[This was shared this evening during the midweek Lenten devotional worship with the people of Saint Matthew Lutheran Church in Logan, Ohio.]
Matthew 26:36-46
Matthew 26:29
Luke 10:9
To focus our thoughts on the second and third petitions of the Lord’s Prayer—“Thy kingdom come, [and] Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven”—I want to share two quotes from Jesus found in the Gospels.
First is Luke 10:9, where Jesus says, “The kingdom of God has come near to you.”
And second, Matthew 26:29, where, during the Last Supper, Jesus tells the disciples, “I will never again drink of this fruit of the vine until that day when I drink it new with you in My Father’s kingdom.”
These two statements from Jesus underscore the strange paradox in the New Testament’s discussion of “the kingdom of God.” A paradox, you know, is a situation that seems to be made up of two contradictory conditions. In the case of Jesus’ words about the kingdom of God—throughout the Gospels—the paradox is that God’s kingdom is already here (and we who belong to Christ are already in it), but it has not yet come. It’s already, but not yet.
The original Greek New Testament word that we translate as kingdom is basileia. It’s a less static or stationary word than our word, kingdom. It really means reign. You can be in the kingdom of God no matter where you live. And because of what Jesus has accomplished on the cross and in the empty tomb, the kingdom of God has already come to believers. The kingdom isn’t a physical place, then.
That, you know, was, partly, the mistaken idea Jesus’ first followers had. Lots of Old Testament prophecy had said that the Messiah or Yahweh—God Himself—was coming to the earth to establish the kingdom of God.*
Peter, James, John, and the rest believed that Jesus was the Messiah who would bring God's kingdom into the world and that's one of the reasons they were so devastated when Jesus was crucified. They had expected Jesus to be the Messiah who would overthrow the Romans and get rid of the fake royalty, the Herod family, and establish God’s kingdom on earth. They thought that the kingdom of God was a political or economic program.
When Jesus rose from the dead, their hopes of an earthly rule by God were revived. That’s why in the New Testament book of Acts we read about the disciples asking the risen Jesus, “Lord, is this the time when you will restore the kingdom to Israel?” It’s as though they’re telling Jesus, “Hey, that resurrection thing was a neat trick. But when are you really going to get down to business and enact the kingdom?”
We may be inclined to laugh at the disciples and say something like the kingdom of God is spiritual, not physical. But that’s not true either. Those who live in the kingdom of God are called—even commanded—by God to live in certain ways here and now. We’re to love God, love neighbors, seek justice, and believe in Jesus Christ. The already/not yet kingdom of God is meant to be more than some private, ill-defined spiritual interchange that happens inside of us. It’s meant to change the ways in which you and I live each day.
If we have any doubt about this, we simply need to look at how Jesus teaches us to pray in the second and third petitions of the Lord’s Prayer. “Your kingdom come, Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.”** Jesus teaches us to pray that God will reign here on earth today as directly, as totally, and as completely as He reigns from His throne in heaven.
But here’s the really dangerous thing about these two petitions: We ask God our Father to reign over this clump of earth, over you and me. We are clumps of earth, by the way. The scientists say it. But the Bible said it first: Remember that when God made Adam, He did it by scooping up dirt from the ground and breathing life into him.
To say, “Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven” is to invite God, first of all, to reign over our lives. As Martin Luther puts it in The Small Catechism, “God’s kingdom comes indeed without our praying for it, but we ask in this prayer that it may come also to us.”
On the night of His arrest, Jesus prayed that the Father would create some other way to bring His kingdom into being than for Jesus to go through the cross. But then He prayed, “…yet not I want but what you want.” Not my will, but Thy will be done, in this lump of clay, on this piece of earth.
It’s a fine thing for us to think of neighbors, friends, and even enemies when we pray these two petitions. We want the kingdom of God to come to all people. We want everyone to come to believe in Jesus Christ as God and Savior and so become part of God’s kingdom. We want God to reign over our church, homes, communities, schools, government leaders, and so on. We should pray that God’s kingdom come and God’s will be done among these people and institutions, these clumps of earth.
But what Jesus, Who taught this prayer and then said this prayer Himself in the Garden of Gethsemane, shows us is that we must also be willing to live this prayer. God brought His kingdom into the world through a flesh and blood Savior. It’s God’s plan that His kingdom will continue to come and His will keep on being done in this world as it is in heaven through the flesh and blood lives AND prayers of Christians.
It’s interesting to remember that Jesus didn’t teach what we know as the Lord’s Prayer to the disciples on His own initiative. He didn’t wake up one day and say, “I think I’ll teach the guys how to pray.” He taught the disciples how to pray after they asked Him to do so. They had seen the kingdom of God in Jesus and they wanted to know how the kingdom could come to them, too.
Maybe if you and I would take up these two petitions earnestly, asking God to reign over us and have His way with us right in the guts of our everyday lives, others might ask us to teach them how to pray.
May the Lord teach us how to pray these petitions and mean them. Amen
*See Ezekiel 34:11-16, Zechariah 14:1-5, Malachi 3:1, Isaiah 40:3-5, and Isaiah 52:7-10.
**See Matthew 6:10.
[I really appreciate the discussion of these two petitions in N.T. Wrights book, The Lord and His Prayer. It distills, far better than I've done here, much of my own thinking about them.]
Wednesday, March 03, 2010
Sunday, February 28, 2010
Living Under the Shadow of Christ's Wings
[This was shared during worship with the people of Saint Matthew Lutheran Church in Logan, Ohio, this morning.]
Luke 13:31-35
A prominent New Testament scholar tells about a discovery made after a barnyard fire. The fire had swept through the chicken coop. But beneath the burnt bodies of several hens were found very living peeping chicks. The hens had saved the lives of their little ones, who may never have realized the danger they faced.
In today’s Gospel lesson, Jesus is warned that He should avoid going to Jerusalem. There, it’s said that the king, Herod Antipas, was planning to kill Jesus. The threat is plausible. Herod was one of several sons of Herod the Great. That Herod was king when Jesus was born. It was Herod the Great who ordered the murder of the baby boys in Bethlehem after the maji told him that the Messiah had been born in David’s city. The son, Herod Antipas, was the one who had murdered John the Baptist. He also, according to the ancient Jewish historian Josephus, generally liked to silence troublemakers.
Whether the Pharisees who warn Jesus away from Jerusalem speak for Herod Antipas or not, Jesus tells them to carry a message back to him. Calling Herod “that fox,” Jesus says that He’s coming to Jerusalem at a time appointed by God and nothing that Herod may threaten, say, or do will prevent Him from going there.
Our passage comes at about the midpoint of a long section of Luke’s gospel called the travel narrative. It runs from Luke, chapter 9, verse 51, all the way to chapter 19, verse 27. The theme of this section is set at its beginning when we’re told that Jesus “set his face to go to Jerusalem.”
Jesus tells us why He is going to Jerusalem in today’s lesson: “It is impossible for a prophet [and Jesus is the greatest of all the prophets, as well as being Messiah and God-in-the-flesh]…impossible for a prophet to be killed outside of Jerusalem…”
Jesus has a mission, which Herod in this week’s lesson, every bit as much as the devil in last week’s lesson, wants to keep Jesus from fulfilling. It’s in Jerusalem that Jesus will fulfill it. God’s will—God’s plans—will triumph not only over the devil, but over the plans of puny human rulers and other wielders of power. In Jerusalem, at a time set by God the Father, Jesus is intent on sacrificing Himself on the cross, taking our punishment for sin, so that all who trust in Him will live forever with God.
In our lesson, Jesus says that Jerusalem is the only place He could possibly do this. Jerusalem, of course, was the holy city of the ancient Jews and their nation’s political capital. In Jesus’ day, Jerusalem was also the place which the Romans, who had conquered what had once been known as Israel, used as their base of operations.
Every sin you can think of was accepted in Jerusalem. Every injustice. Every dirty deal. And the leaders of what we would today call “church and state”: the priests at the temple, supposed guardians of true faith in God and the Jewish puppet kings and their advisers who wielded power by submitting to Rome instead of God, went along with the sin.
More than that, they got involved with it. It lined their pockets. It gave them nice homes and servants. It gave them influence and power. Jerusalem, like much of our world today, had become a corrupted, dark place that closed its ears to God, God’s Word, and God's will.
It was only by going into this heart of darkness that Jesus could do what He set His face to do. He would do something very similar to what the mother hens did in the face of that barnyard fire. In fact, Jesus speaks of what He will do in Jerusalem in those very terms. “Jerusalem, Jerusalem,” He laments, “the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to you. How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing…”
Jesus’ desire is to gather not only Jerusalem, but Logan and Saint Matthew, you and me, and all our neighbors, under the protection of His maternal wings.
He will give His very life in order to gather us in, saving us from death, and giving us life.
The most critical question each and every human being faces—the question of our lives—is whether we will let Jesus gather us in or go our own ways?
Will we live in the shadow of the Lord’s wings or not?
We may find that, as was true of Herod and even of the religious Pharisees, a lot within us and around us keeps us from taking shelter with Christ. It means swallowing our pride, for one thing. This is hard. The sin within us resists.
We don’t want to acknowledge that we’re not in control of our lives.
We don’t want to admit that we’re involuntary sinners who need a Savior to set us on the right path.
We don’t want to deal with the fact that, absent the help of God, we’re incapable of becoming the people we sense we could be.
So, we try blocking out the truth about ourselves and our need for God with lots of habits—many not bad in and of themselves, but destructive when taken to excess—from mindless TV channel-surfing to overeating, from sex outside the bounds of marriage to overwork, from gossiping to indulge a pretense of being superior to others to harboring resentments of those who have more than we do, from a lazy indifference to difficulties faced by neighbors to frenzied activity and achievement designed to prove to the world—and to ourselves—that our lives are worth something.
Jesus wants to free us from all that. He wants us to walk free and forgiven, free and filled with hope, free and full of life, free and without worry, free and certain of our eternal destinies.
Under Jesus’ protective wings, we aren’t given lives devoid of risk, or challenge, or even the possibility of adversity, pain, or tragedy.
But we are freed from the weight of our past.
We are freed to begin becoming the people God made us to be.
We’re freed to live each day in the awareness that God loves us and will stand with us forever.
When we dare to throw away all the props we use to shelter us from the unpleasantness of life and the reality of our need for God and the salvation He offers through Jesus, God gives us life, an incredible gift that only the Creator of life could possibly give!
Jesus could have played it safe, He could have skipped out on going to Jerusalem. But He knew that without His death and resurrection, our lives would be meaningless pilgrimages to eternal separation from God. He chose instead to spread out His arms on the cross and welcome all who will receive Him as their Lord and King into the shelter of His grace. No matter what life brings our ways, what Jesus accomplished in Jerusalem makes true and everlasting life possible for all with faith in Him.
