Free in Christ

[This was shared during worship with the people and friends of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio, earlier today.]

Mark 2:23-3:6

Years ago, I’ve read, there was flooding happening in a section of rural Holland. Government officials determined that a small village lay in the flood’s path. The government contacted the local pastor, the closest thing to a public official there was in the village and said that the community might be spared if the people worked all that day, a Sunday, to build a temporary dam.

The pastor was caught in a dilemma. On the one hand, he wanted to lead the villagers in saving their community. That seemed like the right thing to do. On the other, it was the sabbath day, a day set aside by God for His people to rest and hear God’s Word. Building the dam would be work. Resting seemed like the right thing to do. 

So, the pastor called a meeting. He asked what the villagers thought should be done. Discussion followed. To make sure that all points of view were considered, the pastor said that while he was certainly in favor of observing the Sabbath day, there were times when Jesus was confronted with what might be called “emergency” situations when He worked on the Sabbath. Might this flood be such a situation? 

At this, an elderly man spoke up: “Pastor, I must say something that I have never ventured to bring up before. But sometimes, I think that our Lord was a bit of a liberal.”

In today’s Gospel lesson, we see an example of why that man thought of Jesus as “a bit of a liberal.” 

We also see that Jesus views things like the Sabbath, along with all the other commands of God, the law of God, from His perspective as God, not from the world’s perspective, whether the world’s perspective is that held by religious people confident of their own goodness or by secular people who think nothing of God. 

Let’s take a look at our lesson, Mark 2:23-3:6. As we do so, I want to warn you that we're going to have to spend some time on the Biblical and historical background. But stick with me, as I think it will be worth it.

The Gospel lesson starts this way: “One Sabbath Jesus was going through the grainfields, and as his disciples walked along, they began to pick some heads of grain. The Pharisees said to him, ‘Look, why are they doing what is unlawful on the Sabbath?’ He answered, ‘Have you never read what David did when he and his companions were hungry and in need? In the days of Abiathar the high priest, he entered the house of God and ate the consecrated bread, which is lawful only for priests to eat. And he also gave some to his companions.’ Then he said to them, ‘The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath. So the Son of Man is Lord even of the Sabbath.’”

The Pharisees, as you know, were a sect of Judaism for hundreds of years. Pharisaism was a people’s movement, composed of mostly poor people without influence over the religious and political elites of their time. The world was a fearful, place for the Pharisees, changing all the time. Looking for stability and certainty, they turned faith in God into a moral and political program. There were many fine Pharisees, but many others used their “religious program” to shame and intimidate people into compliance with their version of God’s will. They also scrupulously observed God’s Law, or at least their version of God’s Law, as an act of defiance of the Romans, who occupied their country. We find Christians doing much the same today, whether they're conservative or liberal. Instead of proclaiming the Gospel of new, everlasting life with God for all who entrust their lives to Christ, they want to tell people what to do.

The Sabbath was mandated by God, of course. In the Third Commandment, God says, “Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy.” God set apart a day so that His people could rest after six days of work, just as He had rested when He created the universe. 

The Sabbath had other functions as well: 

• to give particular focus to worshiping God; 
• to gratefully remember God’s deliverance of Israel from Egypt in ancient days; 
• to joyfully anticipate the day when the Lord’s Messiah--the Christ, God’s Anointed One, referred to by the Old Testament book of Daniel as “the Son of Man”--would come into the world and establish His kingdom. 

But for the Pharisees, the Sabbath wasn’t a day of rejoicing or faith-filled rest; it was a day to prove how wonderful they were. For them, the Sabbath was a flag they waved in the faces of the Romans, not as a witness to God’s goodness and desire to save all humanity from sin and death, but as a symbol of their own moral superiority.

They used the Sabbath also as a moral and religious bludgeon on their fellow Jews. The Pharisees acted as a kind of unofficial secret police, seeking to out anyone they deemed insufficiently Jewish, insufficiently loyal to God, or insufficiently loyal to the Judean homeland. 

That’s how they act in today’s Gospel lesson. Jesus and His disciples are walking through a grain field. The disciples are hungry. They pick some of the heads of grain, grind them on the palms of their hands, and eat. 

