Today's readings from Genesis start out with a murder, then proceed with a dry genealogy...then get extremely wet!
January 8
Genesis 4: TNIV ESV TEV
Genesis 5: TNIV ESV TEV
Genesis 6: TNIV ESV TEV
Psalm 2: TNIV ESV TEV
Notes:
1. Genesis 4:1-16. The Hebrew word usually translated as "offering" in verse 3, is associated most of the time with grain offerings and with thankofferings. Offerings of thanks are to be given from the heart, not begrudgingly. According to Jesus, God has little concern about the size of our offerings to Him, though its authenticity is seen in heaven's eyes in the sacrifice involved in proportion to our incomes. (The Bible holds up the tithe, an offering of the first 10% of our income, as an appropriate response to God's goodness and grace.) What is important in God's eyes is the authenticity of our motives, the genuineness of the thanks behind the offering.
Apparently, Cain had a less than cheerful heart. When God received his brother's offering with apparently more delight, he resented it. (To learn more about Cain and Abel, see The IVP Bible Background Commentary: Old Testament.)
2. God told Cain that Abel's blood was crying out. The Bible understands that blood is life. This is why the blood of a lamb was smeared on doorposts by the Hebrews when the the angel of death passed over their homes, as commanded by God in the event we know as the Passover. On the Day of Atonement, the blood of unblemished lambs was sacrificed at the Temple for the sins of the people, the blood spattered on them as parts of the sacrifice. The blood covered then life and forgiveness against death and sin. And Jesus is the Lamb of God Who takes away the sin of the world. Today, Christians receive life and forgiveness when they receive the body and blood of Jesus in Holy Communion.
3. The answer to Cain's question, "Am I my brother's keeper?," is simple: Yes. We are all our brothers' and sisters' keepers. The great commandment, seen in the Ten Commandments, as well as in Jesus' words in Matthew 22:34-40, is that we are to live in a fellowship of love for God and neighbor. (This is shalom.) The point of Jesus' parable of the good Samaritan is that we are all the keepers of others.
Because of the condition of sin, this love doesn't come naturally to us. The Christian's life on earth is marked by daily repentance and renewal so that as we submit to Christ, the Holy Spirit will help us manifest the love for which we were made.
Points to Ponder:
1. Genesis 6:22 says that Noah did everything just as God commanded. What does command you in His Word that you find difficult to accept? Does Noah's example help you or not?
2. In Genesis 4:15, God marks Cain. Scholars don't believe this was a physical marking. Nonetheless, how is this marking an example of both condemnation and grace? Have you ever felt yourself to be "marked" by God in a similar way?
Wednesday, January 08, 2014
Tuesday, January 07, 2014
Read the Bible in a Year (Day 1)
It's been your New Year's resolution for years, maybe. You've started with Genesis and gotten stuck in the "begat" mud and have never been able to move on.
Help is on the way!
We're starting your new year today!
Beginning today, I'll have a series of posts that will, by the grace of God, appear for the next 365 days. There will be a few notes and questions to ponder on the Bible passages for the day.
You can read the entire Bible in one calendar year by reading little more than three chapters a day. A friend suggested that a good format would be to read three chapters and a Psalm. I thought that was a great idea. The Psalms are the Old Testament's hymnal and book of prayer and they still speak powerfully in so many ways. (Sometimes we'll use a portion of a Psalm.)
Each day, I'll have hyperlinks to the chapters appointed and give you the option of reading them in three different renderings: The New International Version (TNIV); the English Standard Version (ESV); and Today's English Version (TEV, also known as the Good News Bible).
One brief word about the nature and authority of Scripture. The writers of the Bible saw themselves as conduits of the Word of God. The Holy Spirit has, through the centuries, led the Church to believe and experience that the Old Testament is God's Word for the human race, not human attempts to understand God.
As we'll have time to discuss in the coming year, historically, the Church, including the denomination of which I am now a part, the North American Lutheran Church (NALC), has held that the Bible is the authoritative source and norm of our life, faith, and practice.
There are things in the Bible we can't fully explain or understand. But its overall theme and story is of the God Who created and loves the human race and Who ultimately became one of us in Jesus Christ in order to offer His life as the pure sacrifice for our sins and then died and rose in order to open up new and everlasting life to those who turn from sin (repent) and believe in Christ as their only God and Savior...their only hope.
(And yes, that story is even told in the parts of Scripture that tell us about God sending His people into wars and such.)
The Christian view of Scripture is put well in 2 Timothy 3:16:
January 7:
Genesis 1: TNIV ESV TEV
Genesis 2: TNIV ESV TEV
Genesis 3: TNIV ESV TEV
Psalm 1: TNIV ESV TEV
Notes:
1. Genesis 1-2: The interest of Genesis in the universe's creation focuses on two basic questions: Who created the universe, especially its life, and why? Who, of course, is God. Why appears to be that God, self-sufficient yet filled with love and life, must, by His nature, give of His life and of His love. God is giving by His very nature.
2. Genesis 1:27-30: These verses demonstrate the special place humanity has in God's creation. First, God makes us in His image. We bear a special resemblance and relationship with God in our essence, not in our physical appearance because "God is spirit." The image of God has become distorted in us because of the condition of sin. Christ came into the world to restore the image of God to those who trust in Him. Death is the consequence of sin and even believers in Christ die. But like the Savior to Whom they surrender, they will rise to live with God eternally. Second, humanity is put in charge of the world God creates.
3. Genesis 2: The Hebrew names of Adam (man) and Eve (life) sound similar: ish and ishah. There are many such word plays throughout the Old Testament, written in Hebrew.
4. Genesis 3: Notice that the serpent told Eve the truth in a lying way. That's how subtle he was. In fact, Adam and Eve didn't immediately die. But death, which was never intended for them or their descendants--you and me--became part of the human condition when they transgressed God's will for them.
5. The Bible speaks of sin in two different ways. (1) First, as a condition of separation from God and from others. We see this in that Adam hid from God after he and Eve sinned. We see it too, in that Adam and Eve, so close a few verses earlier, blame each other for their common sin against God. Psalm 51:5, among other passages, affirm that we are born into the condition of sin we have inherited from our parents and, ultimately, the first humans.
(2) Second as those things we do, sins, that we do because we are sinners.
6. The grace (or undeserved charity) of God can be seen in several ways in Genesis 3: (1) First, God didn't do away with Adam and Eve as a good project gone bad as soon as they rebelled. He reached out to them.
(2) Second, God sewed clothing for them. Adam and Eve had been naked and ashamed. But once they had sinned, they became aware of how they could misuse their bodies and their lives. Mark Twain once said that man is the only animal that blushes...or needs to. Even today, God provides the world with "daily bread." The fact that millions go hungry is not a problem of God's provision, but of human selfishness...It's a sin issue.
(3) Third, God banished them from the Garden of Eden. It may seem cruel for the first human beings to have been barred from paradise. But the reason it had to be was simple: Had the two remained there, they would have gained access to the tree of life, but done so while still alienated from God and in sin. They would have been eternally separated from God and others. This is exactly how the Bible describes hell!
God has better plans in mind for Adam and Eve and their descendants. It's only when sin's power over our lives is eliminated that we can take eternal life as God intends for us from Him. That's why Jesus Christ, God in the flesh, was crucified. The cross is, for all who turn from sin and trust in Christ alone, the tree of life. (See this more literal rendering of Acts 5:30, from the New Revised Standard Version's translation of the Bible.) We submit to its verdict on our lives and to the crucifixion of our old selves so that our new selves can rise with Christ!
Points to Ponder:
1. How much of yourself do you see in Adam and Eve?
2. In light of the phrase, "her husband, who was with her," why have some believers pinned the blame for sin more onto Eve than Adam, do you suppose? What are the implications of this blame game?
3. Historically, New Testament scholars have seen the promise of Christ in Genesis 3:15. Can you see why this might be so? (Think about that before taking a gander here, if you like.)
Help is on the way!
We're starting your new year today!
Beginning today, I'll have a series of posts that will, by the grace of God, appear for the next 365 days. There will be a few notes and questions to ponder on the Bible passages for the day.
You can read the entire Bible in one calendar year by reading little more than three chapters a day. A friend suggested that a good format would be to read three chapters and a Psalm. I thought that was a great idea. The Psalms are the Old Testament's hymnal and book of prayer and they still speak powerfully in so many ways. (Sometimes we'll use a portion of a Psalm.)
Each day, I'll have hyperlinks to the chapters appointed and give you the option of reading them in three different renderings: The New International Version (TNIV); the English Standard Version (ESV); and Today's English Version (TEV, also known as the Good News Bible).
One brief word about the nature and authority of Scripture. The writers of the Bible saw themselves as conduits of the Word of God. The Holy Spirit has, through the centuries, led the Church to believe and experience that the Old Testament is God's Word for the human race, not human attempts to understand God.
As we'll have time to discuss in the coming year, historically, the Church, including the denomination of which I am now a part, the North American Lutheran Church (NALC), has held that the Bible is the authoritative source and norm of our life, faith, and practice.
There are things in the Bible we can't fully explain or understand. But its overall theme and story is of the God Who created and loves the human race and Who ultimately became one of us in Jesus Christ in order to offer His life as the pure sacrifice for our sins and then died and rose in order to open up new and everlasting life to those who turn from sin (repent) and believe in Christ as their only God and Savior...their only hope.
(And yes, that story is even told in the parts of Scripture that tell us about God sending His people into wars and such.)
The Christian view of Scripture is put well in 2 Timothy 3:16:
All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness...
January 7:
Genesis 1: TNIV ESV TEV
Genesis 2: TNIV ESV TEV
Genesis 3: TNIV ESV TEV
Psalm 1: TNIV ESV TEV
Notes:
1. Genesis 1-2: The interest of Genesis in the universe's creation focuses on two basic questions: Who created the universe, especially its life, and why? Who, of course, is God. Why appears to be that God, self-sufficient yet filled with love and life, must, by His nature, give of His life and of His love. God is giving by His very nature.
2. Genesis 1:27-30: These verses demonstrate the special place humanity has in God's creation. First, God makes us in His image. We bear a special resemblance and relationship with God in our essence, not in our physical appearance because "God is spirit." The image of God has become distorted in us because of the condition of sin. Christ came into the world to restore the image of God to those who trust in Him. Death is the consequence of sin and even believers in Christ die. But like the Savior to Whom they surrender, they will rise to live with God eternally. Second, humanity is put in charge of the world God creates.
3. Genesis 2: The Hebrew names of Adam (man) and Eve (life) sound similar: ish and ishah. There are many such word plays throughout the Old Testament, written in Hebrew.
4. Genesis 3: Notice that the serpent told Eve the truth in a lying way. That's how subtle he was. In fact, Adam and Eve didn't immediately die. But death, which was never intended for them or their descendants--you and me--became part of the human condition when they transgressed God's will for them.
5. The Bible speaks of sin in two different ways. (1) First, as a condition of separation from God and from others. We see this in that Adam hid from God after he and Eve sinned. We see it too, in that Adam and Eve, so close a few verses earlier, blame each other for their common sin against God. Psalm 51:5, among other passages, affirm that we are born into the condition of sin we have inherited from our parents and, ultimately, the first humans.
(2) Second as those things we do, sins, that we do because we are sinners.
6. The grace (or undeserved charity) of God can be seen in several ways in Genesis 3: (1) First, God didn't do away with Adam and Eve as a good project gone bad as soon as they rebelled. He reached out to them.
(2) Second, God sewed clothing for them. Adam and Eve had been naked and ashamed. But once they had sinned, they became aware of how they could misuse their bodies and their lives. Mark Twain once said that man is the only animal that blushes...or needs to. Even today, God provides the world with "daily bread." The fact that millions go hungry is not a problem of God's provision, but of human selfishness...It's a sin issue.
(3) Third, God banished them from the Garden of Eden. It may seem cruel for the first human beings to have been barred from paradise. But the reason it had to be was simple: Had the two remained there, they would have gained access to the tree of life, but done so while still alienated from God and in sin. They would have been eternally separated from God and others. This is exactly how the Bible describes hell!
God has better plans in mind for Adam and Eve and their descendants. It's only when sin's power over our lives is eliminated that we can take eternal life as God intends for us from Him. That's why Jesus Christ, God in the flesh, was crucified. The cross is, for all who turn from sin and trust in Christ alone, the tree of life. (See this more literal rendering of Acts 5:30, from the New Revised Standard Version's translation of the Bible.) We submit to its verdict on our lives and to the crucifixion of our old selves so that our new selves can rise with Christ!
Points to Ponder:
1. How much of yourself do you see in Adam and Eve?
2. In light of the phrase, "her husband, who was with her," why have some believers pinned the blame for sin more onto Eve than Adam, do you suppose? What are the implications of this blame game?
3. Historically, New Testament scholars have seen the promise of Christ in Genesis 3:15. Can you see why this might be so? (Think about that before taking a gander here, if you like.)
Monday, January 06, 2014
The Grateful Dead?
Actually, I don't think that these projections of how musical stars who died at a young age would look if they were still on earth look bad. The folks at the web site appear to disagree.
Elvis does look bad, maybe. But the rest look fine to me. Their early deaths were all tragic.
Elvis does look bad, maybe. But the rest look fine to me. Their early deaths were all tragic.
Sunday, January 05, 2014
"Because, who is perfect?"
"But the LORD said to Samuel, 'Do not consider his appearance or his
height, for I have rejected him. The LORD does not look at the things
people look at. People look at the outward appearance, but the LORD
looks at the heart.'" (1 Samuel 6:7)
To watch the sense of being affirmed seen in the people featured in this video, despite how the world might view them, is so moving.
Thank you, Tyler Burkum for sharing this!
To watch the sense of being affirmed seen in the people featured in this video, despite how the world might view them, is so moving.
Thank you, Tyler Burkum for sharing this!
Song for Epiphany #1
This wonderful song by Randy Stonehill, a pioneer of Christian contemporary music who is still going strong, is from his Equator LP, released in 1983. The whole album still stands up remarkably well. Jesus is the Light of the world!
The Light of the World!
[This was the prepared for sermon for worship this morning with the people and friends of Living Water Lutheran Church in Springboro, Ohio.]
Matthew 2:1-12
To begin this morning, I ask you to turn to Isaiah 49:5-6 (page 508 in the pew Bibles). We're told:
And in verse 6, Messiah, the Anointed King Who God promised would come to set things right in Israel--bringing people back to the right worship of God, granting forgiveness to those who repent and trust in Him alone--quotes God the Father.
Here, God the Father tells God the Son, the Messiah, in effect, “It’s much too small a project for You to usher in the Kingdom of heaven for the descendants of Abraham. I want every human being on the planet to have the opportunity for salvation from sin and death. All people. You will bring light into a world darkened by sin and death!”
On the first Christmas, Jesus came into the world to be a light to all nations.
The passionate desire of God for relationship with people isn’t confined to one ethnic group, race, or nation.
He wants to give all people the light they need to first, see their sins and vulnerabilities--and therefore see their need of God’s offered hand of forgiveness--and second, He wants to give all people the ability to see Jesus Christ as their hope for lives made eternally new by God Himself.
God doesn’t force the Light of the world on us. The spiritually blind will only be given sight if they want the Messiah.
But He shines still today in the witness of Scripture, in the Sacraments, in the fellowship and service of the Church, in the witness of Christians who prepare themselves always to account for the hope that Jesus the Messiah has given them.
Please turn to John 1:9-13 (page 739). Here, John writes about the Messiah after Jesus’ death and resurrection, at least seven hundred years after the prophecy from Isaiah we just read.
John writes: “The true light that gives light to every man was coming into the world. He was in the world, and though the world was made through him, the world did not recognize him. He came to that which was his own, but his own did not receive him. Yet to all who received him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God--children born not of natural descent, nor of human decision or a husband's will, but born of God.”
Jesus, the Light of the world, scours the nations not just to show us our sins, but also to enlighten the hearts and minds of every person to know that...
They can be filled by the Messiah Jesus.
That’s what the New Testament is talking about when it says that all people can be saved by grace through faith in Jesus Christ alone. (See here, here, and here, among other places.)
