles--have always insisted that those facts about God and salvation that Scripture insists to be absolutely true are facts and truths we absolutely believe. While today’s Evangelical Lutheran Church in America has never repudiated this Lutheran understanding of Biblical truth, you will find that many of our pastors, theologians, bishops, and others do repudiate things like things like the virgin birth, the physical resurrection from the dead, and the necessity of faith in Christ for salvation, expressed in conferences, assemblies, official papers, and publications by our own publishing house and no one in the hierarchy of our denomination steps in to say, “No, actually, this is what Lutheran Christians confess.”

All of which leads us to Holy Communion and a simple verb, is.

Please pull out a Bible and turn to Mark 14:22. Three of the gospel writers and Paul write about Jesus’ institution of Holy Communion. And while John doesn't mention the institution of either Baptism or Communion, the two sacraments of the Church, He starts His account of Jesus’ ministry with the miracle of turning water into wine, symbolic of Baptism and and Communion, and describes how, within moments of Jesus’ death, a sword was driven through His side and out came water and blood. So, we can conclude that both sacraments are important. Look at what we’re told by Mark about the night when Jesus instituted Holy Communion: “And as they were eating, Jesus took bread, blessed and broke it, and gave it to them and said, ‘Take, eat; this is My body.” Then, look at verse 24, where Jesus says, “This is My blood of the new covenant, which is shared for many.”

Our Roman Catholic friends read this passage and, employing the Aristotelian philosophy favored by Saint Thomas Aquinas who was influenced by the Greek philosopher Aristotle, say that in Communion, bread and wine become Jesus’ body and blood and remain so beyond a congregation’s time of worship. This is why the bread is stored in a box called a tabernacle next to the altars of Roman Catholic sanctuaries.

Our Protestant friends say that the bread and the wine represent Christ’s body and blood and that Communion is a time, not to be re-membered to Christ and His Church of every time and place, as we believe, but only to recall what Jesus has done for us, a ceremonial memorial.

Lutherans have historically said, in effect, “It all depends on what your definition of is is.”

We believe that the bread is Christ’s body because Jesus says it is His body.

We believe that the wine is Christ’s blood because Jesus says it is His blood.

We believe that Christ’s body and blood are in, with, and under the bread and the wine of Holy Communion.

We have no way of understanding or explaining it. If we could explain it, we ourselves would be God...and we're not!

We only have Christ’s promise that when His words of promise, what we call the Words of Institution, are said again over the bread and the wine as His people worship, He comes to us again.

Holy Communion is a way that the risen Jesus, now ascended into heaven, can come to us and assure us of the truth of His promise that He is with us always, that He will never leave us nor forsake us.

It’s though Jesus is telling us, “I know that it’s hard to believe in Me or My promises when you can’t see me. But here’s My body. Here’s My blood. Taste and see the goodness of the Lord. See my wounds, touch my body. I am with you.”

Someone has said that Holy Communion is like “the hat on the invisible man.” If a man were invisible, you might not know he was around unless he put on a hat. We can’t see Jesus. But when we invoke His words of promise over bread and wine, He really is with us.

But Holy Communion is more than just an assurance of Christ’s presence with us, wonderful though that is. For those who trust in Christ when He says that He is in the bread and is in the wine, there is also assurance that His forgiveness of our sins--sins which would otherwise send us to eternal separation from God in hell--is ours.

Turn, please, to John 1:29. Early in Jesus’ ministry, John the Baptist catches sight of Jesus and says: “Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world.”

Before Jesus came into the world, God’s people would annually sacrifice unblemished lambs on the altar in Jerusalem. The lambs were stand-ins for themselves. The lambs died to take the punishment for sin that every human being deserves. The ancient Hebrews understood that blood had power. It contained the very power for life. Loss of too much blood brings loss of life. Blood is life.

That’s why, after Cain, a son of Adam and Eve, killed his brother Abel, God said that Abel’s blood was crying out to Him.

Many millenia later, when God’s people were slaves in Egypt, God delivered them from slavery through an action that, to this day, Jews celebrate at Passover. They smeared the blood of lambs on the doorposts of their dwellings and while the angel of death brought the deaths of firstborns all across Egypt, the angel passed over the homes of the Jews.

In a sense, as we receive Christ’s blood in Holy Communion, we are covered by the sacrifice of Himself that Christ made when He willingly went to the cross for us. The blood of Jesus cries out for us to say to God the Father, “This man belongs to Me. This woman is one of My own. This child is My child.”

This is why we should never receive the Sacrament flippantly or with anything other than the joy and reverence it deserves. I’m not saying here that you must affect a particular emotion in order to receive the bread and the wine. Fortunately, the power of Holy Communion doesn’t depend on how we’re feeling on any given day. Whether you’re sad or happy has no bearing on Christ’s promises, “This is my body”; “This is my blood.” But the Sacrament must be received with faith, even if that faith is only the size of a mustard seed. We must be willing to trust Christ when He promises that He is with us and that He brings us forgiveness of sin when He comes to us in the Sacrament.