Now, everybody knew that God’s law allowed hungry travelers to glean from crops in the fields through which they passed. 

But the Pharisees get upset with the disciples because in their harvesting and grinding, they're doing work on the Sabbath. They're violating the Third Commandment. 

When the Pharisees confront Jesus on this, Jesus doesn't deny that the disciples are doing work on the Sabbath. Nor does He deny the importance of Sabbath observance as a moral law given by God. 

But Jesus does point to an Old Testament precedent to demonstrate that the Pharisees' criticism of His disciples was not of God. 

Back when King Saul was still in power in the 11th.-century BC and trying to kill David, who had already been anointed by God to be Israel’s second king, David and his men, running for their lives, sought refuge from the high priest Abiathar. David and the others were famished and asked for food. The priest was out of everything but the consecrated bread, or the bread of the Presence, which God’s law stipulated could only be eaten by the priest. 

But Abiathar may have been a bit of a liberal: He thought that feeding hungry people might be good use of bread dedicated to God. So, he let David and his men eat. This, Jesus is telling the Pharisees, was the right thing. 

Then Jesus reverts to the original discussion about another one of God's laws. “The Sabbath,” Jesus tells them, “was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.” 

God gave the Sabbath not as a badge or a flag for proud, judgmental people, but as a day for rest and celebration. 

And then, to underscore His authority to teach in this way, Jesus tells them: “So the Son of Man [that’s Him, the Messiah-King foretold in Scripture] is Lord even of the Sabbath.” 

Listen: God gives His Law to show us what it's like to live as His children, not to make us judges of others’ lives, to show people who are grateful for His undeserved grace how best to live if we want to honor God. 

Jesus isn’t just Lord of the Sabbath, He’s the Lord of everything, the great I AM. He alone has kept God’s Law perfectly so that He can set free from sin, death, and darkness all who turn from sin and surrender to Him.

On another Sabbath, our Gospel lesson says, Jesus saw that the Pharisees were out to trap Him. So, He decided that it was a good time to do some of God’s work. He had a man with a shriveled hand stand in front of the crowds following Him. 

Then He asked the Pharisees: “'Which is lawful on the Sabbath: to do good or to do evil, to save life or to kill?” (Mark 3:4) 

Mark tells us that the Pharisees said nothing. Then we’re told, starting at verse 5: “He [Jesus] looked around at them in anger and, deeply distressed at their stubborn hearts, said to the man, ‘Stretch out your hand.’ He stretched it out, and his hand was completely restored.” 

At the very least, the Pharisees might have said, “Wow! We’re so happy for the man healed by Jesus!” 

But in this miracle, they didn’t see a sign of the coming of God’s kingdom. 

They didn’t comprehend that Jesus was and is God. 

They didn’t stop to think that it might be OK to do good to others on the Sabbath day. 

Instead, they were enraged. Mark tells us, “Then the Pharisees went out and began to plot with the Herodians how they might kill Jesus.” (Mark 3:6)

Those are strange bedfellows, the Pharisees and the Herodians, by the way. 

The Herodians were a powerful class of people who supported and were enriched by their connection to King Herod. Herod wasn’t Jewish, though he claimed to be descended from David. He had been put on his throne by the Romans. The Herodians were secular people out for power and money. The Pharisees allying themselves with the Herodians made sense for only one reason: They both wanted Jesus dead and out of the way.

What does it all mean for us? Just this. Pharisaism started out as a well-meaning movement by people of God. They wanted to follow God in a frightening, tumultuous world. But instead of clinging to God and trusting in the grace He gives to all who believe, they clung to the Law, which cannot save us because no one but Jesus has ever perfectly kept God’s Law. 

The Law can point us to our need of God’s grace given in Jesus. 

It can be a guide to us in our prayer lives, as we allow it to show us our sins and vulnerabilities. 

But only Jesus can save us. 

In the end, Pharisees, ancient and modern, are no different from secularists who don’t believe in God: They put their trust not in God, but in themselves and their own goodness. 

