The Subversive Act of Marriage

[This message was shared tonight during the worshipful worship ceremony of Phil and Julie Hohulin. Phil is a cherished pastoral colleague.]

Julie and Phil, marriage is a subversive act, a defiant refusal to acquiesce to our inborn nature’s desire to go it alone, to have our own way, to be our own gods.

This human default position can be traced right back to the garden of Eden. After Adam and Eve fell into sin, they immediately revealed how sin had taken hold of them.

They hide from God. God asks, “Have you eaten from the tree that I commanded you not to eat from?” Adam: “The woman you put here with me—she gave me some fruit from the tree, and I ate it.” Eve: “The serpent deceived me, and I ate.” So much for “at last, this is bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh.” (Genesis 3:9-13) It’s been mostly every sinner for themselves ever since.

That’s why your marriage, Phil and Julie, which we joyfully celebrate with you today, is a subversive act. Far from hiding from God, you’re asking Him today in Jesus’ name to be the other partner in your marriage. You know that every marriage is meant to involve a man, a woman, and God.

But neither of you is naive. You know that marriage has its enemies. Scripture and the Catechism name them: the devil, the world, and our sinful selves. These enemies can wreak havoc in all of our relationships: marriages, friendships, families, churches, nations. When sin prevails in our lives, we forget God’s will for us: to love God and to love neighbor, even the neighbor with whom we share the marital bed.

Among the passages just read, Jesus speaks of one of the sins by which the devil, the world, and our sinful selves prevents many people from having the marriages God wants for them and prevents others from even considering marriage. That sin is worry or fear.

Jesus says: “...I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothes? Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they? Can any one of you by worrying add a single hour to your life?” (Matthew 6:29-34)

Fear and worry are the opposite of faith. When we know that we have been saved by grace through faith in Christ, we know that God has set us free from sin, death, darkness, and fear. 

That’s why, clapped in a prison cell for preaching Christ and His gospel, Saint Paul could say, “...we are more than conquerors through him who loved us...neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord…” (Romans 8:37-39)

With the psalmist, the Christian can say, “The LORD is my light and my salvation-- whom shall I fear? The LORD is the stronghold of my life-- of whom shall I be afraid?” (Psalm 27:1)

The devil, the world, and our sinful selves can only cause us to cave into the temptations of worry and fear if we fail to rely on Jesus. For those who are married, the reliable presence, grace, and provision of the God we know through Jesus Christ means that, not only do we have eternal life with God, it means that even when pressures and uncertainties assail us in our marriages--when we disagree, when ill-health threatens us, when money gets tight, when the quirks of our spouses get to us (although we know that neither of you have quirks)--God will never fail to forgive, love, and empower us to keep living together and loving one another in this covenant of grace called marriage. 

God’s Word is clear. “Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved,” we’re told (Romans 10:13). And Jesus promises, “...the one who stands firm to the end will be saved” (Matthew 24:13). 

When you follow Jesus Christ, you have nothing to fear and a Lord to be trusted with your whole lives...including your marriage!

So, Julie, Phil, along with everyone else who is here today, I am honored to be with you now and I say good for you for being subversives who dare to trust the God revealed in Jesus! 

Daily seek Him together, individually, and in the fellowship of Christ’s Church and He will reward your faithful subversion, come what may, with a life filled with Him now and forever. God bless you! Amen

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

When Jesus Sets Us Free

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

Luke 8:26-39

Our son Philip was in Haiti on a mission trip a few years back. One evening, his group had several free hours. Their translator, a young man who aspired to be a doctor, gave Phil a tour of the community. They ended up at the young translator’s home. Among his family members was his sister, a young woman, who Phil said, had the most terrible vacuum in her eyes: there, but somehow disconnected and isolated from everyone else. The translator later told Philip, “She has a demon.”

We who live in a Western post-modern world hear stories like that and have our doubts. We deem ourselves too sophisticated to believe that there's such things as demons.

