Showing posts with label Mark 9:2-9. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Mark 9:2-9. Show all posts
Tuesday, February 13, 2018
Listen! (AUDIO)
Here is the audio for this past Sunday's message for the Transfiguration of Our Lord.
Monday, February 12, 2018
Listen!
[This was shared during worship with the people and friends of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio, yesterday.]
Mark 9:2-9
Throughout this Epiphany season, which ends today, our gospel lessons have been about epiphanies, moments when Who Jesus really is took on clarity.
All of these narratives of Jesus’ earthly life have shown us the truth that Jesus was not just a man and was more than just a great teacher, but also was and is God in the flesh, our King, Whose mission still is to bring God’s kingdom to all who trust in Him.
None of the epiphanies we’ve looked at have allowed us to see this more clearly than what happens in today’s gospel lesson, Mark 9:2-9. Let’s take a look at it together and then consider what it might mean for us today.
It starts: “And after six days Jesus took with him Peter and James and John, and led them up a high mountain by themselves….” (Mark 9:2).
Six days after what? Well, just a few verses before, Mark tells us that Peter confessed his belief that Jesus was God’s long-awaited Anointed One (Messiah in the Hebrew, Christ in the Greek) and that Jesus told Peter that he was right.
The apostles’ euphoria over being alive when the Messiah was revealed was instantly smothered when Jesus explained the method by which their Messiah brings His kingdom. Mark says that Jesus told them, “...the Son of Man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests and the teachers of the law, and that he must be killed and after three days rise again” (Mark 8:31).
And if that weren’t enough of a downer, He says: “Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me’ (Mark 8:34).
Imagine how disappointed the apostles must have felt at this moment. They had been following Jesus and seen amazing things. They knew His power: They’d seen Him cast out demons, feed thousands of people with just a few scraps of food, heal lepers, and even raise the dead.
They must have thought that with all of that power, their Messiah could undertake a simple procession into Jerusalem, vanquish the Romans, establish God’s reign over Israel, and, in the bargain, give them cushy positions in His government. Easy-peasy.
But Jesus tells them that sin is Israel’s (and humanity’s) greatest enemy, that the only way the kingdom of God could be brought to Israel (and to you and me, though the apostles at the time would have had no thought that Yahweh, Israel’s God, cared much for us) was for the Messiah Himself, perfect and sinless, to offer Himself on a cross, taking the condemnation of death we deserve so that He then could share with us the eternal life He of which He took hold on Easter Sunday.
Not only that, Jesus said if we are to have any part of His kingdom or of eternity with God, we must take up our crosses--we must own the reality of our sins, our mortality, and our need of a Savior--and humbly follow Jesus.
The way into God’s kingdom for you and me begins with death to ourselves, to our priorities, to our desires, and to our pretensions of being in control.
The apostles must have felt confused and disappointed. They were experiencing something C.S. Lewis talked about. “The truth [God’s truth] will set you free,” Lewis wrote, “but first it will make you miserable.”
We cannot have Jesus as our Savior and King if we persist in thinking that there’s nothing so bad about us that needs saving, nothing from which we can’t save ourselves, or no situation so desperate that we can’t conquer.
If we persist in believing these lies, we will be miserable, either in the present or in eternity or in both.
If we let go of them, we will see the kingdom of God, in this imperfect world and in the perfect world to come.
While the apostles were feeling miserable, Mark tells us that Jesus took Peter, James, and John with Him up to a mountaintop and “he was transfigured before them, and his clothes became radiant, intensely white, as no one on earth could bleach them. And there appeared to them Elijah with Moses, and they were talking with Jesus.” (Mark 9:2-4)
This was glory.
This was power.
Here was Jesus with Israel’s great law-giver Moses and Israel’s greatest prophet Elijah. The law and the prophets had pointed Israel to the coming of the Messiah and now the law and the prophets were confirming that Jesus is that Messiah, that King!
This was a great epiphany revealing Jesus as both God and human.
Imagine now the elation felt by the three apostles there on that mountain!
Two of them were tongue-tied. One of them, Peter, should have been. But he couldn’t help himself.
Verse 5: “And Peter said to Jesus, ‘Rabbi [Teacher], it is good that we are here. Let us make three tents, one for you and one for Moses and one for Elijah.’ For he did not know what to say, for they were terrified.”
Peter could think of nothing but bottling up the moment in tents or booths so that he could keep hold of it.
But Jesus hadn’t brought the three apostles to that mountaintop to give them goosebumps. He brought them to that mountaintop to give them the truth: The truth from God that we are sinners, and that though “the wages of sin is death” (Romans 6:23), the power of sin and death over us can be erased by the infinitely greater Power, Jesus “the way and the truth and the life” (John 14:6). All who believe in Him “will not perish, but have everlasting life” (John 3:16) in the Kingdom of God. In the face of sin, death, and darkness, no holy booths or goosebump-inducing feeling or place can save us. Jesus is our only sanctuary!
That seems to be the message from the Voice in heaven, the voice of God the Father, to Peter in response to his impulsive proposal. Verse 7: “And a cloud overshadowed them, and a voice came out of the cloud, ‘This is my beloved Son; listen to him.’”
“Hush, Peter,” the Voice seems to say. “Now is not the time for speaking. Now is the time for listening. When the Word made flesh, My beloved Son, is speaking to you, whether in words or deeds, you can’t hear Him if you’re yammering. Listen to Him!”
One of the great problems in the contemporary Church is that we do a lot more talking than listening. We impulsively offer up our feelings, our opinions, our preferences for how the Church and the world should operate. We even make decisions, when what we should be doing is listening for what the God in Jesus Christ is telling us.
And to be able to speak the authentic Word of God, we need to spend time, like Jesus did, in quiet places reflecting on Scripture and praying with the expectation that Christ will speak to us.
We need to spend time with Jesus and other believers, reading and reflecting on God’s Word like Peter, James, and John did on the mount of transfiguration.
We cannot speak God’s truth to each other or to the world, we can’t authentically tell others the saving good news that all who repent and surrender to Jesus Christ are given new, eternal lives in God’s kingdom, unless we take the time each day to listen to God.
Verse 8 says that after the Father had given this message to Peter, James, and John, “they no longer saw anyone with them but Jesus only.” Peter, James, and John must have kneeled before Jesus in stunned silence. Moses and Elijah had pointed to Jesus, but they weren’t equal to Jesus. Neither is any preacher, guru, president, parent, grandparent, aunt, uncle, boyfriend, girlfriend, spouse, or friend. Jesus alone is King. And if we have any desire to experience the kind of life for which God made us, a life of love and fulfillment even in the midst of this uncertain, fallen world, we will only find it in Jesus. Only Jesus!
Then comes the final and maybe, strangest, verse in Mark’s narration for today, verse 9: “And as they were coming down the mountain, he charged them to tell no one what they had seen, until the Son of Man had risen from the dead.”
In the midst of the apostles' misery over Jesus’ talk about His own cross and about the cross all who would be His disciple must bear, Jesus had taken Peter, James, and John to the top of a mountain. He had shown them the glory of His kingdom, a glory that is only experienced by those who take up their crosses and surrender to Him. The world wouldn’t be ready to hear about this glory until they had seen that the way to God goes through the crucifixion and humbling of the self before Jesus our King. Until then, the disciples were to keep following and to keep listening to Jesus.
On this side of Jesus' death and resurrection, we're free and commissioned by Jesus to tell the world about Him. But we have the same call as the apostles, to keep following and listening to Jesus.
In a little book called Why I Am a Christian, Lutheran theologian Ole Hallesby talked about five ways that you and I can know Jesus, keep following Him, and listen to Him.
First, we can daily read the New Testament. We will meet Jesus there.
Second, we can pray in Jesus’ name. Jesus promises that when we pray in His name, God hears our prayers.
Third, we can ask God to show us how we may have displeased Him. Because Jesus is our Savior and Advocate, He will show us our sins so that we can repent and have our relationship with Him restored.
Fourth, we can receive Holy Communion every time it’s offered. Jesus gives Himself to us in this sacrament. We feed on His life, are drawn closer to Him, and receive forgiveness.
Fifth, we can spend time in fellowship with Jesus’ people, gathered around His Word.
If we will follow Jesus and listen to Jesus, we will see the glory of God even in the most mundane moments of our lives.
And we will realize that the moments we spend with Jesus are never mundane. Amen
[I'm the pastor of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio.]
Mark 9:2-9
Throughout this Epiphany season, which ends today, our gospel lessons have been about epiphanies, moments when Who Jesus really is took on clarity.
All of these narratives of Jesus’ earthly life have shown us the truth that Jesus was not just a man and was more than just a great teacher, but also was and is God in the flesh, our King, Whose mission still is to bring God’s kingdom to all who trust in Him.
None of the epiphanies we’ve looked at have allowed us to see this more clearly than what happens in today’s gospel lesson, Mark 9:2-9. Let’s take a look at it together and then consider what it might mean for us today.
It starts: “And after six days Jesus took with him Peter and James and John, and led them up a high mountain by themselves….” (Mark 9:2).
Six days after what? Well, just a few verses before, Mark tells us that Peter confessed his belief that Jesus was God’s long-awaited Anointed One (Messiah in the Hebrew, Christ in the Greek) and that Jesus told Peter that he was right.
The apostles’ euphoria over being alive when the Messiah was revealed was instantly smothered when Jesus explained the method by which their Messiah brings His kingdom. Mark says that Jesus told them, “...the Son of Man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests and the teachers of the law, and that he must be killed and after three days rise again” (Mark 8:31).
And if that weren’t enough of a downer, He says: “Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me’ (Mark 8:34).
Imagine how disappointed the apostles must have felt at this moment. They had been following Jesus and seen amazing things. They knew His power: They’d seen Him cast out demons, feed thousands of people with just a few scraps of food, heal lepers, and even raise the dead.
They must have thought that with all of that power, their Messiah could undertake a simple procession into Jerusalem, vanquish the Romans, establish God’s reign over Israel, and, in the bargain, give them cushy positions in His government. Easy-peasy.
But Jesus tells them that sin is Israel’s (and humanity’s) greatest enemy, that the only way the kingdom of God could be brought to Israel (and to you and me, though the apostles at the time would have had no thought that Yahweh, Israel’s God, cared much for us) was for the Messiah Himself, perfect and sinless, to offer Himself on a cross, taking the condemnation of death we deserve so that He then could share with us the eternal life He of which He took hold on Easter Sunday.
Not only that, Jesus said if we are to have any part of His kingdom or of eternity with God, we must take up our crosses--we must own the reality of our sins, our mortality, and our need of a Savior--and humbly follow Jesus.
The way into God’s kingdom for you and me begins with death to ourselves, to our priorities, to our desires, and to our pretensions of being in control.
The apostles must have felt confused and disappointed. They were experiencing something C.S. Lewis talked about. “The truth [God’s truth] will set you free,” Lewis wrote, “but first it will make you miserable.”
