The King Who Ignores Our Expectations

[This was prepared to share during the morning worship services of Living Water Lutheran Church in Springboro, Ohio.]

Matthew 11:2-15
Life sometimes throws us curveballs.

The curveballs can be good or bad.

But whether good or bad, they break from our expectations.

They can leave us breathless with horror.

Or dazzled with wonder.

Grateful beyond expression.

Saddened beyond telling.

A man looks forward to retirement, expecting long years of enjoyment with his wife, but learns he has Stage 4 cancer weeks before his retirement date.

A woman, long hurt by life, assuming that she will always be alone, suddenly and amazingly falls in love with a wonderful man she hadn’t dared to hope existed for her.

Expectations dashed.

Expectations exceeded.

The curveballs of life are enough to counsel us, I think, to check our expectations.

For believers in the God Who has revealed Himself to the world in Jesus Christ, it means, above all I think, learning to pray the hardest prayer of all: “Thy will be done.”

I can tell you that much of my life as a Christian, even to this day, has been spent learning to conform my expectations to the will of God, to truly learn to pray with my Savior, “Not as I will, but as you will."

I have not yet learned how to fully yield to God’s will for my life over against my expectations of what my life should be.

I have not yet fully learned what Paul teaches in 1 Corinthians 6:19, that my life is not really my own. And that is doubly true. It's true first, because I didn't bring my life into being. And it's true second, because Jesus Christ died and rose to give me new and everlasting life. Still I struggle over proprietary rights with God. I struggle to accept that my life does not belong to me and God doesn't dance to the tune I punch in on life's juke box.

Maybe you struggle with this just like I do.

If that is our common struggle here this morning (or one of them), our Gospel lesson for today tells us that we are not alone.

John the Baptist had certain expectations of the Messiah or the Christ. Messiah (Meshiah) is the Hebrew word for Anointed One; Christ, Christos in the original Greek of the New Testament, carries the same meaning.

John rightly understood that the Messiah, Who He correctly identified as Jesus, was going to bring judgment on this old world of sin.

John also understood that Jesus was to be the legitimate King of the Jews Who would bring the Kingdom of heaven to this earth.

But John’s expectations of what that meant, of what kind of King Jesus would be, of what the kingdom looked like, were very different from what Jesus seemed to be as Jesus traveled from place to place, preaching, teaching, and performing miraculous signs.

John was looking for a king who, acting in God’s righteousness, would supplant the corrupt and violent Herod, the king who had slapped John into jail in his own house because John’s proclamation of a new king threatened him.

John wondered what was going on.

Jesus wasn’t what he had expected.

That’s where our Gospel lesson starts and this morning, I hope you don’t mind, I want to focus on just the first few verses of the lesson today. Please go to it, Matthew 11:2-6 (page 682 in the pew Bibles). It begins: “When John heard in prison what Christ was doing, he sent his disciples to ask him, ‘Are you the one who was to come, or should we expect someone else?’ Jesus replied, ‘Go back and report to John what you hear and see: The blind receive sight, the lame walk, those who have leprosy are cured, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the good news is preached to the poor...’”

John was all-in for Jesus. Yet Jesus wasn’t doing any of the things John had expected of God's Anointed One!

Jesus hadn’t taken the reins of political power, hadn’t purified the temple and the priesthood, hadn’t put the righteous into power, hadn’t established the kingdom of heaven.

In His response, Jesus’ told John He needed to change his expectations. There was to be more to the kingdom of heaven than judgment!

Do you remember what happened when, near the beginning of His ministry, Jesus went to His hometown of Nazareth? To define His mission as the Messiah and the Kingdom He had come to earth to bring, Jesus chose to read from Isaiah 61:1-2. Please turn to it on page 517. It says: “The Spirit of the Sovereign LORD is on me, because the LORD has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim freedom for the captives and release from darkness for the prisoners, to proclaim the year of the LORD's favor and the day of vengeance of our God, to comfort all who mourn...”

Jesus does bring judgment, of course. It’s the judgment we pass on ourselves when deciding whether or not to receive the offer of life and forgiveness and joy that comes from God through Jesus alone. As Jesus told Nicodemus: “This is the verdict: Light has come into the world, but men loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil.” And the aged Simeon said of Jesus when the Lord was only eight days old, brought to the temple by Mary and Joseph to be circumcised: "This child is destined to cause the falling and rising of many in Israel, and to be a sign that will be spoken against, so that the thoughts of many hearts will be revealed."

People cast judgment on themselves--we cast judgment on ourselves--whenever we choose the darkness of life without God and when we choose sin over the brightness of forgiveness and fresh life that comes from Jesus, the Light of the world.

But judgment is not ultimately why Jesus came into the world.

And it isn’t why He will one day return to the world.

Jesus also told Nicodemus: “God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him.”

All who believe in the Name of Jesus are saved to live in the kingdom of heaven where, Revelation 21:4 says that Jesus “will wipe away every tear from [believers’] eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.”

This is why Jesus presents the evidence for His being Messiah to the emissaries of John the Baptist that He does. The words Jesus cites come from Isaiah 35:5-6. Please go there, page 497. Here, God’s ultimate intentions--beyond sin and death and judgment--and the content of life in His kingdom are described: “Then will the eyes of the blind be opened and the ears of the deaf unstopped. Then will the lame leap like a deer, and the mute tongue shout for joy. Water [living water?] will gush forth in the wilderness and streams in the desert.”

Jesus didn't come into the world to force God’s kingdom on us.

He came so that all who trust in Him will receive a new Eden, an eternal city where there is no darkness, only light; no death, only life; no despair, only hope!

Jesus performed the signs of the coming Kingdom so that people would not feel forced or coerced into following Him but so that, in seeing, they would be open to believing in--to betting their lives on--Jesus and Jesus only! And so that by believing in Jesus, that kingdom would invade their (our) daily lives in this world and, one day, at what one of the old hymns called “the consummation,” believers in Christ will live in that new Eden, the new heavens and the new earth, the new creation.

In essence, Jesus tells John's disciples, “Tell John about the signs."

Then, Jesus says: “Blessed is the man who does not fall away on account of me."

In verse 11 of our lesson, Jesus says: “among those born of women there has not risen anyone greater than John the Baptist.” Yet John, like you and me and every other human being on the planet this morning, was left with a critical decision when considering the life, deeds, signs, death, and resurrection of Jesus:

• Would he yield to the testimony of Christ’s activities on earth and the promptings of the Holy Spirit to leave himself open to accepting that Jesus is the One Who came into the world to destroy the fallen kingdoms of this world and to bring God’s kingdom into being?
• Or would John turn his back on Jesus because Jesus didn’t match the limited expectations he had of the Savior?

I have known people who have rejected Jesus because Jesus didn’t turn out to be what they wanted Him to be.

He didn’t do what they wanted Him to do when they wanted Him to do it.

He didn’t thwart the unfair boss.

He didn’t save the marriage.

He didn’t help them get into the National Honor Society.

He didn’t cure a loved one’s cancer.

I don’t say any of this to condemn those who reject Jesus because they have been hurt! Through the years, it’s been my experience that atheists are generally more sensitive about the hurts of the world than are we Christians. (To the shame of we Christians.)

It’s that very sensitivity and the belief that life in this world should be better than it is that leads many atheists to spurn God.

But, when I was an atheist, I had to ask myself, “Where does my sense that things ought to be better come from if not from the God Who made us for something better?”

The truth is that a godless universe would give us no reason to hold up things like love, justice, or grace as ways of life to which human beings should aspire.

If we are all the result of some random collision of elements derived from some unknown force and if all of life is a contest for the survival of the fittest, our stubborn human ideas about right and wrong would be inexplicable.

For me then, atheism, though perhaps understandable as a reaction to life, simply doesn't account for all of life's realities.

Others become atheists because, like John the Baptist who wrestled with doubts in a cell in Herod’s prison, the God they tried to believe in didn’t meet their expectations. Their picture of what God should be like was based on their preferences, not on Who God has revealed Himself to be. They tried to domesticate God.

In the first volume of C.S. Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia, in which four children from our world visit an alternative universe and are told about Aslan. Aslan is a figure of Christ in Lewis' books, "the great King, Son of the Emperor-beyond-the-sea." When informed that Aslan was a lion, one of the children asks, "Is he safe?" The reply: "Course he isn't safe. But he's good. He's the king..."

Jesus is like that. He is the King. He is good. But if we're looking for safety, we should look elsewhere for our Savior. Jesus calls us to turn away from the safety of our favorite sins, the safety of lives turned inward for our own ends to a life lived for Him and for our neighbor.

It’s at those moments when God fails to meet our expectations that we need to consider Jesus. We need to look at Him closely.

The gospels’ accounts about Jesus’ time on earth tell us all we need to know to have saving faith and to expand our faith in Jesus, despite the hard realities of life.

The four Gospels in the New Testament--Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John--make it possible for us to do exactly what Jesus said that John the Baptist should do: Look at what He did and why. See how He had control of life and death, yet never used that control for selfish purposes, not even self-preservation when they nailed His hands and feet to a cross. See the compassion of God evident in Jesus.

In effect, Jesus says, “Decide for yourself from the evidence Who I am!” Look at Jesus closely and we see the God of the universe Who may be different from our expectations, but Who is exactly the King we need!

Toward the end of his Gospel, another John writes: “Jesus did many other miraculous signs in the presence of his disciples [including, most miraculous of all, His death and resurrection], which are not recorded in this book. But these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name.” If you would know God, look to Jesus!

Someone once wrote that life in this world is “nasty, brutish, and short.”* There is truth in that, although there is also much beauty, love, and wonder in this world.

I got another precious glimpse of that yesterday. One of the littlest of our Christmas carolers approached us in the kitchen after we'd been singing in the neighborhood, her nose running. She asked for a tissue. There were no tissues there, so I handed her a few napkins from the dispenser. She took the napkins and blew her nose as well as she could, then handed the napkins back to me. If that isn't precious and beautiful, I don't know what is!

Beauty and wonder still rise stubbornly "like grass through cement" in this fallen world. Despite our sin and the calamities it has brought to our life on this planet, we see glimpses of how perfect this world was meant to be, how dependent and trusting we were made to be toward God and one another, every day.

