The Beginning

[Here's the message from this past Sunday's worship services from Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio. You'll also find live-stream video of both worship services. (I personally feel that the sermon at the second service went better than the one at the first.)]

Mark 1:1-8

Last Sunday, as we began the season of Advent, we talked about the End. Today, we talk about the Beginning.

Mark opens the gospel lesson for today by saying, “The beginning of the good news about Jesus the Messiah [or, the Christ, God’s Anointed One], the Son of God…” (Mark 1:1)

In these few words, Mark does several things.

First, he gives you the title of the book that the Holy Spirit has inspired him to write. I’m convinced that if Mark were here with us right now, he would be horrified to learn that we refer to his book as “the Gospel of Mark.” Mark is not the Gospel. He’s not the good news. Mark presents the good news of Jesus, even if it’s helpful to refer to the Gospel of Mark to distinguish it from the other three books that tell us about Jesus. But truly, this book is about Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection.

From Mark’s perspective, his whole narration of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection is “The Beginning of the good news [or Gospel] about Jesus the Christ…” Even at the end of Mark’s book, the Gospel, the saving good news that Jesus, the Son of God, second Person of the Trinity, has died to take God’s wrath for sin and sinners onto Himself, then rose from the dead to tear open eternity with God for all who repent and believe, is just the beginning of what Jesus’ Gospel will do.

This Gospel will keep going, bringing new beginnings to all who believe, until Jesus returns.

But in his opening verse–”The beginning of the good news about Jesus”--Mark also tells you that Jesus didn’t just spring out of nowhere unexpectedly. Jesus was promised long ago.

The beginning of the gospel goes all the way back to the Garden of Eden, God said that One would come Who, on behalf of us all, would crush evil underfoot to give us life. (Genesis 3:15)

And we see that promise repeatedly in the Old Testament. Job lived about the same time as Abraham, two-thousand years before the birth of Jesus, and kept trusting in God when he suffered unbearable horrors. He confessed his faith in God to his fickle friends and said, “I know that my redeemer lives, and that in the end he will stand on the earth. And after my skin has been destroyed, yet in my flesh I will see God…” (Job 19:25-27)

The Gospel began then, when God, His heart broken over the refusal of the first humans to keep trusting in Him, wanting to be gods themselves, issued His promises–His good news or gospel promises–of restoration, forgiveness, and life through patriarchs, preachers, prophets, and ordinary believers.

We hear this promise to us again in this morning’s Old Testament lesson. God, through Isaiah, who lived 700 years before Jesus’ birth, delivers promises of the Savior to come, saying of Him, “He tends his flock like a shepherd: He gathers the lambs in his arms and carries them close to his heart…” (Isaiah 40:11)

Back in today’s gospel lesson, Mark quotes two Old Testament passages to describe the beginning of the unveiling of the Gospel about Jesus, the anointed King of kings, Who is also God the Son. He cites God’s promise from Malachi: “I will send my messenger ahead of you, who will prepare your way…” (Malachi 3:1) Then, from Isaiah: “a voice of one calling in the wilderness, ‘Prepare the way for the Lord, make straight paths for him.’” (Isaiah 40:3)

So, not only do the prophets foretell the coming of the Messiah, but they also foretell the coming of the forerunner who would prepare for the revelation of the Messiah, the Savior.

And here we come to the crux of what Mark is telling us today. The Gospel of new life with God that never ends begins to come to the whole world, Gentiles as well as Jews, when this strange man who dresses like the Old Testament prophet Elijah–who wears “clothing made of camel’s hair…[and eats] locusts and wild honey” not the kind of person you’d likely invite to the Christmas party–the Gospel begins to come to us when John the Baptizer starts his ministry.

Mark says that John “appeared in the wilderness, preaching a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins…” (Mark 1:4)

Now, if you think I’ve duped you with a bunch of talk about good news and God’s love for you only to start talking about repentance and are thinking of checking out of whatever else I have to say, you may misunderstand what repentance is. So, hear me out, please.