We cannot have Jesus as our Savior and King if we persist in thinking that there’s nothing so bad about us that needs saving, nothing from which we can’t save ourselves, or no situation so desperate that we can’t conquer.
If we persist in believing these lies, we will be miserable, either in the present or in eternity or in both.
If we let go of them, we will see the kingdom of God, in this imperfect world and in the perfect world to come.
While the apostles were feeling miserable, Mark tells us that Jesus took Peter, James, and John with Him up to a mountaintop and “he was transfigured before them, and his clothes became radiant, intensely white, as no one on earth could bleach them. And there appeared to them Elijah with Moses, and they were talking with Jesus.” (Mark 9:2-4)
This was glory.
This was power.
Here was Jesus with Israel’s great law-giver Moses and Israel’s greatest prophet Elijah. The law and the prophets had pointed Israel to the coming of the Messiah and now the law and the prophets were confirming that Jesus is that Messiah, that King!
This was a great epiphany revealing Jesus as both God and human.
Imagine now the elation felt by the three apostles there on that mountain!
Two of them were tongue-tied. One of them, Peter, should have been. But he couldn’t help himself.
Verse 5: “And Peter said to Jesus, ‘Rabbi [Teacher], it is good that we are here. Let us make three tents, one for you and one for Moses and one for Elijah.’ For he did not know what to say, for they were terrified.”
Peter could think of nothing but bottling up the moment in tents or booths so that he could keep hold of it.
But Jesus hadn’t brought the three apostles to that mountaintop to give them goosebumps. He brought them to that mountaintop to give them the truth: The truth from God that we are sinners, and that though “the wages of sin is death” (Romans 6:23), the power of sin and death over us can be erased by the infinitely greater Power, Jesus “the way and the truth and the life” (John 14:6). All who believe in Him “will not perish, but have everlasting life” (John 3:16) in the Kingdom of God. In the face of sin, death, and darkness, no holy booths or goosebump-inducing feeling or place can save us. Jesus is our only sanctuary!
That seems to be the message from the Voice in heaven, the voice of God the Father, to Peter in response to his impulsive proposal. Verse 7: “And a cloud overshadowed them, and a voice came out of the cloud, ‘This is my beloved Son; listen to him.’”
“Hush, Peter,” the Voice seems to say. “Now is not the time for speaking. Now is the time for listening. When the Word made flesh, My beloved Son, is speaking to you, whether in words or deeds, you can’t hear Him if you’re yammering. Listen to Him!”
One of the great problems in the contemporary Church is that we do a lot more talking than listening. We impulsively offer up our feelings, our opinions, our preferences for how the Church and the world should operate. We even make decisions, when what we should be doing is listening for what the God in Jesus Christ is telling us.
And to be able to speak the authentic Word of God, we need to spend time, like Jesus did, in quiet places reflecting on Scripture and praying with the expectation that Christ will speak to us.
We need to spend time with Jesus and other believers, reading and reflecting on God’s Word like Peter, James, and John did on the mount of transfiguration.
We cannot speak God’s truth to each other or to the world, we can’t authentically tell others the saving good news that all who repent and surrender to Jesus Christ are given new, eternal lives in God’s kingdom, unless we take the time each day to listen to God.
Verse 8 says that after the Father had given this message to Peter, James, and John, “they no longer saw anyone with them but Jesus only.” Peter, James, and John must have kneeled before Jesus in stunned silence. Moses and Elijah had pointed to Jesus, but they weren’t equal to Jesus. Neither is any preacher, guru, president, parent, grandparent, aunt, uncle, boyfriend, girlfriend, spouse, or friend. Jesus alone is King. And if we have any desire to experience the kind of life for which God made us, a life of love and fulfillment even in the midst of this uncertain, fallen world, we will only find it in Jesus. Only Jesus!
Then comes the final and maybe, strangest, verse in Mark’s narration for today, verse 9: “And as they were coming down the mountain, he charged them to tell no one what they had seen, until the Son of Man had risen from the dead.”
In the midst of the apostles' misery over Jesus’ talk about His own cross and about the cross all who would be His disciple must bear, Jesus had taken Peter, James, and John to the top of a mountain. He had shown them the glory of His kingdom, a glory that is only experienced by those who take up their crosses and surrender to Him. The world wouldn’t be ready to hear about this glory until they had seen that the way to God goes through the crucifixion and humbling of the self before Jesus our King. Until then, the disciples were to keep following and to keep listening to Jesus.
On this side of Jesus' death and resurrection, we're free and commissioned by Jesus to tell the world about Him. But we have the same call as the apostles, to keep following and listening to Jesus.
In a little book called Why I Am a Christian, Lutheran theologian Ole Hallesby talked about five ways that you and I can know Jesus, keep following Him, and listen to Him.
First, we can daily read the New Testament. We will meet Jesus there.
Second, we can pray in Jesus’ name. Jesus promises that when we pray in His name, God hears our prayers.
Third, we can ask God to show us how we may have displeased Him. Because Jesus is our Savior and Advocate, He will show us our sins so that we can repent and have our relationship with Him restored.
Fourth, we can receive Holy Communion every time it’s offered. Jesus gives Himself to us in this sacrament. We feed on His life, are drawn closer to Him, and receive forgiveness.
Fifth, we can spend time in fellowship with Jesus’ people, gathered around His Word.
If we will follow Jesus and listen to Jesus, we will see the glory of God even in the most mundane moments of our lives.
And we will realize that the moments we spend with Jesus are never mundane. Amen
[I'm the pastor of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio.]
Sunday, February 15, 2015
How to See Jesus Christ
[This was shared during worship with the disciples and guests of Living Water Lutheran Church in Springboro, Ohio earlier today.]
Transfiguration Sunday
Mark 9:2-9
On this Transfiguration Sunday, the last Sunday of the Epiphany season, we’re going to explore the Gospel of Mark’s account of the day that Jesus took three of His disciples--Peter, James, and John--to a mountaintop, where His glory as God was made plain to see.
The fact is though, God has never wanted to be removed from us. God cares about us. And while we should always approach God with reverence, awe, and holy fear, we also can treasure knowing that we were made for intimacy with God, an intimacy that God craves to have with us. That’s why God didn’t want to stay forever in the cloud away from His people.
Turn to Exodus 25:8 (page 56). There, God is giving instructions to Moses on how His people are to worship Him and He says: “...have them make a sanctuary for Me, and I will dwell among them.” God was instructing the people: “Pitch a tent for Me, that I may live among you.”
As our lesson begins, Jesus takes His core leadership group--Peter, James, and John--to a mountaintop. While there, verse 3 says, Jesus “was transfigured before them. His clothes became dazzling white, whiter than anyone in the world could bleach them.” At that moment, Peter, James, and John, though they didn’t yet understand it all, saw Jesus in the bright splendor of His deity. Jesus as Jesus had said would happen six days earlier, they saw the kingdom of God come with power!
Look now at verse 4: “And there appeared before them Elijah and Moses…” The main strands of the Old Testament scriptures are the Law and the Prophets. The Law and the Prophets pointed to Jesus and here was Moses, the great Lawgiver, and Elijah, Israel’s greatest prophet, conversing with Jesus.
Transfiguration Sunday
Mark 9:2-9
On this Transfiguration Sunday, the last Sunday of the Epiphany season, we’re going to explore the Gospel of Mark’s account of the day that Jesus took three of His disciples--Peter, James, and John--to a mountaintop, where His glory as God was made plain to see.
Don’t you wish that we could see Jesus’ glory so clearly today? I believe that we can, even in the midst of the humdrum and difficulties of everyday life.
To start our exploration of Jesus' transfiguration and how it can help us to see Jesus, please turn to John 1:14. (It’s on page 739 in the sanctuary Bibles.) John, you remember, says that Jesus is the Word, Who was with God and was God. He then says this: “The Word became flesh and made His dwelling among us...”
In the Greek in which John (and the other New Testament writers) originally wrote his gospel, the word rendered as made His dwelling among us is eskenosen. It’s the verb form of a noun, skene, which means tabernacle or tent. John is saying that God Almighty took on flesh and experienced everything that we human beings experience because He pitched His tent among us.
The idea of the tent or the tabernacle was important in the centuries before Jesus, in Old Testament times.
In the 21st. century BC, God called a couple He later named Abraham and Sarah to leave their comfortable lives in the land of Ur and go live in a place God would show them after they’d gotten their start. God said that He would also make this childless and elderly couple the ancestors of God’s own people, of which we as people who confess Jesus Christ as Savior and God, are members today. From the moment God called, Abraham and Sarah lived in tents or tabernacles.
Some six-hundred years later, the descendants of Abraham and Sarah, having been freed from slavery in Egypt by God, spent forty years in a wilderness before entering the land God had promised their ancestors. In the wilderness, they lived in tents.
During their journey, the Old Testament says, God led them by a cloud. God was in the cloud, a bright and overwhelming presence shining within it. God’s perfection would kill any imperfect human being who came directly into His presence and, in fact, Abraham’s descendants--the Hebrews, the Israelites--begged their earthly leader Moses not to let them be exposed to God’s presence. The cloud in which God’s presence, holiness, and glory were shrouded were OK at a distance. But they didn’t want to see God up close.
The fact is though, God has never wanted to be removed from us. God cares about us. And while we should always approach God with reverence, awe, and holy fear, we also can treasure knowing that we were made for intimacy with God, an intimacy that God craves to have with us. That’s why God didn’t want to stay forever in the cloud away from His people.
Turn to Exodus 25:8 (page 56). There, God is giving instructions to Moses on how His people are to worship Him and He says: “...have them make a sanctuary for Me, and I will dwell among them.” God was instructing the people: “Pitch a tent for Me, that I may live among you.”
For many years, as we mentioned, God’s people lived in tents while the presence of God lived among them in a tent that also housed the Ten Commandments. In the very inner sanctum of this tent was a place called “the holy of holies,” the place where the holiness of God dwelt on earth.
Five hundred years after God gave those instructions to Moses, King Solomon built a temple which, like the tent in the wilderness, was a copy of God’s heavenly throne room. In the midst of it was the tabernacle, the holy of holies, the place where God pitched His tent. A curtain concealed the holy of holies, a wall that the people feared to breach, afraid, just like their ancestors, of meeting God face to face.
Now, we come to our Gospel lesson, Mark 9:2-9. Take a look at it, please.
Six days before the events the lesson recounts, Jesus told His disciples: “Truly I tell you, some who are standing here will not taste death before they see that the kingdom of God has come with power.”
As our lesson begins, Jesus takes His core leadership group--Peter, James, and John--to a mountaintop. While there, verse 3 says, Jesus “was transfigured before them. His clothes became dazzling white, whiter than anyone in the world could bleach them.” At that moment, Peter, James, and John, though they didn’t yet understand it all, saw Jesus in the bright splendor of His deity. Jesus as Jesus had said would happen six days earlier, they saw the kingdom of God come with power!
