Living Words

A Sermon for the Eleventh Sunday after Trinity

1 Corinthians 15:1-11 & St. Luke 18:9-14

by William Klock

 

“Two men went up to the temple to pray,” Jesus said.  The temple was the place where heaven and earth met.  The place where men and women could go to be in the presence of God.  Twice a day the priests would lead the people in prayers, at nine in the morning and at three in the afternoon, but people could go any time to pray and they did.  They still do.  Jews today gather at the Western Wall, not technically the temple, but part of the foundation of the temple complex and all that was left after the Romans brought it all crashing down.  Jews still go there to pray.  Two men climbed the steps to the temple courts to pray.  “One of them,” Jesus said, “was a Pharisee.”  It was perfectly fine to pray at home, but if anyone was going to go and pray at the temple, it would be a Pharisee.  Their “thing” was to live their lives as if they served in the temple.  They weren’t Levites and they weren’t priests, but they took great pains to always remain ritually pure like the Levites did.  They would have been some of the most regular men to say their prayers in the temple instead of just at home.

 

But there were two men, Jesus said, who went up to the temple.  “The other was a tax collector.”  You could almost hear the boos and the hisses and “Eew, gross!”.  Tax collectors didn’t belong in the temple.  Jews had a whole category for people who had forsaken God’s law.  They called them “sinners”.  These weren’t people who slipped up and did bad things occasionally.  Everyone did that—even the Pharisees—but they still loved God, they still loved his covenant and his law, and the law made provision for atonement and they availed themselves of it.  “Sinners”, on the other hand, they were people who had no regard for God’s law.  If they sinned, they didn’t care and they didn’t seek atonement.  They were Jews—ethnically speaking, at least—but they basically rejected or, at least, had no respect for the covenant.  But in those days there was one special class of “sinner” that was singled out because of just how awful they were: tax collectors.  So people would talk about “sinners and tax collectors”.  Tax collectors didn’t just sin—they got rich stealing from and swindling their own people.  They were collaborators with the evil, unclean Romans.

 

So Jesus went on with his story: “Standing, the Pharisee prayed to himself like this, ‘God, I give thanks to you that I am not like other men—like the greedy, like the unjust, like adulterers—or like this tax collector.  I fast twice a week.  I give a tenth of everything I earn.”  Everyone pictured the Pharisee, confidently making his way up the steps to the temple complex, confidently walking across the outer court—the place they called the Court of the Gentiles, because that’s as close to the temple as the Gentiles could go.  And they pictured him confidently passing through the gate into the Court of the Women and then, still confidently, striding across that outer court and into the inner Court of Israel—the place where the great altar was, where the priests offered their sacrifices.  And he boldly went and stood at the base of the steps leading up into the temple itself and he lifted up his hands and he prayed.  And it was normal to pray out loud in those days, but he made a point of raising his voice so that everyone could hear his prayer, and he thanked the God of Israel that he was not like other men.  His prayer of thanksgiving becomes a thinly veiled boast of his own faithfulness to God’s law—especially as he turns his head and looks back to the tax collector who just barley dared to pass through the gate and was practically hiding behind a column.

 

In stark contrast, “The tax collector,” Jesus said, “standing far off, didn’t even want to lift his eyes to heaven.  Instead, he beat his breast, saying ‘God, have mercy on me a sinner.’”

 

 

While the Pharisee strode proudly into the temple, the poor tax collector kneels—or maybe he even prostrates himself on the ground—off on the fringes, hiding in the shadows or behind a column and quietly utters his humble prayer for mercy.  The Pharisee—at least as far as he was concerned—he belonged there.  But the tax collector.  He was a sinner and he knew it.  He did not belong in the presence of the holy.  Other people made that clear and he probably believed it himself.  But he was desperate for God’s mercy and this was the place to ask for it.  What happened to the tax collector that brought him to the temple?  Jesus doesn’t say. For all we know, Jesus could be telling Matthew’s story here.  Maybe he was one of those people to whom Jesus had pronounced, “Your sins are forgiven.  Go and sin no more.”  And so he followed it up the only way he knew how, by turning over a new leaf, by ritually purifying himself, and by going to the temple to fall on the mercy of the Lord.

 

“This one—the tax collector,” said Jesus, “he went down to his house justified, not the other one.”  Why?  “Because everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, but the one who humbles himself will be exalted.”