But if we expect that Jesus is going to make this world--unrepentant and self-driven--into Eden, we misunderstand Him.

If we think that Jesus has laid down a political program by which people of can live out certain principles and give the world a makeover.

One of the worst sins we commit in post-modern Christianity, whether conservative or liberal, is the sin of idolatry, turning Jesus into the God we prefer, replacing His deity and Lordship with our particular political preferences and programs so that we can get what we want in this world. That, friends, is a scandal!

And it's stupid because this world is under a death sentence!

This world must die so that the new world, the new Eden can come into being.

We must die--in the waters of Baptism and in daily repentance and renewal--so that the Kingdom can enter us and so that we can be part of the Kingdom.

The God we know in Jesus, “able to do immeasurably more than we ask or imagine” has bigger plans for us than remodeling this dying creation.

Eternal plans.

Plans not to harm us, but to give us a future no longer darkened by sin or death or futility.

He has come and will come again to establish a kingdom in which tears are dried, the lame walk, even run, and the aggrieved know joy.

Jesus is the sign and the seal of God’s good intentions for the human race.

His death and resurrection are God’s guarantee of life free from sin and death for all who dare to surrender to Jesus Christ.

The kingdom Jesus died and rose to bring into being is living in and among those who believe in Him, the Church, despite the imperfections of we individual Christians.

We are even today empowered by His Spirit to give sight to the blind, cleansing to the leprous, life to the dead, food to the hungry, shelter to the homeless, and good news that brings everlasting life.

We see that in the many ministries pursued by the people of Living Water.

May we remain open to being conduits of Jesus’ kingdom each day.

May we become ever more receptive to going wherever our King calls us to be.

And may others see the signs of Jesus in our life and so, with us, come to everlasting life in His Name.

Amen

*The writer was Thomas Hobbes. He was actually specifically referencing war. But in my lifetime, war has been a sufficiently central feature of human existence that I feel no hesitation in saying that it reflects life in this world.

The Unwanted Guest?

Audio version.

Ready to See Jesus

Audio version.

Who's Your King?

Live version.

Stand Firm!

Live version.

Thoughts on Advent Preparations

Pastor David Wendel writes in today's installment of Amen, Come Lord Jesus!, a devotional for the members and friends of the North American Lutheran Church:

As a parish pastor, I was often asked, “If Advent is a time of preparation, what should I be doing to prepare?” My answer was often, “Love the Lord your God...and your neighbor as yourself!”

Good thoughts!

The Unwanted Guest?

[This was prepared for sharing with the people and guests of Living Water Lutheran Church in Springboro, Ohio, for this morning's worship services.]

Matthew 3:1-12
If you were to make a list of all the Biblical people of faith you wouldn’t want to invite over to the house for an evening of holiday revelry, John the Baptist might be at the top. On the face of it, John seems like such a downer! 

But I think, we need to revise our estimation of John the Baptist a bit.

Like you and me, John was a believer in Jesus. Even in his mother’s womb, Luke’s Gospel tells us, the Holy Spirit prompted John to recognize Mary, who had come to visit John’s parents in the Judean hill country, as the mother of the Lord Jesus. And when, after Jesus had spent many years in Nazareth then presented Himself for John’s baptism, John demurred. “I need to be baptized by You, and do you come to me?” In the fourth gospel, we're told that John the Baptist, pointed Jesus out and said, "Behold, the Lamb of God, Who takes away the sin of the world."

But sometimes, John's faith vied with his doubts. As we’ll  be reminded in next Sunday’s Gospel lesson, John was far from perfect. There, we'll be reminded that though he believed in Jesus, Jesus didn't seem to be quite the King that John had expected. He would send people to ask Jesus, "Are You the One. Or is there going to be someone else?" Like you and me sometimes maybe, he doubted the Savior in Whom he believed.

But John kept believing in Jesus, however imperfectly.

There's a comfort to be derived in that. God only uses imperfect people to be His hands and feet in the world.

Despite his imperfections though, John was God’s choice for a ministry that had two basic elements:

• to call people to repentance;
• to announce the coming of the kingdom of heaven through the Christ, the Messiah, God’s anointed King.

John’s message is only a downer to those who have no desire to repent or be part of God’s Kingdom. For others, those willing to follow Jesus and to give up on calling the shots in the universe, John’s message brings, “comfort and joy”! (Even when that message makes us squirm.)

Please turn to the Gospel lesson for today, Matthew 3:1-12 (page 676 in the pew Bibles). Matthew begins our lesson with words like those often used by Old Testament prophets to describe moments of decisive action by God: “In those days John the Baptist came, preaching in the Desert of Judea...”

The prophets often used phrases like "in those days." They signaled a moment when God had or, the prophets said, He would act.

The New Testament has two main words it uses for time. There's chronos, chronological time. Then there's kairos, God's time.

God acts on His own timetable. It's because we want God to bow to our chronological timetables that we're inclined to cry to heaven, "How long, Lord? How long do I have to wait?"

God acts at precisely the right moments for His purposes and for our good. At the kairos moment, God prompted John, "Now John. Now is the time for you to start preaching the message I give to you."

And God tells John to do this important ministry in the strangest of venues. In the wilderness by the banks of the Lower Jordan River. If John had gone to a business or church growth consultant, the wilderness is not the place they would have told him to set up shop. That wilderness area is composed partly of desert, but mostly of rocky terrain that contains sparse pastureland that can't stand much grazing. It's a good for nothing place where nobody lives unless they have to. Few would have lived there. Few would have gone there.

Yet, as we'll see, many flocked to hear John preach. The takeaway is simple: If God's hand is in a ministry, God will connect people to it. If God's hand isn't in a ministry, a crowd might be attracted, but it's doubtful that anyone will get connected to God.

Verse two: [John said:] “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is near." John is bleak, isn’t he? Or is he?

Turn, please to Matthew 4:17 (page 677). “From that time on Jesus began to preach, ‘Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is near.’"

John the Baptist was the last of the prophets who pointed, as a future event, to the kingdom of heaven that Jesus died and rose to bring to those who follow Him. We have a stereotype of prophets and of the Old Testament as being surly, demanding, vindictive, while we see Jesus and the New Testament as jolly, passive pushovers.

Yet, here we see that John preached the precise message as Jesus.

That message has two parts. It’s really the message of Advent, the message of Christian faith.

First, repent. We mentioned last Sunday that the word usually translated as repent in our English translations is metanoia, literally meaning I change my mind.

But to repent means a lot more than changing one’s mind. It's not like saying, "Blue used to be my favorite color. Now it's red."

In fact, in repentance, we own the fact that we are incapable of changing our own minds.

We may want to see things God’s way, but we can’t.

We may want to stop sinning, but we’re too into it to conquer it in our own power.

In repentance, we ask God to give us a new mind, new eyes, and a new way of living.

We ask that God will impose a new direction on our lives, His direction.

To shift us from following what our sinful impulses tell us to do--to do what I want to do whoever might get hurt; to follow my thoughts, emotions, or wills irrespective of what God says a “still more excellent way.” And, instead, we ask God to help us follow where He leads.

The Bible teaches us that it isn’t even we who author our desire to be in sync with God. That too, is a gift, tendered to us through the Holy Spirit.

In repentance, we yield to the desire for forgiveness and to the One Who gave that desire to us!

But what’s clear from John’s words--and from Jesus’ words--is that repentance is not a one-time proposition. The word for repent here is uttered in the present tense: Metanoieite. And in Greek that means John was saying: “Keep repenting!” “Keep turning back to God!”

You see, God understands us. He really does, better than we understand ourselves!

Repentance is more than sorrow for sin.

It’s also the willingness to keep coming back to God for guidance and forgiveness and grace.

Some people offer what they call repentance and say, “From here on in, I will be a good person. I will do good deeds. I will avoid sin.”

But true repentance says, “I can’t be a good person or do good deeds or avoid sin on my own, Lord. Kill my sinful self again today and help me to walk with you.” 

That is not a downer message from John the Baptist.

It’s a message that urges us to keep following the God we know in Jesus Christ, even when we mess up.

Repent every day, live a life of repentance, of turning back to God, because God wants to live beside us now and in perfection in eternity. That should be an uplifting message!

The second part of John’s message was, “the kingdom of heaven is near.”

However crazy or indecipherable our lives can be, we can be sure that God is never far from from us.

That was true even before God took on human flesh in Jesus Christ and died and rose to set all who believe in Him free from sin and death.

It’s even more true now.

The risen Jesus promises to always be with us!

Verse 3: “This is he who was spoken of through the prophet Isaiah: ‘A voice of one calling in the desert, ‘Prepare the way for the Lord, make straight paths for him.”’"

The words are from Isaiah 40:3. These were originally words to God’s people Israel when they were exiled. A voice would proclaim that the time was near when God would come and lead His people back home.

Matthew sees that John is like Isaiah’s voice. He came to prepare for God Himself--Jesus--to come into this world and lead us from the wilderness of sin and death into the kingdom of heaven.

In his proclamation that people repent and believe that God’s kingdom was close, John was preparing people to meet Jesus.

It’s how we prepare to meet Jesus too.

We turn from sin, asking God’s help to live as He wills, and we trust that in Jesus, God is with us always!

Verse 4: “John's clothes were made of camel's hair, and he had a leather belt around his waist. His food was locusts and wild honey.” They wouldn’t like John’s attire on those TV fashion shows.

In Malachi 4, in the Old Testament, God promised that before the day of judgment, He would send the prophet Elijah and he would turn people’s hearts back toward the ways of God. Later in Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus makes clear that, at the least, John the Baptist played that prophetic role because Jesus’ ministry, as we saw last week, is the prerequisite for the judgment and the final fulfillment of His kingdom.

In 2 Kings 1:8, we’re told that Elijah was as much of a fashionista as John: “He had a garment of hair and had a leather belt around his waist.”

When John started preaching in his attire, when he only ate food that could be gathered, just as had been true of the ancient Israelites during their wilderness journey before crossing the Jordan into God’s promised land, people gave John their attention.

Verses 5 and 6: “People went out to him from Jerusalem and all Judea and the whole region of the Jordan. Confessing their sins, they were baptized by him in the Jordan River.” We prepare the way for Christ to enter our lives with power and grace when we clear away the obstructions. When we clear away our sin by confessing them to God.