Look now at verse 4: “And there appeared before them Elijah and Moses…” The main strands of the Old Testament scriptures are the Law and the Prophets. The Law and the Prophets pointed to Jesus and here was Moses, the great Lawgiver, and Elijah, Israel’s greatest prophet, conversing with Jesus.
Look at what happens next, in verse 5. “‘Rabbi, it is good for us to be here. Let us put up three shelters...’”
Can you guess what the word translated as shelters might be in the original New Testament Greek? It’s skenas, the plural word for tents or tabernacles.
Jesus says nothing to Peter’s suggestion. But there are two problems with what Peter wants to do.
First: Peter is putting Moses and Elijah on the same level with Jesus. Peter still doesn’t understand that Jesus is God in human flesh.
Second: When the Word became flesh and pitched His tent among us, God signaled that He was busting out of the confines of tents or clouds or any of the other straitjackets in which we try to put God.
God wants to come into your life right now, today, with all its messiness and drama, boredom and challenge, joy and sorrow.
God wants to be your Lord, Friend, and Savior.
God doesn’t want you to wait for the sweet by and by to have an intimate relationship with Him.
God wants in on every part of Your life, to rip out all the sin and hell that dwells within you (and me), and to give you (and me) new life.
Peter doesn't understand any of these things about God yet. He has no idea that while grace is free, being Jesus’ disciple costs us the loss of everything that would keep us from following Him.
It's out of this ignorance, Mark tells us, that Peter suggests building coequal dwelling places or monuments for Jesus, Moses, and Elijah. Mark says in verse 6 that Peter “did not know what to say, they [Peter, James, and John] were so frightened.”
The fear of the three disciples no doubt increased with what happened next. Verse 7: “Then a cloud appeared and covered them, and a voice came from the cloud: ‘This is my Son, whom I love. Listen to him!’” God the Father confirmed that Jesus is God the Son.
Not long after these events, the God Who came to tabernacle among us would die on a cross and, strangely, the curtain of the temple, the wall between God and the human race would tear in two, from top to bottom. No longer would human beings need to offer sacrifices or live without the constant, sustaining presence of God in their lives.
Through Jesus, all who turn from sin in His Name and trust in Him alone as their God and King can have immediate access to God. That is the greatest miracle ever.
Need your sins forgiven or help with resisting temptation? Approach God in Jesus’ Name.
Need guidance on how to live your life? Come to God in Jesus’ Name.
Wrestling with a tragedy or setback that has befallen you? You may not get an answer to the question of why, but you will get God by your side.
Jesus Himself was and is the only sacrifice needed to bridge the gulf between a perfect God and imperfect people like you and me.
In verse 9, Jesus tells Peter, James, and John “not to tell anyone what they had seen until the Son of Man had risen from the dead.”
The reasons for Jesus’ instructions were simple: No one can really see Jesus for Who He really is, God in human flesh, until we see the cross of Jesus and know that it was our sins--yours and mine--that made Jesus’ death necessary. Romans 6:23 tells us that “the wages of sin is death.” Death is what we deserve for our sin. But sinless Jesus took the wages we earned onto Himself.
And no one can see Jesus for Who He really is until we accept by faith the testimony about His actual, physical resurrection from the dead. Jesus rising from the dead is the sure sign that He and He alone is the only way to life with God.
Until Jesus' death and resurrection happened, no matter how amazed Peter, James, and John must have been by Jesus' transfiguration, they could not see Who Jesus really was...and is. Until Jesus' death and resurrection call us to die to sin and death so that we may rise and live in what The Small Catechism calls, "everlasting righteousness, innocence, and blessedness."
Peter, James, and John didn't yet know what Jesus had come to bring into our lives. But today, on this side of Christ’s death and resurrection, God’s Holy Spirit sets us free to tell the world exactly Who Jesus is. It’s a freedom we exercise all too infrequently!
Today, at this moment, you and I can't see the risen Jesus physically. But we can see Jesus by faith in Him.
We talk a lot about reaching up, reaching in, and reaching out here at Living Water. These are the three ways that you and I can see Jesus in our lives, the three ways in which His glory is revealed and we grow in our hope and confidence in Him.
In response to what God has done for us in Jesus, we reach up to worship God, to receive His grace and forgiveness.
In response to what God has done for us in Jesus, we reach in, sharing fellowship with His Church, engaging in small group Bible studies, praying and encouraging our fellow believers in Christ.
In response to what God has done for us in Jesus, we reach out to unbelievers to make disciples, telling others the good news of new life for all who repent and believe in Jesus, AND we serve others in Christ’s Name.
Jesus wants to pitch His tent in your life every day.
He wants to live with you now as well as live with you in eternity.
Taking God’s extended hand of grace to reach up, reach in, and reach out, is how we can see Jesus ever more clearly in this life.
And, we can be certain, with face to face clarity in eternity. May we always see Christ clearly, starting now. Amen
Sunday, February 26, 2012
The Love We Need to Face the Wilderness
[This, as near as I can recall, is the sermon I shared this morning during worship with the people of Saint Matthew Lutheran Church in Logan, Ohio.]
Mark 1:9-15
Years ago, when our kids were small, we were all shopping together at a mall book store in Toledo. In the children's section, we ran across a book with a blue cover showing a happy toddler in a bath room with reams of toilet paper he had pulled from the dispenser. The title was Love You Forever. Ann read it first and then, crying, handed it to me. When I read it, I couldn't keep from crying either. Love You Forever is a fun and touching ode of love from a mom to her child. The text is punctuated with a recurring promise from mother to child: "I'll love you forever. I'll like you for always. As long as I'm living, my baby you'll be."
Any normal parent can identify with that sentiment. When parents have children enter their lives, they don't stop being parents just because their kids grow up and live responsible, adult lives. As long as we're living, our kids will be our kids and even if they sin and rebel and walk away from God or us, we will always love them.
Parents who love their children give their kids strong foundations for life. And, while I hate to think of this as being genetically built into us, studies have shown that the love, support, and caring discipline provided by fathers is especially important.
Several studies, for example, have been done comparing the faith lives of two groups of children, those who regularly attend worship with their moms only as opposed to those who do so regularly with their dads only. Those who attend with only their fathers are far more likely to continue with lives of prayer, service in Christ's Name, and regular worship than those brought to worship only by their mothers.
Of course, it's better when both parents go to worship and Sunday School with their kids. Better too, when both parents seek to live out their faith in Christ on Mondays through Saturdays, as well as on Sundays. Martin Luther said that the family is to be "a little church," in which Christ is daily worshiped, glorified, and served. But these studies on the spiritual development of children are echoed in studies into other realms of living too: When fathers love, affirm, and nurture children, children are better prepared to face life's challenges.
Our Gospel lesson shows us that God the Father knew the importance of giving strong affirmations of His love to Jesus, God the Son. He knew that His love could sustain Jesus through all that Jesus came into the world to do for you and me. Take a look at the first few verses of today's Gospel lesson, Mark 1:9-11.
Jesus, Mark tells us, was baptized by John the Baptist. We know, of course, that Jesus didn't need to be baptized by John. John was offering a baptism of repentance, a baptism that symbolized that people were turning away from their sin and turning, instead, in faith toward God, God's will, and God's promises, in anticipation of the coming of the King of kings. Jesus never sinned and Jesus was and is the King of kings. But Jesus also came into our worlds to share everything that we go through. So, He was baptized by John.
Look at what happens next: "...just as He was coming out of the water, He saw the heavens torn apart..." Last Sunday, when we looked at Jesus' transfiguration, we saw this very thing happen. The heavens were torn apart so that God the Father could express His approval for Jesus. The same verb translated as "torn apart" shows up again at another place in Mark's Gospel: At the moment when Jesus died on the cross and curtain in the temple that concealed the holy of holies, the place where God dwelt on earth, was torn. In all these instances, the unseen realm of God were breaking into our fallen, imperfect world. God's kingdom was breaking into the world at the very moment that Jesus was baptized in the Jordan.
Now, look at what comes next: "...and the Spirit [descended] like a dove. And a voice came from heaven, 'You are My Son, the Beloved; with You I am well pleased." Father, Son, and Holy Spirit were all together in that moment. This really was the kingdom of God breaking into our world!
But notice what God the Father says to Jesus: "You are My Son, the Beloved; with You I am well pleased." Do you see what the Father was saying to Jesus? It's this: "I'll love you forever, I'll like you for always. As long as I'm living, my baby you'll be."
The One Jesus taught us to call Abba, Father, the first person of our three-three-person-in-one-God is a great Father! "I love You completely and always," the Father was telling Jesus.
Something similar happens to us when we are baptized. The Word of God is invoked over the waters of Holy Baptism, the Holy Spirit reaches down to us, and in the Name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, we become children of God. Rebellious children can walk away from parents and God, of course. But that doesn't alter God's love for or commitment to us. Pull out the green hymn books and turn to page 124 in the front. This comes near the end of the baptismal liturgy. A blessing is given to the baptized:
Jesus needed the assurance of the Father's love for Him. Go back to our Gospel lesson, to Mark 1:12. "And the Spirit immediately drove Him [Jesus] into the wilderness."
The Gospels of Matthew and Luke are a bit more dainty in describing how Jesus came to be in the wilderness. They say that the Holy Spirit "led" Jesus there.
Mark though, says that the Spirit "drove" Jesus into the wilderness. The word translated into our English translation is, in the Greek in which it was originally written, ekballei, a past tense form of a compound word ekballo. Ek is a prefix meaning out. Ballo, from which we get words like ball and balloon, means throw. Literally, the Holy Spirit threw Jesus out into the wilderness.
The wilderness, or literally in the Greek, the desolate, is a place of terror, a place of sin and temptation, of struggle with tests of character. In other words, the wilderness is the every day world in which you and I live.
It's also a place in which a war for our eternal souls is waged between unseen forces: God and His angels, on the one hand, and Satan--a name for the devil that means adversary--and his demonic forces, on the other.
Through His cross and resurrection, Jesus has already won this war. All who repent and believe in Him and the Good News He has brought are part of God's kingdom and live with God for all eternity, starting right here and now in the wilderness.
But Satan is selfish and desperate, violent and willful. He wants to tear us from God's hands, not because he values us, but because he knows how much God values us, which God showed when Jesus went to a cross bearing our sins on His sinless shoulders.
Some well-meaning Christians deny the existence of the spiritual realm, or of a war going on between God and Satan, with you and me as the prizes for which they battle. Years ago, I was in a study group with other Lutheran pastors. The subject of angels came up and one of our colleagues scoffed at the whole notion of angels or demons, Satan or hell. "I find it hard to believe in extraterrestrials," he told us with something of a smirk. One of our older colleagues put his hand on this fellow's shoulder and said, "Mike, if you don't think that Satan, demons, or hell are real, you haven't been paying attention."
We need to pay attention too!
Turn Ephesians 6:12 in the New Testament. It says: "...our struggle is not against enemies of blood and flesh, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic forces of this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places." (And here, "heavenly" doesn't refer to the place where God reigns, but to the unseen spiritual realm where the war for our souls is played out each moment of our lives.)
