Who's the Greatest?

[Below you'll find the message presented during both worship services at Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio. You'll also find live stream video of both services.]

Matthew 18:1-20

One of the stories we often tell in our family revolves around something that happened when our kids were about ten and seven.

We’d visited family in Columbus and stopped at a Columbus shopping center before heading back to Cincinnati, where we lived.

After we’d finished our errand, we got into the car and were pulling out, when we heard a kind of whimpering yell from behind us. It was Philip, who wasn’t yet in the car. We stopped and Phil jumped in.

Now, why did we stop to get him?

I mean, we’d successfully collected 50% of our kids and, with Phil being ten years old, he was costing us a lot of money without generating any income. And besides, it was a hassle taking him to this event and that activity. Phil hadn’t attained any great achievements, led any governments or armies, or made his first billion dollars. He was completely dependent on us.

So, why did we bother bringing him back into the car?

We stopped, of course, because every member of a family, from the child awaiting birth in its mother’s womb to the infirm parent no longer able to take care of themselves, matters. 

In the section of Matthew’s gospel that starts with this morning’s gospel lesson, Matthew 18:1-20, Jesus talks about how the people in His family, that is, His kingdom, His Church, are to regard one another. The key to understanding today’s lesson is found in the first five verses. So, today, we’re only going to address those verses. 

It all begins with the disciples asking Jesus a question: “Who, then, is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven?” (Matthew 18:1)

This kind of question is very important for people trying to get ahead in the world…or, if they’re of a religious inclination, to impress God. We human beings complain about rules, but we really like rules, mostly because we think if we can stay on top of the rules of the universe–or at least appear to be obeying them, we’ll be top dogs.

At the first church I served as pastor, we had a five-week long summer school for kids in the third through eighth grades focusing on the Bible and Catechism. We had 85 students. For recess during the last week one year, I set up a kickball tournament. I announced that we would play the tournament March Madness-style, only with a twist: the losing teams would advance. One boy, troubled by the set-up, asked, “How will we know which is the best team?” When I told him that we wouldn’t know, he offered a quietly disappointed, “Oh.”

So, these questions of who’s most important, who’s the best, who has the most, who’s on top, and even who’s the best Christian, seem to be important to us, even from a young age. 

When Jesus is asked who is most important in His kingdom, Matthew says: “He called a little child to him, and placed the child among them. And he said: ‘Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Therefore, whoever takes the lowly position of this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven. And whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me.’” (Matthew 18:2-4)

We mustn’t miss Jesus’ point here. Jesus is not saying that children are innocent and therefore, we should imitate them. Children may be gullible or credulous; but children are not innocent.

Like King David, writing in Psalm 51, Jesus knows and we know that every child conceived by human parents is born in sin. That means we’re all born wanting to be in charge.

Part of the job of those God puts in authority over children–parents, grandparents, teachers, governments–is to keep them and the rest of us from running roughshod over others who are just as loved by God as we are.

What Jesus is pointing to in this child is their status.

No one is needier than a child.

All children need someone to take care of them. Think of what Jesus is saying to the question posed by the disciples then. He tells them, essentially, “Set aside for a moment.” To anyone trying to be the greatest in HIs Kingdom, Jesus says, “You won’t even enter My kingdom unless you recognize that there is nothing you can do to make yourself acceptable for life with God!” When it comes to life with God, the number one requirement is our neediness, our complete inability to be good enough or righteous enough for life with God!

When I was growing up, I was filled with all sorts of ambition. I had delusions of grandeur. I took an early interest in history, government, and politics. I was sure I was destined for greatness, whatever that is. I think that’s part of why I became an atheist: I was sure I was better than anyone who might get in my way and I didn’t want any God pretending He was more important than me.

When Jesus stepped back into my life a few years after Ann and I were married and I understood that God and His love were for real and that, despite my egotism and selfishness, God wanted a knucklehead like me for all eternity, I fell in love with Christ. I came to understand that all my egotistical presumption and Mark Daniels, the egotist, had to die. I had to daily take up the cross of all my sin, including my pretense of self-sufficiency and intrinsic goodness, submitting it and myself to daily crucifixion so that, unburdened of my sin, I could walk with Christ in newness of life, an undeserved forgiveness and hope.

It has been a hard lesson for this hardhead to learn, which is why I pray quite regularly, “Father, in Jesus’ name, make war on my ego. Please, make war on my ego.”

I visited a shut-in this past week. At one point she told me that she was surprised I took the time to visit her. Later, I read the first five verses of this gospel lesson for today to her and said, “Earlier, you wondered why I would visit you. It’s simple. You’re like that little child. You have physical issues and it’s hard for you to get around. You may think you have no value. But in the eyes of Jesus, precisely because in your weakness you know how much you need Jesus, you are the greatest in the Kingdom of Heaven.”

In the New Testament, the apostle Paul says he was afflicted with “a thorn in the flesh.” This thorn could have been a physical affliction. It could have been depression. We don’t know. Paul says that he asked God to remove this thorn three times and each time, the God Who loved him, just as He loves you and me, told Paul, “No.” God explained to Paul, “my grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” God was telling Paul, “Your faith in Me and in My grace grows when, in your weakness, you learn to depend on Me.” Paul writes in response to God’s refusal to remove the thorn from his flesh: “Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me.” (2 Corinthians 12:9)

Friends, if you’re tempted to feel everything is going so well that Jesus and His Church are optional accessories in a life over which you’re sure you have control, watch out! The reality of your neediness may soon smack you in the face.

If though, as a mortal sinner, like the rest of us mortal sinners, you know that you too are a little child, dependent on the God we know in Jesus for every good and perfect gift, then rejoice!

Rejoice in the gift of Christ crucified and risen!

Rejoice in the gift of grace by which, at His cross and empty tomb, He has already saved you from sin, death, and hell for life with Him!

Rejoice in the power Christ gives you to live each day in God’s forgiveness and love!

Rejoice too, because it is to children like you who know you need Jesus that the Kingdom of Heaven belongs now and forever! Amen

God's Law and Gospel, July 2, 2023

Here's video from the Facebook Live presentation of today's adult Sunday School class from Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio. We're using this material for our discussions.

God's Law and Gospel, May 21, 2023

Sorry for the reversed image.

Pentecost Thoughts: Learning to Speak with One Another

During the pandemic, we're celebrating online Holy Communion synchronously with members of our congregation. This evening, I read Psalm 51, David's great psalm of repentance, and a portion of the Biblical account of the first Christian Pentecost, Acts 2:1-4. Then, I shared the thoughts contained in the video below.

Below that yet, you'll find the Malcolm Guite video I mention.

Jesus: High Priest, King of Kings (AUDIO)

Here.

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

Jesus: High Priest and King

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

Hebrews 5:1-10
The name of Melchizedek isn’t often mentioned among Christians. And there’s no mystery about that. Melchizedek makes only one actual appearance in the Bible, in Genesis 14:18-20.

