Sad Beginning to Holy Week and Passover

How horrible that with Passover just two days away and Holy Week beginning yesterday, a white supremacist killed three people at a Jewish community center in Kansas City.

Jesus summarized Old Testament law when He said that the greatest commandment included loving God completely and loving our neighbors as we love ourselves.

May God teach us to love.

Perfect Comfort from the Perfect Savior

He feared what this life in our world can do to a person.

See here too.

Not the King We Want...the King We Need

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

Palm Sunday
Matthew 21:1-11

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

It’s possible to know the words we say without knowing what we’re saying. How often do we, on Sunday mornings recite the Apostles’ Creed or the Lord’s Prayer with little thought as to what we’re confessing or praying? More often than we might want to admit, I’ll bet.

The crowd that welcomed Jesus into Jerusalem on the first Palm Sunday said words that came from Psalm 118. “Hosanna [a word that means Save, please] Hosanna to the Son of David! Blessed is He Who comes in the Name of the Lord! Hosanna in the highest heaven!”

They were the right words to use in welcoming the King of kings. But they clearly didn’t really understand what it means for God to save us or to answer our prayers: A few days later, this crowd would turn on Jesus, along with the rest of the world, and cry for Him to be executed on a cross. In the end, Jesus wasn’t what the crowd was looking for. I wonder sometimes if Jesus--the real Jesus--is what you and I are looking for.

The crowd that welcomed Jesus to Jerusalem on the first Palm Sunday saw Jesus as a means to their ends. They wanted Jesus to lead a rebellion against their Roman conquerors. They wanted some of the money that the extortionist tax collectors were constantly taking from them. They wanted Jesus to be their king, so long as that meant He took orders from them. But it’s doubtful, at that moment, that many of them wanted Jesus to go to a cross. After all, they would have reasoned, what good would Jesus’ dying do them?

Yet, Jesus’ reason for coming into the world had always been plain.

It had been clear to the wise men who came to visit the infant Jesus in Bethlehem. One of their gifts had been myrrh, a resin used to anoint the dead.

And Jesus sought to make His reason for entering the world clear to His disciples. He told them that He was going to Jerusalem to be rejected by the world, killed on a cross, and then raised from the dead. And when Peter tried to correct Jesus on this point, Jesus told him that Peter’s ideas were from Satan, not from God.

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

That’s good news. But it also can be hard to accept because it entails things we don't like: surrender, obedience, submission. It also means accepting that, just like everybody else, we're sinners in need of a Savior.

A few days after Jesus arrived in Jerusalem, the crowds noticed that He hadn’t led an armed rebellion. He hadn’t taken over the government. He hadn’t done their bidding. Instead, He spent His time throwing moneychangers out of the temple, talking about prayer, arguing with the religious authorities, telling stories (or parables) about the kingdom of heaven, talking about love of God and neighbor as the greatest commandment, teaching of the need to be ready for Him to return after He’d died and risen, and, most strangely of all maybe, He prayed, sometimes for hours at a time. This wasn’t the king they'd been looking for. And so, by the Thursday after the first Palm Sunday, the crowd was crying for Jesus’ execution.

Jesus may not be the king we are looking for. But Jesus is the Savior we need. I’m convinced of that, first of all, because of the road Jesus took on Palm Sunday. It demonstrates that Jesus is committed to walking through the hardest places in this life with us.

As our Gospel lesson from Matthew begins, Jesus is walking on the road from Jericho to Jerusalem. This is the same road, different direction, on which Jesus set His fictional parable of the Good Samaritan. It was a road on which people were often subjected to violence and robbery. Thugs hid in the rocks and crags of the road. Jesus walked that road. But, as you know, that wasn’t the hardest road Jesus traveled with us and for us.

The hardest road was Jesus’ entire life on this earth, when the Creator of the universe took the form of a servant, aiming all the while to die for us. That’s the point of some of Paul’s words in our second lesson today. “Your attitude should be the same as that of Christ Jesus,” Paul writes, saying that though Jesus was “in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness. And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself and became obedient to death-- even death on a cross!”

“I don’t understand all of this,” a woman whose husband had left her once told me, “but I sure wouldn’t want to go through it without God.” A king like the one the crowd wanted--and that we may sometimes want: a king who skated above us, untouched by our failings and our difficulties, a king who gave us all we wanted without reshaping our characters into being more loving and more human, couldn’t help us when we’re confused or lost or lonely or grieving. But Jesus can! Like that woman, we learn that, in Jesus, the God of all creation can reach down into our everyday lives, even when we go through tough times. He can do that because every experience we may have as human beings, He has experienced. And every sin you and I have ever committed, He bore in His own body on the cross.

On Palm Sunday, Jesus also proved that He was the Savior we need by Who He chose to rely on. When I was in high school, I played hooky to see a President deliver a speech down at the State House. He was surrounded by a phalanx of Secret Service security, necessary to be sure. He also had Air Force One and his presidential limo and cars filled with assistants and the latest communication technology. Back on Air Force One, he had access to every comfort he could want. Wherever presidents go, they look like rulers of the world.

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

Every king, president, great athlete, and pop star, no matter how exalted dies. Even Elvis has left the building, folks! Only one king has ever defeated death. It was Jesus and there's only one reason for His victory over death. Even when He hung on the cross, the taunts of the fickle crowds ringing in His ear, the agonies of His wounds besetting Him, the horror of feeling abandoned by all haunting Him, Jesus depended only on God the Father. And here’s the point: Jesus’ resurrection is confirmation that surrender to God is the only path to new life.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Growing in Discipleship

[This was prepared for presentation during worship with the people and guest of Living Water Lutheran Church in Springboro, Ohio, earlier today.]

1 Corinthians 3:1-2
Matthew 28:19-20

During these weeks in Lent, we’ve been talking about the five building blocks of Christian discipleship and of the mission of Christ’s Church. Today, we come to the fifth building block: Personal growth in discipleship.

Now, this may seem like the least interesting and maybe the least important of the five. But I believe that every time the Church or individual Christians fail to live out the other four building blocks--loving God, loving our neighbors as ourselves, loving our fellow believers as Christ loved us, and making disciples--the root cause of this cluster of failures is that we have failed to grow as disciples.

In his book, Real Life Discipleship, Pastor Jim Putman identifies five stages of spiritual development. The first stage is being spiritually dead. Every human being is born spiritually dead. We are turned in on ourselves. We are born in sin. We are separated from God, the only one Who can give life.

This is why Jesus told Nicodemus: “...no one can see the kingdom of God unless he is born again." The old must die so that the new can rise, which is what happens in Holy Baptism.

This need is why God, not wanting to see the people He created eternally lost to Him, sent God the Son Jesus to die and rise so that all who repent and believe in Him will have eternal life with God.

