Life from God

[Below, you'll find live stream video of yesterday's worship services from Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio, along with the text od the message for the day. Yesterday was Holy Trinity Sunday.]

Matthew 28:16-20

On this Holy Trinity Sunday, God, Whose revealed name is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, comes to us in His fullness. He does so, as Jesus says elsewhere, so that you “may have life, and have it to the full…” (John 10:10)

God is going to give you life again this morning in our Gospel lesson, which recounts the last words of the crucified and risen Jesus recorded in Matthew’s gospel.

We need to receive life from God–actually we need to receive God’s life from God–because we are sinners prone, like stupid sheep, to wander away from God and the life that He alone can give to us.

Without life from God, the Author of life, we are dead.

To understand how God is going to give life to you again today in our Gospel lesson, it would be helpful to consider the witness of our first lesson–Genesis 1:1-2:4 in the Old Testament–and see how God gave life at the birth of all the physical universes He created. Genesis 1:1-3 says: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters. And God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light.”

What happens here? God the Father speaks the Word, Who as we know from the Gospel of John, is Jesus, and the Holy Spirit makes it possible for the “formless, dark, deep”--dead and lifeless–to hear or receive God’s Word.

Wherever God’s life-giving Word, Christ Himself, is heard, life happens.

It is this Word, full of life, gospel, good news, that causes nothing to become something, that causes the dead to come alive!

It was of this Word that the apostle Paul wrote in Romans: “...it is the power of God that brings salvation to everyone who believes: first to the Jew, then to the Gentile.” (Romans 1:16)

So, the Father speaks Christ the Word and the Spirit wings that Word into dead darkness in order to bring, as 2 Timothy in the New Testament tells us, “life and immortality to light.” (2 Timothy 1:10)

Now that we know how the Trinity–Father, Son, and Holy Spirit–gives life, we’re ready to receive life from Him in Matthew 28:16-20 today.

You know the incident well. The eleven remaining apostles–after betraying Jesus, Judas has died–go to a mountain to which Jesus has commanded them to go. There, they meet the risen Jesus!

This surely is a moment of joy, right? Not entirely. Matthew says, “When they saw him, they worshiped him; but some doubted.” (Matthew 28:17)

Matthew doesn’t tell us what the disciples doubt. They can’t doubt that Jesus is risen: Jesus is standing in front of them. So, what are they doubting?

The root of the word translated as “doubted” here is διστάζω, a compound word the two parts of which are double and stand. When we doubt, it’s because we’re not sure about where we stand.

When you know where you stand with God, you can worship Him.

When you’re unsure, you doubt not only that you can worship but whether God will accept your worship.

As they wobble and kneel in the presence of Jesus, at least some of the eleven likely doubt that Jesus will forgive them.

Peter may wonder, “Can Jesus forgive me for denying Him?”

The others may wonder, “Can Jesus forgive us for abandoning Him when trouble came?”

They all may wonder, “Are my sins so great that I’m beyond the forgiveness of Jesus?”

What about you? Do doubts like these ever assail you?

“I lied to make myself look good,” you may think.

Or, “I lusted for another man’s wife or another woman’s husband.”

Or, “I was dishonest about money.”

Or, “I have been unwilling to forgive so-and-so for how they hurt me.”

Do you doubt that God’s grace in Christ is for you? Do you sometimes think that Christ died and rose for everybody’s sin but your own?

Friends, the God we know through Jesus Christ knows how you feel and not just because as God, He knows everything you think and do. He knows because He already took all your sin and all mine into Himself and was crucified with it. He knows your sin from the inside out. He knows how horrible it is. He knows how, when you look only to yourself in the light of God’s law–His commandments–that you feel you must be eternally condemned. He was experiencing the condemnation of God’s Law on you when He cried from the cross, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Matthew 27:46)

But forsakenness is not the end that God desires for any of us.

After reminding the eleven on the mountaintop that all authority on heaven and earth has been given to Him because He has conquered sin, death, and the devil through His death for us and His resurrection for us, Jesus speaks life to sinners like you and me. (I’m rendering the words in verse 19 here literally.) “As you are going, keep being my disciples in all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit…” Here are the Gospel words that bring you life!

