"Take up your cross and follow Me"

Matthew 16:21-28
[This message was shared during the worship services of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio, on September 3, 2017.]

Our gospel lesson for today, Matthew 16:21-28, begins in this way: “From that time on Jesus began to explain to his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and suffer many things at the hands of the elders, the chief priests and the teachers of the law, and that he must be killed and on the third day be raised to life.”

We Christians have read and heard those words (or words like them) so many times in our lives that we may hardly notice them. Or give them a second thought. But when Jesus spoke them to His original hearers, the twelve apostles, their effect must have been not just jarring, but volcanic!

A few moments before, we read in Matthew, Peter had confessed his faith in Jesus as God’s anointed King, the Messiah or the Christ, as well as God in the flesh, which is what the phrase "the Son of the Living God" means. Peter was saying that Jesus was the Son of God, the very reflection and embodiment of God Himself!

Jesus had commended Peter’s confession, which He said, had come to Peter not from human beings, but from God Himself, the way our faith always does (1 Corinthians 12:3).

And Jesus said that it was on this strong confession made by Peter that “I will build my church, and the gates of Hades [or hell] will not overcome it” (Matthew 16:18).

Peter’s confession of Jesus and Jesus’ affirmation of it must have been an incredible moment for the twelve. For centuries, their people, the people of God, had been waiting for the Messiah promised by God. And here was Jesus confirming what Peter (and probably many of the other disciples) had come to believe. The wait was over. The Messiah, Who would make all things right, had arrived.

The problem was that in the four-hundred-some years since God had given the last book of the Old Testament to His people and the moment of Peter’s confession, an enormous gap between what God means by making all things right for us and what God’s people meant by making all things right had developed.

This gap was caused by the failure to understand on the part of God’s peoplewhat their real problem was.

God’s people had come to see their problem as the Romans. And before that, the Assyrians and the Babylonians. Each had been foreign conquerors. The problem, as God’s people had come to see it then, was these foreigners who had come and taken over their country.

God said that His people’s basic problem wasn’t the people who had conquered them through the centuries. It was that they had forgotten Who their God was.

They worshiped idols.

They worshiped the things of this world.

And because they did, they perpetrated grave injustices against each other and the strangers that were among them, violations of God’s holiness that God had adamantly and repeatedly forbade many times in His Word. It was because of all of this sin that God had allowed His people to be conquered.

To God’s people, including the disciples, the biggest problem they had was all of those other people who made their lives miserable. But God knew that the real problem wasn’t with all those other people.

And the only way that God could make all things right for His people and the whole world was not to give them a strongman king, the people’s version of a Messiah, the Messiah they wanted, who would boot out the foreign conquerors. Why? Because even if the strongman king was successful in routing the Romans and filling the people’s fevered desire for fat pocketbooks, the success of such a king would still only leave God’s people dead in their sin.

The only way that God could make all things right for His people and the world was to send a Messiah Who would deal with the sin into which every one of us--Jew and Gentile--is born.

Our greatest enemy in the world isn’t someone else: It’s not our spouse, our family, our boss, our government, or any of those “other people.” It’s not even the devil, although he hates us and wants us eternally separated from God.

Our greatest enemy is us. It’s us--you and me--who need to be dealt with. We and our sin must be conquered before they kill us off for all eternity.

But this isn’t something we like to hear or wrestle with. Who wants to be forced into saying, “It’s my fault”? Most of the time, those words stick in our throats.

Peter was just like us in that way. Verse 22 tells us that Peter is horrified at the idea of the One he had just confessed as Messiah going to Jerusalem, to be rejected and crucified. Matthew says that Peter rebuked Jesus. “That will never happen to You, Lord,” Peter says to Jesus, telling Jesus, the One he had just confessed to be God that Jesus was wrong. Peter was telling Jesus how to be the Messiah. He was giving Jesus "God lessons"!

In fact, as my son Philip pointed out to me last night, the word used to describe Peter's words to Jesus--rebuked--was in the Greek Septuagint translation of the Old Testament with which Jesus would have been familiar only used of superiors upbraiding or chastising people beneath them in class or authority. Peter is treating the One he has confessed as God and Messiah like an underling!

Look what happens next, starting at Matthew 16:23. “Jesus turned and said to Peter, ‘Get behind me, Satan! You are a stumbling block to me; you do not have in mind the concerns of God, but merely human concerns.’”

Jesus calls Peter, Satan! The very name means enemy or adversary. At this moment, Jesus is calling Peter an enemy of God! This is a serious matter.

To try to stand in the way of God and the will and purpose of God makes a person an enemy of God. So, when Jesus uttered this condemnation of Peter, you can imagine how mystified Peter must have felt.

Do we stand in the way of God and His will for our lives?

Are there times when we try to turn Jesus into the king of our dreams, the king who will even go along with us when we’re being selfish or hurtful?

Are there times when we expect Jesus to overlook our sins while we stand in judgment over others for theirs?

Are there times when we insist that the problems in our marriages, our families, or our lives are exclusively the fault of others and not us?

