Who is a Saint?

[Below are the live stream videos of today's worship services with the people and friends of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio. Also, you can find the text for today's message. Have a good week. God bless you!]





1 John 3:1-3

Friends in Christ, God’s Word in today’s second lesson tells us, “All who have this hope in him purify themselves, just as he is pure.” (1 John 3:3)

The “this hope” to which John refers here is that when Christ appears, that is, when He returns at the end of this old creation’s story, “we [who put our hope and trust in Christ] shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is.” (1 John 3:2)

What a promise!

We, who have given things in this world higher priority than we have given to God…

We, who have used God’s name to prop up our petty deceptions…

We, who have chosen to watch a mindless movie or attend a sporting event over worshiping God or listening to His Word…

We who have dishonored our parents or others in authority, who have swiped little things and coveted big things, who have committed adultery in mind or act, who have lied or misconstrued the actions of others to feel superior…we sinners, who are also saints, live in the hope that whenever Jesus returns to this universe and calls us from death, WE will be just like Jesus because, unlike the rest of the world, we will see Him as He is. We will see Him for Who He is, truly God and truly human, “the way and the truth and the life.” (John 14:6)

All of this begs the question: Who is a saint?

Saints are sinners who have been made clean–made pure, righteous, worthy for life with God–by God. God does this through Jesus’ death on the cross for sinners and through the faith in Jesus the Holy Spirit gives to sinners through God’s Word, whether preached, taught, read, or given to us in Holy Baptism or Holy Communion.

It’s a good thing because the Bible reminds us that unless we are made pure through faith in Jesus, we’re in eternal trouble, bound for eternal condemnation. “Do you not know that wrongdoers will not inherit the kingdom of God?” Paul asks in 1 Corinthians 6:9-10. “Do not be deceived: Neither the sexually immoral nor idolaters nor adulterers nor men who have sex with men nor thieves nor the greedy nor drunkards nor slanderers nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God.”

These words of Paul judge us all in some way. There’s no getting around the Bible’s verdict about you and me: “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God…” (Romans 3:23)

But only sinners can be saints.

Throughout his letters in the New Testament, the apostle Paul addresses the churches to which he writes as “saints” or “children of God.”

He calls those in the Roman church he doesn’t know “holy people.” (Romans 1:7)

He calls the church in Corinth whose members include those guilty of incest, adultery, and idolatry, among other things, and who we will in subsequent verses, forcefully call to repentance for their sins, “those sanctified in Christ Jesus and called to be his holy people.” (1 Corinthians 1:2)

Repeatedly, Paul calls the sinners in the churches he writes, “saints.”

Revelation 7:14 assures us that saints are sinners who “have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb.” (Revelation 7:14)

Saints are those who believe that, in spite of their sins, when Jesus, “the the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world” died on the cross, the world for which He died includes you and me! (John 1:29)

Jesus died for you, friends.

He died to make you righteous and holy, His saint.

The Bible assures us, “If you declare with your mouth, ‘Jesus is Lord,’ and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.” (Romans 10:9) That’s true even when we don’t feel very saintly, even when our faith is weak, maybe as small as a mustard seed!

Do you find this hard to accept? That God, through Christ, declares you, a sinner, also one of His saints who will live with Him forever?

I told the new members class yesterday that, on occasion through the years, I’ve had people tell me, “I’m too much of a sinner for God to love me or save me from sin and death.” I want to jump out of my chair and ask them, “Who do you think you are? You’re underestimating the power of God to destroy the power of sin and death over your puny life and your sins!”

I have to also say today, what I didn’t mention yesterday, that I’ve had others tell me, “You know, pastor, I’ve lived a pretty good life. I think I’ll be in heaven.” I want to jump out of my skin when I hear this and scream, “Who do you think you are? Do you think your ‘pretty good life’ adds up to the perfect righteousness needed to have a life with God?”

The Bible tells us that “we have been justified [that is, made righteous, made saints] through faith, [and so] we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ…” (Romans 5:1)

Friends, if by the power of God’s Word, you believe in Jesus as your God and your Savior, you are a saint and this day is for you. As much as it is to remember the saints who have passed from this world into the presence of Jesus.

It’s a day to celebrate what God has done for all the saints in making us His own through Christ and filling us with the hope that not only will we one day see Jesus face to face, but also by the miracle of God’s grace, we will be just like our Savior: alive, righteous, and eternally new. Amen

You Might Be a Saint...Really

[This is the message that was shared during both worship services yesterday, All Saints' Sunday, at Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio.]

Revelation 7:9-17
On this All Saints’ Sunday, a modified rerun, from three years ago. But, since God inspired the message in the first place, I’m hopeful that it will still speak to the primary question of this day: What is a saint?

To find out, we’ll turn to today’s first lesson, Revelation 7:9-17. Revelation is based on a series of visions given to the apostle John about sixty years after Jesus’ resurrection.

Beginning at chapter 6, John sees Jesus, the second Person of the one God, open the first six of seven seals.

With the opening of each seal, John sees this old creation moving closer to its inevitable end. He also sees glimmers of the new creation that the risen and ascended Jesus will fully usher in at His second coming, when He returns to this world to claim His kingdom from our enemies: sin, death, and the devil.

Jesus’ return will bring celebration and relief to all who have turned from sin and who have believed in Christ. But, as the last verse of Revelation 6 points out, the return of Jesus won’t be universally welcomed, any more than He or His people are universally welcomed today.

Those who have rejected Christ, will ask the caves, mountains, and rocks for help. “‘Fall on us,’ they will beg, ‘and hide us from the face of him who sits on the throne and from the wrath of the Lamb [the Lamb being Jesus]!’ For the great day of their wrath has come, and who can withstand it?” (Revelation 6:16)

Then, just before the opening of the seventh and final seal, John is allowed to see two scenes which he records in Revelation, chapter 7.

The first scene comes in Revelation 7:1-8, right before today’s lesson. The location of this scene is this world. God assigns four angels to hold back the final destruction of the old creation. “Don’t damage the earth,” God tells the angels, “until we’ve marked all of the servants of God with a seal on their foreheads” (Revelation 7:3) (This is the seal of the Holy Spirit which every baptized person receives on the day they’re made new by water and the Spirit.)

Then the numbers of those sealed for salvation are counted out. The total comes to 144,000. Now, the Bible is not saying that just 144,000 people out of all human history will be part of God’s eternal kingdom! The number 144 is derived from multiplying the 12 tribes of Israel times the 12 apostles Jesus chose to lead the post-resurrection church. For John, it would have been a number implying perfection and completeness. And, tacking three zeroes onto the back of 144, making it 144,000, would be a bit like one of us talking about “a gazillion” people showing up at yesterday's women's retreat or for the Black Friday sales at Macy’s or Target.

Then comes Revelation 7:9, where John writes, “After this I looked, and there before me was a great multitude that no one could count…” This is no little crowd of 144,000! It’s a multitude! It’s a crowds so big that “no one could count” it!

