The Call to Reach In (Part 4, Reach Up, Reach In, Reach Out Lenten Series)

[Below you'll find the text of part four of our Lenten series at Living Water Lutheran Church, as well as live stream video of the devotional worship during which it was shared. God bless you.]

Matthew 16:13-18

John 13:34-35

Tonight, as we continue to consider the mission of Living Water Lutheran Church, we turn to the second element of our “Reach up. Reach in. Reach out.” summary. We focus on reaching in.

Christ’s Church is meant to be more than a fellowship in which, responding to God’s grace in Christ, we reach up to God in worship, prayer, praise, and thanksgiving.

And Christ’s Church is meant to be more than a fellowship from which God sends us to reach out with the good news of new and everlasting life by grace through faith in Jesus Christ.

Christ’s Church is also meant to be a fellowship in which we sinners who have been saved by grace through faith in Jesus, reach in to each other with encouragement, prayer, and an occasional fit word of correction or counsel.

Many people who call themselves Christians see the reach in element as an unnecessary add-on to their being faith life. They tire of the messiness involved when you bring together people who have different ideas, gifts, and personalities in a local congregation.

They recoil at the Biblical truth that we who have been made saints by grace through faith in Jesus are also still, and will be until our own deaths and resurrections, sinners. We drag our sinful selves with us right past the Baptismal font, which is why when we gather on Sunday mornings, we begin by, together, confessing our sins to God and receiving His Word of absolution, forgiveness.

Jesus tells us that there will always be counterfeit Christians within the Church–the weeds among the wheat–and that He will sort all that out on the day of His return. For some convinced of their righteous wheatiness though, this isn’t enough. They dismiss the Church as being filled “with a bunch of hypocrites” and are unconvinced when we invite them by saying, “And there’s always room for one more.”

For some, being a Christian is mere intellectual assent. “I believe Jesus died for my sins and rose from the dead. So why do I need to go to church?” these people ask.

One woman went round and round with me recently on her insistence that because she believed in Jesus, she didn’t need a church. She told me, “Jesus never went to church.” But when I pointed out to her that Jesus regularly participated in the life of local synagogues, whether in his home village of Nazareth or in the towns to which she traveled, she said, “You see. He went to synagogues, not to a church.” I think she missed my point.

For Jesus, God the Son, Who bore the punishment for our sin on the cross and rose from the dead to bring the forgiveness of sin and everlasting life to all, to be received by faith in Him, His Church is no mere add-on to Christian discipleship. It is essential to Christian discipleship.

We read two lessons from the Gospels tonight.

In the first, from Matthew 16, Jesus has that famous conversation with Peter and the other disciples about Who Jesus is. When Simon Peter says that Jesus is “the Messiah, the Son of the living God,” Jesus tells him, “I tell you that you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not overcome it.” (Matthew 16:18)  

This is one of the most misconstrued passages in Scripture. Jesus is not saying Peter is the rock on which He will build His Church. We know that Peter was not a rock that floated; he sank! Jesus is saying that the bedrock on which He builds His Church is the confession that Jesus Christ, crucified and risen, God the Son, the King of kinds, is Lord.

We confess Jesus as Lord not because we’ve been intellectually convinced, although the life of faith isn’t opposed to the life of the mind.

We confess Jesus as Lord because, through the administration of Christ’s means of grace–the Word and the Sacraments–the Holy Spirit has given us faith in Christ.

It’s in the Church and in the Church alone that these means of grace are administered.

And that leads us to our second Gospel lesson for tonight, taken from John 13. There Jesus says, “A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another.” (John 13:34)

Now, we human beings are no good at keeping the first laws God gave to us, embodied in the Ten Commandments and summarized by Jesus in the great commandment: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’...and…Love your neighbor as yourself…” (Matthew 22:36-40) We’ve proven pretty lousy at doing that. So, what makes Jesus think that giving us an even more stringent commandment, that we love our fellow believers with the same passion He showed by dying on a cross for us, is going to work?

Well, remember, no law can save us. No matter how strenuously or devotedly we commit ourselves to loving our fellow Christians as Christ has loved us, we will always fall short.

Only the Gospel–the good news that we are justified in God’s eyes by the grace God gives to us in Jesus–can we be obedient to this command.
As we live in the fellowship of Christ’s Church, Christ living in us by our Baptism, His presence in us quickened within us as we hear His Word and receive Christ’s body and blood, the love of Christ will be manifest in us, often without our even knowing it.

Sometimes, the most important thing we have to offer one another is our availability. When we don’t know what to say, when we can’t figure things out either, but are there in the name of Jesus with a sister or brother in Christ to remind them that Christ died and rose for them and cares for them.