Jesus tells disciples who have messed up, sinned, and betrayed or denied Him, “You are still My disciples. Keep being My disciples. Keep turning back to Me for forgiveness and life.”

Listen, the God Who tells His disciples that, in His power, we are to forgive others seventy times seventy times, is ready and able to forgive and give life to us infinitely more than that!

That’s not a license to sin, of course, it’s freedom to live assured that our Father in heaven forgives us our trespasses and views us as His very own disciples, children, friends.

And it means that we can turn to Him for forgiveness each day because “He remembers that we are dust,” dead dust into whom He breathes the Holy Spirit, the only One Who can give us life! (Psalm 103:14)

We can live in the freedom of being God’s own children because we have been baptized and called to faith in the name–notice it’s name, not names–the name by which God saved us at the waters of Holy Baptism: the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

This is the name by which God has reveals Himself to us.

And it’s this His name He has placed on us to claim us as His own.

By this name, we sinners are saved and made saints.

And this name assures us that prodigals though we are, we can turn to Him and live.

Not only that, we can baptize others and know that they too have been made God’s children. As Peter reminds us, “baptism…saves you.” (1 Peter 3:21) 

Then Jesus says, finishing the sentence started in verse 19 (I’m rendering His words in verse 20 literally from the Greek again): “...teaching them [the nations] to keep guard over all the things that I have given you to keep guard over. And behold, I am with you all the days until the completion of the age.” (Matthew 28:20, literal translation)

To keep guard of the things that Christ has given to us is to hold the sacred trusts of the Law that condemns human sin and the Gospel that sets us free as God’s message for all nations.

It means to repent when God’s Word calls us to repentance and it means to believe when God’s Word of absolution–in the name of Jesus, all your sins are forgiven–is declared. It means telling the world what Jesus tells us in Mark 16:16: “Whoever believes and is baptized will be saved, but whoever does not believe will be condemned.”

Sisters and brothers in Christ, because the triune God has spoken the Gospel Word to you, giving you both the gift of repentance and the gift of faith in Jesus, sin no longer has the power to condemn you. You are forgiven.

This promise isn’t just for eleven apostles on a mountaintop in Galilee two-thousand years ago. It’s for you too. Again this morning, dear saints in Christ, in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, you are forgiven and you belong to God forever. Amen

Don't give up on God; God hasn't given up on you!

Matthew 2:13-23
The Old Testament tells us that God called the descendants of Abraham and Sarah--the people known as Israel--to be “a covenant for the people and a light for the Gentiles [or the nations]. (Isaiah 42:6)

In other words, ancient Israel was called to be a people who trusted in God and told the nations about God so that they could come to trust in Him and follow Him too.

While generations of Israelites--or Hebrews, as they are sometimes called in the Bible--thought that being God’s people was all about sharing Abraham’s DNA, that’s never how it’s worked in God’s eyes. Being in relationship with God always depended (and still depends) on one thing: faith.

After Abraham--then called Abram--heard God’s promise to make him the ancestor of a great nation, Genesis 15:6 says: “Abram believed the Lord, and [God] credited it to him as righteousness.” In the New Testament, the apostle Paul writes “that those who have faith are children of Abraham.” (Galatians 3:7)

If you’re going to be a light to the nations, you have to be connected to the power source. God was to be Israel’s power source, enabling others to see the need for repentance for sin and faith in the great and good God you and I now know through Jesus. (Today, through Christ we know, He can be our power source for the same mission of giving light to the nations!)

If you read your Bible (or pay attention to your own life), you know that faith in God hasn’t always been exhibited by those who saw themselves as members of the club, whether they thought they were members by birth or by occupying the rolls of some church.

Faith in God is trust in God. That’s what makes a person a “child of Abraham.”