Jesus didn’t go to Jerusalem, face down the evil of the devil and the world, suffer agony on the cross, and rise from the dead so that you and I could play it safe. Jesus did all of that so that, like the chicks saved by their mother hens, we could live!
He calls us to join Him in the risky business of facing the evil of the world with love, confronting sin with the gospel, filling the needs of the hungry, the jobless, the victims of natural disasters, and others with Christian service, praying even for our enemies, and not only reading God’s Word but praying for God’s help in living that Word.
Christian living isn’t always safe living. But it is living!
And it’s made possible when we dare to take shelter under the wings of just one God, just one King, just one way, truth, and life. It happens only under the wings of Jesus. May that be the way we all live each day! Amen
Luke 13:31-35
A prominent New Testament scholar tells about a discovery made after a barnyard fire. The fire had swept through the chicken coop. But beneath the burnt bodies of several hens were found very living peeping chicks. The hens had saved the lives of their little ones, who may never have realized the danger they faced.
In today’s Gospel lesson, Jesus is warned that He should avoid going to Jerusalem. There, it’s said that the king, Herod Antipas, was planning to kill Jesus. The threat is plausible. Herod was one of several sons of Herod the Great. That Herod was king when Jesus was born. It was Herod the Great who ordered the murder of the baby boys in Bethlehem after the maji told him that the Messiah had been born in David’s city. The son, Herod Antipas, was the one who had murdered John the Baptist. He also, according to the ancient Jewish historian Josephus, generally liked to silence troublemakers.
Whether the Pharisees who warn Jesus away from Jerusalem speak for Herod Antipas or not, Jesus tells them to carry a message back to him. Calling Herod “that fox,” Jesus says that He’s coming to Jerusalem at a time appointed by God and nothing that Herod may threaten, say, or do will prevent Him from going there.
Our passage comes at about the midpoint of a long section of Luke’s gospel called the travel narrative. It runs from Luke, chapter 9, verse 51, all the way to chapter 19, verse 27. The theme of this section is set at its beginning when we’re told that Jesus “set his face to go to Jerusalem.”
Jesus tells us why He is going to Jerusalem in today’s lesson: “It is impossible for a prophet [and Jesus is the greatest of all the prophets, as well as being Messiah and God-in-the-flesh]…impossible for a prophet to be killed outside of Jerusalem…”
Jesus has a mission, which Herod in this week’s lesson, every bit as much as the devil in last week’s lesson, wants to keep Jesus from fulfilling. It’s in Jerusalem that Jesus will fulfill it. God’s will—God’s plans—will triumph not only over the devil, but over the plans of puny human rulers and other wielders of power. In Jerusalem, at a time set by God the Father, Jesus is intent on sacrificing Himself on the cross, taking our punishment for sin, so that all who trust in Him will live forever with God.
In our lesson, Jesus says that Jerusalem is the only place He could possibly do this. Jerusalem, of course, was the holy city of the ancient Jews and their nation’s political capital. In Jesus’ day, Jerusalem was also the place which the Romans, who had conquered what had once been known as Israel, used as their base of operations.
Every sin you can think of was accepted in Jerusalem. Every injustice. Every dirty deal. And the leaders of what we would today call “church and state”: the priests at the temple, supposed guardians of true faith in God and the Jewish puppet kings and their advisers who wielded power by submitting to Rome instead of God, went along with the sin.
More than that, they got involved with it. It lined their pockets. It gave them nice homes and servants. It gave them influence and power. Jerusalem, like much of our world today, had become a corrupted, dark place that closed its ears to God, God’s Word, and God's will.
It was only by going into this heart of darkness that Jesus could do what He set His face to do. He would do something very similar to what the mother hens did in the face of that barnyard fire. In fact, Jesus speaks of what He will do in Jerusalem in those very terms. “Jerusalem, Jerusalem,” He laments, “the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to you. How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing…”
Jesus’ desire is to gather not only Jerusalem, but Logan and Saint Matthew, you and me, and all our neighbors, under the protection of His maternal wings.
He will give His very life in order to gather us in, saving us from death, and giving us life.
The most critical question each and every human being faces—the question of our lives—is whether we will let Jesus gather us in or go our own ways?
Will we live in the shadow of the Lord’s wings or not?
We may find that, as was true of Herod and even of the religious Pharisees, a lot within us and around us keeps us from taking shelter with Christ. It means swallowing our pride, for one thing. This is hard. The sin within us resists.
We don’t want to acknowledge that we’re not in control of our lives.
We don’t want to admit that we’re involuntary sinners who need a Savior to set us on the right path.
We don’t want to deal with the fact that, absent the help of God, we’re incapable of becoming the people we sense we could be.
So, we try blocking out the truth about ourselves and our need for God with lots of habits—many not bad in and of themselves, but destructive when taken to excess—from mindless TV channel-surfing to overeating, from sex outside the bounds of marriage to overwork, from gossiping to indulge a pretense of being superior to others to harboring resentments of those who have more than we do, from a lazy indifference to difficulties faced by neighbors to frenzied activity and achievement designed to prove to the world—and to ourselves—that our lives are worth something.
Jesus wants to free us from all that. He wants us to walk free and forgiven, free and filled with hope, free and full of life, free and without worry, free and certain of our eternal destinies.
Under Jesus’ protective wings, we aren’t given lives devoid of risk, or challenge, or even the possibility of adversity, pain, or tragedy.
But we are freed from the weight of our past.
We are freed to begin becoming the people God made us to be.
We’re freed to live each day in the awareness that God loves us and will stand with us forever.
When we dare to throw away all the props we use to shelter us from the unpleasantness of life and the reality of our need for God and the salvation He offers through Jesus, God gives us life, an incredible gift that only the Creator of life could possibly give!
Author Steve Smith tells of a man who lived a “safe” life. [He tried to shelter himself from life’s realities the way the Pharisees supposedly sheltered Jesus.] He decided not to love too much because love cost too much. He decided not to dream too much because dreaming only brought disappointment. He decided not to serve too much because serving got your hands filthy and got you into trouble. When he died, he presented his life to God—undiminished, unmarred, and unsoiled by the messiness of a fallen world. He proudly said, “God, here is my life!” And God said, “What life?”I don’t know about you, but that’s not the kind of interchange I want to have with God when I face Him in eternity. Someone has said, “Life is not a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming, ‘Wow! What a ride!’”
Jesus could have played it safe, He could have skipped out on going to Jerusalem. But He knew that without His death and resurrection, our lives would be meaningless pilgrimages to eternal separation from God. He chose instead to spread out His arms on the cross and welcome all who will receive Him as their Lord and King into the shelter of His grace. No matter what life brings our ways, what Jesus accomplished in Jerusalem makes true and everlasting life possible for all with faith in Him.
Jesus didn’t go to Jerusalem, face down the evil of the devil and the world, suffer agony on the cross, and rise from the dead so that you and I could play it safe. Jesus did all of that so that, like the chicks saved by their mother hens, we could live!
He calls us to join Him in the risky business of facing the evil of the world with love, confronting sin with the gospel, filling the needs of the hungry, the jobless, the victims of natural disasters, and others with Christian service, praying even for our enemies, and not only reading God’s Word but praying for God’s help in living that Word.
Christian living isn’t always safe living. But it is living!
And it’s made possible when we dare to take shelter under the wings of just one God, just one King, just one way, truth, and life. It happens only under the wings of Jesus. May that be the way we all live each day! Amen
[Agnus Day appears with the permission of www.agnusday.org.]
Saturday, February 27, 2010
Please Keep Praying for Pastor David Wayne
Here is an update from David Wayne. Please continue to pray for him.
David's musings about his motives for blogging, whether to glorify God or bring attention to himself, are something with which I identify. It reminded me of this song, I Just Wanna Know, in which Steve Taylor wrestled with his own motivations for being a musician, back in 1985.
Life's too short for small talk
So don't be talking trivia now
Excess baggage fills this plane
There's more than we should ever allow
There's engines stalling and good men falling
But I ain't crawling away
I just wanna know
Am I pulling people closer?
I just wanna be pulling them to you
I just wanna stay angry at the evil
I just wanna be hungry for the true
Folks play follow the leader
But who's the leader gonna obey?
Will his head get big when the toes get tapping?
I just wanna know are they catching what I say?
I'm a little too young to introspect
And I surely haven't paid all my dues
But there's bear traps lying in those woods
Most of them already been used
I just wanna know
Am I pulling people closer?
I just wanna be pulling them to you
I just wanna stay angry at the evil
I just wanna be hungry for the true
Search me, Father, and know my heart
Try me and know my mind
And if there be any wicked way in me
Pull me to the rock that is higher than I
I just wanna know
Am I pulling people closer?
I just wanna be pulling them to you
I just wanna stay angry at the evil
I just wanna be hungry for the true
[There are other Steve Taylor songs on the playlist linked above.]
David's musings about his motives for blogging, whether to glorify God or bring attention to himself, are something with which I identify. It reminded me of this song, I Just Wanna Know, in which Steve Taylor wrestled with his own motivations for being a musician, back in 1985.
Life's too short for small talk
So don't be talking trivia now
Excess baggage fills this plane
There's more than we should ever allow
There's engines stalling and good men falling
But I ain't crawling away
I just wanna know
Am I pulling people closer?
I just wanna be pulling them to you
I just wanna stay angry at the evil
I just wanna be hungry for the true
Folks play follow the leader
But who's the leader gonna obey?
Will his head get big when the toes get tapping?
I just wanna know are they catching what I say?
I'm a little too young to introspect
And I surely haven't paid all my dues
But there's bear traps lying in those woods
Most of them already been used
I just wanna know
Am I pulling people closer?
I just wanna be pulling them to you
I just wanna stay angry at the evil
I just wanna be hungry for the true
Search me, Father, and know my heart
Try me and know my mind
And if there be any wicked way in me
Pull me to the rock that is higher than I
I just wanna know
Am I pulling people closer?
I just wanna be pulling them to you
I just wanna stay angry at the evil
I just wanna be hungry for the true
[There are other Steve Taylor songs on the playlist linked above.]
Wednesday, February 24, 2010
Learning to Pray (First Midweek Lenten Devotional Message, 2010)
[This was shared during the midweek Lenten service with the people of Saint Matthew Lutheran Church in Logan, Ohio, tonight.]
Luke 11:1-2; Psalm 98
From Luke, chapter 11, verse 1: “[Jesus] was praying in a certain place, and after He had finished, one of His disciples said to Him, ‘Lord, teach us to pray, as John taught His disciples.’”