 

Now, there’s an interesting twist in the tale.  If you were following along in Luke 18 or if you were paying careful attention when the Gospel was read earlier, you might have noticed that I left out Luke’s introduction.  At the beginning, Luke introduces the parable, writing, “Jesus told this parable to some who were confident in themselves, because they were righteous and looked down on others.”  In Greek, “righteous” and “just” are the same word, so Luke plays with that here.  Jesus told this parable to some who were confident in themselves, because they were righteous (or just).  The point is that they knew—they were certain they were “in”.  Whenever the Lord came to judge the wicked and to deliver his people and to set the world to rights, they knew they’d be on God’s side.  They knew they had a place in his presence in the age to come.  But then in the end, who is it who goes home justified or in the right?  It’s not the righteous Pharisee, but the tax collector who prayed for God’s mercy.

 

It's not that the Pharisee—whether the one in the parable or the ones Jesus was telling the parable to—it’s not that they weren’t righteous.  By all accounts they were.  They were obedient to the law.  They weren’t perfect, but if they made a mistake, they offered the appropriate sacrifices.  That was part of being faithful to the law, too.  They took part in the atonement for sins offered through the temple.  They were righteous.  And they were the opposite of the tax collector.  The tax collector had no regard for God, for his law, or for his covenant.  The Pharisee loved God’s law; the tax collector trampled all over it.  And I think it’s important to add that it wasn’t just the Pharisees.  When Luke says that Jesus told this to people who were confident in themselves because they were righteous, that included most of the people.  The Pharisees may have set the bar higher than it needed to be, but the majority, most people who say themselves as good and upstanding Jews had this same problem.  They were confident of their position before the Lord because they knew they kept his law: they were circumcised, they kept the sabbath, they ate only clean food, and they avoided gentiles.

 

And yet, at the end of the story, Jesus says, it’s not the righteous or the just man who goes away justified—meaning declared by God to be in the right.  It’s the scummy, unrighteous tax collector.  Why?  Well, to answer that we need to ask what Jesus meant that he went home justified.  To be justified is to be found or to be declared to be “in the right”.

 

Think of a courtroom.  Plaintiff and a defendant bring their case before a judge, they explain the circumstances and present their evidence, and the judge makes a ruling.  The judge declares one of them to be in the right.  The judge vindicates one of them.  Maybe it’s the defendant, who proves his innocence to the judge.  Or maybe it’s the plaintiff, who proves to the judge that he is truly the victim.  One of them goes home vindicated by the judge.  He goes home declared to be in the right.  He goes home justified.  But what’s the judge’s basis for determining who is in the right?

 

We really have to do is go back to the Old Testament and to the beginning of Israel’s story.  Think about Abraham in Genesis 15.  That’s where this got started.  The Lord made a promise to Abraham—to give him a land and to give him a son and to make him a great nation.  And it was absurd.  Abraham went to the promised land and lived there—but he was just one man and even as rich as he was, with flocks and herds and servants, he only ever occupied the smallest corner of that land.  And there he was, almost one hundred and his wife ninety—long past child-bearing years.  How could he, a childless man ever become a great nation?  But the Lord made a promise to him and Abraham believed.  And, we’re told, the Lord counted that belief, that faith, as righteousness.  Because Abraham believed that the Lord not only could, but somehow would pull off this crazy promise, he was counted as being in the right.  There was no way any of it could happen, but Abraham trusted in the faithfulness of the Lord anyway.  And in that, Abraham set the standard by which the Lord recognised his people: faith.  Later the torah would mark out this people of faith as a special people, visibly different from everyone else, but long before the torah there was faith, and faith was ultimately what it always was and always would be that marks out the people of God—faith in the God who promises crazy things and then never fails to do them.

 

And this theme echoes all the way through Israel’s story.  It was the message of the Prophet Habakkuk who lived during the last decades of the kingdom of Judah, in the years before Jerusalem was defeated and destroyed by the Babylonians and the people taken off into exile.  Habakkuk looked around him and saw the wickedness and idolatry of his own people and, very much like the psalmists, he cried out to the Lord.  This is the opening of his lament.

 

O Lord, how long shall I cry for help,

         and you will not hear?

Or cry to you “Violence!”

         and you will not save?

Why do you make me see iniquity,

         and why do you idly look at wrong?

Destruction and violence are before me;

         strife and contention arise.