Verses 7-10: “But when he saw many of the Pharisees and Sadducees coming to where he was baptizing, he said to them: 'You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the coming wrath? Produce fruit in keeping with repentance. And do not think you can say to yourselves, "We have Abraham as our father." I tell you that out of these stones God can raise up children for Abraham. The ax is already at the root of the trees, and every tree that does not produce good fruit will be cut down and thrown into the fire."”

We know the Pharisees and Saducees. Good religious folks. Pillars of the faith community. But also smug. Certain that because they were genetic descendants of Abraham, they were on solid ground. There’s no indication that they came to be baptized. Only to check things out. John calls them for being just good church members.

But God doesn’t want church members; God wants disciples!

God wants disciples who make other disciples.

He wants people who, like John the Baptist, follow the Lord, however imperfectly; not people who think that once they’re in the club, they might volunteer for this or that, but never attempt aligning themselves with Christ’s call to follow Him!

In Verses 11 and 12, John says: “‘I baptize you with water for repentance. But after me will come one who is more powerful than I, whose sandals I am not fit to carry. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and with fire. His winnowing fork is in his hand, and he will clear his threshing floor, gathering his wheat into the barn and burning up the chaff with unquenchable fire.’"

Before John, there were baptisms in Judea. They were self-administered. New converts to Judaism washed the sin of being Gentiles away before embracing the purity of the Jewish people. Some Jewish sects asked people to baptize themselves as a sign of renewed commitment to God. John was the first person ever to administer a baptism to other people.

But as John makes clear, his baptism was very different from the one that Jesus would administer, the one that Christians undergo at baptismal fonts like ours.

John’s baptism was only symbolic, the washing of water symbolizing the washing that true repentance brings to our lives.

But the Baptism that Jesus commands, the Sacrament, brings life from the Holy Spirit and the fire of God, burning away impurity and lighting our way through this life to eternity. That is good news. “All who believe and are baptized shall be saved,” Jesus says. John points us to eternal salvation in Christ!

Finally, John, talks about Jesus as judge of all humanity.

But in truth, what we learn from John the Baptist is that, in an ultimate sense, Jesus judges no human being. We are the ones who decide the judgment of eternity over our lives.

We pass sentence on ourselves by the choices we make each day.

The choice we are called to make is not to be perfect or good or religious.

The choice we’re called to make is to live each day in repentance, acknowledging our sins and imperfections, our need of daily reconstruction by Christ, our need of the crucified and risen Christ Himself.

When, by faith, we let Christ and His forgiveness into our lives, we’re walking toward God and His promises for time and eternity and we experience the truth that the Kingdom of heaven is truly near!

We might think that John would be an uncomfortable Christmastime guest in our homes.

But for all his rough edges, all of his incomplete knowledge, and the difficulty of his message, if we truly listen to him, we can hear a man who pointed us to trust in Jesus.

We can hear the Gospel about Jesus, which is good news of great joy for all people. I like to think that a guy like John would have a place at my table any time. Amen!

Ready to See Jesus

[This is the sermon prepared for worship with the people and guests of Living Water Lutheran Church this morning. It turned out a little differently in the delivery at both services though. Living Water is in Springboro, Ohio. Worship is at 9:01 and 10:32 each Sunday morning. On Christmas Eve, we'll be having Family Christmas Eve worship at 4:00 PM and Traditional Candlelight worship at 7:00 PM.]

Matthew 24:36-44
In our encounter with Jesus today, we're reminded of an important truth: God makes promises. But God doesn't make appointments.


The greatest promise God ever kept and made is that He sent His only Son Jesus to die and to rise for us, so that all who believe in Him have their sins covered by God's grace and they have everlasting life with God.

That fulfilled promise ought to cause us to ascribe complete credibility to God's promises. But it is as yet by faith that God calls us to believe another promise. Jesus talks about it today.

Today is the First Sunday of Advent. Advent is a word that means coming. In today’s Gospel lesson, Jesus says that He will come to us, either at the ends of our own lives or at the end of life in this world, like a thief, at an unexpected moment.

Jesus won't have an appointment. We don’t know when any of us may die. We don’t know when this world will end and God’s eternal Kingdom will be ushered into being in its fullness.

But that shouldn’t frighten us. In fact, the prospect of meeting our Lord face to face should bring us joy and anticipation.

And it should remind us to get ready.

Let’s look at the Gospel lesson, Matthew 24:36-44 (page 695). 

Chapters 24 and 25 of Matthew’s Gospel comprise the fifth of five discourses by Jesus that Matthew records. This one deals with the end times of this world.

Much of the discussion is triggered by a question posed by the disciples in Matthew 24:3: “Tell us, what will happen, and what will be the sign of your coming and of the end of the age?”

The disciples want to know when Jesus will come back and how they will know His arrival is impending.

Jesus answers them, really, by ignoring their question. Look at verse 36, where He tackles the question of when: “No one knows about that day or hour, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father.”

Only the sovereign God of the universe knows the day of Jesus’ coming to this world. This may ruffle our egos. But it’s not a bad thing for us that God isn’t subject to our timelines or expectations. God operates on His own timetable and He doesn’t consult any human being.

In fact, Jesus says that not even He knows when the Father will send Him back to the earth. If you want to blow your mind sometime, try to figure out how one of the three Persons of the Trinity--Father, Son, and Holy Spirit--can somehow keep a secret from one of the other Persons of the Trinity. I can’t explain it. But then, I’m still working on understanding the Trinity.

I’ve concluded that the God we can completely figure out isn’t God! I’m content with that!

“So,” we, like the first disciples, wonder, “how will we know when Jesus is coming?” Look at verses 37 to 39, please. Jesus says: “As it was in the days of Noah, so it will be at the coming of the Son of Man. For in the days before the flood, people were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, up to the day Noah entered the ark; and they knew nothing about what would happen until the flood came and took them all away. That is how it will be at the coming of the Son of Man.”

Now, you and I know from reading Genesis 6-9, where the experiences of Noah are narrated, that God had instructed Noah to build the ark as a place of sanctuary for those God was saving--just as Jesus has established the fellowship of the Church as sanctuary so that all who live by faith in Christ will be saved from sin and death.

We know that God did that because of His plan to destroy a human race given over to sin and start over again with Noah and his family, the only ones left on the planet who trusted in God.

But Jesus isn’t talking about the moral lives of the people in Noah’s world here. He’s talking about innocent human activities. Eating, drinking, marrying, giving in marriage. This is normal stuff. And there's nothing wrong with them.

Jesus is saying that everything was normal in the days before the flood. There were no signs to show people that cataclysm was about to befall them, that they were soon to be swept away by a flood. Only those who were ready, who were dialed into God and the will of God--Noah and his family--knew that anything was up, that there was anything for which the world needed to prepare.

The people of Noah's time were going about the business of their lives, not knowing that the God Who doesn’t make appointments was about to act decisively to change the course of history, to change their lives for eternity.

Jesus says we all need to be similarly prepared for His coming to us.

In verses 40 and 41, Jesus goes on to say: “Two men will be in the field; one will be taken and the other left. Two women will be grinding with a hand mill; one will be taken and the other left.”

The word translated as taken here can more literally rendered, taken to one’s self. At the moment when Jesus comes back to our world, He will take some people to Himself, while others will be left. “He will judge the living and the dead,” is how we confess it in the Apostles' Creed.

It’s not politically correct to say, but Jesus and the Bible make clear that while God loves everybody with equal passion and commitment, only some will be saved. Jesus will only take some to Himself.

From everything that Jesus has said so far, we know that the ones who will be taken to Himself are those who are ready for His return.

All of which is why Jesus says what He does next, in verses 42-44: "Therefore keep watch, because you do not know on what day your Lord will come. But understand this: If the owner of the house had known at what time of night the thief was coming, he would have kept watch and would not have let his house be broken into. So you also must be ready, because the Son of Man will come at an hour when you do not expect him.”

Let’s review what Jesus has told us so far about the day of His coming.

First, He hasn’t told us when it will happen.

Second, He hasn’t told us about any clues by which we might anticipate it.

Searching for signs will be an exercise in futility. In fact, the condition of the world just before Jesus’ coming might be the opposite of what we would expect.

From what Jesus says, everyone in the world will be going about their daily business, in seeming peace, without anxieties or worries on the day before He comes to us.

There could be universal prosperity, ceasefires, no violence on our streets or in our homes, and full employment on that day.

It’s possible that everyone’s teeth will be pearly white without a single cavity.

On that day before Jesus’ return, there might be no volcanic eruptions, tsunamis, recessions, depressions, or traffic jams to tip us off to how close the world is to final judgment or the new heaven and the new earth Jesus will return to this world to bring.

The lion could, for the moment, be ignoring the lamb and Republicans and Democrats might actually be working together.

But when Jesus comes to the earth, for some still living in this world, it will be a cataclysmic event, judgment, separation from God and from others, an eternity of bitter, regretful aloneness.

For others still living in the world, it will bring unspeakable joy, an eternity of fellowship with God and with others also saved by grace through faith.

Similarly, for some, death will bring cataclysm.

For others, it will bring joy.

How we meet Jesus is simply a question of our readiness.



And our readiness is, I believe, composed of two elements.

First: Do we believe in Jesus Christ? Meaning, do we trust Him enough to repent for our sins, receive His forgiveness and the power of the Holy Spirit for living, and trust Jesus with our whole lives, from our past to our eternal future?

Faith in Jesus is really about turning to Him and saying each day, “Thy will be done. Be my God. By your grace, ‘I am Yours and none other’s. I am Yours alone!’”

Jesus says in Matthew 24:13: “...the one who stands firm to the end will be saved.”

In his book, The Great Divorce, C.S. Lewis writes: “There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, ‘Thy will be done,’ and those to whom God says, in the end, ‘Thy will be done.’ All that are in hell, choose it. Without that self-choice there could be no hell. No soul that seriously and constantly desires joy will ever miss it. Those who seek find. To those who knock it is opened.”

Those who submit themselves to God’s will to save from sin and death all who entrust themselves to His Son are prepared for the day of Jesus’ return, whenever He comes.

Let me refine this discussion of faith in Christ a bit. Believing in Jesus also entails what New Testament scholar N.T. Wright calls “keeping short accounts with God.”