Absent repentance and trust in Christ, if our answer to any of those questions is yes, then Jesus’ words of rebuke and their intrinsic call to repentance and renewed trust in Him, first leveled at Peter apply to you and me too. I know that Jesus' call applies to me many times, too.

But there is good news! King Jesus has come to set us free and make us right. 

Look at what He says, starting at verse 24: “Then Jesus said to his disciples, ‘Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me will find it. What good will it be for someone to gain the whole world, yet forfeit their soul? Or what can anyone give in exchange for their soul? For the Son of Man is going to come in his Father’s glory with his angels, and then he will reward each person according to what they have done.’”

Jesus could have been the king that Peter, the other disciples, and God’s people in Judea wanted. He had the power to do it.

When Jesus was later arrested in the garden of Gethsemane, He said that He had at His disposal “twelve legions of angels,” 60,000 angelic soldiers ready at the direction of Jesus. He could have been a warrior king.

When Satan met Jesus in the wilderness, it was to be precisely this kind of king that he tried tempting Jesus into being. Satan knew that if Jesus relied on raw power, coercive force, to make Himself king, Jesus would have been as guilty of sin as Adam and Eve had been when, in their desire to “be like God,” they ate the fruit God told them not to eat.

And had Jesus been this kind of king, He wouldn’t have been trustingly relying on His Father and His plan, but on violent force.

Our lives could never have been made eternally right had Jesus gone that route.

We could never have been set eternally free from sin and death. Jesus had to go to the cross to take our punishment for sin so that, in rising, He could set free all who turn from sin, that is repent, and surrender trustingly in Him, that is believe in Him.

In the way Jesus chose, He could be King, not of a worldly nation, all of which eventually fail and fall from the weight of their arrogance, sin, and injustice, but the King of a new creation.

Jesus didn’t enter the world to conquer all the armies of the world while leaving everyone in this world dead and separated from God. Jesus came to conquer us with His love and so, give us life that never ends.

The only way for us to appropriate the victory won for us by Jesus on the cross and from the empty tomb is to first, take up our cross--meaning, to acknowledge, in Pogo’s famous words, “We have seen the enemy and he is us.” We need to own the fact that we need a Savior, Someone Who will save us from our sins and ourselves and to save us to be all that God intended for us to be. 

And we need secondly, to follow Jesus. Even when it’s inconvenient. Even when it’s the last thing we want to do. Even when it’s less than popular. Even when it costs us money, time, or our lives.

Taking up our crosses and following Jesus. We Lutherans have always called this a lifestyle of “daily repentance and renewal.” This is the content of the faith in Jesus that Peter, just a few verses before our gospel lesson, confessed: a faith that believes in Jesus as the King that makes all things right, the God Who opens up infinitely more than “we can ask or imagine” (Ephesians 3:20) to all who dare to surrender to Him.

And how can we know this is true?

That’s the question from the disciples that Jesus seems to anticipate in the last verse of our lesson.

“Truly I tell you,” He says. “some who are standing here will not taste death before they see the Son of Man coming in his kingdom.”

Is that true?

Did the disciples see the coming of Jesus’ kingdom?

I mean, didn’t Jesus teach us to pray, “Thy kingdom come”?

The first disciples did see the kingdom of God come when Jesus rose from the dead, “the firstborn of the dead” as the New Testament calls Jesus (Colossians 1:18; Revelation 1:5) and the “pioneer and perfecter of faith” as He’s called in Hebrews 12:2. The disciples saw the kingdom of God when they saw the King after He had died and risen.

And we see--we experience--this kingdom when we too, take up our cross and follow Jesus.

May that be how we live.

How we die.

And, by the grace God bears for all who trust in Christ, may it also be how we will all rise again.

Amen

[Blogger Mark Daniels is pastor of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio.]

4 things God taught me about spiritual gifts on Monday

During my quiet time on Monday morning, I considered 1 Corinthians 12 in the New Testament. I was particularly struck by verse 18:

...in fact God has placed the parts in the body, every one of them, just as he wanted them to be.

Here, the apostle Paul is talking to a church that had come into being through his proclamation of Jesus Christ as the way to salvation and new life with God.

But since Paul left the Corinthians, unchristian ideas and practices had taken root in their church. Among them was the notion that the possession of some spiritual gifts made a person superior to others in the church who didn't have that gift. (You still hear nonsense like this from some Christians today. Paul responded to such smug lovelessness among the first century Corinthian Christians with 1 Corinthians 13.)

In 1 Corinthians 12, Paul compares the Church to the human body. In fact, in many other places in the New Testament, Paul, under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, does more than compare the Church to a human body. Paul asserts that the Church is the body of Christ in the world. While the crucified and risen Jesus has ascended into heaven, the Church is Jesus Christ's physical presence here and now. For example, Paul says in different places:

Now you are Christ's body, and individually members of it. (1 Corinthians 12:27)

For just as we have many members in one body and all the members do not have the same function, so we, who are many, are one body in Christ, and individually members one of another. (Romans 12:4-5)

He is also head of the body, the church; and He is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, so that He Himself will come to have first place in everything. (Colossians 1:18)

...no one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it, just as Christ also does the church, because we are members of His body. (Ephesians 5:29-30)

And that's just a sampling.