But listen: The book of Genesis tells us that the serpent was the most subtle, the most sneaky and sly of all creatures. If Jesus' encounter with the devil in the wilderness tells us anything, it's that the devil is a master marketer. In some cultures, he puts people under his thumb with overt demon possession. In others, he convinces people that he's not around and so gains free rein to wreak all sorts of havoc to nations, communities, families, individuals, even churches. I am firmly convinced that there really is a devil and that there really are demons.
Luke, the writer of our gospel lesson for this morning, Luke 8:26-39, has traditionally been thought to be a doctor, an educated person. Of all the New Testament writers, who all composed their books and letters in the first-century world's second language, Greek, Luke writes with the greatest vocabulary and the most precision. 

When Luke writes of someone who has a physical ailment that causes them seizures, he makes it clear that the person is suffering from a physical ailment. 

But when Luke reports on someone who suffers a spiritual ailment like demon possession, he gives that information as well. Luke identifies people’s problems with specificity. 

In today’s gospel lesson, Luke 8:26-39, which recounts an event that occurred in Gentile territory on the eastern banks of the Galilee, where steep cliffs meet the sea, Jesus and His disciples encounter a man possessed by demons. 

Not just one demon, but a legion of demons. Legion was a term used in the first-century world for a 5000-man unit of the Roman army. So, a regiment of demons had taken hold of this young man. Luke doesn’t explain how they came to take up residence in the young man. But he does explain what happens when Jesus takes on the evil of the world, the devil, and our sinful selves that can engulf us. 

And he does show us the appropriate response of those set free from evil by Jesus. 

It's these two things we see in this passage.
In verses 26-29, Jesus and the disciples come ashore in the region of the ten Greek cities established in territory once conquered by Alexander the Great, the decapolis. They encounter this demon-possessed man. Of him, Luke says, “For a long time this man had not worn clothes or lived in a house, but had lived in the tombs.” (Luke 8:37)

When evil or sin holds sway in our lives, it isolates us from God and others. The great commandment in which Jesus summarizes God’s will for human beings calls us to love God and to love others, to live in community with others. This doesn’t mean we should never have times of solitude, times when we seek out the Lord in Scripture and prayer. Jesus needed such times and we do too. 

But God made us to be communal beings. God created Eve, you’ll remember, because He said that it wasn’t good for Adam to live alone. “How good and pleasant it is when God's people live together in unity!” David wrote in Psalm 133:1. The demon-possessed man lived among the tombs of the dead, in “solitary places.”

The legion of demons possessing the man, as spiritual beings, fallen angels, immediately know who Jesus is. 

Jesus sets out to free the man victimized by this demonic occupation, calling the demons out. The demons are afraid that Jesus is going to send them to “the abyss,” the place of the dead and the damned, what we call hell, a place of isolation from God, a place devoid of life and love. 

Since they’re in a Gentile enclave, a place not constrained by Jewish dietary laws which prohibited eating pork, there’s a herd of 2000 pigs nearby. Jesus sends the demons into the pigs, who run over the cliffs into the sea below.

Jesus has set the man free! That should have been a cause for celebration in the community. A man had been set free from evil. But all the pig herders see is that Jesus used some sort of supernatural power to send their business assets to the bottom of the Sea of Galilee. They run into town and the surrounding area to report this outrage.

One of the worst traits of our fallen human race is how readily we accept sin and evil, how easily we see the suffering of others as “normal.” As Canadian rock musician Bruce Cockburn says, “The trouble with normal is it always gets worse.” 

Instead of being concerned for the demon-possessed man, the pig herders (and the other people of the nearby town, as we’ll see) had come to accept his affliction as a permanent state of being. 

Are there people whose suffering we simply accept? 

Are there people subjected to injustice and mistreatment about which we say nothing because we don’t want to rock any boats, especially our own? 

Are there people to whose daily walk with sin and death we have simply become resigned, with no thought of praying for them, or sharing Jesus with them, or helping them?

When the people of the town go out to the fields to check things out, finding all the pigs dead and the once demon-possessed man clothed and in his right mind, they’re terrified that Jesus had disrupted their “normal.” 

“Then,” verse 37 of our gospel lesson tells us, “all the people of the region of the Gerasenes asked Jesus to leave them, because they were overcome with fear.” 

Do you know why most people, even people on the membership rolls of churches, don’t want to have too much to do with Jesus? Because they’re afraid (we all can be afraid) that Jesus is going to change our lives, our “normal”. 