Our sins, as Jesus teaches us, are trespasses on God’s holiness, debts to God. People of faith live in what Martin Luther called “daily repentance and renewal,” trusting Christ so much that we daily and courageously lay ourselves before God and ask Him, “Show me my secret sin. Show the sin I am regularly committing that I don’t even see.” A pastor wrote to me just this past week about praying in this way. “I prayed,” she wrote, “that God would reveal my unknown sins to me one Lent--no question that the prayer was answered. It took a little time, but WOW!”

That pastor showed courage...and faith. She trusted her Savior with her whole life. It led to a wow moment in which she was able to place another set of sins in Jesus’ feet, receive His cleansing forgiveness, and experience the renewing power of the Holy Spirit in her life. Her faith was deepened.

We will never be able to name all our sins. (At least I know that I can't!) Sin is too intrinsic to our natures for that. And, this side of our resurrection, you and I will not be perfect. We will always have reason to rely on God’s compassionate forgiveness and love!

A passage of Scripture that gives me incredible comfort when I consider my own sinfulness is Psalm 103:11-14 (page 418 in the pew Bibles): “For as high as the heavens are above the earth, so great is his love for those who fear him; as far as the east is from the west, so far has he removed our transgressions from us. As a father has compassion on his children, so the Lord has compassion on those who fear him; for he knows how we are formed, he remembers that we are dust.”

Isn’t that rich and wonderful? We are ready to meet Jesus, first and foremost, when we believe in Jesus and trust in Him enough to seek to keep our relationship through daily honest, patient prayers of repentance in which our God renews us daily in His grace.

There is a second aspect of being ready to meet Jesus. Jesus talks about it elsewhere in Matthew’s Gospel. We’ll talk more about them all when we have those texts for our lessons later in the Church Year. But it boils down to this: We are ready when we are engaged in service to God and others in the Name of Jesus. As one commentator has pointed out: “It is in service to others that we prepare for [Jesus’ appearance in our lives]...”

That doesn’t mean that we earn our way into the grace of God. What it does mean is this: The more we trust--the more we believe--in Jesus, the more God will set us free from the paralysis of self-concern, self-analysis, self-absorption.

The central questions of our lives will increasingly cease to be, “Am I happy?” “How can I get ahead?” or “What’s in it for me?”

Instead, confident in the grace and love and power and hope and peace God gives to those who make themselves clay in the nail-scarred hands of Jesus, the more God will set us free to be our true selves.

We were made to love God and love our neighbors, to serve God and serve our neighbors. Sin prevents us from living in this way. The forgiveness of sin sets us free to do so.

A Methodist theologian, Albert Outler, now gone but then in his sixties, once confessed in a sermon, “For forty years, I’ve gotten it wrong. I told people, ‘You’ve got to love!’ Now, I realize the true message is, ‘You get to love.’”

When we believe in Jesus and stand fast in that faith, the Holy Spirit turns us into servants who serve not from obligation, but from the joy of knowing that we belong to the God Who sent His Son to serve, die, and rise for us!

So many of you in this congregation serve without fanfare or desire for recognition in so many ways. I truly am amazed by this church! You know the joy of service in Jesus’ Name.

You, my friends, are, I think, ready to meet Jesus, whenever you meet Him face to face.

By grace through faith in Christ, you have been freed from the tyranny of death, the devil, and of the self. You have been set free to live for God and for your neighbor through Jesus’ cross and resurrection and your faith in Him and in the power of what He has done for you.

By faith in Jesus and by the life of service Jesus has unleashed in you, you are ready for Jesus’ coming. Keep believing. Keep serving in Christ’s Name. You will be ready, whenever you meet Jesus. Amen!

Helplessness Can Lead Us to God

"No man can meet God without discovering that he can not fully understand God...

"We can endure a great many things with a calm mind if we can see the reason for, or the purpose of, our suffering. It is that which we cannot understand and which therefore seems meaningless that irritates us and makes us rebellious more than anything else. For that reason no aspect of God becomes a stumblingblock to us more easily than His inscrutability. It reminds us of the poignant words of Jesus, 'Blessed is he, whosoever shall find no occasion of stumbling in me' (Matthew 11:6).

"For this reason no aspect of God breaks down our self-conceit and our self-sufficiency more quickly than this. For the first time we come to a point where we do not know what to do. We are unable to go back to our former life, and we cannot find the way to God. We have not learned as yet to surrender to a God whose ways are past finding out. As a result our whole being is in a state of rebelliousness. That which is incomprehensible always fills us with paralyzing fear.

"Every one who continues in this fear and does not flee from God or his own conscience, and who tarries in the presence of the inscrutable God, experiences a miracle, God breaks down his self-conceit and self-sufficiency. Without knowing how, the helpless soul is drawn into the fellowship of our incomprehensible God..." (Ole Hallesby in Prayer)

Two Kinds of People

"There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, 'Thy will be done,' and those to whom God says, in the end, 'Thy will be done.' All that are in Hell, choose it. Without that self-choice there could be no Hell. No soul that seriously and constantly desires joy will ever miss it. Those who seek find. To those who knock it is opened." (C.S. Lewis)

If we truly want the God made known to all the world in Jesus Christ, He will have us and we will have Him. And whether we truly want Him, as is true of anything or anyone we truly desire, it will be manifest in the choices we make each day.

Jesus says, "But seek first [the Kingdom of God] and His righteousness..." (Matthew 6:33)

Prayer: God, help me to be the kind of person who chooses Christ and who so chooses life. I know this is only possible by the power of Your Holy Spirit, Whose help I ask for now. I pray it in the Name of Jesus. Amen

[See here.]

If You're Going to Get Hated, Make Sure It's for the Right Reason

"Just as Jesus could not help but produce enemies, so [His] disciples will have enemies who hate them. That they will be hated, that Christians have been and will continue to be hated, is not necessarily a sign of faithfulness; but if Christians are faithful, they will be hated. They will be hated because those who have gone to the nations in Jesus' name cannot help but produce enemies who refuse to acknowledge the challenge that Jesus's people present to any loyalty not determined by discipleship to Jesus." [from Stanley Hauerwas, Matthew (Brazos Theological Commentary on the Bible (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Brazos Press, 2006), p.202. Part of his chapter on Matthew 24 and 25.]

It's no surprise that Christians incur hatred for their faith in Christ.

The problem with the Church today is that many Christians seem to almost want to be hated for the wrong reasons. That happens when they confuse faithfulness to Jesus Christ for being apologists for their political philosophy, their class, their social views.

God is not a Republican. God is not a Democrat.

God is not wealthy, middle class, or white.

God is God.

He has been revealed definitively in Jesus Christ.

Christians, if we're going to get people to hate us, let's make sure it's for being faithful to Christ and not for any other reason!

Thankful!

There are many things for which I'm thankful this Thanksgiving Day. But one stands out above all others.

Most of all, I'm thankful that by God's grace--His charitable love, I have been saved from my sin, eternal separation from God (death), and eternal and daily futility through faith in Jesus Christ.

Jesus died and rose for rebel sinners like me.

And when I turn from sin and trust in Him, I have life with God.

More than that, despite my sins and resistance to Jesus' Lordship, for which I daily repent, I am able to live with God and, contemplating the wonder, power, and love of God, I am "being transformed into his image with ever-increasing glory."

Love like that is beyond comprehension.

But it can be experienced!

"Repent and be baptized, every one of you, in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins. And you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit." (Acts 2:38-39)

And the Holy Spirit will help you know and walk with Christ each day.


And that's one more thing for which to be thankful!

Throw in with Christ and each day on earth and eternity itself will be thanksgiving...without the family arguments, plumbing problems (the 2013 challenge du jour at my house, by the way), turkey fires, traffic jams, and indigestion.

What is the Church Year?

[Eight years ago, while serving in a parish in the Cincinnati area, as we were beginning a new season of Advent, I presented this explanation of the Church Year. I've renewed it several times in the intervening time, including during my six years at Saint Matthew Lutheran Church in Logan. The article, in all its incarnations, remains one of the most popular pieces to appear on the blog. Now with a new Church Year upon us, starting this Sunday, December 1, my first Advent season with the people of Living Water Lutheran Church in Springboro, Ohio, I thought people might find this overview helpful.]

The Church Year is a human invention. Observing it won't make us better than anyone, although it's designed to give worshipers who attend Sunday to Sunday, a full exposure to the most important elements of life with Jesus Christ.

Nor does keeping the Church Year "save" a person from sin and death, though the readings from God's Word appointed throughout the year can, in the person willing to let that Word do its work, will be saved.

The Church Year is one of those Church customs or traditions designed to help people know the God we meet in Jesus and also to help believers to grow in their faith. Knowing Jesus as Savior and holding onto Him with sustained belief is how we are saved from sin and death and give us eternal life in Jesus' Name. When the Church Year does that, it's a tool in the hands of God, human invention or not!

The Church Year is built around three great festivals: Christmas, Easter, and Pentecost.

Christmas, of course, is the celebration of Jesus' birth.

Easter is the day remembering Jesus' resurrection from the dead.

Pentecost remembers the occasion fifty days after Jesus' resurrection and ten days after His ascension into heaven when the Holy Spirit came to Jesus' praying disciples and gave birth to the Church.

Historically, Easter was the first holiday (that word contracts two words: holy day) that Christians began to celebrate. This only makes sense, as it's Jesus' resurrection that gives Christians hope for this life and the one to come. While early Christians did seem to remember Easter on a Sunday falling at the beginning of the Jewish Passover, the practice of the first Christians, all of whom were Jews like Jesus, was to worship on the traditional Jewish Sabbath--from sundown Friday to sundown Saturday--and to celebrate every Sunday as a little Easter. (Some echo of this can be found in the Gospel of John's occasional references to an "eighth day," a new beginning in a new week of the new creation!)

Over time, a Church Year developed which allowed for the retelling of Jesus' life, death, resurrection, and ascension, followed by Pentecost. The Church Year, in order, moves through these seasons:

• Advent
• Christmas
• Epiphany
• Lent
• Easter
• Pentecost

Advent, with which the color blue is most often associated today, is celebrated on the four Sundays preceding Christmas, which always occurs on the fixed date of December 25. The word advent, means coming or presence. The theme of Advent is waiting. This season remembers more than just the centuries when the world anticipated or waited for the coming of the Savior, Jesus, on the first Christmas. (And it's even less a remembrance of our own waiting for Christmas to roll around.) Advent also calls us to patiently await both God's activity in every part of lives and the return of Jesus at the end of earthly time. Advent's blue, the color of the sky, reminds us of the endless hope all believers in Jesus Christ have.

