New Year Apprehensions? A Strategy and Four Strengths for 2016

[This was shared with the people and guests of Living Water Lutheran Church during both worship services yesterday morning, the Second Sunday of Christmas.]

Ephesians 1:3-14

It’s a new year. Feeling apprehensive about anything as you consider what awaits you in 2016?

If so, that’s normal. And I say that as a recovering worry wart.

But in today’s second lesson, Ephesians 1:3-14, we’re given two things that can help us face our apprehensions.

The first is a strategy for dealing with life.

The second is a set of four reasons for why we don’t need to be apprehensive or worried or frightened.

Our lesson from Ephesians comes near the start of this New Testament letter. Scholars have argued for years over the letter's authorship, but many scholars believe that the book was written in the mid-first century AD by the apostle Paul while he was imprisoned.

If that’s so, the book of Ephesians is remarkable. Seemingly in need of encouragement himself, Paul writes to encourage others!

And how does he do that?

First of all, right here in our lesson, he worships, praises, and prays to God. “Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in the heavenly realms with every spiritual blessing in Christ,” verse 3 begins. For Paul, worship displaces worry!

God commands us to worship Him, of course. He does this when He tells us to “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength,” first, through Moses in Deuteronomy 6:4-5 and then, when Jesus gives the great commandment in Matthew.

God doesn’t give this commandment because He’s needy.

And He doesn’t command us to love or worship Him because He’s an egomaniac.

God commands our worship because we need to worship God.

We need to acknowledge that our lives come from Him and that only He, through Jesus, can make us whole, give us His presence and His guidance, and give us life beyond the grave.

When we worship, we acknowledge the truth of what Jesus has told us: “Apart from Me, you can do nothing” [John 15:5].

And as we worship and love God, we can say with Paul when he writes elsewhere: “I can do all this through him who gives me strength” [Philippians 4:13].”

Without worship of God, we may exist. But when we worship God, we live! God commands us to worship Him because He loves us and wants us to do more than exist.

So, from his confinement, Paul experiences a brush of eternity with God, just as we can experience every time we pray, read God’s Word, worship with our sisters and brothers in Christ, or every time we hear the words, “Given and shed for you.” That strengthens us for living!

I’m not encouraging a utilitarian view of worship here, by the way. We don't worship in order to get goosebumps or to feel good. Nor is worship some kind of magical psychotherapy.

We worship because we long for God or, at least, we want to long for God.

In the worship of God, our priorities get shifted. Our pride is challenged and we experience the joy of repentance. Our need for grace is fulfilled. Our relationship with God and our sisters and brothers in Christ is strengthened. God restores us to our right minds and right hearts. The panic diminishes. God gives us the strength to face our apprehensions.

Paul then says, starting in verse 4: “For he chose us in him before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in his sight. In love he predestined us for adoption to sonship through Jesus Christ, in accordance with his pleasure and will— to the praise of his glorious grace, which he has freely given us in the One he loves.”

Paul isn’t saying here that God predestined who would come to faith in Christ and those who wouldn’t. Just as was true of God’s ancient chosen people, Israel, Christians may be members of a Christ's church, they are part of God's saved people by faith. Genesis tells us that Abraham, the father of ancient Israel, believed in God’s promises and God counted Abraham’s faith as righteousness. Abraham had been chosen, but he was only saved by grace through faith. The same is true for we who have come to know God through Jesus.

Ephesians 2:8 tells believers that: “...it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God.” Through Christ, God has chosen us as His people and that’s one reason we should never be apprehensive.

Our lesson goes on: “In him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of sins, in accordance with the riches of God’s grace that he lavished on us. With all wisdom and understanding, he made known to us the mystery of his will according to his good pleasure, which he purposed in Christ, to be put into effect when the times reach their fulfillment—to bring unity to all things in heaven and on earth under Christ.”

Since the fall of Adam and Eve, God has had a plan for bringing heaven and earth together again in a fellowship undistorted by sin, death, or darkness. This is God’s good pleasure. To put it another way, God’s good pleasure, the thing God wants more than anything else is you.

God wants you, not as a subject or a piece on a game board He can manipulate.