Set eternally free from sin and death by what Jesus has done for us, we’re afraid that He might call us to live differently, to think differently. 

He might call us spend our time and money differently. 

He might call us to love the unlovable, serve the needy, help others to know Jesus, fight injustice, pray for the spread of the gospel.

“Please, go away, Jesus,” the people of town beg Jesus. 

Jesus will never go where He’s not invited. Which is why I make it a point on many Fridays at the end of my office hours, to walk around this building, going into every room, to invite Jesus to come and be Lord over this place and over the people who enter it. 

I ask that Jesus will make the presence of God’s Holy Spirit unavoidable when people come here. 

I touch every seat in the sanctuary, as well as  the pulpit, the piano, the altar, the baptismal font, the music stands, the keyboard, the drum, the mixer board, and the video equipment and I ask Jesus to be Lord of everyone who sits here and of everything that’s in here that we would live in the confidence and hope of knowing that we are saved by grace through faith in Jesus and that we will go into the world filled with the Holy Spirit, empowered to share Jesus with others, ready to welcome Jesus into every part of our own lives!

When Jesus leaves the Decapolis at the request of the villagers, the man from whom Jesus cast out the demons wants to go with Him. But Jesus says that the man needs to stay. “Return home and tell how much God has done for you,” Jesus says (Luke 8:39). 

Jesus calls some people to be witnesses for Him as missionaries in South Africa, like Claire Brown, who will be speaking here on July 14. 

He calls others to take mission trips to Haiti; others to visit and pray with folks at hospitals; others to help and to share the Bible with victims of tornadoes; others to meet privately with people around God’s Word to nurture them in the faith. 

All of us are called to share the good news of new life through faith in the crucified and risen Jesus in our everyday lives. 

We’re to share what God has done for us in Jesus, even with those who want Jesus to go away. 

Luke tells us that, at Jesus' command, “the man [once filled with demons] went away and told all over town how much Jesus had done for him” (Luke 8:39). 

One day, believers will be with Jesus. 

But for now, our call is the same one given to the man by Jesus that day: to live for Him and share Him with people right where we are. Amen

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

Winker Amazingly Avoids Tag

In the Reds' 7-1 win over the Brewers last night, Jesse Winker pulled what's been called a Matrix move to elude the tag at third to record a triple. Pretty amazing.



But more than the Matrix diversionary moves, Winker's hurdle over the third baseman reminds me of the hurdling of Chris "Beanie" Wells, the Ohio State running back, during the 2008 season.





But, back to baseball, a cleaner jump for a score was turned in by the Toronto Blue Jays' Chris Coghlan back in 2017.


All pretty amazing stuff!

A Prayer: "A public office is a public trust"

Once again last evening, I was able to share the Invocation for the Centerville City Council. This was the prayer:

Heavenly Father, a public office is a public trust. That may get lost in the routine rhythms and challenges of meetings and decision-making. But it’s precisely in the midst of the routine, the seemingly ordinary, that the members of this city council are to fulfill the responsibilities of their offices. Even the most routine of decisions in all of our lives can have an enormous impact on others. So, as this city council meets again tonight, give its members Your wisdom. Grant that they will treat the routine duties they discharge tonight for what they are: opportunities to do Your will, to love You and to love their neighbors in practical ways. In Jesus’ name. Amen

Sharing this prayer on Facebook tonight, I wrote:

Scripture enjoins us to pray for leaders, whether we agree with them or not. The apostle Paul wrote to the young pastor, Timothy, "I urge, then, first of all, that petitions, prayers, intercession and thanksgiving be made for all people--for kings and all those in authority, that we may live peaceful and quiet lives in all godliness and holiness." (1 Timothy 2:1-2) 

This is a remarkable passage in that Paul is telling Timothy that the people of Christ's Church in the first-century Roman Empire were to pray for those in authority, even despots like the Roman Emperors, for the sake of the people they govern. 