The Bible chronicles how God kept working with the Israelites, the genetic descendants of Abraham-- forgiving them, chastening them, shaping them, calling them to faith-- and how most of this people gave up on trusting in God, even when He showed up in their neighborhood in the Person of Jesus.

Ancient Israel is no more, of course. The modern state of Israel that bears its name has a citizenry composed of people who are, like their ancient forbears, genetic descendants of Abraham. But modern Israel shouldn’t be confused with the ancient people called to be a “light to the nations.” In God’s time, that role fell to one person, the God-man Jesus. Jesus was the perfect child of Abraham--the perfect person of faith--who, unlike ancient Israel, has cast the light of God onto the entire darkened world and destroyed the dark bonds of death for all who believe in Him.

In Jesus, the life of Israel was re-lived. Only this time, it was lived with perfect faith in God. By living and dying as He did, Jesus cast the light of heaven into the darkness of our world. (Just think of Jesus' forty days in the wilderness and Israel's forty years in the wilderness. Jesus was faithful to His Father, Israel was not.)

On the cross, perfectly righteous Jesus earned the right to be our perfect, sinless Savior.

And when He rose, He guaranteed that those who believe in Him won’t be put to shame by sin or death, but will have everlasting life with God.

So, let’s see what happens in the life of the young, new Israel, when Jesus was a toddler, in today’s Gospel lesson. In it, we're given three short narratives from Jesus' infancy, each punctuated by a reference to the Old Testament.

Matthew starts: “When they [the they are the wise men who had just visited from the east] had gone, an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream. ‘Get up,’ he said, ‘take the child and his mother and escape to Egypt. Stay there until I tell you, for Herod is going to search for the child to kill him.’ So he got up, took the child and his mother during the night and left for Egypt, where he stayed until the death of Herod. And so was fulfilled what the Lord had said through the prophet: 'Out of Egypt I called my son.'”

Now, what’s interesting about that last line--"Out of Egypt I called my son"--is that, while it’s from the Old Testament and appears in a prophetic book, it’s not a prophetic passage.

Hosea 11:1 are words of history, God recalling how He had called ancient Israel out of Egypt. “When Israel was a child, [God says] I loved him, and out of Egypt I called my son…”

You’ll remember that ancient Israel had first gone to Egypt to be protected by one of its own, Joseph, and to escape the famine the rest of the world was suffering. Later, the Israelites were slaves in Egypt for 430 years.

In His time and according to His plan, God called Israel, His “son,” out of Egypt. God the Father protected God the Son Jesus so that Jesus could fulfill the very reason that God had called Israel into the being in the first place, to bring “life and immortality to light.” (2 Timothy 1:10) That happened when Jesus died and rose for us all, Jews and non-Jews.

Please read on. “When Herod realized that he had been outwitted by the Magi, he was furious, and he gave orders to kill all the boys in Bethlehem and its vicinity who were two years old and under, in accordance with the time he had learned from the Magi. Then what was said through the prophet Jeremiah was fulfilled: “A voice is heard in Ramah, weeping and great mourning, Rachel weeping for her children and refusing to be comforted, because they are no more.’”

This is the second event narrated by Matthew in our lesson. Herod the Great was, to the extent the Romans allowed it (and they allowed Herod to do a lot), a thug, a dictator.

Like Adolf Hitler, Josef Stalin, Mao Tse-Tung, or Vladimir Putin, Herod never hesitated to murder anyone who got in his way. Herod had killed his favorite wife (his favorite wife) and several of his own sons, all, he thought, to maintain his power.

So, to Herod it was a no-brainer as to whether he should order those who worked for him to kill all the infant boys below the age of two in Bethlehem. In a town of 1000, which Bethlehem was, this probably meant the death of twenty children. Somewhere among them, Herod was sure, was the Child that the magi had mentioned, a King sent from God; Herod wanted no rivals.

The Old Testament verse that punctuates this second account in the gospel lesson is Jeremiah 31:15. This is also taken from the book of an Old Testament prophet. It’s also not prophecy, but remembrance.