God wants you.

He wants me.

He wants the whole fallen, imperfect human race.

He wants us so that He can set us free to be who we were made to be, who we have been redeemed to be through Jesus Christ. So that we can be our true selves, our God-made selves for all eternity. We should be strengthened in the face of our apprehensions by knowing that God wants us as His children! The world may spurn us or view us as rejects, but God never will!

Verse 11: “In him [that is, in Christ] we were also chosen, having been predestined according to the plan of him who works out everything in conformity with the purpose of his will, in order that we, who were the first to put our hope in Christ, might be for the praise of his glory.”

God once told the people of Israel through the prophet Jeremiah: “...I know the plans I have for you...plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.” [Jeremiah 29:11]

God could be addressing those words to you and me as the Church this morning!

Jesus tells us that there will be difficulties--even grief and death--in this life. But He will never abandon us. “...surely, I am with you always, to the very end of the age,” Jesus promises. [Matthew 28:20] And eternity with God is part of His plan for us. Paul writes in 2 Timothy 2:11-12: “Here is a trustworthy saying: If we died with him, we will also live with him; if we endure, we will also reign with him.”

Jesus’ gives us strength to face our apprehensions through the promise of His constant presence and of eternity with God.

But in the rush of events, it can be hard to remember to worship or praise God. (I know; I sometimes forget God and try to get through life in my own power!) When life comes at us, we can lose the strength God wants to give us by forgetting God’s faithfulness, instead turning to our modern world’s golden calves, things like money, sex, status, entertainment, the daily horoscope, sigils, the applause of the crowd.

Even when we forget God though, He never forgets us. Anyone who remembers to come to Him in the name of Jesus Christ, worshiping and praising Him for His faithfulness in standing with us and redeeming us, can be given strength to face what gives us apprehension or fear. We’ve already talked about the strategy for dealing with these things, worship. And we’ve talked about three ways in which God can strengthen us to face our apprehensions.

But God gives us more. Verse 13: “And you also were included in Christ when you heard the message of truth, the gospel of your salvation. When you believed, you were marked in him with a seal, the promised Holy Spirit, who is a deposit guaranteeing our inheritance until the redemption of those who are God’s possession—to the praise of his glory.”

To strengthen us, God gives believers in Jesus the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit, Paul is telling us, is God’s down-payment on our eternity, guaranteeing us that all God promises us in Christ is true!

Recently, I was apprehensive.

There was a situation in my extended family. I had volunteered to be the one who confronted a family member. I had no idea what to say, but I knew something needed to be said. I prayed for several days.

Finally, one evening, I prayed: “God, I have no idea what to say, how to even bring things up. This will catch this other person by surprise and they’re likely to be very angry. Help me to know how to approach things. I ask this in Jesus’ name. Amen.”

The phone rang. It was the person I was contemplating contacting. “Just thought I'd give you a call,” the person told me.

More silent praying: “God, send Your Spirit.”

After some pleasantries, I found myself speaking. I don’t know exactly what I said. The other person did get mad. But then I explained my motives and how much I loved this person. We talked for about forty minutes. At the end of the conversation, we had reached an understanding. A situation had been dealt with.

I hasten to add that not all my prayers are so quickly answered. There have been some requests I've brought before God daily for years before, in ways I never could have anticipated, answered them.

Jesus exhorts us to persevere in prayer, I believe, so that when He delays answering our pleas positively, we will have no doubt that the answer, when it arrives, is from Him. And, so that when the answer is no, we will have formed the habit of turning to the God Who knows what our suffering is like and has redeemed us from the worst that this life can bring us.

In any case, those who turn to God through prayer in Jesus' name have the power to live!

And that is always the Holy Spirit’s doing.
We can be encouraged face our apprehensions because who believe and are baptized have the power of God’s Holy Spirit working in our lives.

As 2016 begins, are you apprehensive? Turn your apprehension into worship and then be strengthened by knowing that you have been chosen to be part of God’s people, that God wants you as His child, that You can stand on the plans and promises of the crucified and risen Jesus, and that, to guide you in your walk with God, you have the gift of the Holy Spirit.