After Israel’s patriarch Abraham, then called Abram, alongside allies, fought and won a battle, we’re told: “Then Melchizedek king of Salem [Salem means “peace.” The city bearing that name later became the site of Israel’s capital, Jerusalem. Melchizedek] brought out bread and wine. He was priest of God Most High, and he blessed Abram, saying, ‘Blessed be Abram by God Most High, Creator of heaven and earth. And praise be to God Most High, who delivered your enemies into your hand.’ Then Abram gave him a tenth of everything.”

[Portrayed here is a the scene from Genesis 14:18-20. Melchizedek brings bread and wine to Abraham.]

Think about this. Before God had begun to fulfill His first covenant (or first testament) by making Abraham and Sarah the parents of Isaac, the foundation on which God would build His people Israel, there already was, at Jerusalem, a king and priest of God.

Now, this is interesting. Among the descendants of Abraham, there were priests and then there were kings. While Israel’s kings were called to be submissive and trusting toward God and to honor the priests, except in the case of pretenders later in ancient Israel’s history, Israel never had people who were priests and kings.

Such a combination of eternal and earthly power could only be handled by someone who, because of their humble trust in God, would resist the temptation to be an autocrat, a dictator, or self-glorifying conqueror. Melchizedek apparently was the kind of person who could resist those temptations.

When Abraham met Melchizedek, he clearly understood himself to be in the presence of someone who was a priest of the very God Who had called him from the comforts of his home in Ur, willing to wander to the new home that God promised to show to him.

That’s why he humbly received bread and wine from this priest and king and, in response to God’s grace, gave Melchizedek a tithe, ten percent “of everything” he owned.

This is the last known appearance by Melchizedek on the earth.

So, what happened to his royal house?

What happened to his priesthood?

And what difference does it make for you and me?

Our second lesson for this morning, Hebrews 5:1-10, provides some answers.

Hebrews, you'll remember, is a book of unknown authorship. We do know that it’s a sermon by a Jewish-Christian to a congregation of Jewish-Christians who are being tempted, under pressure of Roman persecution, to renounce Christ.

The preacher of Hebrews encourages his fellow Jewish-Christians to not desert the hope they have in Christ. Christ, he says, is the culmination of all of God’s promises of forgiveness and new life given to their ancestors and through them, to the world.

Let’s take a look at what he has to say today.

Verse 1 (He's talking about priesthood.): “Every high priest is selected from among the people and is appointed to represent the people in matters related to God, to offer gifts and sacrifices for sins. He is able to deal gently with those who are ignorant and are going astray, since he himself is subject to weakness. This is why he has to offer sacrifices for his own sins, as well as for the sins of the people. And no one takes this honor on himself, but he receives it when called by God, just as Aaron [the brother of Moses] was.”

The high priest of Israel, who had been at the temple in Jerusalem before the temple was destroyed and the priesthood decimated in 70 AD, several decades before this sermon was given, acted as a mediator between God and God’s people.

The high priest was called to make sacrifices for their sins and to gently counsel people with God’s Word. He was able to do this because, as a human being himself, he understood the pressures, joys, and temptations that we human beings face.

But the high priest could only do this because he acknowledged his own sins before God and offered sacrifices for them.

The preacher in Hebrews says that anyone who would presume to take the office of high priest would not be qualified for it; it had to be conferred on them by God.

I think that even today, there’s a principle for us: Anyone who wants to have a position of authority or power in the Church--be it pastor, bishop, church council president, congregational officer, church council officer--ought to be viewed with a certain amount of skepticism. When the people of the Church, after a season of prayer, felt led to ask an often reluctant but faithful person to respond to God’s call, that’s the person God is likely calling.

One of the things I love about this congregation is that we don’t ask any elected person to serve in positions of responsibility unless there has been prayer and a discernment of their call from God. We don’t use the spaghetti method to recruit candidates for church council, for example: We don’t just throw up a name and see which one sticks. Like the high priests, those who hold responsibility in today’s Church need to be believers who live in daily repentance and renewal, who have no notion that they’re anything other than sinners made saints by God’s grace through their faith in Christ. We are blessed to have elected leaders like that at Living Water. And it’s my observation that we take the same care in selecting people for appointment to positions in the congregation.

The preacher goes on to say that Jesus Christ’s claim to be our great High Priest, King, and Lord is not contingent on His taking the reins of ultimate power by force. Jesus too was called by His Father in heaven. Verses 5 and 6: “In the same way, Christ did not take on himself the glory of becoming a high priest. But God said to him, ‘You are my Son; today I have become your Father.’ [This is from Psalm 2. More on that in a second. And he says in another place, ‘You are a priest forever, in the order of Melchizedek.’”

Here, the preacher of Hebrews cites two different psalms. There are different kinds of psalms. Psalm 35, for example, is an imprecatory psalm in which the psalmist asks God to go after his tormentors. In Psalm 51, David confesses his sin and asks God to give him a clean heart. In our lesson from Hebrews, two psalms, Psalm 2 and Psalm 110, are cited. These are both royal psalms. They were written to celebrate the anointing of God's king in Israel. royal pslams. A king of Israel was referred to as the Anointed One, in the Hebrew, Meshiah, Messiah and in the Greek in which the New Testament was written, Christos, Christ.

So, what’s the point? Jesus isn’t a successor to the priesthood of the Levites in the temple, who were descendants of Aaron. Instead, Jesus is, like Melchizedek, anointed directly by God the Father. And like Melchizedek

Jesus is also a king, the King of kings.

God has made Jesus both our High Priest, able to understand our weaknesses because He’s withstood every test and temptation that we have in life, and our King, Who has conquered death, darkness, and the devil to give all who let Him be their Priest and King, life with God that never ends.

And how has Jesus achieved this for us? Verse 7: “During the days of Jesus’ life on earth, he offered up prayers and petitions with fervent cries and tears to the one who could save him from death [Remember Jesus in Gethsemane, Who prayed in submission to the Father’s will that He become the perfect sacrifice for our sins even as He asked if there might be a way for Him to avoid the cup of wrath for human evil that He was about to drink full-up on the cross?], and he was heard because of his reverent submission. [He was heard even though the Father didn’t take away the cross. He was heard because God gave Christ the strength to endure the cross for us, the greatest act of love in the history of the universe. And He was heard too because, having faithfully endured the cross, the Father raised Him on the third day, allowing Christ to exert an eternal priesthood and an eternal kingship for you and me.] Son though [Jesus] was, he learned obedience from what he suffered and, once made perfect [The word in the original Greek doesn’t mean perfect, but complete. Jesus uses a form of the same word when, with His dying breath on the cross, He says, “It is fulfilled,” more literally, ‘It is completion. Having completed His mission], [Jesus] became the source of eternal salvation for all who obey him and was designated by God to be high priest in the order of Melchizedek.”