This passage comes less than halfway through Luke’s account of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. That means it comes well before Jesus’ disciples knew that Jesus was God as well as a good man. But at this point, it’s probably fair to say that they did understand two things about Jesus:
With the help of a concordance the other night, I looked at the times that Luke's gospel says that the words pray, prayed, or praying were used of Jesus. He withdrew to deserted places to pray. Jesus went to a mountain to pray all night alone. At Gethsemane on the night of His arrest, you'll remember, Jesus withdrew from the disciples "about a stone's throw" in order to pray. After He was baptized, Jesus prayed, and then the heavens were opened, the Holy Spirit descended on Him, and a voice from heaven said that Jesus was the beloved Son of God. In an incident we looked at recently during Sunday morning worship, while in the company of three of His disciples, Jesus prayed, a cloud descended to the mountaintop where they were, His appearance was transfigured, and a voice from the cloud told the disciples to listen to Jesus. Jesus prayed a lot!
So, it may seem the most natural thing in the world that one of the disciples--interestingly, never named, meaning it could have been any one of them--would ask Jesus, “Lord, teach us to pray.”
I want to caution you against seeing this as a pious request, though. By this point in Jesus' ministry, Peter had made his confession of Jesus as the Messiah and he, James, and John had seen Jesus transfigured on the mountain. But all of the disciples were a long way from understanding Who Jesus was, what it meant to confess Him as Messiah or Lord, or what it meant to pray.
One clue to the ignorance with which the disciple asked to be taught to pray is that after he says, “Lord, teach us to pray,” he adds, “as John taught his disciples.” This is club-thinking, like someone at Kiwanis saying, “Hey, the Rotarians have dinners, shouldn’t we have dinners, too?” Or, like ancient Israel saying, "All the other countries around us have kings. We need a king." So, the disciples' request for instruction on how to pray is a bit suspect.
But, among the many wonderful things about Jesus is that even when the requests we bring to Him are ill-formed, misinformed, or silly, He still listens to us.
Jesus heard the disciple’s request to teach him and the others how to pray, overlooked the ignorance and misinformation behind the request, and gave him—gave us—a model for prayer that can accommodate everyone from the youngest believer to the most seasoned saint.
“When you pray, say, ‘Father, hallowed be Your Name.” Matthew’s Gospel remembers Jesus’ instructions a bit differently: “Pray then in this way: Our Father in heaven, hallowed be Your Name…”
Of course, these constitute the opening words of the Lord's Prayer. It's great to say the Lord's Prayer, as we do in our worship together. But more importantly, this prayer provides a great pattern for our praying and for our personal relationships with God.
In The Small Catechism, Martin Luther refers to, “Our Father, Who art in heaven,” as the introduction to the Lord’s Prayer. Here, we’re encouraged to see God not as some distant deity, but as our loving parent who wants to hear from us.
When our son first went away to college and our daughter went to Florida to work at Walt Disney World, every telephone call and every email we got from them were important to us. Our prayers can become the telephone calls or conversations with the Parent Who always has our backs, One with Whom we can share our most intimate thoughts, our deepest desires, our greatest fears, worst sins, most noble hopes, and most urgent requests.
But after this note of intimacy, the prayer Jesus teaches us introduces another element that should be part of our praying as well. He does it in the words, “Hallowed by Your Name (or Thy Name).” The word “hallowed” means revered, sacred, inviolable, respected, glorified.
New Testament scholar N.T. Wright, speaking of how the Lord’s Prayer begins with both intimacy and what we might call God-fearing awe, writes, “This prayer starts by addressing God intimately and lovingly, as ‘Father’—and by bowing before his greatness and majesty. If you can hold those two together, you’re already on the way to understanding what Christianity is about.”
Pulling those two things together—the loving intimacy of God and the overpowering, perfect, majestic holiness of God—will also, I think, help us learn to truly pray.
In Jesus Christ, we know that God is willing to go with us into our deepest valleys and can, if we will let Him, move our biggest mountains.
“God is great, God is good,” a prayer we learned as children says. The Lord’s Prayer, in effect, begins, “God is good, God is great.” Either way you put it, it’s wonderful to know that the perfect, powerful God Who is in charge of the universe also is ready to hear from us anytime.
It seems to me that knowing these two things is the first step in truly learning how to pray.
Luke 11:1-2; Psalm 98
From Luke, chapter 11, verse 1: “[Jesus] was praying in a certain place, and after He had finished, one of His disciples said to Him, ‘Lord, teach us to pray, as John taught His disciples.’”
This passage comes less than halfway through Luke’s account of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. That means it comes well before Jesus’ disciples knew that Jesus was God as well as a good man. But at this point, it’s probably fair to say that they did understand two things about Jesus:
- He was magnetic. The disciples felt pulled into Jesus' orbit.
- And He prayed.
With the help of a concordance the other night, I looked at the times that Luke's gospel says that the words pray, prayed, or praying were used of Jesus. He withdrew to deserted places to pray. Jesus went to a mountain to pray all night alone. At Gethsemane on the night of His arrest, you'll remember, Jesus withdrew from the disciples "about a stone's throw" in order to pray. After He was baptized, Jesus prayed, and then the heavens were opened, the Holy Spirit descended on Him, and a voice from heaven said that Jesus was the beloved Son of God. In an incident we looked at recently during Sunday morning worship, while in the company of three of His disciples, Jesus prayed, a cloud descended to the mountaintop where they were, His appearance was transfigured, and a voice from the cloud told the disciples to listen to Jesus. Jesus prayed a lot!
So, it may seem the most natural thing in the world that one of the disciples--interestingly, never named, meaning it could have been any one of them--would ask Jesus, “Lord, teach us to pray.”
I want to caution you against seeing this as a pious request, though. By this point in Jesus' ministry, Peter had made his confession of Jesus as the Messiah and he, James, and John had seen Jesus transfigured on the mountain. But all of the disciples were a long way from understanding Who Jesus was, what it meant to confess Him as Messiah or Lord, or what it meant to pray.
One clue to the ignorance with which the disciple asked to be taught to pray is that after he says, “Lord, teach us to pray,” he adds, “as John taught his disciples.” This is club-thinking, like someone at Kiwanis saying, “Hey, the Rotarians have dinners, shouldn’t we have dinners, too?” Or, like ancient Israel saying, "All the other countries around us have kings. We need a king." So, the disciples' request for instruction on how to pray is a bit suspect.
But, among the many wonderful things about Jesus is that even when the requests we bring to Him are ill-formed, misinformed, or silly, He still listens to us.
Jesus heard the disciple’s request to teach him and the others how to pray, overlooked the ignorance and misinformation behind the request, and gave him—gave us—a model for prayer that can accommodate everyone from the youngest believer to the most seasoned saint.
“When you pray, say, ‘Father, hallowed be Your Name.” Matthew’s Gospel remembers Jesus’ instructions a bit differently: “Pray then in this way: Our Father in heaven, hallowed be Your Name…”
Of course, these constitute the opening words of the Lord's Prayer. It's great to say the Lord's Prayer, as we do in our worship together. But more importantly, this prayer provides a great pattern for our praying and for our personal relationships with God.
In The Small Catechism, Martin Luther refers to, “Our Father, Who art in heaven,” as the introduction to the Lord’s Prayer. Here, we’re encouraged to see God not as some distant deity, but as our loving parent who wants to hear from us.
When our son first went away to college and our daughter went to Florida to work at Walt Disney World, every telephone call and every email we got from them were important to us. Our prayers can become the telephone calls or conversations with the Parent Who always has our backs, One with Whom we can share our most intimate thoughts, our deepest desires, our greatest fears, worst sins, most noble hopes, and most urgent requests.
But after this note of intimacy, the prayer Jesus teaches us introduces another element that should be part of our praying as well. He does it in the words, “Hallowed by Your Name (or Thy Name).” The word “hallowed” means revered, sacred, inviolable, respected, glorified.
New Testament scholar N.T. Wright, speaking of how the Lord’s Prayer begins with both intimacy and what we might call God-fearing awe, writes, “This prayer starts by addressing God intimately and lovingly, as ‘Father’—and by bowing before his greatness and majesty. If you can hold those two together, you’re already on the way to understanding what Christianity is about.”
Pulling those two things together—the loving intimacy of God and the overpowering, perfect, majestic holiness of God—will also, I think, help us learn to truly pray.
In Jesus Christ, we know that God is willing to go with us into our deepest valleys and can, if we will let Him, move our biggest mountains.
“God is great, God is good,” a prayer we learned as children says. The Lord’s Prayer, in effect, begins, “God is good, God is great.” Either way you put it, it’s wonderful to know that the perfect, powerful God Who is in charge of the universe also is ready to hear from us anytime.
It seems to me that knowing these two things is the first step in truly learning how to pray.
Tuesday, February 23, 2010
What I Learned from Our Discussions of 'The Shack'
[This is the latest installment of my pastoral articles written for the monthly newsletter of the congregation I serve as pastor, Saint Matthew Lutheran Church in Logan, Ohio.]
Our recent Monday night adult discussions of The Shack, the novel by William P. Young, have been among the best experiences I’ve had as a pastor.*
There are several reasons for that, I think.
First: The number of people participating. Consistently, we’ve had good turnouts for each of the gatherings. Obviously, the book—or at least, the issues that it addresses—provokes thought, reflection, discussion, and prayer. Even people who didn’t care for the book came for the discussions!
Second: The level of participation. Many people have spoken up and I can say that I personally, have learned so much from the differing viewpoints and reflections people have brought to the discussions.
Third: It has taught me that there is more than one way for we adult Christians to grow in our awareness and reliance on Biblical truth.
Typically, when I’ve done adult studies, I’ve offered classes on books of the Bible or Biblical topics like, “witnessing” or “The Holy Spirit.” No doubt, I’ll do so again in the future. But stories are powerful things. They don’t intimidate people the way, “Turn in your Bibles to Habakkuk, chapter 2, verse 4,” might.
Stories invite us to enter the experiences of the characters at levels with which we find it easier to connect.
The power of stories shouldn’t surprise me: Jesus told them all the time; we call them parables. They conveyed truth about which Jesus could have preached or written an essay. Instead, He told stories, making things clearer than they otherwise would have been.
In our discussions of The Shack, we’ve talked about and read the Bible a lot. But we’ve entered its truth through the story, making the Bible’s teachings more accessible and understandable than they might otherwise be.
Fourth: We’ve had quite a few participants who aren’t members of Saint Matthew come to be part of our discussions. This has been exciting…and may be a preview of what God has in mind for Saint Matthew’s future.
In stagnant or dying churches, the numbers of people participating in the congregation’s ministries are always less than their total numbers of members. These churches, like most organizations, operate by the old 80/20 rule: 20% of the members are involved in 80% of the activities.
In growing churches though, different numbers are evident. In all their ministries, be they educational, servanthood, worship attendance, youth groups, or whatever, more than just their members participate.
That’s because the members of growing churches are outwardly focused and they’re always inviting their friends—especially their spiritually disconnected friends—to be with them for worship, service projects, youth activities, or discussion groups like the one we’ve been experiencing on The Shack.
That’s why it was so fun to see what happened with The Shack discussions. Members of Saint Matthew invited their friends, some connected to churches and others not. The result has been a month-and-a-half of get-togethers that have been enjoyable, enriching, and fun. Faith and fellowship have been fostered.