Happy new year!

Amen

,

Why Resist Evil?

[This is the sermon prepared for delivery at this morning's 10:15 worship service with the people of Saint Matthew Lutheran Church in Logan, Ohio. You are invited to worship with us any time.]


Mark 6:14-29
With its account of John the Baptist’s execution, our gospel lesson from Mark for today is so laced with evil that it’s disturbing. I’d rather just close the Bible on this passage today and move on to Holy Communion.

But that’s no way to treat the Bible, God’s revealed Word. Second Timothy 3:16, in the New Testament, says that, “all scripture is given by the inspiration of God and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness.” That’s true even of the disturbing parts.

And when I think of it, what I see in today’s Gospel lesson is a lot like what I see in life on Monday through Saturday. As wonderful as this life can be, there are things I would rather not face. These are the evils—like the inhumane things that human beings sometimes do to one another—that, when you learn of them, make you wonder, “How could this have happened? How can people be so cruel or sadistic?”

And I’m not talking just about murders or holocausts. I’m thinking also of the everyday evils, the cutting, harsh ways in which we all can diverge from the clear will of God to love God and love neighbor:

The husband or wife who ignores the spouse.

The parent who discourages a child.

The child who is disrespectful to the parent.

The customer who berates the clerk at the store.

None of us wants to be mistreated. Yet, often we can find ourselves subjecting others to the very disrespect or callous disregard that we hate to receive!

We all are sinners, of course. That’s the burden that the sinless Jesus came to take from us, the weight He took on His own shoulders on the cross so that all who repent for sin and trust in Him will have life with God forever.

As Christians, we’re called to do daily battle with our sin, which, if ignored, acts as a wall between God and us, between life and death.

We’re called to keep grabbing the strong, outstretched hand of Jesus Christ so that the power of sin and death over our lives can be destroyed by God’s powerful grace and deathless love.

That isn’t always as easy to do as it seems it should be.

You’ve heard me speak before about the frog in the kettle. A frog haplessly plopped himself into a kettle full of water that set on a stove top. Shortly after he got there, someone turned on the burner underneath the kettle. The frog, being a cold-blooded animal, adaptable to the world around him, didn’t realize he was being boiled to death.

Only insane people set out to be evil. Yet, like the frog in the kettle, sometimes people who should know better, are capable of evil, of cruelty to others. We allow our kettles--our environments, the world and the people around us--to dictate how we will act and react in everyday life. We adapt ourselves so well to the world around us that we boil ourselves in our own sin.

Herod Antipas was a man who should have known better than to fall into evil. He had been schooled in God’s will through a thorough knowledge of the Hebrew Scriptures, what we know as the Old Testament. On top of that, Herod had good political reasons for avoiding evil: Though his family had no legitimate claim on the honor, they had for generations held themselves to be Israel’s royal family. It was so important to Herod Antipas to be seen as the “king of the Jews” that he had undertaken to build a new temple on Mount Zion, the same spot in Jerusalem where, a thousand years before, King Solomon had built the first temple. Both spiritual training and political common sense should have kept Herod from evil.

But our Gospel lesson for today tells us that Herod perpetrated a horrible evil: Ordering the execution of John the Baptizer, whose crime was speaking the Word of God.

How that happened, a story you know well, comprises most of the lesson. Please turn to it, Mark 6:14 to 29. The stotry comes in what the moviemakers would call a flashback. Herod gets reports about the miracle-working ministry of Jesus and is convinced that John, whose beheading he had ordered, has come back from the dead. The memory of his evil clearly haunted Herod.

We’re then told about the night Herod threw a birthday party for himself, how the daughter of his wife—the wife he had stolen from his brother--had danced for him, pleasing Herod a lot, how—probably a little more than drunk—Herod had promised the girl anything in exchange for the dance, how she had asked her mother what to ask for and was given the chilling reply (in verse 24), “The head of John the Baptist,” and how, in spite of what Herod knew to be right, he complied with the girl’s wish.

It was an act of evil equal to anything you might hear about tonight on the Eleven O’Clock News. But I believe that our gospel lesson can help us to avoid falling into evil ourselves.