In the wilderness, you and I are tempted to take the easy way through life: to sin and walk away from God. God will let us do that, if that's the path we choose.
God won't force Himself on us, ever.
And, there are going to be millions of people in hell who were baptized and who are loved passionately by God, but who spurned God's love, Christ's cross, and the call to repent and believe and so are eternally separated from God.
But that isn't the way it has to be!
We can walk with God even in the wilderness and Jesus shows the way. Look at the last phrase of verse 13 in our Gospel lesson: "and the angels waited on Him." If we will rely completely on God, He will care for us. He will make a way through the wilderness.
In his book, You Were Made for More, Pastor Jim Cymbala tells the story of Roberta, a member of his New York City congregation. Roberta had misused drugs and engaged in all sorts of sinful relationships for decades. She came to faith in Christ through Cymbala's congregation and began a life of recovery from her addictions. She was living with God, free of her past. And though she was HIV-positive, Roberta refused to let the possibility of death from AIDs keep her from living life to the full with Christ by her side.
As she was improving, serving God, and growing in her faith, at that moment, a man from her past re-entered her life. (This shouldn't be surprising, by the way. My experience shows that anytime Godly and good things are happening, Satan will try to find ways to derail them.) The man told Roberta that he was clean, free of drugs for some time.
While wary, Roberta began seeing this man. She didn't love him. But she did feel affection for him. And, as she told Cymbala, they knew about each other's "stuff." Maybe they could build a life together. Still, she was still uncertain and praying about things.
In the meantime, the man invited her to visit him at his place in upstate New York. Roberta had a friend who lived in the same little town and, wanting to do things God's way this time, she arranged to stay at the friend's house, then visit the man at his place.
She had settled into her friend's place and borrowed the friend's car to see the man she now referred to as her "boyfriend." But she was thrown out into the wilderness at almost the moment she greeted him in his kitchen. In his pocket, she could see, was a pipe for smoking crack cocaine.
Without saying a word, her head swimming, she went to his living room and began to pray. "God," she cried out silently, "give me strength to get up and run out of this house right now! I know I should leave!"
As Roberta prayed, she heard an unspoken whisper, spoken undoubtedly by Satan, the one who tempted Jesus in His wilderness: "Let's be honest here--this is who [your boyfriend] is, and this is who your are down deep, don't you know?" Satan continued to tell her that her life could never get better, that she could never be right with God, that she ought to make do and once more take up the life of an addict and enjoy some good times before she left this world.
Just then, as though reading from Satan's playbook, the boyfriend came into the living room. He knew that the jig might be up. "Don't leave!" he kept telling Roberta.
But praying to God for strength and help, Roberta picked up her purse, pulled out her keys, made her way to the car, climbed in behind the wheel, and, her hands shaking, put the key in the ignition and drove away.
The man didn't stop campaigning to get her back. He would leave calls on her answering machine. But Roberta didn't answer. You see, she knew what all of the Bible teaches and what we see in Jesus in our Gospel lesson:
When confronted with temptations to sin or testing circumstances that could lure us away from God, we close our ears; we run away from the temptation; and we cry out to God to help us do things the right way, God's way.
And even if and when we do fall into sin, replacing our flimsy wisdom for the true wisdom of God, so long as we're still breathing, we can turn back to God. We can, in the Name of Jesus, turn from sin. We can entrust ourselves to Christ and know that God will make a way through all of our testings and temptations. And we can come back to God, because, as God has said through the death and resurrection of His Son:
Mark 1:9-15
Years ago, when our kids were small, we were all shopping together at a mall book store in Toledo. In the children's section, we ran across a book with a blue cover showing a happy toddler in a bath room with reams of toilet paper he had pulled from the dispenser. The title was Love You Forever. Ann read it first and then, crying, handed it to me. When I read it, I couldn't keep from crying either. Love You Forever is a fun and touching ode of love from a mom to her child. The text is punctuated with a recurring promise from mother to child: "I'll love you forever. I'll like you for always. As long as I'm living, my baby you'll be."
Any normal parent can identify with that sentiment. When parents have children enter their lives, they don't stop being parents just because their kids grow up and live responsible, adult lives. As long as we're living, our kids will be our kids and even if they sin and rebel and walk away from God or us, we will always love them.
Parents who love their children give their kids strong foundations for life. And, while I hate to think of this as being genetically built into us, studies have shown that the love, support, and caring discipline provided by fathers is especially important.
Several studies, for example, have been done comparing the faith lives of two groups of children, those who regularly attend worship with their moms only as opposed to those who do so regularly with their dads only. Those who attend with only their fathers are far more likely to continue with lives of prayer, service in Christ's Name, and regular worship than those brought to worship only by their mothers.
Of course, it's better when both parents go to worship and Sunday School with their kids. Better too, when both parents seek to live out their faith in Christ on Mondays through Saturdays, as well as on Sundays. Martin Luther said that the family is to be "a little church," in which Christ is daily worshiped, glorified, and served. But these studies on the spiritual development of children are echoed in studies into other realms of living too: When fathers love, affirm, and nurture children, children are better prepared to face life's challenges.
Our Gospel lesson shows us that God the Father knew the importance of giving strong affirmations of His love to Jesus, God the Son. He knew that His love could sustain Jesus through all that Jesus came into the world to do for you and me. Take a look at the first few verses of today's Gospel lesson, Mark 1:9-11.
Jesus, Mark tells us, was baptized by John the Baptist. We know, of course, that Jesus didn't need to be baptized by John. John was offering a baptism of repentance, a baptism that symbolized that people were turning away from their sin and turning, instead, in faith toward God, God's will, and God's promises, in anticipation of the coming of the King of kings. Jesus never sinned and Jesus was and is the King of kings. But Jesus also came into our worlds to share everything that we go through. So, He was baptized by John.
Look at what happens next: "...just as He was coming out of the water, He saw the heavens torn apart..." Last Sunday, when we looked at Jesus' transfiguration, we saw this very thing happen. The heavens were torn apart so that God the Father could express His approval for Jesus. The same verb translated as "torn apart" shows up again at another place in Mark's Gospel: At the moment when Jesus died on the cross and curtain in the temple that concealed the holy of holies, the place where God dwelt on earth, was torn. In all these instances, the unseen realm of God were breaking into our fallen, imperfect world. God's kingdom was breaking into the world at the very moment that Jesus was baptized in the Jordan.
Now, look at what comes next: "...and the Spirit [descended] like a dove. And a voice came from heaven, 'You are My Son, the Beloved; with You I am well pleased." Father, Son, and Holy Spirit were all together in that moment. This really was the kingdom of God breaking into our world!
But notice what God the Father says to Jesus: "You are My Son, the Beloved; with You I am well pleased." Do you see what the Father was saying to Jesus? It's this: "I'll love you forever, I'll like you for always. As long as I'm living, my baby you'll be."
The One Jesus taught us to call Abba, Father, the first person of our three-three-person-in-one-God is a great Father! "I love You completely and always," the Father was telling Jesus.
Something similar happens to us when we are baptized. The Word of God is invoked over the waters of Holy Baptism, the Holy Spirit reaches down to us, and in the Name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, we become children of God. Rebellious children can walk away from parents and God, of course. But that doesn't alter God's love for or commitment to us. Pull out the green hymn books and turn to page 124 in the front. This comes near the end of the baptismal liturgy. A blessing is given to the baptized:
Mark James, child of God, you have been sealed by the Holy Spirit and marked with the cross of Christ forever.You see, through the pastor and the Church, God tells the baptized, in words similar to those the Father addressed to Jesus in today's Gospel lesson: "I'll love you forever. I'll like you for always. As long as I'm living, my baby you'll be."
Jesus needed the assurance of the Father's love for Him. Go back to our Gospel lesson, to Mark 1:12. "And the Spirit immediately drove Him [Jesus] into the wilderness."
The Gospels of Matthew and Luke are a bit more dainty in describing how Jesus came to be in the wilderness. They say that the Holy Spirit "led" Jesus there.
Mark though, says that the Spirit "drove" Jesus into the wilderness. The word translated into our English translation is, in the Greek in which it was originally written, ekballei, a past tense form of a compound word ekballo. Ek is a prefix meaning out. Ballo, from which we get words like ball and balloon, means throw. Literally, the Holy Spirit threw Jesus out into the wilderness.
The wilderness, or literally in the Greek, the desolate, is a place of terror, a place of sin and temptation, of struggle with tests of character. In other words, the wilderness is the every day world in which you and I live.
It's also a place in which a war for our eternal souls is waged between unseen forces: God and His angels, on the one hand, and Satan--a name for the devil that means adversary--and his demonic forces, on the other.
Through His cross and resurrection, Jesus has already won this war. All who repent and believe in Him and the Good News He has brought are part of God's kingdom and live with God for all eternity, starting right here and now in the wilderness.
But Satan is selfish and desperate, violent and willful. He wants to tear us from God's hands, not because he values us, but because he knows how much God values us, which God showed when Jesus went to a cross bearing our sins on His sinless shoulders.
Some well-meaning Christians deny the existence of the spiritual realm, or of a war going on between God and Satan, with you and me as the prizes for which they battle. Years ago, I was in a study group with other Lutheran pastors. The subject of angels came up and one of our colleagues scoffed at the whole notion of angels or demons, Satan or hell. "I find it hard to believe in extraterrestrials," he told us with something of a smirk. One of our older colleagues put his hand on this fellow's shoulder and said, "Mike, if you don't think that Satan, demons, or hell are real, you haven't been paying attention."
We need to pay attention too!
Turn Ephesians 6:12 in the New Testament. It says: "...our struggle is not against enemies of blood and flesh, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic forces of this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places." (And here, "heavenly" doesn't refer to the place where God reigns, but to the unseen spiritual realm where the war for our souls is played out each moment of our lives.)
In the wilderness, you and I are tempted to take the easy way through life: to sin and walk away from God. God will let us do that, if that's the path we choose.
God won't force Himself on us, ever.
And, there are going to be millions of people in hell who were baptized and who are loved passionately by God, but who spurned God's love, Christ's cross, and the call to repent and believe and so are eternally separated from God.
But that isn't the way it has to be!
We can walk with God even in the wilderness and Jesus shows the way. Look at the last phrase of verse 13 in our Gospel lesson: "and the angels waited on Him." If we will rely completely on God, He will care for us. He will make a way through the wilderness.
In his book, You Were Made for More, Pastor Jim Cymbala tells the story of Roberta, a member of his New York City congregation. Roberta had misused drugs and engaged in all sorts of sinful relationships for decades. She came to faith in Christ through Cymbala's congregation and began a life of recovery from her addictions. She was living with God, free of her past. And though she was HIV-positive, Roberta refused to let the possibility of death from AIDs keep her from living life to the full with Christ by her side.
As she was improving, serving God, and growing in her faith, at that moment, a man from her past re-entered her life. (This shouldn't be surprising, by the way. My experience shows that anytime Godly and good things are happening, Satan will try to find ways to derail them.) The man told Roberta that he was clean, free of drugs for some time.