On February 22, we had what should have been our sixth and final discussion of The Shack. But we decided to meet two more times, on March 2 and 9. You’re invited for those final two gatherings. The sessions run from 7:00 to 8:30pm.
We also decided that after Easter, we’ll do another book discussion group. We haven’t decided what book we’ll discuss, though several titles have been suggested.
If you have a book that you’ve always wanted to discuss, let me know, and when we start the next set of discussions, I hope that you’ll be involved. You won’t regret it!
Your Friend in Christ,
Pastor Mark
*For those unfamiliar with this best-selling book, it’s a Christian novel that avoids both sappiness and academic dryness. As I’ve told people, it’s not the best-written novel I’ve ever read, but it relates to real-life issues, which may explain the chord it seems to have touched in millions of readers.
Our recent Monday night adult discussions of The Shack, the novel by William P. Young, have been among the best experiences I’ve had as a pastor.*There are several reasons for that, I think.
First: The number of people participating. Consistently, we’ve had good turnouts for each of the gatherings. Obviously, the book—or at least, the issues that it addresses—provokes thought, reflection, discussion, and prayer. Even people who didn’t care for the book came for the discussions!
Second: The level of participation. Many people have spoken up and I can say that I personally, have learned so much from the differing viewpoints and reflections people have brought to the discussions.
Third: It has taught me that there is more than one way for we adult Christians to grow in our awareness and reliance on Biblical truth.
Typically, when I’ve done adult studies, I’ve offered classes on books of the Bible or Biblical topics like, “witnessing” or “The Holy Spirit.” No doubt, I’ll do so again in the future. But stories are powerful things. They don’t intimidate people the way, “Turn in your Bibles to Habakkuk, chapter 2, verse 4,” might.
Stories invite us to enter the experiences of the characters at levels with which we find it easier to connect.
The power of stories shouldn’t surprise me: Jesus told them all the time; we call them parables. They conveyed truth about which Jesus could have preached or written an essay. Instead, He told stories, making things clearer than they otherwise would have been.
In our discussions of The Shack, we’ve talked about and read the Bible a lot. But we’ve entered its truth through the story, making the Bible’s teachings more accessible and understandable than they might otherwise be.
Fourth: We’ve had quite a few participants who aren’t members of Saint Matthew come to be part of our discussions. This has been exciting…and may be a preview of what God has in mind for Saint Matthew’s future.
In stagnant or dying churches, the numbers of people participating in the congregation’s ministries are always less than their total numbers of members. These churches, like most organizations, operate by the old 80/20 rule: 20% of the members are involved in 80% of the activities.
In growing churches though, different numbers are evident. In all their ministries, be they educational, servanthood, worship attendance, youth groups, or whatever, more than just their members participate.
That’s because the members of growing churches are outwardly focused and they’re always inviting their friends—especially their spiritually disconnected friends—to be with them for worship, service projects, youth activities, or discussion groups like the one we’ve been experiencing on The Shack.
That’s why it was so fun to see what happened with The Shack discussions. Members of Saint Matthew invited their friends, some connected to churches and others not. The result has been a month-and-a-half of get-togethers that have been enjoyable, enriching, and fun. Faith and fellowship have been fostered.
On February 22, we had what should have been our sixth and final discussion of The Shack. But we decided to meet two more times, on March 2 and 9. You’re invited for those final two gatherings. The sessions run from 7:00 to 8:30pm.
We also decided that after Easter, we’ll do another book discussion group. We haven’t decided what book we’ll discuss, though several titles have been suggested.
If you have a book that you’ve always wanted to discuss, let me know, and when we start the next set of discussions, I hope that you’ll be involved. You won’t regret it!
Your Friend in Christ,
Pastor Mark
*For those unfamiliar with this best-selling book, it’s a Christian novel that avoids both sappiness and academic dryness. As I’ve told people, it’s not the best-written novel I’ve ever read, but it relates to real-life issues, which may explain the chord it seems to have touched in millions of readers.
Sunday, February 21, 2010
Temptations: Tests of Our Priorities
[This was shared during worship with the people of Saint Matthew Lutheran Church in Logan, Ohio, this morning.]
Luke 4:1-13
There's a story that's only tangentially related to today's Gospel lesson. But I've decided to tell it anyway.
It's about a sheriff who had a vacancy on his staff. A guy in the community who wasn't exactly the brightest bulb in the pack wanted to interview and the sheriff didn't feel that he could fairly refuse to give the fellow an opportunity. So, the sheriff sat down to ask him a few questions. "What's 1 and 1?" the sheriff asked. "11," the guy replied. That wasn't the answer the sheriff was looking for, of course, but he could understand how the guy came up with it. "OK," the sheriff went on, "what are the two days of the week that begin with the letter T?" Without hesitation, the guy answered, "Today and tomorrow." Again, wrong answer, but understandable. The sheriff asked a third question: "Who killed Abraham Lincoln?" The interviewee didn't say anything for a long while. He was stumped. "I tell you what," the sheriff said. "You go home and think about that." The man left his interview and out on the sidewalk, ran into some friends. "How did the interview go?" they asked. "Great!" he answered. "It's my first day on the job and I'm already working a homicide case!"
In today’s Gospel lesson, Jesus is really experiencing His first day on the job as the Son of God. As our lesson begins, He has just come from being baptized, where God the Father triumphantly declared Him to be the Son--the very presence of God--and the Messiah, when the Holy Spirit drives Him into the wilderness--the desert--to be tempted by the devil. In between the account of Jesus' baptism and our lesson, the gospel writer Luke inserts a genealogy that culminates with the designation of Jesus as "the Son of God."
But already during His first day as the Messiah, we find Jesus in a contest to decide whether, as God's Son, He will be faithful to the Father’s will or will go another way.
Each day of our lives, we confront the same choices Jesus faced in the wilderness: whether we’ll follow God’s will for our lives or we’ll walk away from God.
Like Jesus, we face temptations.
Interestingly, the words used in the Greek of the New Testament--peirazo or ekpeirazo--can be equally well translated as test or temptation. Like the two sides of a single coin, every temptation that comes from the devil, the world, or our sinful selves is also a test from God.
There were three major temptations that came to Jesus during His forty days in the wilderness. Each was similar to the temptations that God's people confronted in the wilderness between Egypt and the promised land during the days of Moses some 1500 years before the birth of Jesus.
Each of Jesus' temptations also reflects the major temptations that you and I face as we move through our daily lives.
The first temptation the devil sets before Jesus: Knowing that Jesus was hungry, the devil said, “Turn a stone into bread.” Out in the Old Testament wilderness, the Hebrew people had doubted that God would provide for them when they were hungry. Jesus has no such doubts. Quoting from the Old Testament, he tells the devil, “One does not live by bread alone.”
A famous third century saint, Augustine, prayed, “O Lord, our hearts are restless until they find their rest in You.” Temptation can lead us to try to feed our hunger for the comfort and peace only God can give with other things. Jesus refused to make that mistake. That’s why He told the devil, quoting the Old Testament book of Deuteronomy, “One does not live by bread alone.” We must instead rely on God alone for life!
In the second temptation, the devil challenged Jesus to worship him. If Jesus would worship him, he said, Jesus could have all the kingdoms of the world.
Truth be told, we all want to reign over our own little kingdoms. Jesus, in fact, had come into the world to take the very kingdoms that the devil offered Him in the wilderness.
But Jesus came to take them through a cross and an empty tomb, not through bowing down to evil and separating you and me from God and life forever. Jesus came to save us from sin and death. And He couldn’t do that if He only looked out for Himself.
So Jesus hung tough, telling the devil, “It is written, ‘Worship the Lord your God, and serve only him.’”
Turn on the television news on any given day and you see the consequences of a world caving into the temptation to put other things—especially themselves—above God.
The path to true joy is the one commended by Saint Paul in the New Testament book of Philippians:
The third temptation from the devil took place on the pinnacle of the temple in Jerusalem, where he told Jesus to jump. The devil did a little proof-texting from the Psalms to try to convince Jesus that it was okay. (You know what proof-texting is: It's taking an isolated piece of Scripture, without taking the witness of the whole Bible into account, in order to prove something you believe or want to believe is true.) Jesus could jump, the devil said, because, in Psalm 91, God promises that his angels will spare Him harm.
But Jesus quoted Old Testament words in which God warns us not to put God to the test. It’s one thing to be pushed from great heights; it’s another to throw ourselves from them and then expect God to rescind the law of gravity to protect us from the consequences of our own stupidity.
A Lutheran pastor friend of mine once bemoaned the size of his mortgage. With a sigh he said, “My life would be so much easier if I just remembered what Saint Paul says in the Bible, ‘Owe no one anything.”
In today’s world, of course, it’s tough to own a home and not have a mortgage. But I know people who pile up massive mountains of debt and then say cheerily that they’re sure God will take care of their finances.
That’s like jumping from a building and expecting God to catch us. People make the same mistake with all sorts of sins. They like to sow their wild oats and then count on God to bring a crop failure. Jesus knew that to depend on God and His grace is not the same as expecting God to wink at our sin.
So, what does Jesus’ encounter with the devil in the wilderness teach us? Three main things, I think.
The first is captured in an incident that supposedly happened a few years ago at an Oregon middle school. Some girls there thought it was fun to put on lipstick in the rest rooms and then press their lips against the mirrors, leaving little kisses all over them. This went on for several weeks when the principal called together groups of girls in one of the rest rooms. There, she explained that the lip prints caused the custodian major problems. She then asked the custodian, who was with them, to show the girls what she meant. So, he dipped a long-handled brush into a toilet and scrubbed the lip prints away.
Temptation makes sin look attractive. But if we could just understand that when we cave into sin, we're kissing filth, we might not surrender to it so easily. Jesus knew that caving into sin would lead to an ugly alienation from God. We need to know that too.
The second thing that Jesus’ temptations in the wilderness tell us is that being tempted isn’t the same thing as sinning. Even Jesus was tempted and because He walked away from sin, going through cross and grave, He won life for us. The New Testament book of Hebrews tells us that, in Jesus, we have an advocate, “who in every respect has been tested as we are, yet without sin.”
When you young people are tempted to go against the directions of your parents, when you older folks are tempted to fudge a little when working on your TurboTax, when any of us are tempted to berate someone, remember these temptations to violate God’s law of love for Him and love for neighbor aren’t sins unless we wimp out and cave into the temptations.
And thank God, when we do sin, because of Jesus Christ, the truly repentant can receive forgiveness and the power to resist temptation in the future.
The third and most important lesson we can learn from Jesus’ being tempted in the wilderness is this: At every turn, Jesus was able to resist the devil by knowing what God says in His Word, the Bible.