The Pharisees saw themselves as God’s protectors and God’s enforcers. But God is bigger than all of us. He is omnipotent, omniscient, and eternal. As believers in the God Who saves us through Jesus Christ, we don’t need to protect God and we don’t need to enforce God’s holy will on the world. When Jesus returns to the world, He will sort everything out. Remember how He said that when He returned to the world, He would separate the wheat from the weeds--the righteous from the unrepentant.

In the meantime, our call as Christians is simple: 

• To trust in Christ alone. 
• To live our faith in Christ. 
• To tell others about Christ. 

Anything else, all the other stuff churches waste their time doing, is not of God. 

By trusting in Christ, seeking to live our faith in Christ, and telling others about Christ and His grace, right out loud for all the world to see, we may, like our Lord, encounter opposition, not just from secularists but from modern Pharisees who claim to be Christians. 

In fact, the Christian's biggest and most unforgiving critics may be other Christians. Years ago, one of my sisters told a friend of hers that her brother was a pastor. The friend was excited to hear that. "Really?" she asked. "Where is he a pastor?" "He's not in town," my sister explained. "But he served a Lutheran congregation." Her friend's attitude soured. "Oh," she replied unenthusiastically, as though she'd learned I was an underworld kingpin. "No," my sister quickly reacted. "He is a Christian."

But no matter how much shade the world or even other Christians throw our way, it's OK. 

When you follow the Lord of the Sabbath, the King of all creation, Who has conquered sin and death, what’s a little opposition? 

What difference does it make if we bear others’ condescension or condemnation? 

What difference does it make even if we die for our faith? 

The Christian lives in the assurance enjoyed by St. Paul: “For to me, to live is Christ and to die is gain.” (Philippians 1:21) 

If the world thinks we’re  “a bit of a liberal” because we live, depend on, and share the love of Jesus with others, so be it. 

We confess and follow Jesus, the Lord of love, and He will never let go of those who trust in Him. Amen

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

Upside Down World

[This was shared during worship with the people of Living Water Lutheran Church in Springboro, Ohio earlier today.]

Matthew 16:21-28
In his book, Radical: Taking Back Your Faith from the American Dream, Pastor David Platt tells about several people from underground house churches in Asian countries where it’s illegal to worship or witness for Jesus Christ.

He mentions Jian, a “doctor who has left his successful health clinic and now risks his life and the lives of his wife and two kids in order to provide impoverished villages with medical care while secretly training [a] network of house-church leaders.”

There’s Lin, a woman who teaches at a university where it’s illegal to talk about Jesus. She secretly meets with students interested in knowing more about Him though, risking the loss of her job in the process.

People like these, who embrace living with the risk of suffering or death in order to glorify God and who share Christ with others, live in an upside-down world.

It’s a world in which living for Jesus, and not for comfort or status or material success, is the highest priority.

Death, sacrifice, and risk looms over their lives.

Yet the people I've met who live like this are more alive and more joyful than most of the people you and I know or know about.

Jesus talks about the strange alternative universe—the kingdom of heaven or the kingdom of God—in which people like Jian and Lin live, in today’s Gospel lesson. It’s the world in which He calls us all to live, too.

If that scares you, it should. I know that it scares me. Yet there is no other place where true life can be found than in Jesus’ kingdom.

Let’s learn more about it. Please turn to the lesson, Matthew 16:21-28 (page 687 in the sanctuary Bibles).

The lesson actually continues the incident that we looked at in last Sunday’s Gospel lesson, in which Peter confessed that Jesus is “the Messiah, the Son of the living God.” The first verse of today’s lesson follows: “From that time on Jesus began to explain to his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and suffer many things at the hands of the elders, the chief priests and the teachers of the law, and that he must be killed and on the third day be raised to life.”

Now, Jesus had a typical way of “explaining” things He wanted them to know. Turn please, to Luke 24:27, as the risen Jesus spoke with two disciples on the way to Emmaus: “And beginning with Moses and all the Prophets [the phrase, Moses and the Prophets, like the Law and the Prophets, referred to what we call the Old Testament], he explained to them what was said in all the Scriptures concerning himself.”