[A portrayal of Jesus, high priest and King of Kings.]

All of this Jesus did for you and me so that, even now, at this very moment, sitting at the right hand of the Father, He is able to be our understanding priest and the King Who has conquered our darkness and death by giving His life for us.

What does Jesus ask of us in return?

What can we do?

What should we do?

"The work of God is this,” Jesus tells us, “to believe in the one he has sent." (John 6:29) 

Everything you and I might be tempted to put our trust in in this world--kings and presidents, money, security, and possessions, health and success, the power of every bit of it will give out at the grave. 

Jesus, our High Priest and King of kings, Who comes to us amid the battles of our lives with bread and wine, His body and blood, has conquered this dying world and its futile ambitions for us. 

He and those who trust in Him and His high priesthood of love are all that will survive and thrive for all eternity. 

May we always be counted among those who trust in Christ alone.

Amen

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

Grief, Remembrance, and Reassurance

[This week, I was part of services for two veterans of World War 2. This is the message for one of them.]

Job 19:23-27
Romans 8:31-39
John 11:21-27
Matthew 7:9-14

This is a day for Doug's family to remember and be reassured.

The things to be remembered, from what little I know of him, are many. In fact, it struck me as his son Don was telling me about his dad the other day, that if a person wanted to produce a mini-series about the twentieth century and beyond, Doug’s life might be one prism through which you could tell it. From serving during World War 2 in the Medical Corps and earning three Silver Stars for service at Guam, Leyte, and the Philippines, to toiling away in a locked room for Sheffield Measurements on brackets for one of NASA’s lunar landers, not to mention living through the Great Depression, he, along with his wife, have had memorable years.

But, of course, the object of life isn’t simply to endure it or go through it, as though life were a mere succession of unrelated events.

We’re to live in loving, respectful relationship with God and with others.

Don tells me that on his eighteenth birthday, he asked his father, “Now that I’m an adult, what’s the best advice you can give me for my life?” His father thought for a while and said, “Do unto others as you have them do unto you.”

And for a son to say of his father, “He practiced that” and that “I never heard him say a bad word about anyone,” reflects lots of good memories for family and friends to remember and cherish.

But, whenever we bury loved ones, whatever their age, whether we realize it or not, we need more than good memories, however blessed we may feel by those memories. We also need reassurance.

Illness, physical deterioration, and death are all part of this life. They are all part of our common inheritance from our first parents, Adam and Eve.

Like King David in Psalm 51, we can say, “I was born in sin.”

This is no small thing because as Romans 6:23 reminds us, “The wages of sin is death.”

Even those who live lives of repentance and faith in Christ will die. That’s just part of human life in this world.

Where do we go for reassurance that this life need not simply be a succession of futile events ending in death?

This isn’t a new question. Psalm 121 begins with it: “Where does my help come from?”

And then it says: “My help comes from the LORD, the Maker of heaven and earth.”

The God Who created the universe and Who has revealed Himself definitively in the person of Jesus Christ stands ready to bring us His help, His love, His forgiveness, and also His reassurance that when we trust in Jesus Christ as our God and Savior, all is well and all will be well, though we and our world may endure constant turmoil.

The believer in Jesus Christ, Who daily turns in surrendering faith to the God we know in the crucified and risen Jesus, can’t understand everything about God or life or death.

But the believer lives in the assurance that the apostle Paul articulated in Romans 8: “If God is for us, who can be against us? He who did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all—how will he not also, along with him, graciously give us all things?” And then: “I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

For the unbeliever, frailty, illness, and ultimately, death, the wages of sin, have the final say over a life.

But for those who seek and follow Jesus day by day, who endure in faith, death is the point at which our fellowship with Christ enters its fullest, perfect, eternal phase. Death becomes a beginning with God and the fellowship of believers that never ends.

Though we grieve the loss of loved ones on this earth, and it would be unnatural not to, we live in the incomparable reassurance that the God Who refuses to be separated from those who turn to Him in faith, will welcome us to our true home when we pass from this life.

Now, I don’t know if people will use rasp files* in eternity. But I am certain that we will all have our work there. The work we do won’t be toilsome or painful, but meaningful and joyous. Our bodies will be restored and whole and we will live as God intended for human beings to live when He first breathed His Spirit into the lifeless dust that became Adam.

Today and in the days to come, as you grieve you loss, take joy from your memories.

And be reassured by the promise of our Lord Jesus: “I am the resurrection and the life. The one who believes in me will live, even though they die; and whoever lives by believing in me will never die.”

God bless you.

*The favorite tool of Doug, a precision machinist, was the rasp file.

Where God Lives

[This was shared this morning during worship with the people and guests of Living Water Lutheran Church in Springboro, Ohio.]

John 2:13-22
Talk to anyone who has ever had their home broken into and they will always speak less of what was stolen and more about their sense of being violated, the feeling that their personal space has been desecrated by greedy hands. The experience evokes anger, even fury. Remembering this may help us to understand something of what Jesus felt and why He acted as He did during the incident recounted in today’s Gospel lesson.

Please turn to the lesson, John 2:13-22 (page 740 in the sanctuary Bibles). Jesus went to the temple in Jerusalem to celebrate Passover. Verse 14: “In the temple courts he found people selling cattle, sheep and doves, and others sitting at tables exchanging money.”

The temple was the one place on earth where God had promised to dwell among His chosen people. It was a holy place. The word holy, as we’ve mentioned before, means set apart. God had set apart this place on all the earth as the place where He would encounter all who worshiped Him.

But what Jesus saw when He arrived at the temple infuriated Him!

This holiest place on earth, set apart for the worship of God, was being violated, turned into a shopping mall.

As you know, one of the things worshipers did when they arrived at the temple was offer sacrifices to God. Depending on their incomes, they might offer oxen, lambs, doves, or, if they were exceptionally poor, grain. Because many Passover celebrants traveled long distances, they didn’t always bring their offerings with them, instead purchasing them at the temple. Merchants sold livestock there. And because the temple had its own money system, “money changers,” people who dealt in foreign currency exchange, also did business in the Temple court.

This was all authorized by the temple priests. They would have argued that, by doing so, they provided a service to people who had traveled hundreds, maybe thousands, of miles to obey God by celebrating the Passover in Jerusalem.

But these practices were far more sinister than that.

Under the Romans and their pretender kings, the Herods, the chief priests of the Jewish faith were appointed by the Roman governors. Being the chief priest was a plumb job for which many of the priestly types vied. In exchange for priestly appointments, the Romans got a cut of all the temple taxes collected.

The rates of exchange charged by the money changers and the prices commanded by the sellers of sacrificial livestock were inflated exorbitantly to allow the Romans and the priests to profit handsomely. It’s easy to do that when you have a monopoly.

This entire system was driven by greed and selfishness.