You, friends, are Christ’s chosen conduits of encouragement and counsel to your sisters and brothers in Christ, to the person sitting next to you tonight.

You are as essential to his or her walk with Jesus as the Bible or the Sacraments.

And your sisters and brothers in Christ are every bit as essential to your discipleship.

God has made us for fellowship with Him and with others in His Church.

How often I have dragged my sorry old self to worship on Sunday mornings, conscious of my sins and failings, not feeling like being in worship, not wanting to preach or teach or preside at the table, when you, my fellow recovering sinners, my fellow saints, have encouraged me, have helped me to see Jesus again, and my faith in Jesus is renewed.

In The Smalcald Articles, one of the basic confessional documents of Lutheranism, Martin Luther says that, “God is superabundantly generous in His grace.” He then enumerates five ways in which God delivers the grace and love of Jesus through the Church. The first four shouldn’t be too surprising to us. 

First, there’s the Word by which the forgiveness of our sin is preached.

Second, Baptism.

Third, Holy Communion, the Sacrament of the Altar.

Fourth, “through the power of the Keys,” the authorization Christ gives to His Church to withhold God’s forgiveness from the unrepentant and declare that forgiveness to those who turn from sin and turn to Christ.

And then, Luther mentions a fifth way that God delivers Christ and His Gospel to us in the Church: “...the mutual conversation and consolation of the brethren.”

Through Bible studies, small groups, visits with friends about to have surgery, cards sent to the grieving and the ill, time spent together in the hospitality room: These are ways in which we strengthen each other in our discipleship. Jesus promises, “where two or three gather in my name, there am I with them.” (Matthew 18:20)

We live in an era in which everybody’s sort of a free agent. Everybody seems wary of making commitments, whether it’s to churches, jobs, careers, marriages, families, children, and parents. We have an allergy to caring about each other because caring about each other can bring hassles.

But the Church is, if you will, Christ’s “hassle castle,” in which He invites us to participate so that in the messiness of life in this world, we encourage each other in the Gospel that God desperately loves us and gives us everlasting life through Christ! It’s something we need to be reminded of constantly. As you’ll remember Luther saying, “We need to hear the Gospel every day, because we forget it every day.” We become a means by which God delivers Christ’s Gospel to one another.

The fellowship of the Church or, as the Apostles’ Creed puts it, “the communion of saints,” is one means God the Holy Spirit uses to encourage us to keep following Jesus.

The reach in element of our mission is essential to our lives as Jesus’ disciples.

It’s as we reach in to each other in this fellowship that we remind one another, “Through Jesus, you are a child of God forever.” Amen

Being Church (Part 3, The Disciple's Life)

[This was shared this evening during midweek Lenten worship with the people of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio.]

John 13:34-35
Matthew 28:19-20
You hear people say it all the time: “I don’t need to be part of a church to be a Christian.” People say this because they don’t like...

• the messy business of being in relationship with others, 
• being accountable to others, or 
• being committed to working at making relationships grow. 

But when they say this to me, I don’t go into all of that. I simply tell them that while it may be theoretically possible to be a Christian without Christ’s Church, the Bible knows of no such possibility.

When Jesus and the New Testament writers speak of discipleship, the life of faith, it’s never as a solo proposition.

Even if, as Jesus says, we may have to choose Him over family members and friends, He does not call us to a “Jesus and me” relationship. Jesus calls us to a "Jesus and us" relationship. Jesus always calls us to be part of His body, the Church. He calls His disciples to be the Church.

Being the Church doesn’t mean that we’re part of a pack of automatons who think alike and never disagree. The New Testament has many examples of how the early Christians argued and disagreed with each other, even while Jesus lived and walked among them.

Remember how Jesus once caught the twelve apostles arguing over who among them was the greatest? (I can't imagine being caught having an argument over who's the greatest by Jesus!)

Or how James and John ticked off the other apostles by asking for special places in Jesus’ kingdom?

And how, after Jesus had dies, risen, and ascended into heaven, the Greek-speaking Christians and the Jewish Christians got into a dispute over whether one set of widows was being better treated than another?

Or how Paul and Barnabas split up their ministry team when Paul wouldn’t agree to take along a young pastor Barnabas wanted to take who Paul thought was unreliable?

And who can forget Paul reminiscing about a long-previously-resolved argument that he’d had with Peter? “When Cephas [Peter] came to Antioch,” Paul remembered, “I opposed him to his face, because he stood condemned.” (Galatians 2:11) (Way to let go of things, Paul!) While the two did resolve their dispute, there’s no record of Paul saying that later, he and Peter sang Kumbaya together.

When Jesus established His eternal salvation community, the Church, He fully anticipated that His people would sometimes disagree or even disappoint each other.