Jesus always pointed to the God of the Old Testament to explain Who He was and what He was about. Jesus taught that everything that Christians confess about Him—from His virgin birth to His sacrificial death for our sin, from His kingship to His resurrection—was foretold in the Old Testament.

Peter though, wasn’t interested in what Jesus or the Old Testament had to say about the Messiah suffering, dying and rising. Peter wanted Jesus to be an earthly king who could produce results, like freeing him and his countrymen from Roman rule and their oppressive taxes. Peter wanted Jesus to make his life easy. That’s why, in verse 22, we read: “Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him. ‘Never, Lord!’ he said. ‘This shall never happen to you!’”

Peter wanted a king who would do things the way he thought that they should be done.

He wanted a God who would be complicit in his favorite sins, things like pride and the disdain of foreigners he presumed God didn’t care about.

Sometimes, I confess, I can be like Peter. I go to God in prayer and say, "Now, Lord, what you need to do is thus and so. That will cause such and such a person to do what you and I both know they need to do. Then, I can step in and do this."

I’ve got everything figured out for God. All He needs to do is sign off on my plan.

Do you know what God's reaction to a "prayer" like that is?

After He stops laughing, He treats my calling out to Him in Jesus’ Name as an invitation for Him to do what He thinks is best.

Peter thought he was going to tell Jesus how to be God and King. He soon found out how off-base he was. Look at verse 23: “Jesus turned and said to Peter, ‘Get behind me, Satan! You are a stumbling block to me; you do not have in mind the concerns of God, but merely human concerns.’”

The man Jesus had just called “the rock” is now “a stumbling block.”

The man who was commended for listening to God in order to know Who Jesus was, now is being condemned for listening to Satan!

Jesus uses the same word for Peter, the word Satan, which means accuser, that He used for the devil when the devil tempted Him in the wilderness.

Back then, Satan tried to tempt Jesus to avoid the cross and take the easy way to becoming a king. No suffering. No cross. All Jesus had to do was worship Satan and Jesus could have the world He had come to reclaim for God.

Jesus refused to take the easy way.

Like the devil, Peter wanted Jesus to take the easy way. The easy way, the way of going along with the world to get along with the world, the way of cutting corners on ethics and our characters in order to get what we want, is exactly what Jesus warned anyone who wanted to follow Him to avoid when He said, “The gate is narrow and the road is hard that leads to life.”

What path are you and I following in life: the Jesus way or the easy way? This is a question worthy of asking ourselves each day.

My mentor, Pastor Bruce Schein, used to tell us about counseling parents whose high school or college-age children were addicted to drugs. He told these parents that if they loved their children, they wouldn’t give the kids the money they knew the kids would just use to buy more dope. “But we can’t stand the thought of our kids hating us and thinking they can’t turn to us for help. We can’t see them in such agony either,” they would say. “It’s too painful.” “How painful will it be,” he would ask them, “if you give them what they want and you lose them forever?”

Peter, like Satan before him, confronted Jesus with the same sort of choice that confronted those parents. It would have been far easier for Jesus to give people what they wanted, to be a king who led a revolution and tossed out the Romans.

But if He had done that, His mission would have remained unfulfilled. You and I would be left hopelessly imprisoned to sin and death.

Jesus willingly endured the hatred of the whole human race and the punishment for sin we deserve so that He wouldn’t lose us forever.

He endured suffering and death on the cross so that on Easter Sunday, when the Father raised Jesus from the dead, He could give new life to all who repent for sin and believe in Him.

It was by the hard way of the cross that Jesus won life for all who trust in Him. God’s saving grace in Christ is free, but we must give up life as it’s usually lived in order to be free to grab hold of it!

In verse 24, Jesus amplifies this point, when He says in part, “Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.” To take up our cross has nothing to do with enduring the pains or inconveniences of life, no matter how severe they may be.

Rather, to take up our cross is to acknowledge that our sins put Jesus on the cross.

I love what Martin Luther says when, in The Small Catechism, he explains the meaning of Holy Baptism for our daily lives: “[Baptism] signifies that the old Adam in us, together with all sins and evil desires, should be drowned by daily sorrow for sin and repentance and be put to death, and that the new person should come forth every day and rise to live before God in righteousness and purity forever.”