This doesn't mean that we need to support leaders' agendas or obey them when and if they are unjust, cruel, or hateful. In fact, Christians have an obligation to not conform to such "leadership," even as we pray for those who wield authority in evil ways. Paul writes in the New Testament book of Romans, "Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind." (Romans 12:2)

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

The Holy Trinity: How God Loves

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

John 8:48-59

Two-thousand years before the birth of Jesus, three strangers appeared beneath the oak trees at a place called Mamre, where a husband and wife and their party were staying. The couple had come from a place in what we know today as Iraq, Ur. Practicing the hospitality that was part of their faith in the God they had come to know and worship, the couple--Abraham and Sarah--welcomed the threesome to their dwelling and fed them a feast. Over the course of their visit, the three made a promise that in one year, Sarah, an old woman, would give birth to the son promised to them by God. They come to realize that they are in the presence of God.

Later, the three strangers engage in a private conversation. “Shall I hide from Abraham what I am about to do? [they ask] Abraham will surely become a great and powerful nation, and all nations on earth will be blessed through him. For I have chosen him, so that he will direct his children and his household after him to keep the way of the Lord by doing what is right and just, so that the Lord will bring about for Abraham what he has promised him.” [Genesis 18:17-19] 

Was God talking to Himself? 

Yes, said Saint Augustine, a 4th century Christian scholar and founder of the Augustinian order of monks of which Martin Luther would be a member four millennia after Abraham and Sarah welcomed the Lord--Yahweh, I AM. In that conversation among the three leaving Abraham, God was talking to Himself, Augustine believed. I agree with Augustine.

If so, it’s not the first time the Bible records God doing that. In Genesis 1:26, we’re told that God spoke to Himself: “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness...”

These Bible passages give us hints at what Jesus later made explicit in the Great Commission, that there is one God in three persons: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. God’s three-in-one nature is part of the mystery of God’s identity and being, but the Trinity--a term never used in the Bible that we use to describe what God has revealed about Himself--is more than just an odd theological concept. God’s triune nature is essential to Who He is, whether we’re ever able to fully understand it or not.

From the oaks at Mamre, fast forward two thousand years to our Gospel lesson. Jesus is in the temple in Jerusalem. He’s teaching. He’s met opposition. Among the opponents are those who had believed in Him, but are now turned off by the challenge of being His disciples. (That happens a lot.) These people are so upset with Jesus that they accuse Him of having a demon [John 8:48]. (They also accuse Him of being a Samaritan, reflecting their prejudice against folks from Samaria.)

Jesus then ushers them (and us) into the mysterious realm of the Holy Trinity. “I am not possessed by a demon,” said Jesus, “but I honor my Father and you dishonor me. I am not seeking glory for myself; but there is one who seeks it, and he is the judge. Very truly I tell you, whoever obeys my word will never see death.” Jesus is pointing to the Father Who judges sin. Jesus seeks to bring the Father glory, not Himself, just as the Father seeks glory for Jesus, not Himself.

This is the nature of the love that exists within the Trinity: self-giving love that doesn’t seek for itself, self-sufficient love that didn’t need to create the universe or the human race in God’s image, but chooses to do so out of pure, giving love. It was this same love, Jesus said, that brought Him to the world. "For God so loved the world that He gave His one and only Son..."

If you really honored God, Jesus tells His fellow Jews, you would see that I am God and you would honor Me too. The crowd is scandalized. “Now we know that you are demon-possessed! Abraham died and so did the prophets, yet you say that whoever obeys your word will never taste death. Are you greater than our father Abraham? He died, and so did the prophets. Who do you think you are?” Jesus replied, “If I glorify myself, my glory means nothing. My Father, whom you claim as your God, is the one who glorifies me. Though you do not know him, I know him. If I said I did not, I would be a liar like you, but I do know him and obey his word. Your father Abraham rejoiced at the thought of seeing my day; he saw it and was glad.”

This pious crowd is paralyzed with anger at Jesus. Who did He think that He was? They should know the answer to that question by now. They should remember what the three strangers--identified in our English translations of our Bibles as L-O-R-D, all four letters capitalized, translating Yahweh--I AM, the name God, would reveal to be His own to Moses--had said that day by the oaks of Mamre. Yahweh had said: “Abraham will surely become a great and powerful nation, and all nations on earth will be blessed through him.” [Genesis 18:18]

It was through Jesus that God’s promise to Abraham that Abraham and all people who trust in Yahweh would be made righteous and would become a great eternal nation, the kingdom of God. Through God the Son made flesh, all who turn from sin and believe, are members of God’s new creation. 