While wary, Roberta began seeing this man. She didn't love him. But she did feel affection for him. And, as she told Cymbala, they knew about each other's "stuff." Maybe they could build a life together. Still, she was still uncertain and praying about things.
In the meantime, the man invited her to visit him at his place in upstate New York. Roberta had a friend who lived in the same little town and, wanting to do things God's way this time, she arranged to stay at the friend's house, then visit the man at his place.
She had settled into her friend's place and borrowed the friend's car to see the man she now referred to as her "boyfriend." But she was thrown out into the wilderness at almost the moment she greeted him in his kitchen. In his pocket, she could see, was a pipe for smoking crack cocaine.
Without saying a word, her head swimming, she went to his living room and began to pray. "God," she cried out silently, "give me strength to get up and run out of this house right now! I know I should leave!"
As Roberta prayed, she heard an unspoken whisper, spoken undoubtedly by Satan, the one who tempted Jesus in His wilderness: "Let's be honest here--this is who [your boyfriend] is, and this is who your are down deep, don't you know?" Satan continued to tell her that her life could never get better, that she could never be right with God, that she ought to make do and once more take up the life of an addict and enjoy some good times before she left this world.
Just then, as though reading from Satan's playbook, the boyfriend came into the living room. He knew that the jig might be up. "Don't leave!" he kept telling Roberta.
But praying to God for strength and help, Roberta picked up her purse, pulled out her keys, made her way to the car, climbed in behind the wheel, and, her hands shaking, put the key in the ignition and drove away.
The man didn't stop campaigning to get her back. He would leave calls on her answering machine. But Roberta didn't answer. You see, she knew what all of the Bible teaches and what we see in Jesus in our Gospel lesson:
When confronted with temptations to sin or testing circumstances that could lure us away from God, we close our ears; we run away from the temptation; and we cry out to God to help us do things the right way, God's way.
And even if and when we do fall into sin, replacing our flimsy wisdom for the true wisdom of God, so long as we're still breathing, we can turn back to God. We can, in the Name of Jesus, turn from sin. We can entrust ourselves to Christ and know that God will make a way through all of our testings and temptations. And we can come back to God, because, as God has said through the death and resurrection of His Son:
"I'll love you forever. I'll like you for always. As long as I'm living, my baby you'll be."Trust in Christ and God will make a way for you to believe and to know that His love is always true. It will empower you to live your life a better way, God's way. Amen
Sunday, February 19, 2012
How to See Jesus
[This is the sermon prepared for today's worship with the people of Saint Matthew Lutheran Church in Logan, Ohio. While the one given had a lot of what's here, this isn't the actual sermon delivered.]
Mark 9:2-9
On this Transfiguration Sunday, the last Sunday of the Epiphany season, we’re going to explore the Gospel of Mark’s account of the day that Jesus took three of His disciples--Peter, James, and John--to a mountaintop and His glory as God was made plain to see.
But to set the stage, we need to look at a passage in the Gospel of John. So, turn to John 1:14, please. John, you remember, says that Jesus is the Word, Who was with God and was God. John then says this: “And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us...”
The biggest word in that verse is the verb, dwelt. In the Greek in which John originally wrote his gospel, the word translated as dwelt is eskenosen. It’s the verb form of a noun, skene, which means tabernacle or tent.
John is saying that God Almighty took on flesh and experienced everything that we human beings experience because He pitched His tent among us.
Now, the idea of the tent or the tabernacle was important in the centuries before Jesus, in Old Testament times. In the 21st. century BC, God called a couple He later renamed Abraham and Sarah to leave their comfortable lives in the land of Ur, in what is today known as Iraq, and go live in a place God would show them after they’d gotten their start. God said that He would also make this childless and elderly couple the ancestors of God’s own people, of which we as people who confess Jesus Christ as Savior and God, are part. From the moment God called, Abraham and Sarah knew that they were just passing through this life and so, lived in tents or tabernacles.
Some six-hundred years later, about 1450 BC, the descendants of Abraham and Sarah, having been freed from slavery in Egypt by God, spent forty years in a wilderness before entering the land God had promised their ancestors. In the wilderness, they slept in tents.
During their journey, the Old Testament says, God led them by a cloud. God was in the cloud, a bright and overwhelming presence shining within it. God’s perfection would kill any imperfect human being who came directly into His presence and, in fact, the Abraham’s descendants--the Hebrews, AKA Israelites, AKA the Jews--begged their earthly leader Moses not to let them be exposed to God’s presence. The cloud in which God’s presence and glory were shrouded were OK at a distance distance. But they didn’t want to see God up close.
But the fact is, God has never wanted to be removed from us. God cares about us. And while we should always approach God with reverence and awe, knowing that He is the Creator and we are His creatures, we also treasure knowing that we were made for intimacy with God, an intimacy God craves. That’s why God didn’t want to stay in the cloud away from His people.
Turn to Exodus 25:8. There, God is giving instructions to Moses on how His people are to worship Him and He says: “And let them [God’s people] make me a sanctuary, that I may dwell among them.” By now, you can guess what God told Moses in the original Hebrew: “Build a tent, a tabernacle, for Me, that I may pitch My tent, live, among them.”
For many years, God’s people lived in tents while the presence of God lived among them in a tent that also housed the Ten Commandments. In the very inner sanctum of this tent was a place called “the holy of holies,” the place where the holiness of God dwelt on earth.
Five hundred years after God gave those instructions to Moses, King Solomon built a temple which, like the tent in the wilderness, was a copy of God’s heavenly throne room. In the midst of it was the tabernacle, the holy of holies, the place where God pitched His tent. It could only be entered only once a year, on a day known as Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. A priest, after making several sacrifices for his own sin, would enter the holy of holies to sacrifice a perfect, unblemished lamb for the sins of God’s people, then sprinkle the waiting worshipers with the blood of the lamb, assuring them that their sins from the previous year had been atoned for and forgiven. A curtain concealed the holy of holies, a wall that the people feared to breach, afraid, just like their ancestors, of meeting God face to face.
Now, we come to our Gospel lesson, Mark 2:2-9. Take a look at it, please.
Six days before the events the lesson recounts, Jesus told His disciples: “Truly, I tell you, there are some standing here who will not taste death until they see that the kingdom of God has come with power.”
Now, Jesus takes His core leadership group--Peter, James, and John--to a mountaintop. While there, verse 3 says, Jesus “was transfigured before them [His appearance was radically changed], and His clothes became dazzling white...” Suddenly, Peter, James, and John, though they didn’t yet understand it all, saw Jesus in the bright splendor of His deity.
Look now at verse 4: “And there appeared to them Elijah and Moses...” The main strands of the Old Testament scriptures are the Law and the Prophets. The Law and the Prophets pointed to Jesus and here was Moses, the great Lawgiver, and Elijah, Israel’s greatest prophet, conversing with Jesus.
Look at what happens next, in verse 5. “Then Peter said to Jesus, ‘Rabbi, it is good for us to be here; let us make three dwellings...”
Can you guess what the word translated as dwellings might be in the original New Testament Greek?
It’s skenas, the plural word for tents or tabernacles.
Jesus says nothing to Peter’s well-meaning but misguided suggestion. But there are two problems with what Peter wants to do.
First: Peter is putting Moses and Elijah on the same level with Jesus. Peter still doesn’t understand that Jesus is God in human flesh.
Second: When the Word became flesh and pitched His tent among us, God signaled that He was busting out of the confines of tents or clouds or any of the other straitjackets in which we try to put God.
God wants to come into your life right now, today, with all its messiness and drama, boredom and challenge, joy and sorrow.
God wants to be your friend and Savior.
God doesn’t want you to wait for the sweet by and by to have an intimate relationship with Him.
God wants in on every part of Your life, to clean up what is sinful and ugly and to give you a new life.
Peter doesn't understand any of these things about God yet. It's out of this ignorance, Mark tells us that Peter suggests building coequal dwelling places or monuments for Jesus, Moses, and Elijah. Peter “did not know what to say,” Mark tells us in verse 6, “for they [Peter, James, and John] were terrified.”
Their fright no doubt increased with what happened next. Look at verse 7: “Then a cloud overshadowed them [a cloud again] and from the cloud came a voice, ‘This is My Son, the Beloved; listen to Him.”
Not long after these events, the God Who came to tabernacle among us would die on a cross and, strangely, the curtain of the temple, the wall between God and the human race, breached only rarely, would tear in two, from top to bottom.
No longer would human beings need to offer sacrifices or live without the constant, sustaining presence of God in their lives.
Through Jesus, all who turn from sin in His Name and trust in Him alone as their God and King can have immediate access to God.
Need your sins forgiven? Approach God in Jesus’ Name.
Need guidance on how to live your life? Come to God in Jesus’ Name.
Wrestling with a tragedy or setback that has befallen you? You may not get an answer to the question of why, but you will get God by your side.
Jesus Himself was and is the only sacrifice needed to bridge the gulf between a perfect God and imperfect people like you and me. He is, as John the Baptist said of Jesus, "the Lamb of God, Who takes away the sin of the world."
After the voice of God the Father spoke on the Mount of Transfiguration, Jesus stood alone with Peter, James, and John.
But those three apostles still could’t yet understand what you and I can understand, if only we will open our wills, minds, and hearts to Jesus. Here's why. Notice that Jesus says, in verse 9, “to tell no one about what they had seen, until the Son of Man had risen from the dead.”
You see, none of us can really see Jesus for Who He really is, God in human flesh, until we see the cross of Jesus and know that it was our sins--yours and mine--that made Jesus’ death necessary. The wages of sin is death and sinless Jesus took the wages we earned on His sinless body.
And none of us can see Jesus for Who He really is until we accept by faith the testimony about His actual, physical resurrection from the dead. Jesus rising from the dead is the sure sign that He and He alone is the way to new, eternal life with God.
Until Jesus' death and resurrection happened, no matter how amazed Peter, James, and John must have been by Jesus' transfiguration, they could not see Who Jesus really was...and is.
Today, at this moment, you and I can't see the risen Jesus physically. But we can see Jesus by faith in Him. Here are five ways that can happen:
These five things--reading the New Testament, praying in Jesus' Name, receiving the Sacrament, living in fellowship with believers in Jesus, and asking God to show you your sins so that they can be dismantled by the forgiveness He offers to all with faith in Jesus--can be means by which Jesus helps us see Him in our lives today.
May you always see Him clearly, starting now.
Mark 9:2-9
On this Transfiguration Sunday, the last Sunday of the Epiphany season, we’re going to explore the Gospel of Mark’s account of the day that Jesus took three of His disciples--Peter, James, and John--to a mountaintop and His glory as God was made plain to see.
But to set the stage, we need to look at a passage in the Gospel of John. So, turn to John 1:14, please. John, you remember, says that Jesus is the Word, Who was with God and was God. John then says this: “And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us...”