And this is why God commissioned the Church--you and me--to act as His rescue mission to a world filled with the spiritually dead. The simplest statement of what it means to be a disciple--a follower of Jesus--was made by Jesus Himself when He called the first disciples in Matthew 4:19: “Come, follow me," Jesus said, "and I will send you out to fish for people."

The ultimate goal of discipleship is to grow up and become strong enough in our discipleship that we reproduce ourselves, making new disciples. That’s why I think Putman’s five stages of spiritual development are right on:

• spiritually dead,
• spiritual infancy,
• spiritual childhood,
• spiritual adulthood, and finally,
• spiritual parenthood.  

We don’t like to hear this. I don’t like to hear this. We don't like the idea that God wants us to grow, to change.

We’d prefer to remain spiritual infants, sopping up the grace and love of Jesus with no thought of being changed by grace or of passing it onto others.

We’d prefer to turn our faith into a kind if intellectual transaction: We give assent to Jesus’ lordship and in exchange, He gives us forgiveness for our sins and life with God.

We want to be able to just say: “Thank you very much, Jesus, we’ll see you when I die and now onto the stuff I really want to do in this world.”

Or we want to make discipleship into membership, like belonging to the Kiwanis or the local health club.

But to be a disciple means to submit to the ongoing process of trusting Jesus to, day after day, destroy our addiction to the dying ways of this world and to make us more like Him.

God does not want us to get too comfortable with life in this world. He wants our whole way of life to be alien to this world. That’s why 1 Peter tells Christians: “Beloved, I urge you as aliens and strangers [to this world] to abstain from fleshly lusts which wage war against the soul. Keep your behavior excellent among the Gentiles, so that in the thing in which they slander you as evildoers, they may because of your good deeds, as they observe them, glorify God in the day of visitation [the day when Jesus returns to the earth].”

Keep so growing in your faithfulness, Peter is saying, that when unbelievers observe you, they’ll have every reason to follow Jesus themselves and then, on the day He judges the living and the dead, join you and all of Christ’s people in glorifying God in eternity because, through you, they too will be disciples.

Often, when I talk with people about the importance of growing in faith, they tell me I’m ignoring Jesus’ call to childlike faith. “All I need is faith as a child,” they say. “I don’t need anything more than that.”

But Jesus never called Christians to be infants. Paul echoes Jesus’ implicit teaching on this subject when in 1 Corinthians 14:20, he writes: “In regard to evil be infants, but in your thinking be adults.”

And the fact is, if we are not growing in our faith, we are dying. If we are not growing closer to Christ, we are, by default, falling away from him.

Under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, the early Christians understood the importance of growth in discipleship. Turn please to 1 Corinthians 3:1-2 (page 794 in the sanctuary Bible). Paul is confronting first century Christians in Corinth. He laments that they weren’t spiritually mature enough for him to speak to them as he needed to. He writes: “Brothers, I could not address you as spiritual but as worldly--mere infants in Christ. I gave you milk, not solid food, for you were not yet ready for it.”

Paul was saying if there is no spiritual growth, Christians aren’t really ready to do Christ’s mission for them. They aren’t ready to be who Christ died and rose to set them free to become!

So, how do we grow as disciples?

Theologians call the process of growing in discipleship sanctification, the process by which God makes us over in Jesus’ image. Paul says that, “...we all, who with unveiled faces contemplate the Lord's glory, are being transformed into his image with ever-increasing glory, which comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit.” In other words, as we lay our lives open to Christ each day, God is remaking us, deepening our faith and our discipleship. We let the Holy Spirit call, gather, enlighten, and work on us as we seek to follow Christ. That’s how we grow as disciples.

But how do we do that exactly? How do we keep still and let God make us over as disciples?

When I was learning how to play in the outfield as a little leaguer, I realized that I had no control over what pitch the pitcher threw or how fast. I had no control over how hard or high or where the batter hit the ball. But if I positioned myself right in the field and used my glove and throwing arm in the right ways, I could catch balls hit to my field. In that conversation with Nicodemus, Jesus said that the Holy Spirit blows where it will and we have no control over it. But if we position ourselves spiritually, we can receive the growth God wants to give to us. We can breathe in the Holy Spirit and grow as disciples. That often can be painful and we will frequently not understand what God is trying to accomplish in our lives. Growing as Christ's disciple isn't easy. But it is the way of life.

Here are a few ways we can breathe in the Spirit and grow.

First of all, ask a person you know who is more spiritually mature than you are to meet with you periodically--once a week, once a month, once every two weeks--and informally. Make sure it’s someone you trust and who isn’t a gossip. Talk about your struggles, spiritual and otherwise. Read Scripture together. Pray together. Make yourself accountable to this person and keep your  appointments. God will meet you as you meet and you will grow.

Second, read God’s Word and pray regularly on your own, with your spouse, or with your family. God’s Word has power. Isaiah says God’s Word never returns empty. Even when we don’t perceive it, as we submissively read and consider God’s Word, the Potter is molding His new creations, you and me.

Third, worship and receive the sacrament regularly with your church family. Hebrews 10:25 says that when Christians worship together, we not only praise God, we also encourage one another and prepare one another for the day we see Jesus face to face.

Fourth, get involved with a small group Bible study. You might want to join us for the studies we’re beginning on Mere Christianity and on discipleship itself after Easter. We gain insight from studying God’s Word together that we can’t gain on our own.

Fifth, get involved with mission and service and evangelism projects. We have lots of them at Living Water. And we’re going to be doing more with our regular Kindness Outreaches in the near future. These outreaches can change both your life and the lives of those you touch. In both of my previous parishes, we did kindness outreaches. In Cincinnati, we committed more than 12,000 individual acts of kindness in five years--giving away cold water or Coke on summer days; cans of soup in the winter; money off at a local gas station; and our youth group loved going to local businesses to clean toilets. And with each act, we handed out a card or were able to verbally tell the recipients, “We’re doing this to share the love of God in a practical way.” Whether others are nudged closer to faith in Christ or not, when you serve others in Jesus’ Name, your discipleship grows.

Sixth, cultivate friendships with people you think are spiritually dead. They’re all around us. We meet them every day. They need to know Jesus. Pray for them. Invite them to your house. Truly befriend them. And then, in Peter’s words from 1 Peter 3:15: “...be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have [in Christ]...” Be willing to be a mentor and faith guide to a co-worker, classmate, or friend. Growing disciples are mentors as well as mentees. It's how we grow.

In Matthew 28:19-20, Jesus gives the great commission. Let’s look at it one more time (page 698). Jesus says: “Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I commanded you; and lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the age.”

It’s God’s plan that we who make up Christ’s Church will be His hands and feet in this world. More than that, it’s His plan that we--His sheep--not the Good Shepherd--Jesus Himself--will make other sheep. As Dan and Trish have both pointed out this past week, there is no Plan B. God is counting on us to play our parts in calling the spiritually dead to new and everlasting life with God through faith in Jesus Christ.

