What the Church is Called to Do in These Times

A Virginia pastor has died from coronavirus after insisting on continuing with regular worship services at the congregation he served.

Here's the deal.

When Jesus began His earthly ministry, following His baptism by John the Baptist when His deity and messiahship were affirmed by both God the Father and God the Holy Spirit, He went into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil.

Jesus faced three major temptations then. One of them involved the devil taking Jesus to the pinnacle of the temple in Jerusalem. The devil told Jesus: "If you are the Son of God...throw yourself down..." (Matthew 4:6) Then, he tried to push Jesus into jumping by citing a passage of Old Testament Scripture, Psalm 91:11-12: "He will command his angels concerning you, and they will lift you up in their hands, so that you will not strike your foot against a stone." That is a beautiful and reliable promise from the God first revealed to Israel and now to all the world in Jesus. Generations of believers have found God to be a fortress through the adversities of life. I know that I have.

But Jesus wasn't having any of the devil's mangling of the Bible. God's promises are not insurance against our willful foolishness.

So, Jesus told the devil, also citing God's Word: "It is also written: ‘Do not put the Lord your God to the test.’” (Matthew 4:7, with Jesus quoting Deuteronomy 6:16).

This pastor's death is tragic.

But it is also the result of a seemingly intelligent man's decision to engage in foolishness, to ignore the wisdom of those who know what they're talking about when it comes to this unique virus for which there is presently no cure.

This is a time that requires social distancing and for group meetings, including meetings of the Church, to not happen.

To forge ahead with public worship or church activities for the foreseeable future is pure foolishness, like texting while driving, not fastening one's seatbelt, or failing to wear a helmet while on a motorcycle. People can do these things. But if they're counting on God to protect them from their foolishness, they're putting God to the test.

I would argue that it's not just foolish, it's downright sinful to expose people to a lethal disease that we can prevent on the pretext of being faithful.

God the Father didn't count it a sin when His sinless Son refused to jump off the temple. And as much as I miss being together in worship with God's people, it's no sin for us to forgo doing so out of simple love for God and neighbor.

The magazine First Things presented an article by Thomas Joseph White this past week. Among other things, it searches through the history of the Roman Catholic Church for circumstances like the Plague we currently face. One paragraph particularly struck me:

The first thing to be said about the suspension of public masses is that it is not innovative nor is there any evidence that it stems from undue influence of a secular mentality. In fact, there is clear evidence that in medieval and modern Europe, as well as in the U.S., this form of response on the part of the Church is a very traditional and time-tested one. St. Charles Borromeo has been mentioned much in these discussions. He closed the churches of Milan due to a plague in 1576–77. During this time, he arranged for masses to be elebrated outside and at street intersections so that people could watch from their windows. There wasn’t any question of distributing communion since it would have been rather unusual in this period for most people to receive regularly at mass. This lasted about two years...

Mass was suspended in Milan because of a plague for TWO YEARS. Clearly, St. Charles Borromeo believed that if the Church truly loves God and loves others, gatherings of the faithful could not happen in diocesan churches until the danger had passed.

White goes on:

There are many other medieval and early modern examples that could be cited, but much more recently, in 1918, the churches in many parts of the United States closed for public worship during the Spanish Flu. In New Orleans (hardly a Protestant city) the city ordered that churches had to close, which did prompt some outcry from Catholic pastors who said that this had not been done during earlier epidemics. They were in error.

Fortunately, unlike past generations of Christians, we have two blessings that can help the Church to (1) not become the means by which coronavirus is spread; (2) continue our mission of proclaiming the Word and being and making disciples (and, I believe, in sharing the Sacraments).

We have modern medicine, infectious disease specialists, epidemiologists, and a track record by which medical professionals have produced vaccines that have destroyed diseases that, initially, were lethal.

We have the Internet. Via the Internet this week, my congregation will be able to worship and hear the Word of God (and share it with others), hold Catechism class for our middle schoolers, have our church council meeting, conduct Bible studies on John and 2 Peter, have gatherings of our small groups for prayer, the consideration of God's Word, and, in a phrase from one of our Lutheran tradition's confessional documents, "the mutual conversation and consolation of the saints," and host a channel composed entirely of bedtime stories read by members of the congregation for our children.