Just as Christ’s crucifixion led to His resurrection, daily taking up our crosses, confessing our sins, and submitting to the death of our sinful selves brings us fresh new life every moment we walk with Jesus.

When we live in daily repentance and renewal, we can confess with Jeremiah, writing in the Old Testament book of Lamentations 3:22-23: “Because of the Lord’s great love we are not consumed, for his compassions never fail. They are new every morning; great is Your faithfulness.”

But what does it mean to deny ourselves? It means to ask God to help us to dare to trust God’s revealed word and will and not in our own reasoning or experiences.

Psalm 118:8 tells us: “It is better to take refuge in the Lord than to trust in humans.” That includes the humans you and I know best, ourselves.

Denying ourselves means admitting that we need God not as we want Him to be, but God as He is, the God Who can only save us from sin and death when we give Him our daily surrender and daily--moment by moment--sign over control over our lives to Jesus Christ.

In Philippians 1:21, the apostle Paul writes, “For to me, to live is Christ and to die is gain.” I pray each day to live with more of that risky, “upside down” attitude of faith, of trust in Christ.

Peter rebuked Jesus because he was concerned about living and organizing life as he wanted life to be. He wanted God to bend to his plans rather than submitting to whatever God had in mind for him. It seemed to risky for Jesus to submit to death on a cross (Jesus might stay dead), too risky to give up on His preferences and give God control of his life (that seemed to frighteningly uncertain). I confess, that following Jesus, even on this side of His cross and resurrection, seems awfully risky me today. And it is risky.

True living though, whether in this life or in eternity, doesn’t belong to those who play it safe, who take a pass on the risk of faith. It belongs to people who give control of their lives to Jesus—to people who deny themselves, who take up their crosses, and who follow Jesus.

After all, truly, this life, no matter how many years we live here, is simply a warm-up lap for the one to come.

Let Jesus take control of your life now.

Start living in Jesus’ alternative universe—the kingdom of heaven—today.

Let Jesus call the shots.

Let Jesus set your priorities.

Do everything you can to tell the world about the new life that only those with faith in Jesus have.

You may not win any popularity contests for living in Jesus’ kingdom. You may not gain power or wealth or ease. But you will live in the power of the only one who can give you life, the only One Who will be left standing when sin and death have done their worst to us.

And as you live with Jesus each day, you will, as Jesus promises at the end of our Gospel lesson, “not taste death before [you] see the Son of Man coming in his kingdom.” You will see the imprint of Jesus on every moment that you breathe. And you will be alive!

"To live is Christ...

...to die is gain" (Philippians 1:21).

So, we keep following Christ, loving God, loving neighbor, and telling others about the new life that on Jesus Christ, the God-Man, can give to those who believe in Him. Whether we Christians live or die, we belong to Christ and it will always be our privilege to glorify Him only!

Not ourselves.

Not our parents.

Not our kids.

Not our friends.

Not our church.

Not our country.

Not our race.

Not our favorite team.

Not our favorite musician, film star, or politician.

Nor out favorite hobby, book, or movie.

We glorify the only one who can set us free to be our true selves for all eternity: Jesus Christ!

Death couldn't stop Jesus. And all who belong to Him, who turn from sin and believe in Him, are also unstoppable.

Here's Unstoppable, another great track from TobyMac's latest CD.

The Emptiness of Power, the Power of Surrender

[This is sort of the sermon shared today at the 10:15 worship service of Saint Matthew Lutheran Church in Logan, Ohio.]

Mark 10:35-45
From the moment we’re born, there’s an issue that takes front and center in our lives: Who will be in charge?

Born in sin, we’re born craving power. Like Adam and Eve, we want to “be like God.”

I once heard the story of a father who took his six year old daughter to a high school basketball game. As they took their seats, the dad told her, “Now, honey, you can go anywhere you want here in the seating area. You can also go to the concession stands. You can go all the way down to the very first row of seats to talk with your friends. But you can’t cross that line down there. That’s the line between where we’re allowed to be on this side and the place where the players, coaches, and referees can be on the other side. If you cross that line, we’ll go home.”