We have no control over the message of the Gospel. That has been set by God.

And we have no control over how others will respond to the Gospel, whether they receive Jesus and live or reject Jesus and choose death.

But we do control whether we will allow Jesus use us to live the Gospel through the five building blocks of loving God, loving others as we love ourselves, loving fellow disciples as Christ loves us on the cross, making disciples, and growing as disciples.

As we position ourselves to receive the life and power God gives to those who are “all in” for Jesus, our lives will be built on the solid foundation of Jesus and we will fulfill our one and only purpose in life: to have and to be Christ’s disciples. Amen

Lenten Welcome Message

One of the customs at Living Water Lutheran Church in Springboro, Ohio, is to have a special seasonally-related welcome to worshipers in the front of the bulletin. This is the welcome we've been using this Lenten season:

Welcome to Living Water Lutheran Church! We pray that you will feel welcomed as we worship the God we know through Jesus Christ.

You’re with us at a special time in the Church Year known as Lent. For centuries, Lent has been a forty-day season of spiritual renewal and preparation that precedes Easter Sunday. (Easter Sunday is April 20, this year.)

Lent emphasizes other aspects of Christian belief:

• The suffering and death of Jesus Christ on the cross, where He took the punishment for sin all human beings deserve so that all who repent and believe in Him will share in the victory over sin and death Jesus won when He rose from the dead.
• Personal repentance and renewal is another emphasis of Lent. While repentance and renewal should be an ongoing element of the Christian life, this season is set aside to encourage believers to especially focus on them.
• Preparation for Baptism or Affirmation of Baptism for those coming to the faith or preparing to publicly declare their allegiance to Christ.

This Lent, at Living Water, we’re looking at five building blocks of Christian living and the mission and ministry of the Church. Each of the building blocks are faithful responses to our being saved by God’s grace through our faith in Jesus Christ. These five building blocks, describing behaviors of the Christian, aren’t ways we earn God’s love. They are what we offer, through the power of God’s Holy Spirit working in us, as a response to God’s love, freely given in Christ.

The five building blocks are:

1. Loving God
2. Loving neighbors
3. Loving fellow believers
4. Sharing our faith and making disciples (or followers of Jesus)
Personally growing in our discipleship

We hope that you will join us in this journey during Lent. We pursue it not because we’re perfect. We’re not. We do it because we love the Lord Who loved us--and you--first...because we’re grateful for His grace, love, and mercy. Welcome!

And a little child shall lead them...to save money

Fascinated by this 14-year older's discovery that governments and businesses could save millions each year by adopting a particular type font.

By the way, what's your favorite font? Mine's Arial, which probably isn't cost-effective.

The New Commandment (AUDIO)

Here

"Your love is teaching me how to kneel"

A Recent Sunset at the James M. Cox Arboretum

Who was James M. Cox, Jr.? He was the son of James M. Cox, Sr., about whom you can read here. The country probably would have been better off had Cox the elder been elected president instead of fellow Ohioan and newspaper publisher Warren G. Harding, when both were the nominees of their parties for president in 1920.

Loving the Church...and the People In It

[This was prepared for sharing during worship with the people and guests of Living Water Lutheran Church in Springboro, Ohio, yesterday.]

John 13:34-35
During these weeks in Lent, we’re focusing on five building blocks for our personal Christian discipleship and for the life of the Church. They are:

• loving God,
• loving others,
• loving fellow believers,
• making disciples, and
• growing in our own discipleship

Today, our focus is on Jesus’ new commandment, John 13:34-35 (page 751 in the sanctuary Bible). Jesus is the speaker. He says:

"A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another."

What makes this commandment so new? And why does Jesus give it?

There are two main ways in which this commandment is different from Jesus’ command to love others as we love ourselves. That command does hold up an impossible standard for us to adhere to, to have the same regard for the needs, hopes, desires, loves, hurts, and difficulties of others that we have for our own needs, hopes, desires, loves, hurts, and difficulties. 

But Jesus’ new commandment holds us to a much higher standard: We are to love just as God in Jesus Christ has loved us!

In thinking about how God loved us, Paul writes in Romans 5:6-8: “You see, at just the right time, when we were still powerless, Christ died for the ungodly. Very rarely will anyone die for a righteous man, though for a good man someone might possibly dare to die. But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” That’s how Christ loves us!

Jesus says in Matthew 20:28: “...the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many." That’s how Christ loves us!

2 Corinthians 5:1 says: “God made [Christ] who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.” And that’s how Christ loves us!

He willingly bore the condemnation for sin we deserve--death--so that, when He rose, He could claim new and everlasting life for all who repudiate sin as their way of life and trust in Him, believe in Him, as the only way to God, their only hope for this world and the next, their only Savior, God and Lord of their lives.

Jesus says that we are to love like that. To be willing to love even to the point of doing what He did for us, giving our lives for others.

As Paul says in Romans, we might do that for a righteous person.

Or we might do it for a family member or a friend.

But Christ did that for a world of people--including you and me--who really don’t want God over our lives, who nailed Him to a cross. “Love like that,” Jesus tells us.

If you’re not feeling a bit squeamish right now, you haven’t been paying attention.

So, the first thing that makes this a new commandment is that it dramatically ups the ante on the love that God requires of us as believers. We’re not just to love others as we love ourselves, we’re to willingly give our lives for them, no matter how they may feel about us, no matter what they do to us. (This doesn’t mean we should submit to abusive or co-dependent relationships, something we’ll talk about another time, I’m sure.)

Now, here’s the second thing that makes this a new commandment: The object of the love Jesus commands isn’t the ordinary neighbors in our lives.

The object of love in this commandment is our fellow believers, our fellow disciples, other Christians, the people who make up Christ’s Church, all who confess Jesus Christ as Lord and God and Savior and King, inside and outside our congregation, inside and outside our denomination.

We are to love the Church--not an abstraction and not the sentimentality surrounding the scent of burning candles or stirring music or fellowship time, but the Church: the flesh and blood, imperfect people, saints by the grace of God who in this world remain sinners by birth and impulse, the people of the Church with whom we confess faith, worship God, receive the sacraments, study God’s Word, pray, serve in Christ’s Name, the people with whom we sometimes disagree or don’t understand or who drive us crazy...These are the people Jesus tells us to love and serve and live for to the point of death itself, if necessary.

Why? Why does Jesus make such a steep and daunting demand of us as His disciples? Jesus, of course, gives the most important reason for obeying the new commandment: “By this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another."

When the world sees Christians loving and caring for each other, as I see happening so often in the life of Living Water, the world then knows that we truly are Christ’s disciples. They see Christ living in us and that makes following Christ--becoming disciples themselves--more compelling to an unbelieving world.

The book of Acts tells us that people saw how the early Christians loved each other and their neighbors and enjoyed “the favor of all the people. And the Lord added to their number daily those who were being saved.” (By the way, notice that the Bible isn't squeamish about saying that some people are saved and some aren't. Those who reject faith in Christ, reject His salvation.)