If the Church is Christ’s designated means for turning imperfect sinners into sanctified saints, you can bet that those people who, while on this earth, are simultaneously saints and sinners, will sometimes rub each other the wrong way.

That’s OK. That’s how we grow. “As iron sharpens iron,” Proverbs 27:17 tells us, “so one person sharpens another.”

Do you know what you call a couple or a family in which there is never disagreement? Dysfunctional.

The absence of disagreement in a church or the absence of a capacity to deal with disagreement in a healthy way indicates not that the people of a church love each other, but that they don’t care about the common life to which they have been called by the Holy Spirit. Who do you get angriest with: people you don't know or people you love?

A couple that refuses to deal healthfully with disagreements in their marriage demonstrates that they really don’t care about their marriage or each other.

The life of a disciple is other-minded. Within the fellowship of the Church, Christ seeks to set us free from all obsessions with ourselves--our desires, our will, our fears, our pride--to focus entirely on the God we know in Christ and His will for our lives and on others.

And so, Ephesians 4:6 urges Christian disciples, “Be angry and do not sin; do not let the sun go down on your anger…”(ESV)

Love, the love of God appropriated through daily reflection on God’s Word, daily prayer, and daily application of God’s Word to our lives, is the way to healthfully work out potential conflicts and to do the will of God. 1 John 4:20 puts it bluntly and truthfully: “Whoever claims to love God yet hates a brother or sister is a liar. For whoever does not love their brother and sister, whom they have seen, cannot love God, whom they have not seen.”

The bottom line is this: The Church, with its imperfect members and its imperfect pastors, is the indispensable means by which Christ brings His perfect, eternal kingdom to the world.

The Church is the people of God in and for the world who, through the power of God’s Word, the power of God’s Spirit, and the power of the Sacraments, are enabled to live for more than themselves to live:

• for God, 
• for sister and brother in Christ, 
• for the spiritually disconnected of the world. 

The only way to be disciples is to be the Church.

This is why the words of Jesus that we read a few moments ago are so important. They give us our marching orders as disciples and as the Church.

In John 13:34-35, Jesus gives a new commandment, new because in it, He doesn’t just command Christians to love others as we love ourselves. He says that our love for the sisters and brothers who make up the Church should go way beyond that low standard. Look at what Jesus says: “A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another: just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another. By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.” We are to love our fellow Christians the way Christ loved us: with suffering, self-sacrifice, and commitment.

But Jesus is clear that our fellowship as Christian disciples is not to be a closed circle.

Our love shouldn’t be confined to those who like us or we find companionable. (As Jesus says, “If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? [Matthew 5:46]) And by the way, how companionable do you think the apostle Paul was sometimes? Or Martin Luther?

Our love shouldn’t be confined to the fellowship of the Church. Jesus says that our love must incorporate those who aren’t yet His disciples. Matthew 28:19-20: “Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.”

Disciples, members of Christ’s body, the Church, refuse to withhold the gospel of new life for all who repent and believe in Jesus Christ from the world. Pastor Rick Warren memorably says that the church that cares nothing about making disciples is really telling the world to go to hell. May we never be that church!

If being the Church sounds daunting, good. It is. One day, by the grace of God, I hope to learn this truth.

Being part of Christ’s Church isn’t like being a member of the local wholesale club in which you pay your dues to derive benefits.

It’s not like joining the National Geographic Society where all you do is send them some money and get twelve months of glossy pictures from around the world.

To be the Church is to be a community of disciples called to a way of life that is impossible apart from the God we know in Jesus Christ: a life of love for God, fellow disciples, and the world, come what may.

Just as it’s impossible for a couple to fulfill their marriage vows apart from the help of the God we know in Jesus, it is equally impossible for us to be Christians without the grace of God we receive in Jesus.

To live this impossible life together, Christ has given us means of grace: repentance, the Word of God read, pondered, shared, savored with others, and proclaimed, and the Sacraments. And He's given us something else. Do you know what it is? He's given us one another. He's given us each other. Christ has given us His Church.

To be disciples, we must be the Church. More next week.

[I'm the pastor of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio.]

Freedom Through Christ's Indispensable Family

Galatians 6:1-10, 14-18
One of the most commonly overlooked aspects of Christian life today in North America and western Europe is this: Whenever and how we profess our faith in Christ, we are saying, “I am not in this alone. I’m part of the Church. I care about other believers. I’m accountable to other believers. I need other believers to live in the freedom Christ died to give me.”

We chafe under this kind of thinking as Americans. We like to think we’re self-sufficient.

But the fact is, we’re all dependent on countless other people. They produce the food we eat and guarantee its safety,  give us running water and electricity, make the cars we drive and the computers we use, and provide the medical care we need, and so on.

