[This was shared with the people and friends of Living Water Lutheran Church, Centerville, Ohio, during yesterday's worship services.]
Proverbs 29:18 (KJV)
1 Corinthians 14:8
Luke 12:32
This morning, I’m scrapping the planned sixth installment of our series, I Am a Church Member. Through times of prayer and conversations with many members of our church, I realized late yesterday morning that I would be shirking my duty as the spiritual leader of Living Water if I did not address our church’s most pressing issue directly, lovingly, and resolutely.
The King James Version translation of Proverbs 29:18, says, “Where there is no vision, the people perish…” Today, I will remind you again today of the vision and mission of Living Water Lutheran Church.
Some will welcome what I say.
A few will not be pleased. I can’t help that.
I take as my model the apostle Paul, who wrote the church at Galatia: “If I were still trying to please people, I would not be a servant of Christ.” (Galatians 1:10)
However imperfectly, I do seek to be a servant of Christ and I do seek to be a leader who gives a clear vision to the people I am called to lead as pastor.
I wrote this message without any input from our leadership or staff. So, if you do get angry, get angry with me.
And if you do want to call anyone crazy, as I know a few people said of our church council this past week...if you feel the need to violate the eighth commandment by failing to put the most charitable construction on the actions and lives of sisters and brothers in Christ, do it to me.
It’s as true of the pulpit as it is of the Oval Office: the buck stops here, with me.
As you know, the only time I’ve spoken before the whole congregation regarding the proposed building project was last March. Otherwise, I’ve listened. I ask you to do the same now as I seek to apply God’s Word to our situation.
This past Monday night, thirty-six hours after it was announced that Living Water members, led by the Holy Spirit, had offered to pay the entire $41,000-cost of a capital campaign to raise money for the first phase of our repeatedly-approved building plan, the church council met in emergency session. The council met because on Sunday night, I received an email from Christ the King Lutheran Church. It told me that that congregation was moving toward closing its doors. Would Living Water be willing to receive the property to be used or sold as our congregation chose? I was told that Christ the King needed to know by September 27, this past Thursday.
The council was unanimous in saying that we would be interested in receiving the property. Since then, I’ve learned that a decision on the disposition of the property still has not been made.
Our church councils have always been transparent. That’s why on Tuesday, the council sent out a special edition of The Wave notifying you that we could possibly receive Christ the King’s property. You deserved to know of this possibility before the vote that was then scheduled for today and next Sunday.
The feeling of some members of the council was that, if we receive property, we should abandon our present property and move to the Christ the King campus.
More said that we should sell the Christ the King campus and use the money to help pay for the first phase of our building project or retire a portion of our current mortgage.
Of course, there’s no decision to make until and unless we actually receive the property.
Because of that, it was felt that we needed to go ahead with the scheduled vote. As our meeting ended on Monday, I had two prevailing feelings:
First, awe of God that in a day-and-a-half, the Holy Spirit had affirmed our plans by blessing us with the money to run a capital campaign and blessing us again with the possibility of a property that could help us pursue the mission and vision of Living Water Lutheran Church. God blesses His people in unexpected ways when they step out in faith to do His work!
Second, I felt grief for the people of Christ the King, forced to acknowledge decline of their congregation.
I also thanked God that the people of Living Water know that the call to discipleship is not a call to comfort or easy answers, but a call to faithfulness and acceptance of God’s crazy plans.
- Like the crazy plan God had to make a 100-year-old man and his 90-year-old wife, Abraham and Sarah, the ancestors of Israel in a place God would show them if Abraham believed and followed.
- Or God’s crazy plan of freeing His enslaved people via the leadership of a tongue-tied murderer, Moses.
- Or God’s plan to defeat the enemies of God’s people through a shepherd boy named David and his measly little slingshot.
- Or God’s plan to save us from sin and death not through good works but by grace through faith in Jesus Christ.
Listen: If God calls you to do something that doesn’t seem a little crazy or that you can easily see the end of, you’re probably not hearing from God.
Within hours of our council’s decision, we heard that some people were confused and some didn’t understand why we would go forward with the vote. Others thought that, given the $41,000 donation, there was no need to vote; we should simply forge ahead with the campaign.