We see God’s passionate desire to draw all people to Himself through Christ in today’s Gospel lesson, Matthew 2:1-10 (page 668). Please turn to it now.
This lesson records the event we call the Epiphany, from the Greek word epiphaneo, which means to shine upon. On the first Epiphany, a bright star led men called Magi, often called wise men, to the Light of the world, the Messiah.
And throughout this season of the Church Year called Epiphany, we will read Gospel lessons in which people had epiphanies, aha moments when someone recognized that when they came into the presence of Jesus, they were doing much more than meeting a man. They were in the presence of God in the flesh!
To our lesson, now. Verses 1 and 2: “After Jesus was born in Bethlehem in Judea, during the time of King Herod, Magi from the east came to Jerusalem and asked, ‘Where is the one who has been born king of the Jews? We saw his star in the east and have come to worship him.’"
The Magi were practitioners of both astronomy, a useful science, and astrology, quackery that believes the stars control the destinies of human beings.
You wouldn’t expect these guys to be among the first people to care about or seek out Jesus.
In Deuteronomy 18:10-11, God forbids relying on superstitions or mediums of any kind. Such practices are called abominations because they're expressions of the human desire to "be like God." Superstitions like astrology appeal to our human impulse to be control freaks, to take control for ourselves instead of submitting to the will and control of the Creator of the universe.
So, the Magis weren’t believers in God. Whatever knowledge they may have had of Hebrew Scripture would have merely been the result of human curiosity, not faith.
And they were also foreigners, Gentiles likely from Persia, modern day Iran.
Yet, when the Messiah was born into the world, God, in His sovereignty, chose to reveal the birth to the Magi through the very stars they superstitiously followed.
Folks, the Light of the world can use any means He chooses to invite people to worship Him, to lead us to grace and new life in His Name, to pull us to His Word of truth.
And the Light of the world wants to call even the most notorious sinners, people good Christians might think are hopelessly separated from God, into a relationship with Him.
In God's eyes, there are no hopeless cases! As long as human beings draw breath on this planet, there is a chance they can come to know Jesus and His grace and forgiveness and be saved from sin and death. That's why the mission of Christ's Church is critically important!
Verses 3 and 4: “When King Herod heard [the Magi’s belief that Messiah had been born] he was disturbed, and all Jerusalem with him. When he had called together all the people's chief priests and teachers of the law [Herod had to get all his key advisors together in the Situation Room to face this crisis], he asked them where the Christ was to be born.”
Herod himself wasn’t Jewish and he wasn’t a descendant of David, which Israel’s kings were supposed to be.
He had been given his throne by the Romans.
In the later years of his life--and Jesus was born sometime not too long before Herod’s death--the paranoid Herod killed off potential rivals.
The news of a newborn King of the Jews disturbed him.
But Matthew says Jerusalem was in an uproar too, people in their pious religious moments would have insisted that they were pining for the coming of the Messiah who would bring God's kingdom to people in need of Him.
Why? Maybe because sometimes God gets too close for comfort. We resist Him.
I shared my faith in Christ with a friend once. Nothing pushy. “That’s fine for you, Mark,” he told me. “But I really don’t need God right now.”
Another guy told me his plan: He would wait to let Christ into his life until he was on his deathbed. Until then, he intended to do without Him. Guess no one ever told him, death isn’t always that tidy or predictable.
Neither are all the other unplanned events where we need the God of the universe and Redeemer of our souls by our sides!
But, isn’t ironic that the Magi were more excited about the birth of the King of the Jews than “Jerusalem,” by which I think Matthew meant official Jerusalem, was.
They were comfortable with their perks and power and ease.
They didn’t want the Messiah messing things up.
This should remind us to never get too comfortable with the things of this world. If we’re not careful they can become so important to us that we gain the world but lose our souls!
In verses 5 and 6, the scribes and chief teachers of God’s Law cited Old Testament passages--Micah 5:2 and 2 Samuel 5:2--to show that the Messiah was to be born in Bethlehem, the hometown of Israel’s greatest king, David.
Verses 7 and 8: “Then Herod called the Magi secretly and found out from them the exact time the star had appeared. He sent them to Bethlehem and said, ‘Go and make a careful search for the child. As soon as you find him, report to me, so that I too may go and worship him.’"
The Magi followed the star to the house where Jesus lived with Mary and Joseph in Bethlehem. Matthew says the Magi “were overjoyed.”
Do you remember how it felt when you first realized that the God of the universe loved you, then died for you and rose for you, so that you could turn from the death and sin of this world and receive life with God as a free gift?
Maybe it wasn’t a realization that came upon you all at once.
And hopefully, it’s a realization that hits you at deeper and deeper levels as you grow and mature in your relationship with Christ.
But this must have been something of what the Magi felt at that moment.
God’s unseen hand, His Holy Spirit, had used the star to lead them to the Child and they reacted as we do when we realize for the first time or once again the depths of God’s commitment to us despite our faults and sins.
Verse 11: “On coming to the house, they saw the child with his mother Mary, and they bowed down and worshiped him. Then they opened their treasures and presented him with gifts of gold and of incense and of myrrh.”
The gifts they brought were ones commonly brought to kings. But what strikes me is that they bowed down and worshiped Jesus.
The Magi, never identified by Matthew as kings, were nonetheless, as their gifts attest, wealthy men. They were important in their society. They might well have seen themselves as important people deigning to give their approval to Jesus, in effect legitimizing Him by their gifts.
Sometimes, you know, we can get caught up in thinking what wonderful people we are and how lucky God is to have us on His side. If thoughts anything like that ever cross our minds, we should look at the Magi.
The word translated as worship here is in the Greek in which Matthew wrote, proskuneo. It can be translated as give homage or honor, like you might give to a queen or a president. We stand when presidents enter the room because they represent the sovereignty of our nation. People bow to royalty for the same reason. The Magi may have simply been acknowledging their belief that this Child, living in the home of an impoverished couple, was, despite all appearances, a king.
But virtually every time Matthew uses this word, proskuneo, he means more than simply paying honor. It’s almost always the gesture of people who realize that when they come into the presence of Jesus, they come into the presence of God. They worship Jesus.
This, of course, is precisely the claim Jesus makes for Himself.
“I and the Father are one,” Jesus says in John 10:30.
And in John 14:6-7, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through Me. If you really know Me, you will know My Father as well. From now on, you do know Him and have seen Him.”
That must have been what the Magi saw when they looked at the Child with awe and gratitude.
Two things I hope you and I will take away from Epiphany Day, 2014:
One, God’s love knows no bounds. God wants all people to know Jesus, the Light of the world.
And two, God wants to use you and me to extend His invitation to others, not to come to Church, but to know Jesus.
In 2014, may we learn to know Jesus better and learn to rely on the Holy Spirit more, so that when we have the chance, like the star, to lead others to the Light that darkness could not snuff out, we will be ready.
As we begin this new year, let’s make it our common prayer to seek God’s help in growing not as church members, but as disciples of Jesus Christ, so that call all who don’t yet know the Messiah or the life God gives in His Name to join us in following Him.
Listen: The brightest light that shone on the first Epiphany wasn’t in the sky; it was on the earth beneath, where “the Word made flesh” brought the way of salvation to all peoples!
God be praised!
Matthew 2:1-12
To begin this morning, I ask you to turn to Isaiah 49:5-6 (page 508 in the pew Bibles). We're told:
“And now the LORD says-- he who formed me in the womb to be his servant to bring Jacob back to him and gather Israel to himself, for I am honored in the eyes of the LORD and my God has been my strength--he says: ‘It is too small a thing for you to be my servant to restore the tribes of Jacob and bring back those of Israel I have kept. I will also make you a light for the Gentiles, that you may bring my salvation to the ends of the earth.’"The speaker in this passage of prophecy written many hundreds of years before the birth of Jesus, has often been believed by Christians to be the Messiah, the Christ, revealed later to be Jesus.
And in verse 6, Messiah, the Anointed King Who God promised would come to set things right in Israel--bringing people back to the right worship of God, granting forgiveness to those who repent and trust in Him alone--quotes God the Father.
Here, God the Father tells God the Son, the Messiah, in effect, “It’s much too small a project for You to usher in the Kingdom of heaven for the descendants of Abraham. I want every human being on the planet to have the opportunity for salvation from sin and death. All people. You will bring light into a world darkened by sin and death!”
On the first Christmas, Jesus came into the world to be a light to all nations.
The passionate desire of God for relationship with people isn’t confined to one ethnic group, race, or nation.
He wants to give all people the light they need to first, see their sins and vulnerabilities--and therefore see their need of God’s offered hand of forgiveness--and second, He wants to give all people the ability to see Jesus Christ as their hope for lives made eternally new by God Himself.
God doesn’t force the Light of the world on us. The spiritually blind will only be given sight if they want the Messiah.
But He shines still today in the witness of Scripture, in the Sacraments, in the fellowship and service of the Church, in the witness of Christians who prepare themselves always to account for the hope that Jesus the Messiah has given them.
Please turn to John 1:9-13 (page 739). Here, John writes about the Messiah after Jesus’ death and resurrection, at least seven hundred years after the prophecy from Isaiah we just read.
John writes: “The true light that gives light to every man was coming into the world. He was in the world, and though the world was made through him, the world did not recognize him. He came to that which was his own, but his own did not receive him. Yet to all who received him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God--children born not of natural descent, nor of human decision or a husband's will, but born of God.”
Jesus, the Light of the world, scours the nations not just to show us our sins, but also to enlighten the hearts and minds of every person to know that...
- those holes in our hearts with which we all are born,
- that gnawing need for meaning and significance,
- that canyon of separation between God and us
They can be filled by the Messiah Jesus.
That’s what the New Testament is talking about when it says that all people can be saved by grace through faith in Jesus Christ alone. (See here, here, and here, among other places.)
We see God’s passionate desire to draw all people to Himself through Christ in today’s Gospel lesson, Matthew 2:1-10 (page 668). Please turn to it now.
This lesson records the event we call the Epiphany, from the Greek word epiphaneo, which means to shine upon. On the first Epiphany, a bright star led men called Magi, often called wise men, to the Light of the world, the Messiah.
And throughout this season of the Church Year called Epiphany, we will read Gospel lessons in which people had epiphanies, aha moments when someone recognized that when they came into the presence of Jesus, they were doing much more than meeting a man. They were in the presence of God in the flesh!
To our lesson, now. Verses 1 and 2: “After Jesus was born in Bethlehem in Judea, during the time of King Herod, Magi from the east came to Jerusalem and asked, ‘Where is the one who has been born king of the Jews? We saw his star in the east and have come to worship him.’"
The Magi were practitioners of both astronomy, a useful science, and astrology, quackery that believes the stars control the destinies of human beings.
You wouldn’t expect these guys to be among the first people to care about or seek out Jesus.
In Deuteronomy 18:10-11, God forbids relying on superstitions or mediums of any kind. Such practices are called abominations because they're expressions of the human desire to "be like God." Superstitions like astrology appeal to our human impulse to be control freaks, to take control for ourselves instead of submitting to the will and control of the Creator of the universe.
So, the Magis weren’t believers in God. Whatever knowledge they may have had of Hebrew Scripture would have merely been the result of human curiosity, not faith.
And they were also foreigners, Gentiles likely from Persia, modern day Iran.
Yet, when the Messiah was born into the world, God, in His sovereignty, chose to reveal the birth to the Magi through the very stars they superstitiously followed.
Folks, the Light of the world can use any means He chooses to invite people to worship Him, to lead us to grace and new life in His Name, to pull us to His Word of truth.
And the Light of the world wants to call even the most notorious sinners, people good Christians might think are hopelessly separated from God, into a relationship with Him.
In God's eyes, there are no hopeless cases! As long as human beings draw breath on this planet, there is a chance they can come to know Jesus and His grace and forgiveness and be saved from sin and death. That's why the mission of Christ's Church is critically important!
Verses 3 and 4: “When King Herod heard [the Magi’s belief that Messiah had been born] he was disturbed, and all Jerusalem with him. When he had called together all the people's chief priests and teachers of the law [Herod had to get all his key advisors together in the Situation Room to face this crisis], he asked them where the Christ was to be born.”
Herod himself wasn’t Jewish and he wasn’t a descendant of David, which Israel’s kings were supposed to be.
He had been given his throne by the Romans.
In the later years of his life--and Jesus was born sometime not too long before Herod’s death--the paranoid Herod killed off potential rivals.
The news of a newborn King of the Jews disturbed him.
But Matthew says Jerusalem was in an uproar too, people in their pious religious moments would have insisted that they were pining for the coming of the Messiah who would bring God's kingdom to people in need of Him.
Why? Maybe because sometimes God gets too close for comfort. We resist Him.
I shared my faith in Christ with a friend once. Nothing pushy. “That’s fine for you, Mark,” he told me. “But I really don’t need God right now.”
Another guy told me his plan: He would wait to let Christ into his life until he was on his deathbed. Until then, he intended to do without Him. Guess no one ever told him, death isn’t always that tidy or predictable.
Neither are all the other unplanned events where we need the God of the universe and Redeemer of our souls by our sides!
But, isn’t ironic that the Magi were more excited about the birth of the King of the Jews than “Jerusalem,” by which I think Matthew meant official Jerusalem, was.
They were comfortable with their perks and power and ease.
They didn’t want the Messiah messing things up.
This should remind us to never get too comfortable with the things of this world. If we’re not careful they can become so important to us that we gain the world but lose our souls!
In verses 5 and 6, the scribes and chief teachers of God’s Law cited Old Testament passages--Micah 5:2 and 2 Samuel 5:2--to show that the Messiah was to be born in Bethlehem, the hometown of Israel’s greatest king, David.
Verses 7 and 8: “Then Herod called the Magi secretly and found out from them the exact time the star had appeared. He sent them to Bethlehem and said, ‘Go and make a careful search for the child. As soon as you find him, report to me, so that I too may go and worship him.’"
The Magi followed the star to the house where Jesus lived with Mary and Joseph in Bethlehem. Matthew says the Magi “were overjoyed.”
Do you remember how it felt when you first realized that the God of the universe loved you, then died for you and rose for you, so that you could turn from the death and sin of this world and receive life with God as a free gift?
Maybe it wasn’t a realization that came upon you all at once.
And hopefully, it’s a realization that hits you at deeper and deeper levels as you grow and mature in your relationship with Christ.
But this must have been something of what the Magi felt at that moment.
God’s unseen hand, His Holy Spirit, had used the star to lead them to the Child and they reacted as we do when we realize for the first time or once again the depths of God’s commitment to us despite our faults and sins.
Verse 11: “On coming to the house, they saw the child with his mother Mary, and they bowed down and worshiped him. Then they opened their treasures and presented him with gifts of gold and of incense and of myrrh.”
The gifts they brought were ones commonly brought to kings. But what strikes me is that they bowed down and worshiped Jesus.
The Magi, never identified by Matthew as kings, were nonetheless, as their gifts attest, wealthy men. They were important in their society. They might well have seen themselves as important people deigning to give their approval to Jesus, in effect legitimizing Him by their gifts.
Sometimes, you know, we can get caught up in thinking what wonderful people we are and how lucky God is to have us on His side. If thoughts anything like that ever cross our minds, we should look at the Magi.
The word translated as worship here is in the Greek in which Matthew wrote, proskuneo. It can be translated as give homage or honor, like you might give to a queen or a president. We stand when presidents enter the room because they represent the sovereignty of our nation. People bow to royalty for the same reason. The Magi may have simply been acknowledging their belief that this Child, living in the home of an impoverished couple, was, despite all appearances, a king.
But virtually every time Matthew uses this word, proskuneo, he means more than simply paying honor. It’s almost always the gesture of people who realize that when they come into the presence of Jesus, they come into the presence of God. They worship Jesus.
This, of course, is precisely the claim Jesus makes for Himself.
“I and the Father are one,” Jesus says in John 10:30.
And in John 14:6-7, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through Me. If you really know Me, you will know My Father as well. From now on, you do know Him and have seen Him.”