Christmas begins on December 25 and ends on January 6, with Epiphany Day. (That's why people sing about The Twelve Days of Christmas.) We don't know the exact date of Jesus' birth. Our current date was long ago selected to be a Christian alternative to a pagan Roman festival, Saturnalia. As such, the setting of the Christmas date was meant to be an act of subversion, allowing Christians to proclaim, We know the true Light of the world! Christmas has a short season of two Sundays associated with it, running right up to the season of Epiphany. The color of the Christmas season and of Easter, because they are both festivals of Jesus, the sinless Savior, is white.

The word epiphany comes from a Greek compound word meaning to shine upon. The Epiphany Season begins with January 6, the day we commemorate the arrival of wise men from foreign lands who followed a star to the baby Jesus, to Bethlehem. It was there that Mary and Joseph lived with their Child for several years after the Savior's birth. January 6, in fact, is called Epiphany Day. (Because the wise men brought gifts, Epiphany was historically the day on which Christians gave gifts to one another.) The Epiphany Season is composed of between four and nine Sundays after January 6. The season is bracketed by a first Sunday, which always remembers Jesus' Baptism, and a Sunday at the end that remembers Jesus' Transfiguration. At the Transfiguration, on top of a mountain, accompanied by three of His disciples, Jesus' image was transfigured by the luminescence of heaven and God spoke, confirming Jesus' identity and mission. On the two bracketing Sundays of the Epiphany Season, the color is white. During the season in between, the color is green.

During the Epiphany season, Christians look at the early signs that pointed to Jesus being more than just a human being, but also God in the flesh, the Light of the world. The emphasis of the Epiphany season is usually on sharing the good news of Christ with others, shining the light of Christ on those around us.

After Epiphany comes Lent, a word which in the Old English, meant spring. Lent is a time for spiritual renewal and precedes the holiest days of the Church Year, including Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and Easter Sunday. Lent is referred to as a season of forty days, which it is if you know how to count the days. Because Sundays are always "little Easters," the Sundays in Lent (not of Lent), are not counted as part of those forty days.

The color associated with Lent is purple, the color of royalty because in ancient times, purple dyes were so rare and expensive that only royalty could afford cloth of that color. Historically, the season of Lent was a time of preparation for adult converts to the faith to prepare for their initiation into Christianity at Easter.

There are several key days on the Lenten calendar. The season begins with Ash Wednesday. This is a day of repentance, that is, of turning away from sin and turning to Christ for forgiveness. Of course, as Martin Luther phrased it, "daily repentance and renewal" are meant to be an ongoing element of the Christian's life as we routinely strive to orient ourselves to God and His will for us. But Ash Wednesday is a time when all are especially reminded of it.

Near the end of the season comes Passion Sunday (also known as Palm Sunday). On this day, we're called to remember both Jesus' seemingly triumphal entry into Jerusalem on the Sunday before His execution and Christ's passion, as well as its foreshadowing of Easter. Passion, a word that is used in entirely different ways today, really means to be so committed to the well-being of another that we're willing to die for them. Christ had that kind of commitment to us and so, went to a cross. Passion Sunday begins that portion of Lent called Holy Week.

The next major day on the Holy Week calendar is Maundy Thursday. Maundy is rooted in the Latin word mandatum, from which we get our word mandate and is related to the word commandment. That's because on the Thursday night before He was executed, during the Passover celebration at which He instituted Holy Communion, Jesus also gave His disciples "a new commandment": that they love one another.

Many churches have foot-washing rites during their special gatherings on this day. Jesus washed the feet of His disciples before they ate together on that first Maundy Thursday and also commanded all of His followers to be servants like Him.

Good Friday, which comes on the next night, is a solemn remembrance of Jesus' death on the cross. For me, this is one of the most moving worship services of the year. At many congregations, there is a service called Tenebrae commemorated on this night. Tenebrae comes from the Latin and means darkness. The service remembers the darkness that engulfed the world at Jesus' execution as well as our need of Him as the light in our darkness. The service ends in silence as all contemplate Jesus' sacrifice of Himself for us, the Light of the world and all humanity snuffed out as a consequence of our sin.

Easter Sunday brings the celebration of Jesus' resurrection in a special way and continues throughout the Easter season. This is usually the high point of the year, even in churches that don't use the Church Year. The Easter Season lasts about seven weeks. The Gospel lessons incorporate accounts of the resurrected Jesus' appearances. Tucked in the midst of the season, on a Thursday, is Ascension Day. This comes forty days after Easter. More on that below.

Pentecost Day, as I mentioned, is the celebration of the Church's birthday, when the Holy Spirit, Who hovered over the waters of primordial chaos to bring life into being back in the Old Testament book of Genesis, once again creates. This time, He creates new life by bringing Christ's Church, His body in the world, into being. The color of this day is red.

There follows after that a season that lasts from twenty-three to twenty-eight weeks. It's referred to simply as the Pentecost Season. The color is green because the emphasis here is on growing in our faith, learning to be Jesus' disciples or followers at ever-deepening levels of maturity. In this season, Christian churches submit to the power and authority and guidance of God's Holy Spirit. The historic creeds of the Church proclaim that the Holy Spirit brings us to faith, establishes Christ's Church, and brings the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting.

The very first Sunday after Pentecost is Holy Trinity Sunday. This focuses on the great mystery of the God we meet in the Bible: One God in three Persons, revealed in the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

The whole Church Year comes to a close, on the Sunday closest to November 30, with Christ the King Sunday.

Associated with each of the Sundays and many of the festivals of the Church Year are three cycles of appointed Biblical lessons. These cycles, referred to as Years A, B, and C, are called lectionaries. There are several sets of lectionaries, the the most well-known being those associated with the Roman Catholics, another with Lutherans, and another with a consortium of several Protestant denominations. The lectionaries are fairly similar, but do diverge occasionally.

Each Sunday and special festival day of the Church Year has appointed lessons from the Old Testament, the Psalms, the New Testament (either Acts, Revelation, or the letters), and a Gospel lesson. Generally speaking, the Old Testament, Psalm, and Gospel readings are thematically linked. The New Testament lessons are designed to make it possible over a three year period, to have almost all the letters, Revelation, and Acts read in public worship.

The three different cycles are built on the three synoptic Gospels: Matthew, Mark, and Luke. (Synoptic is a word that means to see together. These three Gospels are quite similar to one another--they see things similarly, while the Gospel of John has the most unique material.) Because Mark, with only sixteen chapters, is so short, the appointed Gospel lessons during its year are often taken from John.

Through my years as a pastor, I've felt free to spring loose from what one of our former Lutheran bishops, David Preus, called "the tyranny of the lectionary," looking at Biblical texts not appointed in the lectionary, in order to address issues that seem to be important in our community or world. But the lectionary does provide a well-rounded diet of Biblical material which, when looked at in a disciplined and devoted way, can help Christians develop a deeper faith.

[The image above, showing the cycle of the Church Year, comes from Augsburg Fortress, the publishing house of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America.]

Who's Your King?

[This was prepared for delivery during this morning's worship with the people and guests of Living Water Lutheran Church in Springboro, Ohio. But it barely resembles the actual sermon delivered. If you visit the Living Water web site in the next several days, you should be able to listen to the sermon.]

Luke 23:33-43
Today, the last day of the Church Year, is Christ the King Sunday.

Our Gospel lesson this morning may seem like a strange text to use on a day devoted to declaring Jesus to be the King of kings. It’s Luke’s sparse account of Jesus’ crucifixion on the first Good Friday.

Kings are treated with honor by their subjects. They get parades, 21-gun salutes, brass bands, palaces. The person sentenced to crucifixion, by contrast, was not only killed, but also labeled as nobodies, the refuse of the world.

On Good Friday, Jesus doesn’t fit our usual picture of a king.

And yet on that day, one man at least, did understand that Jesus Christ is King.

Please go to Luke 23:33-43 (page 737 in the pew Bibles). It begins: “When they came to the place called the Skull, there they crucified him, along with the criminals--one on his right, the other on his left.”

It’s interesting how Luke describes the two men between whom Jesus was crucified. The other gospel writers use words to describe them that can be translated as bandits, revolutionaries, or thieves.

But the word used by Luke, which is translated in our Bible as criminals, is, in the original Greek, kakourgous. It’s a compound word which means simply doers of bad.

To me, this is a clever word choice by Luke because we have to admit that we all can be doers of bad. Look, please, at Romans 3:10-12, page 784 in the pew Bibles. It says: "There is no one righteous, not even one; there is no one who understands, no one who seeks God. All have turned away, they have together become worthless; there is no one who does good [not good-doers, in other words, but evildoers] [And, lest we think we can get off the hook, the passage says again] “no not one." Sinless Jesus was crucified between two sinners who weren’t Osama bin-Laden or Adolf Hitler. They were doers of bad things, just like you and me. That’s important to remember on this Christ the King Sunday.

Next, we’re told: “Jesus said, ‘Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.’"

In those days executed people usually prayed something like, “May my death atone for all My sins.” But Jesus, supremely confident that He has led a sinless life, is concerned for the sins of others. He in essence prayed this His death might atone for their sins.

This isn’t a man at the mercy of His accusers or executioners, but a man in control, in charge. A king. On a cross. Willing to accept the punishment that His people--the whole human race--deserve in order to set the free to live in God’s kingdom.

Let's face it though, giving of self to the point of death for the benefit of others is not the way we usually see kings--be they magnates, the superstars of film, music, and sports, presidents, prime ministers, and royalty--act.

Their usual M.O. is built on a simple consideration: What’s in it for me? 

Three different times, Jesus is challenged--mocked, really--to act like a king, to look out for Himself at the expense of others.