When the Church is united in its commitment to Christ, to the authority of God’s Word over its life, and its love for God, the world, and one another, it is a powerful magnet for people who don’t yet know Jesus Christ or the freedom from sin and death only Christ can give.

We all know, by personal experience how destructive church fights can be.  The world sees Christians fighting and they figure the whole Christianity thing is a worthless delusion.

Church fights are nothing new. Paul wrote early in his first letter to the Church at Corinth, filled with conflict, back in the first century: “I appeal to you, brothers and sisters, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that all of you agree with one another in what you say and that there be no divisions among you, but that you be perfectly united in mind and thought.”

So, does loving like Christ mean we paper over our differences?

Hardly! Jesus Himself confronted false teaching. He threw out the moneychangers who were using the faith of others to line their pockets. He called Peter a Satan.

Some church fights are stupid. I know of a church that split because people couldn't agree on the color of the carpeting in the sanctuary.

Some church fights are necessary. When the basics of the faith are called into question--when people deny Jesus' virgin birth or His resurrection from the dead or that He performed and still performs miracles or that the Bible is the inspired Word of God, and things like that, then church fights are essential. God's truth is worth fighting for within His Church.

The New Testament makes clear that the Church should discipline or remove preachers who preach or teachers who teach false doctrine, that it should confront and deal with unrepentant sin. It should only call people to positions of leadership and service among them who have the gifts for particular ministries and have the courage to say when they don't.

Jesus Himself teaches that there will be fights in the Church, that sometimes those fights must happen, and, in Matthew 18:15-20, gives a whole process by which those fights should be fought cleanly, with love and grace. And even those fights, Jesus says, should be fought with the idea of restoring unity to the Church.

So why is the unity of the Church so important?

First, because it authenticates our faith.

Second, because we need each other! “People learn from one another, just as iron sharpens iron,” Proverbs 27:17 says. There is no such thing as a solo Christian because when you try a “Jesus and me” faith, there is no one to tell you that you’re full of it when you forget to get full of Christ or full of the Bible instead.

But the Church is so important to Jesus for another reason: It’s the only entity that will survive the end of this old creation, that is eternity.

In Revelation 19:7, we’re told about the rejoicing that will happen in the new heaven and the new earth after Jesus has returned to this world, the dead in Him rise, and this old creation has been destroyed. It describes the wedding between the groom, the Lamb of God Who takes away the sin of the world, and His bride. “Let us rejoice and be glad and give [God] glory!” it says. “For the wedding of the Lamb has come, and his bride has made herself ready.”

The Church is the bride of Christ. The Church--the fellowship of those who turn from sin and trust in Jesus as God in the flesh for forgiveness, life, and eternity--will live forever. And Christ wants His bride to produce many newborn children of God. He wants His Church to be the safe harbor in which His bride, living in His grace and forgiveness, is made ready for its wedding day in heaven. It becomes that when those to whom we reach out with the Gospel, in our words and in our deeds, see that we love each other as Christ has loved us.

But, how do we do that? Only, as we’ve said the past few weeks about loving God and loving our neighbors, by letting Christ live within us. Only by becoming one with Christ and renewing our relationship with Him in daily repentance and renewal by the Holy Spirit. Jesus tells us how this works in John 15:5-8 (page 752 in the sanctuary Bible):

"I am the vine; you are the branches. If a man remains in me and I in him, he will bear much fruit; apart from me you can do nothing. If anyone does not remain in me, he is like a branch that is thrown away and withers; such branches are picked up, thrown into the fire and burned. If you remain in me and my words remain in you, ask whatever you wish, and it will be given you. This is to my Father's glory, that you bear much fruit, showing yourselves to be my disciples.”

If we try to love Christ’s Church apart from a tight connection to Christ, we’ll give up. No one but God Himself is capable of loving with the passionate love Christ lived out and died for on the cross...unless, like the branches of a vine, we remain connected to Christ. That’s why the Church is here: to keep pumping us full of Christ’s love and God’s truth as we move through life, that we might flourish and grow in the love of God given in Christ. Then that love comes alive in us and among us and a world mired in sin wants what we have. “Jesus is what we’ve got. Do you want Him too?”

Christ’s love living in people is a magnet. It starts to exert its pull when we believe in Christ and as we submit to letting Christ grow our faith, we come to do what doesn’t come naturally to human beings: to love God, to love our neighbors, and to love each other. On these three building blocks and the two more we’ll be discussing in the next few weeks, Christ readies us as individual disciples and His the whole Church for eternity with Him.

Loving Others

[This was prepared to be shared during this morning's two worship services with the people and friends of Living Water Lutheran Church in Springboro, Ohio.]

Matthew 22:36-40
During this Lenten season, we’re considering five building blocks for our Christian discipleship and for the faithful mission of Christ’s Church that come to us from three passages of Scripture. In them, Jesus gives to us the Great Commandment, the Great Commission, and the New Commandment. Last week, our focus was on what Jesus calls the first and greatest commandment, reiterating the Old Testament, that we are to love God.

Today, we consider the command which Jesus says is of the same importance as loving God. Please turn again to Matthew 22:36-40 (page 692 in the sanctuary Bible).

It says that a Pharisee approached Jesus with a question:

"Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law?" Jesus replied: "'Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.' This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: 'Love your neighbor as yourself.' All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments."

“Love your neighbor as yourself” was not a commandment that Jesus just made up. It’s not a new commandment. In Leviticus 19:18, part of that section of the Old Testament referred to as “the holiness code,” God told His ancient people Israel: “Do not seek revenge or bear a grudge against one of your people, but love your neighbor as yourself. I am the LORD.”

From the beginning, God intended human beings to live in a community of shalom--a community of peace and wholeness--with God and with other human beings.

This comes through in Genesis, after the first murder had taken place. The blood--the very life--of Abel cried out to God after Abel had been murdered by his brother Cain. When God asked Cain where Abel was, Cain responded with words that must have broken God’s heart: “Am I my brother’s keeper?” For God, the answer to that question was, has always been, and always will remain “Yes.”

We are called to be our brothers’ and sisters’ keepers. Human beings may sometimes crave and need solitude. Even Jesus would sometimes pull away from the needy crowds in order to rest and pray in the presence of God the Father. But we are not made to live outside of loving community with others.

In the Old Testament, God commanded His people to, first of all, love and care for their fellow Israelites, especially the weak, the poor, the widowed, and the orphaned.

But they were also to extend precisely that same love to the “resident aliens,” the foreigners who lived among them. God told the Israelites through Moses in Deuteronomy 10:19: “...you are to love those who are foreigners, for you yourselves were foreigners in Egypt.” (There's a lesson to be learned there for those of us who are descendants of people who were at one time foreigners in what is now the United States of America.)