It does this by helping us to see that evil happens, first of all, when we want what we want more than we want what God wants. Herod wanted his wife’s daughter. He let himself be led by his lust and not by God.

That sort of thing can happen to us, too.

It may not be lust that leads us.

It might be materialism or acceptance or even a competitive spirit grown out of right proportions.

A woman, upset with herself, once told me, “I don’t know what happens to me at work. It’s like I’m a different person. I say and do things to get by or get what I want that, a few years ago, I could never have imagined myself doing.”

This woman was a frog in a kettle and she didn’t know how to get out! She was being led by things other than God.

Evil also happens when we’re more concerned with how we appear than we are with who we are. Herod kept his vow to his wife's daughter because he didn’t want to seem like a welcher to his guests. He didn't want to seem incapable of or unwilling to keep his word. He let the opinions of others lead him into evil.

Years ago, a pastor I know taught me a valuable lesson. One week, he made a mistake, one that the congregation needn’t have known about, not a sin, but a failure to make a deadline which cost the church some money. The first thing that pastor did the following Sunday morning during the announcements was stand up and apologize. If he had worried about appearances, he wouldn’t have said a word. But he was willing to admit his imperfections and gained credibility for it.

Evil also happens when we ignore the Word of God. Herod, in spite of the judgment against his actions he could hear in John’s preaching, liked to listen to John. He knew that John’s words were from God. Yet, at his birthday party, Herod turned a deaf ear to God’s Word and he ordered the execution of a man whose crime had been clearly speaking God’s Word.

It’s clear that to avoid evil, we need to:

• keep God’s will foremost in our priorities, 
• be focused on our character than our status, and 
• remain attentive to God’s Word. 

It’s by these means that the God we know in Jesus Christ can free us from the push to selfishness and evil that exists within us and around us.

But that still leaves us with a question: What’s in it for us? At the end of our Gospel lesson, after all, Herod was still alive, still on his throne, and John’s body was taken away by his disciples for burial. Herod had caved into evil. John had remained faithful to God. So, does it really pay off for us to resist evil?

Of course, there’s the obvious answer to that question: Those who faithfully seek to follow the God we know in Jesus Christ will, in spite of our sins and failings, spend eternity with God. Jesus promises: “the one who endures to the end will be saved” from sin, death, and separation from God.

But there are more immediate rewards for those who commit themselves to keeping hold of Christ’s hand and resisting the temptation to sin. They’re mentioned in our lesson from Ephesians for today. We’re given, we’re told “every spiritual blessing.” Herod went to bed on the night he killed John the Baptizer knowing that he had done evil and that barring a renewal of his relationship with God, on a collision course with hell.

Unlike Herod Antipas, John the Baptist lived and died with the certainty that, even in the midst of things he couldn’t and didn’t fully understand, in resisting evil, in seeking to follow God faithfully, he had a Lord, a Friend, and an Advocate Who would never desert him, not even at the gates of death. Who, do you suppose, died a happier man: Herod Antipas or John the Baptist?

Sometimes, people ask me, “Where is God?” The simple truth is that God is present for all who want God around. God is present for all who call on the Name of Jesus Christ. If you want Jesus in your life, you can find Him in the Word of God, in prayers in Jesus’ Name, in the fellowship of the Church, in the Sacraments, in the neighbor you’re called to serve and share the gospel with each day.

And having Jesus Christ at the center of our lives makes all the difference in this life and in the one to come. And, finally, gloriously, eternally, joyfully, having Jesus Christ at the center of your life makes resisting evil worth all the trouble it can bring to our lives. Amen

A Look at This Sunday's Bible Lessons (January 3, 2010)

Here's a discussion of the lessons around which our worship at Saint Matthew Lutheran Church in Logan, Ohio, will revolve this coming Sunday. These comments are a re-run of a post I presented last year. Since we follow a lectionary associated with the Church Year, these comments might help others get ready for worship, too.