In a few weeks, lay representatives and pastors of the 60+ congregations of our Ohio Mission Region will gather in convocation, hear our bishop, and conduct business online.

Wouldn't I rather that we were able to worship and meet together in person? Of course, I would.

But if we are serious about following Jesus and living in His love, then the Church must be willing not to meet until we no longer will be testing God by doing so, until Jesus' great commandment to love God and love neighbor gives us leave to resume more normal activities.

I also think that while our church buildings are closed, we are seeing Christians reaching out to others in loving ways. Every day, I hear of people in our congregation checking on each other, checking on neighbors, and praying together on the phone and by other means. The blessing in this cursed time is a Church--laity and clergy alike--growing in their faith and sharing Christ with others as I haven't seen in thirty-five-plus years as a pastor and over forty years as a Christian!

The family of this Virginia pastor is in my prayers. I pray that God will comfort them.

And I pray that all churches will refrain from worship and all group activities until, by the grace of God and in answer to the prayers of the faithful, this scourge is forever destroyed!

What Jesus taught me today about refusing the selfish way

During my Quiet Time with God today, I read the fourth chapter of Luke's Gospel. It includes Luke's account of the forty days when Jesus, fasting, was tempted by the devil in the wilderness.

I was struck today by the exchange between Jesus and the devil in what Luke says was the third temptation offered up against Jesus:

The devil said to him, “If you are the Son of God, tell this stone to become bread.”

Jesus answered, “It is written: ‘Man shall not live on bread alone.’” [Luke 4:3-4]

Here, as in the entire chapter, we see Jesus refusing to use His divinity for selfish ends.

Although He is hungry and could do what the devil challenges Him to do, Jesus persists in accepting all the limitations of being human when it comes to His own needs or desires.

He does this, it seems, in order to make His redeeming connection to the human race complete, pure, unadulterated. (We see this also from about the same time in His ministry, when Jesus insists on John the Baptist performing the baptism of repentance on Him despite the fact that Jesus, unlike John and the rest of the human race, was sinless. “Let it be so now," Jesus tells John, "it is proper for us to do this to fulfill all righteousness” [Matthew 3:15].)

In fact, it appears that the devil notices Jesus' insistence on accepting the limitations of His humanity when it comes to His own interests in Jesus' response to the first two temptations. The devil customizes the third temptation to do an end-around.

He refers to a promise made in Psalm 91:11-12. That psalm is addressed to human beings, "whoever dwells in the shelter of the Most High."

The devil's temptation is clearly meant to sneak past Jesus' defenses by tempting Him with a promise made to an ordinary people. The devil surely hopes that Jesus will reason, "The devil isn't pushing me to misuse my deity by being selfish, but only wants me to prove to have the same kind of faith that an ordinary human being is called to have."

But Jesus will have none of it. He answers as a man steeped in God's Word. He gives an answer that any ordinary believer who knows the Lord could give. Jesus' response, quoting Deuteronomy 8:3, effectively tells the devil:"God's promises don't cover me when I do willfully stupid things to test whether He's good for His promises."

Testing God is unbelief. And it was from the scourge of unbelief and its consequences--death, futility, and darkness--that Jesus came into the world to save all who trust in Him.

Had Jesus gone to the cross without belief--trust--in God the Father, having tested the Father to gain momentary relief or pleasure, His death would have been meaningless and we would be without any hope, for this life or the next. Only a sinless Savior Who trusted in God could be the perfect sacrifice who expunges the power of sin and death over us.

Through this encounter with God today, I realized that I need to be human, accessible, and vulnerable to others, even as I live under God's rule. Jesus refused to exploit His deity in selfish ways. By the power He gives to believers through the Holy Spirit, I need to refuse to lord it over anyone. Jesus is both the model of this life and the One Who, as I lean on Him, gives me the power to live in this way.

I need to not use my status as a child of God (or as a pastor) to try to get my way, to be in charge. I need to simply trust God to lead me where He wants me to be in any given situation.

This passage assures me, as it always does, that I can rely on the power of God to help me to resist temptation and to live for God, even when it's easier to live in other ways.

The words of Paul in Philippians 2:3-11 keep coming to mind.

