Humility: Standing Upside Down with Jesus

[This was shared during both worship services with the people and guests of Saint Matthew Lutheran Church in Logan, Ohio, on September 1.]

Luke 14:1, 7-14

In Acts 17:6, people in the first-century city of Thessalonica had an interesting reaction to the apostle Paul and his team, who had come to proclaim the good news of new life for all who turn from sin and trust in the crucified and risen Jesus as their God.

They said: “These people who have been turning the world upside down have come here also...”

These people who have been turning the world upside down...!

Paul and Silas, representing Jesus Christ in their teaching and preaching, were seen as radicals who upset the normal human way of thinking about living. Christians were seen as offering and living a radically different way of life than either the Jews or Gentiles of the mid- and late-first century had ever experienced. And it frightened people.

Unfortunately, Christians of today aren’t frightening people in the way Paul and Silas and party frightened people in Thessalonica back in the first century.

In fact, depending on which “wing” of the contemporary Church to which people belong, today’s Christians are turning very little of the world upside down.

Right wing Christians, at least in the United States, seem to speak not so much for surrender and submission to the Lordship of Jesus Christ as they do for a red-white-and-blue Jesus Who affirms them in their materialism, their self-styled decency, and their hatred for change.

Left wing, or so-called mainline, Christians tell a population resistant to submission to Christ that Jesus is just a man, the Bible is just a book, that Jesus didn’t mean it when He called Himself “the Way...the Truth...the Life,” and that only a narrow-minded bigot would accept as gospel-truth Jesus‘ claim that “no one comes to [God] the Father except through Me.”

Neither of these wings of Christianity are “turning the world upside down.” They’re just trying to fit in with a world that the Bible makes clear will one day be destroyed to make way for God’s new creation.

The Jesus preached by so many churches today is one who endorses people in their own predispositions, sins, and habits of thought, whether liberal, conservative, whatever. This version of Jesus isn’t turning anyone’s world upside down. He’s the cruise director on the HMS Titanic, keeping everybody comfortable in their own self-centered world views and self-satisfied living as every human being hurtles toward the judgment we all will and must face.

“Wait a minute!” you might say. “Jesus is the Friend of sinners. Paul and Silas may have been zealot hot-heads who went off on illogical tangents of Christian idealism. But Jesus wouldn’t want to turn our worlds upside down. He doesn’t want to change me, just comfort me.”

Listen: It is precisely because Jesus is the friend of sinners that He wants to change us.

He wants to make us feel uncomfortable in living life in the selfish, self-centered ways that represent our default positions as people born in sin.

Until we feel uncomfortable in our sins--until we are dissatisfied with the fact that we are idol-worshipers, thieves, gossips, adulterers, dishonorers of our parents--until we understand that we commit these sins because we are sinners who cannot help ourselves, we will never understand our need of the help that Jesus has come to give to us.

We will never see how desperately we need Christ to free us to choose to walk away from sin and toward being actual human beings until we’re uncomfortable enough to let Christ change us.

Until we’re uncomfortable with our own sin, our Christianity will be a going-through-the-motions religion and not an eternity-changing relationship with God.

The only way Jesus can ever bring us comfort is if, day by day, moment by moment, we remain open to letting Him change us, transform us.

The gifts of salvation and new, eternal life with God are free for all who believe in Jesus. But to believe in Jesus--the real Jesus--will turn our worlds upside down! Our treasured ways of thinking must be crucified, daily, in our repentance and confession, and in God’s forgiveness, given in Christ. The habits we dismiss as being simply the way we are, must be put on the cross, so that the new people God is making of us in Christ can rise!

Jesus Christ, God in the flesh, came to turn our worlds upside down!

Just how topsy turvy the new world--the kingdom of God--that Jesus lived, died, and rose to give us truly is, can be seen in today’s Gospel lesson.

It finds Jesus, on a sabbath day, at a banquet in the home of a Pharisee. In chapter 14, Jesus tells three parables. Two of them are in our lesson. But I want to focus on just the first one this morning. It’s set in verses 7 to 11. Let’s a take a look:

So Jesus told a parable to those who were invited, when He noted how they chose the best places, saying to them:  "When you are invited by anyone to a wedding feast, do not sit down in the best place, lest one more honorable than you be invited by him; and he who invited you and him come and say to you, 'Give place to this man,' and then you begin with shame to take the lowest place. But when you are invited, go and sit down in the lowest place, so that when he who invited you comes he may say to you, 'Friend, go up higher.' Then you will have glory in the presence of those who sit at the table with you. For whoever exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted."