Because of the confusion, the council decided to postpone the vote. I supported that decision. But I was and am deeply saddened that that decision was necessary. I know from my conversations with others, that many other Living Water disciples feel the same way. Many feel betrayed. Others feel like yo-yos, up and down, back and forth, yes and no.
As you can imagine, both because I’m pastor of Living Water and dean of the Southwest Ohio Mission District, Bishop John and I have had ongoing discussions for several months about what might happen with Christ the King. In our most recent conversation, two weeks ago, Bishop John said, “I’ve told you before, Mark, and I don’t mind you telling everyone there that whatever happens at Christ the King, Living Water must move ahead with the building plans for your present site.”
Is Bishop John crazy? Well, he is a fool for Christ. And like me, he loves this congregation. But he also knows that we cannot afford to keep delaying doing what, through prayer and discernment, we have learned God wants us to do! We can’t keep saying, “Ready! Aim!” “Ready! Aim!” "Ready! Aim!"
Bishop John has repeatedly underscored for me that the priorities we originally identified through our cottage meetings and online voting and which you have affirmed in multiple votes since--activity/community center and kitchen first, classrooms and offices second, sanctuary third--are the priorities adopted by churches that are serious, as Living Water is serious, about being and making disciples, about growing.
The community center is a key component of our future growth. A bigger sanctuary won’t bring growth because the unchurched aren’t likely to be introduced to Christ and the church through a worship service. That’s too foreign and foreboding to them. They’re likeliest to be introduced through various community events, like Upward basketball or outreach efforts.
And, given traffic patterns, this location is superior to Christ the King’s location for that.
I believe that we need to quickly reschedule the vote originally scheduled for today and next Sunday and get moving on God’s plan for us!
Am I apprehensive about doing that? Let me remind you of a few facts.
- We have ended every year of this congregation’s history with an operating surplus.
- While our attendance for 2018 is presently lower than it was in 2017, it’s higher than it was in 2016, a common blip in the path of growing congregations.
- While our current annual budget is at about $400,000, it’s no stretch to extrapolate from the answers of well over half of our congregants in the recent REVEAL survey that this congregation could easily handle an annual general fund budget of $800,000. I’m not proposing any such increase. But I am saying that although we’ve never held an annual stewardship program, our members have still generously given to the need they perceived in our budget.
- In addition, they have always found extra money to pay for things like sanctuary reconfiguration or building a church in Haiti or money for rice and beans for people in that country.*
So, am I afraid to have a capital campaign and have it fall short of whatever goal we set for it? No, I’m more afraid of waiting around or settling for being an ordinary, cruise-control church.
This is not a cruise-control church. This is a church that prays, that serves, that reads and studies God’s Word.
This is a church that cares about those who are going to go to hell if they aren’t connected with Christ and His Church.
The building process laid out in the plans displayed in our hallway will, in the first phase, provide us with an irreplaceable tool that we need to reach this community for Christ and at a great location.
I remember the day that George Kellar asked to meet me at 667 Miamisburg-Centerville Road. “Pastor,” he told me after I’d arrived. “I’m asking you to look at this property not for what it is right now, but for what it can be.”
The relocation team that George headed had looked at, in one way or another, about forty properties.
This was where they were led, this is where we were led, not as a stopgap station, but as a place where we could put down roots and do an expansion that will make Living Water and the Gospel we proclaim visible to and welcoming of the spiritually disconnected in our community.
In 1 Corinthians 14:8, the apostle Paul asks, “... if the trumpet does not sound a clear call, who will get ready for battle?” Today, as your pastor, I am sounding a clear call: Let’s quickly reschedule the vote and move ahead on the path God has laid before us. The quicker we do a capital campaign, the quicker we’ll know what God wants and, perhaps, the quicker we can start building. No more uncertain trumpets or signals! We need a vote to decide right now it we want to be a missional church that takes reasonable chances to reach the lost or if we just want this congregation to be a place where we gather in comfort.
But let me remind you that this congregation started because people believed--many of you here believed--in more than having a comfortable church.
You believed in Christ and the authority of His Word and the power of prayer and the joys of discipleship.