The notion that any of us is self-sufficient is a dangerous lie, dangerous because it makes us think that we don’t need God, when in fact, everything--even safe food, running water, cars and computers and medical care--ultimately comes from God.

The lie of self-sufficiency is even more dangerous within the Church. In fact, it’s demonic.

Romans 6:19-20 reminds believers that we are totally dependent on God for our lives and for the eternal life Christ gives to those who repent and believe in Him: “You are not your own; you were bought at a price. [A purchase Jesus made on the cross where He spent His life to save us.] Therefore honor God with your bodies.” (That means with our whole selves!)

And Jesus tells believers in John 15:5: “apart from Me, you can do nothing.”

We need the God revealed to us and the rest of the world in Jesus Christ.

But we also need and are called to sacrificially love those who make up Christ’s Church.

Jesus says to His Church: “ A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another.” And then, Jesus says: “By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.” [John 13:34-35] The credibility of Jesus and the Church’s message about new life for all who repent and believe in Jesus Christ depends on whether Christ’s Church sees itself, collectively and individually, as mutually-dependent, mutually-accountable sisters and brothers of faith in Jesus.

Romans 12:4-5, drives home the call to mutual dependency, telling the Church: “...just as each of us has one body with many members, and these members do not all have the same function, so in Christ we, though many, form one body, and each member belongs to all the others.”

The New Testament repeatedly refers to the Church as “the bride of Christ.” One truth we see from this metaphor is that the believer’s relationship to Christ and His Church is more important than the relationship of a husband and wife. Marriages end at the grave. But the Church endures for all eternity!

We Christians need each other and we are commanded to live in love with each other and in accountability to each other for the sake of Christ’s mission in the world.

But let's be honest: Whether among husband and wife, friends, family members, or the disciples who make up a Christian congregation, conflict happens.

And conflict isn’t inherently bad. Conflict can be creative and lead to new ways of people looking at things and relating to each other, if the parties are healthy, loving, and Christian toward one another.

Over the past several weeks, in this series called Freedom in Christ, we’ve been looking at the words the apostle Paul wrote to Christians in Galatia in about 49 AD. Paul wrote to correct a dangerous heresy, a false belief, that had taken root among some of the Galatian Christians. They believed, in effect, that Jesus’ death on the cross was insufficient to give those who repent and believe in Jesus life with God, that the men had to be circumcised and that all believers also had to add to it good works proscribed by Old Testament law.

There was a conflict in the churches at Galatia between those who believed what Jesus taught--that all who turn from sin and believe in Him are saved and have new, everlasting life--and those who believed that what they did was what saved them. Paul called one the life of the flesh and other, the life of the Spirit. Clearly, the two perspectives contradicted each other. There could be no compromise between them: one was of God and the other wasn’t. It was to correct those who had strayed from God’s truth that Paul had written this letter.

In today’s second, Galatians 6:1-10, 14-18, probably praying that the first sections of his letter had reminded those who had strayed what God’s truth and the way to life really were, Paul wrote to encourage all the Galatian Christians to repent, reconcile, and move on with their life as Christ’s people in the world.

Take a look at our lesson, please. Paul writes: “Brothers and sisters, if someone is caught in a sin, you who live by the Spirit should restore that person gently. But watch yourselves, or you also may be tempted. Carry each other’s burdens, and in this way you will fulfill the law of Christ. If anyone thinks they are something when they are not, they deceive themselves.”

Unrepentant sin on the part of just one Christian disciple in Christ’s Church has an impact on the whole Church. There may be times, then, when it becomes the responsibility of another member of the Church to approach the person engaging in unrepentant sin.

It isn’t easy. I’ve told before about the Christian I knew and respected who used God’s name to make exclamations or punctuate sentences. Finally, I asked, “Why do you use God’s name like that?” “I’m not cussing,” he said defensively. “No, you’re not cussing. But you are using God’s name for something other than prayer, praise, and thanksgiving. That disses His holiness.” The man thought for a moment and said, “You’re right.”

Now, listen: I didn't tell that story to paint myself a hero. (If you knew how much my knees were knocking when I confronted that brother in Christ, you'd know that I'm no hero!) But, hers my point in telling you that story: It was at the moment that I helped that man see the need for repentance for taking God’s name in vain though, that I was in the most danger as a Christian. Do you hear what I'm saying?

It was right for me to be concerned--in Paul’s words “to carry that fellow believer’s burdens”--about unrepented sin. Lovingly confronting him was a way to fulfill Christ’s law that I love others.

But had that little confrontation become an occasion for me to cave into self-righteous crowing, even within my own mind, I would have fallen into sin myself.

We’re to speak the truth in love to help our fellow believers hold onto Christ, not to make ourselves look or feel better than others.