It desecrated the holy place where God dwelt.

This explains what happens next, in verses 15 and 16. Jesus “made a whip out of cords, and drove all from the temple courts, both sheep and cattle; he scattered the coins of the money changers and overturned their tables. To those who sold doves he said, ‘Get these out of here! Stop turning my Father’s house into a market!’”

The house of God and the grace of God had been monetized.

People who should have known better were ignoring the fact that the Temple was a space set apart for God to meet His people, not a place to transact business or to steal from the pious.

The understandable anger that people feel when their homes are broken into is but a fraction of the fury that Jesus felt on seeing the house of God being used wrongly!

Verse 17 says that Jesus’ disciples remembered a passage from Psalm 69:9, written by King David about one-thousand years earlier: “...zeal for your house consumes me.”

There, David was saying that God was so central to his existence that passion for God’s house, for the place where God lived, had subordinated all his other thoughts, motives, and priorities! This is what Jesus was feeling as He entered the temple.

But truly, it wasn’t the desecration of the temple as a place that aroused such fury in Jesus.

In the end, the Temple was just a building.

It was never meant to be anything other than “a shadow” of the heavenly throne room from which God reigns.

The real issue in all this commerce in the temple was this: If the people were buying and selling as though they were lining up for an attraction at Disney World had no zeal for the place where God had graciously promised to meet them on earth, what sort of zeal did they have for God Himself?

Verse 18. “The Jews [meaning here, the Temple authorities] then responded to him, ‘What sign can you show us to prove your authority to do all this?’”

Jesus had already given one sign of His authority and identity as God in the flesh, at Cana, where He turned water into wine.

Now, in response to the priests’ demand, Jesus gives a new sign of Who He is, a miracle that will require patient faith to see and believe. Look at verses 19-22. “Jesus answered them, ‘Destroy this temple, and I will raise it again in three days.’ They replied, ‘It has taken forty-six years to build this temple, and you are going to raise it in three days?’ But the temple he had spoken of was his body. After he was raised from the dead, his disciples recalled what he had said. Then they believed the scripture and the words that Jesus had spoken.”

The temple in which Jesus and the others stood at that moment wasn’t the first one built on the temple mount in Jerusalem. And, the one in today’s Gospel lesson would, in 70AD, about forty years after Jesus' death and resurrection, be destroyed by the Romans. Today, all that remains is a wailing wall in Jerusalem.

But the temple’s days were numbered in another and more important way. Look at John 1:14: “The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us.” You’ll remember that this literally means that Jesus, God the Word, tabernacled or pitched His tent in the world. God no longer would live in buildings so easily desecrated by human beings who forget the fear and love for God that make up faith in God. God would live among us on this earth in other ways.

First of all, God would come to the world in the person of Jesus Himself. Colossians 1:19 says that, “...God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in [Jesus Christ].” Jesus is the Holy of the holies. He is God.

Short-sighted human beings thought they could be their own gods, buying and selling salvation and sinning with no accountability to God. (We still think that, it seems.) So, just as Jesus foretells in our Gospel lesson, they tried to tear down the new and best Temple, Jesus. They crucified Jesus. But He rose again.

In John 10:18, Jesus says of His crucifixion and resurrection: “No one takes [My earthly life] from me, but I lay it down of my own accord. I have authority to lay it down and authority to take it up again. This command I received from my Father.”

This, Jesus says, is the sign of His authority, that He, by his own decision voluntarily gives Himself as the perfect sacrifice for our sin that nobody has to buy or pay for and He, not human beings, has the power to take up the life He voluntarily sacrificed.

Nobody--not the devil and not sinful people trying to swipe our money, or plague our consciences, or build their own egos at our expense--can put themselves between God and us. In Jesus, God has acted and today, He lives.

But if Jesus is God among us and He is the temple, how can we be made right with Him? The temple was a place where people made sacrifice for their sins. This is like a question once asked of Jesus: “What must we do to do the works God requires? Jesus answered, ‘The work of God is this: to believe in the one he has sent.’”

Jesus was outraged that people who should have known better forgot that God had blessed them out of pure fatherly and divine mercy, made them His own people, and called them to be a light to all nations, helping the nations see that all who will turn from sin and believe in Him will live with God forever.

Because of God's grace, through Jesus, God’s presence on earth is no longer confined to a tabernacle on a Judean hill!

He can be seen today in God's Word and in the Sacraments, of course.

But He can also be seen in the people who follow Jesus.

First Corinthians 6:19-20 says that whoever turns from sin and believes in Jesus Christ is a temple of the Holy Spirit where God dwells! Imagine that.

Through Jesus, Christians are the places where God today dwells on this earth.

We don’t need to go to buildings to find Him.

We don’t need to make sacrifices to reach Him.

We don’t need to burn candles in order to attract Him.

He comes to live in all who welcome Him into their lives. In Revelation 3:20, Jesus says: "Here I am! I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in and eat with that person, and they with me."

Now, the holy of holies can be found in all who repent and believe in Jesus Christ and who daily live that belief by turning to Christ for grace, guidance, forgiveness, and hope.

God lives in all who acknowledge with both their lips and their lives that Jesus Christ is Lord and Savior and King over everything.

That's a somewhat scary thought because, speaking for myself, I know that I can be a somewhat shaky temple for the Holy Spirit. I can forget to trust God. I sin. The truth is that like the temple in Jerusalem, we frail temples of the Holy Spirit, we believers in Jesus, must regularly be cleansed by the savage grace of Jesus Christ.

Without regular prayer, confession and repentance, worship with God’s people, receiving Christ’s body and blood, personal study of God’s Word, and submission to examination and correction by our Lord, these temples of flesh and blood can be desecrated by sin as certainly as the temple in Jerusalem was.

In Psalm 51, David prays: “Wash away all my iniquity and cleanse me from my sin.” Each day we need to pray, “Lord, cleanse this temple.”

Christ can cleanse the repentant, forgive our sin, strengthen our faith, and fill us with His Holy Spirit’s power for living.

Christ can make each of us ever fitter places for the King of kings to take up residence, places where the devil, the world, and our sinful selves are kept at bay and Jesus reigns as our loving God, Lord, and King.

May we daily submit to Christ so that, like the temple cleansed, God will live in us and through us, now and eternally. Amen

Desperate by Lecrae

We've all been in the place Lecrae, with help from Cam, describes in this great track: Desperate for a sense of God's forgiveness after we've repented in Christ's Name, but the voices of the devil, the sinful world, and our sinful selves insist on convicting us.

This experience, shared by people who believe in the God ultimately revealed in Jesus, is exactly what King David felt, as chronicled in Psalm 32, the psalm appointed for this coming Sunday. Lecrae also draws on Psalm 51, another of David's hymns, for this rap.

May God give to all who repent and trust in Christ, a sense of God's grace!