That must have been what the Magi saw when they looked at the Child with awe and gratitude.
Two things I hope you and I will take away from Epiphany Day, 2014:
One, God’s love knows no bounds. God wants all people to know Jesus, the Light of the world.
And two, God wants to use you and me to extend His invitation to others, not to come to Church, but to know Jesus.
In 2014, may we learn to know Jesus better and learn to rely on the Holy Spirit more, so that when we have the chance, like the star, to lead others to the Light that darkness could not snuff out, we will be ready.
As we begin this new year, let’s make it our common prayer to seek God’s help in growing not as church members, but as disciples of Jesus Christ, so that call all who don’t yet know the Messiah or the life God gives in His Name to join us in following Him.
Listen: The brightest light that shone on the first Epiphany wasn’t in the sky; it was on the earth beneath, where “the Word made flesh” brought the way of salvation to all peoples!
God be praised!
Friday, January 03, 2014
Wednesday, January 01, 2014
Songs for the New Year #14
"When you don't get what you deserve, that's a real good thing. When you get what you don't deserve, that's a real good thing."
Great lyrics by Steve Taylor on this track by the old Newsboys.
Great lyrics by Steve Taylor on this track by the old Newsboys.
Songs for the New Year #12
The theology is suspicious, to say the least. But when I die, I'd like people to have memories of jokes and songs, too, among other things.
Songs for the New Year #10
This one by Dylan is, I'm certain, with others I know, also about Christ, at least partly.
Songs for the New Year #8
This is the ballgame, folks. We are saved from sin, death, and futility by God's grace (His charity) through faith in Jesus Christ alone. Wow, is that a relief!
Songs for the New Year #7
This is the final movement of Paul McCartney's Standing Stone. It almost always brings me to tears for the sheer beauty of it!
Songs for the New Year #4
OK, despite my protestations to the contrary, I'm a sucker for romance. And this romantic ballad, written by a master of that genre (as well as many others) is a classic.
Tuesday, December 31, 2013
AUDIO: The Genesis of Hope
Here. Don't be daunted by how long the site says the sermon goes. It's actually less than half as long as that. It was shared during worship with the people and friends of Living Water Lutheran Church in Springboro, Ohio on December 22. Hope you find it helpful.
Sunday, December 29, 2013
The Threatening Baby
[This was the message prepared for worship with the people and friends of Living Water Lutheran Church in Springboro, Ohio, this morning. It's a revised version of a sermon I preached several years ago. Turns out, I didn't preach this sermon at all, but, with a lot of prayer, did something completely different. I'll post a link to the audio of the actual sermon soon.]
Matthew 2:13-23
Christmas was just four days ago. Yet our Gospel lesson for this morning fast forwards us to events that happened two years and more after the birth of Jesus, skipping over the events that will be recounted in next Sunday’s Gospel lesson. In spite of the confusion that it might cause us though, I think it’s good for us to come to this lesson immediately following Christmas day. Through the centuries, our Christmas celebrations have been loaded down with what can be described as sentimental lies. Jesus, when acknowledged at all in most contemporary celebrations, is turned into a harmless little baby.
But Jesus was not and is not harmless. Herod knew that. The wise men did too. They knew what we must know: Christmas is God storming the beaches of our resistant lives and wills in order to liberate for all eternity those who believe in Him.
In the name of the same freedom the serpent told Eve she would have if she disobeyed God, a freedom that ends in slavery to sin and death and futility, we willingly buckle under the authority of an evil, morally compromising world. At Christmas, God entered our world to destroy the power of sin and death over us. Christmas is God coming to overthrow the illegitimate occupier of power in our world, the devil himself. Christmas is a just God come to overturn the tables of extortionists, to strip the selfish of their power, to put the violent and unjust in their places, and to bring life to those who, contrary to what the world tells us to do, repent for our sin and surrender our whole lives only to Him.
The bottom line is that the sweet baby Jesus is a threat to the standard operating procedures of the world, even of our own standard operating procedures. In the New Testament book of Acts, it was said of the first Christians that they had turned the world upside down. Filled with faith in Christ and with God's Holy Spirit, they were empowered by God to continue the mission of Jesus, each believer in Jesus a representative of the kingdom that destroys all the powers of this world. Jesus Himself was such a threat to the king of Judea, that, to protect Jesus, God sent Him and His earthly parents to Egypt for safe-keeping.
Keep in mind the threat that Jesus represents to all the selfishness and injustice that exists in our world as we delve into today’s Gospel lesson. Please look at Matthew 2:13-14, at the beginning of the lesson (page 676 in the pew Bibles):
Herod and the leaders of Judaism and the emissaries of the Roman Empire a generation later acted out of fear. Jesus threatened them. Even today, people who resist Christ’s lordship are afraid of Him, afraid to admit their need of Him. Jesus is a threat to all who delude themselves with the idea that we human beings are self-sufficient and don’t need a Savior. A woman in one of my former parishes told me that she got angry with people who dismissed her faith in Christ as “a crutch.” Her anger wasn’t born of a belief in her ability to conquer any mountain in life. “Of course Christ is a crutch,” she said, “I need a crutch. That’s why I’m a Christian!” Jesus Christ, Who bore the weight of all our sin on the cross and then rose again to life, is the only crutch we can find that won’t buckle under the pressure of all our personal sins, our stresses, our difficulties, our daily challenges. Salvation belongs to those willing to admit their helpless need of the Savior Who died and rose for helpless people just like you and me!
Notice a second thing in these first verses of our lesson, something we see throughout the passage: Joseph did not hesitate. As soon as he was told to take the child and his mother to Egypt, he did so. He apparently took action on the very night he had his dream. If I had been Joseph, I might have hesitated. I might even have simply ditched Jesus and Mary. After all, Joseph had no genetic connection to Jesus. Joseph could have turned Jesus and Mary over to the authorities and maybe lived a comfortable life in the employ of Herod and his descendants. He certainly could have spared himself the grief of being connected with a baby who was already a fugitive.
But Joseph opted to share the danger that the toddler Jesus faced. Joseph chose to obey God…immediately! Faith that doesn’t result in a genuine desire for obedience to God, to the extent that you and I are able to understand God’s will and obey, isn’t faith; it’s just an idea. We are all sinners who fall short of the glory of God. And, it’s been my experience that nobody wrestles more with God over what’s right and wrong for them in their lives than the person who truly seeks to follow Jesus Christ. But wherever the call of the God we know in Jesus, sends us, that’s where believers in Jesus seek to go. That’s what faith does.
Fast-forward to the last verses of our lesson, verses 19 to 23. Herod has died and Joseph, once again, is told in a dream to head out, this time away from Egypt and now, to Nazareth. Like ancient Israel, called out of Egypt, to the promised land, the young Jesus travels to the promised land. This may have been the hardest of all the orders Joseph received from God. By the time Joseph received it, he and his fledgling family had put roots down in Egypt. Anyone who has ever worked for a large corporation, been in the military, been in ministry, or grabbed a new opportunity in a different community, will know how hard it is for a young family to move to new places. The reasons for staying always seem to outweigh the reasons for leaving.
But Joseph took his family to Galilee immediately. The thought of keeping the life to which he’d grown accustomed seems never to have crossed his mind. Joseph is an example of faith for us. To follow Christ means, ultimately, to heed God’s call, even when we don’t understand it.
And that brings us back to this: Christmas reminds us that Jesus and those who dare to follow Him are threats to this world. When you understand that Jesus is the way, and the truth, and the life, the only means of being reconciled to the only One Who can give us life, all other ways, all other supposed truths, and every other way of life must be abandoned. This is hard; but, God has revealed, following Jesus is the only way to truly live.
When I was a senior in high school, I asked a girl out on a date. She said, “Yes,” but later backed out. I was baffled. (I mean, I was real charmer back then.) During the rest of the school year, she would speak to me, but in little more than grunts. When our yearbooks were delivered, I boldly asked her to sign mine. “You really are a nice guy,” she wrote. “But you have to quit worrying about what other people think of you.” It took me years to figure out what she meant. And it took Jesus to begin to liberate me from the tyranny of other people’s opinions.
If Joseph had worried about the opinions of others--even when the opinions were held by a ruthless king, he wouldn’t have played the part God had in mind for his life. He wouldn’t have fulfilled his God-given destiny. And later, had Jesus worried about what others were going to do with them to the point of avoiding the cross, we would have no hope for God’s presence and help in this life or for His promise of life with God and His saints in eternity.
There is only one person Whose opinion of you and me matters, and that’s the God we know in Jesus Christ. He has expressed His opinion of us in the suffering, blood, and cross of Jesus. In the cross, God says that He will take the rap for our sins if we will confess them and repudiate them. He will subsume death into His being so that He can cover us with the power of His resurrection, life anew here and now, life eternal and perfect in the world to come!
This Christmas, let Jesus storm the beaches of your will and heart. Let Him assault and destroy the sin in you through a life style of daily repentance and renewal in His Name. Let Jesus be your highest priority, your deepest desire. None of that is likely to win you a popularity contest. And letting Jesus be first in our lives won’t earn us places of comfort and ease. But surrendering all to Jesus will allow us to be ushered into the presence of the One Who tells all who grow weary of the rat mazes of a sinful world, “Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest.”
May we hear that call from Christ above all the sinful din of the world and of our own souls, and living in faithful obedience to Him, know life, abundant, brimming over with grace and the joy of fellowship with God. Amen
Matthew 2:13-23
Christmas was just four days ago. Yet our Gospel lesson for this morning fast forwards us to events that happened two years and more after the birth of Jesus, skipping over the events that will be recounted in next Sunday’s Gospel lesson. In spite of the confusion that it might cause us though, I think it’s good for us to come to this lesson immediately following Christmas day. Through the centuries, our Christmas celebrations have been loaded down with what can be described as sentimental lies. Jesus, when acknowledged at all in most contemporary celebrations, is turned into a harmless little baby.
But Jesus was not and is not harmless. Herod knew that. The wise men did too. They knew what we must know: Christmas is God storming the beaches of our resistant lives and wills in order to liberate for all eternity those who believe in Him.
In the name of the same freedom the serpent told Eve she would have if she disobeyed God, a freedom that ends in slavery to sin and death and futility, we willingly buckle under the authority of an evil, morally compromising world. At Christmas, God entered our world to destroy the power of sin and death over us. Christmas is God coming to overthrow the illegitimate occupier of power in our world, the devil himself. Christmas is a just God come to overturn the tables of extortionists, to strip the selfish of their power, to put the violent and unjust in their places, and to bring life to those who, contrary to what the world tells us to do, repent for our sin and surrender our whole lives only to Him.
The bottom line is that the sweet baby Jesus is a threat to the standard operating procedures of the world, even of our own standard operating procedures. In the New Testament book of Acts, it was said of the first Christians that they had turned the world upside down. Filled with faith in Christ and with God's Holy Spirit, they were empowered by God to continue the mission of Jesus, each believer in Jesus a representative of the kingdom that destroys all the powers of this world. Jesus Himself was such a threat to the king of Judea, that, to protect Jesus, God sent Him and His earthly parents to Egypt for safe-keeping.
Keep in mind the threat that Jesus represents to all the selfishness and injustice that exists in our world as we delve into today’s Gospel lesson. Please look at Matthew 2:13-14, at the beginning of the lesson (page 676 in the pew Bibles):
When they had gone, an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream. "Get up," he said, "take the child and his mother and escape to Egypt. Stay there until I tell you, for Herod is going to search for the child to kill him." So he got up, took the child and his mother during the night and left for Egypt, where he stayed until the death of Herod...There are several things worth noticing in these verses. First: Herod, in the Greek in which Matthew wrote his gospel, we’re told that Herod wanted to “destroy” the child. The verb in the original Greek, apollumi, is part of the same verb family used much later in Matthew’s gospel to describe what the religious leaders in Jerusalem conspired to do to Jesus. They wanted to destroy Jesus, just as Herod does in today’s lesson. Our text shows us that Herod’s attempt to destroy Jesus was unsuccessful: Jesus disappeared from Judea for a time and reappeared later. The same thing really would happen with His crucifixion. The Jewish and Roman leaders thought that they got rid of Jesus when they killed Him on the cross. But He reappeared on the first Easter Sunday. Listen: When all hope seems lost, even when death claims the follower of Christ, that isn’t the end of the story. We belong to a God Who brings the exiles and the victims of sin and death back to life!
Herod and the leaders of Judaism and the emissaries of the Roman Empire a generation later acted out of fear. Jesus threatened them. Even today, people who resist Christ’s lordship are afraid of Him, afraid to admit their need of Him. Jesus is a threat to all who delude themselves with the idea that we human beings are self-sufficient and don’t need a Savior. A woman in one of my former parishes told me that she got angry with people who dismissed her faith in Christ as “a crutch.” Her anger wasn’t born of a belief in her ability to conquer any mountain in life. “Of course Christ is a crutch,” she said, “I need a crutch. That’s why I’m a Christian!” Jesus Christ, Who bore the weight of all our sin on the cross and then rose again to life, is the only crutch we can find that won’t buckle under the pressure of all our personal sins, our stresses, our difficulties, our daily challenges. Salvation belongs to those willing to admit their helpless need of the Savior Who died and rose for helpless people just like you and me!
Notice a second thing in these first verses of our lesson, something we see throughout the passage: Joseph did not hesitate. As soon as he was told to take the child and his mother to Egypt, he did so. He apparently took action on the very night he had his dream. If I had been Joseph, I might have hesitated. I might even have simply ditched Jesus and Mary. After all, Joseph had no genetic connection to Jesus. Joseph could have turned Jesus and Mary over to the authorities and maybe lived a comfortable life in the employ of Herod and his descendants. He certainly could have spared himself the grief of being connected with a baby who was already a fugitive.
But Joseph opted to share the danger that the toddler Jesus faced. Joseph chose to obey God…immediately! Faith that doesn’t result in a genuine desire for obedience to God, to the extent that you and I are able to understand God’s will and obey, isn’t faith; it’s just an idea. We are all sinners who fall short of the glory of God. And, it’s been my experience that nobody wrestles more with God over what’s right and wrong for them in their lives than the person who truly seeks to follow Jesus Christ. But wherever the call of the God we know in Jesus, sends us, that’s where believers in Jesus seek to go. That’s what faith does.
Fast-forward to the last verses of our lesson, verses 19 to 23. Herod has died and Joseph, once again, is told in a dream to head out, this time away from Egypt and now, to Nazareth. Like ancient Israel, called out of Egypt, to the promised land, the young Jesus travels to the promised land. This may have been the hardest of all the orders Joseph received from God. By the time Joseph received it, he and his fledgling family had put roots down in Egypt. Anyone who has ever worked for a large corporation, been in the military, been in ministry, or grabbed a new opportunity in a different community, will know how hard it is for a young family to move to new places. The reasons for staying always seem to outweigh the reasons for leaving.
But Joseph took his family to Galilee immediately. The thought of keeping the life to which he’d grown accustomed seems never to have crossed his mind. Joseph is an example of faith for us. To follow Christ means, ultimately, to heed God’s call, even when we don’t understand it.
And that brings us back to this: Christmas reminds us that Jesus and those who dare to follow Him are threats to this world. When you understand that Jesus is the way, and the truth, and the life, the only means of being reconciled to the only One Who can give us life, all other ways, all other supposed truths, and every other way of life must be abandoned. This is hard; but, God has revealed, following Jesus is the only way to truly live.
When I was a senior in high school, I asked a girl out on a date. She said, “Yes,” but later backed out. I was baffled. (I mean, I was real charmer back then.) During the rest of the school year, she would speak to me, but in little more than grunts. When our yearbooks were delivered, I boldly asked her to sign mine. “You really are a nice guy,” she wrote. “But you have to quit worrying about what other people think of you.” It took me years to figure out what she meant. And it took Jesus to begin to liberate me from the tyranny of other people’s opinions.
If Joseph had worried about the opinions of others--even when the opinions were held by a ruthless king, he wouldn’t have played the part God had in mind for his life. He wouldn’t have fulfilled his God-given destiny. And later, had Jesus worried about what others were going to do with them to the point of avoiding the cross, we would have no hope for God’s presence and help in this life or for His promise of life with God and His saints in eternity.