If you’d wanted a comfortable church, you would have stayed at your former congregation.
But you wanted to be part of a faithful church.
Don’t let the temptations of comfort lure you away from that.
Don’t let the temptations of ease lure you away from being faithful stewards of the gospel and all the other gifts God has given to you!
Jesus famously tells His Church: “Do not be afraid, little flock, for your Father has been pleased to give you the kingdom.” (Luke 12:32)
Friends, the worst that can happen if we forge ahead with a capital campaign for this location is that we might fail to raise the needed money.
But even if we fail, we will still have the Kingdom of God, eternally.
Forging ahead with the vision revealed to us in prayer will not result in the loss of our salvation.
We don’t know how a capital campaign will turn out.
But we do know that if we forge ahead it may result in many new believers trusting in Christ and becoming part of His eternal kingdom.
And we know that it will certainly result in our trusting Christ more and growing deeper in discipleship.
By forging ahead, we may even ensure that this congregation will be a vital disciple-making community, welcoming young families and singles, for decades to come. Whatever happens, that possibility alone makes trying to move ahead with our current plans a win.
I took the call to Living Water because God and the congregation were telling me that this is a church that cares about mission, about making disciples. Continued inaction will harm the positive initiatives we’ve undertaken since we moved here, including the growth of youth, children’s, and family ministries, which had to be rebuilt from scratch when we moved to our present location. We don’t know what decisions Christ the King will take. The real question is what decision are we going to make?
I urge you all to pray. Then, let’s do the vote and move into the future God has in mind for us. Amen
[I'm the pastor of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio.]
*At the 8:45 service, I mentioned that through the generosity of Living Water, a well was built in a community in Haiti served by our congregation. In this instance, it was the generosity of one member rather than of the whole congregation. No matter. It still speaks to the generosity of this incredible church!
[This message was prepared to be shared during worship on Sunday, September 30, 2018, with the people and friends of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio. I felt moved to share a different message. That other message will be shared too. But this scrapped sermon is the sixth installment of our series on the Biblical themes raised by the book, I Am a Church Member, by Thom Rainer.]
1 Corinthians 12:27
Revelation 21:2
John 3:29
Lucy Van Pelt, the creepy little kid in the old Peanuts comic strip who always pulled the football away just as Charlie Brown was about to kick it, said, “I love humanity. It’s the people I can’t stand.”
Some people in the Church have an equivalent attitude about all local congregations. “I love Christ’s Church,” they seem to say, “It’s the people in individual congregations that I have no use for.”
But, as Thom Rainer rightly points out in the sixth and final chapter of his book, I Am a Church Member, people who try to make such distinctions aren’t really paying attention to the witness of the New Testament. Rainer writes that “...the universal church and the local church are not mutually exclusive...The Bible is clear that we are to be connected to a specific church in a specific context.”
This insight comes from reading Paul’s letters to New Testament congregations. Each letter was written to individual, local congregations, each committed to living out their faith in partnership with and accountability to one another.
Essential to being a member of Christ’s church universal or church catholic then, is to be a member of a local church. The holy catholic Church is in every local congregation where Christ’s gospel is rightly proclaimed and the sacraments are rightly administered. And every member of every local congregation where those conditions are met is also part of the whole Church in heaven and on earth. We who make up local congregations like Living Water are part of Christ’s body, His eternal fellowship. This is why the apostle Paul says to we disciples of Jesus, “Now you are the body of Christ, and each one of you is a part of it.” (1 Corinthians 12:27)
But church life can be difficult. Like families or workplaces, we can disagree, argue, and not see eye to eye. Why then does God give us the gift of salvation only through the life, ministry, and proclamation of Christ’s Church? And why does He consider the Church such a gift for its members anyway?
Members of my extended biological family experienced a major blow-up with their local church and its pastor. They tell me that they now have “church” at home, inviting companionable friends over for Bible studies that they lead.
Now, I’m an advocate of small groups. They are essential for our growth as disciples. But the problem with these family members’ approach to church, of course, is that people who treat a small group as their “church” are more likely to take a wrong turn in their faith.