As radical as the Bible's teaching that Jesus is the second Person of a triune God (one God, three Persons: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit) is its insistence, voiced often by Paul, that the Church is Christ's body, every disciple a member of Christ's body.

That person with the annoying cackle, the pastor who talks too much, the man with moral failures, the woman who seems to measure her worth by what she does rather than by what Christ has done for her on the cross...all who turn to Christ in repentance and faith are members of Christ's body, children of God the Father.

And each of them, Paul would say, is irreplaceable. When members of Christ's body at any given place fail to exercise their spiritual gifts, parts of the body die and individual congregations are at risk of dying.

On Monday, it struck me how truly revolutionary this whole business would be for the Church (and the world) if we would take Paul's words seriously. God impressed four major points on me as I read 1 Corinthians 12:18:

1. We must not doubt that by whatever agency--be it history, circumstance, mistakes--that the parts of the body possessed by any given congregation at any given time are precisely what God has decided that congregation needs to fulfill its Christ-given mission.

This means no more searching for the "ideal" church. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, in his fantastic little book, Life Together, warns Christians against falling in love with their ideal church, the church of their imaginations, lest they fail to appreciate the church they're already in, the church where God's Holy Spirit is already active.

This also means no more church of the fantasized future. It's God's future that we are meant to discover through lives of faithfulness, not a future born of the empty well of human wisdom and sin.

Jesus says that no truly wise person begins something without counting the cost. But He also tells a parable in Luke 12 about a man who had so much that he decided to build big barns to store everything and simply live a life of ease. He had big plans born of his own view of things.

Jesus' fictional man's smug self-satisfaction (there's that smug thing again) came to an abrupt end when, Jesus says, God came to him and said: "You fool! This very night your life will be demanded from you. Then who will get what you have prepared for yourself?" (Luke 12:12) In other words, it's fine for people (and congregations) to make plans; but we'd better be prepared to trash them when God throws up walls or calls us in different directions. James 4:13-15 puts our fantasized futures in perspective when he writes:

Now listen, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go to this or that city, spend a year there, carry on business and make money.” Why, you do not even know what will happen tomorrow. What is your life? You are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes. Instead, you ought to say, “If it is the Lord’s will, we will live and do this or that.”

Paul's words in 1 Corinthians 12:18 also tell us no more lamentations for what our congregation is not, but celebration for what it is when Jesus and the Word of God hold center place, as well as prayerful faith in God that He is providing and He will provide what we need in gifted people to do, not what we want to do, but what He is calling us to do.

2. We must not allow other disciples' quirks to get in the way of recognizing their God-gifts that must be exercised for our congregations to do what God is calling us to do.

Everybody has quirks. (Even you!) There are no quirkless humans.

And it's through humans who make up Christ's body, with all their peculiarities and particularities, that God does His work in the world. The Church is called to "make disciples," internally and externally. God has given all the parts needed for any congregation needed to do this. And all of those parts will be imperfect, idiosyncratic, quirky.

It's always been that way. Paul had a volcanic temper, it seems. Peter was impulsive. James and John had to learn to get over looking out for number one. David had an eye for the ladies. Naomi was self-pitying. No matter. God used them all with their quirks. So, who are we to mentally disqualify people from doing the part in Christ's mission for His Church to which God has called them?

I've always remembered a wonderful bit of advice given by Alan Loy McGinnis in his book, The Friendship Factor. For any relationship to thrive and be all that it can be, each person must make allowances for the peculiar insanities of the other person. That's true in friendships, in marriages, and in the most sacred of all relationships, the Church, this organic body of Christ, the only relationship in this world that will continue to exist in eternity.

3. We cannot overestimate nor underestimate the value or necessity of any spiritual gift or the baptized believer in Christ who possesses the gift. We in the body of Christ all need each other.

4. We must encourage every Christian disciple to know and exercise their spiritual gifts, with mutual accountability to Christ and to the Church.

Congregations need to work hard at getting rid of gatekeepers who prevent some members from doing the ministries to which God calls them through their gifts.

Congregations need to discourage the "humble pie" excuse-makers who claim they can't do anything for the mission of the Church because, "I have no gift." People who ply such nonsense are calling God a liar, because God's Word insists that the Holy Spirit has given every believer in Christ a spiritual gift by which the Church fulfills its calling.

1 Peter 4:10 says: "Each of you should use whatever gift you have received to serve others, as faithful stewards of God’s grace in its various forms." Peter assumes that "each of you" in the churches he addresses in first century Asia Minor has been allotted at least one spiritual gift. For a Christian to say that she or he missed out on a spiritual gift is a humble-sounding way of dodging our calls to play our part in Christ's great commission of all Christians.

Help me to live out these insights as a Christian disciple and as a servant-leader in Your Church, Lord. Amen

[Blogger Mark Daniels is pastor of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio.]