So the law is paralyzed,

         and justice never goes forth.

For the wicked surround the righteous;

         so justice goes forth perverted. (Habakkuk 1:1-4)

 

Habakkuk knew that things weren’t the way they were supposed to be and he knew the promises of the Lord to his people and he and so many others had cried out and cried out—for centuries—and things only got worse.  Wickedness and idolatry multiplied and from their perspective it seemed like the Lord wasn’t listening and that he was refusing to act.  Judah’s situation seemed as hopeless to Habakkuk as Abraham’s situation must have once seemed to him.  But that was just it.  Habakkuk knew that the Lord is faithful and so he continued to cry out.  He trusted the Lord.  He had faith, that one characteristic that defines the people of God above all else.

 

But then the Lord responds.  He tells Habakkuk that he has seen the state of his people and that he is going to visit them, but that he will be dealing with their problem by sending the Babylonians to defeat them.  That wasn’t what Habakkuk wanted to hear.  He argues with the Lord.  The Babylonians are even more wicked and idolatrous than the people of Judah.  How can defeat by them possibly be the Lord’s solution?  And the Lord responds and assures Habakkuk that while Babylon may be his instrument of justice against Judah, Babylon herself—and all the nations—will be held accountable and will one day be judged.  The cycle of violence will be broken and everything will be set to rights.  One day, he says, the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord, as the waters cover the sea.  It’s another one of those impossible promises—maybe even more impossible than the promise he made to Abraham.  But what do the Lord’s people do in the meantime?

 

Here's the Lord’s answer—and Jesus’ parable points us right back to these words.  The Lord says to Habakkuk in 2:4:

 

Look at the proud!

         His spirit is presumptuous and is not right

But the righteous shall live by faith.

 

The world is falling apart.  Everything is wrong.  The wicked prosper and are proud and presume on the Lord’s faithfulness and the righteous are oppressed.  By all human appearances it doesn’t sound like the Lord is even listening.  But those who continue to live by faith in the midst of tribulation, those who remember the Lord’s promises in the midst of persecution, those who steep themselves in the story of the Lord and his people and remember his faithfulness, those who continue to trust in him, they are the ones who will be vindicated by the Lord when he does come in judgement on the wicked.  They are the ones who will remain faithful to the Lord and to his covenant, even when all the proud people around them do evil and bow to idols, they will remain faithful, because they know and because they trust that the Lord is always faithful.  I hope that’s an encouraging word for you already, but first we need to go back to Jesus’ story about the two men in the temple.

 

There’s the proud Pharisee.  By the standard of the law, he is in the right.  And there’s the scummy tax collector.  By the standard of the law, he’s in the wrong.  And yet in the end, it’s the tax collector who goes home and is found to be in the right.  If this were one of Jesus’ “kingdom stories” it would be the tax collector who is welcomed into the kingdom, while the Pharisee is left in the outer darkness, weeping and gnashing his teeth.  The tax collector would escape the coming judgement and know the life of the kingdom, while the coming judgement would fall on the Pharisee right along with all the other wicked in Israel.  Why?  Because below, underlying the law—it’s foundation—was faith in the Lord.  A faith that humbly trusted in his promises.  A faith that humbly trusted in his grace.  A faith in the sufficiency of the Lord, instead of the sufficiency of self.  A faith that would rejoice in the presence of the Messiah and a faith that rejoice over the repentance of sinners.

 

Over and over Jesus was clear.  He came not to the righteous, but to seek out the lost sheep of the house of Israel.  At least in theory, the righteous were fine.  They should have been expecting this all along.  They were the ones who knew the scriptures so well, after all.  But, ironically, they got angry when Jesus went to the lost sheep.  And so Jesus told them stories to explain the joy in heaven over sinners who repent.  The Lord is like the widow who seeks and eventually finds her lost coin.  He’s like the shepherd who goes to great lengths to find his lost sheep.  He’s like the father, rejoicing and throwing a party when his prodigal son returns home.  But so many in Israel were like the proud and resentful older brother.  They’d been doing the right thing all along.  Why wasn’t Jesus throwing a party for them?  And so, in their pride, they refused to enter the house and were left out in the darkness gnashing their teeth.  And it would be like that, only much, much worse when judgement came.  Because the law was not enough.  Because in Jesus, the Lord was doing something new.  In Jesus he was fulfilling his promises.  In Jesus he was making a new people who would be finally and truly fit for the kingdom, a people forgiven once and for all and a people filled with God’s own Spirit, a people with his law of love written on their hearts—a people fit for God’s new creation.  When Jesus told people they needed a righteousness greater than the Pharisees if they wanted to take part in the kingdom, that’s what he was getting at.  The Lord was finally giving something better than the law written on stone tablets.  He was about to make a people with his law of love written on their hearts.  But that people was centred in Jesus.  So only those who trusted in this Messiah—this Messiah who was so different from their expectations—only those humble enough to recognise the new thing the Lord was doing in Jesus and to live by faith, trusting that Jesus really is the Lord’s answer to all the problems of the world, only they will go home justified.  Only they will be able to be part of the kingdom—forgiven and filled with the Spirit, because of their faith in Jesus.