Repentance does entail sorrow for our sin. But if you think it’s all about wearing a solemn face, putting on sackcloth and ashes, or crying tears for sins you enjoyed and will only regret if you have to, you need to know that repentance is more than grief over wrongdoing.

As a boy, I started taking trumpet lessons. My cousin Gary, who was about fifteen years older than me, had been a talented trumpet player, gave me his trumpet. I did well practicing. At first. But one weekend, I left the trumpet at school and when Mr. Barnard, the band director, asked me if I’d practiced on Saturday or Sunday, I lied, telling him I had. He then produced my trumpet. It happened that day that Gary was at our house and came to the school with my mom to pick me up. Mr. Barnard went with me to the car to tell my mom about my failure to practice and about my lie.

I was filled with sorrow, not so much because I got caught, but because I hadn’t wanted to disappoint my cousin. Repentance begins with sorrow over disappointing the One Who gave you life and, through His death and resurrection, gave you new life.

But the repentance to which God calls us through prophets like John the Baptist and through His Word today doesn’t end in sorrow. Mark tells us today that John’s preaching brought throngs of people into the wilderness to hear his call to repent. Then Mark tells us, “Confessing their sins, they were baptized by him in the Jordan River.” (Mark 1:5) They confessed their sins.

Martin Luther writes in The Small Catechism that “confession consists of two parts. One is that we confess our sins and the other is that we receive absolution, or forgiveness, from the confessor as from God Himself, in no way doubting, but firmly believing that our sins are thereby forgiven before God in heaven.”

I was called to a hospital ER one night when a man who had been attending the church I served was found by a friend, just as he was about to take his own life. For all kinds of reasons, he was riddled by guilt, fear, and self-loathing. When he saw me, he begged me to go away at first. He couldn’t believe that God could love or forgive him. But over time, this man who had heard the gospel many times, and would, like us all, need to hear it in the word spoken, and read and need to receive it in Holy Communion would begin to believe that the gospel was for him too. He could accept that he too was a child of God for whom Jesus shed his blood and rose to open up life with God, both now and in eternity, to him.

John the Baptizer didn’t come into the world to lay an eternal guilt trip on us, friends. The Old Testament Hebrew word for repent is shuv, meaning turn around. The New Testament Greek word for repent is metanoia, meaning to have one’s mind changed.

John the Baptist came to bring the Word from God that will first bring us to sorrow for sin and then turn us around, change our minds, enabling us to see that God is not our enemy, but our best Friend.

God hates our sin and all that it does to us. Sin brings death, bloodshed, contention, hatred, selfishness, greed: all the things the bedevil and kill us. We need God’s forgiveness for sin, given to us freely in Christ. But when, through His Word and the Sacraments, the God we know in Jesus works repentance in us, He turns us from sorrow to the joys of life, freedom, reconciliation, and a hope beyond the grave that spills its blessings and wonders on each day we live in this world.

God’s Gospel promise is for you today: “Return to me...and I will return to you…” (Zechariah 1:3)

So Jesus says: “The kingdom of God has come near [in Jesus Himself]. Repent and believe the good news!” (Mark 1:15)

Repentance isn’t something you and I have to do to please an angry God. It is a gift from God, given in His Word. Through His Word, He repents you, turning you away from separation from God and others. Repentance prepares you to receive another gift from God, the forgiveness of sins and everlasting life with God. As God turns us to Jesus Christ, we know, as God’s Word promises, “There is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus…” (Romans 8:1)

In Jesus Christ, your sin condition, the condition that causes you to think of yourself over God and others, and all the sins you’ve ever committed because of that condition, are totally and forever forgiven, forgotten, destroyed, done away with.

As we live in daily repentance and faith, the old self dies and the new self rises to live with God “in everlasting righteousness, innocence, and blessedness.”

And that, friends, for all of us, is “the beginning of the good news about Jesus the Messiah, the Son of God,” a gracious, loving beginning that will never end for anyone who daily takes shelter in Jesus, our only King, our only God, and our only Savior. Amen

Dressed and Blessed

[Here's the message from this past Sunday's worship with the people and friends of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio, as well as live stream video of both worship services.]