When you’re only around the companionable people with whom you feel comfortable, you’re ripe for heresy that can pull you far away from God and the truth of His Word. It’s only when “iron sharpens iron” (Proverbs 27:17), when we’re in a church in which we can disagree with Christ’s love, that we grow, that we really learn what it means to love each other as Christ loves us. The approach taken by my family members also leaves them at risk of forgetting all about the entire mission of Christ’s Church, to make disciples, instead, being satisfied to just read Scripture and pray with people who will never challenge them for self-satisfaction or spiritual smugness.
So, one reason that God considers the Church His gift to us is that it helps keep us faithful. I mentioned Hebrews 10:25 in the first installment of this series a few weeks ago. There, we’re told not to give up “meeting together, as some are in the habit of doing, but encouraging one another—and all the more as you see the Day approaching.” So, as the day of Christ’s return grows ever closer, we need the people of our local churches even more. We need to gather around the Word and Sacrament, we need to be challenged and afflicted by God’s Word, as well as comforted and empowered by it. That’s part of what Christ’s Church, part of what this church, does!
Another reason God says we should regard the Church as His gift is that it shows contempt for God to see it in any other way. In Revelation, chapters 18 to 22, we find an idea developed that comes from Jesus: The Church is the bride of Christ. This is rooted in the very language that Jesus used about Himself during His earthly ministry. In John 3:29, Jesus says, “The bride belongs to the bridegroom. The friend who attends the bridegroom [the best man, John the Baptist] waits and listens for him, and is full of joy when he hears the bridegroom's voice. That joy is mine, and it is now complete.”
Jesus here speaks of His joy of being one with His bride, the Church. The marriage of Christ and His Church is consummated in Holy Baptism and strengthened in Holy Communion. And one day, the groom will come to take His bride into His home for all eternity.
John saw this in one of the visions he had while on the island of Patmos, where he records, “I saw the Holy City, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride beautifully dressed for her husband.” (Revelation 21:2)
The Church then, including Living Water Lutheran Church, is a big deal, an eternal fellowship. That’s why Rainer writes, “Church membership is a gift. A gift must be treasured. It should not be taken for granted or considered lightly. Because it is a gift, we must always be thankful for it. And when we are thankful for something, we have less time and energy to be negative.”
The Church ultimately is the fellowship of believers in Jesus in which we learn that Christian faith is not about me, it’s about us as a community of believers submissive to Christ whose only mission is to invite and welcome “outsiders” into that same community so that, believing in Jesus, they too will have life with God.
That’s a truth that we cannot and will not learn apart from the fellowship of the Church Jesus established through His apostles and their successors.
The crucified and risen Jesus tells His Church, “Whoever believes and is baptized will be saved, but whoever does not believe will be condemned.” (Mark 16:16)
The Church then is a gift because through it, we learn and build our lives around the truth of the gospel that God gives new and everlasting life to all who daily turn from sin and daily follow Jesus...and then, by His Holy Spirit, empowers us to grow each day in the likeness of the Lord Who died and rose for sinners like us.
When you have the gift of Christ and the Church that can never be taken from those who believe, you then can keep giving those gifts away--Christ and the Church. And as that happens, not only will more people be given the chance to know Christ, follow Christ, and share Christ with others, those same people--new believers in Jesus--will join us in sharing our free gifts of life with Christ and His Church with others.
The apostle Peter was one of the first to be sent out to invite others to receive the gifts of Christ and Church. One day at the temple, Peter encountered a lame man begging for money and told the man, “Silver or gold I do not have, but what I do have I give you. In the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, walk.” (Acts 3:6) Peter claimed that he could offer prayer and new life in Jesus’ name and Jesus underscored the validity of Peter’s words by also giving the man the ability to walk and jump once again. That was because Peter was part of Christ’s Church. And you can bet that that formerly lame man was anxious to hear all about Peter’s church after that.
Are we treasuring Christ’s Church enough to respect those with whom we disagree in our congregation?
Or, do we speak of them and treat them like the refuse that some politicians claim their opponents to be?
Are we Lucy Van Pelt Christians?
Or do we love our sisters and brothers in Christ in this church? Do we pray for them, speak well of them, encourage them?