First century Judea in which Jesus lived, died, and rose was as an honor/shame culture. What people thought of you could be a life and death matter. People had feuds or worse over matters of honor. And your status played out in every aspect of daily life.

We haven’t really gotten over this. Every school playground has its pecking order, for example. And we build monuments and give awards to millionaires who may otherwise be stinkers but decided to give a chunk of money to the local college or community charity. In the meantime, we may ignore the everyday sacrifice made by the old widow who serves her neighbors and friends.

But Jesus says that those who exalt themselves will be humbled and that those who humble themselves will be exalted. So, he tells us, don't take places of honor. Be willing to take the lower place in any pecking order; you might get invited to a place of honor.

Now, don’t misunderstand what Jesus is saying here. I’ve heard motivational speakers say things like: “Be willing to serve others; you might gain a better place in the world from it.” "Scratch other people's backs so that they'll scratch yours." Folks, that is the exact opposite of what Jesus is saying in our Gospel lesson.

Jesus is not telling us to play the humble card so that we can manipulate others into giving us what we want in this world, like a better seat at the banquet, or tickets on the 50-yard line at Ohio Stadium, or a cushy job, or an inheritance.

This is a parable. And all of Jesus’ parables are about the kingdom of God, the reign of God.

Where God rules, things are different than under the dog-eat-dog rules of sinful human beings. In the kingdom of God, all who have been saved from sin and death by faith in Jesus Christ alone, already have a preferred place at the table, every single one.

You don’t need to scheme or cheat to get it.

You don’t have to work hard to attain it.

You don’t have to have been born into the right circumstances.

And you don’t have to take places of honor when you know the greatest honor imaginable has already been paid you: the King of all creation died and rose for you.

All you do is admit that you're a sinner in need of saving, trust your life to Jesus, and fall into His gracious, saving arms.

That’s it.

We are exalted when, sinners though we are, we accept Jesus’ invitation to His banquet--to the kingdom of God and are made eternally clean, eternally children of God!

This means that arrogance is neither a necessity nor an option in the kingdom of God.

Each of us who stands each day in humility before God acknowledging our sin and our need of the forgiveness that Christ died and rose to give us, cannot pretend to be anything other than what we are, garden variety sinners turned into saints, holy ones, of God, solely by grace through faith in Christ.

This is how upside down Jesus’ kingdom is! In every other kingdom of the world, the honors go to those who have pushed and elbowed their ways to the top. In the kingdom of God, the honors go to those who trust in Christ, who let Christ call them and lead them and work through them.

And every one who trusts in Christ wears a crown.

All who believe in Christ are seated in God’s banquet hall!

The ultimate arrogance, of course, is for human beings to think we don’t need God.

Or, in another guise of faithlessness, to think we only need God for the things we can't handle ourselves.

Or, in another, to believe that Christ is optional for salvation.

Or, in another, that we haven’t sinned badly enough to lose our place in the kingdom of God.

Or, in yet another, to think that God’s Word is whatever we decide it is.

Friends, that all these ways of thinking, some of them having currency in the Church today, represent the way of the world, not of God.

They're all part of the easy way: the way of using people, sometimes pushing them out of the way, other times playing to the crowd to win their votes, their confidence, their money, their respect, all the while losing our own eternal souls.

Jesus once said: “Enter by the narrow gate; for wide is the gate and broad is the way that leads to destruction, and there are many who go in by it. Because narrow is the gate and difficult is the way which leads to life, and there are few who find it.”

The way of humility and servanthood over arrogance, of submission to Jesus Christ and the holy Word of God, is the narrow way, the harder way to take in this world.

It’s the way that glorifies God for the simple privilege of being part of His family and never presuming to be better than anyone else...just forgiven, just made right with God by grace through faith in Christ. This is the way of life with God!

People who trust in Christ as their God and King know that no matter what situation into which they walk--banquets or ICUs, corporate negotiations or church meetings, worship services or firing squads, into death itself, they walk with Jesus! 

As they trust in Christ, they are already being exalted by God.

They have been called by name, marked with the cross of Christ, and sealed by the Holy Spirit for all eternity.

Their worlds have been turned upside down and they don’t need to follow the dying world.

