Christ Church (Moscow, ID)

We are well into the back quarter of the calendar year. And we are in the last leg of “ordinary time” in the Christian calendar. Advent is just over a month away. Our world will be made new again soon. But we’re attempting to take the last leg of the journey now. Sinatra sang about the “warm September of his years.” But it is late October now. The leaves are enduring to the end. We should follow their example. So, a sermon on endurance.

The church of Jesus Christ should never allow itself to be manipulated in accordance with the wishes of a particular political party or faction. The church is never to be a partisan institution. At the same time, the church is inescapably political. We are building out an alternative polis, as the apostle Paul teaches us in Philippians. There are times when our citizenship in Heaven (Phil. 3:20) has a direct impact on how we live out our citizenship in our earthly communities. One of the most obvious ways this can happen is when the state legislates immorality.

Many foolishly claim that the state cannot legislate morality, but it is going to be one or the other. They will either legislate on the basis of God’s law (morality) or on the basis of man’s whims (immorality). One of the areas where this can be seen in stark relief is in the area of abortion.

When it comes to living a righteous life the sky really is the limit for the Christian. The greatest problem we face is not that believers in the Lord Jesus Christ set their holiness aims too high. It is that they simply do not believe they have been healed. Grant the wisdom of Scripture when it says, “Be not righteous over much.” But that passage deals with gnat swallower, the OCD law keeper. He stresses over the particulars and even if he is aiming at a broad and full holiness, he can’t help but do so in a stressful way. Our passage moves in another direction entirely. It says that there is no reason whatever to stress about sin, seeing you are dead to it and have been healed to run in the way of God’s commandments.

The commands of God may be lofty, but they are also pleasant. You think, “I can’t rejoice all of the time.” But this thought is joined by another, “I sure would like to.” You may say, “I know that I’m going to worry about something.” But before the words are out of your mouth, you find yourself longing for a world where you wouldn’t have a care. Cynicism about your own ability is fitting. You can’t thread a camel through the eye of a needle. That’s why the text doesn’t say, “Rejoice always, you can do it.” It says, “Rejoice always, the Lord is at hand.”

In his rebellion, man looks to dethrone Christ. He has attempted to cast away Christ’s cords from marriage, legislation, and the economy. But there is no greater place where man is tempted to burst God’s bonds apart than in human emotions. Conversely, the Christian insists Christ is Lord and desires to see the crown rights of Jesus materialize. But you will find this far easier to accomplish in the halls of power than you will in the halls of your own chest.

In literature and in movies, an Easter egg is some little detail that is hidden away. It might be an inside joke, or secret point, or something else that is not immediately obvious on a first reading. The metaphor comes from our custom of hiding Easter egg for our children. And so what could be more fitting than finding just such an Easter egg in one of the gospel’s resurrection accounts?

In order to understand the Triumphal Entry properly, we need to grasp the fact that the Cleansing of the Temple was the culmination of that Triumphal Entry. It was all of a piece. Reading it with the flow of the story in mind, it should remind us of the conclusion of The Odyssey, where the entire build up is learning into the justice that Odysseus will bring to his house. It is a fitting and satisfying conclusion. 

In order to address the subject of ambition rightly, we have to remember some other things first. There is a certain kind of desire that every human being has to deal with, and this is a desire that tends to veer toward envy. If God has not given us the grace of being able to see this in ourselves, we will come into competitive situations motivated in the wrong way entirely. And the same thing is true of our ambitions. Our ambitions will lust after what God has never given.