And even in Old Testament times, God commanded that His people love their enemies. (This may surprise those who support the stereotype that the God of Old Testament is stern and vengeful, while the God of the New Testament is mooshy. Neither stereotype is true.) Proverbs 25:21, for example, says: “If your enemy is hungry, give him food to eat; if he is thirsty, give him water to drink.”

The Pharisee who asked Jesus about what the greatest commandment was had hoped to trap Jesus, showing to be some wild-eyed leader of a cult, introducing notions about God different from what God had revealed of Himself and His will through the centuries to Israel, as recorded in what we call the Old Testament.

But far from trapping Jesus, the Pharisee who asked Jesus what the greatest commandment was, found Jesus upholding the very law and the prophets--the Old Testament canon--which they claimed Jesus threatened.

Jesus underscored the central importance of love of brother and sister or love of neighbor, repeatedly. In Luke 10 for example, Jesus tells the parable of the Good Samaritan, in which a foreigner who happened upon a man who had been beaten by thugs, helps the man, cares for him, and provides for him. Jesus says that whoever we come across in need is our neighbor and that we are to love them.

Under the influence both of his time with Jesus and the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, the apostle John wrote in his later years in 1 John 4:20: “Whoever claims to love God yet hates a brother or sister is a liar. For whoever does not love their brother and sister, whom they have seen, cannot love God, whom they have not seen.” (How's that for directness?)

But one thing we should be clear about is that from the Bible’s perspective, love is not primarily a feeling. Feelings of affection come and go. They fluctuate in intensity. Love, the Bible insists, is something different.

There’s an old preacher story told about a young man in love. (I've updated a little bit so that I don't seem hopelessly ancient!) This guy texts his girlfriend: “I would climb the highest mountain for you. I would swim the deepest ocean. I’d cross the Mojave Desert. I would even go to a Justin Bieber concert. I would do anything for you. By the way, I’ll be over tonight if it doesn’t rain too much.”

His girlfriend may have wondered how much he really loved her, not because his words were so objectionable but because his commitment to the deeds of love seemed questionable.

The Bible does say that our love for others must be rendered from our hearts, meaning that we should be intent on loving others and not render acts of love resentfully or with selfish ulterior motives.

But love isn't primarily an emotion. And it's not just words. Love is a verb.

It’s about the good we do for others, even when we don’t feel like doing it.

Jesus‘ earthly brother James writes in James 2:14-17: “What good is it, my brothers, if a man claims to have faith but has no deeds? Can such faith save him? Suppose a brother or sister is without clothes and daily food. If one of you says to him, ‘Go, I wish you well; keep warm and well fed,’ but does nothing about his physical needs, what good is it?” Where is our faith if we don't love others? Where is our love?

We can claim to love our neighbors--from the people who occupy the same homes in which we live to the victims of poverty, calamity, or despotism in foreign countries--but unless that sentiment is backed by deeds of self-sacrifice and compassion, our claims will be hollow and without meaning.  

The most famous portrait of love in the Bible probably is the so-called “love chapter,” 1 Corinthians 13. It’s often read at weddings, although the original issues Paul was addressing when he wrote to the Christians in first-century Corinth included the pride that some in the church had because they’d been given the gift of tongues and the arrogance of the wealthier members toward those with less.

Yet it does bear relevance to any discussion about love.

Take a look at part of it now with me, please. 1 Corinthians 13:4-7 (page 800). It says:

“Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.”

I have to tell you that when I consider that portrait of love, I feel ashamed.

I do not measure up.

More often than not, I don’t love my neighbor as I love myself. I am self-absorbed and often selfish. I’m not always patient or kind. And I often watch news reports about people who are hurting in other places and don’t even muster enough compassion to pray for them. (A friend of mine always prays when a squad passes by and I find it hard even to remember to do that!)

Yet, here today we again confront Jesus’ command that we love others as we love ourselves. It is a core element in God’s will for us all, summarizing the second table of the Ten Commandments.

It’s part of the law written on every human heart.

And, I don’t keep this commandment.

New Testament scholar N.T. Wright says that it’s instructive to notice where in Matthew’s Gospel that Jesus gives the Great Commandment.

The Pharisee’s question was more or less a last ditch effort to derail Jesus’ credibility among His fellow Judeans. But Jesus gave an answer to which no one could object.

And then, Jesus asks a question of them: “What do you think about the Messiah? Whose son is he?” They reply without hesitation: “The Son of David.” Then, we’re told in Matthew 22:43-46:

“[Jesus] said to them, 'How is it then that David, speaking by the Spirit, calls him "Lord"? For he says, '"'The Lord said to my Lord: "Sit at my right hand until I put your enemies under your feet." If then David calls him "Lord," how can he be his son?' No one could say a word in reply, and from that day on no one dared to ask him any more questions.”

The Pharisees, who had wanted to stump Jesus, were now stumped themselves. They could marshall no evidence warranting Jesus’ death. So, in order to get rid of Him--in order to get rid of the authority of God over their lives and their religious fiefdoms, they would have to resort to trumping up fake evidence to put Jesus on the executioner’s cross. That’s exactly what they did.

But in doing so, of course, they played into Jesus’ hands.

This One Who perfectly loved God and loved neighbor and Who was the Messiah called Lord by King David multiple centuries earlier had come for the express purpose of living out His love for us by dying on the cross, the perfect sacrifice for our sins.

Jesus lived the love He commands. He demonstrated that He is the Messiah, the King above all kings, by doing love’s ultimate deed, taking the punishment for sin you and I deserve so that when we repent for sin and believe in Him, we have everlasting life with God.

And He gives the righteousness that He lived--including the righteous obedience of the command to love others as we love ourselves--to all who believe in Him. Jesus gives His perfect obedience to us and then pours God's Holy Spirit into all with faith in Him.

Through Jesus then, N.T. Wright says, having been made right with God not by our deeds of love, but by Jesus’ deed of love rendered on the cross, we see that the Great Commandment--to love God and love neighbor--isn’t so much an order “to be obeyed in our own strength”--which we can not do anyway--but an invitation and a promise to new way of life.

The God Who claims us as His own by grace through our faith in Christ will, as we daily  call on Him to be in our lives, give us “a new way of life in which, bit by bit, hatred and pride can be left behind and love can become [a larger and larger] reality [in our lives].”

During our recent study of Ole Hallesby's book, Prayer, we noticed that the content of our prayer in Jesus' Name isn't as important that in praying in Jesus' Name, we invite Jesus into our lives and circumstances.

We may approach God with a perceived need or desire. But in responding to Jesus' call and command to pray, we actually are inviting Him in to do what He deems best in our lives. Give Jesus an inch and He will take a mile! As we pray in Jesus' Name, He takes up residence in our lives, usually with consequences we couldn't imagine, most especially consequences for our faith, our characters, and our priorities.