Treasure your church; after all, if we’re saved by grace through faith in Christ, all of the people in every local church of which you may be a part, are people with whom you’re going to spend eternity! Better to learn to love them now than wait until Jesus returns.
And if we don’t learn to love them now, it may be too late to learn after Jesus comes back and time has run out for us to repent for our half-hearted discipleship. “Now you are the body of Christ, and each one of you is a part of it.” Let’s live out that truth with gratitude and love for one another. Amen
[I'm the pastor of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio.]
[This was shared with the people and friends of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio, on Sunday morning, September 23.]
Deuteronomy 6:7-9
Recently, I had two separate conversations with members of my extended family: one a believer who doesn’t attend church; the other is a non-believer who attends church.
In the conversation with the believer who doesn’t attend church, I mentioned some of the things I was going to be doing over the succeeding few days. “I’m sure that must be hard,” the family member told me. “Well, not that hard,” I started to explain. “Oh,” my family member interjected, “it must be old hat for you by now.” “No,” I said, “I mean that my work depends less on how much experience I have than it does on how much I depend on God to do it.” I think that sounded like a foreign language to my relative.
In the conversation with the non-believer who attends a church, we were talking about how people in their church helped at the church office. Looking at me, this family member said, “I guess that’s what the Church is about, isn’t it?” “Well, sort of,” I said. I wanted to recite this month’s Living Water memory verse about the Church: “Now you are the body of Christ, and each one of you is a part of it.” (1 Corinthians 12:27) Church life isn’t so much about being nice to each other as it is about helping each other so that we can fulfill our mission as the Church. Once again, I think I sounded like a foreigner to a family member.
Folks, Jesus commissions each of us as His people, both collectively and individually, to make disciples. First Peter tells us that you and I were bought out of our slavery to sin and death by Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection not only so that we could be saved, but so that we could help others to a saving faith in Jesus. “But you are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s special possession,” Peter writes, “that you may declare the praises of him who called you out of darkness into his wonderful light.” (1 Peter 2:9) That’s our purpose.
When you and I leave worship on Sundays, we go into our own personal mission fields. They include every place we work, play, study, shop, exercise, relax, or socialize.
And the most challenging part of our personal mission fields is our families.
What makes reaching our families with the good news about Jesus so challenging? I think that it's this: Our families--spouses, children, parents, siblings, cousins, grandparents, aunts, and uncles--know all about us. (Or they think they do.)
They know our imperfections.
They know our weak spots and what makes us crazy.
Our family members have built-in walls of defense against our witness for Christ.
I’m sure that many of my relatives think, when our conversations veer off into dangerously Christian territory, “There he goes again” and simply tune me out or move onto the next subject.
And yet two things are true.
First, as Thom Rainer reminds us in the fifth chapter of his book, I Am a Church Member, we are called to help our families know Christ. (I refuse to say, as Rainer does, that we lead people to Christ. We can’t lead anyone to Christ! Only the Holy Spirit can lead a person to Christ, even if the Spirit happens to use me in some way to that end!)
Secondly, it’s also true that we have no more intimate connections than the ones we have with our families. Nowhere are we able to have more opportunities to share the gospel of new and everlasting life for all who repent and believe in Jesus Christ than in our own homes, among our own kin.
The Bible says that parents have a particular responsibility to share their faith and the importance of living in the community of faith with their kids. In Deuteronomy 6, starting at verse 7, God tells Israel, the ancient proto-church that anticipates the eternal Church that Jesus would later begin: “Impress them [God’s words of law and promise] on your children. Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up. Tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads. Write them on the doorframes of your houses and on your gates.” (Deuteronomy 6:7-9)
In other words, the primary place in which children are to be instructed in the faith and where they’re to see how the Church is to function as Christ’s community in the world is in their homes.
This is why Martin Luther called the family “a little church.”
It’s also why he wrote The Small Catechism to be used by families as part of worship and devotional life in their homes.
In our families, as we pray together, talk about what was discussed in worship and Sunday School, read Scripture together, and, love each other and even love and care about the people in our churches or the world who try our patience, children and parents learn together and live out together the meaning of their Christian discipleship.