Free Will? (Part 14, The Augsburg Confession)

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

John 15:1-5
Do human beings have free wills?

Most people, when asked that question, would probably say, “Yes.” So, when they try to explain why two brothers from Chechnya allegedly perpetrated the Boston Patriots’ Day bombings and killed an MIT police officer, most people would likely say that their behavior was an exercise of their free will.

But under other circumstances, these same people may defend their own poor choices by saying that, in a moment, their free will was overridden by forces beyond our control.

“I know it was wrong for me to say all those cutting things,” they will explain. “But I was having a bad day.”

“I know it’s wrong to have sex outside of marriage,” others might say. “But I just got swept away by the moment.”

So, do we have free wills then?

Are we born with the ability to make the right choices in our lives?

Can we choose to walk with God and according to His will? 

Article 18 of The Augsburg Confession, one of the basic confessional documents of Lutheran Christianity, summarizes Lutherans’ understanding of what God reveals in the Bible about the human will. The first paragraph says:

Our [Lutheran] churches teach that a person’s will has some freedom to choose civil righteousness and to do such things subject to reason. It has no power, without the Holy Spirit, to work the righteousness of God, that is, spiritual righteousness. For [quoting 1 Corinthians 2:14 in the New Testament] the natural person [that is the person born equipped with original sin without a saving relationship with the crucified and risen Jesus Christ] does not accept the things of the Spirit of God...This righteousness is worked in the heart when the Holy Spirit is received through the Word...”

Human beings, like say, my imaginary friend Ted, have wills that are free to choose what the Confession calls civil righteousness, the kind of righteousness that causes the world to say that Ted’s a nice guy.

You see, Ted pays his taxes, holds a steady job, has never gotten a traffic ticket or been arrested, takes his family out to dinner once a week, coaches his kids’ baseball and basketball teams, shovels snow and rakes leaves for his neighbors, and gives a generous offering to the church every Sunday. When Ted dies and family and friends gather at the funeral home for the visitation, someone will likely say, “Ted was such a good man. He surely must be in heaven.”

But the people apt to say such things could well be told, “Do not judge, so that you may not be judged." Ted’s well-meaning friends would be guilty of judging Ted worthy of eternity because of the outward acts he chose to do. The Bible teaches that you and I are capable of choosing to do those things that elicit the applause of the world, that look good on the outside. But that’s not how God judges us!

As God told Samuel in the Old Testament: “...the Lord does not see as mortals see; they look on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart.” God judges us fit for eternity not on the externals that may wow the world, but on what goes on inside of us: in our hearts, our wills, our minds. And it’s precisely inside of us that we are incapable of fearing God, believing in God, trusting in His grace, or doing what God wills.

We can decide to live with civil righteousness, worldly righteousness. But we cannot decide to live in spiritual righteousness. We are incapable of freely deciding to live as Christians. We are incapable of freely deciding to live according to the will of God.

Saint Paul puts it this way in Romans 7: “For we know that the law [of God] is spiritual; but I am of the flesh, sold into slavery under sin...nothing good dwells within me...I can will what is right [that is, I can want to joyously and happily do the right thing because I want to do the right thing], but I cannot do it...”

And the prophet Isaiah spoke for the whole human race, even exemplary guys like Ted, when he wrote: “...we are all like an unclean thing, and our righteousnesses are like filthy rags...our iniquities [our sins] have taken us away.”

It’s this reality that we can only choose an external, worldly righteousness, but are incapable of choosing, much less living, with a spiritual, internal, eternal righteousness that causes you and me as Lutherans to confess each Sunday, “We are in bondage to sin and cannot free ourselves."

So, what hope do we have?

Please turn to John 15:1-5. Jesus is speaking to the disciples in the upper room on the night of His arrest. He begins: “I am the true vine, and My Father is the vinedresser.”

These words come a few short verses after Jesus says in John 14:6, “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through Me.”

And after He says in John 10:30, “I and My Father are one.”

Here, in John 15:1, Jesus is expanding on the claims He has made about Himself earlier: He is God. He is one Person of the Trinity. And He is the vine, the new life of God invading a world dying in its sin. God the Father is the vinedresser, the One Who tends and nurtures this vine, which is the body of Christ in the world.

Look at John 15:2. Jesus says: “Every branch in Me that does not bear fruit He [the Father] takes away and every branch that bears fruit He prunes, that it may bear fruit.”

This is an amazing verse! Consider three things it tells us.

First: Everyone who believes that Jesus has died and risen to give forgiveness of sins and everlasting life to them is a branch of Christ, drawing new life and forgiveness of sins from Christ.

When we are connected to Jesus, God does the works of true spiritual righteousness through us, not because, like Ted, we’re good guys or good women, but because the goodness and life of Christ surges through the lives of those who humbly submit to Christ as their God and Savior.

Usually this will happen without our being aware of it or self-conscious about it. Many of you as followers of Jesus can probably remember times when someone has told you that that thing you did or that thing you said, something you don’t even remember doing or saying, was what shored up their faith in Christ or brought the truth of Christ to them clearly for the first time.

Many of you have heard me talk about my friend Sig, a committed Lutheran Christian man who, along with his wife, was involved in Christ Renews His Parish and marriage enrichment weekends, helping people to bring their lives and marriages under the renewing grace and love of Christ. Sig worked for a major company in the Cincinnati area. So was a man I’ll call Bob, who joined my former parish shortly after it got off the ground. During a conversation with Bob, I just happened to mention Sig and Bob told me, “Sig was a huge influence on me. I wanted to have Christ in my life the way I saw Sig did.” Though they worked for the same company, they were at different facilities, and they had only met a few times years before. Yet Sig's faith had made an indelible imprint on Bob. The next time I saw Sig, I mentioned what Bob had said. Sig was puzzled: He could barely remember meeting Bob and told me that he had no idea what he might have done to influence Bob for Christ so positively.

When you’re connected to the vine, you don’t usually think about the righteous things you do or even that what you do is righteous. Those deeds will be the simple, wonderful byproducts of staying connected to Jesus.

Second in John 15:2, Jesus says that, as we remain connected to Him, God will sometimes prune us. I don't know about you, but getting pruned is not something I particularly want God to do to me. The word in the original Greek in which John wrote his Gospel, katharizo, literally means cleanse. It's the root word for English ones, catharsis and cathartic, words often used of experiences, confessions, or conversations that cleanse our emotions or our psyches. Jesus is telling us that as we daily repent for our sin and surrender again to Christ, God cleanses us of sins committed, clarifies our thinking, purifies our living.

Sometimes, this will be extremely painful as God incites and empowers us to turn our backs on things we want to do. God replaces our corrupted, enslaved will with the will of a child of God living under the will and in the freedom of His grace! A man I know, an alcoholic, once told me of how painful it was for him to realize that he would have to give up beer for the rest of his life. There’s nothing inherently wrong with beer, of course. But as a person who suffered from an addiction, he knew that he would be ceding control of his life to the devil, the world, and his sinful self if he ever took another drink. Daily, he had to seek the power of God to make the right or righteous choice he could not make on his own. He had to submit to God’s pruning in order to stay connected to Jesus.