Second Sunday of Christmas
January 3, 2010

This Sunday's Bible Lessons:
Jeremiah 31:7-14
Psalm 147:12-20
Ephesians 1:3-14
John 1:10-18

Prayer of the Day:
Almighty God, You have filled all the earth with the light of Your incarnate Word. By Your grace empower us to reflect Your light in all that we do, through Jesus Christ, our Savior and Lord, Who lives and reigns with You and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen

General Comments:
1. The Christmas Season continues on the Church calendar. The season ends January 6, Epiphany Day. Epiphany, falling the day after "the twelfth day of Christmas," commemorates the arrival of the magicians (magi, astrologers) bringing their gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh to the infant Christ.

2. The Bible lessons during the short Christmas Season emphasize God's past promises of reconciliation to ancient Israel, the fulfillment of those promises in the Messiah Jesus, the implications of God becoming human, and the promises of the complete realization of God's kingdom in Christ.

Jeremiah 31:7-14
1. Our lesson from Jeremiah comes from chapter 31, of this Old Testament book, a chapter important for Lutherans because Jeremiah 31:31-34, is always the Old Testament lesson for Reformation Sunday celebrations in October. It's a chapter in which Jeremiah spoke of the restoration of Israel following a sad cycle of treachery to God and consequent imprisonment by foreign conquerors.

2. Jeremiah descended from a prophet who had incurred the wrath of King Solomon long years before. Abiathar was banished to his ancestral home of Anothoth, a few miles from Jerusalem, but far from palace life.

Jeremiah began his ministry in 627BC and continued for more than forty years.

As explained by the editors of The New Oxford Annotated Bible (Revised Standard Version):

Jeremiah is much concerned with rewards and punishments, the recompense for good and evil, faithfulness and obedience [to God]...He criticized Judah [the Southern Kingdom, composed of a portion of the former Israel, which broke up shortly following the reign of Solomon] for its worship of gods other than the LORD, with all the attendant evils in cult and daily life. God's covenant people must return to him. The judgment must come, but the ominous future (later, the unhappy present) would be replaced by a new and more enduring relationship with God.

3. In the lesson for this Sunday, Jeremiah says that following his people's exile to conqueror Babylon, there would be a restoration. The exiled slaves will return to their promised land. Unlike the first exodus, there will be ready supplies of water along the way. Also unlike that first exodus, which saw God's people following a circuitous route, the returning exiles will come by "a straight path."

God's reason for providing an easy way home may be that, unlike the whiny group God led from Egypt, the descendants He will lead from exile understand their need of God and the futility and stupidity of relying on anyone or anything but God. God had lots of lessons to teach the ancient Hebrews; by the time God led the exiles back to Israel, they presumably, had learned the lessons of mature faith.

4. Jeremiah prophesies a time of restoration when the harvests will be plentiful. In v.14, he speaks of even the priests having plenty. Old Testament law said that the people were to give a portion of their produce to the priests, who, in turn, would be freed to focus full time on their priestly duties.

Psalm 147:12-20
1. Last Sunday's psalm, Psalm 148, was the middle of the five final songs of the Old Testament's worship book. Each begins and ends with, "Hallelujah!," a Hebrew word meaning, "Praise the Lord!"

This Sunday's psalm is another from that grouping. Like Jeremiah, it praises the God of all creation for His regard for His chosen people. Israel was unique among the nations, the people to Whom God revealed His gracious nature, preparing it to become, through His Son, a light to all the nations.

Ephesians 1:3-14
1. Those who claim, as many modern scholars do, that Ephesians wasn't written by the apostle Paul, have a major problem to resolve when it comes to these verses. The entire passage is one sentence, consistent with the undisputed writings of Paul.

2. The lesson from Jeremiah talked about the restoration of God's Old Testament people. This lesson assures us that in Christ, Jews and Gentiles who hope in Christ are heirs of God's pledge to set Christ's followers free of sin and death.

John 1:10-18
This is the latter part of the prologue to John's Gospel. John employs modes of thought and allusions to both Greek philosophy and the Old Testament. It affirms that the foundational, energizing Word of the universe--God Himself--entered the world.

He came, in fact, to His chosen people and most of them, along with the Romans, supposedly representing the most sophisticated of the Gentiles, didn't recognize Jesus for Who He was.