Matthew 22:1-14

When Ann and I were first married, her stepfather belonged to the Columbus Männerchor. The Männerchor started as a German singing club. But for those who don’t sing, it’s primarily a social club with a very good restaurant. Members ask their families to have dinner with them there. But, at least in those days, there was a stipulation: Men had to wear jackets and ties to enter. Without a jacket and tie, you were on the outside looking in.

Near the end of the parable Jesus tells us in today’s gospel lesson, Matthew 22:1-14, a king who is throwing a wedding banquet for his son spots one man who, unlike all the other guests, wasn’t wearing the proper wedding garment. At that, Jesus says, “[The king]...asked, ‘How did you get in here without wedding clothes, friend?’ The man was speechless. Then the king told the attendants, ‘Tie him hand and foot, and throw him outside, into the darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.’” (Matthew 22:12-13) The wedding crasher was on the outside looking in.

Jesus’ parable, like many of those He tells, is about the eternal Kingdom of God: His Church.

Jesus’ Word for us this morning, encompassing both the parable and a Word of summary, can be divided into three parts. Together, these three parts tell us: about the sorry history of God’s ancient people, Israel, not to be confused with the contemporary nation-state that bears that name; the sorry history of the whole human race, including Jews and Gentiles; and, most importantly, God’s unwavering desire to save the whole human race, Jews and Gentiles, from sin, death, and eternal separation from God, and to bring all people into His eternal Kingdom!

Jesus tells about a king who plans a wedding banquet for his son. In Jesus’ telling, the king is God the Father and the Son is God the Son, Jesus Himself.

The human race, you know, fell into sin and separation from God, back in the garden of Eden. Each of us has inherited the condition of sin and the desire to be our own gods.

But at the very moment sin entered the human story, God gave a promise. In Genesis, He told the serpent that He would send a Savior born of woman who “will crush your head.” (Genesis 3:15)

God’s desire is that all people will be saved from sin and death. “Do I take any pleasure in the death of the wicked? declares the Sovereign Lord [in Ezekiel 18:23]...Rather, am I not pleased when they turn from their ways and live?”

Throughout the Old Testament, God referred to the Church of those days–the people or the nation of Israel–as HIs bride.

In the New Testament, Jesus and the apostles speak of the Israel of these days–that is, the Church, the New Testament Israel–as His bride.

In Revelation, the apostle John is given a glimpse of the new heaven and the new earth that Jesus will bring from heaven when He returns to earth and is told about the Church, “Come, I will show you the bride, the wife of the Lamb.” (Revelation 21:9)

And for His Church–the fellowship of forgiven sinners eternally wed to Jesus, God has long promised an eternal banquet, as our first lesson for today, from Isaiah, reminded us.

Even today, before we die and before the day when Jesus will raise us from the dead, we can come to the table and enjoy a foretaste of this banquet when Jesus comes to us and says, “This is My body given for you…This is My blood shed for you.”

The ancient Israelites repeatedly rebuffed the invitations of God to feast with Him, to live with Him. They followed other gods, sacrificed their children to false deities, and engaged in injustice.

God, the broken-hearted husband, called them to repentant faith. They would return for short periods of time and then betray God again. The behavior of God’s people in those days (and of many in the Church today), are represented in Jesus’ parable by those who paid no attention to or even killed the Old Testament prophets, the New Testament preachers, and the ordinary Christians of history who have shared Jesus’ call to turn from sin and death and to follow Him and live with God.

A man I know, concerned that a good friend of his hadn’t been in worship for a while asked why. The friend said that while he wanted Jesus and Jesus’ salvation, he didn’t agree with the Bible’s teaching that sexual intimacy is for marriage between a husband and a wife only. He refused his friend’s invitation to come to Jesus in repentance and faith and to come to Christ’s table because he insisted on believing what the world was teaching him rather than what God teaches.

This past week, I listened to a podcast interview with Paul McCartney about his song, Let It Be. That song, you know, was inspired by a dream in which McCartney saw his mother, named Mary, come to him and reassure him that everything was going to be OK and he should just “let it be.” McCartney said that some people found a spiritual dimension to his song and that pleased him. He remembered that his mother had seen to his being baptized and that pleased him too, because she cared about saving his soul. But then, McCartney asserted, that all the religions of the world are the same.