 

This is what St. Paul is getting at in our Epistle from 1 Corinthians 15.  He declares once again the good news about Jesus the Messiah who died and was buried and who rose again according to the scriptures.  And he talks about the twelve who saw him and believed and about the five hundred who saw him and believed.  And then there was Paul.  He heard the message, but he was one of those proud Pharisees, confident that he already had the right answers, confident that he knew how the Lord was going to deliver his people—and, most of all, confident that it wasn’t through Jesus.  The gospel was blasphemy as far as he was concerned.  And so, he writes, he persecuted the church.  And yet there’s hope.  Paul was stuck.  He had a mountain of faith, but it wasn’t in Jesus.  The torah had been preparing Israel for Jesus all those centuries, but Paul and so many others just couldn’t see it, couldn’t make the leap.  But even as he persecuted the church, the Lord was at work to transform Paul.  “But by the grace of God I am what I am,” he writes, “and his grace toward me was not in vain. On the contrary, I worked harder than any of them, though it was not I, but the grace of God that is with me.”

 

Brothers and Sisters, there’s that righteousness greater than that of the Pharisees.  There’s the faith that humbles the proud and brings even the greatest sinner into the kingdom.  Not because the faith is so great, but because it’s in Jesus the Messiah.  It’s a faith that brings forgiveness and the life of the Spirit.  Habakkuk wrote that the just shall live by faith and that’s precisely what Jesus’ people do.  He gives us the very life of God, because we trust in him.  And that life he gives—the law of love written on our hearts, the experience of God’s love and faithfulness revealed so dramatically in our Saviour—that life fills our hearts with a faith that overflows.  And that, Brothers and Sisters, is how we live in this in-between time.  It’s how those first Christians lived through the devastation of Jerusalem’s destruction.  It’s how the next generation lived through Rome’s persecution.  It’s how the saints lived, even as they were thrown to the lions.  It’s how the saints still live in many parts of the world, imprisoned because they live by faith, tortured because they live by faith, martyred because they live by faith.  And it’s how the saints have lived in the midst of a world that still isn’t right, that still anticipates the final consummation of the Lord’s new creation.  We live by faith as we struggle in our work..  We live by faith as we struggle with illness or frailty or cancer.  We live by faith as we struggle to bring justice and mercy to a world that is so unmerciful and lacking in justice.  We live by faith as we face droughts and floods and forest fires.  We live by faith in the midst of difficult and broken relationships.  And we live by faith as we live out our calling to proclaim the good news about Jesus in a world that thinks us fools; faithful to our calling to holiness in a world filled with idolatry and sin.  It’s how we live in hope, like Habakkuk, like the Apostles, like they martyrs, looking past this broken world and the evils of our time, and knowing that the Lord is faithful to his promises, that he will set this world to rights, and that in Jesus, he will surely finish what he has begun—we know he will, because he always has.

 

Let’s pray: Lord God, you declare your almighty power most chiefly in showing mercy and pity: mercifully grant to us such a measure of your grace, that we, running the way of your commandments, may receive your gracious promises, and be made partakers of your heavenly treasure; through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord, who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.  Amen.