I find this incredibly moving because on a starlit night 4000 years ago, an elderly man to whom God had promised the impossible struggled to believe that God could overcome decay and death to give him a son and a future to his descendants. The man’s name at the time was Abram. (Later to be changed by God to Abraham, a name that means “father of nations.”) To Abram, the promise seemed too good to be true. So, God reassured Abram in Genesis 15:5: “[God took Abram] outside and said, ‘Look up at the sky and count the stars—if indeed you can count them.’ Then he said to him, ‘So shall your offspring be.’” “I will give you a son, Abram,” God was saying. “And not only that, your descendants will dwarf the numbers of stars in the sky."

The multitude from every nation that John is shown in His vision of heaven after the life of this old world has come to an end are the descendants of Abram, the very descendants God had promised on that starry night so long ago.

They were, in the words of John in his gospel: “children born not of natural descent, nor of human decision or a husband’s will, but born of God” (John 1:13).

This multitude comes to be numbered among Abraham’s descendants not by genetics, but by faith in the God Who ultimately revealed Himself to Jews and Gentiles in the person of Jesus Christ.

Jesus says in John 14:9: “Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father.” The Father, God the Father, the same one Who made Abraham and Sarah the ancestors of nations, not because their bodies were capable of making children, but because God’s Holy Spirit, by the grace of God, can make new life in all who turn from sin and entrust themselves to Jesus.

Jesus, God the Son, is the God Who gave Abraham that promise four millennia ago.

And He is the God Who promises that all who turn from sin and believes in Him become descendants of Abraham. They are saints. We are the saints!

Reading about the vision that the risen Jesus gave to John shows us that God has never changed. In God, there is, James 1:17 tells us, “no variation or shadow due to change.”

God has always wanted to rescue His fallen, dead children from sin and death and to give them life.

And His plan has always been the same: to give eternal life in His new creation to all who will trust, not in their own achievements, smarts, money, shrewdness, health, or anything else, but who trust only in Him.

Saints are those who trust God to give them the free gifts that come to all who follow Jesus: gifts like forgiveness of sin, eternal life, and the power to live each day for His purposes.

But if sainthood is a free gift from God, we must not think for a moment that sainthood is easy.

We see this from just four words in our lesson from Revelation today. The first two of those words appear at the beginning of verse 9: “After this.” After what, exactly? John saw the multitude of saints after an event that’s mentioned in verse 14. That’s where you can read two more important words: “great tribulation.”

Now, despite the propaganda the comes from those who misconstrue Revelation, "the great tribulation" does not refer to some endtime cataclysm. The great tribulation s the common experience through which every believer in Jesus goes in this life.

Life in this world is the great tribulation. We live in a world filled with beauty and wonder. But with its beauty and wonder marred by human sin, death, and even the suffering of the saints, this world, at its best, can still only give us nothing more than a glimmer of the beauty and wonder—the perfection—that await all who persevere in following Jesus as their only God and King to the end.

After completing life in this world, the saints who have kept on trusting Jesus, will be met by the Savior, Who will make them clean forever, Who will dry their tears, Who will feed their hunger and quench their thirst for the righteous life that only He can give, and He will welcome them into the new creation for which each of us were made.

For now, we live in an in-between time in which, as Paul writes Romans 8, both we and the whole of creation wait with eager longing for Christ to reveal Himself and His children. But the truth is that life in this world is hard. Even in the best of times, life can be a struggle.

And sometimes, our struggles are made even harder because we believe in Jesus Christ. How much easier the lives of Christians would be if we just went along with the world instead of rooting ourselves in the truth and grace of God revealed in His Word. Of course, along with that ease would come death, because life is only found in Christ!

The devil tests, tempts, and tries the saints. And every believer in Christ will, eventually, bear the scars—physical, emotional, or relational—that come to those who put following Jesus first in their lives. Mark it well: Follow Christ and He will most certainly thwart you in some of your most heartfelt desires because He’s less interested in giving you momentary happiness than He is in fitting and forging you and your character for eternal life with Him.

The ancient saints living in exile, the victims of injustice, would cry out to God, “How long, O Lord?”

Their pain was echoed for me in the words of a saint and friend battling cancer who told me, “I just can’t seem to catch a break.”

In this life, we’ve all been there...or will be. Our own personal “great ordeals” may include persecution, chronic or fatal illness, disagreements over priorities with those we love or with whom we work, or the conflicts that happen within us when a sin tantalizes us and we know that we must choose God’s way and not our own.

What is a saint?

Saints are people who trust their whole lives to Jesus. Sometimes haltingly. Always imperfectly. At times, speaking for myself anyway, resentfully. Always buttressed by daily repentance and renewal.

But no matter how saints’ hearts may wander, they always know to come back to Christ.

They know to Whom they belong and they know where they’re headed.

They know that this life is not perfect.

But they have a purpose in this life: To live for and to let the whole world know about the Lamb Jesus, Who will, after the last page has been closed in the last chapter of this world's story, welcome all who have trusted in Him to His new creation.

In the meantime, dear saints of God, trust in Jesus. Know His love for you even in the midst of life’s greatest tribulations and know for a fact that, if you remain steadfast in following Jesus, like saints before us, you will be in Jesus' everlasting kingdom.

If we remain faithful to Christ, you and I will one day join our fellow saints, along with God’s messengers, the angels, in singing and savoring the glories of our loving God and all who have persistently, perseveringly, enduringly followed their Savior in this world will hear the Lord say to us in the next world, “Come, you who are blessed by my Father; take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world.” (Matthew 25:34) Amen!

[I'm the pastor of Living Water Lutheran Church.]

All Saints Sunday Welcome

This the welcome worshipers at tomorrow's services at Living Water Lutheran in Springboro, Ohio will read in their bulletins.

We’re glad that you’re worshiping with us today at Living Water Lutheran Church. We welcome you in the Name of the God we know in Jesus Christ!

Today is All Saints’ Sunday, a “lesser festival” of the Church Year. Originally, All Saints’ Day, November 1, was a time to remember the witness of Christians who were killed for their faith in Jesus. Now, we use All Saints’ Sunday to remember with thankfulness the witness of all Christians who have passed from this life to eternity with God.

From the standpoint of the Bible, a “saint” is a forgiven sinner. Forgiveness comes to all who dare to “repent” (turn from sin, turn to God) and trust Christ to be the only means through Whom God is known and brings forgiveness and eternal life to us (John 14:6).

Through Christ, God confers what the Bible calls “righteousness,” or rightness with God, on believers in Christ. Christians confess that we are saints not by what we do, but by God’s grace (His charity) given to us in Christ, while, remaining, in this world, sinners by birth and impulse.

We rejoice in knowing that freedom from sin and death come from Jesus Christ. That’s why Lutheran Christians believe in daily repentance and renewal, daily submitting ourselves for examination, correction, and forgiveness from God.

The saints we remember on today were not perfect. No saint is. But they turned to Christ for life. We thank God that they pointed us to Christ.

November 1 is All Saints' Day

So, what is a saint?

We'll be celebrating All Saints' Sunday tomorrow.