If you think only of “the Law,” laws like, ”Do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” McCartney’s statement is true. All religions pretty much agree with what’s right and what’s wrong. But that doesn’t mean that all religions are the same. Rather, it’s a testimony to the fact that God’s Law is written on every human heart.

But we will never love others just by being told to love others. Neither will we ever love God by being told to love God. The Law only tells you what’s wrong with you; it doesn’t tell you how what’s wrong with you can get fixed!

The only religion in the world that can offer a fix to our failure to love God and to love others is Biblical, Christian faith. In this faith, God came to earth and offered His sinless life on a cross to take the punishment for sin that you and I deserve and then engages in what has been called “the happy exchange”: God gives us His righteousness and we give Him our sin; He gives us His life and we give Him our death.

The Gospel only happens through the Christian faith through which the Savior says, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through Me.” (John 14:6) We want to fudge on that and create our own religion and our own righteousness. But if we insist on doing that, we will stand naked in our sin before God on judgment day.

In Jesus’ parable, the King, God, sent his army and had those who rejected His invitation destroy the people who met his invitations to his son’s feast with rejection and murder. This is the fate that will befall all who insist on facing God in their own supposed righteousness instead of taking refuge in Jesus Christ as their God, Savior, and only hope for grace in this life and eternity with God in the next.

But God our King isn’t easily discouraged when it comes to saving us from ourselves, from sin and death. He is the God who “wants all people to be saved and to come to a knowledge of the truth.” (1 Timothy 2:4)

So, He sends out more servants–people like you and me who God sends into the world each week to share the gospel of forgiveness and everlasting life through faith in Jesus Christ–to invite those the world regards as “the bad as well as the good,” to come to His Son’s banquet.

And so Jesus pictures the heavenly banquet hall, filled with people invited by God to know the eternal salvation earned by His Son Jesus when He died on the cross and rose from the dead for sinners: street people, drug addicts, sports heroes, corporate CEOs, celebrities, nobodies, people of every color and from every walk of life, all of whom who have heard the inviting Gospel Word about Jesus with glad and grateful hearts.

These are the people, repentant believers in Jesus Christ, who are in His Church and will be in His Church for eternity.

This is the kingdom of God, which The Small Catechism tells us about when explaining the second petition of the Lord’s Prayer, “Thy kingdom come”: “God’s kingdom comes when our heavenly Father gives us His Holy Spirit, so that by His grace we believe His holy Word...”

We can’t decide to follow Jesus; it’s foreign to our sinful nature to follow anyone or anything other than our selfish impulses.

But, by the power of the Holy Spirit, when the Word of God comes to us in water, in bread, in wine, or in the word heard or read, God creates faith in us, we can become part of the heavenly banquet, the Kingdom of God. This kingdom is what we’re all part of when God’s Word comes to us and by its power and the love, forgiveness, and newness it brings, enables us to say, “I believe in Jesus Christ. I believe that Jesus is my Lord.”

All of which leads us back to the Columbus Männerchor. It turns out that they didn’t want people to be left on the outside looking in. If a man showed up without a coat and tie, as I accidentally did once, they ushered him into a large room with a  collection of coats and ties of various sizes they could wear while they were there.

God is even more gracious than the Männerchor!

He freely gives us the proper dress for entering into His eternal Church, His everlasting Kingdom.

Do you know what that proper dress is?

It’s Jesus.

It is Jesus alone.

Jesus is the One in Whom all who believe will be dressed and fitted for everlasting life with God.

Your good works or fine character won’t get you into God’s Kingdom.

Nor will your good name or your good reputation.

Only Jesus.

The apostle Paul tells us to “clothe yourselves with the Lord Jesus Christ, and do not think about how to gratify the desires of the flesh…” (Romans 13:14)

Friends, I want to give you a tip. You remember in the parable when the king confronted the man not wearing wedding clothes, asked him how he’d gotten into the banquet hall, and the man had nothing to say.