A Sermon for the Tenth Sunday after Trinity

1 Corinthians 12:1-11 & St. Luke 19:41-47

by William Klock

 

Imagine being in the crowds that surrounded Jesus as he made his way through the towns and cities to Jerusalem for the last time.  By now, everyone knew who he was—or, at any rate, who he claimed to be.  There were sceptics.  There were believers.  A lot of people weren’t sure what to believe.  He wasn’t what people expect of the Messiah, but he was doing Messiah things.  He was healing the sick and the blind and the lame.  He cast out demons.  He raised the dead.  He preached good news to the poor.  Think of the crowds in Jericho, the last city before Jesus climbed the mountain to Jerusalem.  The crowds swarmed the road to see him, he’d healed blind Bartimaeus, and that thing with Zacchaeus!  That little twerp had spent his traitorous life selling out to the Romans and ripping everyone off, but since he’d met Jesus he was a new man—even paying everyone back what he’d stolen.  Everywhere that Jesus went, the promises of the Prophets of old were finally being fulfilled.  Despite all the questions people had about him, there was definitely something about Jesus.  That, and Passover was just days away.  Jesus plus Jerusalem plus Passover!  Surely something big was about to happen!  Maybe the day of the Lord really was just around the corner and that got everyone out and lining the road as Jesus came through town.

 

And then, on his way out of town, Jesus stopped and looked around.  The crowd went silent.  He was about to say something.  “There was once a nobleman,” Jesus said, “who went to a far country to be given royal authority and then return.  He summoned ten of his slaves and gave them ten silver coins.  ‘Do business with these,’ he said, ‘until I come back.’  His subjects, however, hated him, and sent a delegation after him to say, ‘We don’t want this man to be our king.’

 

“So it happened that when he received the kingship and came back again, he gave orders to summon these slaves who had received the money, so that he could find out how they had got on with their business efforts.  The first came forward and said, ‘Master, your money has made ten times its value!”

 

“ ‘Well done, good and faithful servant!” he said.   ‘You’ve been faithful with something small; now you can take command of ten cities.’

 

“The second came and said, ‘Master, your money has made five times its value!’

 

“ ‘You too—you can take charge of five cities.’

 

“The other came and said, ‘Master, here is your money.  I kept it safe, hidden away in this handkerchief.  I was afraid of you, knowing that you are a hard man.  You profit where you made no investment and you harvest where you did not sow.’

 

“ ‘I’ll condemn you out of your own mouth, you wicked servant!  You knew that I’m a hard man, profiting where I haven’t invested and harvesting where I haven’t sown, so why didn’t you at least put my money in the bank?  Then, at least, I’d have earned some interest when I got back!”

 

“ ‘Take the money from him,’ he said to the bystanders, ‘and give it to the man who turned my one coin into ten!’ (‘Master,’ they said to him, ‘he’s got ten coins already!’)

 

And then paused and he looked around at the crowd and his face was sombre and the people could tell, he wasn’t just telling a story anymore.  Now he was the king from the story talking directly to them

 

“ ‘Let me be clear,” he said, “To everyone who has will be given more; but if someone has nothing, even what he has will be taken away from him.  But as for these enemies of mine, who didn’t want me to be king over them—bring them here and slaughter them in front of me.”

 

And with that, Luke says that Jesus went on his way, setting out on that winding road up to Jerusalem.  No further interactions with the crowd.  No further commentary.  Did the people understand?  I think they must have.  Of course, the problem was—as so often seems to be the case—everyone was pointing fingers at everyone else.  Jesus the Messiah had come to judge—to bring God’s justice—but it was the other guys who were the problem.  The Pharisees looked down on everyone who wasn’t a Pharisee.  The Essenes looked down on everyone who wasn’t an Essene.  The am ha’artez—the regular Joes—they looked down in return on those other folks because they were always looking down on everyone else.  And the Sadducees?  Pfft.  Judgement.  It’ll never happen—just like the resurrection of the dead will never happen.  But everyone understood what Jesus was saying.  He was the king finally coming back to see what his servants have been up to in his absence.  The crowds already saw Jesus as part of the story of Israel.  If he was the Messiah, then he was the rightful king returning to Zion to take his throne—just like the king in the parable.  And that—if Jesus really was the Messiah—that meant the day of the Lord—the day when God would judge the wicked and vindicate the righteous—that meant it was coming—almost here—just like in the parable.