The biggest word in that verse is the verb, dwelt. In the Greek in which John originally wrote his gospel, the word translated as dwelt is eskenosen. It’s the verb form of a noun, skene, which means tabernacle or tent.
John is saying that God Almighty took on flesh and experienced everything that we human beings experience because He pitched His tent among us.
Now, the idea of the tent or the tabernacle was important in the centuries before Jesus, in Old Testament times. In the 21st. century BC, God called a couple He later renamed Abraham and Sarah to leave their comfortable lives in the land of Ur, in what is today known as Iraq, and go live in a place God would show them after they’d gotten their start. God said that He would also make this childless and elderly couple the ancestors of God’s own people, of which we as people who confess Jesus Christ as Savior and God, are part. From the moment God called, Abraham and Sarah knew that they were just passing through this life and so, lived in tents or tabernacles.
Some six-hundred years later, about 1450 BC, the descendants of Abraham and Sarah, having been freed from slavery in Egypt by God, spent forty years in a wilderness before entering the land God had promised their ancestors. In the wilderness, they slept in tents.
During their journey, the Old Testament says, God led them by a cloud. God was in the cloud, a bright and overwhelming presence shining within it. God’s perfection would kill any imperfect human being who came directly into His presence and, in fact, the Abraham’s descendants--the Hebrews, AKA Israelites, AKA the Jews--begged their earthly leader Moses not to let them be exposed to God’s presence. The cloud in which God’s presence and glory were shrouded were OK at a distance distance. But they didn’t want to see God up close.
But the fact is, God has never wanted to be removed from us. God cares about us. And while we should always approach God with reverence and awe, knowing that He is the Creator and we are His creatures, we also treasure knowing that we were made for intimacy with God, an intimacy God craves. That’s why God didn’t want to stay in the cloud away from His people.
Turn to Exodus 25:8. There, God is giving instructions to Moses on how His people are to worship Him and He says: “And let them [God’s people] make me a sanctuary, that I may dwell among them.” By now, you can guess what God told Moses in the original Hebrew: “Build a tent, a tabernacle, for Me, that I may pitch My tent, live, among them.”
For many years, God’s people lived in tents while the presence of God lived among them in a tent that also housed the Ten Commandments. In the very inner sanctum of this tent was a place called “the holy of holies,” the place where the holiness of God dwelt on earth.
Five hundred years after God gave those instructions to Moses, King Solomon built a temple which, like the tent in the wilderness, was a copy of God’s heavenly throne room. In the midst of it was the tabernacle, the holy of holies, the place where God pitched His tent. It could only be entered only once a year, on a day known as Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. A priest, after making several sacrifices for his own sin, would enter the holy of holies to sacrifice a perfect, unblemished lamb for the sins of God’s people, then sprinkle the waiting worshipers with the blood of the lamb, assuring them that their sins from the previous year had been atoned for and forgiven. A curtain concealed the holy of holies, a wall that the people feared to breach, afraid, just like their ancestors, of meeting God face to face.
Now, we come to our Gospel lesson, Mark 2:2-9. Take a look at it, please.
Six days before the events the lesson recounts, Jesus told His disciples: “Truly, I tell you, there are some standing here who will not taste death until they see that the kingdom of God has come with power.”
Now, Jesus takes His core leadership group--Peter, James, and John--to a mountaintop. While there, verse 3 says, Jesus “was transfigured before them [His appearance was radically changed], and His clothes became dazzling white...” Suddenly, Peter, James, and John, though they didn’t yet understand it all, saw Jesus in the bright splendor of His deity.
Look now at verse 4: “And there appeared to them Elijah and Moses...” The main strands of the Old Testament scriptures are the Law and the Prophets. The Law and the Prophets pointed to Jesus and here was Moses, the great Lawgiver, and Elijah, Israel’s greatest prophet, conversing with Jesus.
Look at what happens next, in verse 5. “Then Peter said to Jesus, ‘Rabbi, it is good for us to be here; let us make three dwellings...”
Can you guess what the word translated as dwellings might be in the original New Testament Greek?
It’s skenas, the plural word for tents or tabernacles.
Jesus says nothing to Peter’s well-meaning but misguided suggestion. But there are two problems with what Peter wants to do.
First: Peter is putting Moses and Elijah on the same level with Jesus. Peter still doesn’t understand that Jesus is God in human flesh.
Second: When the Word became flesh and pitched His tent among us, God signaled that He was busting out of the confines of tents or clouds or any of the other straitjackets in which we try to put God.
God wants to come into your life right now, today, with all its messiness and drama, boredom and challenge, joy and sorrow.
God wants to be your friend and Savior.
God doesn’t want you to wait for the sweet by and by to have an intimate relationship with Him.
God wants in on every part of Your life, to clean up what is sinful and ugly and to give you a new life.
Peter doesn't understand any of these things about God yet. It's out of this ignorance, Mark tells us that Peter suggests building coequal dwelling places or monuments for Jesus, Moses, and Elijah. Peter “did not know what to say,” Mark tells us in verse 6, “for they [Peter, James, and John] were terrified.”
Their fright no doubt increased with what happened next. Look at verse 7: “Then a cloud overshadowed them [a cloud again] and from the cloud came a voice, ‘This is My Son, the Beloved; listen to Him.”
Not long after these events, the God Who came to tabernacle among us would die on a cross and, strangely, the curtain of the temple, the wall between God and the human race, breached only rarely, would tear in two, from top to bottom.
No longer would human beings need to offer sacrifices or live without the constant, sustaining presence of God in their lives.
Through Jesus, all who turn from sin in His Name and trust in Him alone as their God and King can have immediate access to God.
Need your sins forgiven? Approach God in Jesus’ Name.
Need guidance on how to live your life? Come to God in Jesus’ Name.
Wrestling with a tragedy or setback that has befallen you? You may not get an answer to the question of why, but you will get God by your side.
Jesus Himself was and is the only sacrifice needed to bridge the gulf between a perfect God and imperfect people like you and me. He is, as John the Baptist said of Jesus, "the Lamb of God, Who takes away the sin of the world."
After the voice of God the Father spoke on the Mount of Transfiguration, Jesus stood alone with Peter, James, and John.
But those three apostles still could’t yet understand what you and I can understand, if only we will open our wills, minds, and hearts to Jesus. Here's why. Notice that Jesus says, in verse 9, “to tell no one about what they had seen, until the Son of Man had risen from the dead.”
You see, none of us can really see Jesus for Who He really is, God in human flesh, until we see the cross of Jesus and know that it was our sins--yours and mine--that made Jesus’ death necessary. The wages of sin is death and sinless Jesus took the wages we earned on His sinless body.
And none of us can see Jesus for Who He really is until we accept by faith the testimony about His actual, physical resurrection from the dead. Jesus rising from the dead is the sure sign that He and He alone is the way to new, eternal life with God.
Until Jesus' death and resurrection happened, no matter how amazed Peter, James, and John must have been by Jesus' transfiguration, they could not see Who Jesus really was...and is.
Today, at this moment, you and I can't see the risen Jesus physically. But we can see Jesus by faith in Him. Here are five ways that can happen:
- First: Read the New Testament. The New Testament is the cradle in which the baby Jesus can be found, His cross can be experienced, and His empty tomb can be seen. Starting on March 8, you can be part of Read the New Testament in a Year, digging into and discussing the second great part of God's written word for the human race, the Bible, with other members of the Saint Matthew family. As we read and discuss and pray over the New Testament, we're going to see Jesus together.
- Second: Pray in Jesus' Name.
- Third: Receive Holy Communion every time it’s offered. “This is my body; this is my blood,” Jesus says of the bread and the wine. In Communion, Jesus literally comes to us and enters us. He is as present and as powerful for us when we receive the body and blood by faith in Jesus, as He was to Peter, James, and John at the Transfiguration.
- Fourth: Spend time in fellowship with God’s people, including regularly worshiping, studying Scripture, and praying with people who believe in Jesus. The Bible says that "iron sharpens iron," meaning that as we challenge and affirm one another, we grow. If you're intent on seeing Jesus, you can't go solo; you need to hang out with and learn from other believers.
- Finally: Ask God to show you the ways in which you may have displeased him. King David prayed, "Search me, O God, and know my heart; test me and know my thoughts. See if there is any wicked way in me and lead me in the way everlasting." We need to submit to a spiritual examination by God and to confess the sins God makes known to us. Jesus died a rose to tear open the curtain--the wall--that sin had put between us. Our sins, the things we do that hurt God or hurt others, can become new walls between God and us. When we ask God to show us the walls we’ve erected against His will, God forgives our sins and dismantles the walls, and we get a clearer view of Jesus, God in the flesh.
These five things--reading the New Testament, praying in Jesus' Name, receiving the Sacrament, living in fellowship with believers in Jesus, and asking God to show you your sins so that they can be dismantled by the forgiveness He offers to all with faith in Jesus--can be means by which Jesus helps us see Him in our lives today.
May you always see Him clearly, starting now.
Sunday, February 22, 2009
Seeing Jesus Without a Vision
[This was shared during worship with the people of Saint Matthew Lutheran Church in Logan, Ohio, earlier today.]
Mark 9:2-9
During an episode of the old Murphy Brown sitcom, Murphy asks her coworkers for their thoughts about God. Jim, the anchorman, says that he’s a lifelong churchgoer and that while he has never personally experienced God, he knows that there are people in the church he attends who have. He keeps going, he says, because he wants to be around people like that and because of a belief that if it happened for them, it could happen for him too.
Truth is, few of us ever have the kind of experience of God in all His power and glory that Peter, James, and John had on the mountaintop with Jesus. Jesus’ transfiguration--the transformation of His appearance so that His clothing became whiter than even Clorox could get it—was a dazzling, overwhelming heavenly affirmation of His authority. It fulfilled what Jesus had promised His disciples just six days earlier—and just one verse before the start of today’s Gospel lesson from Mark. Jesus had said, “I can assure you that some of the people standing here will not die before they see God’s kingdom come with power.” [CEV]
Peter, James, and John saw what Jim the anchorman hoped to see: the power and the presence of God. They saw a vision and heard words from heaven that confirmed the rightness of following Jesus, that He is the One Who brings God’s kingdom to our world, He is the One to Whom we should listen day in and day out.
I don’t know about you: But sometimes I think that following Jesus would be a lot easier for me if God would be that direct with me. In fact, if I let myself, I could even resent Peter, James, and John a little.
But, if you are inclined to feel ripped off because the three of them got to see a vision that would sustain their faith and you may not have been given such a gift to sustain your faith, keep in mind that even then only three of Jesus’ disciples saw the Transfiguration. The other nine were down in the lowlands below. Thomas, the disbeliever, wasn’t there. Nor was Andrew, the one who had introduced Peter to Jesus in the first place. And neither was Judas, who would later betray Jesus.
Maybe if Thomas and Judas had seen Jesus up on that mountain, things would have turned out differently. Maybe Thomas wouldn’t have doubted. Maybe Judas wouldn’t have betrayed Jesus. But they weren’t there.