Two Special Memorials

On November 6, All Saints' Sunday, we'll be dedicating two memorials in honor of two special Saint Matthew members.

One is an oak tree and butterfly bushes, all planted this past week, in honor of Sarah. Sarah was a twenty year old member of the congregation, who died in August after a valiant seven-and-a-half year battle with cancer. Sarah loved butterflies or more accurately, butterflies loved her. The oak tree, projected to live 200 years, is, along with the bushes, a fitting memorial to one who taught us so much about trustingly living for Jesus Christ. (For more about Sarah, see here.)

On the same day, we'll dedicate a brand new sound system at Saint Matthew in memory of Luke, a lifelong member of the congregation who died two years ago at age 87. Active until the end of his life, Luke operated the old sound system every Sunday and for every other service--when not, briefly, away on vacation--for many years. In fact, he commented shortly before he passed that he hadn't missed providing service for a funeral in the Saint Matthew sanctuary in 25 years! Operating the sound system is no small matter at Saint Matthew because it connects the congregation with a radio audience that listens to our Sunday worship every week. Saint Matthew has been on the radio continuously since 1962. Luke did a lot of other unheralded things for the congregation. He would love this new sound system, I think! (For more about Luke, see here.)

Below the new mixer board cabinet is pictured.

[Click on the images to enlarge.]

How Emptiness Can Be Blessedness (All Saints Sunday)

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

Luke 6:20-31
He was a sophomore second-string quarterback at Boston College.* The son of a former NFL player, he had all sorts of talent. But, maybe because up to that point in his life everything had come so easily to him, he was, by most accounts, a so-so college player. Years later, he recalled, “...also...I didn’t work as hard as I needed because I think that gave me an out if I wasn’t successful...”

Then, during his second year of college, he went on a mission trip to Jamaica with a priest and sixteen classmates. First stop was a place called Riverton City, “a shanty-town built on a garbage dump near Jamaica’s capital city of Kingston...” There, the young quarterback saw poverty as he’d never seen it before. For several days, “he worked in a home for elderly lepers.” **

An article in the magazine, Sports Spectrum says, “He cleaned, scraped, then painted a bathroom in the home. In the evenings after a day’s work, he’d join the lepers for song and worship. It was then that [he] met George McVee, [a] man disfigured by leprosy. That first evening, [the college athlete] was the last to arrive and only one chair remained. It was next to McVee. “’I’m ashamed to say this, but it was hard to look at him,’” he remembered years later. “’I didn’t really want to sit next to him. His leprosy was so much worse than everyone else’s. They said it wasn’t contagious, but I was a kid. I didn’t know.'"

Once the young man was seated, McVee, who had lost his forearms, held a harmonica to his mouth with his remaining stumps. He played songs of praise to God. All around the room, accompanied by McVee’s harmonica, voices emanating from aged bodies being destroyed by leprosy joined together to worship God. “In between songs, McVee...[recited] long passages of Scripture and poems he had composed. One of his poems he called, ‘My Cup Runneth Over.’”

In his affliction and desperate poverty, McVee still regarded himself as a blessed man, all because of the God we know in Jesus Christ. The athlete from Boston College remembers: “’I’m saying to myself these people should be angry. What they were born into--poverty, poor health. What do they have to be happy about?...But in their eyes, it was the exact opposite. Their attitude was what my attitude should have been like.”

The young man saw a lot of other things on that trip to Jamaica. And the thing that struck him most was how faithful and how joyful the people he encountered in Jamaica were.

Shortly after his return to the States, the quarterback was stricken with Hepatitis A, which he probably contracted while in Jamaica. In the hospital for six days, he went from 215 to 185 pounds. As “he lay in the hospital, [jaundiced], waiting for his release” he wondered “about his future in football. ‘But I never really thought, “Why me?”’” he says. “’I thought, “This is nothing compared to what the lepers in Jamaica deal with.” And they had so much joy in their hearts because of the Lord, despite their circumstances.’”

It was then that sophomore Matt Hasselbeck, who would go on to play in Super Bowl 40 in 2006, “made a promise to God.” He first apologized to God for not being all that he could be and then told the Lord that in all departments of his life, he would always try his hardest. Second string, practice squad, also ran, whatever, he would always do his best.

Hasselbeck says that it was not only the moment that changed him as an athlete, but also the moment that changed him as a human being.

And it all happened because of the faith and joy he saw in people suffering from the worst poverty and disease, people the world would say had nothing. But Hasselbeck knew that the world was wrong: George McVee and the others he met had Jesus Christ!

Today’s Gospel lesson begins a section in Luke’s Gospel in which Jesus delivers what’s usually referred to as The Sermon on the Plain. It has a lot in common with the more famous Sermon on the Mount, found in the Gospel of Matthew. You’d expect to find similarities to appear in the two sermons; after all, Jesus was the preacher in both cases.

But I’ve sometimes wondered, why is the sermon in Matthew more quoted than the one in Luke? Both are equally beautiful and important. The sermon in Luke's gospel has the added asset of being the shorter and, in some ways, more elegant of the two.

But I think I know why the sermon in Matthew is quoted more often. You see, in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus says, “Blessed are the poor in spirit.” In our lesson today, Jesus says, “Blessed are the poor.”

In today's lesson, Jesus is saying: Blessed are...

• the George McVees, 
• the elderly lepers in Jamaica, 
• the homeless who sleep in Worthington Park,  just one block from this church building,
• the destitute in Haiti, 
• the orphans in Iraq and Afghanistan, 
• the military veterans of America forced to live on the street. 

This is a jarring thought, this notion that those who have nothing of what the world values most are blessed by God.

We’d much rather quote Jesus’ words from Matthew and speak of ourselves as being poor in spirit. To be poor in spirit sounds less specific, like a description of people who are, well, just like us...you know, ordinary.

But when Jesus says, “Blessed are the poor,…blessed are the hungry….blessed are you who weep now,” it may make us feel left out. While all of us in this sanctuary have experienced or are experiencing adversities in life, few of us have known the yawning emptiness and grief that Matt Hasselback saw in George McVee and the lepers in Jamaica.

In fact, George McVee seems to be exactly the sort of person Jesus is describing in the first verses of today’s Gospel lesson.

But where exactly is the blessedness of poverty or disfiguring disease, in poverty or hunger or grief?

Matt Hasselbeck saw how even those experiencing the worst that life brings can be God’s blessed ones.

The people he met on that college mission trip were stripped of things that we all count as valuable, things like money, property, position, health.

But precisely because they lacked such things, these people turned to Jesus Christ and found...

• a God Who loved them, 
• a Friend Who would stand by them no matter what, 
• a Lord Who would give them a peace that passes all understanding, 
• a life that will never end. 

All people should be so poor, so destitute, so empty!

Jesus, of course, isn’t saying that only the poor, hungry, and grieving can have a relationship with Him.

Nor is he saying that folks like these aren’t sinners.

Salvation is still a matter of sinful human beings, in response to all that God has done for us in Jesus Christ, turning from our sin and trusting our whole lives to Jesus Christ.