The simple fact is that we cannot love our neighbor unless we first let Jesus love us into following Him and surrendering to Him.

But as we dare to let Jesus into our lives each day--when we let Him know our dreams and our sins, our fears and our personal challenges and invite Him to be Lord over all our lives, to transform all our lives in accordance with the will of God--He will gradually, often without our even knowing it, usually without our even knowing it, help us to love our neighbor as we love ourselves. Not just in words and not just in feelings, but in deeds and in living.

Jesus comes to live in the lives of all who call on Him and as we call on Him, both we and all the people with whom we come in contact are the better for it.

Our call is to let Jesus in, so that His love can go from us to all the world. Amen

Saturday Song #3: Lean on Me by DCTalk

Here's my favorite cover of Withers' great song, from DCTalk. It appeared on the Free at Last LP.

Saturday Song #2: Lean on Me by Bill Withers

This song has been covered many times. But Withers is wonderful in this live treatment of his own composition, a great song by one of the greats. (I love the bass in this version.)

Saturday Song #1: Terra Nova by James Taylor

Because we all want to go home.

Good People

The really good people I know aren't better than others and wouldn't claim to be. They're simply people who, in the power of God's love given in Christ, do the right thing even when they don't want to. I'm blessed to know a few people like that.

Loving God

[This was prepared to be shared with the people and friends of Living Water Lutheran Church in Springboro, Ohio, during worship this morning.]

Matthew 22:36-40
Fads blaze in and out of life in the Church world as surely as they do in the realms of business, education, medicine, movies, and teenage music. All the time, it seems, someone selling a book or a DVD or a whole program with claims of having the silver bullets that will transform the lives of churches and individual believers, helping congregations to find and pursue their missions, and grow in all the ways God intends.

And some parts of those products and programs may actually help churches. After all, even a stopped clock, as they say, is right two times a day.

But, the problem is that often once churches and pastors adopt such programs, however well-intentioned, their lives effectively demonstrate that where they claim to believe in Jesus, they really believe in the mission statement, or the program, or the book, or the church growth guru, or the computer algorithm. Yet Jesus says, “I will build My church.”

The Church doesn’t need fads or new mission statements or DVDs or programs to know what its mission should be. Jesus, true God and true man, Who endured the condemnation for sin we deserved when He submitted to death on the cross, then sprung alive from the grave so that He can give us reconciliation with God, forgiveness of sin, power for living today, and eternity with God to all who repent and believe in Him as their only God and King, has already laid out the mission of the Church and the mission of Christ in plain language.

In three passages in the Gospels, Jesus defines the mission of every Christian congregation and of every Christian.

What He commands in these three passages is so impossible for us to do that unless we live in constant faithful dependence on Him, unless we constantly and regularly receive His grace and power as we pray in Jesus’ Name, worship Him with other believers, and receive His forgiveness and presence in Holy Communion, we simply will not be able to live the fivefold mission Jesus has given to us in these three key passages of Scripture.

As we begin this journey into deeper discipleship this Lenten season, let’s leave behind any notions of silver bullets or special programs that create instant discipleship or an instantly faithful and effective congregation.

If we as a congregation want to be all that Christ has in mind for us to be and if we as individual Christians want to live with the hope and peace that God has in mind for us, we must be attentive to the five building blocks for Christian living and mission that Jesus gives us in these three passages.

Let’s take a look at each of the three passages briefly.

The first is what we call the Great Commandment, found in Matthew 22:36-40. (Page 692 in the sanctuary Bibles.) A man asks Jesus, “Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law?" Jesus replied: " 'Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.' This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: 'Love your neighbor as yourself.' All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments."

Here, Jesus quotes two Old Testament passages which, taken together, summarize the two tables of the Ten Commandments, the first three deal with our relationship with God and the latter seven dealing with our relationship with our neighbors.

The second passage in which Jesus gives us our mission as congregation and individuals is referred to as the Great Commission, Matthew 28:18-20. (Page 698 in the Bibles.) The resurrected Jesus tells the 11 remaining apostles just before ascending to heaven: "All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age."

Notice how frequently Jesus uses the word all here: God the Father ceded all authority to Him and Jesus in turn gives us authority in His Name to make disciples of all people and to teach them everything (another word for all) about Jesus, His commands, and the new and everlasting life He offers to all people who trust in Him.

The third passage that gives us our mission is the New Commandment, John 13:34-35. (Page 751 in the Bibles.) Speaking to His disciples during the Last Supper, Jesus says to His Church: "A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another."

Here, Jesus commands us to love our fellow disciples because doing so authenticates the reality of our faith and that we really have been made new by the grace of Christ.

This doesn't mean we will never disagree. Someone has said that if two people agree on everything, at least one of them is irrelevant. We will have disagreements with one another in the Church; that doesn't mean we don't keep loving each other!

The five building blocks by which Christ builds His Church are seen in these three passages. They were the focal point of our church-wide vision and mission retreat in January.

They will continue to inform everything we do as a congregation and can help us all become the followers of Jesus--the disciples of Christ--we are called to be and that we all want to be.

The building blocks are:

• loving God; 
• loving our neighbors (wherever they may live); 
• loving our fellow believers; 
• making disciples; and 
• personally growing in our faith every day of our lives. 

Our focus during Lent, both on Sunday mornings and, in more informal gatherings, on Wednesday nights, including the testimonies of faith of our young people, will be on these five building blocks and how we can surrender ourselves to the gracious hand of Jesus Christ to become, as the Bible puts it, “living stones” in His body on earth, the Church.

Today, our focus is on loving God. Jesus says, quoting Moses’ sermon in Deuteronomy 6:5: “Love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength.”

Jesus, Who, after all is also God, says that this “the first and greatest commandment.”

Why does God need our love?

And why should we love Him?

And what does it mean to love God?

Let’s take each of those questions in order. Why does God need our love?

To put it simply, God doesn’t need our love. While speaking to the people in the marketplace in first century Athens, the apostle Paul noted: "The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples built by hands. And he is not served by human hands, as if he needed anything, because he himself gives all men life and breath and everything else.”

God doesn’t need for us to love Him. God isn’t some self-absorbed egomaniac needing constant reassurance that He’s the apple of our eyes. God has all the love He could ever need or ever want within Himself, the Holy Trinity: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

The New Testament tells us that, “God is love,” which doesn’t mean that God is some abstraction called love. It means that love informs every aspect of God's character and personality. Love is the motive behind everything God does--including judgment and discipline, including giving us the freedom to walk away from Him, including the cross and the empty tomb.

Out of an extravagance of love, though He didn’t need to do it, God gave us life and made us in His image.

The Old Testament says that we are the apple of God’s eye, the object of His passion and commitment and concern. That’s why, after humanity fell into sin, God set to work to save us from our sin--to save us from ourselves--and to save us from the death we deserve by becoming one of us in Jesus Christ, then dying and rising, so that all who repent and believe in Christ have life with God that begins now in this imperfect world and is “brought to perfection in the world to come.”