 

So this was the day the prophets had spoken of.  The Jewish exiles had returned to Jerusalem from Babylon hundreds of years before, they’d rebuilt the city and the temple, but the Lord’s presence had never returned.  The temple, as glorious as it was—especially after Solomon’s recent renovations—the temple sat empty.  The priests went about their business of offerings and sacrifices, but the cloud of glory that had once rested on the ark of the covenant, the presence of the God of Israel, had never returned and, because of that, the people questioned whether their exile had really ever ended.  They were back in the promised land, but the most important part of the promised land—the presence of the Lord—was still missing.  The prophet Malachi had announced that the “the Lord whom you seek” would come to the temple, but that he would come in fiery judgement.  Zechariah, too, spoke of the Lord, one day, finally, returning to Zion.  Again, everyone would have understood Jesus’ story.  He was saying that in him, the Lord was finally returning to Jerusalem as he had promised through the Prophets.  And Jesus has left them with that big question: Who will stand before the Lord’s judgement.

 

And the part of the story about the talents entrusted to the servants made perfect sense to the people.  That was them.  They knew that the Lord had given them a purpose.  They knew that the Lord had called Abraham, that he had delivered their ancestors from Pharoah’s bondage, that he had led them to the promised land to be a light in the midst of the nations—a witness to what it looks like to be the people who live with the Creator God in their midst.  They knew that their ancestors had gone off into exile in judgement for their faithlessness and idolatry.  And that judgement still hung over them.  The people of Israel were called to be stewards of God’s covenant, his law, his grace and when he returned he would judge them.  Had they been faithful stewards?  All along the way, as Jesus made his way from Galilee to Jerusalem, he was warning the people that if they did not listen to him, if they did not repent, if they continued to treat the Lord’s covenant with disdain, the Lord’s judgement would fall on them: on the nation, on Jerusalem, and especially on the temple.  Jesus is saying that in him, the God of Israel is coming and on that day of judgement, you don’t want to be that faithless servant who has been a poor steward of God’s grace and hidden away his master’s treasure in a handkerchief.

 

Jesus reminds the people that God’s kingdom was about to come and that as much as it was good news for many, it also meant horrible judgement for a lot of them.  Some of the crowd cheered, some wept happy tears, but there were some—the people invested in the status quo, the people with their own firmly entrenched ideas of what the Messiah would be like and how the Lord’s return was supposed to go down—there were some who were angry.  Like those in the parable, they didn’t want this man to be their king.  They couldn’t bear the thought that somehow this Jesus was actually the Messiah, let alone the Lord, the God of Israel returned to Zion.

 

And I expect that parable raced ahead of Jesus, up the long and winding road from Jericho to Jerusalem—passed from mouth to mouth down the long line of pilgrims on their way to Passover.  The parable prepared the way for Jesus to enter Jerusalem.  Luke leaves out the long and tiring journey up the road from Jericho—the road where we meet the Good Samaritan in another of Jesus’ stories.  From Jericho Luke takes us straight to the top of the mountains, to Bethany, as Jesus sends his friends to find the prophesied donkey.  (That’s the Palm Sunday Gospel we know so well.)  As Jesus rode through the crowd into Jerusalem, the people cheered him and sang messianic chants.  They knew what was happening.  The Lord was returning to Zion.  But just like at Jericho, there were those who were angry.  How dare Jesus do this!  And Jesus knew, despite the crowds who welcomed him, Jesus knew that judgement was inevitable.  The Pharisees were sure to remind him.  There he was, riding through the crowd to their messianic chants and the Pharisees pushed their way through and they said, “Rabbi, tell your disciples to cut it out.”  As far as they were concerned, this was blasphemy.  Jesus wasn’t the Messiah, let alone the Lord returning to his people.  That, at this kingly display was probably going to cause problems with the Romans.  And with their rebuke ringing in his ears, Luke says in verse 41, that as Jerusalem came into view, Jesus stopped and wept.

 

“If only you’d known this day—even you,” Jesus said, “the things that make for peace!  But now they are hidden from your eyes.  For the days are coming upon you, when your enemies will build up earthworks around you and surround you and hem you in on every side and bring you crashing down to the ground, you and your children within you. And they will not leave one stone on another, because you did not know the moment when God was visiting you.”

 

Jesus’ tears remind us what’s at the heart of the gospel.  For three years, Jesus had warned the people of Galilee that judgement was coming to the nation, to Jerusalem, and to the temple.  Over and over he called his people to repent.  His message hadn’t gone over any better than it had for the prophets of old, like Jeremiah, who was known for the tears he wept over his people.  Jerusalem would be no different than Galilee and Jesus knew it.  He’d been rejected there—they even tried to stone him once.  His reception in Jerusalem was going to be even worse.  And as much as he knew rejection meant his own death, that’s not why he wept.  He wept for their sake.  “Unless you repent, you will all likewise perish,” he had said a few chapters earlier.  And now he looks across the valley to Jerusalem where Pilate had just recently killed a bunch of Galileans and where the tower of Siloam had fallen, crushing people alive, and it was all just a foretaste of another, greater catastrophe soon to come.  A few decades later and the hills around the city would be covered with Roman crosses, bearing executed Jews and the city and the temple would be brought crumbling down.