Abraham, Jesus says, had heard this promise and if Abraham had been standing in the temple that day, he would have been filled with joy. But the crowd of skeptics in John 8 aren't thinking as Jesus says Abraham would think at all. Verse 57: “You are not yet fifty years old,” they said to him, “and you have seen Abraham!” “Very truly I tell you,” Jesus answered, “before Abraham was born, I am!”

Jesus’ response isn’t grammatical. But it is definitive. Yes, Jesus is saying, I know exactly what Abraham thought. Not only am I older than Abraham, I made Abraham. I gave life to everything that breathes and moves. “Before Abraham was born, Yahweh, I AM!”

Now, this is such a stunning claim that if it isn’t true--if Jesus isn’t, as we sing at Christmas, God in flesh appearing, if He isn’t the second person of the triune God, the crowd would be right to be scandalized. As C.S. Lewis’ famous formulation puts it, either Jesus is a liar; a madman, or precisely who He claims to be. As Lewis writes: “You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God; or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronising nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.”

Jesus didn’t intend for the crowd in the temple to see Him as a great teacher or a magnetic leader who might give them what they wanted. Jesus wanted them (and us) to see is that He is the loving God of the universe in human flesh, Who bears our sin and death on the cross and is raised by the Father to bring the death of sin and death to all who trust in Him. 

It’s to help the people who are rejecting Him in our lesson to see Who He is that Jesus provokes a confrontation with them. It’s why He provokes a confrontation with us in every burning word of Scripture. 

Is Jesus God in the flesh? 

Is He the incarnation of the God that Abraham saw back at the oaks of Mamre? 

If He is, then why would any of us mess around with living lives of unrepentant sin, that break faith with our Creator and our Redeemer, that dehumanize us, that fail to love God or neighbor? Why would we insist on our right to take His name in vain? Why would we justify adultery, in mind or body? Why would we make excuses for murder, physically or through the poison of gossip? Why would we want to take ourselves and our own desires more seriously than we do the will of the One Who made us and brought salvation to us on the cross? Why do we often choose to worry rather than trust in Him? It was for these sins and more that Jesus died for you and me and seeks to set us free, covering them over with His forgiving grace, and putting us at liberty to live as human beings are meant to live.

On hearing Jesus’ claim to be God, verse 59 says: “At this, they picked up stones to stone him, but Jesus hid himself, slipping away from the temple grounds.”

As I reflect on this passage, I wonder, did the crowd want to stone Jesus because they thought He was dishonoring-- blaspheming-- 

God? Or did they want to stone Him because they knew that He was God enfleshed and saw their chance to take advantage of His weakness, His voluntary acceptance of the limits of humanity? 

“This is the heir,” the tenants in Jesus’ parable in Matthew’s gospel say of the son who stands for Jesus in the story. “Come, let’s kill him and take his inheritance.” Going all the way back to the garden, humanity has been looking for a way to declare our independence of our Maker, to “be like God.” It was for this reason that the world would later crucify Jesus. Get rid of God and the sinners can run the concentration camp, the lunatics can run the asylum!

“But,” as Peter says in the Pentecost sermon, a part of which makes up our second lesson today, “God raised [Jesus] from the dead.” 

And it’s here that we see the practical implications of this strange doctrine of the Trinity. It was out of love that God the Father sent God the Son. It was this same love that caused the Father to bring Jesus back to life. Not love for Himself, but from love for the Son and love for us that the Father raised the Son to new life and through Him, raises all who trust in Jesus to new life. 

Without God’s triune nature then, we could not know that "God is love." Without God's triune nature, we could not be saved. 

Nor could we know or believe in this God, because it’s God the Holy Spirit, the comforter sent in love by God to call us to faith, who makes it possible for us to believe and to have life in Jesus’ name.

If you remember nothing else about the Trinity, remember this: It’s from the love that God has known within Himself--the love the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit have for each other--that He loves you and makes you His own through Christ. 

The Trinity is how God loves. It's also how He loves us. Three times over, He loves us, and we are eternally the richer for it! Amen

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