Jesus knew not just what the words of the Bible said. He also knew what the words of the Bible were about. That was because He spent time in God’s Word every day. It was His bread and water! As Martin Luther wrote in A Mighty Fortress is Our God, the Christian has the confidence that as the devil tempts us, “one little word”--one word from God--”subdues him.”
Fiery coach Greg Schiano has taken the Rutgers University football program from nowhere to being contenders every year. He’s tough and competitive. He’s also a deeply committed Christian. In an interview with Sports Spectrum magazine a few years ago, he said, “When I’m doing well [as a Christian and a person], it’s getting in the Word in the morning and constant prayer. When I’m not doing well, it’s ‘I’m too busy to get in the Word’ in the morning, and I go to bed at night and I haven’t talked to God all day.”
If you and I are intent on having a meaningful life and to be prepared to resist the temptation to walk away from God, the only Giver of life, we need to make our relationship with Jesus Christ our number one priority. God first; no exceptions. It only seems fair when you think about it: God has put us first, so reciprocating seems the appropriate response. When we’re focused on the God we meet in Jesus Christ, we’re empowered to live life as it’s meant to be lived!
This Lenten season, as we consider the spiritual discipline of prayer during our midweek services, I ask you to allow a daily time with God’s Word to inform your praying.
When we, like Jesus, get to know our Father and lean on His Word, we build a tower of faith in Christ and an ability to really live life that no one and nothing can tear down!
Luke 4:1-13
There's a story that's only tangentially related to today's Gospel lesson. But I've decided to tell it anyway.
It's about a sheriff who had a vacancy on his staff. A guy in the community who wasn't exactly the brightest bulb in the pack wanted to interview and the sheriff didn't feel that he could fairly refuse to give the fellow an opportunity. So, the sheriff sat down to ask him a few questions. "What's 1 and 1?" the sheriff asked. "11," the guy replied. That wasn't the answer the sheriff was looking for, of course, but he could understand how the guy came up with it. "OK," the sheriff went on, "what are the two days of the week that begin with the letter T?" Without hesitation, the guy answered, "Today and tomorrow." Again, wrong answer, but understandable. The sheriff asked a third question: "Who killed Abraham Lincoln?" The interviewee didn't say anything for a long while. He was stumped. "I tell you what," the sheriff said. "You go home and think about that." The man left his interview and out on the sidewalk, ran into some friends. "How did the interview go?" they asked. "Great!" he answered. "It's my first day on the job and I'm already working a homicide case!"
In today’s Gospel lesson, Jesus is really experiencing His first day on the job as the Son of God. As our lesson begins, He has just come from being baptized, where God the Father triumphantly declared Him to be the Son--the very presence of God--and the Messiah, when the Holy Spirit drives Him into the wilderness--the desert--to be tempted by the devil. In between the account of Jesus' baptism and our lesson, the gospel writer Luke inserts a genealogy that culminates with the designation of Jesus as "the Son of God."
But already during His first day as the Messiah, we find Jesus in a contest to decide whether, as God's Son, He will be faithful to the Father’s will or will go another way.
Each day of our lives, we confront the same choices Jesus faced in the wilderness: whether we’ll follow God’s will for our lives or we’ll walk away from God.
Like Jesus, we face temptations.
Interestingly, the words used in the Greek of the New Testament--peirazo or ekpeirazo--can be equally well translated as test or temptation. Like the two sides of a single coin, every temptation that comes from the devil, the world, or our sinful selves is also a test from God.
There were three major temptations that came to Jesus during His forty days in the wilderness. Each was similar to the temptations that God's people confronted in the wilderness between Egypt and the promised land during the days of Moses some 1500 years before the birth of Jesus.
Each of Jesus' temptations also reflects the major temptations that you and I face as we move through our daily lives.
The first temptation the devil sets before Jesus: Knowing that Jesus was hungry, the devil said, “Turn a stone into bread.” Out in the Old Testament wilderness, the Hebrew people had doubted that God would provide for them when they were hungry. Jesus has no such doubts. Quoting from the Old Testament, he tells the devil, “One does not live by bread alone.”
A famous third century saint, Augustine, prayed, “O Lord, our hearts are restless until they find their rest in You.” Temptation can lead us to try to feed our hunger for the comfort and peace only God can give with other things. Jesus refused to make that mistake. That’s why He told the devil, quoting the Old Testament book of Deuteronomy, “One does not live by bread alone.” We must instead rely on God alone for life!
In the second temptation, the devil challenged Jesus to worship him. If Jesus would worship him, he said, Jesus could have all the kingdoms of the world.
Truth be told, we all want to reign over our own little kingdoms. Jesus, in fact, had come into the world to take the very kingdoms that the devil offered Him in the wilderness.
But Jesus came to take them through a cross and an empty tomb, not through bowing down to evil and separating you and me from God and life forever. Jesus came to save us from sin and death. And He couldn’t do that if He only looked out for Himself.
So Jesus hung tough, telling the devil, “It is written, ‘Worship the Lord your God, and serve only him.’”
Turn on the television news on any given day and you see the consequences of a world caving into the temptation to put other things—especially themselves—above God.
The path to true joy is the one commended by Saint Paul in the New Testament book of Philippians:
Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God…humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death— even death on a cross. Therefore God also highly exalted him and gave him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bend, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.True living comes only to those who let God have first place in their lives.
The third temptation from the devil took place on the pinnacle of the temple in Jerusalem, where he told Jesus to jump. The devil did a little proof-texting from the Psalms to try to convince Jesus that it was okay. (You know what proof-texting is: It's taking an isolated piece of Scripture, without taking the witness of the whole Bible into account, in order to prove something you believe or want to believe is true.) Jesus could jump, the devil said, because, in Psalm 91, God promises that his angels will spare Him harm.
But Jesus quoted Old Testament words in which God warns us not to put God to the test. It’s one thing to be pushed from great heights; it’s another to throw ourselves from them and then expect God to rescind the law of gravity to protect us from the consequences of our own stupidity.
A Lutheran pastor friend of mine once bemoaned the size of his mortgage. With a sigh he said, “My life would be so much easier if I just remembered what Saint Paul says in the Bible, ‘Owe no one anything.”
In today’s world, of course, it’s tough to own a home and not have a mortgage. But I know people who pile up massive mountains of debt and then say cheerily that they’re sure God will take care of their finances.
That’s like jumping from a building and expecting God to catch us. People make the same mistake with all sorts of sins. They like to sow their wild oats and then count on God to bring a crop failure. Jesus knew that to depend on God and His grace is not the same as expecting God to wink at our sin.
So, what does Jesus’ encounter with the devil in the wilderness teach us? Three main things, I think.
The first is captured in an incident that supposedly happened a few years ago at an Oregon middle school. Some girls there thought it was fun to put on lipstick in the rest rooms and then press their lips against the mirrors, leaving little kisses all over them. This went on for several weeks when the principal called together groups of girls in one of the rest rooms. There, she explained that the lip prints caused the custodian major problems. She then asked the custodian, who was with them, to show the girls what she meant. So, he dipped a long-handled brush into a toilet and scrubbed the lip prints away.
Temptation makes sin look attractive. But if we could just understand that when we cave into sin, we're kissing filth, we might not surrender to it so easily. Jesus knew that caving into sin would lead to an ugly alienation from God. We need to know that too.
The second thing that Jesus’ temptations in the wilderness tell us is that being tempted isn’t the same thing as sinning. Even Jesus was tempted and because He walked away from sin, going through cross and grave, He won life for us. The New Testament book of Hebrews tells us that, in Jesus, we have an advocate, “who in every respect has been tested as we are, yet without sin.”
When you young people are tempted to go against the directions of your parents, when you older folks are tempted to fudge a little when working on your TurboTax, when any of us are tempted to berate someone, remember these temptations to violate God’s law of love for Him and love for neighbor aren’t sins unless we wimp out and cave into the temptations.
And thank God, when we do sin, because of Jesus Christ, the truly repentant can receive forgiveness and the power to resist temptation in the future.
The third and most important lesson we can learn from Jesus’ being tempted in the wilderness is this: At every turn, Jesus was able to resist the devil by knowing what God says in His Word, the Bible.
Jesus knew not just what the words of the Bible said. He also knew what the words of the Bible were about. That was because He spent time in God’s Word every day. It was His bread and water! As Martin Luther wrote in A Mighty Fortress is Our God, the Christian has the confidence that as the devil tempts us, “one little word”--one word from God--”subdues him.”
Fiery coach Greg Schiano has taken the Rutgers University football program from nowhere to being contenders every year. He’s tough and competitive. He’s also a deeply committed Christian. In an interview with Sports Spectrum magazine a few years ago, he said, “When I’m doing well [as a Christian and a person], it’s getting in the Word in the morning and constant prayer. When I’m not doing well, it’s ‘I’m too busy to get in the Word’ in the morning, and I go to bed at night and I haven’t talked to God all day.”
If you and I are intent on having a meaningful life and to be prepared to resist the temptation to walk away from God, the only Giver of life, we need to make our relationship with Jesus Christ our number one priority. God first; no exceptions. It only seems fair when you think about it: God has put us first, so reciprocating seems the appropriate response. When we’re focused on the God we meet in Jesus Christ, we’re empowered to live life as it’s meant to be lived!
This Lenten season, as we consider the spiritual discipline of prayer during our midweek services, I ask you to allow a daily time with God’s Word to inform your praying.
When we, like Jesus, get to know our Father and lean on His Word, we build a tower of faith in Christ and an ability to really live life that no one and nothing can tear down!
Friday, February 19, 2010
True Piety, the Lifestyle God Rewards (Ash Wednesday Sermon)
[This was shared during Ash Wednesday worship at Saint Matthew Lutheran Church in Logan, Ohio, on February 17.]Matthew 6:1-6, 16-21; Psalm 51
“Beware,” Jesus says at the beginning of this evening’s Gospel lesson, “of practicing your piety before others in order to be seen by them; for then you have no reward from your Father in heaven.”
Piety, you know, is a blanket term for acts of devotion toward God. In our lesson, Jesus talks about three different acts of piety: almsgiving (that’s providing monetary and material aid to the poor); praying; and fasting. Good Jews were to do these things in Jesus’ day. They are to do them still today.
And, by His words to us tonight, we see that Jesus presumes that good Christians will do them as well. Notice what Jesus says: “Whenever you give alms…,” not “If you give alms…” “Whenever you pray…,” not “If you pray…” “Whenever you fast…,” not “If you fast…”
As unpopular or as disdained as the word may be, followers of Jesus Christ, you and I are called to strive living pious lives. We're to engage in disciplined devotion to God. That means, among other things, giving to the poor, praying, and fasting. It also means worshiping regularly, sharing our faith in Jesus with others, serving our neighbors, and studying God’s Word. Disciplines like these need to become habits for us.
But, Jesus tells us, we need to watch out for our motives in adopting them.