But, John says, some could see in Jesus the overabundant amplitude of God's grace and receive it through Him.

I love verse 17. Here's my Daniels caveman paraphrase:

Sure, Moses was the lawgiver. That's no small thing. The law God gives through Moses teaches us what human beings do if they want to be human. But grace and truth, the things that turn us from enemies to friends and children of God, the things that pour life into our otherwise dead and dormant frames, those truly big deals, come only from Jesus the Messiah.

Overcoming the Evil Within Us

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

Mark 6:14-29
As a preacher, I have to tell you, I sometimes wish I could avoid some passages of Scripture. I’d rather not face our Gospel lesson for this morning, for example. But because I made a rule for myself, to always preach on the most difficult passage of Scripture appointed for a given day, I'm preaching on it. With its account of John the Baptizer’s execution, our lesson from Mark is so laced with evil that it’s disturbing.

But when I think of it, what I see in today’s Gospel lesson is a lot like what I see in life on Monday through Saturday. As wonderful as life is most of the time, there are things I’d rather not face. These are the evils—like the inhumane things that human beings sometimes do to one another—that, when you learn of them, make you wonder, “How could this have happened? How can people be so cruel or sadistic?”

And I’m not talking just about murders or holocausts. I’m thinking also of the everyday evils, the cutting, harsh ways in which we all can diverge from the clear will of God to love God and love neighbor: The husband or wife who ignores their spouse. The parent who discourages a child. The child who is disrespectful of the parent. The customer who berates the hapless clerk at the store. None of us want to be mistreated. Yet, often we can find ourselves subjecting others to the very disrespect or callous disregard that we hate to receive!

We all are sinners, of course. That’s the burden Jesus came to share with us, the weight He took on His own shoulders on the cross so that all who turn from sin and trust in Him will have life with God forever. As Christians, we’re called to do daily battle with our sin, which, if ignored, is a wall between God and us, between life and death. We’re called to keep grabbing the strong, outstretched hand of Jesus Christ so that the power of sin and death over our lives can be destroyed by God’s powerful grace and deathless love. That isn’t always as easy as it seems it should be.

Most of you have undoubtedly heard about the frog in the kettle. A frog haplessly plopped himself into a kettle full of water that set on a stove top. Shortly after he got there, someone turned on the burner underneath the kettle. The frog, being a cold-blooded critter, adaptable to the world around him, didn’t realize he was being boiled to death.

Only insane people set out to be evil. Yet, like the frog in the kettle, sometimes people who should know better, are capable of evil, of cruelty to others. We allow our kettles--our environments, the world and the people around us--to dictate how we will act and react in everyday life.

Herod Antipas was a man who should have known better than to fall into evil. He had been schooled in God’s will through a thorough knowledge of the Hebrew Scriptures, what we know as the Old Testament. On top of that, Herod had good political reasons for avoiding evil: Though his family had no legitimate claim on the honor, they had for generations held themselves to be Israel’s royal family. It was so important to Herod Antipas to be seen as the “king of the Jews” that he had undertaken to build a new temple on Mount Zion, the same spot in Jerusalem where, a thousand years before, King Solomon had built the first temple. Both spiritual training and political common sense should have kept Herod from evil.

But our Gospel lesson for today tells us that Herod perpetrated a horrible evil: Ordering the execution of John the Baptizer, whose crime was speaking the Word of God.

How that happened, a story you know well, comprises most of the lesson. It comes in what the moviemakers would call a flashback. Herod gets reports about the miracle-working ministry of Jesus and is convinced that John has come back from the dead. We’re then told about the night Herod threw a birthday party for himself, how the daughter of his wife—the wife he had stolen from his brother, had danced for him, pleasing Herod a lot, how—probably a little more than drunk—Herod had promised the girl anything in exchange for the dance, how she had asked her mother what to ask for and was given the chilling reply, “The head of the prophet of God on a platter,” and how, in spite of what Herod knew to be right, he complied with the girl’s expressed wish.

It was an act of evil equal to anything you might hear about tonight on the Eleven O’Clock News. But unlike those news items, I believe that Mark’s flashback can help us to avoid falling into evil ourselves.