At the beginning of Jesus’ ministry, He was tempted by the devil in the wilderness. Three times the devil went after Jesus to behave like an earthly king, to take power over the world without first conquering our sin and death through His cross and empty tomb. “If you are the Son of God...” the devil had taunted Jesus, “then turn this stone to bread, worship me and you’ll be on easy street, throw Yourself from the temple and give the world a convincing demonstration of Your power that will wow the crowds and do no good for them.” Jesus had resisted every temptation, you’ll remember.

But remember how that encounter between Jesus and the devil ended. Luke 4:13 (page 718): “When the devil had finished all his tempting, he left [Jesus] until an opportune time.”

Good Friday was that opportune time.

Jesus, suffering so much and knowing, because He was also God, how much more there was yet for Him to suffer in fulfilling His mission as the atoning sacrifice for the sins of every doer of bad things on the planet, was deemed ripe for temptation by the devil and those who worked for him in the world.

The devil, through his agents, once more tempted Jesus three times on that Good Friday.

And each time, the temptations were the same as those of the devil in the wilderness: "If you’re King, act like the kings we know. Take the easy way. Look out for number one. Wow us with your power. Seize control of this world."

In verse 35, we’re told that “the rulers [that’s the religious elites of the time] even sneered at [Jesus]. They said, ‘He saved others; let him save himself if he is the Christ of God, the Chosen One.’" In verses 36 and 37, we read: “The soldiers also came up and mocked him. They offered him wine vinegar and said, ‘If you are the king of the Jews, save yourself.’" And verse 39 tells us: “One of the criminals who hung there hurled insults at him: ‘Aren't you the Christ? Save yourself and us!’"

What’s interesting is that in two of these temptations, there’s an acknowledgment that Jesus had the power to save!

They knew that Jesus had raised people from the dead, saving them from death.

That He had given given fresh starts and new lives to notorious sinners, saving them from the consequences of their sin.

They knew that Jesus had fed thousands with a few bits of bread and fish, saving them from weakness and hunger.

They knew that Jesus had healed many diseases and infirmities, saving them from calamity.

But that wasn’t what Kings did! Kings only did things for others as a way of buying their loyalty, their gratitude, their subservience.

And maybe those who mocked and taunted Jesus, like the devil himself, really knew the truth about Jesus, that He was and is the King.

In that case, they might have really wondered, why Jesus didn't save His own neck, take control of the world by power wielded for whatever ends He chose?

That’s the way kings have behaved for centuries. The Roman emperors gave the people bread and circuses in order to keep the reins of power.

The moguls of the entertainment industry are committed to giving people what they want.

They want a king who will look out for number one and to placate them, give them what they want and who will never tell them that they’re sinners lost from God, sinners in need of God's grace and salvation. Kings are egotists who through the wily use of lies, feed human egos!

But Jesus Christ came to bring God’s kingdom not to those who are confident of their own goodness or righteousness.

He doesn’t play to our egos. “...the Son of Man came,” He says in Luke 19:10,  “to seek and to save the lost."

If we don’t know that we’re lost without the forgiveness and new life that Jesus died and rose to make possible for all who believe in Him and know that things of this world that earthly kings might give us are dead and useless, we will never see Jesus as our King.

And, absent that soul-shaking realization, none of us can ever see His kingdom or be part of its. Until we understand that we need Jesus and His cross, we remain outside of the Kingdom.

No one--not the religious leaders, not the soldiers, not the first of the two criminals quoted in our lesson--understood this.

In verse 40 though, we hear though from the second criminal: “But the other criminal rebuked [the first]. ‘Don't you fear God,’ he said, ‘since you are under the same sentence [as Jesus]? We are punished justly, for we are getting what our deeds deserve. But this man has done nothing wrong.’ Then he said, ‘Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.’"

I love this man more than almost anyone we meet in Scripture! He is so honest, so humble, so open to the prompting of the Holy Spirit, so ready to enter the Kingdom of God!

This man knows that Jesus is the King.

And he understands that the only way any of us can see the Kingdom is if we first see that we are sinners in need of a Savior and can confess that Jesus is that Savior, allowing Him to be our King, to reign over us with His forgiveness and grace.

But, notice, he does not ask Jesus to take away his cross!

He understood somehow what we must all understand if we are to have Jesus as our King. Jesus calls all of us to take up our crosses and follow Him.

The wages of sin is still death and those of us born into sin will, unless Jesus returns during our earthly lives, die.

And even in this life, we will face all sorts of crosses, all manner of death.

We must, like the second criminal, own our sins and crucify them through daily confession, repentance, and renewal through the crucified and risen Jesus.

And along life’s way, we must refuse to follow the path of ease and self-glorification.

In this world, we can only follow Jesus on the narrow path of the cross and self-denial.

On this path, we are called to resist the temptation to please ourselves, instead of God.

We’re called to forgo the applause of the world in order to one day hear the “well done” of our Savior.

We’re called to live according to God’s will even at those times when God’s will is the last thing we want in our lives.

We’re called to keep trusting in God even when our prayers seem unanswered or are answered in ways that leave us grieving and inconsolable.

And we are called each day to confess our sins and, like the second evildoer, ask for mercy without any pretense that we deserve it and in the full conviction that we cannot live without God or the mercy He gives through Jesus Christ alone.

Each day, we have before us the way of death or the way of life. Jesus is the way of life. Like the second criminal, we must see that there is life only in Jesus!

In verse 43, Jesus responds to the confessions of the second criminal: “Jesus answered him, ‘I tell you the truth, today you will be with me in paradise.’"

This self-confessed evildoer was assured by Jesus that because of his faith in Jesus, he would not be lost to God forever. By repentance, his old sinful self had been crucified and by his faith, Jesus assured him, wherever Jesus is, there is His kingdom and there are those who have become citizens of that kingdom by faith in Christ the King!

And when does that happen for us?

Today! Salvation and life with God comes and is revived within us whenever we confess our sins and confess our faith in Christ the King.

At the very moments we repent and trust in Christ and at every moment we are renewed through repentance and God’s gracious forgiveness, we are in the Kingdom!

The kingdom of God can come to us through every today of our lives, no matter what’s going on in our lives or in the world.

The angels announced at Christmas, “Today in the town of David a Savior has been born to you...”

In the synagogue of Nazareth after reading Isaiah’s prophecy about the messiah, Jesus said, “Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.”

To the tax collector who turned from his sin and trusted in Christ, Jesus said, “Today salvation has come to this house.”

God wants us in His Kingdom, even now in this imperfect and dying world.

But you know what?

We can know that Jesus is King.

We can know what the Kingdom of God is.

We can even know how we become part of Jesus’ Kingdom.

But the real question for each of us is this: Is Jesus Christ our King?

Are we daily reclaiming our faith in Him as the only Lord over our lives, priorities, and decisions?

Are we daily turning to Him in humble recognition of our sins and our need of His forgiveness?

Is Jesus Christ our King?

I ask the question not to incite guilt or fear. That would be presumptuous on my part because I know that I am a sinful human being who falls way short of the glory of God!

Instead, I ask the question to give hope.

You see, the God we know in Jesus Christ is the King Who gives second chances.

And third chances.

And unnumbered chances.

To an evildoer who was being justly executed for his sin, but who sought a new chance, a new life, Jesus eagerly and lovingly gave not just the promise of eternity, but also the promise of being with him today, now, in all the remaining moments of this life.

If you’re anything like me, I know that you need those second chances.

Not breads and circuses.

Not tax breaks or the latest bauble or googog the world offers.

You need Jesus Christ.

Today, Christ our King offers no less than life eternal with God, beginning with His stubborn, loving presence with us today, right now, to all who turn from sin and latch onto Him as their only God.

May Jesus Christ be our King every day we live! Amen

Woody's and Kelly's Lutheran Problem

Thanks for sending the link, Dave!

Lyric Video for U2's Latest

Ordinary Love, in honor of Nelson Mandela.

Why I Sometimes Avoid God

I find that as a Christian, I can sometimes so enjoy my sin, that I want anything but to be in the presence of God. Consequently, I avoid God.

In those times, I elude facing the blazing light of God's purity and truth. I know that there, as I pray, I will inevitably see my sin as sins, rather than just part of who I am. My view of them changed, I have a decision to make. I will either cling to the sin or I'll have to renounce it, accept God's view of it as wrong, death-dealing, and then leave it behind.

At other times, I shy away from God's presence because I simply feel unworthy as an unholy man to be in the presence of holy God. Like Simon Peter, who witnessed a miraculous sign of Jesus' divinity, I say, "Go away from me, Lord; I am a sinful man!" (Luke 5:8) "Look at someone else," I think, "I can't bear Your gaze!"

But God is an incessant lover. He isn't so easily turned away.

Out of His great love for us, He sent Christ into the world to die and rise for us.

From that same love, He sends His Holy Spirit now to hound us, to confront us with the reality that we live in the condition of sin with a tendency to violate His will for as long as we draw birth on this doomed planet, and that the only cure is the forgiveness and new life that Jesus Christ alone--the Way, and the Truth, and the Life--gives to those who repent and believe in Him.

Prayer: God, give me the courage to come into Your presence, to unflinchingly confess my sins, which become so clear when I am with You, and to gladly and gratefully receive Your forgiveness given only in Jesus Christ that we might be reconciled. In Jesus' Name, the only Name given among mortals by which we can be saved from sin and death, I ask these things. Amen

Stand Firm!

[This was shared during the worship services of Living Water Lutheran Church in Springboro, Ohio, this morning.]

Luke 21:5-19
We’ve heard it a million times: Don’t judge a book by its cover.

It’s a way of reminding us that looks are deceiving.

Often the people for whom we harbor jealousy because they seem to have it totally together, are the very people whose lives are most unhappy, most out of control.

Unassuming people may harbor a depth of character we can hardly imagine.

We should know better.

When the judge and prophet Samuel was sent to Bethlehem in order to anoint one of the seven sons of Jesse as king of Israel, he was about to choose Eliab. Eliab looked like a king sent from central casing.

But look, please, at 1 Samuel 16:7 (page 196 in the pew Bibles): “But the Lord said to Samuel, ‘Do not consider his appearance or his height, for I have rejected him. The Lord does not look at the things people look at. People look at the outward appearance, but the Lord looks at the heart.’” Instead, God ordered Samuel to anoint David to become king.

Don’t judge a book by its cover!

It isn’t just people we judge wrongly. We can have a wrong estimation of churches too.