They know that every earthly banquet hall will one day be destroyed, every worldly honor will be forgotten, every bank account and stock portfolio will go to someone else, all of it finally burned up in the final conflagration that will engulf this old, dying planet.

But salvation--the privilege, the honor, of being made a child of God by the precious blood of Jesus shed on the cross and by His resurrection from the dead--cannot and will not be taken from the one who sticks with Jesus.

“But he who endures to the end shall be saved,” Jesus says. Those who endure in faith in Jesus will have their lives turned right-side-up even in this world and they will stand with their Savior forever.

Keep following Jesus and no one else!

Stand under the authority of God’s Word and none other!

It will turn your world upside down and make you whole, now and forever. Amen

Sweet Baby Jesus: The Biggest Threat in the World

[This was shared during worship with the people of Saint Matthew Lutheran Church in Logan, Ohio, earlier today.]

Matthew 2:13-23
Christmas was just yesterday. Yet our Gospel lesson for this morning fast forwards us to events that happened two years and more after the birth of Jesus. In spite of the confusion that it might cause us though, I think it’s good for us to come to this lesson immediately following Christmas day. Through the centuries, our Christmas celebrations have been loaded down with what I can only describe as sentimental lies or pleasant sounding truth-blockers. Jesus, when acknowledged at all in most contemporary celebrations, is turned into a harmless little baby.

But Jesus was not and is not harmless. Herod knew that. The wise men did too. They knew what we must know: Christmas is D-Day!

Christmas is God storming the beaches of our resistant lives and wills.

In the name of the same freedom the serpent told Eve she would have if she disobeyed God, a freedom that ends in slavery to sin and death and futility, we willingly buckle under the authority of an evil, morally compromising world. At Christmas, God entered our world to upend that reality.

Christmas is God coming to overthrow the illegitimate occupier of power in our world, the devil himself.

Christmas is a just God come to overturn the tables of extortionists, to strip the selfish of their power, to put the violent and unjust in their places, and to bring life to those who, contrary to what the world tells us to do, repent for our sin and surrender our whole lives only to Him.

The bottom line is that the sweet baby Jesus is a threat to the standard operating procedures of the world, maybe even of our own standard operating procedures.

In the New Testament book of Acts, it was said of the first Christians that they had turned the world upside down. Filled with faith in Christ and with God's Holy Spirit, they were empowered by God to continue the mission of Jesus, each believer in Jesus an outpost of the kingdom that destroys all the powers of this world.

Jesus Himself was such a threat to the king of Judea, that, to protect Jesus, He and His earthly parents became refugees in Egypt.

Keep in mind the threat that Jesus represents to all the selfishness and injustice that exists in our world as we delve into today’s Gospel lesson. Please pull the Celebrate inserts from your bulletins and find it on page three.

Read along silently with me as I read the first few verses:

Now after they [that’s the wise men] had left, an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream and said, ‘Get up, take the child and his mother, and flee to Egypt, and remain there until I tell you; for Herod is about to search for the child, to destroy him.’ Then Joseph got up, took the child and his mother by night, and went to Egypt, and remained there until the death of Herod...

There are several things to notice here.

First: Herod, we’re told, wanted to “destroy” the child. The verb in the original Greek is part of the same verb family used much later in Matthew’s gospel to describe what the religious leaders in Jerusalem conspired to do to Jesus.

Herod loved power and personal comfort. Over his lifetime he had been willing to do anything to retain his power, including the killing of a wife whom he adored, but who, he was convinced, was plotting to take power from him. Herod was so selfish that, when he was dying, he ordered that the leading citizens of the town of Jericho be murdered to ensure that people would be crying during his funeral. The fact that the same word--destroy--was later used by Matthew to describe what the religious leaders—the priests and the levites—plotted to do to Jesus demonstrates what a threat Jesus can be not just to the rich or to those in government, but also to those who exercise religious power.

Jesus, in fact, is a threat to all who delude themselves with the idea that we human beings are self-sufficient and don’t need a Savior for a crutch. A woman in my former parish told me that she got angry with people who dismissed her faith in Christ as “a crutch.” Her anger wasn’t born of a belief in her ability to conquer any mountain in life. “Of course Christ is a crutch,” she said, “I need a crutch. That’s why I’m a Christian.” Jesus Christ, Who bore the weight of all our sin on the cross and then rose again to life, is the only crutch we can find that won’t buckle under the pressure of all our personal sins, our stresses, our difficulties, our daily challenges. I've often thought since that woman shared her insight with me that we Christians ought to wear lapel pins portraying a crutch in order to openly declare our total dependence on Christ!