Lord, help me to steep myself in Your Word by beginning to memorize Scripture this week. Forgive my unbelief. Help me to rely totally on Jesus. In His name. Amen

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

Temptations: Tests of Our Priorities

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

Luke 4:1-13
There's a story that's only tangentially related to today's Gospel lesson. But I've decided to tell it anyway.

It's about a sheriff who had a vacancy on his staff. A guy in the community who wasn't exactly the brightest bulb in the pack wanted to interview and the sheriff didn't feel that he could fairly refuse to give the fellow an opportunity. So, the sheriff sat down to ask him a few questions. "What's 1 and 1?" the sheriff asked. "11," the guy replied. That wasn't the answer the sheriff was looking for, of course, but he could understand how the guy came up with it. "OK," the sheriff went on, "what are the two days of the week that begin with the letter T?" Without hesitation, the guy answered, "Today and tomorrow." Again, wrong answer, but understandable. The sheriff asked a third question: "Who killed Abraham Lincoln?" The interviewee didn't say anything for a long while. He was stumped. "I tell you what," the sheriff said. "You go home and think about that." The man left his interview and out on the sidewalk, ran into some friends. "How did the interview go?" they asked. "Great!" he answered. "It's my first day on the job and I'm already working a homicide case!"

In today’s Gospel lesson, Jesus is really experiencing His first day on the job as the Son of God. As our lesson begins, He has just come from being baptized, where God the Father triumphantly declared Him to be the Son--the very presence of God--and the Messiah, when the Holy Spirit drives Him into the wilderness--the desert--to be tempted by the devil. In between the account of Jesus' baptism and our lesson, the gospel writer Luke inserts a genealogy that culminates with the designation of Jesus as "the Son of God."

But already during His first day as the Messiah, we find Jesus in a contest to decide whether, as God's Son, He will be faithful to the Father’s will or will go another way.

Each day of our lives, we confront the same choices Jesus faced in the wilderness: whether we’ll follow God’s will for our lives or we’ll walk away from God.

Like Jesus, we face temptations.

Interestingly, the words used in the Greek of the New Testament--peirazo or ekpeirazo--can be equally well translated as test or temptation. Like the two sides of a single coin, every temptation that comes from the devil, the world, or our sinful selves is also a test from God.

There were three major temptations that came to Jesus during His forty days in the wilderness. Each was similar to the temptations that God's people confronted in the wilderness between Egypt and the promised land during the days of Moses some 1500 years before the birth of Jesus.

Each of Jesus' temptations also reflects the major temptations that you and I face as we move through our daily lives.

The first temptation the devil sets before Jesus: Knowing that Jesus was hungry, the devil said, “Turn a stone into bread.” Out in the Old Testament wilderness, the Hebrew people had doubted that God would provide for them when they were hungry. Jesus has no such doubts. Quoting from the Old Testament, he tells the devil, “One does not live by bread alone.”

A famous third century saint, Augustine, prayed, “O Lord, our hearts are restless until they find their rest in You.” Temptation can lead us to try to feed our hunger for the comfort and peace only God can give with other things. Jesus refused to make that mistake. That’s why He told the devil, quoting the Old Testament book of Deuteronomy, “One does not live by bread alone.” We must instead rely on God alone for life!

In the second temptation, the devil challenged Jesus to worship him. If Jesus would worship him, he said, Jesus could have all the kingdoms of the world.

Truth be told, we all want to reign over our own little kingdoms. Jesus, in fact, had come into the world to take the very kingdoms that the devil offered Him in the wilderness.

But Jesus came to take them through a cross and an empty tomb, not through bowing down to evil and separating you and me from God and life forever. Jesus came to save us from sin and death. And He couldn’t do that if He only looked out for Himself.

So Jesus hung tough, telling the devil, “It is written, ‘Worship the Lord your God, and serve only him.’”

Turn on the television news on any given day and you see the consequences of a world caving into the temptation to put other things—especially themselves—above God.

The path to true joy is the one commended by Saint Paul in the New Testament book of Philippians:

Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God…humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death— even death on a cross. Therefore God also highly exalted him and gave him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bend, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.

True living comes only to those who let God have first place in their lives.