Let’s slide down a few verses now, to verse 7, to see Paul’s warning against self-righteousness in dealing with conflicts and disagreements: “Do not be deceived: God cannot be mocked. A man reaps what he sows. Whoever sows to please their flesh, from the flesh will reap destruction; whoever sows to please the Spirit, from the Spirit will reap eternal life. Let us not become weary in doing good, for at the proper time we will reap a harvest if we do not give up.”

Earlier in Galatians, you’ll remember, Paul spent some time distinguishing between life in the Spirit and life in the flesh.

Life in the Spirit is life lived with the freedom of knowing that while I’m not perfect, as I trustingly turn my sins to Jesus and seek to follow Him obediently each day, the life of faith, I am being saved from sin and death.

The life of the flesh is life lived according to the beliefs of this world. Whether their belief system is religious or secular, people who live life in the flesh look at themselves and pronounce, “I’m good enough to pass muster with God and the universe.”

The Galatian Christians who got circumcised and claimed that their good works would save them were living life in the flesh.

But, Paul was warning, any time we rationalize or forget our own sins while looking down our noses on fellow Christians or other people because we think they’re not as good as we are, we’re sowing our own eternal destruction.

If we want to live in the grace of Christ, we need to extend the grace of Christ to others. Jesus says bluntly in Matthew 6:15: “...if you do not forgive others their sins, your Father will not forgive your sins.”

In the Church, Paul is saying here in our second lesson, “You must call each other to account. You must call each other to live in the freedom of forgiven sin, helping each other out of the traps of sin and death with which life this life is littered. But you must also forgive. Otherwise, you’ll fall into death too, via the sin of self-righteousness.”

Finally, Paul writes to anyone who may be inclined to say, “Who is this Paul character to tell us how to live out our faith in Christ?” Verse 14: “May I never boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, through which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world. Neither circumcision nor uncircumcision means anything; what counts is the new creation.”

“My only brag,” Paul is saying, “is in the power of Jesus’ cross to crucify the old sinner in me and in all of us, so that the new self can live in the freedom of forgiven sin, new life, and holy purpose."

Folks, nothing else matters! Only faith in Jesus Christ sets us free to live as we were made to live by God. Only faith in Jesus Christ sets us free to live as a vibrant church.

The cross of Christ is our only brag too.

The cross is where freedom comes from, both for individual disciples and for Christ’s Church.

Our common confession is that in order to live in the freedom to be all God made us to be, to claim the victory over sin and death that Jesus won on the cross, we need Jesus Christ and we need His eternal family, the Church. Amen

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

Present-Tense Presence

[This was prepared for presentation during worship with the people and friends of Living Water Lutheran Church, Centerville, Ohio on Maundy Thursday 2016, March 24. You can listen to this message here.]

Luke 22:7-20
Maundy Thursday commemorates events that happened on the night of Jesus’ betrayal and arrest. The word Maundy is derived from the Latin word mandatum, from which we get words like mandate and commandment. That’s because in his Gospel, John tells us that on the first Maundy Thursday, Jesus said this to His disciples: “A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another" (John 13:34-35).

Previously in the Old Testament, of course, God had commanded that we love Him and love our neighbor as we love ourselves, commands that Jesus underscored in what we call the Great Commandment.

But in His new commandment, Jesus tells His disciples that we must love our fellow disciples just as Christ has loved us. Jesus’ command is non-negotiable: No matter how much we Christians may drive each other crazy, no matter how much we may disagree with one another, we are to love one another with the same self-sacrificing passion Jesus has for us. This command is even more demanding and rigorous than the great commandment! Absent constant humble prayer and reliance on the Holy Spirit, absent Jesus Christ living in us, we cannot hope to fulfill it.

But it’s hard for we human beings to rely on the God you can’t see. That’s why something else that transpired on the first Maundy Thursday, something not recorded in John’s Gospel, is so important. Unlike John, Luke records how Jesus and the twelve apostles celebrated the Passover together that night.

At the table, Jesus told the twelve how eager He had been to partake of Passover with them. He wanted to have it with them before He suffered, Jesus said. Undoubtedly, these words were jarring and made the twelve uneasy. But Jesus went on to explain that He would not be enjoying a feast of this kind again until He had ushered in the Kingdom of God.

Bringing the Kingdom of God--the reign of God, the freedom of eternal forgiveness and new life--to human beings otherwise lost and shackled to sin and death, was Jesus’ entire mission. It was the whole point of His entering our world. It was why He had come to Jerusalem, where He would die on Good Friday, lie dead in a tomb on Holy Saturday, and rise on Easter Sunday.

It’s why in Luke 9:51, we’re told that “Jesus resolutely set out for Jerusalem.” (Another translation says that Jesus "set His face" for Jerusalem.)