This is what Paul is talking about when he says in 1 Corinthians: “Whoever, therefore, eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be answerable for the body and blood of the Lord. Examine yourselves, and only then eat of the bread and drink of the cup. For all who eat and drink without discerning the body, eat and drink judgment against themselves” (1 Corinthians 11:27-29).

Please open the buff and brown edition of The Augsburg Confession and turn to Article 10, "The Lord’s Supper":

Our [Lutheran] churches teach that the body and blood of Christ are truly present and distributed to those who eat the Lord’s Supper...They reject those who teach otherwise. 

Holy Communion is one of the greatest gifts a Christian can receive, which is why the people in the early Church received it every single time they worshiped.

It’s why Martin Luther and the early Lutherans received Holy Communion every single Sunday they worshiped. Luther also offered it every single Wednesday of every week and on other occasions as well.

It was only in America, where there was a shortage of pastors, that every Sunday celebration of Holy Communion fell into disuse.

If a church has a regularly called minister of a Word and Sacrament and Holy Communion isn’t being celebrated every single week, that church is a bit like a motorcycle with one wheel, trying to move along with only one of the blessings God intends to give His people every time they gather to worship Him.

But no matter how often the Sacrament is shared, if those who receive Holy Communion don’t believe in Jesus, believe in the Word of God in the Bible, or believe in Christ’s promises regarding Holy Communion, the elements are only bread and wine.

As Luther says in the Small Catechism, we must believe in Christ’s promise, “Given and shed for you.”

When we do, we are blessed beyond all telling!

5 Things to Do When You Get Bad News

Whether it's learning that someone at work has betrayed you, that you're being downsized out of a job, or that strange symptom you've been suffering has yielded a frightening diagnosis from the doctor, we all get bad news. What should you do when you get bad news? Here are five suggestions, gleaned from the Bible.

1. Talk it over with God. As a Christian, I believe that God became human in the person of Jesus Christ in order to take the punishment we deserve for our sins--death--and to rise again in order to open up eternity with God to all who turn from sin and turn to Jesus as their only hope. Jesus says: "Come to Me, all you that are weary and carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest" (Matthew 11:28).

Whenever we receive bad news, we can churn with frenzy, a sure recipe for making bad decisions. Instead, go to the God we know through Jesus. Tell Him what you're going through. Spend time with Him. The bad news won't go away. But God will give you the peace and power you need to face it.

Talking things over with God when we get bad news isn't just about dumping our woes on Him. Prayer isn't a monologue. To pray also means spending time reading God's Word, letting Him speak to us. In the New Testament we're told: "All scripture [which we now know as the Old and New Testaments] is inspired by God and is useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, so that everyone who belongs to God [that happens through faith in Christ] may be proficient, equipped for every good work" (2 Timothy 3:16-17).

2. Seek the advice of faithful Christian friends. Proverbs 15:22 says: "Without counsel, plans go wrong, but with many advisers they succeed."

God has especially granted to every member of the local church particular spiritual gifts. He does this, we're taught, "To each [Christian believer] is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good" (1 Corinthians 12:7). So, if you're a Christian, remember that in your local congregation, whatever its size, there's likely to be someone gifted by God to help your or advise you on how best to address your bad news.

But even when there are no ready strategies, God gives the fellowship of the Church to lighten our burdens. Referring to the second portion of Jesus' great command that we love others as we love ourselves, Paul tells Christians: "Bear one another's burdens, and in this way you will fulfill the law of Christ" (Galatians 6:2).

When we share and bear each other's burdens, those burdens get easier to bear and we draw strength from one another. "Two are better than one...For if they fall, one will lift up the other; but woe to one who is alone and falls and does not have another to help...A threefold cord is not easily broken" (Ecclesiastes 4:9-12).

3. Make plans, but don't let your planning turn into worry about tomorrow. The Bible tells us that it's wise to make plans (Luke 14:31), but we should be ready for the curve balls that come at us in this imperfect world. We also need to be ready for God's vetoes of our plans.

James writes in the New Testament: "...you do not even know what tomorrow will bring...Instead, you ought to say, 'If the Lord wishes, we will live and do this or that'" (James 4:14-15).

Jesus says, "...do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will bring worries of its own. Today's trouble is enough for today" (Matthew 6:34).

Make plans, but take each day as it comes.

4. In the midst of troubles, let God love you. Jesus' death and resurrection were for you. The good news that Jesus wants to give you life with God, not just after you die and leave this world, but right now, trumps all bad news. You may feel powerless; but when you let God love you, bad news is powerless to destroy your hope, peace, or joy.

When you surrender your life, including all your troubles and your sins, to Jesus and let them be covered by His grace and goodness, you'll live each day in the assurance that nothing can separate you from the love God gives through Jesus Christ (Romans 8:31-39).

5. Remember that God won't let go of you; so, don't you let go of God! Millions of believers in Jesus Christ have endured all sorts of troubles, experiencing what the Bible calls "the peace that passes all understanding" (Philippians 4:7).

You can know that peace too. In Deuteronomy 31:6, God promised His people, and in Hebrews 13:5, He promised again to all people who believe in Him through Jesus Christ, that He will never leave or forsake us.

That promise is like a blank check from God written to be used you whenever you get hit by bad news. Cash it!