The fact is that God commands us to love Him not because He needs to be loved by us, but because we need to love Him.

When we love God, we simply acknowledge the reality that He is God and we aren’t, that He made us and that our lives are completely in His hands. We acknowledge that all of life is a gift from Him. And with gratitude, we acknowledge the depths of His passion for us, a passion that led Him to submit to suffering and death on the cross for us.

But how do we love God?

1 John 4:19 says: “We love because He first loved us.” Only God can empower us with the capacity for loving Him. We are only capable of truly loving God or other people because God, in Christ, has loved us into relationship with Him. In Christ, our love is no longer hostage to our thoughts or our emotions, which can change from day to day. To love God is to acknowledge the reality of both my need for Him and His grace for me, no matter what the circumstances of my life or my psyche at the moment.

My friends sometimes call me a human Thesaurus. If that’s even partly true then I have to tell you that a near synonym for the phrase love God is one simple word, worship.

To love God is to worship God, not just on Sunday mornings or Wednesday nights, but with our whole lives. The Old English word from which we get worship was worth-ship. When we worship God, we acknowledge His worthiness of all our praise, honor, allegiance, and sacrifice. When you know that you have been saved for eternity from sin and death by grace through faith in Jesus Christ, you know that putting your life at His disposal is the only course in this life that makes sense. God’s people, the Israelites, who looked to the coming of the Messiah so that God could make His fallen creation right again, often extolled God’s worthiness. “Great is the Lord and most worthy of praise; His greatness no one can fathom,” Psalm 145:3 declares, for example.

But this raises a final point: To worship God involves more than our words: more than recited creeds, more that hymns or praise songs, more than offerings.

Through the prophet Amos in Old Testament times, God confronted a people who were evidently good at planning and executing impressive worship services. But He wasn’t pleased. “I hate, I despise your religious feasts; I cannot stand your assemblies," God told His people. "Even though you bring me burnt offerings and grain offerings, I will not accept them. Though you bring choice fellowship offerings, I will have no regard for them. Away with the noise of your songs! I will not listen to the music of your harps. But let justice roll on like a river, righteousness like a never-failing stream!” In other words, to truly love God means that we do more than give God or Jesus or our faith lip service. It entails seeking to do God's will and enlisting His power to do so.

David talks about this in Psalm 51: “You do not delight in sacrifice, or I would bring it...My sacrifice, O God, is a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart you, God, will not despise...”

To love God means to seek each day to align ourselves with God.

To praise and honor Him, not just with our lips, but with our lives.

To repent for sin.

To pray for the needs of others.

To help those in need.

To put God first because we know that in Christ, God has always put us first.

To put God first is the hardest and most impossible of all the commands God gives. It runs counter to our inborn nature as sinners.

But as we heed the call of the Holy Spirit to faith in Christ and to call out to God in Christ’s Name, God will do battle each day in the little places where we live our lives so that, whether with our families, at work, or in some ministry of the congregation in which we’re involved, God will help us render Him worship, honor, glory, and praise through who we are and what we do. By the power of the Holy Spirit given to Christians by Jesus, Who Himself was given to us by the Father, we will love God. Amen 

"The 5 to 1 Ratio for Relationship Health"

From a colleague of my Cincinnati days, Gary Sweeten.

The Transfiguration and the Cross

[This was prepared to be shared during the worship services of Living Water Lutheran Church in Springboro, Ohio this morning. Attendance was sparse. But both services were wonderful.]

Matthew 17:1-9
Sometimes you need to get away. Away from the phone, the fax, and the demands of people. It allows for a different perspective. You can pay attention to things that you otherwise ignore or take for granted or didn’t even know existed. Sometimes you get away for your own mental health and physical renewal. Sometimes you take a few people with you--family, friends--for their sakes, not your own. Because they’re the ones who need to get a different perspective. Who need to pay attention to things they were ignoring, to things they’ve been taking for granted, to things they didn’t know existed.

Six days before the events recorded in today’s Gospel lesson took place, Jesus had a stunning interaction with the twelve men we know as apostles. It’s recorded in Matthew 16:13 to 28. Let’s scan it because I don’t think we can understand what happens in today’s lesson without considering this incident first. It begins with Jesus asking the Twelve who people are saying “the Son of Man”--Jesus Himself--is. They report hearing people say that Jesus was Elijah and Jeremiah, prophets who, by that time, had been gone for centuries. “But what about you?" [Jesus asks in verse 15]. "Who do you say I am?" Peter makes a breathtaking confession. Verse 16: “Simon Peter answered, ‘You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.’"

Trace the background and the use of that title, Son of God, in Scripture and you realize that it doesn’t refer to someone who descends from another or to someone who is subordinate to another. It means Jesus was and is God Himself. Jesus confirmed that Peter was right.

Yet, even Peter didn’t yet fully appreciate the meaning of his breathtaking confession that God had become flesh and was living among us on earth. Beginning at Matthew 16:21, Jesus explains that He would go to Jerusalem, undergo suffering, be killed, and be raised from death on the third day. In verse 22, Matthew says that Peter took Jesus aside and began to rebuke the One he had just called God. Peter evidently thought it was OK for him to tell God He was wrong. Peter could imagine “glory days” for Jesus, days when the world would recognize in His miracles the signs of God’s grace and power, days when hail Jesus as God and king. But Peter couldn’t imagine that God in the flesh--and by extension, those who repent for sin and believe in Him--could possibly suffer, or experience futility in their living and dying, or die. Jesus’ response to Peter is swift and condemnatory. Verse 23: "Get behind me, Satan! You are a stumbling block to me; you do not have in mind the things of God, but the things of men."

Read any of the gospels in the New Testament and you know that Jesus is a master teacher. So, He let the implications of this heated exchange with Peter simmer in the disciples’ minds for a while. Then, six days later, we come to today’s Gospel lesson. Take a look at it, please. Verses 1 and 2 tell us: “After six days Jesus took with him Peter, James and John the brother of James, and led them up a high mountain by themselves. There he was transfigured before them. His face shone like the sun, and his clothes became as white as the light.” 

The word translated as transfigured is, in the Greek in which Matthew wrote his gospel, metamorphoo. We get the word metamorphosis from it. Jesus looked different. On another mountain centuries before, the appearance of Moses was transformed by His exposure to the blazing, pure presence of God. It so terrified Moses’ fellow Hebrews that they begged him to ask God to keep them from ever being exposed to God’s radiance. I’ve heard modern day Christians try to reduce God to a compliant puppy, anxious to do our bidding. But the New Testament tells us that God is a consuming fire. Peter, James, and John were seeing that truth before their eyes!