And Andrew, who followed Jesus before the rest of them, would seem to have had more right to a faith-encouraging vision than Peter, James, or John had. But he wasn’t there either.
It seems that God gives visions to the people to whom God chooses to give visions. We have no control over that.
Erling Wold was a Lutheran pastor who, along with his wife Margaret, wrote many inspiring articles and books. One day, Wold was surfing in the Pacific Ocean near his southern California house. A wave knocked him down and smashed him into the sand. His neck was broken. In a book he called, What Do I Have to Do--Break My Neck?, Wold writes (along with his co-author, Margaret) of the moment after impact, when he knew that he was seriously hurt: “Then and there, something very important happened to me. It was not a hallucination. My senses were totally alive. In that moment, there was an inrush of light and [it] filled me as I floated. The light was on my right side, and the light took shape, pulsating with an invitation to come into the light, into the center of the light.” Wold knew that the light was the Light of the world, the risen Jesus. He writes, “I was swept up into an unspeakable exhilaration of glory and I had an intense longing to let go of everything. I welcomed anything. Death. Paralysis. As long as I could be part of that light. I was filled with a light born ecstasy, and my exhilaration continued for what seemed like an eternity.”
Obviously, much pain, healing, and rehabilitation were ahead of Erling Wold at that moment. But from that time on, the risen Jesus Who he had always trusted and believed in became more real and present for him than at any time in his life. I believe that God gave Wold a vision of the risen Jesus so that Wold could have a ministry that sustained and encouraged many people in their faith in the decades that followed. [see here]
Sometimes, I think, visions of God’s kingdom—visions of the glory of Jesus--like that experienced by Peter, James, and John on the Mount of Transfiguration may be as much burden as reassurance, comfort, or inspiration. After Jesus had died and risen and sent the Holy Spirit, what choice did Peter, James, and John have but to spread the Good News about Jesus Christ? Proclaiming the vision they had seen of God’s kingdom would eventually bring suffering and martyrdom to each one of them. The vision sustained them, assuring them that Jesus is more than an Easter God, He's also the God Who comes down into our worlds. But the Transfiguration vision didn’t turn the three disciples' lives into primrose paths. In fact, being true to what the Transfiguration told them about Jesus cost them their earthly lives.
Many of you remember the speech given by Martin Luther King, Jr. in Memphis just before he went to the hotel where he was killed. Reverend King, whose work for civil rights flowed from his commitment as a follower of Jesus Christ, seemed to have a premonition of his impending death, conveyed in that speech through words that spoke of a vision. “I’ve been to the mountaintop,” he said, “…and I’ve seen the promised land…. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land. And I'm happy, tonight. I'm not worried about anything. I'm not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.” For King, the vision of the risen Jesus’ kingdom he seemed to experience not only affirmed his faith, but burdened him.
And yet, each of us as we move through our days and face the challenges of daily living—doing our work, paying our taxes, stewing about our kids, facing economic uncertainties—each of us would like to know that God has our back, that the risen Jesus is here for us and with us.
Last year, I shared with you five ways I have learned to see Jesus. On the theory that, even though you may have been fascinated when I shared these five ways of seeing Jesus with you back in January of 2008, you may have forgotten one or two of them, I’m going to quickly share the list with you again now.
This list of five ways to see Jesus isn’t new with me. They come from a wonderful book called Why I Am a Christian, written by the late Lutheran theologian and pastor Ole Hallesby. He wrote this list for people who want to believe, but like Peter, James, and John, and maybe sometimes you or me, find it hard to believe.
If you want to believe, Hallesby says, do these things. First: Read the New Testament. The New Testament is the cradle in which the baby Jesus can be found, the place of His cross can be experienced, and His empty tomb can be seen.
Second: Pray. I was going through a discouraging day recently. Nothing seemed to be going right and every time I turned around, I got bad news of one sort or another. It wasn’t a terrible day, just a down day. In desperation, I stopped what I was doing and prayed. The bad news didn’t disappear. But as I prayed in Jesus’ Name, the God we know in Jesus, assured me of His presence and His love. Too often we try to face life with our own brains or brawn. But if we ask for Him to help us, though we can’t see Him, Jesus will show up.
Third: We ask God to show us the ways we’ve displeased Him. We submit to a spiritual examination by God and we confess the sins God makes known to us. Our sins, the things we do that hurt God or hurt others, can become walls between God and us. When we ask God to show us the walls we’ve erected against His grace, they can be dismantled and we get a clear internal view of Jesus.
Fourth: Receive Holy Communion every time it’s offered. “This is my body; this is my blood,” Jesus says of the bread and the wine. In Communion, Jesus comes to us and enters us. He is as present to us then as He was to Peter, James, and John.
Finally: Spend time in fellowship with God’s people. Of course, this means being in worship with God’s people when we’re able to do so. But we can fellowship with other believers at other times and, in fact, we really need to fellowship with them at other times. In the past week or so, I was visiting one of our shut-ins who I told, “I’m inspired every time I visit you.” She was taken aback by that comment. “Really?” she asked. “Absolutely!” The fellowship of believers assures us that God’s kingdom isn’t some far-off thing, but that it comes right down to us the way it came to the Mount of Transfiguration. In the movie, The Color Purple, one character battered by life, tells another, “When you walked into the room, I knew there was a God.” The fellowship of believers can give us that same assurance.
You and I may never be blessed or burdened by the kind of vision of God’s Kingdom and of Jesus’ glory that three of Jesus’ disciples saw on the mount of Transfiguration. But when we read the New Testament, pray in Jesus’ Name, submit to spiritual examination and correction by God, receive Jesus’ body and blood, and spend time in fellowship with other believers, we too can see Jesus. We can know that Jesus is with us now. We can experience His strength in the midst of our weakness. We can be assured that there is a Lord that gives eternity to all who follow Him. And when we experience Jesus in these ways, we can face anything in life or death and beyond. Amen
Mark 9:2-9
During an episode of the old Murphy Brown sitcom, Murphy asks her coworkers for their thoughts about God. Jim, the anchorman, says that he’s a lifelong churchgoer and that while he has never personally experienced God, he knows that there are people in the church he attends who have. He keeps going, he says, because he wants to be around people like that and because of a belief that if it happened for them, it could happen for him too.
Truth is, few of us ever have the kind of experience of God in all His power and glory that Peter, James, and John had on the mountaintop with Jesus. Jesus’ transfiguration--the transformation of His appearance so that His clothing became whiter than even Clorox could get it—was a dazzling, overwhelming heavenly affirmation of His authority. It fulfilled what Jesus had promised His disciples just six days earlier—and just one verse before the start of today’s Gospel lesson from Mark. Jesus had said, “I can assure you that some of the people standing here will not die before they see God’s kingdom come with power.” [CEV]
Peter, James, and John saw what Jim the anchorman hoped to see: the power and the presence of God. They saw a vision and heard words from heaven that confirmed the rightness of following Jesus, that He is the One Who brings God’s kingdom to our world, He is the One to Whom we should listen day in and day out.
I don’t know about you: But sometimes I think that following Jesus would be a lot easier for me if God would be that direct with me. In fact, if I let myself, I could even resent Peter, James, and John a little.
But, if you are inclined to feel ripped off because the three of them got to see a vision that would sustain their faith and you may not have been given such a gift to sustain your faith, keep in mind that even then only three of Jesus’ disciples saw the Transfiguration. The other nine were down in the lowlands below. Thomas, the disbeliever, wasn’t there. Nor was Andrew, the one who had introduced Peter to Jesus in the first place. And neither was Judas, who would later betray Jesus.
Maybe if Thomas and Judas had seen Jesus up on that mountain, things would have turned out differently. Maybe Thomas wouldn’t have doubted. Maybe Judas wouldn’t have betrayed Jesus. But they weren’t there.
And Andrew, who followed Jesus before the rest of them, would seem to have had more right to a faith-encouraging vision than Peter, James, or John had. But he wasn’t there either.
It seems that God gives visions to the people to whom God chooses to give visions. We have no control over that.
Erling Wold was a Lutheran pastor who, along with his wife Margaret, wrote many inspiring articles and books. One day, Wold was surfing in the Pacific Ocean near his southern California house. A wave knocked him down and smashed him into the sand. His neck was broken. In a book he called, What Do I Have to Do--Break My Neck?, Wold writes (along with his co-author, Margaret) of the moment after impact, when he knew that he was seriously hurt: “Then and there, something very important happened to me. It was not a hallucination. My senses were totally alive. In that moment, there was an inrush of light and [it] filled me as I floated. The light was on my right side, and the light took shape, pulsating with an invitation to come into the light, into the center of the light.” Wold knew that the light was the Light of the world, the risen Jesus. He writes, “I was swept up into an unspeakable exhilaration of glory and I had an intense longing to let go of everything. I welcomed anything. Death. Paralysis. As long as I could be part of that light. I was filled with a light born ecstasy, and my exhilaration continued for what seemed like an eternity.”
Obviously, much pain, healing, and rehabilitation were ahead of Erling Wold at that moment. But from that time on, the risen Jesus Who he had always trusted and believed in became more real and present for him than at any time in his life. I believe that God gave Wold a vision of the risen Jesus so that Wold could have a ministry that sustained and encouraged many people in their faith in the decades that followed. [see here]
Sometimes, I think, visions of God’s kingdom—visions of the glory of Jesus--like that experienced by Peter, James, and John on the Mount of Transfiguration may be as much burden as reassurance, comfort, or inspiration. After Jesus had died and risen and sent the Holy Spirit, what choice did Peter, James, and John have but to spread the Good News about Jesus Christ? Proclaiming the vision they had seen of God’s kingdom would eventually bring suffering and martyrdom to each one of them. The vision sustained them, assuring them that Jesus is more than an Easter God, He's also the God Who comes down into our worlds. But the Transfiguration vision didn’t turn the three disciples' lives into primrose paths. In fact, being true to what the Transfiguration told them about Jesus cost them their earthly lives.
Many of you remember the speech given by Martin Luther King, Jr. in Memphis just before he went to the hotel where he was killed. Reverend King, whose work for civil rights flowed from his commitment as a follower of Jesus Christ, seemed to have a premonition of his impending death, conveyed in that speech through words that spoke of a vision. “I’ve been to the mountaintop,” he said, “…and I’ve seen the promised land…. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land. And I'm happy, tonight. I'm not worried about anything. I'm not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.” For King, the vision of the risen Jesus’ kingdom he seemed to experience not only affirmed his faith, but burdened him.
And yet, each of us as we move through our days and face the challenges of daily living—doing our work, paying our taxes, stewing about our kids, facing economic uncertainties—each of us would like to know that God has our back, that the risen Jesus is here for us and with us.
Last year, I shared with you five ways I have learned to see Jesus. On the theory that, even though you may have been fascinated when I shared these five ways of seeing Jesus with you back in January of 2008, you may have forgotten one or two of them, I’m going to quickly share the list with you again now.