Finally, in John 15:2, Jesus says that God will lop off those branches that have given up on their connection to Christ. Those who refuse God’s grace won’t have God’s grace forced on them.

Now look at John 15:3. Here, Jesus, speaking to believers in Him, like you and me, says: “You already are clean [the word here is katharoi, the adjective form of that word that can be translated also as pruned] because of the word which I have spoken to you.”

The Word about Jesus, God-enfleshed Who loves sinners so much that He shared the death for sin they deserve (that we deserve) and rose from the dead as a sign that He conquers sin, death, and the devil for all who believe in Him, this Word, creates faith in those who listen. As Romans 10:17 puts it: “So faith comes from what is heard, and what is heard comes through the word of Christ.”

We can’t be saved by good works, by exercising that part of our will that’s free to do works that are pleasing to the world.

But we can be saved as we welcome into our lives God’s Word and the truth of God’s decision to die for us, to rise for us, and to count our faith in Him as righteousness, cleanses us from sin and makes us new!

Folks, that is very good news!

Our salvation and our eternal relationship with God does not depend on the good works we decide to do. These things depend entirely on the grace of God given in Jesus Christ and on the faith in Christ that the Holy Spirit creates in the lives of those willing to receive and abide in Jesus Christ, the true vine!

That’s why Jesus says what He does next in John 15:4-5: “Abide in Me [stay connected to Me, keep listening to Me, keep reading My Word, keep receiving My Sacraments, keep worshiping with like-minded believers in Christ, keep praying] and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself, unless it abides in the vine, neither can you unless you abide in Me. I am the vine, you are the branches. He who abides in Me, and in him, bears much fruit; for without Me you can do nothing.”

Do human beings--you and I--have free wills?

The Bible and the Lutheran Confessions say we have free will when it comes to the decisions we make that relate to the kingdoms of this world--to pay our taxes, to be polite, to obey the speed laws, to obey our parents.

But we are completely lacking in free will when it comes to things of God’s kingdom.

Only God can cause us to willingly be sacrificial in loving others, joyful in giving to others, focused on God and not ourselves.

We can clean up our acts, but we can’t clean up our minds and hearts and wills, the places where sin starts, the places that God judges.

Only Christ and the Word about His death and resurrection and the new life He offers to those who believe in Him, can truly clean us up, from the inside out.

That’s why, like David in Psalm 51, we might well pray each day: “Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a steadfast spirit within me.”

God has come into the world in Jesus Christ so that whenever anyone who humbly trusts in Christ prays that prayer, God will answer it positively.

You see it’s God’s delight and it's God's will to give forgiveness, a purposeful life, and eternity with Him to all who humbly confess their inability to make themselves clean and ask that instead, their lives, their decisions, their wills are washed in the blood of the Lamb, Jesus, Who takes away sin.

God loves to answer that prayer, day after day till we see Him face to face! Amen

Repentance: Changing Our Way of Thinking

[This is the text I prepared for this evening's Ash Wednesday worship at Saint Matthew Lutheran Church in Logan, Ohio. But it's not exactly what I preached.]

Psalm 51
You know, sometimes we forget that the Word of God in the Bible arose from specific historical circumstances or specific encounters between God and real life human beings, like you and me.

Take, for example, Psalm 51, which we read responsively a short time ago. It was written by Israel’s King David, later in his reign, sometime after 1003 BC. And it arose from a specific situation.

Open a Bible to 2 Samuel 12. David had committed adultery with Bathsheba, the wife of one of his most loyal soldiers, Uriah. Bathsheba became pregnant. David tried to make it look as though Uriah was the father. But that didn't work. So, David made arrangements for Uriah to get isolated and exposed to enemy fire and killed in battle. The king God refers to as “a man after My own heart,” was guilty of adultery and murder!

In 2 Samuel, God sends the prophet Nathan to confront David for his sins. Nathan does it by telling David the story of a poor man who owned a ewe lamb. This ewe lamb was so beloved that both the poor man and his family see the lamb as another one of the children. When a rich man down the road has visitors, he decides that as a good host, he has to throw a big dinner for them. But he doesn’t want to use any of his own flock for the main course. So, he steals the poor man’s ewe lamb and serves it up at dinner.

Look at David’s reaction in 2 Samuel 12:5-6. “So David’s anger was greatly aroused against the man, and he said to Nathan, ‘As the Lord lives, the man who has done this shall surely die! And he shall restore fourfold for the lamb because he did this thing and because he had no pity.”

The king had spoken and rendered his verdict. But there was a question: Who was the man who had done this awful thing?

Nathan gives the answer in verse 7, telling King David: “You are the man!"

He goes on: "'Thus says the Lord God of Israel: “I anointed you king over Israel, and I delivered you from the hand of Saul. I gave you your master’s house and your master’s wives into your keeping [This, by the way, doesn’t mean that God had given David permission to take these women as his wives. It means that God had given David control over that which his predecessor, in that patriarchal society, had control.]...and [I] gave you the house of Israel and Judah. And if that had been too little, I also would have given you much more! Why have you despised the commandment of the Lord to do evil in his sight? You have killed Uriah...you have taken his wife to be your wife...”’”

Through Nathan, God was telling David, “I gave you blessings you never could have earned or deserved. I did these things for you out of pure divine and fatherly love and mercy. But instead of gratitude, instead of trying to follow the way of life I revealed long ago in the Ten Commandments, you decided to go your own way. Why?”

You know, every time a Christian deliberately flouts the will of God, I’m sure God asks the same question: “I went to the cross for you, endured the beating, the punches, the spitting, the insults, the nails, the thorns plaited into a mocking crown, and a slow agonizing death...all for you. I took the punishment for sin you deserved. I rose from death to open eternity up to you. I did all these things to give you a new life freed from the power of sin and death. I set you free to become the person I made you to be. And I want to spend eternity showering blessings on you. So, why would you block Me from your life by deliberately doing anything that I have shown you is the way of death? Why?"

Having been confronted for his sins, David might have reacted in a number of ways.

As king, he could have simply ordered Nathan’s death. It wouldn't have been the first time David had ordered the murder of an innocent man, after all. But David didn’t do that.

Or, he might have made excuses, like the ones I've heard people make in counseling sessions through the years:

“My wife hasn’t been fulfilling my needs.”

Or, “You must understand, Nathan: Bathsheba and I really love each other.”

Or, “If I hadn’t ordered Uriah’s death, the poor old devil would have died of a broken heart anyway knowing that his wife loved me and not him.”

But David didn’t make excuses either.