And it’s why in Luke 13:33, Jesus said, “I must press on today and tomorrow and the next day—for surely no prophet can die outside Jerusalem!”

Jesus would die and rise to bring His eternal kingdom to those who dare to repent and believe in Him.

Of course, Jesus’ disciples were always lost when He told them that He would be rejected by the priests and elders, be crucified by the Romans, and rise from the dead.

The expectations of pious Jews like Jesus' first disciples were that the Messiah would be a popular leader who brought greatness to Judea, kicked out foreign interlopers, and make sure everyone was prosperous. The disciples were horrified whenever Jesus spoke of unpopularity and being executed. “That’s not what happens with Messiah,” they thought. Peter even once told Jesus, “Never, Lord...This shall never happen to you!” [Matthew 16:22]

And when Jesus said that, after dying, He would be resurrected, it didn’t register with the disciples. Jews who believed in a resurrection thought that there would be a general resurrection of all believers at some point. They didn’t know what to do with the idea that one Man--in this case, Jesus--would rise first as, in a phrase Saint Paul would later use, “the first fruits" of the dead.

In any case, Jesus’ talk on that first Maundy Thursday must have frightened the disciples. The hopes that Jesus had raised through His preaching, teaching, healing, exorcisms, and raising of the dead were going to be dashed? Jesus was going to leave them alone? Had they come this far, the disciples must have wondered, only to be abandoned by Jesus?

It was to allay the fears of those first disciples--and of we present-day disciples who have our own fears--that Jesus did what He did next. Verse 17: “After taking the cup, he gave thanks and said, ‘Take this and divide it among you. For I tell you I will not drink again from the fruit of the vine until the kingdom of God comes.’ And he took bread, gave thanks and broke it, and gave it to them, saying, ‘This is my body given for you; do this in remembrance of me.’ In the same way, after the supper he took the cup, saying, ‘This cup is the new covenant in my blood, which is poured out for you.’”

The celebration of Passover involved the drinking of four cups of wine. Jesus instituted Holy Communion between the third and fourth cups of His celebration with the disciples. In doing so, Jesus spoke words that were strange to the disciples and, if we allow ourselves to truly listen to them and not treat them like church words that wash over us, can seem strange to us too.

To disciples who worry that God is far away, distant, detached, Jesus says, “You are not alone. I will not leave those who trust in Me orphaned. This is My body. Here’s My blood, poured out for you.”

The God we can’t see comes to us “in, with, and under” the bread and the wine, the God of flesh and blood Who says that whenever His Word, the words of institution meet the bread and the wine among His believing people, He is there!

Now, there are some Christians who believe that when they take Holy Communion, they’re remembering what Jesus has done for them, or remembering Maundy Thursday, like friends reminiscing about days gone by or like historians rummaging through the archives of history for cogent lessons. Remembering is nice. It can even be helpful, even, when it comes to the study of history, essential. But none of this is what Holy Communion is about!

Jesus says, “This is My body...This is the new covenant in My blood.” Holy Communion isn’t about remembering a past event. It’s experiencing the present-tense presence of Jesus as we receive His body and blood with believing hearts.

When we receive the sacrament trustingly, Jesus is here, now, as close as the person sitting next to us, as close as the hearts beating in our chests.

Just this past Saturday, I was able to share Holy Communion with Phyllis at the hospital, just three days before she died. I can assure you that she wasn’t focused on the past when she received the sacrament. She was focused on the Lord Who was with her at that moment and the future heavenly banquet that this feast foreshadows for all who trustingly surrender to Jesus and His Lordship over their lives.

Yes, people say, but didn’t Jesus say that we are to do the sacrament “in remembrance of Him”? He did. But we must understand two things here.

First, Holy Communion isn’t something we do. Without Jesus and His powerful word, bread and wine are still just bread and wine. We don’t do the sacrament; Jesus gives it, He gives Himself, to us! Holy Communion is something that Jesus does; we are its recipients.

Second, the word Jesus uses which we translate as remembrance is, in the original Greek of the New Testament, a form of the word anamnesis. This word tells us that Holy Communion isn’t something for us to remember Jesus by, like a souvenir from Disney World or the lock from a deceased loved one’s hair. Instead, Holy Communion is the means by which Jesus re-members us to Him and re-members us to the Church on earth and in heaven, re-members us to the body of Christ made up of saints below and saints above.

I don’t know about you, but in my everyday life, I get so caught up in everyday life, that I sometimes start to fall apart at the seams. I fragment. I worry. I get upset. Sometimes I get angry. I sin.

When we humbly and unrepentantly come to Jesus as He offers His body and blood to us in Holy Communion, He pulls the fragments of our souls together. He makes us whole. He heals our souls. Feeding us on one holy food, Jesus makes us one with Him, one with our sisters and brothers in Christ, one with our true and best selves.