In it God, recalls how the Israelites who lived in the northern portion of the promised land were, in the mid-eighth-century BC, conquered by a foreign army, the Assyrians. This happened because of the people’s continued faithlessness toward God. God allowed His people to be conquered in the hopes of bringing them back to Him in faith.

In connecting the weeping of the mothers of those baby boys in Bethlehem to the weeping of Rachel, the mother of the Joseph of Old Testament times, Matthew was pointing to the human sinfulness that gave rise to each event. The ancient Israelites were conquered and sent into exile because they had repeatedly turned from God, ignoring the calls of the prophets to repent and trust in God alone. The tragedy visited on the families of Bethlehem were the result of the sin of an earthly tyrant who wanted to “be like God.” Yet it all happened because the Child Jesus, righteous as Israel had never been, and, unlike Herod, a descendant of David, had come to save us.

The deaths of the innocents in Bethlehem are troubling. But the Savior was saved so that He could save us...as well as the innocents who died on that horrible day.

Now the third incident in today’s lesson. “After Herod died, an angel of the Lord appeared in a dream to Joseph in Egypt [I think that had I been Joseph, I'd have tried not to fall asleep; but he was always faithful!] and said, ‘Get up, take the child and his mother and go to the land of Israel, for those who were trying to take the child’s life are dead.’ So he got up, took the child and his mother and went to the land of Israel. But when he heard that Archelaus was reigning in Judea in place of his father Herod, he was afraid to go there. Having been warned in a dream, he withdrew to the district of Galilee, and he went and lived in a town called Nazareth. So was fulfilled what was said through the prophets, that he would be called a Nazarene.”

This incident isn’t punctuated by a particular verse from the Old Testament. The prophets never say, “He will be called a Nazarene.” But Matthew is right nonetheless. He presents an Old Testament idea. Take a look at Isaiah 11:1, written about 800 years before Jesus’ birth: “A shoot will come up from the stump of Jesse; from his roots a Branch will bear fruit.” Jesse was the father of Israel’s King David. The Messiah King would be a Branch--in the Hebrew, the word is nezer--of David’s family tree. Some scholars see a connection between that word for branch and the name Nazareth, which my mentor Pastor Schein used to call, appropriately, Sproutville, the place where the Branch of Jesse, the Messiah King Jesus, sprouted and grew up to be our King.

What does this all have to do with you and me?

When I was a young boy, we lived in a part of the city called the Bottoms. Whenever it rained, my neighborhood mates and I would go out to the kerbs and build dams made of grass, mud, and sticks. We'd build one dam after another to thwart the flow of the rain water. But while we could divert the water, we could never stop it. The water always found a way off of the street and into the sewer traps.

God is like that water. Puny human beings, like Herod or, sometimes, you and me, or faithless ancient Israel, may make a fuss for a while. We may get in the way of God’s grace and new life reaching people. We may take ourselves on side-trips into sin or even turn from God altogether.

But God will not be thwarted!

He will fulfill His purposes.

He will do what He sets out to do.

Even using faithless Israel as the means by which He brought the Messiah into the world! 

The dam was sidestepped, the obstacles were overcome, and God sent Jesus to be the light of the nations, our light. John 1:5 reminds us: “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.”

It’s good to know that God doesn’t give up on us! He sent His Son when all hope seemed exhausted. And when Jesus had given His life for us on the cross, the Father raised Him up: to give the hope and the certainty of His presence with us through all this life and on into eternity for all who believe in Christ, God in the flesh!

God always finds a way to deliver His grace, His love, and His help to those who trust in Him. Even when Israel was faithless, God was faithful to all that He had promised to Israel and to us! He’ll be faithful to you too! 

Isaiah 40:31 tells us: “those who hope in the Lord will renew their strength. They will soar on wings like eagles; they will run and not grow weary, they will walk and not be faint.”

Whatever is wearying you today, you have God’s promise that He will not give up until He has helped you and given you new and everlasting life.

God’s love is tough: Don’t give up on Him because He will never give up on you!

[Blogger Mark Daniels is pastor of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio. This is the message prepared for today's worship.]