Ann and I have our burial plots purchased at Sunset Cemetery in Columbus. When Jesus comes back, He’s going to raise us and all the dead. He’s going to judge the living and the dead. The new heaven and the new earth will descend to heaven and only those dressed appropriately will be able to enter this place of eternal life with God.

Friends, when Jesus raises you from the dead, looks at you, and wonders if you’re wearing the right attire, this is what you can say, “Jesus. I am not worthy myself to be in your eternal banquet. But Jesus Christ has claimed me at the font, He has fed me with His Word, He has fed me His body and blood, and He has covered me with His righteousness and grace and Christ is eternally worthy! Jesus is my wedding garment!”

And all who are clothed in Jesus Christ will enter eternity with God. You can trust that to be true.

Amen

[PS: I'm grateful to God for the inspiring exegetical work done on this text by Steve Paulson, John Hoyum, Jeffrey A. Gibbs, Rick Serina, and John Wohlrabe, Jr.]

The God Who Never Forgets You

[Below you'll find both live stream videos of yesterday's Sunday worship services from Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio and the text of the prepared message.]





Matthew 4:1-11

Years ago, a man shared with a group of us what his dad told him every time he borrowed the car keys when he was a teenager. His dad said: “Remember who you are.”

Those seem like wise words to me because it’s so easy in the daily challenges of life to forget who we are and who we’re meant to be and to become someone else.

The Word of God teaches that we all have a call, a vocation. For the Christian, our vocation has less to do with our jobs than with who we are and who we are called by God to be, whatever our jobs or stations in life.

The call we all have as disciples of Jesus Christ is given to us at the moment of our baptisms when, after we are washed in the water connected to God’s Word and God’s promise, Christ’s cross is marked on our foreheads, and we are given our vocation, our identity, “child of God.” “Mark James,” the pastor said at my baptism, “child of God, you have been sealed by the Holy Spirit and marked with the cross of Christ forever.” Pastors said similar things when you were baptized, whenever you were baptized.

As Christians, our vocation, our call, is to be God’s children, daily turning to the One Who has saved us in repentance and faith and through our faith in Jesus, acting as God’s light in a dark world.

We Christians aren’t the first God called children or sons of God. Moses once told Egypt’s king, Pharaoh: “This is what the Lord says: ‘Israel is my firstborn son,  and I told you, “Let my son go, so he may worship me.’” (Exodus 4:22-23)

History shows though that Israel failed in its calling as God’s son. The people of Israel constantly forgot who they were. They chased after false gods, temporary pleasures, worldly power. They became diverted from their mission as God’s children to be God’s light to the nations.

Our first lesson for this morning shows us that it was always God’s intention to send a Messiah into the world in order to save the human race and the universe our sin has impacted. God told the serpent–the devil, “...I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers; he will crush your head, and you will strike his heel.” (Genesis 3:15)

Jesus, the Messiah, was to fulfill the call that Israel--and no one else among we sinful human beings--ever could fulfill: the call of being the perfectly obedient Son of God, Who by going to the cross as God the Father willed, would crush the power of Satan over all of us.

Our gospel lesson for today starts right after Jesus was baptized in the Jordan River. There, “a voice from heaven said of Jesus, ‘This is my Son, whom I love; with him I am well pleased.’” (Matthew 3:17) Jesus was given His call to be the obedient Son of God. Abruptly, Matthew 4:1 then tells us, “Then Jesus was led by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil.”  

Jesus is Lord of heaven and earth, the second Person of the Holy Trinity, but He is also a human being, though a sinless one, Who did not inherit the condition of sin we all have inherited from Adam and Eve. Jesus had to take on our humanity, becoming the perfect human sacrifice for our sins, paying the debt we owe for failing in our call to be children of God. We sinful human beings don’t want God to have authority over us. But Jesus, as the Son of God, lives under the authority of the Father and the Holy Spirit.

So the Holy Spirit led Jesus into the wilderness for the express purpose of Jesus being tempted by the devil. Like ancient Israel, who God had called His son, Jesus, just proclaimed God’s Son at the Jordan, goes into the wilderness. In Jesus’ forty days, He was tempted in the same ways that ancient Israel was tempted. But with a different result: Jesus resists every temptation, fulfilling His call as the Son of God.