That’s true whatever our circumstances in life.

But it also is true to say, that the poor, hungry, and grieving, though, have a much easier time knowing how much they need God!

When you’re cruising along in life with a full belly, cash in your bank account, and no troubles on the horizon, it’s easy to forget about God, easy to think you don’t need God. Life’s tragedies and difficulties can act as, in a wonderful phrase coined by C.S. Lewis, God’s trombones. It's hard to ignore trombones! And when adversities blare at us, they wake us up, showing us how much we need God after all.

So, where does that leave you and me, people who, by the mysteries of life and history find ourselves not living in places like Jamaica, Haiti, Sudan, Indonesia, Iraq, or the inner city of Columbus, people whose lives, though not untouched by difficulty, are still likelier easier than most of the people who have ever lived or who are living now?

We find the answer to that question in a verse that comes just before our Gospel lesson, one that sets the stage for it. It’s Luke 6:17, which you’ll find in the pew Bibles on page 592. This passage comes just after Jesus calls the twelve apostles, an event that happens up on a mountaintop after Jesus prays. It says:

And He came down with them and stood on a level place with a crowd of His disciples and a great multitude of people from all Judea and Jerusalem, and from the seacoast of Tyre and Sidon, who came to hear Him and be healed of their diseases...***

Jesus could have stayed on the mountaintop, could have kept spending time with His Father in prayer. But He came to a level place, the place where all of us—rich and poor, hungry and full, happy and sad—live.

This same Jesus tells us today that those who are truly blessed—those who are His saints—are the ones who, filled with the certainty of a grace that loves us just as we are and is committed to helping us to become all that God made us to be, live in those same level places.

Saints aren’t exalted beings whose lives are spent in a series of mountaintop experiences.

Saints are ordinary sinners, just like us, who, through Jesus, have been filled with the power to live in life’s ordinary places and, when a need is made known to them, extend Christ’s hand of love to others.

Ann, our then two year old son Philip, and I were living in the almost-one bedroom cinder block apartments the seminary had originally built for single students, but which were then being used as housing for seminarians with a spouse and a child. We didn’t have two pennies to rub together. As the saying goes, "We had nothing and thought we were going to keep it."

Ann commuted by bus to a job that paid close to minimum wage at the downtown Columbus Lazarus store. One day, she accidentally left her purse on the bus. It contained a couple of credit cards, a few dollars in cash, and her driver’s license. We put a stop on the credit cards and Ann planned on calling the BMV the next day to start the process of getting a new license.

But then our phone rang. It was a woman who had found Ann’s purse. We later met her. She was neat in appearance, but elderly and, from the look of things, could have used what little cash was in the purse herself. She was an African-American woman who worked as a cleaning lady and was raising her great-grandson.

As she handed the purse over to Ann, we thanked her profusely. She smiled and said, “I just loves the Lord.”

Folks, that is a saint.

No airs.

No self congratulation.

Just a person who lived Jesus’ love.

A saint isn’t a person grimly trying to live up to the golden rule Jesus cites at the end of our lesson—“Do to others as you would have them do to you.”

They’re people so grateful to the God Who, in Christ, has come down to them, so filled with thankfulness for the undeserved blessings of God, that that the love commanded by the golden rule spills out of them every day…just because the Lord loves them and they loves the Lord.

May we ever be so thankful!

*The true story, extensively quoted, appeared in an issue of Sports Spectrum magazine three years ago.


**Leprosy, Hansen’s Disease, “can eventually cause a variety of skin problems, loss of feeling, and paralysis of the hands and feet.”


***This comes from the New King James Version translation.

"It's no trick to make a lot of money..."

I thought of this line from Citizen Kane while studying the Gospel lesson for this coming Sunday, Luke 6:20-31. We celebrate All Saints Sunday this week, by the way.



Here is Luke 6:20-31:

20 Then [Jesus] looked up at his disciples and said: “Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God. 21“Blessed are you who are hungry now, for you will be filled. “Blessed are you who weep now, for you will laugh. 22“Blessed are you when people hate you, and when they exclude you, revile you, and defame you on account of the Son of Man. 23Rejoice in that day and leap for joy, for surely your reward is great in heaven; for that is what their ancestors did to the prophets. 24“But woe to you who are rich, for you have received your consolation. 25“Woe to you who are full now, for you will be hungry. “Woe to you who are laughing now, for you will mourn and weep. 26“Woe to you when all speak well of you, for that is what their ancestors did to the false prophets.


27“But I say to you that listen, Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, 28bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you. 29If anyone strikes you on the cheek, offer the other also; and from anyone who takes away your coat do not withhold even your shirt. 30Give to everyone who begs from you; and if anyone takes away your goods, do not ask for them again. 31Do to others as you would have them do to you.

You Are Saints...Be Saints

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

Matthew 5:1-12
Bill Hybels, pastor of the massive Willow Creek Community Church in the Chicago area, tells about the final inspection of the congregation’s new campus, which he and a staff person made with the head of the construction company that built it.

Before the meeting, the staffer had secured a huge skylight, one like those used at fairs and festivals. The meeting was taking place before sunrise and the staffer intended to circle the perimeter of the entire enormous facility with that light, pointing it toward the building so that on the inside, the seals around every window, door, and seam could be confirmed to be tight. If any light shone through, he reasoned, patchwork would have to be done.

But when the contractor arrived and learned what the staffer planned, he pointed out that their contract stipulated that re-sealing would have to be done only if “natural light” shone through the structure's seams. “No building could stand up to the light you want to use,” the contractor explained. The contractor knew that in light like that, any building would be shown to be imperfect.

As I begin this morning, I have to make a confession to all of you: The closer I get to Jesus Christ, the more imperfect I can see myself to be. That’s especially true today on this All Saints Sunday, considering our Gospel lesson. It contains Matthew the Evangelist’s rendering of Jesus’ “Sermon on the Mount.”

Martin Luther looked at these words of Jesus and said that they exemplified the perfect law of God which none of us can keep. Jesus laid them out, Luther said, to hold us up to the brilliant light of God’s holy perfection and show us our many imperfections and our desperate need of grace, God’s charitable forgiveness and acceptance. It will be no surprise to any of you who know how much I respect and appreciate Luther to learn that I think Luther is right.

But I also think that Jesus meant to do much more than hold us up to His light and drive us to His grace here.

I think that Jesus means to give us not just laws, but incredible comfort.

To see what I mean, we need to hold the Beatitudes, the opening salvo of Jesus’ sermon, up to some light this morning.

The first verse sets the stage for what follows. Matthew tells us: “When Jesus saw the crowds, he went up the mountain; and after he sat down, his disciples came to him…”

We usually picture the Sermon on the Mount as an oration that Jesus delivered to throngs of people. I’m not so sure about that. To me, nowadays anyway, it appears that Jesus called out to the crowds to follow and some did follow. Those who did are called disciples, the first time this word is used in the Gospel of Matthew, incidentally. The word, disciple, mathetes, in the original Greek of the New Testament, means student or follower.