The third temptation from the devil took place on the pinnacle of the temple in Jerusalem, where he told Jesus to jump. The devil did a little proof-texting from the Psalms to try to convince Jesus that it was okay. (You know what proof-texting is: It's taking an isolated piece of Scripture, without taking the witness of the whole Bible into account, in order to prove something you believe or want to believe is true.) Jesus could jump, the devil said, because, in Psalm 91, God promises that his angels will spare Him harm.

But Jesus quoted Old Testament words in which God warns us not to put God to the test. It’s one thing to be pushed from great heights; it’s another to throw ourselves from them and then expect God to rescind the law of gravity to protect us from the consequences of our own stupidity.

A Lutheran pastor friend of mine once bemoaned the size of his mortgage. With a sigh he said, “My life would be so much easier if I just remembered what Saint Paul says in the Bible, ‘Owe no one anything.”

In today’s world, of course, it’s tough to own a home and not have a mortgage. But I know people who pile up massive mountains of debt and then say cheerily that they’re sure God will take care of their finances.

That’s like jumping from a building and expecting God to catch us. People make the same mistake with all sorts of sins. They like to sow their wild oats and then count on God to bring a crop failure. Jesus knew that to depend on God and His grace is not the same as expecting God to wink at our sin.

So, what does Jesus’ encounter with the devil in the wilderness teach us? Three main things, I think.

The first is captured in an incident that supposedly happened a few years ago at an Oregon middle school. Some girls there thought it was fun to put on lipstick in the rest rooms and then press their lips against the mirrors, leaving little kisses all over them. This went on for several weeks when the principal called together groups of girls in one of the rest rooms. There, she explained that the lip prints caused the custodian major problems. She then asked the custodian, who was with them, to show the girls what she meant. So, he dipped a long-handled brush into a toilet and scrubbed the lip prints away.

Temptation makes sin look attractive. But if we could just understand that when we cave into sin, we're kissing filth, we might not surrender to it so easily. Jesus knew that caving into sin would lead to an ugly alienation from God. We need to know that too.

The second thing that Jesus’ temptations in the wilderness tell us is that being tempted isn’t the same thing as sinning. Even Jesus was tempted and because He walked away from sin, going through cross and grave, He won life for us. The New Testament book of Hebrews tells us that, in Jesus, we have an advocate, “who in every respect has been tested as we are, yet without sin.”

When you young people are tempted to go against the directions of your parents, when you older folks are tempted to fudge a little when working on your TurboTax, when any of us are tempted to berate someone, remember these temptations to violate God’s law of love for Him and love for neighbor aren’t sins unless we wimp out and cave into the temptations.

And thank God, when we do sin, because of Jesus Christ, the truly repentant can receive forgiveness and the power to resist temptation in the future.

The third and most important lesson we can learn from Jesus’ being tempted in the wilderness is this: At every turn, Jesus was able to resist the devil by knowing what God says in His Word, the Bible.

Jesus knew not just what the words of the Bible said. He also knew what the words of the Bible were about. That was because He spent time in God’s Word every day. It was His bread and water! As Martin Luther wrote in A Mighty Fortress is Our God, the Christian has the confidence that as the devil tempts us, “one little word”--one word from God--”subdues him.”

Fiery coach Greg Schiano has taken the Rutgers University football program from nowhere to being contenders every year. He’s tough and competitive. He’s also a deeply committed Christian. In an interview with Sports Spectrum magazine a few years ago, he said, “When I’m doing well [as a Christian and a person], it’s getting in the Word in the morning and constant prayer. When I’m not doing well, it’s ‘I’m too busy to get in the Word’ in the morning, and I go to bed at night and I haven’t talked to God all day.”

If you and I are intent on having a meaningful life and to be prepared to resist the temptation to walk away from God, the only Giver of life, we need to make our relationship with Jesus Christ our number one priority. God first; no exceptions. It only seems fair when you think about it: God has put us first, so reciprocating seems the appropriate response. When we’re focused on the God we meet in Jesus Christ, we’re empowered to live life as it’s meant to be lived!

This Lenten season, as we consider the spiritual discipline of prayer during our midweek services, I ask you to allow a daily time with God’s Word to inform your praying.

When we, like Jesus, get to know our Father and lean on His Word, we build a tower of faith in Christ and an ability to really live life that no one and nothing can tear down!