Notice a second thing in these first verses of our lesson, something we see throughout the passage: Joseph did not hesitate. As soon as he was told to take the child and his mother to Egypt, he did so. He apparently took action on the very night he had his dream.

If I had been Joseph, I might have hesitated. I might even have simply ditched Jesus and Mary. After all, Joseph had no genetic connection to Jesus. Joseph could have turned Jesus and Mary over to the authorities and maybe lived a comfortable life in the employ of Herod and his descendants. He certainly could have spared himself the grief of being connected with a baby who was already a fugitive.

But Joseph opted to share the danger that the toddler Jesus faced. Joseph chose to obey God…immediately! Faith that doesn’t result in obedience to God, to the extent that you and I are able to understand God’s will and obey, isn’t faith; it’s just an idea. Wherever the call of the God we know in Jesus, sends us, that’s where we’re to go. That’s what faith does.

Back to the lesson:

When Herod saw that he had been tricked by the wise men [who had left Herod’s kingdom without telling Herod where they found the newborn King], he was infuriated, and he sent and killed all the children in and around Bethlehem who were two years old or under, according to the time that he had learned from the wise men…

Herod was taking no chances. He enjoyed his comforts and perks too much to allow a competitor for his throne to threaten him. This intolerance of other contenders for positions of privilege still goes on, and not just in the counsels of the national governments and big corporations. It even happens in churches.

I read once about a man who held a place of prominence in the church he attended, a large congregation in a small Texas town. People bowed and scraped to him and didn’t call him directly by his first name. He was Mister John. No decision was taken in that church without Mister John first giving his approval. A young pastor arrived, who, naïve enough to believe in the Bible's teaching that all believers are ministers, treated John with the same respect he showed all people, but not with deference. John wasn’t on the church council; so, the pastor didn’t know he was supposed to run things by John before bringing them before council. Mister John tried to correct the young pastor, but the pastor seemed insusceptible to any authority but God’s authority, as expressed in the Scriptures. No one knows how they got started for sure, but after awhile, rumors started being noised around the church and community: rumors about the pastor and his relationships with other people, rumors about church finances, rumors about the church’s decision making process, all false. Nonetheless, the pastor was forced from ministry altogether. Most people in the church had no idea what had happened. But Mister John did, which is why, to his credit, decades later, he found that pastor and his wife living in another town and apologized to the pastor. But much damage had been done, the same damage always done by those who are threatened by Jesus’ authority supplanting their own.

In the last verses of our lesson, Herod has died and Joseph, once again, is told in a dream to head out, this time away from Egypt and now, to Nazareth. To me, this may have been the hardest of all the orders Joseph received from God. By the time Joseph received it, he and his fledgling family had put roots down in Egypt. Anyone who has ever worked for a large corporation, been in the military, been in ministry, or grabbed a new opportunity in a different community, will know how hard it is for a young family to move to new places. The reasons for staying always seem to outweigh the reasons for leaving.

But Joseph took his family to Galilee immediately. The thought of keeping the life to which he’d grown accustomed seems never to have crossed his mind. For followers of Jesus, he status quo will never do; only Jesus will do!

And that brings us back to this. Christmas reminds us that Jesus and those who dare to follow Him are threats to this world. When you understand that Jesus is the way, and the truth, and the life, the only means of being reconciled to the only One Who can give us life, all other ways, all other supposed truths, and every other way of life must be abandoned. This is hard; but, God has revealed, it’s the only way to truly live.

When I was a senior in high school, I asked a girl out on a date. She said, “Yes,” but later backed out. I was baffled. (I mean, I was real charmer back then. Right, Ann?) During the rest of the school year, she would speak to me, but in little more than grunts. When our yearbooks were delivered, I emboldened myself to ask her to sign mine. “You really are a nice guy,” she wrote. “But you have to quit worrying about what people think of you.”  It took me years to figure out what she meant. And it took Jesus to begin to liberate me from the tyranny of other people’s opinions.

There is only one person Whose opinion of you and me matters, and that’s the God we know in Jesus Christ. He has expressed His opinion of us in the suffering, blood, and cross of Jesus.

This Christmas, let Jesus storm the beaches of your will and heart.

Let Him assault and destroy the sin in you through a life style of daily repentance and renewal in His Name.