To me, that creates a comforting image. Even the most saintly follower of Jesus is just learning what it means to be a child of God.

I once heard about a lecture given by a Bible scholar and theologian who, at that point, was deep into his nineties. By all accounts, he’d been a loving and enthusiastic follower of Christ his whole life. He’d spent decades studying the Bible. After his lecture, someone asked him a question. I love his answer: “I have no idea.”

The Lord Who calls us to listen to Him again this morning is the God of the entire universe, infinitely wiser, more intelligent, and more powerful than any of us. This God may have become one of us, dying and rising for us. But if any of us thinks that, short of our own deaths and resurrections, we will ever be more than learners, students, disciples, of the Christ way of living, we’re fooling ourselves.

For me, whenever I feel confused or tormented by the mysteries of life—why suffering comes to the undeserving, why we must age and die, why some seem incapable of making healthy choices for their living, it’s enough to remember that the God Who enters our life through Jesus Christ, calls me to follow Him.

Jesus calls Mark Daniels, who grew up on the Hilltop in Columbus, Ohio, to follow Him. I didn’t have to do anything to earn His attention or His love. He loves me and all I have to do is follow when He calls!

If any of this sounds familiar to those of you who have taken Catechism class within the past seventy-five years or so, it should. About 1500 years before the birth of Jesus, on a mountain, God gave the Ten Commandments for Moses to share with God’s people. But, as you know, the commandments didn’t start out with rules. They began with God’s commitment to His people and His call to the people to follow. It begins with relationship: “I am the Lord your God...” God says.

After calling people to be disciples, displaying a similar love and commitment to those who follow Him, Jesus doesn’t immediately list laws. Instead, Jesus describes two different kinds of disciples.

The first kind are those who are empty in different ways: the poor in spirit (people who, rich or poor, find no hope in the rewards offered by this world), those who mourn (by which Jesus means all who are saddened by any sort of loss), and the meek (by which Jesus means anyone who’s been shafted in any way). Jesus says of these people that they hunger and thirst to be filled with something He calls righteousness. Righteousness is rightness with God, with neighbor, with self. We all hunger and thirst for this kind of rightness, no matter how close we are to God. Jesus says that one day, God’s kingdom will come and God’s will will be done in our lives.

The second description provided by Jesus is of those God uses to fill the emptiness of others. The merciful, Jesus says, will receive mercy. Those who are “pure in heart” (which means a God-filled point of view) will see God. Those who seek to reconcile God to people and people to people, the peacemakers, will be designated children of God. Those who take it in the neck for trying to fill up an empty world with the love and grace of God will be citizens of God’s kingdom.

In the last two verses of today’s Gospel lesson, the perspective changes. Jesus shifts away from describing what disciples to whom God’s kingdom comes look like. Now, as you teachers of grammar see, Jesus speaks to those He calls away from the world’s ordinary ways of doing things. He speaks to His disciples. That’s you and me. Jesus says: “Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven…”

On this All Saints Sunday, it’s good to be reminded of what a saint is. A saint, you know, is just a disciple, a forgiven sinner learning how to follow Jesus.

One of Saint Matthew’s older saints died this past week. Like all the saints, Gloria Arnold was imperfect. But she was saved by the grace of God, given to us in Jesus Christ. During the one year and twenty-six visits through which I got to know Gloria, I saw her exemplify both kinds of discipleship that Jesus describes today.

Long illness had weakened her. In the past year, I only ever saw her in a chair and a bed in a single room, Room 308 of the Skilled Nursing Unit of Hocking Valley Community Hospital. Gloria hungered and thirsted for the rightness that we all lack while we live here. She craved Holy Communion. And, as Pastor Brian, with whom I did Gloria’s funeral on Friday pointed out, she never let a pastor leave her room without asking for prayer.

But in Gloria I also saw the second sort of discipleship Jesus describes today. Even sick and dying, she was full with something to give. Several days before she died, Gloria was still conscious, aware of what was going on. She told me that, although it had been a difficult concession to make, she was finally ready to go. She underscored that because she believed in Jesus, she wasn’t afraid of dying. She actually looked forward to it. Her only hesitation was about leaving her family behind.

I read a bit of Scripture to her, Romans 8:31-39. After I read it, I explained to her, as I have to you before, that I’ve told Ann that if that passage isn’t read at my funeral, I'm popping out of the box to read it myself. Then, hovering between this world and eternity, Gloria laughed, asking me to read the passage at her funeral. Before I left, she asked if I would look in on her family and if we could have a goodbye hug.

Gloria had asked for me to come to her room to fill her with the assurance of God’s help in her dying. Hopefully, she received that from me. But the fact is that, filled with the righteousness of God, Gloria had filled me with that assurance. She overcame my poverty of spirit, inspiring me with yet another confirmation of the powerful love and grace of God!

There’s only one way for you and me to be disciples—to be saints who yearn for God’s fullness and saints who fill the emptiness of others—and that’s to give up our resistance, to let Christ love us and call us His own, to allow God to use us for God’s purposes, and to simply follow when Jesus Christ calls us. We let Christ see us, sin and all, so that we can be made over in God’s image and experience reconciliation and rightness with God, with our neighbors, and with ourselves.

“Faith,” Martin Luther said, “is permitting ourselves to be seized by the things we do not see.” Saints are those who pray, “Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven” and proceed to live in the assurance that, in ways they cannot always see, their prayers are being answered.

You have been made saints by Christ. Now be Christ’s saints

What Saints Are Like

[This message was shared with the people of Saint Matthew Lutheran Church in Logan, Ohio, during worship on Sunday, November 4, my first official Sunday as pastor of the congregation. We celebrated it as All Saints Sunday.]

Luke 6:20-31
Today, I'm going to do something which in seminary we were taught never to do. I'm going to give you the two points of my sermon. That way, you can feel free to fall asleep. You can still say you know what the sermon was about. Here they are:

• Blessed are the empty.
• Blessed are those who risk rejection by others because they follow Christ.
  

And now, the sermon.

Her name was Mabel and the story of her impact on a young seminary student chaplain is told in John Ortberg’s book, The Life You’ve Always Wanted. Mabel was a resident of a nursing home, blind, nearly-deaf, and suffering from a cancer that was disfiguring her face. She’d been bedridden for twenty-five years. Tom Schmidt was the student chaplain, working at the nursing home where Mabel lived.

It was Mother’s Day and Schmidt was making his rounds. He decided to try ignoring his revulsion at the sight of Mabel and to present her with a flower. He didn’t want to do it, especially since he was sure that Mabel would be unresponsive. “Here’s a flower,” he told her. “Happy Mother’s Day.” Mabel pulled the flower to her face, attempting to smell it and then, in somewhat slurred speech, said, “Thank you. It’s lovely. But can I give it to someone else? I can’t see it, you know, I’m blind.” So, Schmidt rolled Mabel’s wheelchair to another resident and watched her as she held out the flower and said, “Here, this is from Jesus.” “That,” said Tom Schmidt, “was when it began to dawn on me that this was not an ordinary human being.”