 

The people had heard the warning, but they would not listen and Jesus wept.  Again, not for himself or for his own coming death.  And not with any sense of, “I told you so!”  Jesus wept, because discipline and justice do not come from the cold heart of a distant God, but from the God who loves so deeply that he was willing to give his own life to summon his beloved to repentance, from a love that is faithful and that will set things to rights, in order to bring what’s best.  A love that wept over a rebellious people intent on their own agendas and their own interests, who refused to be stewards of his goodness and grace.

 

And the temple—the temple was at the heart of it all.  There’s a reason why Jesus went straight to the temple when he entered Jerusalem.  That was what the Messiah was supposed to do.  And so Luke goes on in verses 45-48:

 

He went into the temple and began to throw out the traders, saying to them, “It is written, ‘My house shall be a house of prayer,’ but you have made it a den of robbers.”

  And he was teaching daily in the temple. But the chief priests and the scribes and the leading men of the people were trying to destroy him.  They couldn’t find any way to do it, because all the people were hanging on his words.

 

If all we take away from this is that it was Jesus’ angry protest of the commercialisation of the temple, we’ll have missed the point.  This is another of his acted-out prophecies.  It’s a warning—in the vein of Jeremiah—that if the temple becomes the hide-out of a bunch of robbers, it will fall under the Lord’s judgement.  And, of course, that’s just what had happened.  But the robbers weren’t necessarily who we might at first think.  The money-changers and the folks selling animals for sacrifice had to be there.  Roman coinage wasn’t allowed in the temple.  People needed animals for their sacrifices and not everyone could bring one from home.  Maybe the exchange rates and the prices were gouging the people, but the real robbers were the priests and leaders of Israel, who were robbing God in far more important ways.

 

The temple stood at the heart of Jewish identity.  It represented the covenant between the Lord and his people.  And even though the cloud of his glory had never returned to it after the exile, it was still seen as that one place on earth where heaven and earth, where God and human beings met.  And so it was the symbol of the Lord’s faithfulness to Israel, of the sureness of his covenant promises.  But in return the leaders of Israel used the temple to put on a show of faithfulness.  The overt idolatry, the altars to Baal and Asherah that sent Israel into exile were long gone, but the leaders of Israel had found other ways to be unfaithful to the Lord.  They lived as if a mere outward façade of faithfulness would bring his blessings and Jesus has been reminding them over and over and over, that the only real response to the Lord’s covenant faithfulness is faithfulness and obedience in return.  Disobedience to the Lord’s covenant doesn’t just result in a lack of blessing.  No, if you’re in covenant with the Lord, disobedience eventually calls down judgement.  The Lord will set this world to rights and if the people he has called to be stewards of his grace for the sake of the world will not be true to their calling, he will remove them from that stewardship and give it to another—just as in the parable.  The leaders of Israel had done nothing with their talent but bury it in the ground.  Soon it would be time to take it and give it to another.

 

Again, this wasn’t unexpected.  Throughout his ministry Jesus had pointed—sometimes subtly and other times not-so-subtly—to the fact that the temple’s days were numbered and that, in him, the Lord was doing something new.  Maybe the greatest hints were those times when he announced the forgiveness of sins, without people having to go to the trouble of offering a sacrifice.  Repeatedly, Jesus bypassed the priests and the temple and offered, himself, what the temple had offered the people.  Later, he would announce that he would tear down the temple and rebuild it in three days.  All of this was blasphemy to the priests and to the scribes and the Pharisees.  And they never did grasp what he meant when he said he would rebuild the temple in three days, but those who saw him raised from the dead did.  Jesus was the new temple.  Heaven and earth, God and man no longer meeting in a building on the mountaintop, but now meeting in Jesus himself.  In him we meet the God of Israel.  In him we know his justice, but in him we also know his grace and his mercy and his love as he weeps for those about to face God’s wrath, as he prays for the very people who crucified him.  In him, most of all, we see the profound faithfulness of God and his worthiness to receive glory and praise.