It does this by helping us to see that evil happens, first of all, when we want what we want more than what we want God wants. That was Herod’s problem. He wanted to be respected more than he wanted to honor God.

That can happen to us, too. Years ago, a man came to see me and explained how he bilked his company for thousands of dollars and got himself fired. I tried to understand how this otherwise upright man fell into this evil. “Did you tell yourself that the company was dishonest, so you could justify stealing from it?” I asked him. “No,” he told me. “I just knew what I wanted and saw stealing as the way to get it. I just forgot all about God.”

Evil also happens when we’re more concerned with how we appear than with who we are. Herod kept his vow to his wife's daughter because he didn’t want to seem like a welcher to his guests.

A pastor I worked with while I was in seminary taught me a valuable lesson. One week, he made a huge mistake, one that the congregation needn’t have known about, not a sin, but a failure to make a deadline which cost the church some money. The first thing that pastor did the following Sunday morning during the announcements was stand up and apologize. If that pastor had worried about appearances, he wouldn’t have said a word. But he was willing to admit his imperfections and gained credibility for it.

Evil happens when we ignore the Word of God. Herod, in spite of the judgment against his actions he could hear in John’s preaching, liked to listen to it. He knew that John’s words were from God. Yet, at his birthday party, he turned a deaf ear to God’s Word.

It’s pretty clear then, that to avoid evil, we need to keep God’s will foremost in our priorities, be more focused on our character than our status, and more attentive to God’s Word than we are to the push to selfishness that exists within us and around us.

But that still leaves us with a question: What’s in it for us?

At the end of our Gospel lesson, after all, Herod was still alive, still on his throne, and John’s body was taken away by his disciples for burial. Herod had caved into evil. John had remained faithful to God.

What’s in it for us when we resist evil?

Of course, there’s the obvious answer…and the true one. Those who faithfully seek to follow the God we know in Jesus Christ will, in spite of our sins and failings, spend eternity with God.

But there are more immediate rewards for those who commit themselves to keeping hold of Christ’s hand and resisting the temptation to sin. They’re mentioned in our lesson from Ephesians for today. We’re given, we’re told “every spiritual blessing.” Herod went to bed on the night he killed John the Baptizer knowing that he had killed an innocent, that he had done evil. That reality, I believe, haunted him and he felt utterly alone. (In fact, one of the words for sin in the New Testament Greek has the idea of being so turned in on oneself so far that one is alienated from God and everybody else. When we allow evil to control us, we are alone with our sins.)

Unlike Herod Antipas, John the Baptizer lived and died with the certainty that, even in the midst of things he couldn’t and didn’t fully understand, in resisting evil, in seeking to follow God faithfully, he had a Lord, a Friend, and an Advocate Who would never desert him, not even beyond the gates of death. The simple truth is that God is present for all who want God around.

She was dying and I visited her in the hospital. "Are you angry with God?" I asked her. "I was at first," she answered honestly. "But then I remembered that He's right here with me. Somehow that helped me."

It can help us too. It makes resisting evil worth it. Amen

Tweets on This Sunday's Bible Lessons

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A Look at This Sunday's Bible Lessons (January 4, 2009)

Each week, I try to present a few thoughts on the Bible lessons appointed for the following Sunday's worship at Saint Matthew Lutheran Church in Logan, Ohio, where I'm the pastor. Since we follow a lectionary associated with the Church Year, these comments might help others get ready for worship, too.

Second Sunday of Christmas
January 4, 2009

This Sunday's Bible Lessons:
Jeremiah 31:7-14
Psalm 147:12-20
Ephesians 1:3-14
John 1:10-18

Prayer of the Day:
Almighty God, You have filled all the earth with the light of Your incarnate Word. By Your grace empower us to reflect Your light in all that we do, through Jesus Christ, our Savior and Lord, Who lives and reigns with You and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen

General Comments:
1. The Christmas Season continues on the Church calendar. The season ends January 6, Epiphany Day. Epiphany, falling the day after "the twelfth day of Christmas," commemorates the arrival of the magicians (magi, astrologers) bringing their gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh to the infant Christ.