As Schmidt’s acquaintance with Mabel grew, so did his sense of awe. He felt each time he entered her room that he was walking on holy ground. Often, he would read a Scripture to Mabel and from memory, she would mouth the words along with him. Then, she might break into a song praising God. “I never heard her speak of loneliness or pain except in the stress she placed on certain lines in certain hymns,” Schmidt recalls. The student chaplain began going to Mabel’s room with pen in hand, ready to jot down the amazing things that she said.

During one week, Schmidt says, he was stressing out, thinking about exams at seminary and a million other things he had to get done, when a question dawned on him, “What does Mabel have to think about—hour after hour, day after day, week after week, not even able to know if it’s day or night?” So, the next time he was at the nursing home, Schmidt decided to ask Mabel. “Mabel, what do you think about when you lie here?” Listen closely to Schmidt’s recollection:

“...’I think about Jesus...[she said]’ I sat there, and thought for a moment about the difficulty, for me of thinking about Jesus for even five minutes, and I asked, ‘What do you think about Jesus?’ She replied slowly and deliberately as I wrote...’I think about how good He’s been to me. He’s been awfully good to me, you know...I’m one of those kind who’s mostly satisfied...Lots of folks wouldn’t care much for what I think...But I don’t care. I’d rather have Jesus. He’s all the world to me.’ "

Although Mabel was blind, nearly deaf, suffering from cancer, and confined to her bed, she was likely more alive and happier and, as she said, “satisfied” than many of the people we know. Why is that? The short answer is that Mabel was a saint. But on this All Saints Sunday, it’s good for us to ask, “What exactly is a saint?”

Taking our cue from Jesus’ words for us in today’s Gospel lesson, I think we can say that a saint is a person blessed by God. But as you read or hear this passage, what’s called, “The Sermon on the Plain,” from the Gospel of Luke, it hits you that Jesus has an entirely different idea of what it means to be “blessed by God” than you and I usually have.

Week before last, fires raged through southern California, particularly affecting San Diego. It was a terrible disaster and I’m sure that like me, you’ve been praying for the people affected by the fires. A player for the San Diego Chargers who has a home in the area met with reporters last week and said, that although all of his neighbors’ houses were destroyed, “Thank God” the fire had literally gone around his house, leaving him unscathed.

I’m not picking on this player and I don’t want to read too much into his words. I’m sure that he was sincere in what he said. But I wonder if he believes that God determined to leave his house standing and decided that his neighbors’ places had to be destroyed?

And what would this player say about the victims of other disasters that happen in life?

What would he say about Mabel?

Would he say that because of the multiple tragedies that had stricken her and the long years of suffering she’d endured that she wasn’t really blessed by God?

That she wasn’t a saint?

That she didn’t really have a connection with the Lord she so fervently confessed and in Whom she so clearly believed?

In fairness, he probably wouldn’t say those things.

And yet, in his comments about how his property hadn’t burned down when the homes of his neighbors had, that player, seems to have the world’s idea of what it means to be blessed. That’s because the world appears to believe that when life breaks our way, we’re blessed by God and that when the events of life go against us, we’re not. But in the Sermon on the Plain, Jesus turns ideas like that on their head. He does so in two major ways, I think.

Listen again to how Jesus begins His message for us this morning. He says: “Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God. Blessed are you who are hungry now, for you will be filled. Blessed are you who weep now, for you will laugh.”

Talk about turning things on their head! You’re blessed, Jesus says, and you’re a saint when you’re poor, hungry, and grief-stricken. If I had to distill those three beatitudes into one, I’d say simply, “Blessed are the empty.” The poor have empty pockets. The hungry, empty bellies. The grieving, an empty place at the dinner table. Or an empty spot in the easy chair in the family room. These are the blessed ones. How can Jesus say that?

Recently, my wife Ann and I spoke with a young woman who had wandered from God. Not in some dramatic way. Instead, she had just allowed her relationship with God to move to the sidelines of her life. But not long ago, her life hit a crisis point. She found a church and began to regularly attend worship there. She’s also established a daily time of prayer and Bible and devotional reading. Ann asked this young woman, “What brought you back to God?” “I was empty inside,” she said. “I just knew that I needed God.” Saints are people who understand the emptiness of life without God and they invite the God we meet in Jesus Christ to fill their emptiness. Blessed are the empty!

Jesus also says, “Blessed are you when people hate you, and when they exclude you, revile you, and defame you on account of the Son of Man. Rejoice in that day and leap for joy, for surely your reward is great in heaven; for that is what their ancestors did to the prophets.” In these words, Jesus seems to say, "Blessed are you when you risk having others reject you because you follow Christ. You will never be rejected by God!"

Methodist bishop Will Willimon once served as dean of the chapel at Duke University. He tells about a Duke student he encouraged “to go out for rush,” joining a fraternity. Willimon explains, “He had grown up as an only child. I thought the incentive to socialize would be good for him, get him out, expose him to others. [But] That night, there had been too much alcohol, and people under the influence are sometimes people at their worst. The incident…involved a number of people. Afterwards, when a police report had been made, a secret meeting was held and everyone was asked to keep the whole thing quiet. And everyone agreed to keep quiet. Everyone but him. It’s not right, he had said to them. This isn’t what a fraternity is to be about. We’re making a wrong even worse. From that night on, he was no longer considered by them a ‘brother.’” In Jesus’ terms, he was excluded, reviled, defamed because of his relationship with Christ and his desire, despite the difficulty and pain of it, to follow Christ’s lead.

Being blessed, being a saint, doesn’t mean that we’re insulated from the pain or grief of this life.

This isn’t heaven.

This is an imperfect world in which bad things happen to even the most faithful people.

The loved ones and friends of those Saint Matthew saints who passed from this life this past year whose names we honored a short time ago can testify to that. Sometimes, in fact, the world reserves its worst treatment for people who seek to follow Christ. But Jesus, the Savior Who, the New Testament tells us, ”emptied Himself, taking the form of a servant” so that He could die and rise and secure eternity with God for all who believe in Him, brings blessings to those who dare to follow Him!

Blessed are the empty; they will be filled with God!

Blessed are those who risk rejection by others; God will never reject them!

Today, I invite you to trust, however hesitantly or incompletely, that Jesus’ words are true. Trust that you are among His saints and that You are part of His Kingdom forever.

Because you are!

Fourth Pass at Bible Lessons for November 4

[To see the first three passes at the lesson for November 4, All Saints Sunday, go here, here, and here. The first of those links explains what these "passes" are all about.]

The Gospel Lesson: Luke 6:20-31
(Verse-by-Verse Comments)
20Then he looked up at his disciples and said: “Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God.
(1) Contrary to our usual thinking, Jesus says that the poor are the blessed ones. Conventional Jewish thought held that the wealthy were especially blessed by God and that poverty was a sign of God's displeasure. (We tend to think the same things today.) Jesus turns that thinking on its head.