There is only one person Whose opinion of you and me matters, and that’s the God we know in Jesus Christ. He has expressed His opinion of us in the suffering, blood, and cross of Jesus. In the cross, God says that He will take the rap for our sins if we will confess them and repudiate them. He will subsume death into His being so that He can cover us with the power of His resurrection, life anew here and now, life eternal and perfect in the world to come!
This Christmas, let Jesus storm the beaches of your will and heart. Let Him assault and destroy the sin in you through a life style of daily repentance and renewal in His Name. Let Jesus be your highest priority, your deepest desire. None of that is likely to win you a popularity contest. And letting Jesus be first in our lives won’t earn us places of comfort and ease. But surrendering all to Jesus will allow us to be ushered into the presence of the One Who tells all who grow weary of the rat mazes of a sinful world, “Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest.”
May we hear that call from Christ above all the sinful din of the world and of our own souls, and living in faithful obedience to Him, know life, abundant, brimming over with grace and the joy of fellowship with God. Amen
Tuesday, December 24, 2013
The Reason for Christmas
[This was shared during the second Christmas Eve worship service of Living Water Lutheran Church in Springboro, Ohio earlier this evening.]
Luke 2:1-7
It’s striking that in his Gospel, Luke takes just seven verses to describe the birth of Jesus! It's so spare that, if we’re not attentive, we may miss the powerful message his narrative conveys.
“In those days,” Luke writes, “Caesar Augustus issued a decree that a census should be taken of the entire Roman world. (This was the first census that took place while Quirinius was governor of Syria.)”
Caesar Augustus was the first Roman emperor. The adopted son of Julius Caesar, in 31 AD, about three decades before Jesus’ birth, he became the uncontested ruler of Rome after a long civil war. After taking power, he named himself emperor. He labeled his adopted father and himself the “son of god.”
It was claimed that through Augustus’ kingship, he had brought God’s justice and peace to the world. The many poems and songs written in honor of Augustus claimed that he was the savior and lord of the world. And in much of his empire, during and after a long reign, Augustus came to be worshiped as a god. Augustus, a ruthless and bloodthirsty man, did nothing to dissuade people from worshiping him or from making all these claims about him.
Employing the coercive powers by which all governments--whether good or bad--must operate, Caesar Augustus ordered a census of his empire, which included most of the lands around the Mediterranean Basin, north into Europe, and even what we today know as the United Kingdom.
Augustus was a powerful man and when he issued an edict, an entire empire hopped-to. The purpose of the census Augustus ordered was to generate tax money. It takes a lot of money to run an earthly empire.
Affected by this decree were two impoverished young people, betrothed to be married, who lived in the often forgotten Galileean countryside of Palestine.
“And everyone went to his own town to register. So Joseph also went up from the town of Nazareth in Galilee to Judea, to Bethlehem the town of David, because he belonged to the house and line of David. He went there to register with Mary, who was pledged to be married to him and was expecting a child. While they were there, the time came for the baby to be born, and she gave birth to her firstborn, a son. She wrapped him in cloths and placed him in a manger, because there was no room for them in the inn.”
Today, many scholars believe what Martin Luther preached in his Christmas sermons: That Joseph of Nazareth actually grew up in Bethlehem and moved to Nazareth in Galilee as a young man. Recent archeological finds indicate that there was a large migration of people from the Bethlehem countryside to the Galileean region. It’s possible that both Mary’s and Joseph’s families had migrated from Bethlehem to Nazareth, because both were descendants of David. Going to Bethlehem would have been required of Joseph because he still owned property there.
Augustus’ decree forced Joseph and Mary to go to Bethlehem. But, in fact, neither Augustus nor his empire were in control of events.
Nor were Mary or Joseph.
Decades later, as He stood trial before Pilate, the governor who oversaw Roman interests in Jesus’ homeland, Pilate asked Jesus why Jesus refused to answer Pilate’s questions. “Don’t you realize I have power either to free you or to crucify you?” Pilate asked Jesus. But Jesus answered: “You would have no power over Me if it were not given to you from above...”
Despite outward appearances, Joseph and Mary and the Child in Mary's womb went to Bethlehem not because that’s where Caesar Augustus, who had never heard and never would hear of Joseph or Mary or Jesus, wanted them to go, but because that’s where God wanted them to go.
Those with earthly power may misuse or abuse their power. They may be selfish. They may act unjustly. They may treat other human beings like chess pieces to be manipulated at will. But the Biblical witness is clear that over the long haul, God is in charge. As I've been telling Catechism students for years, "Either God gets His way or God gets His way." There are no other options.
Old Testament prophecies had made it clear that when God’s Anointed King--the Messiah, the Christ-- came into the world, His birth would take place in Bethlehem.
He would be born into a family descended from David. God intended to enter our world and be our Lord at precisely the moment and in precisely the place He chose.
He would do it in order to live the perfect life, become the perfect human sacrifice for sin, then rise from the death promising that all who repent and believe in Him will share His victory over sin and death and meaningless living.
A Caesar might be willing to die to take or keep earthly power. Augustus had killed a thousand times over.
But he never would have died to give forgiveness and eternal life to people who, like us, only deserve condemnation and death for our sin. Jesus is a different King and Lord.
Please pull out a pew Bible and look at Romans 5:6-8 (page 785). It says: “You see, at just the right time, when we were still powerless, Christ died for the ungodly. Very rarely will anyone die for a righteous man, though for a good man someone might possibly dare to die. But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.”
At the right time, the Savior Who was to die on a cross was born in a barn.
There’s a simple reason why God doesn’t bludgeon us into submission with showy displays that evoke “shock and awe” the way the Caesars of this world do.
A reason why God the Father sends God the Son, Who totally takes on human flesh, a baby who cries and needs His mother, Who suffers and bleeds and dies.
There’s a reason God claims subjects for His kingdom not by brute force, but by love, by the gentle wooing of the Holy Spirit Who empowers ordinary people like you and me to keep telling the story of our crucified and risen Savior.
There’s a reason why by God’s plan, we become His subjects not by establishing residence in a religious institution, not by performing a set of tasks that lead to earning citizenship in the kingdom of God, but solely and simply by grace through faith in Jesus Christ.
And the reason is simple: “God is love,” the New Testament teaches.
The Old Testament book of Genesis says that God made we human beings in His image.
God made us to love and to be loved by Him.
God made us for relationship with Him.
Sin has marred that relationship, separating us from God.
Jesus is the bridge back to God.
He is the manifestation of God’s love given on the cross.
The ultimate goal of a Caesar is to elicit obedience so that he can lord it over you.
The ultimate goal of Christ is to elicit faith and obedience so that He can set you free to live in a relationship of self-giving, fulfilling love with God and with others.
Jesus doesn’t want to judge you, though one day He will one day judge the living and the dead.
He wants to save you from your sin.
He wants to make us children of God.
There are lots of things that we do in the name of Christmas. But all that the God we meet in Jesus really wants us to do is repent and believe, turn from sin and trust in Him to guide us into life with God.
It's a life characterized by love, service, and selflessness.
It's a life of confidence that we are loved and approved by the only One Whose love and approval matters.This is the God Who came at Christmas.
The God Who demonstrates His power not by ordering people around as though they were worthless robots, but by becoming One of us so that, by His grace, we might be restored to Him again and forever.
Thank God He loves us and gives us Jesus.
May we take Him as God's great gift to us every day and learn to joyfully, voluntarily, without coercion, be loved by God and to love Him in return.
Merry Christmas! Amen
Luke 2:1-7
It’s striking that in his Gospel, Luke takes just seven verses to describe the birth of Jesus! It's so spare that, if we’re not attentive, we may miss the powerful message his narrative conveys.
“In those days,” Luke writes, “Caesar Augustus issued a decree that a census should be taken of the entire Roman world. (This was the first census that took place while Quirinius was governor of Syria.)”
Caesar Augustus was the first Roman emperor. The adopted son of Julius Caesar, in 31 AD, about three decades before Jesus’ birth, he became the uncontested ruler of Rome after a long civil war. After taking power, he named himself emperor. He labeled his adopted father and himself the “son of god.”
It was claimed that through Augustus’ kingship, he had brought God’s justice and peace to the world. The many poems and songs written in honor of Augustus claimed that he was the savior and lord of the world. And in much of his empire, during and after a long reign, Augustus came to be worshiped as a god. Augustus, a ruthless and bloodthirsty man, did nothing to dissuade people from worshiping him or from making all these claims about him.
Employing the coercive powers by which all governments--whether good or bad--must operate, Caesar Augustus ordered a census of his empire, which included most of the lands around the Mediterranean Basin, north into Europe, and even what we today know as the United Kingdom.
Augustus was a powerful man and when he issued an edict, an entire empire hopped-to. The purpose of the census Augustus ordered was to generate tax money. It takes a lot of money to run an earthly empire.
Affected by this decree were two impoverished young people, betrothed to be married, who lived in the often forgotten Galileean countryside of Palestine.
“And everyone went to his own town to register. So Joseph also went up from the town of Nazareth in Galilee to Judea, to Bethlehem the town of David, because he belonged to the house and line of David. He went there to register with Mary, who was pledged to be married to him and was expecting a child. While they were there, the time came for the baby to be born, and she gave birth to her firstborn, a son. She wrapped him in cloths and placed him in a manger, because there was no room for them in the inn.”
Today, many scholars believe what Martin Luther preached in his Christmas sermons: That Joseph of Nazareth actually grew up in Bethlehem and moved to Nazareth in Galilee as a young man. Recent archeological finds indicate that there was a large migration of people from the Bethlehem countryside to the Galileean region. It’s possible that both Mary’s and Joseph’s families had migrated from Bethlehem to Nazareth, because both were descendants of David. Going to Bethlehem would have been required of Joseph because he still owned property there.
Augustus’ decree forced Joseph and Mary to go to Bethlehem. But, in fact, neither Augustus nor his empire were in control of events.
Nor were Mary or Joseph.
Decades later, as He stood trial before Pilate, the governor who oversaw Roman interests in Jesus’ homeland, Pilate asked Jesus why Jesus refused to answer Pilate’s questions. “Don’t you realize I have power either to free you or to crucify you?” Pilate asked Jesus. But Jesus answered: “You would have no power over Me if it were not given to you from above...”
Despite outward appearances, Joseph and Mary and the Child in Mary's womb went to Bethlehem not because that’s where Caesar Augustus, who had never heard and never would hear of Joseph or Mary or Jesus, wanted them to go, but because that’s where God wanted them to go.
Those with earthly power may misuse or abuse their power. They may be selfish. They may act unjustly. They may treat other human beings like chess pieces to be manipulated at will. But the Biblical witness is clear that over the long haul, God is in charge. As I've been telling Catechism students for years, "Either God gets His way or God gets His way." There are no other options.
Old Testament prophecies had made it clear that when God’s Anointed King--the Messiah, the Christ-- came into the world, His birth would take place in Bethlehem.
He would be born into a family descended from David. God intended to enter our world and be our Lord at precisely the moment and in precisely the place He chose.
He would do it in order to live the perfect life, become the perfect human sacrifice for sin, then rise from the death promising that all who repent and believe in Him will share His victory over sin and death and meaningless living.
A Caesar might be willing to die to take or keep earthly power. Augustus had killed a thousand times over.
But he never would have died to give forgiveness and eternal life to people who, like us, only deserve condemnation and death for our sin. Jesus is a different King and Lord.
Please pull out a pew Bible and look at Romans 5:6-8 (page 785). It says: “You see, at just the right time, when we were still powerless, Christ died for the ungodly. Very rarely will anyone die for a righteous man, though for a good man someone might possibly dare to die. But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.”
At the right time, the Savior Who was to die on a cross was born in a barn.
There’s a simple reason why God doesn’t bludgeon us into submission with showy displays that evoke “shock and awe” the way the Caesars of this world do.
A reason why God the Father sends God the Son, Who totally takes on human flesh, a baby who cries and needs His mother, Who suffers and bleeds and dies.
There’s a reason God claims subjects for His kingdom not by brute force, but by love, by the gentle wooing of the Holy Spirit Who empowers ordinary people like you and me to keep telling the story of our crucified and risen Savior.
There’s a reason why by God’s plan, we become His subjects not by establishing residence in a religious institution, not by performing a set of tasks that lead to earning citizenship in the kingdom of God, but solely and simply by grace through faith in Jesus Christ.
And the reason is simple: “God is love,” the New Testament teaches.
The Old Testament book of Genesis says that God made we human beings in His image.
God made us to love and to be loved by Him.
God made us for relationship with Him.
Sin has marred that relationship, separating us from God.
Jesus is the bridge back to God.
He is the manifestation of God’s love given on the cross.
The ultimate goal of a Caesar is to elicit obedience so that he can lord it over you.
The ultimate goal of Christ is to elicit faith and obedience so that He can set you free to live in a relationship of self-giving, fulfilling love with God and with others.
Jesus doesn’t want to judge you, though one day He will one day judge the living and the dead.
He wants to save you from your sin.
He wants to make us children of God.
There are lots of things that we do in the name of Christmas. But all that the God we meet in Jesus really wants us to do is repent and believe, turn from sin and trust in Him to guide us into life with God.
It's a life characterized by love, service, and selflessness.
It's a life of confidence that we are loved and approved by the only One Whose love and approval matters.This is the God Who came at Christmas.
The God Who demonstrates His power not by ordering people around as though they were worthless robots, but by becoming One of us so that, by His grace, we might be restored to Him again and forever.
Thank God He loves us and gives us Jesus.
May we take Him as God's great gift to us every day and learn to joyfully, voluntarily, without coercion, be loved by God and to love Him in return.
Merry Christmas! Amen
Monday, December 23, 2013
Still in Love with the Savior Who Isn't Always Easy to Get
During worship yesterday, I told the story of how, after a decade of being an atheist, my new faith in Jesus Christ made itself plain to me.
It happened while taking a class at my wife's home church. I was trying to understand this faith she and the people of the congregation of which she was a part, professed.
Uncharacteristically for someone who was a "just do enough" student, the God I was learning about in the course, Life with God, incited me to seek to learn more on my own. Because I wanted to try to understand more about how a person lived faith in the God revealed in Christ, the first book of the Bible I read was Acts, in the New Testament.
I read it in 1976, around the time I came to faith in Christ. The other day, I looked inside the resource book for Life with God and found these brief notes I made after reading Acts. (You can click on the image above is if you want to enlarge it.)
Thirty-seven years later, I still love Jesus. He sometimes baffles and confounds me. Often, I simply don't understand Him or His ways.
But I know that He loves me and blesses me with a passionate love I don't deserve and could never earn. He's my lifeline and my hope.
And more than ever, I want to have the courage to share Him and His gracious love with the world.
Here's a demo Rich Mullins recorded shortly before his death. The song is called Hard to Get and it's about Jesus.
Sunday, December 22, 2013
The Genesis of Hope
[This message was prepared to share during worship with the people and guests of Living Water Lutheran Church in Springboro, Ohio, this morning.]
Matthew 1:18-25
It’s not a new observation to say that the beginnings of things often explain a lot about their later development.
The fact that of the two Steves who started Apple, Steve Jobs, the marketer, was the dominant partner, explains you how a passion for creating new and expanding old markets nurtured a corporate culture in which technical people are still expected routinely to do things that can’t be done.
The fact that Living Water began with a commitment to reaching out in word and deed with the Good News of new life for all who believe in Jesus Christ, explains this congregation’s outreach culture.
Beginnings are important.
The ancient rabbis said that if you wanted to understand Biblical faith, you should master the book of Genesis, the book of beginnings.
In Jesus Christ, God has made a new beginning and God gives new beginnings to us every time we trust Christ with our sinful pasts, our each today, and our unknown futures!
That’s what Matthew conveys in chapter one of his Gospel, including the verses that make up today’s Gospel lesson.