The little girl said she understood, then promptly went down to the edge of the line her father had told her not to cross, looked back to make certain that he was watching, and stuck her toe over the line. Dad collected daughter and they went home. Her attempt to assert power without accountability failed.

Please turn to the lesson, Mark 10:35-45. Jesus is on His way to Jerusalem. Jesus knows that there, He’ll be rejected and crucified before rising from the dead.

But the disciples, thick as ever, are excited. They’ve come to believe, rightly, that Jesus is God’s promised Messiah (the Christ). But their idea of what that means is different from God’s idea.

They’re sure that Jesus will enter Jerusalem, get the crowds riled up, toss the Romans out of power, and establish Himself as the King of renewed Israel. And they’re sure that as Jesus loyalists they’ll get a piece of Jesus’ power, ruling alongside Him.

They think these things even though Jesus had already told them that the Messiah would be a suffering servant and that only those who submit to the deaths of their old selves, trusting Christ to lead them through the ultimate cross we all must endure, physical death, onto a resurrection life with Him, can experience the kingdom of God.

In Mark 10:32-34, Jesus tells them all of these things again. After Jesus’ two previous predictions of His death and resurrection, one or all of the disciples put their feet in their mouths. They just didn’t seem to understand what Jesus was telling them so clearly.

Why?

Scholars have suggested many explanations for the disciples’ thickness. But for me, one explanation stands above them all: They felt the strong magnetic pull of power.

The disciples had experienced Jesus as a powerful person, one who could make the lame walk, the blind see, the dead rise. They wanted a share in His power to set things right.

And for them, setting things right meant throwing out their Roman oppressors, toppling the religious elites, making the country happy with all the material wealth they could ever imagine.

They didn’t understand that Jesus was playing for much higher stakes than ruling over a world dying in sin. Jesus, God in the flesh, had come to turn this world upside down, to call sinners to repent for their sin, and give their whole lives to Him so that He could give a new and everlasting life in a new and everlasting creation to all who believe in Him.

Jesus came into the world to put us and the whole creation, weighed down by the decay and death unleashed by human sin, right with God, in sync with God, at peace with God and His original intentions for His creation.

That goal is a lot more important to Jesus than a piddly thing like leading a country which, like all countries, will burn at the final judgment.

Jesus is going to Jerusalem not to take control of the first century Judean equivalent of the White House. He’s going to take a cross and, as New Testament scholar N.T. Wright points out, the cross isn’t just the way God forgives our sins

...it is God’s way of putting the world, and ourselves, to rights. It challenges all the human systems which claim to put the world to rights but in fact only succeed in bringing a different set of humans on top.

 So, after this third prediction of His death and resurrection, Jesus knew what to expect. At least one of the disciples would surely open mouth and insert foot. They would misunderstand and they would let the human desire for power prevail in their thinking.

In the opening verse of our lesson, two brothers, James and John, approach Jesus: “Teacher, we want you to give us whatever we ask.” These two sons of a wealthy fisherman named Zebedee want Jesus to give them a blank check. “Give us whatever we want,” they say.

But Jesus doesn’t fall for that. “What do you want me to do for you?” He asks them, knowing exactly what’s coming. Verse 37 has their request: They want seats of power in Jesus’ kingdom.

Jesus responds, “You do not know what you ask. Are you able to drink the cup that I drink, and be baptized with the baptism that I am baptized with?”

Jesus’ words here are filled with deep meaning. In the Old Testament, the image of drinking from a cup symbolized taking punishment for evil. “Drinking the cup” was a way of saying, “Receiving God’s judgment for sin.” Psalm 11:6 says: “Upon the wicked [God] will rain coals, fire and brimstone and a burning wind shall be the portion of their cup.”

Jesus was telling James and John that He was going to drink from the cup of condemnation for human sin that He didn’t deserve in order to save us from sin and death.

Jesus knew how bitter the cup would be. That’s why later, in the garden of Gethsemane, before His arrest, He would pray, “Abba, Father, all things are possible for You. Take this cup away from Me...” But then, Jesus would pray, “Nevertheless, not what I will, but what You will.”