(2) The "poor" to which Jesus refers here are the absolute poorest of the world.

(3) Jesus uses the present tense here to say that the poor are now in the kingdom of God. In the beatitudes which follow, Jesus uses the future tense. Jesus seems to be making several points:

• a. God's kingdom has already invaded our world. The term, kingdom of God (basileia tou theou, in the original Greek), can more accurately be called, "the reign of God." Irrespective of outward circumstances, despite intense poverty, people may live under the reign of God. There is an "already/not yet" quality to God's Kingdom. Through Jesus, God has already established His Kingdom in the hearts and lives of those who follow Christ. But we await its completion with Jesus' return at the end of history.
• b. Will the Kingdom of God be composed only of the poor? If that were the case, Abraham, the patriarch of Old Testament faith, wouldn't be in the Kingdom. Nor would Joseph of Arimethaea, who donated his tomb for Jesus' burial. Jesus is engaging here in what I would call "accurate hyperbole." As I mentioned in yesterday's pass, wealth is an impediment to faith in Christ because it can delude the wealthy person into believing themselves to be self-sufficient, in no need of God. The poor find it easier to believe that there's Someone bigger than them, Someone they need to follow.

21“Blessed are you who are hungry now, for you will be filled. “Blessed are you who weep now, for you will laugh.
(1) The filled here in the original Greek is related to the term chortazo. That's the same word used of the prodigal son looking longingly at the pods being eaten by the pigs after he'd left his father. The same word is used of the fictional Lazarus in Jesus' parable about a poor man who would have gladly eaten the scraps from the rich man's table. Chortazo is usually used of an animal eating its feed. So, the idea here, is of a poor person, perhaps dehumanized and ignored by the world, who is desperately hungry.

Mary uses the same term in the Magnificat, the words she speaks after being told that she will give birth to the Messiah:

...he [God] has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty. [Luke 1:53]

(2) The word Jesus uses here for weep describes a deep, mournful, agonized wailing. The person who weeps in this way is suffering from a deep, inconsolable grief.

(3) Notice that Jesus uses the future tense to describe the blessedness here. As long as we live in this world, the possibility of suffering is with us. We aren't guaranteed that in this life we will go without hunger or intense sadness. But we are promised that if we will follow Christ, we will be part of the Kingdom of God forever. The apostle Peter writes:

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! By his great mercy he has given us a new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, and into an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading, kept in heaven for you, who are being protected by the power of God through faith for a salvation ready to be revealed in the last time.

In this you rejoice, even if now for a little while you have had to suffer various trials...[1 Peter 1:3-6]

(Peter goes on to suggest that some trials may be allowed to come our way by God as a way of increasing the strength of our faith. This is a tough idea for us to accept. Tough for me to accept.)

22“Blessed are you when people hate you, and when they exclude you, revile you, and defame you on account of the Son of Man.
(1) This may be topsy-turviest of the beatitudes Jesus presents here. Don't we associate popularity with being blessed? But Jesus is saying here that if people turn on us because we follow Him we are blessed. Present tense again.

23Rejoice in that day and leap for joy, for surely your reward is great in heaven; for that is what their ancestors did to the prophets.
(1) An extension of the previous verse, Jesus moves here to describe future blessedness because we steadfastly follow Christ in spite of those who hate and revile us for our faithfulness to Christ.

24“But woe to you who are rich, for you have received your consolation. 25“Woe to you who are full now, for you will be hungry. “Woe to you who are laughing now, for you will mourn and weep. 26“Woe to you when all speak well of you, for that is what their ancestors did to the false prophets.
(1) These woes basically reverse the blessings of the previous verses.

(2) Dictionary.com defines woe as "grievous distress, affliction, or trouble."

(3) "False prophets" are those who claim to speak in the Name of God, but overlook sins that God doesn't overlook. A prophet, whether entrusted with words of encouragement or condemnation from God, is always to deliver God's counsel to God's people. The prophet is to remind people of the consequences to their relationship with God when they are faithful and when they are unfaithful. The false prophets mentioned in the Old Testament were popular because, like pandering politicians, they always told people what they wanted to hear. The true prophets got into trouble because sometimes God tells us what we don't want to hear, such as our need to repent for our sins.

27“But I say to you that listen, Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, 28bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you. 29If anyone strikes you on the cheek, offer the other also; and from anyone who takes away your coat do not withhold even your shirt. 30Give to everyone who begs from you; and if anyone takes away your goods, do not ask for them again.
(1) Here, Jesus outlines the radical ethic that flows from a dependence on the grace of God granted through Him. These words may be even more stunning than the beatitudes that precede them.

(2) I like what Brian Stoffregen says about these verses:

I think that the theme...is that we are not to let others determine our actions. As Jesus' disciples we are to love, do good, speak well of, and pray--regardless of how others treat us. [When I let bullies speak ill of me or act unkindly toward me] I am not letting them control my life...

This, of course, is precisely what Jesus did when He went to the cross.

This is harder than we can imagine...and I pray that under the most adverse and dire of circumstances I would heed Jesus' words and be faithful to Him!

31Do to others as you would have them do to you.
(1) Jesus' Golden Rule. It describes how I want everybody else to treat me, but I always seem to have excuses for why I can't or shouldn't always behave this way. I can only pray for forgiveness for my failure to obey Jesus' command to love God and love neighbor unstintingly.

Third Pass at the November 4 Bible Lessons

[To learn what these "passes" are about and to read the first one, go here. To see the second pass, look here.]

The Gospel Lesson: Luke 6:20-31
General Comments:
1. Of all the Gospels, Luke is the one that most underscores the topsy-turvy, countercultural realities of the Kingdom of God. We see this early on, for example, in the Magnificat, the song of Mary, spoken after the angel tells her that she will give birth to the long-awaited King and Savior. In the Gospel lesson for November 4, Jesus tells us that the "blessed" include the poor, the hungry, the sorrowful, and those hated and rejected "because of the Son of Man." (Jesus characteristically refers to Himself as "the Son of Man.") Only those living under the reign of God would dare to see these conditions as signs of God's favor or blessing.

2. As Lutheran pastor Brian Stoffregen points out, Jesus uses the word makarios, blessed, in a completely different--and subversive--way than it had been used previously. Stoffregen traces the history of the term in the Greek language:

The Greek word for "blessed" used in our text is _makarios_. In
ancient Greek times, that word referred to the gods. They had achieved
a state of happiness and contentment in life that was beyond all
cares, labors, and even death. To be blessed, you had to be a god,
living in some other world.

That word took on a second meaning. It referred to the "dead". The
blessed ones were humans, who, through death, had reached the other
world of the gods. They were now beyond the cares of earthly life. To
be blessed, you had to be dead.

Finally, in Greek usage, the word came to refer to the elite, the
upper crust of society, the wealthy people. It referred to people
whose riches and power put them above the normal cares and worries of
the lesser folk -- the peons, who constantly struggle and worry and
labor in life. To be blessed, you had to be very rich and powerful.