At a seminar, I once heard the pastor of a megachurch lamenting the motives of a number of people who joined his congregation. The congregation wasn’t just large (20,000 worshiping there every weekend), its members also included a number of wealthy business people. “Our church has become a place for people on the make to network,” I recollect the pastor saying. “I watch them exchanging business cards and I realize that the only reason many come to church is to see and be seen by others.” This guy also said, “Whatever their motives, I trust that, because with God all things are possible, the Word of God will do its stuff and they might find God changing their motives for worshiping every week.” Yet, it makes that pastor sad that so many of the thousands who worship at his church--among them, some of the most regular attenders--are just there to look good. “Beware,” Jesus says, “of practicing your piety before others in order to be seen by them.”
You all are good enough Lutherans to know that no one’s motives are entirely clean and faultless.
Christians are, simultaneously, saints and sinners, forgiven sinners who trust in Jesus alone for our salvation.
This side of eternity, none of us engage in any otherwise commendable act of piety with absolutely pure motives. But Jesus warns us tonight not to be hypocrites in doing these pious things.
The word hypocrite that Jesus uses is the English version of a Greek word: ὑποκριτής (hupokrites). Hupokrites in ancient times was the term for an actor. In ancient Greek and Roman theater, actors wore masks. The word, hypocrite came to be used for people who strive to look one way to the world, but are really very different under their masks.
“You may be able to fool other people behind the masks you wear,” Jesus is telling us tonight. “You may fool people into thinking of you as a person of faith, when in fact, you just want to create that impression. But you can’t fool God!”
Our acts of piety—including receiving the imposition of ashes on our foreheads on Ash Wednesday—are worthless if they’re just masks we wear.
If we come forward for the ashes, yet don’t really believe that we’re finite mortals who need God or sinners who need forgiveness, who are we fooling? Other people? Ourselves? God?
Our acts of piety are great, but no good if they’re masks. To God, they’re just perfume on a cesspool, lipstick on a pig, or, as Jesus Himself once put it in describing the hypocrisy of the Pharisees, “whitewashed tombs.”
Psalm 51, which we read together earlier, has been attributed to King David. He wrote it, the Old Testament tells us, after the prophet Nathan confronted David for two sins which David had unrepentantly committed. David thought he’d successfully escaped responsibility for these sins: adultery with another man’s wife and the arranged murder his lover’s husband.
The mask of piety that David wore either fooled the people of Israel or they were so impressed or intimidated by David’s power that they said nothing.
But God prompted Nathan to call his king to repentance. David, the most powerful person in Israel, could have simply arranged for Nathan to die. It wouldn’t have been the first time or the last that a ruler covered up his sins with another one.
But, as the psalm shows us, David repented. He confessed his sins. He turned away from them, disavowing them. He asked God to create a new heart within him and to align his life with God’s Spirit.
In other words, David repudiated his own hypocrisy. He took off the mask. He knew that this was all God asks of us: to be real, to be authentic, to admit our sins, to acknowledge our need of God’s help to live as truly human beings. David put it this way in his prayer to God: “You desire truth in the inward being.”
David knew that when the focus of our piety is on God and not on ourselves or the esteem of others, the walls between God and us, between us and joyful living tumble down.
In our Gospel lesson, Jesus says that those who practice authenticity rather than hypocrisy in their devotion to God receive one reward, while the hypocrites get another.
Jesus isn’t saying that we earn eternity.
He is saying that we should aim higher than we are prone to do.
The fact is that, spiritually, we always get what we aim for.
The esteem of others and a comfortable life derived from pleasing the world can come to those for whom those things are important.
But on the day you and I see Jesus face to face, these things will be of no value.
Better to make our aim to connect with and surrender to God!
Then, we’ll not only enter eternity with Christ, Christ will also enter our lives today.
Authentic connection with the God we know in Jesus pays the greatest rewards, now and in eternity.
Make an authentic, honest relationship with Christ your aim and all the best things which God, our Maker and Savior, has in mind for us, will come to be. Amen
Wednesday, February 17, 2010
Before I forget...
Last Sunday, I read Saint Valentine by Robert Sabuda, to the kids during the Children's Sermon. I recommend it highly.Valentine was martyred in the third century on February 14. That was one day before a traditional Roman holiday, Lupercalia, devoted to the remembrance of the she-wolf who, in ancient myth, suckled Romulus and Remus, the founders of Rome.
Saint Valentine was a real person though, and Christians' decision to celebrate his martyrdom around the same time as an already-established pagan holiday represents the ongoing genius of the Judeo-Christian faith for reclaiming and rebaptizing celebrations to honor the God revealed to ancient Israel and ultimately, in Jesus of Nazareth.
In Old Testament times, the ancient Israelites reclaimed the sites of altars to the numerous gods worshiped by others and devoted them to the worship of the one God of the universe. Christians would take a holiday like Saturnalia and reclaim it to celebrate the birth of Jesus, the Light of the world. In later centuries, Patrick would recast the traditions of the Irish people in order to teach and remind people of the truth of Jesus.
The book on Valentine is very good and I recommend it for use by parents, pastors, and Sunday School teachers who work with young people.
'How to Use Lent as a Time of Repentance'
Lent is a time for spiritual renewal, which always begins with repentance. To repent means, quite simply, to turn away from sin--whether deliberate rebellion against God or the accumulation of small, otherwise innocent habits which, taken together, crowd God out of our lives--and to turn to Christ for forgiveness and life.
My colleague, Glen VanderKloot, sent a link to this post from the How To web site which lists some spiritual disciplines you might want to take up to live repentantly during Lent.
Of course, repentance is to be a daily feature of the Christian's life and the season of Lent itself is a human-made custom. But its forty days are an intense reminder of the importance of constantly turning our lives back to Christ, lest sin take hold of us and find us, with scarcely any awareness on our parts, far from the Savior Who gives us life.
To me, it's just as important for us to adopt new habits that draw us closer to Christ as to drop old ones that take us away from Him. That's why I like the link shared by Glen.
Check out the list. You may want to pick one or two for yourself this Lent. But don't be surprised if you're still doing them after Lent.
My colleague, Glen VanderKloot, sent a link to this post from the How To web site which lists some spiritual disciplines you might want to take up to live repentantly during Lent.
Of course, repentance is to be a daily feature of the Christian's life and the season of Lent itself is a human-made custom. But its forty days are an intense reminder of the importance of constantly turning our lives back to Christ, lest sin take hold of us and find us, with scarcely any awareness on our parts, far from the Savior Who gives us life.
To me, it's just as important for us to adopt new habits that draw us closer to Christ as to drop old ones that take us away from Him. That's why I like the link shared by Glen.
Check out the list. You may want to pick one or two for yourself this Lent. But don't be surprised if you're still doing them after Lent.
Tuesday, February 16, 2010
Ash Wednesday, Starting Lent, is Tomorrow
Tomorrow, Christians all over the world will be celebrating Ash Wednesday. It begins a forty-day season of spiritual renewal and preparation that precedes Easter Sunday. The season is called Lent.Actually, there are more than forty days between Ash Wednesday and Easter. But the Sundays that fall during Lent are never counted as part of that somber season. For Christians, Sundays are always "little Easters," days when the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead is celebrated.
Lent emphasizes other aspects of Christian belief, which is why many churches, including Saint Matthew Lutheran Church in Logan, Ohio, where I serve as pastor, along with other area churches, hold special Lenten services on Wednesday nights during this period.
The word Lent is from Middle English and means spring, the season of the year with which Lent somewhat corresponds.
According to Philip H. Pfatteicher and Carlos R. Messerli, writing in a book called Manual on the Liturgy, "Lent [as a season of the Church Year] derives from the [period of] preparation of [adult] candidates for Baptism [in the Church's early history]. By the middle of the fourth century at Jerusalem, candidates for Baptism fasted for 40 days, and during this period...[instructional] lectures...were delivered to them."
Of course, forty is an important number in the Bible. Jesus was tempted in the wilderness for forty days. The Old Testament book of Exodus says that God's people wandered in the wilderness for forty years. The rains that produced the great flood recorded in the book of Genesis lasted forty days and forty nights. So, it was natural that Lent would become a forty-day period.
Pfatteicher and Messerli say that after Christian faith was legalized in the Roman Empire in 313 A.D., "the period of preparation for Baptism became a general period of preparation of all Christians for Easter." That continues to this day.
Ash Wednesday itself, say Pfatteicher and Messerli, features a mood of "penitence and reflection on the quality of our faith and life." The goal is to call believers to remember their mortality, dependence on God, and need to seek God's help in disciplining themselves to surrender every part of their lives to Jesus Christ.
At our congregation tomorrow evening, we'll begin our time of worship together with the singing of Just As I am, Without One Plea, followed by corporate confession, the reading of Bible lessons, and then, the imposition of ashes on the foreheads of the repentant. Each person will receive this sign with the words, “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”
Ashes, in a Jewish and Christian context, suggest three things:
- judgment and God’s condemnation of sin;
- our total dependence upon God for life; and
- repentance, joyful turning back to God.
Ashes are also a symbol of cleansing and renewal. This makes sense when you think about it. When I was a boy and would lodge splinters into my hands, I'd go to my dad. Dad inspected things and soon, got a needle from my mom's sewing kit, and pulled out his lighter. He turned the tip of the needle over and over again in the flame of the lighter for maybe thirty seconds and after that, wave the needle through the air to cool it off. Then, he used it to pick the splinter out of my hand. Of course, the reason that Dad ran the needle through the flame was to kill off any bacteria that might cause infection.
In the Greek of the New Testament, the word for fire is pur, from which we get such English words as purge, pure, and purify, among others. When we open ourselves to letting Jesus Christ be in charge of our lives, He begins to purge us of all the old, destructive habits that previously blocked God's presence from our lives and He creates a place of purity where He can live with us and transform our lives. The old life is burnt away and a new life begins.
Just as baptismal water suggests death and brand new life with God...so do the ashes of Ash Wednesday.
[This is a piece I wrote several years ago. I hope you find it helpful.]
Monday, February 15, 2010
Faith Tidbit #50
According to the Bible, God didn’t just create sexuality so that we humans could make babies. One of my favorite Biblical passages on this subject comes from the story of Abraham and Sarah. That couple, you remember, were chosen by God to be the ancestors of the Israelite people. Into the nation of Israel the Savior Jesus was to be born. But there couldn’t be a nation of Israel if Abraham and Sarah didn’t have kids. Sarah had gone through menopause years before. When she hears God promise Abraham that she will still have a baby, she laughs, and asks, “After all these years, my husband and I old, am I going to have pleasure with my husband.”
Intrigued by that passage, I once asked a Hebrew scholar about it. He confirmed my suspicions: The pleasure to which Sarah referred wasn’t just the pleasure of having a child. She was also talking about the pleasure of being sexually united with her husband. God made us sexual beings, in part, so that husbands and wives might enjoy an exclusive, lifetime covenant sealed by sexual intimacy.