It’s in our families that we learn the meaning and importance of the Church, the only agency in the world through which the Gospel of new and everlasting life for all who repent and believe in Jesus is proclaimed. Without the Church, no one would know that there is a loving God Who has acted to save us from sin, death, and darkness. The family is one of the most important places in which the work of the Church is done.
So, how can we best point our families to Christ as the only hope human beings have for life with God and to His family, the Church, as the only fellowship in which we can know and experience the truth about God?
Let me make a few suggestions.
First, our family members must see that we love Christ and His Church, including church members who have annoyed or hurt us. It’s good when, in the power of the Holy Spirit, we seek to live out what Jesus tells us about forgiveness: “You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye.” (Matthew 7:5) When our families understand from our witness and our lives that the Church is Christ’s hospital for hypocrites and we are among its life-long patients, both Christ and the central importance of the Church are authenticated.
Second, families must see that Christians don’t think that they’re better than others. If we’ve been saved by grace through faith in Christ, how can we think that we’re better than other people anyway? In one of His parables, Jesus said that a Pharisee had it wrong when he thanked God that he wasn’t a sinner like a tax collector then standing at a distance from the altar. But Jesus said that the tax collector had it right when he prayed, “God, have mercy on me, a sinner” (Luke 18:13). In Ephesians, we’re told, “For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God— not by works, so that no one can boast.” (Ephesians 2:8-9)
Third, our families must catch us being Christians. Some Christians can talk about faith with others, but the rubber hits the road in their life and witness.
I read about a rebellious teenager whose elderly Norwegian-American grandfather came to live with the family. One day, the teen walked by his grandfather’s bedroom. The door had slipped ajar and he saw the old man kneeling at his bed, praying for the salvation of his teenage grandson, tears rolling down his cheeks. That teenager later became a committed Christian and a pastor.
When our families see us praying, worshiping at church and at home, witnessing to others for Christ, and serving others in Jesus’ name, when they see us dealing with success with gratitude and failure with magnanimity, they can better see the validity of the Christian life and life in connection with Christ’s Church.
Our families are our mission fields. They are the people with whom we have the greatest influence, the ones to whom we can most readily show that Christ is the way and the truth and the life and that it’s only in the fellowship of the Church that we can know Christ and be part of His mission in the world.
Finally, I want to say a word to you who have family members who, like those family members of mine I mentioned, presently have no apparent connection to Christ and His Church: Don’t lose hope!
Even if your family members are today ignoring their need for Christ and His eternal family, you can still pray in Jesus’ name.
You can continue to share your witness for Jesus with them.
You can tell them that, while you are an imperfect sinner deserving of death and judgment, you’ve been made alive by God in your Baptism and given new and everlasting life by your trust in the Savior Who died and rose for sinful human beings.
You can let them see how much this church family means to you.
Trust that God will use your prayers and witness and the prayers and witness of other Christians to give that spiritually disconnected family member every chance to know and follow Christ into life with God. Even after we’re dead and gone, God will still hear our prayers and find ways to answer them. Our call is simply to be faithful and leave everything else to the God Who washes sinners clean and raises the dead.
May the Holy Spirit use us to point our families to Christ and His Church. Amen
[I'm the pastor of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio.]
[This was shared during the funeral for Ron, a member of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio, earlier yesterday.]
Job 19:23-27a
John 11: 21-27
I liked Ron and Colleen from the moment I met them. They were faithful, earnest, real, kind, committed to one another and to their family, and filled with good humor. I got to know them through our Tuesday Bible studies and I got to know Ron even better when he volunteered in the church office where we sometimes had long conversations.
Ron’s passing leaves a hole in your lives, Colleen, Ron, Mike, Vicki, Karen, and family. Please know that he leaves a hole in the lives of all who have known him for years and for those of us who have known him for shorter periods at Living Water. Ann and I will miss him.
Ron was such a positive and caring person. He always took it upon himself to care for people: no fanfare, no showboating, just compassionate help. He was committed to his marriage and, along with Colleen, committed to helping others have good marriages through their work with Marriage Encounter. In the hospitals where Ron was a patient toward the end of his life, he was kind and considerate toward all the staff. When Ann and I visited with him and Colleen at their home just before he was transported to hospice (Jane was there too), I asked Ron how he was doing. He answered with his trademark response, “Fantastic!”