Jesus would drink from the cup. And He requires all who follow Him to drink it too: We drink it when we admit our sins and our need of Christ to save us, when we confess our faith in Jesus as the only way for us to be saved, the only way for us to enter God’s kingdom today and in eternity.

Jesus’ baptism was His cross. Our baptism is the death of the old self that rises from the water as children of God and is crucified each day in the self-disciplined way of life known as daily repentance and renewal.

It isn’t easy following Jesus. It entails the death of our selfish old Adams and Eves, the renunciation of power, and the commitment to serve and love God and others. All of this is foreign to our natures and can only be accomplished through the grace and empowerment of God!

In verse 39, James and John say that, of course, they can drink the cup from which Jesus will drink and endure the baptism with which He will be baptized. Jesus tells them that, in fact, if they are intent on following Him, they will drink the cup. They will be judged by the world and suffer for their faith in Him. And, in fact, James would become the first of the twelve apostles to be executed for believing in Jesus. His brother John would die an old man, living in exile on the island of Patmos for that same faith.

We live in a country in which you can’t be killed just for being a Christian. (Though you can be ridiculed and excluded for it, all in the name of tolerance.)

But, because we belong to a King Who has conquered sin and death, no matter what happens to us for following Jesus--shady business deals we have to turn down, friendships we may lose, power we may give up, we can say with the apostle Paul who, as he pondered his own death, wrote, “...to me, living is Christ and dying is gain” (Philippians 1:21).

Jesus tells James and John that He can’t promise them higher places in His kingdom and Jesus doesn’t promise that to us either. Just being in God’s kingdom, not because we deserve it but because Jesus died and rose to make a way for us should be enough for anyone.

Whether Jesus calls a person to be a pope, president, king, stay-at-home mom, factory worker, or shoeshine boy, if she or he can live each moment on earth as a follower of Christ and live each day in the certainty that they will spend eternity in His presence, it is enough. It’s all any of us need!

Now, the other apostles hear James and John’s cheeky request for power and, seeming not to hear Jesus’ words to them, become incensed with the Zebedee brothers. On the brink of a presidential election, the results of which will not put our world right or put those who don’t know Christ right with God, no matter who wins, Jesus’ words are important to remember. They put things in perspective. Read what Jesus says in verses 42-45 with me aloud, please:

But Jesus called them to Himself and said to them: "You know that those who are considered rulers over the Gentiles lord it over them, and their great ones exercise authority over them. Yet it shall not be so among you; but whoever desires to be great among you shall be your servant. And whoever of you desires to be first shall be slave of all. For even the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve and to give His life a ransom for many.”

True power that changes the world--that changes us--comes from only one place. It comes from Jesus Christ and it only comes to those who empty themselves of all pretense to deserving special privileges or even a fair shot in life.

The Bible tells us that all have sinned and fallen short of God’s intentions for us. But all who believe in Jesus Christ don’t get what we deserve. We deserve death. Instead, we get what our servant King Jesus fought to give us by resisting the easy path, the offer of earthly power. Jesus died a criminal’s death for us so that He could rise and give us life with God that begins now and is perfected in eternity.

I’m almost 59 and I’ve been a pastor for 28 years. But I’ve only begun to learn the lesson Jesus teaches in today’s gospel lesson. We are not in control. (Since I have children, I should have known that already. But I’m a slow learner.) For me, after a lifetime of secretly wanting to be the BMOE (Big Man on Earth), the realization that I don’t need to be in charge to have good life with God has come as a relief!

From a cross and an empty tomb, Jesus Christ has paid the price for us to receive the gift of new and everlasting life. We don’t need to carry the world on our shoulders. We need not bear the burden for seeing that everything is just right. Our job is to simply do our best and then let God bless our mess!

If you’re burdened by a need to keep everything together, I hope that this comes as a freeing word for you today.

Follow our servant king Jesus by letting yourself be a servant yourself--a servant of God and a servant of others.

Trust your life to Christ alone.

Let His power fill you, inspire you, give you peace and hope.

Even when you walk through the valley of the shadow of death, Jesus will always lead you the right way.

He will give you so much more than the things that power in this dying world possibly can.

He will give you life with God.

There is no greater blessing that we can aspire to than that. Amen