And in this way, Jesus holds us close and assures us that we are not alone. Holy Communion is the visible means on this earth by which He enacts the truth of God’s promise, given both in Deuteronomy of the Old Testament and Hebrews of the New Testament: “Never will I leave you; never will I forsake you.” No matter what happens to us, even on the brink of our deaths, Holy Communion proves that that promise is true, which is why Phyllis received the sacrament so gratefully this past Saturday.

On Sunday, eight Living Water young people will receive the sacrament for the first time. They will tell you that there are three big things that Jesus gives us in Holy Communion: forgiveness, new life, and communion with God’s family, the Church, on earth and in heaven. But all of that happens for one simple reason: In this sacrament, Jesus comes to us. In times of joy and times of sadness, and in all the times of our lives, through Holy Communion, Jesus’ gives us His body and blood to assure us that He is always with those who trust in Him. Always. Amen

Loving the Church...and the People In It

[This was prepared for sharing during worship with the people and guests of Living Water Lutheran Church in Springboro, Ohio, yesterday.]

John 13:34-35
During these weeks in Lent, we’re focusing on five building blocks for our personal Christian discipleship and for the life of the Church. They are:

• loving God,
• loving others,
• loving fellow believers,
• making disciples, and
• growing in our own discipleship

Today, our focus is on Jesus’ new commandment, John 13:34-35 (page 751 in the sanctuary Bible). Jesus is the speaker. He says:

"A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another."

What makes this commandment so new? And why does Jesus give it?

There are two main ways in which this commandment is different from Jesus’ command to love others as we love ourselves. That command does hold up an impossible standard for us to adhere to, to have the same regard for the needs, hopes, desires, loves, hurts, and difficulties of others that we have for our own needs, hopes, desires, loves, hurts, and difficulties. 

But Jesus’ new commandment holds us to a much higher standard: We are to love just as God in Jesus Christ has loved us!

In thinking about how God loved us, Paul writes in Romans 5:6-8: “You see, at just the right time, when we were still powerless, Christ died for the ungodly. Very rarely will anyone die for a righteous man, though for a good man someone might possibly dare to die. But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” That’s how Christ loves us!

Jesus says in Matthew 20:28: “...the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many." That’s how Christ loves us!

2 Corinthians 5:1 says: “God made [Christ] who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.” And that’s how Christ loves us!

He willingly bore the condemnation for sin we deserve--death--so that, when He rose, He could claim new and everlasting life for all who repudiate sin as their way of life and trust in Him, believe in Him, as the only way to God, their only hope for this world and the next, their only Savior, God and Lord of their lives.

Jesus says that we are to love like that. To be willing to love even to the point of doing what He did for us, giving our lives for others.

As Paul says in Romans, we might do that for a righteous person.

Or we might do it for a family member or a friend.

But Christ did that for a world of people--including you and me--who really don’t want God over our lives, who nailed Him to a cross. “Love like that,” Jesus tells us.

If you’re not feeling a bit squeamish right now, you haven’t been paying attention.

So, the first thing that makes this a new commandment is that it dramatically ups the ante on the love that God requires of us as believers. We’re not just to love others as we love ourselves, we’re to willingly give our lives for them, no matter how they may feel about us, no matter what they do to us. (This doesn’t mean we should submit to abusive or co-dependent relationships, something we’ll talk about another time, I’m sure.)

Now, here’s the second thing that makes this a new commandment: The object of the love Jesus commands isn’t the ordinary neighbors in our lives.

The object of love in this commandment is our fellow believers, our fellow disciples, other Christians, the people who make up Christ’s Church, all who confess Jesus Christ as Lord and God and Savior and King, inside and outside our congregation, inside and outside our denomination.

We are to love the Church--not an abstraction and not the sentimentality surrounding the scent of burning candles or stirring music or fellowship time, but the Church: the flesh and blood, imperfect people, saints by the grace of God who in this world remain sinners by birth and impulse, the people of the Church with whom we confess faith, worship God, receive the sacraments, study God’s Word, pray, serve in Christ’s Name, the people with whom we sometimes disagree or don’t understand or who drive us crazy...These are the people Jesus tells us to love and serve and live for to the point of death itself, if necessary.

Why? Why does Jesus make such a steep and daunting demand of us as His disciples? Jesus, of course, gives the most important reason for obeying the new commandment: “By this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another."

When the world sees Christians loving and caring for each other, as I see happening so often in the life of Living Water, the world then knows that we truly are Christ’s disciples. They see Christ living in us and that makes following Christ--becoming disciples themselves--more compelling to an unbelieving world.