Please turn to our Gospel lesson, Matthew 1:18-25 (page 675 in the pew Bibles). Verse 18 says: “This is how the birth of Jesus Christ came about...” A more literal translation from the Greek in which Matthew wrote would be, “This is how the genesis of Jesus Christ happened...”
Matthew is signaling a fresh start for the human race. In Jesus, a new Genesis is possible for us all!
The verse goes on: “His mother Mary was pledged to be married to Joseph, but before they came together, she was found to be with child through the Holy Spirit.”
The phrase “pledged to be married” hardly does justice to the state of Mary’s relationship with Joseph. They were betrothed. Betrothal was more than an engagement. During betrothal, the couple were considered married, although they were strictly forbidden from consummating their relationship until they publicly affirmed their commitment to one another before God and witnesses. If one of them had intimacy with someone else during betrothal, the act was considered adultery. The Old Testament book of Deuteronomy said that if a woman was guilty of adultery during this period, she should be stoned to death. By the first century AD, this law was rarely enforced.
But even then, the woman cut loose by her betrothed quietly didn’t have an easy lot in life, forever branded by her adultery.
Our lesson conveys an unambiguous message: Mary was a virgin.
She and Joseph had not come together, we're told.
And, the child conceived within her was from the Holy Spirit.
Later in the passage, we’re told that Mary and Joseph didn’t have marital relations until after Jesus was born.
Today, as has been the case since the first century, there are people who deny that Jesus could possibly have been born of a virgin.
It’s always seemed a bit presumptuous to me for human beings to claim that the God Who created every particle of this universe is incapable of doing something that doesn’t comport our usual experience. Jesus teaches that, “With God all things are possible.”
Still, some virgin birth deniers point out that other ancient religions told stories of their idol gods roaming the earth and having intimate relations with women, often resulting in the birth of a notable person. They say that the claim that Jesus was born of a virgin is similar.
But the witness of the New Testament about God the Father and about Jesus’ birth is very different from those mythical gods.
During His ministry, Jesus said that “God is spirit.” The God of the universe isn’t like the bawdy deities of mythology. He is Spirit, Who by His Word created matter, created human beings.
Just as the book of Genesis says that God’s Spirit moved over chaos and brought life into being, so now, as God prepares to gives us the chance for new life through Jesus Christ, His Spirit passes over a virgin’s womb and the Person the apostle Paul calls, “the second Adam,” is conceived.
If this is hard for us to accept--because it doesn’t fit with our everyday experiences, imagine the effect it had on Joseph!
Verse 19: “Because Joseph her husband was a righteous man and did not want to expose her to public disgrace, he had in mind to divorce her quietly.”
Hurt, Joseph decides he won’t lash out. But he won’t have a life with a woman he believes has been unfaithful to him. The verb translated as divorce here in the original Greek is apoluo, meaning basically, that Joseph would cut Mary loose.
Verse 20: “But after he had considered this, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream and said, ‘Joseph son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary home as your wife, because what is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit...’”
The Bible and centuries of believers affirm that God speaks to people in many ways. The God Who created the universe can use the universe in whatever way He wants to get our attention.
He spoke to Moses through a burning bush.
He spoke to Elijah in a still, small voice.
You know how God spoke to Balaam.
And sometimes, God gets the attention of His saints in dreams.
However we may sense God is speaking to us, the message and the messenger must conform to what God has revealed to us about Himself through His inspired Word, the Bible.
The Bible’s last book very sternly warns against adding or subtracting anything from the truths taught there, a statement that we can make about the whole of Scripture, because it’s God-breathed, a living Word.
The book of Hebrews says that, “The word of God is alive and active. Sharper than any double-edged sword, it penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit, joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and attitudes of the heart.”
In this light, one of the basic confessional statements of Lutherans, the Formula of Concord says that God’s Word in the Bible, “is and should remain the sole rule and norm of all doctrine, and...no human being’s [teachings] dare be put on a par with that...everything must be subjected to it.”
Joseph understood that the witness of the angel in his dream was true because the angel’s words conformed to the promises of Scripture!
Verses 21 to 23 continue the angel’s message to Joseph: “She [Mary] will give birth to a son, and you are to give him the name Jesus , because he will save his people from their sins.’ All this took place to fulfill what the Lord had said through the prophet [in Isaiah 7:14]: ‘The virgin will be with child and will give birth to a son, and they will call him Immanuel’--which means, ‘God with us.’"
Joseph, a man who walked with God, knew God well enough and knew God’s Word well enough to know that the angel was telling the truth.
In a fallen world, it’s imperative that those who believe in Jesus know God’s Word! I hope that every member of Living Water will make it their business to know God through regular Bible reading and study!
Now, in Matthew’s explanations of the origins of our hope as believers in Christ, He mentions two names associated with the child in Mary’s womb.
First: Jesus, the Savior’s given name. It means Yahweh, [God], is our salvation. Jesus’ name says that God sent Jesus to save His people from sin.
“The wages of sin is death,” as we know. But Jesus came to take the wages we deserve, death, separation from the God Who gives life. Then He rose from the dead so that all who believe in Him have the gift we don’t deserve: Never-ending life with God.
And Jesus came to save more than just God’s first people, the Jews. In the great commission, Jesus sends us to share the Good News of new life for all who repent and believe in Him with people of every nation. Jesus came to give all people the chance to believe in Him and be saved for eternity.
Second: Matthew tells us about the name Immanuel. It’s a nickname, really. Like many nicknames, it’s descriptive. As the text says, Immanuel means God with us. Jesus is God in the flesh Who came into our world to save us from sin and death, to give us life in the world to come. Jesus is also God with us, in this world.
To truly celebrate Christmas this year, may I suggest you remind yourself of those two names of our Lord?
In Matthew’s account of Jesus’ origins and of the Names of Jesus, we find the origins of all the hope a person can ever want or have!
Immanuel, God with us, assures us that no matter what happens to us in this life, God stands by us, strengthening us, encouraging us.
And Jesus is not only with us, He lives in those who receive and believe in Him. 1 John 4:4 tells believers in Christ: “You, dear children, are from God and have overcome them, because the one who is in you is greater than the one who is in the world.”
Satan, temptations, fears, apprehensions, worries, sins, stress: God with us can give us the strength of character and the thrill of hope that will help us face every obstacle!
God is with us when the kids make us crazy, the in-laws are a pain, the marriage is troubled, we’re sick or depressed, the bills pile up, or the pressures mount.
If you want Him, Immanuel will never let you go!
And, I have found, He will even send His ambassadors--other believers in Christ--to extend His love, grace, mercy, and help when you need it! You just have to lay down any pretense of self-sufficiency and let Him carry you when you’re to weary to take the next step!
And by His Name, Jesus, God is our salvation, assures us that no matter how lost we may feel, no matter how guilty, when we trust in Him, we are saved from sin and death and separation from God.
The hope of heaven imbues this life with joy even when we’re unhappy or guilty, assures us of peace even when things are crazy.
Please turn to Romans 8:1-2 (page 787 in the pew Bibles). It says: “Therefore, there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus, because through Christ Jesus the law of the Spirit who gives life has set you free from the law of sin and death.”
That, friends is the good news that came when God was virgin born of Mary and Joseph accepted the responsibility of acting as His father on earth.
If we want Him, we are saved and accompanied always by Christ!
Welcome Him as Mary and Joseph did, ignoring the wagging tongues and the warped reason of a world that wants to sell God short and feed human ego.
Welcome Jesus.
Let Him save you.
Let Him live with you every day.
Because of all the things the God of this universe wants, nobody and nothing is more important to Him than you!
Let that truth soak into your heart and mind this Christmas and every day!
Amen
Matthew 1:18-25
It’s not a new observation to say that the beginnings of things often explain a lot about their later development.
The fact that of the two Steves who started Apple, Steve Jobs, the marketer, was the dominant partner, explains you how a passion for creating new and expanding old markets nurtured a corporate culture in which technical people are still expected routinely to do things that can’t be done.
The fact that Living Water began with a commitment to reaching out in word and deed with the Good News of new life for all who believe in Jesus Christ, explains this congregation’s outreach culture.
Beginnings are important.
The ancient rabbis said that if you wanted to understand Biblical faith, you should master the book of Genesis, the book of beginnings.
In Jesus Christ, God has made a new beginning and God gives new beginnings to us every time we trust Christ with our sinful pasts, our each today, and our unknown futures!
That’s what Matthew conveys in chapter one of his Gospel, including the verses that make up today’s Gospel lesson.
Please turn to our Gospel lesson, Matthew 1:18-25 (page 675 in the pew Bibles). Verse 18 says: “This is how the birth of Jesus Christ came about...” A more literal translation from the Greek in which Matthew wrote would be, “This is how the genesis of Jesus Christ happened...”
Matthew is signaling a fresh start for the human race. In Jesus, a new Genesis is possible for us all!
The verse goes on: “His mother Mary was pledged to be married to Joseph, but before they came together, she was found to be with child through the Holy Spirit.”
The phrase “pledged to be married” hardly does justice to the state of Mary’s relationship with Joseph. They were betrothed. Betrothal was more than an engagement. During betrothal, the couple were considered married, although they were strictly forbidden from consummating their relationship until they publicly affirmed their commitment to one another before God and witnesses. If one of them had intimacy with someone else during betrothal, the act was considered adultery. The Old Testament book of Deuteronomy said that if a woman was guilty of adultery during this period, she should be stoned to death. By the first century AD, this law was rarely enforced.
But even then, the woman cut loose by her betrothed quietly didn’t have an easy lot in life, forever branded by her adultery.
Our lesson conveys an unambiguous message: Mary was a virgin.
She and Joseph had not come together, we're told.
And, the child conceived within her was from the Holy Spirit.
Later in the passage, we’re told that Mary and Joseph didn’t have marital relations until after Jesus was born.
Today, as has been the case since the first century, there are people who deny that Jesus could possibly have been born of a virgin.
It’s always seemed a bit presumptuous to me for human beings to claim that the God Who created every particle of this universe is incapable of doing something that doesn’t comport our usual experience. Jesus teaches that, “With God all things are possible.”
Still, some virgin birth deniers point out that other ancient religions told stories of their idol gods roaming the earth and having intimate relations with women, often resulting in the birth of a notable person. They say that the claim that Jesus was born of a virgin is similar.
But the witness of the New Testament about God the Father and about Jesus’ birth is very different from those mythical gods.
During His ministry, Jesus said that “God is spirit.” The God of the universe isn’t like the bawdy deities of mythology. He is Spirit, Who by His Word created matter, created human beings.
Just as the book of Genesis says that God’s Spirit moved over chaos and brought life into being, so now, as God prepares to gives us the chance for new life through Jesus Christ, His Spirit passes over a virgin’s womb and the Person the apostle Paul calls, “the second Adam,” is conceived.
If this is hard for us to accept--because it doesn’t fit with our everyday experiences, imagine the effect it had on Joseph!
Verse 19: “Because Joseph her husband was a righteous man and did not want to expose her to public disgrace, he had in mind to divorce her quietly.”
Hurt, Joseph decides he won’t lash out. But he won’t have a life with a woman he believes has been unfaithful to him. The verb translated as divorce here in the original Greek is apoluo, meaning basically, that Joseph would cut Mary loose.
Verse 20: “But after he had considered this, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream and said, ‘Joseph son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary home as your wife, because what is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit...’”
The Bible and centuries of believers affirm that God speaks to people in many ways. The God Who created the universe can use the universe in whatever way He wants to get our attention.
He spoke to Moses through a burning bush.
He spoke to Elijah in a still, small voice.
You know how God spoke to Balaam.
And sometimes, God gets the attention of His saints in dreams.
However we may sense God is speaking to us, the message and the messenger must conform to what God has revealed to us about Himself through His inspired Word, the Bible.
The Bible’s last book very sternly warns against adding or subtracting anything from the truths taught there, a statement that we can make about the whole of Scripture, because it’s God-breathed, a living Word.
The book of Hebrews says that, “The word of God is alive and active. Sharper than any double-edged sword, it penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit, joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and attitudes of the heart.”
In this light, one of the basic confessional statements of Lutherans, the Formula of Concord says that God’s Word in the Bible, “is and should remain the sole rule and norm of all doctrine, and...no human being’s [teachings] dare be put on a par with that...everything must be subjected to it.”
Joseph understood that the witness of the angel in his dream was true because the angel’s words conformed to the promises of Scripture!
Verses 21 to 23 continue the angel’s message to Joseph: “She [Mary] will give birth to a son, and you are to give him the name Jesus , because he will save his people from their sins.’ All this took place to fulfill what the Lord had said through the prophet [in Isaiah 7:14]: ‘The virgin will be with child and will give birth to a son, and they will call him Immanuel’--which means, ‘God with us.’"
Joseph, a man who walked with God, knew God well enough and knew God’s Word well enough to know that the angel was telling the truth.
In a fallen world, it’s imperative that those who believe in Jesus know God’s Word! I hope that every member of Living Water will make it their business to know God through regular Bible reading and study!
Now, in Matthew’s explanations of the origins of our hope as believers in Christ, He mentions two names associated with the child in Mary’s womb.
First: Jesus, the Savior’s given name. It means Yahweh, [God], is our salvation. Jesus’ name says that God sent Jesus to save His people from sin.
“The wages of sin is death,” as we know. But Jesus came to take the wages we deserve, death, separation from the God Who gives life. Then He rose from the dead so that all who believe in Him have the gift we don’t deserve: Never-ending life with God.
And Jesus came to save more than just God’s first people, the Jews. In the great commission, Jesus sends us to share the Good News of new life for all who repent and believe in Him with people of every nation. Jesus came to give all people the chance to believe in Him and be saved for eternity.
Second: Matthew tells us about the name Immanuel. It’s a nickname, really. Like many nicknames, it’s descriptive. As the text says, Immanuel means God with us. Jesus is God in the flesh Who came into our world to save us from sin and death, to give us life in the world to come. Jesus is also God with us, in this world.
To truly celebrate Christmas this year, may I suggest you remind yourself of those two names of our Lord?
In Matthew’s account of Jesus’ origins and of the Names of Jesus, we find the origins of all the hope a person can ever want or have!
Immanuel, God with us, assures us that no matter what happens to us in this life, God stands by us, strengthening us, encouraging us.
And Jesus is not only with us, He lives in those who receive and believe in Him. 1 John 4:4 tells believers in Christ: “You, dear children, are from God and have overcome them, because the one who is in you is greater than the one who is in the world.”
Satan, temptations, fears, apprehensions, worries, sins, stress: God with us can give us the strength of character and the thrill of hope that will help us face every obstacle!
God is with us when the kids make us crazy, the in-laws are a pain, the marriage is troubled, we’re sick or depressed, the bills pile up, or the pressures mount.
If you want Him, Immanuel will never let you go!
And, I have found, He will even send His ambassadors--other believers in Christ--to extend His love, grace, mercy, and help when you need it! You just have to lay down any pretense of self-sufficiency and let Him carry you when you’re to weary to take the next step!
And by His Name, Jesus, God is our salvation, assures us that no matter how lost we may feel, no matter how guilty, when we trust in Him, we are saved from sin and death and separation from God.
The hope of heaven imbues this life with joy even when we’re unhappy or guilty, assures us of peace even when things are crazy.
Please turn to Romans 8:1-2 (page 787 in the pew Bibles). It says: “Therefore, there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus, because through Christ Jesus the law of the Spirit who gives life has set you free from the law of sin and death.”
That, friends is the good news that came when God was virgin born of Mary and Joseph accepted the responsibility of acting as His father on earth.
If we want Him, we are saved and accompanied always by Christ!
Welcome Him as Mary and Joseph did, ignoring the wagging tongues and the warped reason of a world that wants to sell God short and feed human ego.
Welcome Jesus.
Let Him save you.
Let Him live with you every day.
Because of all the things the God of this universe wants, nobody and nothing is more important to Him than you!
Let that truth soak into your heart and mind this Christmas and every day!
Amen
Wednesday, December 18, 2013
Humbled and Inspired
A few weeks ago, I was in a surgery prep room at a local hospital. One of our congregation's members was undergoing surgery and I was there to pray and spend time with him and his wife before he was wheeled in for his procedure.