Jesus is tempted in three ways by the devil. 

Knowing that Jesus is hungry, the devil tells Jesus to turn stones into bread. Jesus cites words from Deuteronomy: “It is written: ‘Man shall not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God.’” (Matthew 4:4)

Next, the devil tells Jesus that He should throw Himself from the top of the Temple in Jerusalem to show people how the Father takes care of Him. Jesus refuses, saying, “Do not put the Lord your God to the test.” (Matthew 4:7) 

Finally, the devil shows Jesus all the kingdoms of the world and says that Jesus can have them all without suffering, scorn, rejection, cross, death, or grave, if Jesus will just worship him. “Away from me, Satan! For it is written: ‘Worship the Lord your God, and serve him only.’” (Matthew 4:10) Although the devil continued to try luring Jesus away from His call as our Savior, and still tempts people today, the devil knew at that moment that the jig was up. Jesus defeated the devil in the wilderness and would finally, definitively defeat Him at the cross by obediently remembering Who He was and that His call was and is to save us.

We often read this account and think of it as a how-to guide: “how to evade temptation by knowing God’s Word.” I've even preached on this lesson that way.

Being steeped in God’s Word, as Jesus was, will help us to avoid the temptation to individual sins: adultery, cursing, thievery, gluttony, covetousness, murder, idolatry, not worshiping with God’s people, or lying.

But if we think that’s why the Holy Spirit drove Jesus into the wilderness to be tempted, we miss the point. In Jesus' temptations, God is not telling us to so much remember who we are, but to remember Who Jesus is.

You see, if Jesus came into this world only to be a good example for us, He could have skipped the cross. The temptation to sin and sin itself isn’t something that we can manage by following “three steps to holy living.” Jesus isn’t a self-help guru. To think so underestimates both how helpless and hopeless we are in the face of both our sin and our temptation. It ignores how deadly, how eternally fatal, sin is! The Bible says that “the wages of sin is death” and we are born in infinite debt to God for our sin.

People who think, after reading the account of Jesus’ temptations, that they’re prepared to face off against the temptations of the devil, the world, and their (our) sinful selves are sitting ducks, bound for condemnation and hell no matter how firm their resolutions to walk away from temptation and sin.

We dare not face off against temptation in our own power!

Even if your intentions are good, the devil will drag you down to hell with him.

So will the sinful world.

So will your sinful, good-intentioned self.

The apostle Peter reminds us, “Your enemy the devil prowls around like a roaring lion looking for someone to devour.” (1 Peter 5:8)

Sin is so deadly that it required a Savior facing our temptations and living in total sinless righteousness to die on a cross to set us free from its power to eternally separate us from God. We can only resist the temptation to sin and we can only know that our sins–the sins we commit every day because we are human–are forgiven as we turn repeatedly to Jesus.

Jesus turned back the devil in the wilderness and at the cross by remembering Who He was--He remembered His call, so that He could save you from the sins we all commit that distort us into becoming something other than what He died and rose to make us, children of God.

So, when we are tempted, we can take refuge in the Savior Who renders the devil, the sinful world, and our sinful selves powerless over us!

Jesus remembered that He was the Son of God for you. He willingly became one of us, bore the rejection of the world, flogging, hatred, condemnation, and crucifixion because He never forgot you.

He never forgot that you need to be saved from sin, death, and the grave.

He always remembered His vocation.

In Jesus, the preacher of the New Testament book of Hebrews says, “we do not have a high priest who is unable to empathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are—yet he did not sin.” (Hebrews 4:15) 

The Savior Who went to the wilderness and the cross and now sits at the right hand of the Father, always remembers you.

It’s in Him and Him alone that we find forgiveness and the grace to be who we could never be by our own willpower or pious resolutions: children of God.

Throughout this Lenten season and each day of life, friends turn to Jesus.

He will never forget nor leave defenseless in the face of sin and death those who turn to Him in trust. Amen