The book of Acts tells us that people saw how the early Christians loved each other and their neighbors and enjoyed “the favor of all the people. And the Lord added to their number daily those who were being saved.” (By the way, notice that the Bible isn't squeamish about saying that some people are saved and some aren't. Those who reject faith in Christ, reject His salvation.)

When the Church is united in its commitment to Christ, to the authority of God’s Word over its life, and its love for God, the world, and one another, it is a powerful magnet for people who don’t yet know Jesus Christ or the freedom from sin and death only Christ can give.

We all know, by personal experience how destructive church fights can be.  The world sees Christians fighting and they figure the whole Christianity thing is a worthless delusion.

Church fights are nothing new. Paul wrote early in his first letter to the Church at Corinth, filled with conflict, back in the first century: “I appeal to you, brothers and sisters, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that all of you agree with one another in what you say and that there be no divisions among you, but that you be perfectly united in mind and thought.”

So, does loving like Christ mean we paper over our differences?

Hardly! Jesus Himself confronted false teaching. He threw out the moneychangers who were using the faith of others to line their pockets. He called Peter a Satan.

Some church fights are stupid. I know of a church that split because people couldn't agree on the color of the carpeting in the sanctuary.

Some church fights are necessary. When the basics of the faith are called into question--when people deny Jesus' virgin birth or His resurrection from the dead or that He performed and still performs miracles or that the Bible is the inspired Word of God, and things like that, then church fights are essential. God's truth is worth fighting for within His Church.

The New Testament makes clear that the Church should discipline or remove preachers who preach or teachers who teach false doctrine, that it should confront and deal with unrepentant sin. It should only call people to positions of leadership and service among them who have the gifts for particular ministries and have the courage to say when they don't.

Jesus Himself teaches that there will be fights in the Church, that sometimes those fights must happen, and, in Matthew 18:15-20, gives a whole process by which those fights should be fought cleanly, with love and grace. And even those fights, Jesus says, should be fought with the idea of restoring unity to the Church.

So why is the unity of the Church so important?

First, because it authenticates our faith.

Second, because we need each other! “People learn from one another, just as iron sharpens iron,” Proverbs 27:17 says. There is no such thing as a solo Christian because when you try a “Jesus and me” faith, there is no one to tell you that you’re full of it when you forget to get full of Christ or full of the Bible instead.

But the Church is so important to Jesus for another reason: It’s the only entity that will survive the end of this old creation, that is eternity.

In Revelation 19:7, we’re told about the rejoicing that will happen in the new heaven and the new earth after Jesus has returned to this world, the dead in Him rise, and this old creation has been destroyed. It describes the wedding between the groom, the Lamb of God Who takes away the sin of the world, and His bride. “Let us rejoice and be glad and give [God] glory!” it says. “For the wedding of the Lamb has come, and his bride has made herself ready.”

The Church is the bride of Christ. The Church--the fellowship of those who turn from sin and trust in Jesus as God in the flesh for forgiveness, life, and eternity--will live forever. And Christ wants His bride to produce many newborn children of God. He wants His Church to be the safe harbor in which His bride, living in His grace and forgiveness, is made ready for its wedding day in heaven. It becomes that when those to whom we reach out with the Gospel, in our words and in our deeds, see that we love each other as Christ has loved us.

But, how do we do that? Only, as we’ve said the past few weeks about loving God and loving our neighbors, by letting Christ live within us. Only by becoming one with Christ and renewing our relationship with Him in daily repentance and renewal by the Holy Spirit. Jesus tells us how this works in John 15:5-8 (page 752 in the sanctuary Bible):

"I am the vine; you are the branches. If a man remains in me and I in him, he will bear much fruit; apart from me you can do nothing. If anyone does not remain in me, he is like a branch that is thrown away and withers; such branches are picked up, thrown into the fire and burned. If you remain in me and my words remain in you, ask whatever you wish, and it will be given you. This is to my Father's glory, that you bear much fruit, showing yourselves to be my disciples.”

If we try to love Christ’s Church apart from a tight connection to Christ, we’ll give up. No one but God Himself is capable of loving with the passionate love Christ lived out and died for on the cross...unless, like the branches of a vine, we remain connected to Christ. That’s why the Church is here: to keep pumping us full of Christ’s love and God’s truth as we move through life, that we might flourish and grow in the love of God given in Christ. Then that love comes alive in us and among us and a world mired in sin wants what we have. “Jesus is what we’ve got. Do you want Him too?”

Christ’s love living in people is a magnet. It starts to exert its pull when we believe in Christ and as we submit to letting Christ grow our faith, we come to do what doesn’t come naturally to human beings: to love God, to love our neighbors, and to love each other. On these three building blocks and the two more we’ll be discussing in the next few weeks, Christ readies us as individual disciples and His the whole Church for eternity with Him.