Intrigued by that passage, I once asked a Hebrew scholar about it. He confirmed my suspicions: The pleasure to which Sarah referred wasn’t just the pleasure of having a child. She was also talking about the pleasure of being sexually united with her husband. God made us sexual beings, in part, so that husbands and wives might enjoy an exclusive, lifetime covenant sealed by sexual intimacy.
Sunday, February 14, 2010
How this whole Lutheran thing got started
I think the video is self-explanatory. But I should point out there may be some slight inaccuracies. One I know I made was when, some time later in the presentation I referred to the Germans as "the Lutherans." I think that you'll pick up on it.
NOTE: Abraham believed and God counted his belief as "righteousness" in Genesis 15:6, and not in Genesis 12, as I erroneously say in the video.
Listening to Jesus
[This was shared during worship with the people of Saint Matthew Lutheran Church in Logan, Ohio, earlier today.]
Luke 9:28-36
Transfiguration Sunday
One of my favorite preachers, Gerald Mann, tells a joke about a televangelist who went skiing. He had never been skiing before, but he was full of himself and, stupidly, simply strapped on some skis, climbed onto a ski lift, and headed up a mountain.
He passed the green and blue stations, spots where inexperienced and intermediate skiers, respectively, were to have gotten off the lift. Instead, he rode all the way up to the black station, confident that despite his inexperience, he would do well.
When he reached the top of the mountain, he jumped off the chair and down the hill he went, end over end through the first turn. He flew over a cliff into a gorge.
About ten feet down, he grabbed a tree branch. There he held on tightly, suspended over certain death. He yelled out, “Is anybody up there?”
It just so happened that a minister who the televangelist constantly criticized in his broadcasts had seen the whole thing. The minister stayed out of the televangelist’s line of vision and called down to him, “Yes, there’s someone up here. It’s I, the Lord your God. The time of your testing is at hand. If you really believe as you’re claiming to believe all the time, let go and I will catch you.”
There was a pause from below. And then the televangelist asked, “Is anybody else up there?”
That’s not a true story, of course. But there is a lot of truth in it. As Mann writes after telling it in his book, When the Bad Times Are Over for Good, “We would all like to really let go and trust God…But we’d like something more than a disembodied voice.”
Interestingly, there is a disembodied voice in our Gospel lesson today. It comes from a cloud that has descended to a mountain. And this voice, which we can take to be God the Father, tells us that God is more than a disembodied voice. We all would like to trust that. But can we? And if so, how?
Throughout this Epiphany season, which began on January 6, we’ve said that the Gospel lessons on these Sundays have all presented epiphanies, manifestations of Who Jesus is and what He can be for us when, by faith, we let Him be.
In Epiphany, our picture of Jesus has been unscrambled and we have seen that He is more than a man, more than a great moral teacher, more even than King of the Jews or Savior of the world.
But you and I have the benefit of hindsight. We live on the other side of Good Friday and Easter. We know that, though the world tried to kill Him off on Good Friday, Jesus rose from the dead on Easter, guaranteeing the truth of His promise that, “Those who believe in me, though they die, will live.”
The three disciples who Jesus took with Him to the top of the mountain in our Gospel lesson probably had no clear idea of why they had followed Jesus in the first place or why they were now on this mountain with Him.
Peter, the one quickest to speak of the twelve apostles, had, just a few verses before today’s Gospel lesson, made a confession about Jesus. When Jesus asked the twelve, “Who do you say I am?” Peter said simply, “The Messiah [that means, the Christ, God’s anointed king]…The Messiah of God.”
But those may have been simply disembodied words for Peter, which is probably why Jesus responded to his confession by telling Peter and the other apostles: “The Son of Man must undergo great suffering, and be rejected by the elders, chief priests, and scribes, and be killed, and on the third day be raised.”
These words of Jesus would not have computed in the minds of the twelve apostles. The Messiah to suffer in the holy city of Jerusalem? The Messiah rejected by the very religious leaders who should have hailed him as king? The Messiah killed? Those thoughts would have been so mind-numbingly confusing to them that they would hardly have taken notice of the most incredible claim of all, that after being murdered, the Messiah would rise again.
But on this Saint Valentine’s Day, it’s important to remember that love is more than words, especially the love God has for us. And so, God gives the three disciples closest to Jesus more than words. He will show them how the Messiah can be both God of all and servant of all, crucified like a criminal yet the King Who brings life.
In our lesson, while Jesus prays, He blazes with the very fire of heaven. Peter, James, and John couldn’t have helped but remember reading from the book of Exodus about the time when God had called Moses to Mount Sinai and covered the mountain with a cloud. After seven days, God had called Moses out of the cloud and, we’re told, “the appearance of the glory of the Lord was like a devouring fire…”
At the Transfiguration, in the presence of Peter, James, and John, 1300 years after Moses had encountered God on Sinai, Jesus was soon joined by Moses, who had died about 1240BC, and Elijah, whom God had taken to heaven in about 840BC. They discussed Jesus’ departure—literally Jesus’ exodus*—His impending death and resurrection.
Thinking that he could bottle up the glory of this moment, Peter suggests that three booths should be built, one each for Moses, Elijah, and Jesus.
At that suggestion, the cloud of heaven’s presence overshadowed and terrified Peter, James, and John, and the voice from cloud said, “This is My Son, the Chosen; listen to Him!”
God is more than a disembodied voice. God is embodied in carpenter from Nazareth Who, sinless, willingly sacrificed Himself on a cross so that all who disavow their sin and entrust their lives to Him, receive the power to live this life whatever the circumstances and a new life that goes beyond the grave in an eternal kingdom with God.
But these free gifts do not come to us without a price. They cost Jesus suffering and death on a cross. And they call us to die to sin, to die to all our human desires for importance or power, and to simply draw our life from the crucified and risen Savior. The voice from heaven told the disciples and that voice tells us today, “Do you want to know Who God is? Do you want to know God as more than a disembodied voice? Get to know Jesus. This is God the Son. Listen to Him. Listen only to Him.”
And what will we hear when we listen to Jesus’ life, teaching, death, and resurrection?
We will hear, first of all, that God loves us and seeks relationship with us. In one of Jesus’ most famous parables, He tells the story of a father who leaves all dignity behind in order to run to a son who had become lost in sin. He kisses his boy, puts new clothes on him, and rings on his fingers and throws a party. Just so, Jesus says, God throws a party in heaven every time one of us realizes our sin and our need of God and turn to Him for forgiveness and life.
When we listen to Jesus we also hear that God’s expectations of us as human beings has not changed. God still hates the sin while loving the sinner. Jesus affirms that to build our lives on anyone or anything other than God is sin. Neither our families nor our countries, neither material acquisitions nor influence are strong enough foundations to sustain our lives; only the God we know in Jesus Christ is!
You know, I wish that we had the same attitude and understanding of God's commands, as succinctly stated in the Ten Commandments, that the ancient Jews had. We have the same feeling toward God's law as we're likely to have toward the skunk who crashes the party. We think they mean God is a spoilsport.
But the ancient Israelites understood that God's commands are gifts. "Within the parameters of this commands," God says, "there is life and happiness and relationship. Transgress them and you walk away from relationships with others, with your true selves, and from Me."
Jesus said that He came into the world not to overthrow the law, but to fulfill it.** But God's laws still function as a mirror for us all, showing us our need of God and, as was true of the son in Jesus' parable, to run go back to the Lord Who runs to His children.
But we also hear this when we pay attention to Jesus: We can be forgiven. We can be made new.
True story: He had been going his own way for a long time. He had joined a small startup company with a newly minted Masters of Business Administration degree and, as the business had grown, so had his prosperity and prestige. He had become a big shot and he knew it. Later, he revealed that there had been some fudging along the way, little deals that might have gotten him in trouble were it not for the fact that he counted prosecuting attorneys, police chiefs, and even a state attorney general among his friends.
But it was all good, he told himself if ever he had second thoughts about his ethics. He had everything he wanted: the nice house, the new cars, the sumptuous vacations, the beautiful wife, the 2.1 perfectly coifed and orthodontistized children. All went well.
Then near-tragedy struck. A twin brother to whom he was close nearly died. He watched his brother’s family through the long months of hospitalization and realized that, in spite of their lower middle class lifestyles, they had something he didn’t have. They didn’t have the answers. They didn’t have an unimpeachable promise of a trouble-free life. But they had a lifeline to the God of the nail-scarred hands. They had Jesus Christ. And even though he knew it meant dying to the power of all of the things for which he had lived and striven all his life, this man grabbed hold of Jesus. Today, he and his wife strive to ensure that in everything they do, they strive to honor God.
Being a Christian isn’t about being perfect. (If you want confirmation of that, look at me. At the top of my blog, in my personal profile space, I say that, "I am an imperfect sinner." A few weeks ago, a guy wrote to me and said, "Mark, I bet if you worked at you could be a perfect sinner.") Being a Christian isn't about being perfect.
It’s about listening to Jesus.
It’s about hearing that God wants nothing more than having a relationship with Him.
It’s about dying to sin and making what God wants for us more important than what we want for us.
It means knowing that even when we fail to love God and love others as we love ourselves, we can be forgiven.
God isn’t a disembodied voice. God has come to us body and blood in the person of Jesus Christ with a simple message: Turn from sin, follow me and learn to live as I made you to live, as My child, as My son, as My daughter, now and forever. Amen
*The exodus, recounted in the Old Testament book that bears that name, is the central event of Israel's history: God's miraculous deliverance of ancient Israel from slavery in Egypt. Jesus' death and resurrection play a similar role in the New Testament. It is through Jesus' crucifixion and resurrection that He is able to lead all who follow Him out of slavery to sin and death. Whereas, the Old Testament exodus is foreshadowing, through His chosen people, of "coming attractions," Jesus' exodus is of cosmic significance. Jesus' exodus has brought the inevitable establishment of a new heaven and a new earth which His followers only experience dimly at best today, but will come in fullness when Jesus returns at the end of history.
**Jesus also says that He came to fulfill the word given by the prophets, an interesting and important point when considering that the two ancient Hebrews who met Him on the mount of Transfiguration were Moses, the one to whom God first gave the moral law, and Elijah, the greatest of the ancient prophets.
Luke 9:28-36
Transfiguration Sunday
One of my favorite preachers, Gerald Mann, tells a joke about a televangelist who went skiing. He had never been skiing before, but he was full of himself and, stupidly, simply strapped on some skis, climbed onto a ski lift, and headed up a mountain.He passed the green and blue stations, spots where inexperienced and intermediate skiers, respectively, were to have gotten off the lift. Instead, he rode all the way up to the black station, confident that despite his inexperience, he would do well.
When he reached the top of the mountain, he jumped off the chair and down the hill he went, end over end through the first turn. He flew over a cliff into a gorge.