Verse 3 says: “Just then there appeared before them Moses and Elijah, talking with Jesus.” Here on the mountain next to Jesus was Moses, the great lawgiver, born in the sixteenth century BC, who had died and then been buried by God Himself before God’s people entered the promised land. And here was Israel’s greatest prophet, Elijah, who God had been taken from the earth via a chariot of fire centuries before. They were the two symbols of everything God had been doing since the fall of Adam and Eve to bring a sinful, dying world back to Him and back to life, standing with Jesus.

Verse 4: “Peter said to Jesus, ‘Lord, it is good for us to be here. If you wish, I will put up three shelters--one for you, one for Moses and one for Elijah.’" Peter was always the man with a plan. And, during those days when Jesus walked the earth, Peter was almost always wrong. Overwhelmed by the scene he was witnessing, Peter did what many of us do when confronted by an imposing, even frightening circumstance we don’t control: He said something stupid. The gospel of Mark says of this remark by Peter that he didn’t know what he was saying. And it’s true. Peter proposes to give equal recognition to the three, even though less than a week before he was confessing Jesus to be God.

Folks, I have to confess I do the same thing. I confess my belief in Jesus as God in the flesh, King of my life, on Sunday mornings. But all too often, later that day, my life betrays that sinful inborn belief that He’s only a man, after all, that I have the right to do whatever I want, that I’m such a good guy I don’t need His shed blood or His resurrection. I think I can rely on myself. My own reasoning skills. My own emotions. My own common sense. My own virtues. It’s a lie. Every bit of it, a big fat, death-dealing lie. And, if I allow it to take hold--if I allow myself to be my own god and make Jesus out to be nothing more than a spineless, compliant buddy--and if I refuse to repent for it and refuse to ask Him to build up my faith in Him as my only hope, I will separate myself from Him forever. Thank God that the Holy Spirit, Who speaks through God’s Word and through the witness of other Christians, grabs me and reminds me to listen not to myself or my ego or my impulses, but to Jesus. When I’m listening, I hit my knees again, acknowledge that Jesus is my God and I’m not, and I seek forgiveness and reconciliation with God for the sake of what Jesus did for sinners like me when He died on the cross and then rose from the empty tomb!

This is similar to what happened to Peter. Verse 5: “While he was still speaking, a bright cloud enveloped them, and a voice from the cloud said, ‘This is my Son, whom I love; with him I am well pleased. Listen to him!’" Notice that? Peter put his building proposal into Jesus’ suggestion box and God cut Peter off. It’s as though God said, “Shush, Peter! Moses and Elijah played their parts in my plans, but listen to Jesus. Focus on Him. He may seem to be only a man, especially when, in a short while, you see Him die on a cross, but He really is also God the Son, just as you confessed. He is God the Son. He pleases Me. Try to remember this moment when you see Him give up His life for you and all sinners. Listen to Him!” Later, after Jesus had been crucified and raised, after He had ascended to heaven and sent the Holy Spirit to give His followers faith and the power to pass it on to others, Peter said of Jesus in Acts 4:12: “Salvation is found in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given to men by which we must be saved." When we listen to Jesus, when we give him priority in our lives, we can trust that the Lord Who calls us to take up our crosses and follow Him--to acknowledge our sin and vulnerability and let Him rule over our lives--will also lead us through this life, safely past the gates of death into eternity with God!  Romans 10:17 tells us: “So faith comes from hearing, and hearing through the word of Christ.” If we want to live lives of integrity, if we want the power to resist temptation, the power to be faithful to the God Who made us, the power to live with Him now and in eternity, we cannot manufacture faith. But we can listen to Jesus. And as we let His voice cut through our sin and resistance, through our self-sufficiency and self-loathing, we will hear the voice of God telling us, “I died for you. I rose for you. Take my hand. Take my yoke upon you. Let me be the shepherd who guides you through all the shadows of this world, including the shadows of your sin and selfishness, and into the splendor of my light.”

Verses 6 to 8: “When the disciples heard this, they fell facedown to the ground, terrified. But Jesus came and touched them. ‘Get up,’ he said. ‘Don't be afraid.’ When they looked up, they saw no one except Jesus.” What frightens you today? What sins are you struggling with. Or worse yet, what sins are you not struggling with? Putting yourself or some other person or some pleasure ahead of God? Neglecting your duty to your family? Looking down on someone else? Adulterous thoughts? Whatever it may be, look up. You need not be afraid. Neither your fears nor your sins need have the last word in your life! They need not condemn you to separation from God. When the world abandons you or seems unable to help, Jesus is there. He gives forgiveness and the power to live with a new heart and a new will in His kingdom to all who renounce their sin and surrender their lives to Him. Jesus, your God and King wants to help!

Now verse 9: “As they were coming down the mountain, Jesus instructed them, ‘Don't tell anyone what you have seen, until the Son of Man has been raised from the dead.’" I would have been busting a gut to tell everyone once I got back from seeing such an amazing thing, especially if I’d been Peter. Confirmation that Jesus is both Messiah and God, just like Peter had confessed. Yet Jesus tells them to tell no one. Lutherans would issue a sigh of relief and they would be rid of their sense of guilt if their pastors told them, “Don’t witness.” 

But that’s not what Jesus is saying here. He took three apostles away so that they could get a different perspective, pay attention to things they were ignoring, things they’d been taking for granted, things they hadn’t even known existed. Jesus was and is God. He promises the glory of heaven to all who follow Him. But that glorious destination can only be reached by way of the cross, only when we’re willing to submit for crucifixion everything in our character that’s marred by sin, everything that’s selfish. Taking up our crosses to follow Jesus means more than coming up with the right answer about Jesus as Peter did the first time he confessed Jesus to be the Son of living God. It means submitting our lives and sins for crucifixion. It means seeking the Holy Spirit’s power to love and forgive others as the crucified and risen Jesus has loved and forgiven us. It means seeking to align ourselves with God’s will and judgment and not our own. It means, to paraphrase The Small Catechism, letting our old selves, together with all our sins and evil desires, be drowned by daily repentance and sorrow for sin so that our new selves can come forward each day and, then one day, rise to live with God, reconciled and made clean by God’s grace through our faith in Jesus Christ alone.

When we follow not just the risen, miracle-working Jesus, but also the Jesus Who died and calls us to die so that we too may rise with Him, then we understand Him. Then we understand what it is to call Him “the Son of God.” Our confession becomes true, authenticated by exposure to the real Jesus in His fullness. And it’s then that we not only can tell others about the Jesus of the Transfiguration, it’s then that we will want to tell others about Him. Knowing that Jesus died to make sinners like us clean, we will be like the early Christians who said when told not to tell others about Jesus: “We cannot help speaking about what we have seen and heard." Amen

Snowy Sunday Song #4: 'Above All' by Michael W. Smith

Snowy Sunday Song #3: 'Breathe' by Michael W. Smith

We sang this in worship last Sunday. A great confession of our need of the God revealed in Christ. Love it!