Physically, of course, Ron wasn’t fantastic. And he had managed in the short time between the day that he got the shocking news that the tumor he’d thought was benign was in fact, likely fatal, to accept the doctors’ prognosis. His biggest concern, from the beginning, was not for himself, but for Colleen. “I know where I’m going,” he told me, acknowledging his faith in Jesus Christ. “I’m just concerned about her,” he said, pointing to Colleen.
These weren’t the words of a resigned fatalist. They were the words of a man of faith.
Today, I want to commend that same faith to all of you who grieve the loss of this special man.
It’s a faith that can take you through your grief and sustain you with the same tenacious hope that Ron displayed as he received Christ’s body and blood and listened to God’s Word this past Tuesday.
In our gospel lesson for today, we’re told that Jesus goes to the village of Bethany after His friend, Lazarus has died. Lazarus’ sister Martha, knowing that Jesus has power over disease and death, is upset when Jesus finally arrives. “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.” But, even in the midst of her grief and anger, Martha trusted in Jesus. “I know that even now God will give you whatever you ask…” she tells Jesus.
I don’t know exactly what Martha’s expectation of Jesus was at that moment. She probably didn’t expect what eventually happened: Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead.
But even before that amazing event took place, Jesus told her, “I am the resurrection and the life. The one who believes in me will live, even though they die; and whoever lives by believing in me will never die.”
This is what Ron believed and it’s what made him so assured for himself as he faced death.
Ron knew that he wasn’t a perfect human being. He often lamented the fact that, as he put it, he didn’t really get serious about his faith in Jesus or the life of discipleship until he was about forty. He felt that he’d missed out on so much without that close connection to Christ and His Church. And he deeply appreciated Colleen’s faith.
But Ron knew that only one human being has been perfect since humanity’s fall into sin: Jesus, true God, and true man. He knew that because of His sinlessness, Jesus was the perfect sacrifice for the sins of imperfect human beings and that all who turn from sin and trust in Him have a life with God that begins now in this imperfect world and is brought to perfection in the world to come.
Jesus puts it succinctly in the Bible’s most famous verse, John 3:16: “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.”
Faith in the God we meet today only in Jesus Christ was well expressed by a man, part of whose life story is told in the Old Testament, Job. Job was a man who believed in God, lived to glorify God, and prayed and cared for his family’s salvation from sin and death. Job was a good man who didn’t deserve the suffering that can come to us simply because this is an imperfect world.
In one fell swoop, he lost his property, his children, and his health. Job had questions. He wondered how God could have let all of this happen to him? Why had his children died? But Job also knew that life in this world is not the ultimate destination for those who trust in God.
And so he could say in the midst of his suffering and grief, “I know that my redeemer lives, and that in the end he will stand on the earth. And after my skin has been destroyed, yet in my flesh I will see God; I myself will see him with my own eyes—I, and not another.”
In some mysterious way that I can’t pretend to fully understand, Ron is in the presence of his Redeemer, the One Who buys believers out of their bondage to sin and death, right now. At this very moment, Ron is looking into the eyes of the Savior Jesus, Who has welcomed Ron into eternity with the words, “Well done, good and faithful servant!”
And this is no pie-in-the-sky make-believe. Jesus, Who died, rose from the dead and was seen by more than five-hundred witnesses who risked and often lost their earthly lives as they insisted, “We have seen the Lord!” (John 20:25)
I know that more than anything today, Ron wants you to know that Jesus Christ, God in the flesh, once dead, is risen and He opens the gates of life with God by our sides in the tumult and challenges of this life and a life in eternity with God to all who dare to believe in Him.
Jesus has said, “My Father's house has many rooms; if that were not so, would I have told you that I am going there to prepare a place for you? And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come back and take you to be with me that you also may be where I am.” (John 14:2-3)
Jesus has prepared a place for you.
Just as Ron did, you can trust in that always.
You can trust in Jesus always.
Amen
[I'm the pastor of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio.]