About ten feet down, he grabbed a tree branch. There he held on tightly, suspended over certain death. He yelled out, “Is anybody up there?”
It just so happened that a minister who the televangelist constantly criticized in his broadcasts had seen the whole thing. The minister stayed out of the televangelist’s line of vision and called down to him, “Yes, there’s someone up here. It’s I, the Lord your God. The time of your testing is at hand. If you really believe as you’re claiming to believe all the time, let go and I will catch you.”
There was a pause from below. And then the televangelist asked, “Is anybody else up there?”
That’s not a true story, of course. But there is a lot of truth in it. As Mann writes after telling it in his book, When the Bad Times Are Over for Good, “We would all like to really let go and trust God…But we’d like something more than a disembodied voice.”
Interestingly, there is a disembodied voice in our Gospel lesson today. It comes from a cloud that has descended to a mountain. And this voice, which we can take to be God the Father, tells us that God is more than a disembodied voice. We all would like to trust that. But can we? And if so, how?
Throughout this Epiphany season, which began on January 6, we’ve said that the Gospel lessons on these Sundays have all presented epiphanies, manifestations of Who Jesus is and what He can be for us when, by faith, we let Him be.
In Epiphany, our picture of Jesus has been unscrambled and we have seen that He is more than a man, more than a great moral teacher, more even than King of the Jews or Savior of the world.
But you and I have the benefit of hindsight. We live on the other side of Good Friday and Easter. We know that, though the world tried to kill Him off on Good Friday, Jesus rose from the dead on Easter, guaranteeing the truth of His promise that, “Those who believe in me, though they die, will live.”
The three disciples who Jesus took with Him to the top of the mountain in our Gospel lesson probably had no clear idea of why they had followed Jesus in the first place or why they were now on this mountain with Him.
Peter, the one quickest to speak of the twelve apostles, had, just a few verses before today’s Gospel lesson, made a confession about Jesus. When Jesus asked the twelve, “Who do you say I am?” Peter said simply, “The Messiah [that means, the Christ, God’s anointed king]…The Messiah of God.”
But those may have been simply disembodied words for Peter, which is probably why Jesus responded to his confession by telling Peter and the other apostles: “The Son of Man must undergo great suffering, and be rejected by the elders, chief priests, and scribes, and be killed, and on the third day be raised.”
These words of Jesus would not have computed in the minds of the twelve apostles. The Messiah to suffer in the holy city of Jerusalem? The Messiah rejected by the very religious leaders who should have hailed him as king? The Messiah killed? Those thoughts would have been so mind-numbingly confusing to them that they would hardly have taken notice of the most incredible claim of all, that after being murdered, the Messiah would rise again.
But on this Saint Valentine’s Day, it’s important to remember that love is more than words, especially the love God has for us. And so, God gives the three disciples closest to Jesus more than words. He will show them how the Messiah can be both God of all and servant of all, crucified like a criminal yet the King Who brings life.
In our lesson, while Jesus prays, He blazes with the very fire of heaven. Peter, James, and John couldn’t have helped but remember reading from the book of Exodus about the time when God had called Moses to Mount Sinai and covered the mountain with a cloud. After seven days, God had called Moses out of the cloud and, we’re told, “the appearance of the glory of the Lord was like a devouring fire…”
At the Transfiguration, in the presence of Peter, James, and John, 1300 years after Moses had encountered God on Sinai, Jesus was soon joined by Moses, who had died about 1240BC, and Elijah, whom God had taken to heaven in about 840BC. They discussed Jesus’ departure—literally Jesus’ exodus*—His impending death and resurrection.
Thinking that he could bottle up the glory of this moment, Peter suggests that three booths should be built, one each for Moses, Elijah, and Jesus.
At that suggestion, the cloud of heaven’s presence overshadowed and terrified Peter, James, and John, and the voice from cloud said, “This is My Son, the Chosen; listen to Him!”
God is more than a disembodied voice. God is embodied in carpenter from Nazareth Who, sinless, willingly sacrificed Himself on a cross so that all who disavow their sin and entrust their lives to Him, receive the power to live this life whatever the circumstances and a new life that goes beyond the grave in an eternal kingdom with God.
But these free gifts do not come to us without a price. They cost Jesus suffering and death on a cross. And they call us to die to sin, to die to all our human desires for importance or power, and to simply draw our life from the crucified and risen Savior. The voice from heaven told the disciples and that voice tells us today, “Do you want to know Who God is? Do you want to know God as more than a disembodied voice? Get to know Jesus. This is God the Son. Listen to Him. Listen only to Him.”
And what will we hear when we listen to Jesus’ life, teaching, death, and resurrection?
We will hear, first of all, that God loves us and seeks relationship with us. In one of Jesus’ most famous parables, He tells the story of a father who leaves all dignity behind in order to run to a son who had become lost in sin. He kisses his boy, puts new clothes on him, and rings on his fingers and throws a party. Just so, Jesus says, God throws a party in heaven every time one of us realizes our sin and our need of God and turn to Him for forgiveness and life.
When we listen to Jesus we also hear that God’s expectations of us as human beings has not changed. God still hates the sin while loving the sinner. Jesus affirms that to build our lives on anyone or anything other than God is sin. Neither our families nor our countries, neither material acquisitions nor influence are strong enough foundations to sustain our lives; only the God we know in Jesus Christ is!
You know, I wish that we had the same attitude and understanding of God's commands, as succinctly stated in the Ten Commandments, that the ancient Jews had. We have the same feeling toward God's law as we're likely to have toward the skunk who crashes the party. We think they mean God is a spoilsport.
But the ancient Israelites understood that God's commands are gifts. "Within the parameters of this commands," God says, "there is life and happiness and relationship. Transgress them and you walk away from relationships with others, with your true selves, and from Me."
Jesus said that He came into the world not to overthrow the law, but to fulfill it.** But God's laws still function as a mirror for us all, showing us our need of God and, as was true of the son in Jesus' parable, to run go back to the Lord Who runs to His children.
But we also hear this when we pay attention to Jesus: We can be forgiven. We can be made new.
True story: He had been going his own way for a long time. He had joined a small startup company with a newly minted Masters of Business Administration degree and, as the business had grown, so had his prosperity and prestige. He had become a big shot and he knew it. Later, he revealed that there had been some fudging along the way, little deals that might have gotten him in trouble were it not for the fact that he counted prosecuting attorneys, police chiefs, and even a state attorney general among his friends.
But it was all good, he told himself if ever he had second thoughts about his ethics. He had everything he wanted: the nice house, the new cars, the sumptuous vacations, the beautiful wife, the 2.1 perfectly coifed and orthodontistized children. All went well.
Then near-tragedy struck. A twin brother to whom he was close nearly died. He watched his brother’s family through the long months of hospitalization and realized that, in spite of their lower middle class lifestyles, they had something he didn’t have. They didn’t have the answers. They didn’t have an unimpeachable promise of a trouble-free life. But they had a lifeline to the God of the nail-scarred hands. They had Jesus Christ. And even though he knew it meant dying to the power of all of the things for which he had lived and striven all his life, this man grabbed hold of Jesus. Today, he and his wife strive to ensure that in everything they do, they strive to honor God.
Being a Christian isn’t about being perfect. (If you want confirmation of that, look at me. At the top of my blog, in my personal profile space, I say that, "I am an imperfect sinner." A few weeks ago, a guy wrote to me and said, "Mark, I bet if you worked at you could be a perfect sinner.") Being a Christian isn't about being perfect.
It’s about listening to Jesus.
It’s about hearing that God wants nothing more than having a relationship with Him.
It’s about dying to sin and making what God wants for us more important than what we want for us.
It means knowing that even when we fail to love God and love others as we love ourselves, we can be forgiven.
God isn’t a disembodied voice. God has come to us body and blood in the person of Jesus Christ with a simple message: Turn from sin, follow me and learn to live as I made you to live, as My child, as My son, as My daughter, now and forever. Amen
*The exodus, recounted in the Old Testament book that bears that name, is the central event of Israel's history: God's miraculous deliverance of ancient Israel from slavery in Egypt. Jesus' death and resurrection play a similar role in the New Testament. It is through Jesus' crucifixion and resurrection that He is able to lead all who follow Him out of slavery to sin and death. Whereas, the Old Testament exodus is foreshadowing, through His chosen people, of "coming attractions," Jesus' exodus is of cosmic significance. Jesus' exodus has brought the inevitable establishment of a new heaven and a new earth which His followers only experience dimly at best today, but will come in fullness when Jesus returns at the end of history.
**Jesus also says that He came to fulfill the word given by the prophets, an interesting and important point when considering that the two ancient Hebrews who met Him on the mount of Transfiguration were Moses, the one to whom God first gave the moral law, and Elijah, the greatest of the ancient prophets.
Faith Tidbit #49
The Bible, God's Word, encourages husbands and wives to enjoy sexual intimacy when the opportunity presents itself. A great Valentine's Day read for wives and husbands might be the Old Testament book, Song of Solomon. Among other things, it celebrates sexual intimacy as an opportunity for couples to generously bring pleasure and the assurance of undying commitment to one another. The New Testament book of Ephesians makes clear that the relationship of wife and husband is to be one of mutual, voluntary servanthood and consideration. This includes the sexual component of the marital relationship.
Saturday, February 13, 2010
Faith Tidbit #48
In his book, Money, Sex, and Power, Richard Foster compares our sexuality to a river. When we use our sexuality within the boundaries created for it by God, sex also is a good and beautiful thing. But when misused, sex can hurt and destroy and disrupt people’s lives. To King Solomon, who certainly would have done well to pay greater attention, God said, "Drink water from your own cistern...rejoice in the wife of your youth...May her breasts satisfy you at all times; may you be intoxicated always by her love..." Sexual intimacy, one component of that special order of the friendship between a wife and a husband, is a beautiful (and even intoxicating) thing, meant only for a wife and a husband.
Friday, February 12, 2010
To Mark Lincoln's Birthday: Thoughts on His Second Inaugural Address
Several years ago, I wrote a seven-part blog series on Abraham Lincoln's second inaugural address. Since then, posting the following links to the series has seemed a good way to mark the anniversary of Lincoln's birth each year on February 12. I hope that you enjoy these articles. Let me know if you find them helpful.
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Part 6
Part 7
Part 1Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Part 6
Part 7
Faith Tidbit #47
The second creation account in the Old Testament book of Genesis reveals God's intent for human beings who choose to express their sexuality in an intimate way. There, we're told, "...a man leaves his father and his mother and clings to his wife, and they become one flesh." Sexual intimacy is meant to be the sign and seal of a lifetime connection between a husband and wife.
Thursday, February 11, 2010
Iran is Feeling the Heat
While protesters celebrate the thirty-first anniversary of their country's Islamic revolution by taking to the streets and the country's president declares Iran to be "nuclear," the regime in Tehran is already feeling the heat from imminent US sanctions, according to Mark Dubowitz.
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