Let Jesus be all that matters to you.

None of that is likely to win you a popularity contest. And letting Jesus be first in our lives won’t earn us places of comfort and ease.

But surrendering all to Jesus will allow us to be ushered into the presence of the One Who tells all who grow weary of the rat mazes of a sinful world, “Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest.”

May we hear that call from Christ above all the sinful din of the world and of our own souls, and so, always live in faithful obedience to Him. Amen

What Happens When Doors Are Unlocked

[This sermon was shared during worship with the people of Saint Matthew Lutheran Church in Logan, Ohio, earlier today.]

John 20:19-31
When we lived in rural northwestern Ohio, we never locked the doors of our church or our house. Having been accustomed to always locking up, we fell into this habit slowly. But I remember the moment when I realized that the habit had fully taken hold. We were getting ready to take a vacation and thought it would be a good idea to lock up. I searched high and low though and couldn’t find the house key. What’s more, it dawned on me that it had been months since I’d even seen a house key, let alone used it!

Why do we lock our houses, cars, garages? That’s simple enough: We’re afraid. Afraid of intruders harming us. Afraid of having our belongings taken. Locked doors are prudent precautions for us all to take.

But, let me ask you this? Are there other doors we lock down tight, doors that maybe we should keep open?

He’d been hurt. Two wives had left him for other men. “Never again!” he vowed. “Never again will I let anyone get in.” So he shut down. He woke up, ate his daily meals, did his job. He socialized. But there was always a wall.

Somehow though, a thought penetrated his fog of fear and loneliness. “Maybe,” he thought, “I need God.” He met with a local pastor. “What can I do?” he asked. The pastor said there was no magic bullet, but he did have a suggestion.

“Start attending worship regularly," the pastor said. "It doesn’t have to be this church. Just go somewhere and really make an effort to get it. Get your brain off your own bellybutoon. Ask God to help you with that.” The pastor also suggested a few places in the Bible the guy could read and they could later discuss. “Do those things,” he told the man, “and come back here in six weeks.”

There were no lightning bolts, or, as one of our old hymns puts it, “no sudden rending of the veil of clay.” But when the man came to the pastor’s office six weeks later, something was different. Some of the doors had been unlocked and opened. God stepped in. Later in that man’s progress, friends walked in. Later still, a new wife walked in. They’re still married. Happily.

God can do wonderful things when we unlock the doors to our lives, wills, and hearts. The risks and the dangers won’t go away. But what that man would tell you—and yes, he really does exist—is that the payoffs--peace with God and others--are worth the risks and dangers.

Today’s Gospel lesson takes us to the Sunday after the first Easter. Huddled behind closed doors, Jesus’ first disciples are a pathetic group. Here they are, recipients of the best news that the world has ever heard—the news that God the Son has died and risen so that all who turn from their sins and believe in Him will live with God forever. It was news that Jesus had spent a considerable period of time preparing them to share this news and His ministry. Yet, they’re not telling anybody about Jesus. They’re not serving anybody in His Name or under His authority. They’re afraid, our translation says, “of the Jews.” But this is a poor rendering. The term in the original Greek of John is Iouadaion and it refers to the people living in and around Jerusalem, Jews like them, many of whom were likely among those who had called for Jesus’ crucifixion just ten days before. This fearful group behind closed doors—the first church—isn’t a lot different from many churches today. Fear keeps them locked behind doors of all kinds.

Bill was the part-time pastor of a multi-point parish, meaning that he did worship and provided some leadership in several small congregations.* This was in rural Suwaunee, Georgia.

“My first visit to one of the churches,” Bill writes, “I found a large chain and padlock on the front door, put there, I was told, by the local Sheriff. ‘The Sheriff, why?’ I asked. ‘Well, things got out of hand at the [council] meeting last month, folks started ripping up carpet, dragging out the pews they had given in memory of their mothers. It got bad. The Sheriff come out here and put that there lock on the door until our new preacher could come and settle things down.’”

That was pretty much the way things went for the rest of Bill’s time at that church. He writes, “The arguments, the pettiness, the fights in the parking lot after the [council] meeting were more than I could take. It was tough and I was glad to be leaving them behind. ‘You call yourself a church!’ I muttered as my tires kicked gravel up in the parking lot on my last Sunday among them.” Here was a church that, truth be told, had padlocked God and neighbor out of its life.