Or, after hearing Nathan out, David might have set up a commission to discern, given the ways the world had changed and grown more complex since God gave the Ten Commandments, whether sin and murder might not be sins any more. “If our consciences are bound to a different idea,” David might have said, “it could be that now, when we know so much more than God did hundreds of years ago, adultery and murder are OK.”

But David didn’t lash out at Nathan, didn’t make excuses, or appoint a commission to cover the truth with lies.

Look at how David did react, in verse 13: “I have sinned against the Lord."

That's it.

Here, David is exemplifying what the Bible--both the Old and the New Testament in their different languages--calls repentance.

In the Greek of the New Testament, the most common word for repent is metanoia. It means to have a change of mind.

The person who repents--or lives the lifestyle Martin Luther called, “daily repentance and renewal”--is saying, “I got off track. I was thinking my way. I was following my own sinful nature--the nature that David mentions in Psalm 51:5, when he confesses, ‘I was born guilty, a sinner when my mother conceived me.’ But now, aware of the sins I’ve committed by following that way, I’m asking God to change my mind, to change the way I’ve been thinking. I’m asking God to help me think His way, not mine.”

This is what Paul is talking about in Philippians 2:5 when he exhorts followers of Jesus: “Let this mind be in you which also was in Christ Jesus.”

God wants us to take on the mind of Jesus: a mind that doesn’t look out just for what I want in this moment, but that wants what God wants, even when what God wants isn’t pleasant for me.

To repent is to confess that when God and I disagree about anything, God is always right and I am always wrong.

After David said plainly, “I have sinned against the Lord,” Nathan told David, “The Lord also has put away your sin; you shall not die.”

This all reminds me of what Paul says in Romans 6:23: “...the wages of sin is death [death is what we sinners deserve], but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

Only the God we meet in the crucified and risen Jesus can set us free from death--separation from God--and hell.


And that can only happen when we repent and trust in Christ, relying on Christ alone to give our lives meaning.

On this Ash Wednesday, as we remember that we are creatures of God formed from the dust and that we will return to dust again one day, we also remember this: If we will change our minds, turning to Christ and to the way of God, rather than to the ways we prefer, this dust will rise again.

We can live each day knowing that while God will never force Himself on us, if we will keep turning to Christ--living, as the New Testament puts it, "in Christ"--nothing will ever separate us from Him.

And we can trust the promise that Jesus made to the sister of His friend, Lazarus: “I am the resurrection and the life. Those who believe in Me, even though they die, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in Me, will never die" (John 11:25).

Had David steeped himself in God’s Word, remained in fellowship with other believers, or been praying the day he first set eyes on Bathsheba--in other words, if he had allowed God to reign over his thoughts--the terrible chain of events that followed never would have taken place.

That’s one lesson we can learn from David’s experience: Life with God belongs to those who seek live life God's way and not our own.

But there’s another lesson, a lesson about God’s grace and goodness: If, when we have sinned, we can forgo our tendency to block out the truths of God we don’t like and instead, let God change our minds, acknowledge our sins, and trust in God to do the right thing--even when it means consequences we don’t like--our relationship with God can be restored.

Life with God belongs to all who repent for sin and trust in Christ. May repentance and renewal be our way of life not just on Ash Wednesday or during Lent, but every day we live on earth. Amen.

"God is Love"

"God is love." God revealed this central truth about Himself in both Old and New Testament times. It's why 1 John 4:8 says, "Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love."

So, would a loving God ever describe His human children with names like wicked, fools, or stupid?

As Dave Branon points out in this piece, the loving God of the universe Who ultimately disclosed Himself in the crucified and risen Jesus, has used these names for some people.

I hope that you'll read Branon's piece, especially if your notions about what the Bible means in saying that "God is love," has created a false image of God as an indulgent grandparent who doesn't care how we defile ourselves, hurt others, or dishonor Him.

Take it from someone who has done lots of wicked, stupid, and foolish things, for which God still calls me out each day, if God didn't love you, He wouldn't call you out for sins or willful ignorance of His will.

It's when God calls us out and we dare to hear what His Word tells us about His will for human beings, that we can exercise the gift of repentance and experience a fuller relationship with Christ.

Two other passages of Scripture come to mind as I think about the tough and tender love of God that loves you just as you are, but loves you too much to leave you there.

One comes from King David, the adulterer and murderer who the Bible describes as a "man after God's own heart." David knew all about having his deeds exposed for being wicked, foolish, and stupid. Remember that David had an affair with another man's wife and then arranged to have that man murdered. For two years, David went on merrily with his life before being confronted for his sins by the prophet Nathan. David repented. Psalm 51 is his song of repentance. But, here's something he wrote for the benefit of his fellow sinners who may be less than inclined to accept God's judgment of them for wickedness, foolishness, or stupidity:

Do not be like a horse or mule, without understanding, whose temper must be curbed with bit and bridle, else it will not stay near you.

And then there are these words, from the same New Testament book which reminds us that, "God is love." (Some of what's said in 1 John 1:8-10, will be familiar to most Lutherans, who hear words drawn from this section of Scripture regularly in our liturgy):

If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, he who is faithful and just will forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness. If we say we have not sinned, we make him a liar, and his word is not in us.

God's enduring will for the human race is laid out clearly for us in what scholars call the Mosaic Law, the Ten Commandments, here. Unlike Old Testament ritual and civil laws, the Ten Commandments are valid for all time.

They're well interpreted for us in 1 Timothy 1:8-10.

It's wicked, foolish, and stupid for us to willfully flout the law of God because doing so separates us from Him and His desire to be with us forever.

But when we confess our sins--when we acknowledge that God is right in calling us out for our sin--and seek and accept the forgiveness God freely offers in Jesus Christ, God not only forgives us, God also gives us the power of the Holy Spirit to resist our inborn inclinations to sin.

God is love!

Great Rap from Lecrae

I love this song, Desperate, by rapper Lecrae (featuring Cam). Here are the lyrics:

[Hook: Cam]
I'm so desperate, I can't believe I've sinned against you
Create in me a clean heart (I'm so sorry)
Your mercy is what I need

[Verse 1: Lecrae]
Woke up this morning too depressed and shamed to leave my bed
Can't stand to see my own reflection so I hang my head
Feel like a disappointment like the scum of the earth
I'm so hurt I know you see I can't cover my dirt
My souls dying hearts weak and I can't even cry
I'm sposed to run to you but WHY I'm such an evil guy
The sun's shining but for me it's the darkest of days
Try to pretend it never happened but the guilt remains
I leave the house it feels like everybody knows I did it
Feels like they reading my mind and know the sin I committed
Through your blood I'm aquitted but my heart doesnt get it
Oh God I'm desperate for Help cause I'm grieving your Spirit
I couldn't sing in the sunday service, Lord I felt fake
And when they started communion I just made an escape
I'm in need of your grace
Feels like you hid your face
Lead me back to cross and show me my sins erased