Our visit had just begun when the surgeon walked in to go over information with the couple. After doing that, the surgeon turned to me and asked, "Did you pray?" "Not yet," we said.
"Well, could I pray with you?"
So, we all held out our hands to each other and prayed.
After asking for God's healing for the patient, encouragement for him and his wife, and help and guidance for the surgeon and all the hospital personnel who would be involved, the doctor talked about a prayer offered by another pastor in similar circumstances. "Lord," the surgeon reported that pastor praying, "let this doctor operate with the hands of Jesus today."
"When he said that," the surgeon told us, "I had tears in my eyes."
I later learned that the doctor spends time in the mornings praying for every patient he's scheduled to operate on that day.
Over the years, I've known of some doctors who have prayed with patients, families, and me prior to medical procedures. But it hasn't been that common. And I was struck by how meaningful prayer was for this particular doctor that we pray together.
But the surprises weren't over.
A short while later, the anesthesiologist entered the prep area to go over things with patient and wife. His business done, he turned to me and asked, "Are you going to offer a prayer?"
"We did pray earlier," I told him, thinking he wanted me to hurry along so that things could get under way.
"Do you think we could pray again now?" he asked.
"Sure!"
And once again, patient, wife, a doctor, and I grasped hands in a circle around the patient's bed and prayed.
Two doctors seeking to pray with others for a patient and his healing before a surgery is unprecedented in my twenty-nine years.
I think it inspired confidence in the patient and his wife to know that those doctors were not only medically competent but dependent on the God we know in Jesus Christ.
The patient is doing well.
I can't prove, of course, that this positive result is attributable to prayer, although many objective studies indicate that prayer does positively augment healing and recovery for hospital patients. I can only say that I was moved by the fact that I was joined in prayer that day by two doctors humble enough to admit their need of God.
It humbled and inspired me.
Our visit had just begun when the surgeon walked in to go over information with the couple. After doing that, the surgeon turned to me and asked, "Did you pray?" "Not yet," we said.
"Well, could I pray with you?"
So, we all held out our hands to each other and prayed.
After asking for God's healing for the patient, encouragement for him and his wife, and help and guidance for the surgeon and all the hospital personnel who would be involved, the doctor talked about a prayer offered by another pastor in similar circumstances. "Lord," the surgeon reported that pastor praying, "let this doctor operate with the hands of Jesus today."
"When he said that," the surgeon told us, "I had tears in my eyes."
I later learned that the doctor spends time in the mornings praying for every patient he's scheduled to operate on that day.
Over the years, I've known of some doctors who have prayed with patients, families, and me prior to medical procedures. But it hasn't been that common. And I was struck by how meaningful prayer was for this particular doctor that we pray together.
But the surprises weren't over.
A short while later, the anesthesiologist entered the prep area to go over things with patient and wife. His business done, he turned to me and asked, "Are you going to offer a prayer?"
"We did pray earlier," I told him, thinking he wanted me to hurry along so that things could get under way.
"Do you think we could pray again now?" he asked.
"Sure!"
And once again, patient, wife, a doctor, and I grasped hands in a circle around the patient's bed and prayed.
Two doctors seeking to pray with others for a patient and his healing before a surgery is unprecedented in my twenty-nine years.
I think it inspired confidence in the patient and his wife to know that those doctors were not only medically competent but dependent on the God we know in Jesus Christ.
The patient is doing well.
I can't prove, of course, that this positive result is attributable to prayer, although many objective studies indicate that prayer does positively augment healing and recovery for hospital patients. I can only say that I was moved by the fact that I was joined in prayer that day by two doctors humble enough to admit their need of God.
It humbled and inspired me.
Tuesday, December 17, 2013
The King Who Ignores Our Expectations
[This was prepared to share during the morning worship services of Living Water Lutheran Church in Springboro, Ohio.]
Matthew 11:2-15
Life sometimes throws us curveballs.
The curveballs can be good or bad.
But whether good or bad, they break from our expectations.
They can leave us breathless with horror.
Or dazzled with wonder.
Grateful beyond expression.
Saddened beyond telling.
A man looks forward to retirement, expecting long years of enjoyment with his wife, but learns he has Stage 4 cancer weeks before his retirement date.
A woman, long hurt by life, assuming that she will always be alone, suddenly and amazingly falls in love with a wonderful man she hadn’t dared to hope existed for her.
Expectations dashed.
Expectations exceeded.
The curveballs of life are enough to counsel us, I think, to check our expectations.
For believers in the God Who has revealed Himself to the world in Jesus Christ, it means, above all I think, learning to pray the hardest prayer of all: “Thy will be done.”
I can tell you that much of my life as a Christian, even to this day, has been spent learning to conform my expectations to the will of God, to truly learn to pray with my Savior, “Not as I will, but as you will."
I have not yet learned how to fully yield to God’s will for my life over against my expectations of what my life should be.
I have not yet fully learned what Paul teaches in 1 Corinthians 6:19, that my life is not really my own. And that is doubly true. It's true first, because I didn't bring my life into being. And it's true second, because Jesus Christ died and rose to give me new and everlasting life. Still I struggle over proprietary rights with God. I struggle to accept that my life does not belong to me and God doesn't dance to the tune I punch in on life's juke box.
Maybe you struggle with this just like I do.
If that is our common struggle here this morning (or one of them), our Gospel lesson for today tells us that we are not alone.
John the Baptist had certain expectations of the Messiah or the Christ. Messiah (Meshiah) is the Hebrew word for Anointed One; Christ, Christos in the original Greek of the New Testament, carries the same meaning.
John rightly understood that the Messiah, Who He correctly identified as Jesus, was going to bring judgment on this old world of sin.
John also understood that Jesus was to be the legitimate King of the Jews Who would bring the Kingdom of heaven to this earth.
But John’s expectations of what that meant, of what kind of King Jesus would be, of what the kingdom looked like, were very different from what Jesus seemed to be as Jesus traveled from place to place, preaching, teaching, and performing miraculous signs.
John was looking for a king who, acting in God’s righteousness, would supplant the corrupt and violent Herod, the king who had slapped John into jail in his own house because John’s proclamation of a new king threatened him.
John wondered what was going on.
Jesus wasn’t what he had expected.
That’s where our Gospel lesson starts and this morning, I hope you don’t mind, I want to focus on just the first few verses of the lesson today. Please go to it, Matthew 11:2-6 (page 682 in the pew Bibles). It begins: “When John heard in prison what Christ was doing, he sent his disciples to ask him, ‘Are you the one who was to come, or should we expect someone else?’ Jesus replied, ‘Go back and report to John what you hear and see: The blind receive sight, the lame walk, those who have leprosy are cured, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the good news is preached to the poor...’”
John was all-in for Jesus. Yet Jesus wasn’t doing any of the things John had expected of God's Anointed One!
Jesus hadn’t taken the reins of political power, hadn’t purified the temple and the priesthood, hadn’t put the righteous into power, hadn’t established the kingdom of heaven.
In His response, Jesus’ told John He needed to change his expectations. There was to be more to the kingdom of heaven than judgment!
Do you remember what happened when, near the beginning of His ministry, Jesus went to His hometown of Nazareth? To define His mission as the Messiah and the Kingdom He had come to earth to bring, Jesus chose to read from Isaiah 61:1-2. Please turn to it on page 517. It says: “The Spirit of the Sovereign LORD is on me, because the LORD has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim freedom for the captives and release from darkness for the prisoners, to proclaim the year of the LORD's favor and the day of vengeance of our God, to comfort all who mourn...”
Jesus does bring judgment, of course. It’s the judgment we pass on ourselves when deciding whether or not to receive the offer of life and forgiveness and joy that comes from God through Jesus alone. As Jesus told Nicodemus: “This is the verdict: Light has come into the world, but men loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil.” And the aged Simeon said of Jesus when the Lord was only eight days old, brought to the temple by Mary and Joseph to be circumcised: "This child is destined to cause the falling and rising of many in Israel, and to be a sign that will be spoken against, so that the thoughts of many hearts will be revealed."
People cast judgment on themselves--we cast judgment on ourselves--whenever we choose the darkness of life without God and when we choose sin over the brightness of forgiveness and fresh life that comes from Jesus, the Light of the world.
But judgment is not ultimately why Jesus came into the world.
And it isn’t why He will one day return to the world.
Jesus also told Nicodemus: “God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him.”
All who believe in the Name of Jesus are saved to live in the kingdom of heaven where, Revelation 21:4 says that Jesus “will wipe away every tear from [believers’] eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.”
This is why Jesus presents the evidence for His being Messiah to the emissaries of John the Baptist that He does. The words Jesus cites come from Isaiah 35:5-6. Please go there, page 497. Here, God’s ultimate intentions--beyond sin and death and judgment--and the content of life in His kingdom are described: “Then will the eyes of the blind be opened and the ears of the deaf unstopped. Then will the lame leap like a deer, and the mute tongue shout for joy. Water [living water?] will gush forth in the wilderness and streams in the desert.”
Jesus didn't come into the world to force God’s kingdom on us.
He came so that all who trust in Him will receive a new Eden, an eternal city where there is no darkness, only light; no death, only life; no despair, only hope!
Jesus performed the signs of the coming Kingdom so that people would not feel forced or coerced into following Him but so that, in seeing, they would be open to believing in--to betting their lives on--Jesus and Jesus only! And so that by believing in Jesus, that kingdom would invade their (our) daily lives in this world and, one day, at what one of the old hymns called “the consummation,” believers in Christ will live in that new Eden, the new heavens and the new earth, the new creation.
In essence, Jesus tells John's disciples, “Tell John about the signs."
Then, Jesus says: “Blessed is the man who does not fall away on account of me."
In verse 11 of our lesson, Jesus says: “among those born of women there has not risen anyone greater than John the Baptist.” Yet John, like you and me and every other human being on the planet this morning, was left with a critical decision when considering the life, deeds, signs, death, and resurrection of Jesus:
He didn’t do what they wanted Him to do when they wanted Him to do it.
He didn’t thwart the unfair boss.
He didn’t save the marriage.
He didn’t help them get into the National Honor Society.
He didn’t cure a loved one’s cancer.
I don’t say any of this to condemn those who reject Jesus because they have been hurt! Through the years, it’s been my experience that atheists are generally more sensitive about the hurts of the world than are we Christians. (To the shame of we Christians.)
It’s that very sensitivity and the belief that life in this world should be better than it is that leads many atheists to spurn God.
But, when I was an atheist, I had to ask myself, “Where does my sense that things ought to be better come from if not from the God Who made us for something better?”
The truth is that a godless universe would give us no reason to hold up things like love, justice, or grace as ways of life to which human beings should aspire.
If we are all the result of some random collision of elements derived from some unknown force and if all of life is a contest for the survival of the fittest, our stubborn human ideas about right and wrong would be inexplicable.
For me then, atheism, though perhaps understandable as a reaction to life, simply doesn't account for all of life's realities.
Others become atheists because, like John the Baptist who wrestled with doubts in a cell in Herod’s prison, the God they tried to believe in didn’t meet their expectations. Their picture of what God should be like was based on their preferences, not on Who God has revealed Himself to be. They tried to domesticate God.
In the first volume of C.S. Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia, in which four children from our world visit an alternative universe and are told about Aslan. Aslan is a figure of Christ in Lewis' books, "the great King, Son of the Emperor-beyond-the-sea." When informed that Aslan was a lion, one of the children asks, "Is he safe?" The reply: "Course he isn't safe. But he's good. He's the king..."
Jesus is like that. He is the King. He is good. But if we're looking for safety, we should look elsewhere for our Savior. Jesus calls us to turn away from the safety of our favorite sins, the safety of lives turned inward for our own ends to a life lived for Him and for our neighbor.
It’s at those moments when God fails to meet our expectations that we need to consider Jesus. We need to look at Him closely.
The gospels’ accounts about Jesus’ time on earth tell us all we need to know to have saving faith and to expand our faith in Jesus, despite the hard realities of life.
The four Gospels in the New Testament--Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John--make it possible for us to do exactly what Jesus said that John the Baptist should do: Look at what He did and why. See how He had control of life and death, yet never used that control for selfish purposes, not even self-preservation when they nailed His hands and feet to a cross. See the compassion of God evident in Jesus.
In effect, Jesus says, “Decide for yourself from the evidence Who I am!” Look at Jesus closely and we see the God of the universe Who may be different from our expectations, but Who is exactly the King we need!
Toward the end of his Gospel, another John writes: “Jesus did many other miraculous signs in the presence of his disciples [including, most miraculous of all, His death and resurrection], which are not recorded in this book. But these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name.” If you would know God, look to Jesus!
Someone once wrote that life in this world is “nasty, brutish, and short.”* There is truth in that, although there is also much beauty, love, and wonder in this world.
I got another precious glimpse of that yesterday. One of the littlest of our Christmas carolers approached us in the kitchen after we'd been singing in the neighborhood, her nose running. She asked for a tissue. There were no tissues there, so I handed her a few napkins from the dispenser. She took the napkins and blew her nose as well as she could, then handed the napkins back to me. If that isn't precious and beautiful, I don't know what is!
Beauty and wonder still rise stubbornly "like grass through cement" in this fallen world. Despite our sin and the calamities it has brought to our life on this planet, we see glimpses of how perfect this world was meant to be, how dependent and trusting we were made to be toward God and one another, every day.
But if we expect that Jesus is going to make this world--unrepentant and self-driven--into Eden, we misunderstand Him.
If we think that Jesus has laid down a political program by which people of can live out certain principles and give the world a makeover.
One of the worst sins we commit in post-modern Christianity, whether conservative or liberal, is the sin of idolatry, turning Jesus into the God we prefer, replacing His deity and Lordship with our particular political preferences and programs so that we can get what we want in this world. That, friends, is a scandal!
And it's stupid because this world is under a death sentence!
This world must die so that the new world, the new Eden can come into being.
We must die--in the waters of Baptism and in daily repentance and renewal--so that the Kingdom can enter us and so that we can be part of the Kingdom.
The God we know in Jesus, “able to do immeasurably more than we ask or imagine” has bigger plans for us than remodeling this dying creation.
Eternal plans.
Plans not to harm us, but to give us a future no longer darkened by sin or death or futility.
He has come and will come again to establish a kingdom in which tears are dried, the lame walk, even run, and the aggrieved know joy.
Jesus is the sign and the seal of God’s good intentions for the human race.
His death and resurrection are God’s guarantee of life free from sin and death for all who dare to surrender to Jesus Christ.
The kingdom Jesus died and rose to bring into being is living in and among those who believe in Him, the Church, despite the imperfections of we individual Christians.
We are even today empowered by His Spirit to give sight to the blind, cleansing to the leprous, life to the dead, food to the hungry, shelter to the homeless, and good news that brings everlasting life.
We see that in the many ministries pursued by the people of Living Water.
May we remain open to being conduits of Jesus’ kingdom each day.
May we become ever more receptive to going wherever our King calls us to be.
And may others see the signs of Jesus in our life and so, with us, come to everlasting life in His Name.
Amen
*The writer was Thomas Hobbes. He was actually specifically referencing war. But in my lifetime, war has been a sufficiently central feature of human existence that I feel no hesitation in saying that it reflects life in this world.
Matthew 11:2-15
Life sometimes throws us curveballs.
The curveballs can be good or bad.
But whether good or bad, they break from our expectations.
They can leave us breathless with horror.
Or dazzled with wonder.
Grateful beyond expression.
Saddened beyond telling.
A man looks forward to retirement, expecting long years of enjoyment with his wife, but learns he has Stage 4 cancer weeks before his retirement date.
A woman, long hurt by life, assuming that she will always be alone, suddenly and amazingly falls in love with a wonderful man she hadn’t dared to hope existed for her.
Expectations dashed.
Expectations exceeded.
The curveballs of life are enough to counsel us, I think, to check our expectations.
For believers in the God Who has revealed Himself to the world in Jesus Christ, it means, above all I think, learning to pray the hardest prayer of all: “Thy will be done.”