Our Gospel lesson shows us that when the first Christians, the first members of the first Church locked themselves behind closed doors on that first Sunday after the first Easter, something happened. Jesus showed up. “Peace I give to you,” He told them. “As the Father has sent Me, so I send you.” And a week later, Jesus showed up again, telling a disbelieving Thomas, “Look at My wounds, Thomas. It’s Me. Sin, death, and the devil couldn’t overcome Me and if you stick with Me, they can’t overcome you either.” When Thomas saw and heard Jesus, he issued the most emphatic confession of Jesus you’ll find in the Bible. “My Lord and my God,” he said of Jesus. “It’s good you believe in Me,” Jesus replied, “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet come to believe.”

In fact, as the man who’d been left by two different wives came to know, even those of us who have never seen the risen Jesus in bodily form can, through the eyes of faith, see Him. And when we do, it will change our lives!

“One day,” Pastor William Self writes, “a man came into my office and asked if I could spend some time with him.” The man showed up and “said he was losing his faith and wanted to leave the church because he was racked with doubts.” Pastor Self told him that he needed to go on a hospital visit and asked this modern day doubting Thomas to go with him. “We drove across town to a large hospital,” Self writes. “We walked through the corridors and found the room of the patient whom I was [visiting]…The patient was a young doctor in his late 30s who was dying…As we entered the room, we noticed all the medical equipment hooked up to his body, but he was very conscious of our presence and wanted to talk. We talked for a moment about life and death. I read Scripture, and we prayed together. My doubting friend was there with me and stood at the foot of the bed as I stood at the patient's side. The entire process in the room took about 15-20 minutes. There were tears in the eyes of the patient in the bed as we turned to leave. We went down the hall to the elevator and then out to the parking deck before either one of us said another word. Finally, on the way back to the church my doubting Thomas turned and said, ‘I see things entirely differently now. Eternity has broken into my life, and I want to start all over with Christ.’"

When we dare to unlock the doors of our lives, the risen Jesus can come in, and change us from fearful people worried about today and tomorrow--maybe yesterday--into confident believers who, like Thomas and the members of the early Church, go into the world with the love of Christ and the message of salvation in His Name.

That’s what happened in that once-padlocked church in Suwaunee, Georgia. A few years after Bill left the church, he met the twenty three year old pastor who was, by that time, serving there. Bill felt sorry for him. But the young pastor began talking about what a remarkable church it was. It was supporting about a dozen poor families in its county, ran a free day care center, and was a place where interracial families, snubbed elsewhere, found a welcoming home. What happened? “I tell you what I think happened,” writes Bill, now a bishop in the United Methodist Church. “I think that…someone greater than I knocked the lock off that door, kicked it open and offered them peace, the Holy Spirit, mission and forgiveness. And now” they can rightly be called a church.

Folks: I believe that the risen Jesus has plans for Saint Matthew Lutheran Church. In you, I see a people willing to open your lives to Jesus, to confess Him as your Lord and God not just with your mouths, but with your lives.

In a few weeks, on the Friday evening and Saturday morning before Pentecost, I want to invite you to participate in a prayer vigil here in Saint Matthew’s sanctuary. From 6:00 on Friday night until 7:00 on Saturday morning, I’ll ask individuals or families to be here for half-hour stints. Your goal?

• To pray for this wonderful congregation and our ministry to the community and the world.
• To pray that the Risen Lord, Who breathed onto that frightened band of disciples in a locked room in Jerusalem, will breathe on us, giving us renewed faith and boldness in sharing His love and inviting others to follow Christ with us here in Logan and Hocking County.
• To pray that we will unlock the doors of our lives and let Jesus Christ into every part of our lives.

I plan on being here to pray that night, too. I’ll be around for. And there will be materials here to help you pray. We’ll have sign-up sheets in the fellowship hall next Sunday. I hope that every half-hour block will be filled with the names of at least two people who will pray. If you can’t drive at night, I ask you to indicate when you’ll pray for Saint Matthew at home during the vigil.

The risen Jesus came to the frightened disciples, gave them His peace, and that band of people then turned the world upside down in the Name of Jesus Christ. Jesus is still risen and still in business. He still has things He wants to do through you and me and through Saint Matthew. When we dare to unlock our wills, minds, and hearts to the risen Jesus, He will enter in. He will give us His peace and He will use us to do wonderful things in His Name!

*"Bill" is William Willimon, a fantastic preacher and able theologian, who told this story about his days as a student pastor here.