2. The Bible lessons during the short Christmas Season emphasize God's past promises of reconciliation to ancient Israel, the fulfillment of those promises in the Messiah Jesus, the implications of God becoming human, and the promises of the complete realization of God's kingdom in Christ.

Jeremiah 31:7-14
1. Our lesson from Jeremiah comes from chapter 31, of this Old Testament book, a chapter important for Lutherans because Jeremiah 31:31-34, is always the Old Testament lesson for Reformation Sunday celebrations in October. It's a chapter in which Jeremiah spoke of the restoration of Israel following a sad cycle of treachery to God and consequent imprisonment by foreign conquerors.

2. Jeremiah descended from a prophet who had incurred the wrath of King Solomon long years before. Abiathar was banished to his ancestral home of Anothoth, a few miles from Jerusalem, but far from palace life.

Jeremiah began his ministry in 627BC and continued for more than forty years.

As explained by the editors of The New Oxford Annotated Bible (Revised Standard Version):

Jeremiah is much concerned with rewards and punishments, the recompense for good and evil, faithfulness and obedience [to God]...He criticized Judah [the Southern Kingdom, composed of a portion of the former Israel, which broke up shortly following the reign of Solomon] for its worship of gods other than the LORD, with all the attendant evils in cult and daily life. God's covenant people must return to him. The judgment must come, but the ominous future (later, the unhappy present) would be replaced by a new and more enduring relationship with God.

3. In the lesson for this Sunday, Jeremiah says that following his people's exile to conqueror Babylon, there would be a restoration. The exiled slaves will return to their promised land. Unlike the first exodus, there will be ready supplies of water along the way. Also unlike that first exodus, which saw God's people following a circuitous route, the returning exiles will come by "a straight path."

God's reason for providing an easy way home may be that, unlike the whiny group God led from Egypt, the descendants He will lead from exile understand their need of God and the futility and stupidity of relying on anyone or anything but God. God had lots of lessons to teach the ancient Hebrews; by the time God led the exiles back to Israel, they presumably, had learned the lessons of mature faith.

4. Jeremiah prophesies a time of restoration when the harvests will be plentiful. In v.14, he speaks of even the priests having plenty. Old Testament law said that the people were to give a portion of their produce to the priests, who, in turn, would be freed to focus full time on their priestly duties.

Psalm 147:12-20
1. Last Sunday's psalm, Psalm 148, was the middle of the five final songs of the Old Testament's worship book. Each begins and ends with, "Hallelujah!," a Hebrew word meaning, "Praise the Lord!"

This Sunday's psalm is another from that grouping. Like Jeremiah, it praises the God of all creation for His regard for His chosen people. Israel was unique among the nations, the people to Whom God revealed His gracious nature, preparing it to become, through His Son, a light to all the nations.

Ephesians 1:3-14
1. Those who claim, as many modern scholars do, that Ephesians wasn't written by the apostle Paul, have a major problem to resolve when it comes to these verses. The entire passage is one sentence, consistent with the undisputed writings of Paul.

2. The lesson from Jeremiah talked about the restoration of God's Old Testament people. This lesson assures us that in Christ, Jews and Gentiles who hope in Christ are heirs of God's pledge to set Christ's followers free of sin and death.

John 1:10-18
This is the latter part of the prologue to John's Gospel. John employs modes of thought and allusions to both Greek philosophy and the Old Testament. It affirms that the foundational, energizing Word of the universe--God Himself--entered the world.

He came, in fact, to His chosen people and most of them, along with the Romans, supposedly representing the most sophisticated of the Gentiles, didn't recognize Jesus for Who He was.

But, John says, some could see in Jesus the overabundant amplitude of God's grace and receive it through Him.

I love verse 17. Here's my Daniels caveman paraphrase:

Sure, Moses was the lawgiver. That's no small thing. The law God gives through Moses teaches us what human beings do if they want to be human. But grace and truth, the things that turn us from enemies to friends and children of God, the things that pour life into our otherwise dead and dormant frames, those truly big deals, come only from Jesus the Messiah.