I can tell you that much of my life as a Christian, even to this day, has been spent learning to conform my expectations to the will of God, to truly learn to pray with my Savior, “Not as I will, but as you will."
I have not yet learned how to fully yield to God’s will for my life over against my expectations of what my life should be.
I have not yet fully learned what Paul teaches in 1 Corinthians 6:19, that my life is not really my own. And that is doubly true. It's true first, because I didn't bring my life into being. And it's true second, because Jesus Christ died and rose to give me new and everlasting life. Still I struggle over proprietary rights with God. I struggle to accept that my life does not belong to me and God doesn't dance to the tune I punch in on life's juke box.
Maybe you struggle with this just like I do.
If that is our common struggle here this morning (or one of them), our Gospel lesson for today tells us that we are not alone.
John the Baptist had certain expectations of the Messiah or the Christ. Messiah (Meshiah) is the Hebrew word for Anointed One; Christ, Christos in the original Greek of the New Testament, carries the same meaning.
John rightly understood that the Messiah, Who He correctly identified as Jesus, was going to bring judgment on this old world of sin.
John also understood that Jesus was to be the legitimate King of the Jews Who would bring the Kingdom of heaven to this earth.
But John’s expectations of what that meant, of what kind of King Jesus would be, of what the kingdom looked like, were very different from what Jesus seemed to be as Jesus traveled from place to place, preaching, teaching, and performing miraculous signs.
John was looking for a king who, acting in God’s righteousness, would supplant the corrupt and violent Herod, the king who had slapped John into jail in his own house because John’s proclamation of a new king threatened him.
John wondered what was going on.
Jesus wasn’t what he had expected.
That’s where our Gospel lesson starts and this morning, I hope you don’t mind, I want to focus on just the first few verses of the lesson today. Please go to it, Matthew 11:2-6 (page 682 in the pew Bibles). It begins: “When John heard in prison what Christ was doing, he sent his disciples to ask him, ‘Are you the one who was to come, or should we expect someone else?’ Jesus replied, ‘Go back and report to John what you hear and see: The blind receive sight, the lame walk, those who have leprosy are cured, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the good news is preached to the poor...’”
John was all-in for Jesus. Yet Jesus wasn’t doing any of the things John had expected of God's Anointed One!
Jesus hadn’t taken the reins of political power, hadn’t purified the temple and the priesthood, hadn’t put the righteous into power, hadn’t established the kingdom of heaven.
In His response, Jesus’ told John He needed to change his expectations. There was to be more to the kingdom of heaven than judgment!
Do you remember what happened when, near the beginning of His ministry, Jesus went to His hometown of Nazareth? To define His mission as the Messiah and the Kingdom He had come to earth to bring, Jesus chose to read from Isaiah 61:1-2. Please turn to it on page 517. It says: “The Spirit of the Sovereign LORD is on me, because the LORD has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim freedom for the captives and release from darkness for the prisoners, to proclaim the year of the LORD's favor and the day of vengeance of our God, to comfort all who mourn...”
Jesus does bring judgment, of course. It’s the judgment we pass on ourselves when deciding whether or not to receive the offer of life and forgiveness and joy that comes from God through Jesus alone. As Jesus told Nicodemus: “This is the verdict: Light has come into the world, but men loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil.” And the aged Simeon said of Jesus when the Lord was only eight days old, brought to the temple by Mary and Joseph to be circumcised: "This child is destined to cause the falling and rising of many in Israel, and to be a sign that will be spoken against, so that the thoughts of many hearts will be revealed."
People cast judgment on themselves--we cast judgment on ourselves--whenever we choose the darkness of life without God and when we choose sin over the brightness of forgiveness and fresh life that comes from Jesus, the Light of the world.
But judgment is not ultimately why Jesus came into the world.
And it isn’t why He will one day return to the world.
Jesus also told Nicodemus: “God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him.”
All who believe in the Name of Jesus are saved to live in the kingdom of heaven where, Revelation 21:4 says that Jesus “will wipe away every tear from [believers’] eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.”
This is why Jesus presents the evidence for His being Messiah to the emissaries of John the Baptist that He does. The words Jesus cites come from Isaiah 35:5-6. Please go there, page 497. Here, God’s ultimate intentions--beyond sin and death and judgment--and the content of life in His kingdom are described: “Then will the eyes of the blind be opened and the ears of the deaf unstopped. Then will the lame leap like a deer, and the mute tongue shout for joy. Water [living water?] will gush forth in the wilderness and streams in the desert.”
Jesus didn't come into the world to force God’s kingdom on us.
He came so that all who trust in Him will receive a new Eden, an eternal city where there is no darkness, only light; no death, only life; no despair, only hope!
Jesus performed the signs of the coming Kingdom so that people would not feel forced or coerced into following Him but so that, in seeing, they would be open to believing in--to betting their lives on--Jesus and Jesus only! And so that by believing in Jesus, that kingdom would invade their (our) daily lives in this world and, one day, at what one of the old hymns called “the consummation,” believers in Christ will live in that new Eden, the new heavens and the new earth, the new creation.
In essence, Jesus tells John's disciples, “Tell John about the signs."
Then, Jesus says: “Blessed is the man who does not fall away on account of me."
In verse 11 of our lesson, Jesus says: “among those born of women there has not risen anyone greater than John the Baptist.” Yet John, like you and me and every other human being on the planet this morning, was left with a critical decision when considering the life, deeds, signs, death, and resurrection of Jesus:
- Would he yield to the testimony of Christ’s activities on earth and the promptings of the Holy Spirit to leave himself open to accepting that Jesus is the One Who came into the world to destroy the fallen kingdoms of this world and to bring God’s kingdom into being?
- Or would John turn his back on Jesus because Jesus didn’t match the limited expectations he had of the Savior?
He didn’t do what they wanted Him to do when they wanted Him to do it.
He didn’t thwart the unfair boss.
He didn’t save the marriage.
He didn’t help them get into the National Honor Society.
He didn’t cure a loved one’s cancer.
I don’t say any of this to condemn those who reject Jesus because they have been hurt! Through the years, it’s been my experience that atheists are generally more sensitive about the hurts of the world than are we Christians. (To the shame of we Christians.)
It’s that very sensitivity and the belief that life in this world should be better than it is that leads many atheists to spurn God.
But, when I was an atheist, I had to ask myself, “Where does my sense that things ought to be better come from if not from the God Who made us for something better?”
The truth is that a godless universe would give us no reason to hold up things like love, justice, or grace as ways of life to which human beings should aspire.
If we are all the result of some random collision of elements derived from some unknown force and if all of life is a contest for the survival of the fittest, our stubborn human ideas about right and wrong would be inexplicable.
For me then, atheism, though perhaps understandable as a reaction to life, simply doesn't account for all of life's realities.
Others become atheists because, like John the Baptist who wrestled with doubts in a cell in Herod’s prison, the God they tried to believe in didn’t meet their expectations. Their picture of what God should be like was based on their preferences, not on Who God has revealed Himself to be. They tried to domesticate God.
In the first volume of C.S. Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia, in which four children from our world visit an alternative universe and are told about Aslan. Aslan is a figure of Christ in Lewis' books, "the great King, Son of the Emperor-beyond-the-sea." When informed that Aslan was a lion, one of the children asks, "Is he safe?" The reply: "Course he isn't safe. But he's good. He's the king..."
Jesus is like that. He is the King. He is good. But if we're looking for safety, we should look elsewhere for our Savior. Jesus calls us to turn away from the safety of our favorite sins, the safety of lives turned inward for our own ends to a life lived for Him and for our neighbor.
It’s at those moments when God fails to meet our expectations that we need to consider Jesus. We need to look at Him closely.
The gospels’ accounts about Jesus’ time on earth tell us all we need to know to have saving faith and to expand our faith in Jesus, despite the hard realities of life.
The four Gospels in the New Testament--Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John--make it possible for us to do exactly what Jesus said that John the Baptist should do: Look at what He did and why. See how He had control of life and death, yet never used that control for selfish purposes, not even self-preservation when they nailed His hands and feet to a cross. See the compassion of God evident in Jesus.
In effect, Jesus says, “Decide for yourself from the evidence Who I am!” Look at Jesus closely and we see the God of the universe Who may be different from our expectations, but Who is exactly the King we need!
Toward the end of his Gospel, another John writes: “Jesus did many other miraculous signs in the presence of his disciples [including, most miraculous of all, His death and resurrection], which are not recorded in this book. But these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name.” If you would know God, look to Jesus!
Someone once wrote that life in this world is “nasty, brutish, and short.”* There is truth in that, although there is also much beauty, love, and wonder in this world.
I got another precious glimpse of that yesterday. One of the littlest of our Christmas carolers approached us in the kitchen after we'd been singing in the neighborhood, her nose running. She asked for a tissue. There were no tissues there, so I handed her a few napkins from the dispenser. She took the napkins and blew her nose as well as she could, then handed the napkins back to me. If that isn't precious and beautiful, I don't know what is!
Beauty and wonder still rise stubbornly "like grass through cement" in this fallen world. Despite our sin and the calamities it has brought to our life on this planet, we see glimpses of how perfect this world was meant to be, how dependent and trusting we were made to be toward God and one another, every day.
But if we expect that Jesus is going to make this world--unrepentant and self-driven--into Eden, we misunderstand Him.
If we think that Jesus has laid down a political program by which people of can live out certain principles and give the world a makeover.
One of the worst sins we commit in post-modern Christianity, whether conservative or liberal, is the sin of idolatry, turning Jesus into the God we prefer, replacing His deity and Lordship with our particular political preferences and programs so that we can get what we want in this world. That, friends, is a scandal!
And it's stupid because this world is under a death sentence!
This world must die so that the new world, the new Eden can come into being.
We must die--in the waters of Baptism and in daily repentance and renewal--so that the Kingdom can enter us and so that we can be part of the Kingdom.
The God we know in Jesus, “able to do immeasurably more than we ask or imagine” has bigger plans for us than remodeling this dying creation.
Eternal plans.
Plans not to harm us, but to give us a future no longer darkened by sin or death or futility.
He has come and will come again to establish a kingdom in which tears are dried, the lame walk, even run, and the aggrieved know joy.
Jesus is the sign and the seal of God’s good intentions for the human race.
His death and resurrection are God’s guarantee of life free from sin and death for all who dare to surrender to Jesus Christ.
The kingdom Jesus died and rose to bring into being is living in and among those who believe in Him, the Church, despite the imperfections of we individual Christians.
We are even today empowered by His Spirit to give sight to the blind, cleansing to the leprous, life to the dead, food to the hungry, shelter to the homeless, and good news that brings everlasting life.
We see that in the many ministries pursued by the people of Living Water.
May we remain open to being conduits of Jesus’ kingdom each day.
May we become ever more receptive to going wherever our King calls us to be.
And may others see the signs of Jesus in our life and so, with us, come to everlasting life in His Name.
Amen
*The writer was Thomas Hobbes. He was actually specifically referencing war. But in my lifetime, war has been a sufficiently central feature of human existence that I feel no hesitation in saying that it reflects life in this world.
Tuesday, December 10, 2013
Thoughts on Advent Preparations
Pastor David Wendel writes in today's installment of Amen, Come Lord Jesus!, a devotional for the members and friends of the North American Lutheran Church:
As a parish pastor, I was often asked, “If Advent is a time of preparation, what should I be doing to prepare?” My answer was often, “Love the Lord your God...and your neighbor as yourself!”Good thoughts!
Sunday, December 08, 2013
The Unwanted Guest?
[This was prepared for sharing with the people and guests of Living Water Lutheran Church in Springboro, Ohio, for this morning's worship services.]
Matthew 3:1-12
If you were to make a list of all the Biblical people of faith you wouldn’t want to invite over to the house for an evening of holiday revelry, John the Baptist might be at the top. On the face of it, John seems like such a downer!
But I think, we need to revise our estimation of John the Baptist a bit.
Like you and me, John was a believer in Jesus. Even in his mother’s womb, Luke’s Gospel tells us, the Holy Spirit prompted John to recognize Mary, who had come to visit John’s parents in the Judean hill country, as the mother of the Lord Jesus. And when, after Jesus had spent many years in Nazareth then presented Himself for John’s baptism, John demurred. “I need to be baptized by You, and do you come to me?” In the fourth gospel, we're told that John the Baptist, pointed Jesus out and said, "Behold, the Lamb of God, Who takes away the sin of the world."
But sometimes, John's faith vied with his doubts. As we’ll be reminded in next Sunday’s Gospel lesson, John was far from perfect. There, we'll be reminded that though he believed in Jesus, Jesus didn't seem to be quite the King that John had expected. He would send people to ask Jesus, "Are You the One. Or is there going to be someone else?" Like you and me sometimes maybe, he doubted the Savior in Whom he believed.
But John kept believing in Jesus, however imperfectly.
There's a comfort to be derived in that. God only uses imperfect people to be His hands and feet in the world.
Despite his imperfections though, John was God’s choice for a ministry that had two basic elements:
Please turn to the Gospel lesson for today, Matthew 3:1-12 (page 676 in the pew Bibles). Matthew begins our lesson with words like those often used by Old Testament prophets to describe moments of decisive action by God: “In those days John the Baptist came, preaching in the Desert of Judea...”
The prophets often used phrases like "in those days." They signaled a moment when God had or, the prophets said, He would act.
The New Testament has two main words it uses for time. There's chronos, chronological time. Then there's kairos, God's time.
God acts on His own timetable. It's because we want God to bow to our chronological timetables that we're inclined to cry to heaven, "How long, Lord? How long do I have to wait?"
God acts at precisely the right moments for His purposes and for our good. At the kairos moment, God prompted John, "Now John. Now is the time for you to start preaching the message I give to you."
And God tells John to do this important ministry in the strangest of venues. In the wilderness by the banks of the Lower Jordan River. If John had gone to a business or church growth consultant, the wilderness is not the place they would have told him to set up shop. That wilderness area is composed partly of desert, but mostly of rocky terrain that contains sparse pastureland that can't stand much grazing. It's a good for nothing place where nobody lives unless they have to. Few would have lived there. Few would have gone there.
Yet, as we'll see, many flocked to hear John preach. The takeaway is simple: If God's hand is in a ministry, God will connect people to it. If God's hand isn't in a ministry, a crowd might be attracted, but it's doubtful that anyone will get connected to God.
Verse two: [John said:] “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is near." John is bleak, isn’t he? Or is he?
Turn, please to Matthew 4:17 (page 677). “From that time on Jesus began to preach, ‘Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is near.’"
John the Baptist was the last of the prophets who pointed, as a future event, to the kingdom of heaven that Jesus died and rose to bring to those who follow Him. We have a stereotype of prophets and of the Old Testament as being surly, demanding, vindictive, while we see Jesus and the New Testament as jolly, passive pushovers.
Yet, here we see that John preached the precise message as Jesus.
That message has two parts. It’s really the message of Advent, the message of Christian faith.
First, repent. We mentioned last Sunday that the word usually translated as repent in our English translations is metanoia, literally meaning I change my mind.
But to repent means a lot more than changing one’s mind. It's not like saying, "Blue used to be my favorite color. Now it's red."
In fact, in repentance, we own the fact that we are incapable of changing our own minds.
We may want to see things God’s way, but we can’t.
We may want to stop sinning, but we’re too into it to conquer it in our own power.
In repentance, we ask God to give us a new mind, new eyes, and a new way of living.
We ask that God will impose a new direction on our lives, His direction.
To shift us from following what our sinful impulses tell us to do--to do what I want to do whoever might get hurt; to follow my thoughts, emotions, or wills irrespective of what God says a “still more excellent way.” And, instead, we ask God to help us follow where He leads.
The Bible teaches us that it isn’t even we who author our desire to be in sync with God. That too, is a gift, tendered to us through the Holy Spirit.
In repentance, we yield to the desire for forgiveness and to the One Who gave that desire to us!
But what’s clear from John’s words--and from Jesus’ words--is that repentance is not a one-time proposition. The word for repent here is uttered in the present tense: Metanoieite. And in Greek that means John was saying: “Keep repenting!” “Keep turning back to God!”