An acquaintance of mine served a megachurch for over a decade. They had all sorts of programs and thousands showed up for worship every Sunday. Their facilities were impressive, state of the art, massive. Now, there’s nothing wrong with any of that. But my acquaintance once told me that there was something missing in that congregation. Everything about the place was big...except the people’s faith in Christ, except their hearts turned cold to God and to others. They believed in their programs, their buildings, their bigness, not in Jesus.

Similarly, I have known congregations that had tiny memberships and remained tiny precisely because their entire congregational lives were built around maintaining their facilities as a stained glass mausoleums.

Buildings, like this school building, can be tools that God gives to congregations to pursue the mission of the Church: loving God, loving neighbor, loving one another, making disciples for Jesus Christ.

But you really can't judge a book by its cover. And there must be more to being Christians, more to being the Church than what a world that doesn’t know God can see.  

Take a look at today’s Gospel lesson, Luke 21:5-19 (pages 734-735).

Let’s quickly set the stage. As with last Sunday’s Gospel lesson, we’re in the week between Palm Sunday and Good Friday, when Jesus would die on the cross, and ultimately, Easter Sunday, when He would rise from the dead. He’s teaching in the temple in Jerusalem.

In the passage just before our lesson, Luke tells us how Jesus observed a procession of wealthy people leave their gifts in the temple treasury.

But Jesus wasn’t impressed with them.

He was impressed with a widow who gave a pittance, which also happened to be all she had to live on.

The world might be impressed by external shows. God isn’t.

It’s why God told His people through the prophet Amos that He hated their festivals.

What God wants from those who come into His presence is authenticity.

Authentic repentance.

An authentic desire for deeper faith and servant hearts.

David himself knew this. Look at Psalm 51:17 (page 395), part of his prayer of repentance after committing adultery and murder: “My sacrifice, O God, is a broken spirit [a spirit broken open to God]; a broken and contrite heart you, God, will not despise.”

Some would look at David and only see a powerful man who abused his power to sin and then publicly repented as a brilliant PR move. That's not how God saw it. God saw a man whose heart was open enough, whose heart was broken enough, to let God in and to let God’s praises erupt from the depths of his wounded soul.

And what did Jesus tell the Samaritan woman at the well, do you remember? She told Jesus that her people thought the worship of God could only happen on the mountain in her country, while Jesus’ people, the Jews, said it only happened in the temple in Jerusalem. Look though, at what Jesus tells her in John 4:21 (page 742): “Woman...believe Me, a time is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem...[then in verse 24] God is spirit, and His worshipers must worship in spirit and truth...”

Not necessarily in candles and organs, not necessarily with guitars and drums, though people can worship God authentically by those means and in many other ways. We always truly worship God in spirit and truth: With broken, open spirits and honesty before God.

Now look at the lesson. “Some of his disciples were remarking about how the temple was adorned with beautiful stones and with gifts dedicated to God. But Jesus said, 'As for what you see here, the time will come when not one stone will be left on another; every one of them will be thrown down.'"

The disciples haven’t been paying attention to what Jesus was conveying in His commendation of the widow rather than the wealthy. The disciples are wowed by the temple.

It may be hard for us to understand how much freight the temple carried for the people of first century Judea.

For the devout, it was the place where God lived in the Holy of holies and the place where they could make sacrifice for their sins.

For nationalists, it was a symbol--like the Statue of Liberty for us--of their country, a symbol they seemed to especially crave as they lived under the rule of the Romans.

For Herod, the puppet king of Rome who built this third temple on the spot of the previous structures, the temple was a bid to win the loyalty of a people who hated him.

It was an impressive place, encrusted with jewels. Its marble columns were more than forty feet high.

But it’s dangerous to judge a book by its cover. Jesus says that as powerful and impregnable as the temple looked, it would one day be reduced to dust. And in 70 AD, the Romans did destroy it.

This was incomprehensible to some people standing nearby in the temple. In verse 7, we read: “Teacher," they asked, "when will these things happen? And what will be the sign that they are about to take place?" This is a control question, the sort of question posed by people who find it hard to trust in God, but what to stay ahead of the curve, have inside information instead of faith in Christ. Today, their number includes Christians who are so obsessed by speculations about the end times that they can't live out simple faith in Jesus.

Next comes the most confusing part of the lesson. Start at verse 8: “He replied: 'Watch out that you are not deceived. For many will come in my name, claiming, 'I am he,' and, 'The time is near.' Do not follow them. When you hear of wars and revolutions, do not be frightened. These things must happen first, but the end will not come right away.' Then he said to them: 'Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom. There will be great earthquakes, famines and pestilences in various places, and fearful events and great signs from heaven.'”

I found these verses confusing because the question asked of Jesus was about what signs would point to the destruction of the temple and, here and as the chapter unfolds, Jesus seems to be talking about the end of this world.

And He is.

Like the Old Testament prophets or the apocalyptic books, Daniel and Revelation, Jesus is conflating time. He’s talking about the present, immediate future, and the future of the cosmos.

That’s because since Adam and Eve fell into sin until the risen, ascended Jesus returns to judge this world, raise the dead in Christ, and bring about the final consummation of His kingdom, two things have been going on in the created cosmos.

First: Under the burden of sin and death, humanity has suffered and will suffer from natural and human disasters. Each disaster, a sign of our need of new life.

Second: The good news of that new life that only comes from Jesus Christ will conquer the sin and death of believers in Christ and ultimately, make the whole creation new.

Much will happen until then though. That’s what Jesus wants us to know in the next part of our lesson, starting at verse 12: “'But before all this, they will lay hands on you and persecute you. They will deliver you to synagogues and prisons, and you will be brought before kings and governors, and all on account of my name. This will result in your being witnesses to them.'”

When we entrust our lives to Christ, which is what it means to believe in Him, we can count on the constant possibility of rejection.

Sometimes, people kill Christians for their faith to this day.

Sometimes, they simply cannot comprehend their faith. A woman who used to read my blog once wrote to me: “I can’t understand it. You seem like an intelligent person, a good writer. How can you talk about Jesus as though He were God? It’s such a waste of your life!”

That, friends, is the world in which we are called to be Christ’s witnesses. Jesus doesn’t promise that it will be easy. Yet it’s our call, out of simple gratitude for being saved from sin and death, to be Jesus’ witnesses. In fact, Jesus makes it a non-negotiable of the Christian life. "This will result in your being witnesses to them," is what He says here. In Acts 1:8, Jesus says, "You will be My witnesses."

How can we do that?

Well, not by trying to look good.

Not by memorizing our testimony about Jesus and spouting it like parrots.

Look at what Jesus says starting in verse 14: “...make up your mind not to worry beforehand how you will defend yourselves. For I will give you words and wisdom that none of your adversaries will be able to resist or contradict.”

In other words, don’t worry about looking Christian or sounding Christian. Simply focus on following Jesus.

Let the Holy Spirit teach you through the study of God’s Word, worship with the Church, receiving the Body and Blood of Jesus.

Then God will teach you what you need to say, not only in the face of hostility, but also in response to people who genuinely want to know what you believe as a Christian.

To be Christ’s witnesses, we don’t need a how-to guide, we simply need to pay heed to what the Holy Spirit is teaching us as we draw close to God the Father in Jesus’ Name and learn to pray the prayer David prayed in that same psalm of confession, Psalm 51:15. Would you go back to that with me? David prayed: “Open my lips, Lord, and my mouth will declare your praise.”

In thirty seven years as a Christian and twenty-nine as a pastor, I have seen things I never would have expected. Many segments of American society have moved from indifference to Christian faith to outright hostility.

Ignorantly, intelligent people who know nothing about Jesus, say that Christianity is the source of most of the world’s problems.

And, in other parts of the world, people are killed and persecuted for their faith.

Jesus’ words seem increasingly to have come true.

But the answer is not for us to hunker down or keep the light of Christ hidden under a basket. That would be inauthentic!

The answer is to be open books: In good times and bad, the God Who threw in His lot with us on the cross of Calvary and rose from the dead to give us everlasting life, calls on us to follow Him, to give witness to His greatness and love. Jesus says at the end of our lesson: “All men will hate you because of me. But not a hair of your head will perish. By standing firm you will gain life.”

May we stand firm in our faith and so stand with Christ forever. Stand firm! Amen

The Church Needs to Get Back to Basics

"While many churches acknowledge that they are in trouble, they too frequently come up with the wrong solutions. Some are chasing fads. Others are asking how to modernize biblical words, worship services, or even our theology so it will be more to the liking of the potential consumers. I believe that in the end, all these solutions will only end up dooming the church to the steady decline it is already on. Don't get me wrong: I am not against using words that people can understand or having music that appeals to a younger crowd. However, whenever we stray from God's Word, we will not have God's blessing, and without that blessing, the forces of hell will prevail against the church (see Matthew 16:18). Jesus said that the gates of hell will not prevail against His church; He did not say any church. If the church is no longer His church, it has no protection from the Enemy. It cannot crash through the walls that protect the lost from the light. Walking away from the church is not an option either, particularly if we want to be a part of the Lord's plan to rescue the world. The church is God's idea, and we must seek to restore it to its purpose and blessing. Rather than swing the pendulum too far, let's get back to basics."

Jim Putman. Real-Life Discipleship: Building Churches That Make Disciples (Kindle Locations 46-51). Kindle Edition.

We Can Help the People of the Philippines

See here. Above all, please keep the Philippines in your prayers.

Alive in Christ!

This is the sermon shared during the second morning worship service of Living Water Lutheran Church in Springboro, Ohio, this past Sunday, November 10, 2013. It's based on Luke 20:27-38.

Silence is Golden

In yet another way, according to this brief summary on recent research presented today by the Harvard Business Review's Daily Stat.

In Proverbs 17:28, God revealed this wisdom to Solomon:

Even a fool is thought wise if he keeps silent, and discerning if he holds his tongue.

I wish that I would remember this more.

God is Neither Terrorist Nor Teddy Bear

I like this quote from Brendan Manning posted by our son last night:

“I want neither a terrorist spirituality that keeps me in a perpetual state of fright about being in right relationship with my heavenly Father nor a sappy spirituality that portrays God as such a benign teddy bear that there is no aberrant behavior or desire of mine that he will not condone. I want a relationship with the Abba of Jesus, who is infinitely compassionate with my brokenness and at the same time an awesome, incomprehensible, and unwieldy Mystery. ”

― Brennan Manning

To weep for the death of anyone or anything...