[Verse 2: Lecrae]
I'm waste deep in my pity
Is Satan tryna trick me and tell me you won't forgive me
Cause it's startin to get me
Jesus help me quickly I hate wrong I've done
I know we all fall but I feel like the only one
Feels like I should be shunned
Should I punish myself
I know it's dumb cause by your death all my sin has been dealt
But my sin is been felt
I didn't want to do it
But what I want to do I don't
I swear I'm gonna to lose it
Try to open my bible I need to read your pages

I need you Lord but my guilt has got me feeling so faithless
Help me see where your face is
Take me back to the basics
Help me find my joy in you and not people and places
My sin is ever before me I turned my back on you
Oh father break and restore me to bring me back to you

[Verse 3: Lecrae]
Have mercy on me God according to your steady love
Wipe away my transgression and wash me in your blood
Create in me a clean heart renew a right spirit
Don't take your Spirit away your Presence keep me near it
I'm waiting patience on you Lord I know you hear my cry
Restore your Joy in me
For you alone I live and die

It's you I Glorify cause you don't want my sacrifice
You want me broken and contrite trusting in the Christ
I confess to you my sin and you show me mercy
I turn away from it demonstrating that you are worthy
Over lust, over pride, over all sin
Is my affection for Jesus is who died for all them
I was lost now I'm found I was toss to the ground
My sin weighed on me heavy but I am no longer bound
As sure as Christ wears the crown
I know that grace will abound
And even when I feel lost I know in You I am found
[ Desperate Lyrics on http://www.lyricsmania.com/ ]

True Piety, the Lifestyle God Rewards (Ash Wednesday Sermon)

[This was shared during Ash Wednesday worship at Saint Matthew Lutheran Church in Logan, Ohio, on February 17.]

Matthew 6:1-6, 16-21; Psalm 51
“Beware,” Jesus says at the beginning of this evening’s Gospel lesson, “of practicing your piety before others in order to be seen by them; for then you have no reward from your Father in heaven.”

Piety, you know, is a blanket term for acts of devotion toward God. In our lesson, Jesus talks about three different acts of piety: almsgiving (that’s providing monetary and material aid to the poor); praying; and fasting. Good Jews were to do these things in Jesus’ day. They are to do them still today.

And, by His words to us tonight, we see that Jesus presumes that good Christians will do them as well. Notice what Jesus says: “Whenever you give alms…,” not “If you give alms…” “Whenever you pray…,” not “If you pray…” “Whenever you fast…,” not “If you fast…”

As unpopular or as disdained as the word may be, followers of Jesus Christ, you and I are called to strive living pious lives. We're to engage in disciplined devotion to God. That means, among other things, giving to the poor, praying, and fasting. It also means worshiping regularly, sharing our faith in Jesus with others, serving our neighbors, and studying God’s Word. Disciplines like these need to become habits for us.

But, Jesus tells us, we need to watch out for our motives in adopting them.

At a seminar, I once heard the pastor of a megachurch lamenting the motives of a number of people who joined his congregation. The congregation wasn’t just large (20,000 worshiping there every weekend), its members also included a number of wealthy business people. “Our church has become a place for people on the make to network,” I recollect the pastor saying. “I watch them exchanging business cards and I realize that the only reason many come to church is to see and be seen by others.” This guy also said, “Whatever their motives, I trust that, because with God all things are possible, the Word of God will do its stuff and they might find God changing their motives for worshiping every week.” Yet, it makes that pastor sad that so many of the thousands who worship at his church--among them, some of the most regular attenders--are just there to look good. “Beware,” Jesus says, “of practicing your piety before others in order to be seen by them.”

You all are good enough Lutherans to know that no one’s motives are entirely clean and faultless.

Christians are, simultaneously, saints and sinners, forgiven sinners who trust in Jesus alone for our salvation.

This side of eternity, none of us engage in any otherwise commendable act of piety with absolutely pure motives. But Jesus warns us tonight not to be hypocrites in doing these pious things.

The word hypocrite that Jesus uses is the English version of a Greek word: ὑποκριτής (hupokrites). Hupokrites in ancient times was the term for an actor. In ancient Greek and Roman theater, actors wore masks. The word, hypocrite came to be used for people who strive to look one way to the world, but are really very different under their masks.

“You may be able to fool other people behind the masks you wear,” Jesus is telling us tonight. “You may fool people into thinking of you as a person of faith, when in fact, you just want to create that impression. But you can’t fool God!”

Our acts of piety—including receiving the imposition of ashes on our foreheads on Ash Wednesday—are worthless if they’re just masks we wear.

If we come forward for the ashes, yet don’t really believe that we’re finite mortals who need God or sinners who need forgiveness, who are we fooling? Other people? Ourselves? God?

Our acts of piety are great, but no good if they’re masks. To God, they’re just perfume on a cesspool, lipstick on a pig, or, as Jesus Himself once put it in describing the hypocrisy of the Pharisees, “whitewashed tombs.”

Psalm 51, which we read together earlier, has been attributed to King David. He wrote it, the Old Testament tells us, after the prophet Nathan confronted David for two sins which David had unrepentantly committed. David thought he’d successfully escaped responsibility for these sins: adultery with another man’s wife and the arranged murder his lover’s husband.

The mask of piety that David wore either fooled the people of Israel or they were so impressed or intimidated by David’s power that they said nothing.

But God prompted Nathan to call his king to repentance. David, the most powerful person in Israel, could have simply arranged for Nathan to die. It wouldn’t have been the first time or the last that a ruler covered up his sins with another one.

But, as the psalm shows us, David repented. He confessed his sins. He turned away from them, disavowing them. He asked God to create a new heart within him and to align his life with God’s Spirit.

In other words, David repudiated his own hypocrisy. He took off the mask. He knew that this was all God asks of us: to be real, to be authentic, to admit our sins, to acknowledge our need of God’s help to live as truly human beings. David put it this way in his prayer to God: “You desire truth in the inward being.”

David knew that when the focus of our piety is on God and not on ourselves or the esteem of others, the walls between God and us, between us and joyful living tumble down.

In our Gospel lesson, Jesus says that those who practice authenticity rather than hypocrisy in their devotion to God receive one reward, while the hypocrites get another.

Jesus isn’t saying that we earn eternity.

He is saying that we should aim higher than we are prone to do.

The fact is that, spiritually, we always get what we aim for.

The esteem of others and a comfortable life derived from pleasing the world can come to those for whom those things are important.

But on the day you and I see Jesus face to face, these things will be of no value.

Better to make our aim to connect with and surrender to God!

Then, we’ll not only enter eternity with Christ, Christ will also enter our lives today.

Authentic connection with the God we know in Jesus pays the greatest rewards, now and in eternity.

Make an authentic, honest relationship with Christ your aim and all the best things which God, our Maker and Savior, has in mind for us, will come to be. Amen