When this word was used in the Greek translation of the Old Testament,
it took on another meaning: It referred to the results of right living
or righteousness. If you lived right, you were blessed. Being blessed
meant you received earthly, material things: a good wife, many
children, abundant crops, riches, honor, wisdom, beauty, good health,
etc. A blessed person had more things and better things than an
ordinary person. To be blessed, you had to have big and beautiful
things.

In all of these meanings, the "blessed" ones existed on a higher plane
than the rest of the people. They were gods. They were humans who had
gone to that other world of the gods. They were the wealthy, upper
crust. They were those with many possessions.

Jesus uses this word in a totally different way. It is not the elite
who are blessed. It is not the rich and powerful who are blessed. It
is not the high and mighty who are blessed. It is not the people
living in huge mansions or expensive penthouses who are blessed.
Rather, Jesus pronounces God's blessings on the lowly: the poor, the
hungry, the crying, and the hated. Throughout the history of this
word, it had always been the other people who were considered blessed:
the rich, the filled up, the laughing. Jesus turns it all upside-down.
The elite in God's kingdom, the blessed ones in God's kingdom, are
those who are at the bottom of the heap of humanity.

3. As I often point out in these passes, context effects content. Within the context of Luke's Gospel, this lesson comes immediately after Jesus calls the Twelve--the apostles, for their special function in His fledgling Church. It's important to realize that, as Luke tells it, "apostles" (the word means "sent ones") are disciples are with a particular function. They're called to lead the Church and to direct its efforts at fulfilling Christ's mission for the Church.

4. In this lesson, Jesus seems to be addressing three audiences: the apostles, the disciples, and the "multitudes," the crowd. The crowd is composed of people who haven't yet begun to follow Jesus. While followers of Jesus are committed to growing up in their faith, the message of the Gospel is the same for everyone.

5. This passage has a lot in common with the Sermon on the Mount. Some insist that this is an entirely different "sermon." (Luke never uses that term to describe it, by the way.) Others that this is essentially the same bit of teaching from Jesus, only seen through the prism of Luke.

Who knows? But the Church, inspired by the Holy Spirit, sees the Word of God in both sermons from Matthew and Luke. I think that as we read both passages, we too experience them as the world-changing, subversive Word of God.

Comparing the two of them:

• The Sermon on the Mount in Matthew, occurs, obviously, on an elevated place. The audience is made up of the Twelve, the group Matthew means when he speaks of "the disciples." In Matthew, Jesus and the Twelve retire from the crowds.
  
• Guess where the Sermon on the Plain, of which our lesson in Luke is a part, happens? As Eliza Doolittle would say, "On the plain." The audience, as noted above, is composed not just of the Twelve (the apostles), but also other disciples and an interested multitude.
• In the Sermon on the Mount, the "poor" who are called blessed are those who are "poor in spirit." In our lesson from Luke, the desperately poor are described as blessed. Why? Probably because they're empty enough of the pretense of self-sufficiency to know that they need God. The rich and that includes most, if not all, who may have the access to technology to read this blog, have just enough of the stuff of this world to think that they don't need God. (See here.)

6. Methodist scholar Fred Craddock writes:

[The Luke passage] is clearly addressing the poor and the despised of the earth in the literal sense of those words, not the "poor in spirit" or "those who hunger and thirst for righteousness," as in Matthew (Matt. 5:3, 6)...

7. The beatitudes of this lesson are followed by what I would call an explanation or expansion of what Jesus shares in 6:20-26. I like what Stoffregen writes:

With the blessings and woes [in vv.20-26], Jesus announces the reversal of fortunes that God is going to bring about. With these verses [vv.27-31], Jesus announces a reversal that is to be part of the lives of those who are listening to him.

If I get the chance, tomorrow or soon, I'll present verse-by-verse reflections on this lesson, the text on which I'll be basing my sermon at Saint Matthew Lutheran Church in Logan on November 1.

Second Pass at Bible Lessons for November 4, 2007

The first pass, which also explains what these "passes" are all about, can be found here.

Ephesians 1:11-23
1. Authorship of Ephesians is disputed. Traditionally, it has been attributed to Paul. However, the vocabulary and theological categories used in Ephesians are sufficiently different from those used in the acknowledged writings of Paul (what's called the Pauline corpus) that many scholars dispute this. Furthermore, in the ancient world it was deemed legitimate for the followers of teachers or those schooled in their ways of thinking to write as though they were that teacher.

On the other hand, many argue that distinctions in style, vocabulary, terminology, and theology between this letter and other writings of Paul can simply be attributed to his growth and maturation as a Christian.

2. A major theme of Ephesians is spiritual warfare. Christians are in the midst of it, as contestants (but only with God's help) and as objects.

3. These past messages from Ephesians help flesh out some of its themes:
Changing Your World: Through Amazing Grace
Changing Your World: By Being a Disciple
Changing Your World: Through Prayer

4. Chris Haslam, an Anglican preacher from Canada, has a good summary of our lesson from Ephesians:

Paul has written of the Father’s wisdom and insight in making known to us his will, his plan for completion of the restoration of the faithful to oneness with him, as told by Jesus (vv. 8, 9). God’s plan embraces both Jews and Gentiles, bringing them together in one Christian community. That this is happening he sees as evidence of God’s ability to break down diverse barriers, and to bring the world to unity in Christ.

And so, in vv. 15-16, he is delighted to hear of the successful missionary activity by people he does not know at first hand. Their “faith” (commitment to Christ) and fraternal love (love of “all the saints”, Christians both Jewish and Gentile) go hand in hand: faith involves appreciating God’s great love for humanity demonstrated in the Father’s giving of the Son. That “your” (v. 15) refers to new Christians is indicated by “as you come to know him” in v. 17: Paul prays that these (relatively) new converts may receive “a spirit of wisdom and revelation” as each progressively come to understand God more and more. It is not just digested knowledge (“wisdom”) that they will receive, but also “revelation”, what God will show of himself and his ways, his manifest character, his greatness, “glory”, and the fruit of interaction of knowledge with experience. The objective (v. 18) is that, illuminated by innermost conviction (“with the eyes of your heart”), they may attain a maturer knowledge of God in three ways:

• in spiritual growth (“hope”) being those whom God has called;
• the “glorious inheritance” Gentile Christians now share with their Jewish brethren; and
• experience of the tremendous power of God as he works in their lives.

Paul’s experience speaks here: God showed him mercy when he was a persecutor of Christians. Then v. 20: this power that they now experience is what the Father used in raising Christ and having him share in the divine glory. Christ has also conquered all alien spiritual powers (“far above all rule ...”, v. 21) and pagan gods (“every name that is named”). God has made “all things” (v. 22) subject to humanity; the Father has given Christ to the church as ruler over all things spiritual. The church is one in Christ and thus is able to share in Christ’s exaltation, Christ being the complete embodiment of God, who is in the process of filling (making good) all things. It is through the church that God pervades the world with his goodness.

Tomorrow, I hope to post the third pass at the All Saints Sunday lessons, looking at the Gospel lesson,