You see, God understands us. He really does, better than we understand ourselves!
Repentance is more than sorrow for sin.
It’s also the willingness to keep coming back to God for guidance and forgiveness and grace.
Some people offer what they call repentance and say, “From here on in, I will be a good person. I will do good deeds. I will avoid sin.”
But true repentance says, “I can’t be a good person or do good deeds or avoid sin on my own, Lord. Kill my sinful self again today and help me to walk with you.”
That is not a downer message from John the Baptist.
It’s a message that urges us to keep following the God we know in Jesus Christ, even when we mess up.
Repent every day, live a life of repentance, of turning back to God, because God wants to live beside us now and in perfection in eternity. That should be an uplifting message!
The second part of John’s message was, “the kingdom of heaven is near.”
However crazy or indecipherable our lives can be, we can be sure that God is never far from from us.
That was true even before God took on human flesh in Jesus Christ and died and rose to set all who believe in Him free from sin and death.
It’s even more true now.
The risen Jesus promises to always be with us!
Verse 3: “This is he who was spoken of through the prophet Isaiah: ‘A voice of one calling in the desert, ‘Prepare the way for the Lord, make straight paths for him.”’"
The words are from Isaiah 40:3. These were originally words to God’s people Israel when they were exiled. A voice would proclaim that the time was near when God would come and lead His people back home.
Matthew sees that John is like Isaiah’s voice. He came to prepare for God Himself--Jesus--to come into this world and lead us from the wilderness of sin and death into the kingdom of heaven.
In his proclamation that people repent and believe that God’s kingdom was close, John was preparing people to meet Jesus.
It’s how we prepare to meet Jesus too.
We turn from sin, asking God’s help to live as He wills, and we trust that in Jesus, God is with us always!
Verse 4: “John's clothes were made of camel's hair, and he had a leather belt around his waist. His food was locusts and wild honey.” They wouldn’t like John’s attire on those TV fashion shows.
In Malachi 4, in the Old Testament, God promised that before the day of judgment, He would send the prophet Elijah and he would turn people’s hearts back toward the ways of God. Later in Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus makes clear that, at the least, John the Baptist played that prophetic role because Jesus’ ministry, as we saw last week, is the prerequisite for the judgment and the final fulfillment of His kingdom.
In 2 Kings 1:8, we’re told that Elijah was as much of a fashionista as John: “He had a garment of hair and had a leather belt around his waist.”
When John started preaching in his attire, when he only ate food that could be gathered, just as had been true of the ancient Israelites during their wilderness journey before crossing the Jordan into God’s promised land, people gave John their attention.
Verses 5 and 6: “People went out to him from Jerusalem and all Judea and the whole region of the Jordan. Confessing their sins, they were baptized by him in the Jordan River.” We prepare the way for Christ to enter our lives with power and grace when we clear away the obstructions. When we clear away our sin by confessing them to God.
Verses 7-10: “But when he saw many of the Pharisees and Sadducees coming to where he was baptizing, he said to them: 'You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the coming wrath? Produce fruit in keeping with repentance. And do not think you can say to yourselves, "We have Abraham as our father." I tell you that out of these stones God can raise up children for Abraham. The ax is already at the root of the trees, and every tree that does not produce good fruit will be cut down and thrown into the fire."”
We know the Pharisees and Saducees. Good religious folks. Pillars of the faith community. But also smug. Certain that because they were genetic descendants of Abraham, they were on solid ground. There’s no indication that they came to be baptized. Only to check things out. John calls them for being just good church members.
But God doesn’t want church members; God wants disciples!
God wants disciples who make other disciples.
He wants people who, like John the Baptist, follow the Lord, however imperfectly; not people who think that once they’re in the club, they might volunteer for this or that, but never attempt aligning themselves with Christ’s call to follow Him!
In Verses 11 and 12, John says: “‘I baptize you with water for repentance. But after me will come one who is more powerful than I, whose sandals I am not fit to carry. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and with fire. His winnowing fork is in his hand, and he will clear his threshing floor, gathering his wheat into the barn and burning up the chaff with unquenchable fire.’"
Before John, there were baptisms in Judea. They were self-administered. New converts to Judaism washed the sin of being Gentiles away before embracing the purity of the Jewish people. Some Jewish sects asked people to baptize themselves as a sign of renewed commitment to God. John was the first person ever to administer a baptism to other people.
But as John makes clear, his baptism was very different from the one that Jesus would administer, the one that Christians undergo at baptismal fonts like ours.
John’s baptism was only symbolic, the washing of water symbolizing the washing that true repentance brings to our lives.
But the Baptism that Jesus commands, the Sacrament, brings life from the Holy Spirit and the fire of God, burning away impurity and lighting our way through this life to eternity. That is good news. “All who believe and are baptized shall be saved,” Jesus says. John points us to eternal salvation in Christ!
Finally, John, talks about Jesus as judge of all humanity.
But in truth, what we learn from John the Baptist is that, in an ultimate sense, Jesus judges no human being. We are the ones who decide the judgment of eternity over our lives.
We pass sentence on ourselves by the choices we make each day.
The choice we are called to make is not to be perfect or good or religious.
The choice we’re called to make is to live each day in repentance, acknowledging our sins and imperfections, our need of daily reconstruction by Christ, our need of the crucified and risen Christ Himself.
When, by faith, we let Christ and His forgiveness into our lives, we’re walking toward God and His promises for time and eternity and we experience the truth that the Kingdom of heaven is truly near!
We might think that John would be an uncomfortable Christmastime guest in our homes.
But for all his rough edges, all of his incomplete knowledge, and the difficulty of his message, if we truly listen to him, we can hear a man who pointed us to trust in Jesus.
We can hear the Gospel about Jesus, which is good news of great joy for all people. I like to think that a guy like John would have a place at my table any time. Amen!
Matthew 3:1-12
If you were to make a list of all the Biblical people of faith you wouldn’t want to invite over to the house for an evening of holiday revelry, John the Baptist might be at the top. On the face of it, John seems like such a downer!
But I think, we need to revise our estimation of John the Baptist a bit.
Like you and me, John was a believer in Jesus. Even in his mother’s womb, Luke’s Gospel tells us, the Holy Spirit prompted John to recognize Mary, who had come to visit John’s parents in the Judean hill country, as the mother of the Lord Jesus. And when, after Jesus had spent many years in Nazareth then presented Himself for John’s baptism, John demurred. “I need to be baptized by You, and do you come to me?” In the fourth gospel, we're told that John the Baptist, pointed Jesus out and said, "Behold, the Lamb of God, Who takes away the sin of the world."
But sometimes, John's faith vied with his doubts. As we’ll be reminded in next Sunday’s Gospel lesson, John was far from perfect. There, we'll be reminded that though he believed in Jesus, Jesus didn't seem to be quite the King that John had expected. He would send people to ask Jesus, "Are You the One. Or is there going to be someone else?" Like you and me sometimes maybe, he doubted the Savior in Whom he believed.
But John kept believing in Jesus, however imperfectly.
There's a comfort to be derived in that. God only uses imperfect people to be His hands and feet in the world.
Despite his imperfections though, John was God’s choice for a ministry that had two basic elements:
- to call people to repentance;
- to announce the coming of the kingdom of heaven through the Christ, the Messiah, God’s anointed King.
Please turn to the Gospel lesson for today, Matthew 3:1-12 (page 676 in the pew Bibles). Matthew begins our lesson with words like those often used by Old Testament prophets to describe moments of decisive action by God: “In those days John the Baptist came, preaching in the Desert of Judea...”
The prophets often used phrases like "in those days." They signaled a moment when God had or, the prophets said, He would act.
The New Testament has two main words it uses for time. There's chronos, chronological time. Then there's kairos, God's time.
God acts on His own timetable. It's because we want God to bow to our chronological timetables that we're inclined to cry to heaven, "How long, Lord? How long do I have to wait?"
God acts at precisely the right moments for His purposes and for our good. At the kairos moment, God prompted John, "Now John. Now is the time for you to start preaching the message I give to you."
And God tells John to do this important ministry in the strangest of venues. In the wilderness by the banks of the Lower Jordan River. If John had gone to a business or church growth consultant, the wilderness is not the place they would have told him to set up shop. That wilderness area is composed partly of desert, but mostly of rocky terrain that contains sparse pastureland that can't stand much grazing. It's a good for nothing place where nobody lives unless they have to. Few would have lived there. Few would have gone there.
Yet, as we'll see, many flocked to hear John preach. The takeaway is simple: If God's hand is in a ministry, God will connect people to it. If God's hand isn't in a ministry, a crowd might be attracted, but it's doubtful that anyone will get connected to God.
Verse two: [John said:] “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is near." John is bleak, isn’t he? Or is he?
Turn, please to Matthew 4:17 (page 677). “From that time on Jesus began to preach, ‘Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is near.’"
John the Baptist was the last of the prophets who pointed, as a future event, to the kingdom of heaven that Jesus died and rose to bring to those who follow Him. We have a stereotype of prophets and of the Old Testament as being surly, demanding, vindictive, while we see Jesus and the New Testament as jolly, passive pushovers.
Yet, here we see that John preached the precise message as Jesus.
That message has two parts. It’s really the message of Advent, the message of Christian faith.
First, repent. We mentioned last Sunday that the word usually translated as repent in our English translations is metanoia, literally meaning I change my mind.
But to repent means a lot more than changing one’s mind. It's not like saying, "Blue used to be my favorite color. Now it's red."
In fact, in repentance, we own the fact that we are incapable of changing our own minds.
We may want to see things God’s way, but we can’t.
We may want to stop sinning, but we’re too into it to conquer it in our own power.
In repentance, we ask God to give us a new mind, new eyes, and a new way of living.
We ask that God will impose a new direction on our lives, His direction.
To shift us from following what our sinful impulses tell us to do--to do what I want to do whoever might get hurt; to follow my thoughts, emotions, or wills irrespective of what God says a “still more excellent way.” And, instead, we ask God to help us follow where He leads.
The Bible teaches us that it isn’t even we who author our desire to be in sync with God. That too, is a gift, tendered to us through the Holy Spirit.
In repentance, we yield to the desire for forgiveness and to the One Who gave that desire to us!
But what’s clear from John’s words--and from Jesus’ words--is that repentance is not a one-time proposition. The word for repent here is uttered in the present tense: Metanoieite. And in Greek that means John was saying: “Keep repenting!” “Keep turning back to God!”
You see, God understands us. He really does, better than we understand ourselves!
Repentance is more than sorrow for sin.
It’s also the willingness to keep coming back to God for guidance and forgiveness and grace.
Some people offer what they call repentance and say, “From here on in, I will be a good person. I will do good deeds. I will avoid sin.”
But true repentance says, “I can’t be a good person or do good deeds or avoid sin on my own, Lord. Kill my sinful self again today and help me to walk with you.”
That is not a downer message from John the Baptist.
It’s a message that urges us to keep following the God we know in Jesus Christ, even when we mess up.
Repent every day, live a life of repentance, of turning back to God, because God wants to live beside us now and in perfection in eternity. That should be an uplifting message!
The second part of John’s message was, “the kingdom of heaven is near.”
However crazy or indecipherable our lives can be, we can be sure that God is never far from from us.
That was true even before God took on human flesh in Jesus Christ and died and rose to set all who believe in Him free from sin and death.
It’s even more true now.
The risen Jesus promises to always be with us!
Verse 3: “This is he who was spoken of through the prophet Isaiah: ‘A voice of one calling in the desert, ‘Prepare the way for the Lord, make straight paths for him.”’"
The words are from Isaiah 40:3. These were originally words to God’s people Israel when they were exiled. A voice would proclaim that the time was near when God would come and lead His people back home.
Matthew sees that John is like Isaiah’s voice. He came to prepare for God Himself--Jesus--to come into this world and lead us from the wilderness of sin and death into the kingdom of heaven.
In his proclamation that people repent and believe that God’s kingdom was close, John was preparing people to meet Jesus.
It’s how we prepare to meet Jesus too.
We turn from sin, asking God’s help to live as He wills, and we trust that in Jesus, God is with us always!
Verse 4: “John's clothes were made of camel's hair, and he had a leather belt around his waist. His food was locusts and wild honey.” They wouldn’t like John’s attire on those TV fashion shows.
In Malachi 4, in the Old Testament, God promised that before the day of judgment, He would send the prophet Elijah and he would turn people’s hearts back toward the ways of God. Later in Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus makes clear that, at the least, John the Baptist played that prophetic role because Jesus’ ministry, as we saw last week, is the prerequisite for the judgment and the final fulfillment of His kingdom.
In 2 Kings 1:8, we’re told that Elijah was as much of a fashionista as John: “He had a garment of hair and had a leather belt around his waist.”
When John started preaching in his attire, when he only ate food that could be gathered, just as had been true of the ancient Israelites during their wilderness journey before crossing the Jordan into God’s promised land, people gave John their attention.
Verses 5 and 6: “People went out to him from Jerusalem and all Judea and the whole region of the Jordan. Confessing their sins, they were baptized by him in the Jordan River.” We prepare the way for Christ to enter our lives with power and grace when we clear away the obstructions. When we clear away our sin by confessing them to God.
Verses 7-10: “But when he saw many of the Pharisees and Sadducees coming to where he was baptizing, he said to them: 'You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the coming wrath? Produce fruit in keeping with repentance. And do not think you can say to yourselves, "We have Abraham as our father." I tell you that out of these stones God can raise up children for Abraham. The ax is already at the root of the trees, and every tree that does not produce good fruit will be cut down and thrown into the fire."”
We know the Pharisees and Saducees. Good religious folks. Pillars of the faith community. But also smug. Certain that because they were genetic descendants of Abraham, they were on solid ground. There’s no indication that they came to be baptized. Only to check things out. John calls them for being just good church members.
But God doesn’t want church members; God wants disciples!
God wants disciples who make other disciples.
He wants people who, like John the Baptist, follow the Lord, however imperfectly; not people who think that once they’re in the club, they might volunteer for this or that, but never attempt aligning themselves with Christ’s call to follow Him!
In Verses 11 and 12, John says: “‘I baptize you with water for repentance. But after me will come one who is more powerful than I, whose sandals I am not fit to carry. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and with fire. His winnowing fork is in his hand, and he will clear his threshing floor, gathering his wheat into the barn and burning up the chaff with unquenchable fire.’"
Before John, there were baptisms in Judea. They were self-administered. New converts to Judaism washed the sin of being Gentiles away before embracing the purity of the Jewish people. Some Jewish sects asked people to baptize themselves as a sign of renewed commitment to God. John was the first person ever to administer a baptism to other people.
But as John makes clear, his baptism was very different from the one that Jesus would administer, the one that Christians undergo at baptismal fonts like ours.
John’s baptism was only symbolic, the washing of water symbolizing the washing that true repentance brings to our lives.
But the Baptism that Jesus commands, the Sacrament, brings life from the Holy Spirit and the fire of God, burning away impurity and lighting our way through this life to eternity. That is good news. “All who believe and are baptized shall be saved,” Jesus says. John points us to eternal salvation in Christ!
Finally, John, talks about Jesus as judge of all humanity.
But in truth, what we learn from John the Baptist is that, in an ultimate sense, Jesus judges no human being. We are the ones who decide the judgment of eternity over our lives.
We pass sentence on ourselves by the choices we make each day.
The choice we are called to make is not to be perfect or good or religious.
The choice we’re called to make is to live each day in repentance, acknowledging our sins and imperfections, our need of daily reconstruction by Christ, our need of the crucified and risen Christ Himself.
When, by faith, we let Christ and His forgiveness into our lives, we’re walking toward God and His promises for time and eternity and we experience the truth that the Kingdom of heaven is truly near!
We might think that John would be an uncomfortable Christmastime guest in our homes.
But for all his rough edges, all of his incomplete knowledge, and the difficulty of his message, if we truly listen to him, we can hear a man who pointed us to trust in Jesus.
We can hear the Gospel about Jesus, which is good news of great joy for all people. I like to think that a guy like John would have a place at my table any time. Amen!
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