This list of five ways to see Jesus isn’t new with me. They come from a wonderful book called Why I Am a Christian, written by the late Lutheran theologian and pastor Ole Hallesby. He wrote this list for people who want to believe, but like Peter, James, and John, and maybe sometimes you or me, find it hard to believe.
If you want to believe, Hallesby says, do these things. First: Read the New Testament. The New Testament is the cradle in which the baby Jesus can be found, the place of His cross can be experienced, and His empty tomb can be seen.
Second: Pray. I was going through a discouraging day recently. Nothing seemed to be going right and every time I turned around, I got bad news of one sort or another. It wasn’t a terrible day, just a down day. In desperation, I stopped what I was doing and prayed. The bad news didn’t disappear. But as I prayed in Jesus’ Name, the God we know in Jesus, assured me of His presence and His love. Too often we try to face life with our own brains or brawn. But if we ask for Him to help us, though we can’t see Him, Jesus will show up.
Third: We ask God to show us the ways we’ve displeased Him. We submit to a spiritual examination by God and we confess the sins God makes known to us. Our sins, the things we do that hurt God or hurt others, can become walls between God and us. When we ask God to show us the walls we’ve erected against His grace, they can be dismantled and we get a clear internal view of Jesus.
Fourth: Receive Holy Communion every time it’s offered. “This is my body; this is my blood,” Jesus says of the bread and the wine. In Communion, Jesus comes to us and enters us. He is as present to us then as He was to Peter, James, and John.
Finally: Spend time in fellowship with God’s people. Of course, this means being in worship with God’s people when we’re able to do so. But we can fellowship with other believers at other times and, in fact, we really need to fellowship with them at other times. In the past week or so, I was visiting one of our shut-ins who I told, “I’m inspired every time I visit you.” She was taken aback by that comment. “Really?” she asked. “Absolutely!” The fellowship of believers assures us that God’s kingdom isn’t some far-off thing, but that it comes right down to us the way it came to the Mount of Transfiguration. In the movie, The Color Purple, one character battered by life, tells another, “When you walked into the room, I knew there was a God.” The fellowship of believers can give us that same assurance.
You and I may never be blessed or burdened by the kind of vision of God’s Kingdom and of Jesus’ glory that three of Jesus’ disciples saw on the mount of Transfiguration. But when we read the New Testament, pray in Jesus’ Name, submit to spiritual examination and correction by God, receive Jesus’ body and blood, and spend time in fellowship with other believers, we too can see Jesus. We can know that Jesus is with us now. We can experience His strength in the midst of our weakness. We can be assured that there is a Lord that gives eternity to all who follow Him. And when we experience Jesus in these ways, we can face anything in life or death and beyond. Amen
Thursday, February 19, 2009
A Few Comments on This Sunday's Gospel Lesson: Mark 9:2-9
[This coming Sunday's Gospel lesson for Saint Matthew Lutheran Church in Logan, Ohio, where I serve as pastor, will be the same as the lessons in many churches around the world. Hopefully, these notes will help folks prepare for worship.]
Mark 9:2-9
2Six days later, Jesus took with him Peter and James and John, and led them up a high mountain apart, by themselves. And he was transfigured before them, 3and his clothes became dazzling white, such as no one on earth could bleach them. 4And there appeared to them Elijah with Moses, who were talking with Jesus. 5Then Peter said to Jesus, “Rabbi, it is good for us to be here; let us make three dwellings, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah.” 6He did not know what to say, for they were terrified. 7Then a cloud overshadowed them, and from the cloud there came a voice, “This is my Son, the Beloved; listen to him!” 8Suddenly when they looked around, they saw no one with them any more, but only Jesus.
9As they were coming down the mountain, he ordered them to tell no one about what they had seen, until after the Son of Man had risen from the dead.
General Comments:
(1) This weekend brings us to the end of the Epiphany Season of the Church Year. (For more on the Epiphany Season, read here.) The sabbath lessons of the season are always bracketed by remembrances of Jesus' Baptism (the Baptism of Our Lord) and by the subject of this weekend's emphasis, the Transfiguration of Our Lord.
These texts fit in well with the Epiphany Season, one purpose of which is to highlight those incidents, especially the early ones, which pointed to Jesus' deity.
In both of these "Epiphany bookends," a voice from heaven affirms Jesus' "office" as Savior of the world, the promised Messiah. The voice's reference to Jesus as "Son" is more significant than it might seem. The term implies a closer kinship than that of an earthly son to his father. It means to have a single identity. Paul makes this explict in a few majestic verses that come at the beginning of his letter to the Colossians:
(2) In the past, some Biblical scholars, who always seem to be looking for ways to deconstruct and reconstruct Biblical texts to suit their own preferred ways of telling the salvation story, held that this was originally an Easter story which Mark and the other Gospel writers read back into an earlier time in Jesus' ministry, as a way of indicating that His Lordship had been revealed to the disciples even before His death and resurrection. But as one commentator, Hugh Anderson, points out, that theory comes to grief in the face of an important fact: In all of the incidents recording post-Easter encounters with Jesus, the resurrected Lord speaks. He doesn't do that here.
(3) Beyond dying and rising for our benefit, Jesus also came into the world to establish a community of faith devoted to living in love toward God and others. This community of faith, which is essential to God's mission in the world, is called the Church.
Of course, on Pentecost Day, fifty days after His resurrection, Jesus would send the the Holy Spirit. He is the source of godly power that has energized the Church ever since, the One Who gave birth to the Church. (And keeps giving birth to it. Check out John 3:3.)
The Spirit came to call out the Church that, under Jesus' leadership had existed in embryonic form. (You can read about this in Acts 2.) In this embryonic fellowship, Jesus had created a spiritual and an organizational infrastructure.
In His leadership, Jesus employed a method that will be familiar to almost anyone who's gone through an executive leadership or business management program. It had several components:
[For an insightful and helpful discussion of the connection between Mark's Transfiguration account and the Old Testament figures of Elijah and Elisha, read Peter J. Leithart's Brazos Theological Commentary of the Bible volume, 1 & 2 Kings (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Brazos Press, 2006), pp. 171-117.]
Mark 9:2-9
2Six days later, Jesus took with him Peter and James and John, and led them up a high mountain apart, by themselves. And he was transfigured before them, 3and his clothes became dazzling white, such as no one on earth could bleach them. 4And there appeared to them Elijah with Moses, who were talking with Jesus. 5Then Peter said to Jesus, “Rabbi, it is good for us to be here; let us make three dwellings, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah.” 6He did not know what to say, for they were terrified. 7Then a cloud overshadowed them, and from the cloud there came a voice, “This is my Son, the Beloved; listen to him!” 8Suddenly when they looked around, they saw no one with them any more, but only Jesus.
9As they were coming down the mountain, he ordered them to tell no one about what they had seen, until after the Son of Man had risen from the dead.
General Comments:
(1) This weekend brings us to the end of the Epiphany Season of the Church Year. (For more on the Epiphany Season, read here.) The sabbath lessons of the season are always bracketed by remembrances of Jesus' Baptism (the Baptism of Our Lord) and by the subject of this weekend's emphasis, the Transfiguration of Our Lord.
These texts fit in well with the Epiphany Season, one purpose of which is to highlight those incidents, especially the early ones, which pointed to Jesus' deity.
In both of these "Epiphany bookends," a voice from heaven affirms Jesus' "office" as Savior of the world, the promised Messiah. The voice's reference to Jesus as "Son" is more significant than it might seem. The term implies a closer kinship than that of an earthly son to his father. It means to have a single identity. Paul makes this explict in a few majestic verses that come at the beginning of his letter to the Colossians:
He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation; for in him all things in heaven and on earth were created, things visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or powers—all things have been created through him and for him. He himself is before all things, and in him all things hold together. He is the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, so that he might come to have first place in everything. For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of his cross. (Colossians 1:15-20)In his account of Jesus' Baptism, Mark diverges from those of the other Gospel-writers (Matthew, Luke, and John) by saying that the voice was only heard by Jesus Himself. But here, in his Transfiguration account, the voice is heard by Peter, James, and John (and presumably Jesus). The first time, the voice comes to affirm Jesus in the course He's about to pursue. In the second, the voice affirms the beliefs of the three members of Jesus' inner-inner circle.
(2) In the past, some Biblical scholars, who always seem to be looking for ways to deconstruct and reconstruct Biblical texts to suit their own preferred ways of telling the salvation story, held that this was originally an Easter story which Mark and the other Gospel writers read back into an earlier time in Jesus' ministry, as a way of indicating that His Lordship had been revealed to the disciples even before His death and resurrection. But as one commentator, Hugh Anderson, points out, that theory comes to grief in the face of an important fact: In all of the incidents recording post-Easter encounters with Jesus, the resurrected Lord speaks. He doesn't do that here.
(3) Beyond dying and rising for our benefit, Jesus also came into the world to establish a community of faith devoted to living in love toward God and others. This community of faith, which is essential to God's mission in the world, is called the Church.
Of course, on Pentecost Day, fifty days after His resurrection, Jesus would send the the Holy Spirit. He is the source of godly power that has energized the Church ever since, the One Who gave birth to the Church. (And keeps giving birth to it. Check out John 3:3.)
The Spirit came to call out the Church that, under Jesus' leadership had existed in embryonic form. (You can read about this in Acts 2.) In this embryonic fellowship, Jesus had created a spiritual and an organizational infrastructure.
In His leadership, Jesus employed a method that will be familiar to almost anyone who's gone through an executive leadership or business management program. It had several components:
He spent the least time with the masses; more time with His disciples or students or followers (a group which, Paul reports, numbered about 500 people); more time still with the Twelve (the apostles); and the most time with three apostles, Peter, James, and John. In other words, the greater the leadership role to be taken by people, the more time Jesus spent training them.At the Transfiguration, Jesus was with the inner-inner circle of Peter, James, and John (PJ2). In his commentary on this passage, Brian Stoffregen observes:
The make-up of Jesus' training program was mainly made up of three steps: He showed them how; He was with them as they did what they showed them; He set them loose to do what He'd showed them; He had them come back for debriefing and refinement.
This is the second time the "inner three" are set apart in Mark. They witness the raising of Jairus' daughter from the dead in 5:37ff. It is then ironic that these three question what the rising from the dead could mean (9:9-10). The same word anistemi is used in both contexts.It's a tribute to the power of God's Holy Spirit to transform people that these three unpromising characters gave faithful leadership to the Church as it carried the life-changing Good News of Jesus into the world!
The next time Jesus takes these three with him is in the Garden of Gethsemane (14:33). The three who have seen his power to raise the dead, who have seen his heavenly glory, also see his earthly agony. In these last two instances, they, especially Peter, respond poorly. On the mountain Peter wants to build booths. In the Garden they are to stay awake and pray, but they fall asleep three times.
[For an insightful and helpful discussion of the connection between Mark's Transfiguration account and the Old Testament figures of Elijah and Elisha, read Peter J. Leithart's Brazos Theological Commentary of the Bible volume, 1 & 2 Kings (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Brazos Press, 2006), pp. 171-117.]
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