...in the only world we yet know is only right.

We have loved and been loved here. To grieve the loss of that which is lost is to intrinsically understand, whatever faith we profess or do not profess, that deaths and ends were never meant to come to us in this once-perfect Eden.

The New International Version's translation of Ecclesiastes 3:11 contains this line: "...He has also set eternity in the human heart." We, the people we have loved and known, the people we have never met, and the creation in which we live were all made for eternity. But death and endings have invaded this place, invaded us, through human sin.

So, it's right for us to mourn and sorrow over what is lost, even those of us who are assured that by God's grace through faith in Christ, the One Who died and rose again, we will step beyond the portals of death, step into eternal sunshine, where loss never happens, where every greeting is hello and not goodbye. There, God will dry our tears and call us further in and further up into the eternity for which we were made.

I love C.S. Lewis' portrayal of grief and eternity in a scene from my favorite of his Narnia books.

The Thrill of Moving Forward

Thoughts from a personal letter written by C.S. Lewis. Remember Lot's wife!

The Blessed Life

[This was shared during both worship services of Living Water Lutheran Church in Springboro, Ohio.]

Luke 6:20-31
There are many things we Christians believe that seem outrageous to the rest of the world.

They may not seem outrageous to us because you and I are accustomed to our memorized confessions of faith.

We affirm beliefs like the resurrection of the dead, eternal life for those who believe in Jesus, Jesus’ virgin birth and bodily resurrection. All of these teachings seem outrageous to an unbelieving world.

And the truth is, left to our own devices, you and I couldn’t believe these things nor experience the joy of knowing that we have been saved by grace through our faith in the crucified and risen Jesus.

Martin Luther writes in his commentary on Galatians: “Christ’s benefits are so precious that He will dispense them only to those who need them [by which, he means, who know they need them] and really desire them.” Faith, even the shakiest of faith, comes only to those who want to believe. The Christian faith that teaches that we must die to sin and trust in Christ to raise us as the Father raised Him on the first Easter, is a scandal, an outrage to a world that likes to think it’s self-sufficient.

And then, we come to the Gospel lesson appointed for this All Saints’ Sunday.

In it, Jesus seems to move to a deeper level of outrageousness. He talks not about the outrageous things Christians are taught to believe or trust, but the outrageous ways we are to live because we believe.

In the opening verses of our lesson, Jesus talks about the blessed life, the lifestyle of a saint.

A saint, the Bible teaches, is a forgiven sinner fighting the good fight to ignore the temptations of a sinful world, the sinful self, and of the devil, to hold onto Jesus as the only way to God, our only hope in this world and the next, the only Savior Who can free us to be the people we were made to be. This, Jesus is saying in these opening words, the kind of life God blesses.

Knowing this could make us feel uncomfortable. It could even make us feel doomed.

“I can’t possibly live the way Jesus says we’re to live,” we could say, “So, why even try being a Christian?”

But Jesus’ words here are descriptive. They describe the life we can live if we keep turning from our sin and trusting in Him.

His words are not proscriptive. By that I mean, Jesus is not telling us that we have to live this way in order to earn life with God. Jesus isn’t giving a new law, impossible for us to keep. He’s describing the life we can live if we let Him live in us, in every part of our lives.

Let me show you something. Please pull out a Bible and turn to Deuteronomy 11:26-28. (Page 130 in the pew Bibles.) Deuteronomy is a long sermon given by Moses, who was soon to die, to the people of Israel, just before God allowed them to enter the promised land. Moses says: “See, I am setting before you today a blessing and a curse-- the blessing if you obey the commands of the LORD your God that I am giving you today; the curse if you disobey the commands of the LORD your God and turn from the way that I command you today by following other gods, which you have not known.” These are proscriptive words. They’re commandments.

Now, turn to our Gospel lesson, Luke 6:20-31. (Page 720 in the pew Bibles.) Jesus says, speaking to His disciples (that is, all who had come to believe in Him): “Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God. Blessed are you who hunger now, for you will be satisfied. Blessed are you who weep now, for you will laugh. Blessed are you when men hate you, when they exclude you and insult you and reject your name as evil, because of the Son of Man.”

See the difference between Moses’ words and those of Jesus? Jesus is not saying, “Do this and you will be blessed.” He’s saying if you are poor, you’re blessed. If you are hungry, you’re blessed. If you are in sorrow, you’re blessed. If people hate you because you believe in Christ, you’re blessed. Jesus is being descriptive.

But, here’s the question Jesus’ words raise for us: Who wants to sign on to be poor, hungry, in mourning, or to be hated?

And how do we react to how Jesus describes the cursed lifestyle?

Look at that description, starting at verse 24. Jesus says: “...woe to you who are rich, for you have already received your comfort. Woe to you who are well fed now, for you will go hungry. Woe to you who laugh now, for you will mourn and weep. Woe to you when all men speak well of you, for that is how their fathers treated the false prophets.”

Now, let’s be clear about what Jesus is saying in these descriptive words.

He isn’t telling us to aspire to poverty, hunger, sorrow, or persecution.

Nor is He telling us that it’s a sin to be rich, well fed, happy, or respected by others.

Instead, Jesus is telling us that whether we have what the world calls success or happiness or not, whether we’re seen as powerful or powerless, important or insignificant, the saint--the forgiven sinner who trusts in Jesus Christ as their only Savior, only God, can live with joy,  hope, and peace.

Are you living with that joy, hope, and peace today? You can be!

Even in the midst of a world that counts faith in Christ as an outrage, an absurdity, a curiosity, a weakness.

Please turn to Philippians 4:11-12 (page 820 in the pew Bibles). The apostle Paul writes this to the first century church at Philippi: “...I have learned to be content whatever the circumstances. I know what it is to be in need, and I know what it is to have plenty. I have learned the secret of being content in any and every situation, whether well fed or hungry, whether living in plenty or in want.” Then, in verse 13, he says: “I can do everything through him who gives me strength.”

A saint then, is a person who is blessed whatever the condition of their life.

They walk in confidence, no matter what’s happening to them.

A friend of mine who has been through more than any human being should have to endure, told me recently, “I am blessed.”

When saints like that make the outrageous assertion that, despite what life in this fallen world has done to them or what hurt unbelieving people--even unbelieving people within the fellowship of the Church--have done to them, and despite what temptations dog them or past sins may sometimes haunt them they are blessed, I have to confess I feel ashamed.

Too often, I bellyache and complain about my lot in life. Too often, I forget that the God Who came into this world, experienced this life, suffered and died for sinners like me, and then rose to give those who repent and believe in Christ life with Him despite the death and condemnation I deserve.

Jesus has conquered all the things I bellyache about, all the things that frighten me.

He has overcome sin and death, even my sin and death.

I forget that even when Christians are hungry, they can be filled with Christ’s goodness, grace, and power.

I forget that when Christians are poor, we nonetheless have a rich life with the Creator of the universe that will only be perfected after we have died and risen to be with Him.

When believers mourn, we know that one day, He will wipe away every tear and that even now, living with Him, He can turn our mourning into dancing.

When we are spurned or even persecuted for our outrageous faith in Christ, we can, as Jesus prompts us, “Rejoice...and leap for joy” because we know that through Him, we have a great reward in heaven.

Certain that nothing can separate us from Christ’s gracious love, we can even dare to “love [our] enemies, do good to those who hate [us], bless those who curse [us]...”

When we hold Christ in the grip of faith, we will even find ourselves sometimes capable of doing to others as we would have them do to us.

Despite our sin and disbelief, we, like saints before us, can be filled with the strength to live lives of outrageous faithfulness to Christ.

In Jesus, we follow a Savior and God Who has lived the very life He calls blessed in today’s lesson. Do you remember what Jesus prayed for the crowds who cried for His death and nailed Him to a cross on the first Good Friday? With His dying breath, Jesus prayed, “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.”

Fine, you may say, Jesus was and is God. He knew how His suffering would end. Beyond His cross lay an empty tomb. He could afford to put the most charitable construction on the actions of those who hated and hurt Him. It was easy for Him to live the blessed life, we might think.

But how to explain someone like Stephen, a disciple, the first Christian to be martyred for his faith? Stephen was an ordinary man who believed in Christ, a sinner and a saint. As he was being stoned to death for his refusal to renounce his faith in Christ, Stephen prayed, “Lord, do not hold this sin against them.” Stephen, unlike Jesus, God in human skin, had no power over sin or death. But he knew he belonged to the God Who does and so could pray just as Jesus had on the cross.

Jesus Christ lives in those who trust in Him.

He empowers those who dare to trust in Him to not be caught up in the ways of this world, to become, as Luther puts it, “little Christs.”

This is why the apostle Paul could write: “I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed to us.”

The saints in Christ know that this world is very important. It's a world God created, then died and rose to set free.

But saints also know that this world is not the end of the story.

No matter what the states of our bodies, our finances, or our relationships, saints know that through Jesus’ resurrection, His life is pulsating within us!

He has us in His mind and in His hands.

By His grace and our enduring faith in Him, our life with Him won’t end here.

And at those moments when we dare to give ourselves totally to Jesus and to God’s purposes for us, we gain the courage to live the outrageous life--the blessed life--that Jesus commends to us this morning.

The funny thing is that the saintly life that Jesus describes is, I believe, precisely how, in our heart of hearts, we all want to live, no matter how outraged we may sometimes feel about this lifestyle that Jesus calls blessed.

Even cynics and the persecutors of Christians want to live as saints, to be people who forgive, people who give, people who treat others as they themselves want to be treated.

By the grace of God in Christ and our openness to Christ, may the Holy Spirit teach us how to live as saints. God bless you all. Amen

Bryan Price on Managing the Reds

In the first of a two-part interview, new Cincinnati Reds manager talks about his philosophy and vision for the team. This guy is incredibly thoughtful and understands that leadership is about relationships. Looking forward to the 2014 baseball season!

"Saints Alive"

Here. Happy All Saints' Day, November 1.

This Isn't Just True of Methodism

It applies to Lutherans too. Thanks to Holly Boardman for sharing the link to this piece with me.