 

And then the amazing thing.  As the Lord judged the old Israel for her unfaithfulness to her calling, in Jesus he creates a new people, a new Israel, and establishes a new covenant—a covenant this time ratified with his blood shed at the cross and in the pouring out of his own Spirit on his people.  We go from Jesus, in whom God and man, heaven and earth intersect, to his church—to a people—in whom the Lord himself dwells.  The old Israel looked to a law written on stone tablets, while the new—while we—live with the law written by the Spirit of God on our own hearts.  And in the same way, the old Israel looked to a temple of bricks and mortar on the mountaintop above Jerusalem, but by his Spirit, Jesus has made us the new temple.  He incorporates us into his ministry.  As we saw a couple of weeks ago.  We have been adopted we share in his inheritance.  And so, because our Lord is prophet, priest, and king, we too as a people share in his prophetic, priestly, and ruling ministry.

 

In our Epistle today, 1 Corinthians 12:1-11, St. Paul reminded the Christians in Corinth of their calling—of the riches the Lord had entrusted to them.  The Spirit had empowered them with amazing gifts, but like the old Israel, they’d forgotten their calling and were using those gifts for their own agendas—again, burying the king’s wealth in the ground—turning the Lord’s temple into a den of robbers.  Paul writes:

 

There are different types of spiritual gifts, but the same Spirit; and there are different kinds of service, but the same Lord; and there are different types of activities, but it is the same God who operates them all in everyone. To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good.  (1 Corinthians 12:4-7)

 

This leads Paul into Chapter 13, where he writes about the nature and supremacy of love.  “Love never ends,” he says.  These other gifts are temporary, but they’re meant to build up love.  They’re meant to create a community of people who will be stewards of God’s grace—a community of people redeemed and made new by his own blood, shed at the cross, a people who, by his grace, have a share in his new creation, a priestly and prophetic people called to go out as the Messiah’s royal heralds to proclaim that he has died, that he has risen, and that he is the world’s true Lord.  A people who live with the Lord in their midst and who show the world his faithfulness, to show the world that he is worthy of glory and praise.

 

Brothers and Sisters, that’s us.  Like Israel in Jesus’s day, we live in an in-between time.  One day the Lord will return again to judge the earth, when the gospel has done its work, when every last one of his enemies has been put under his feet, when he comes to remove every last vestige of sin and rebellion and to set everything to rights, to wipe away every tear, and bring his new creation in all its fulness.  But in anticipation of that day, we are his stewards, empowered by his Spirit and entrusted with the gospel, with the good news about Jesus, crucified and risen.

 

And as Christendom wanes—at least in our part of the world—and as the darkness creeps back in, there’s a powerful sense in which we, the church, are coming to know exile as the old Israel once did.  Brothers and Sisters, that exile is a call to faithfulness, a call to remember that Jesus is king, and call to remember that his gospel and his Spirit will accomplish what he’s sent them to do.  And that means that as stewards of his gospel and his Spirit, we will accomplish what he has chosen and called us to do—to be stewards of his grace, to be his royal heralds proclaiming his death and resurrection and his lordship until he comes again.  No matter how dark it gets, no matter how hated and despised we may be, the Lord is always faithful to his promises.  He is our hope and he never fails.  May we be faithful with the treasures of the gospel and the Spirit he has entrusted to us, that one day he may say, “Well done, good and faithful servants.”

 

Let’s pray: Let your merciful ears, O Lord, be open to the prayers of your humble servants; and, that we may obtain what we ask of you, teach us to ask for those things that please you, through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.  Amen.

A Sermon for the Ninth Sunday after Trinity

St. Luke 16:1-9

by William Klock

 

The Pharisees and the legal experts were grumbling.  They’d come to meet with Jesus, but as Luke tells us, the tax-collectors and the sinners were coming close to Jesus and listening to him.  The Pharisees didn’t associate with people like that and neither should Jesus, if he really was the Messiah.  You can practically hear their teeth grinding as that one Pharisee spits out with disdain and disgust, “This fellow welcomes sinners!  He even eats with them!”  If the kingdom of God was ever going to come, it certainly wasn’t going to come that way!

 

But Jesus, oh so patiently, sat down in response and told them a series of three stories.  We know them well.  He started with a story about a shepherd hunting high and low for a lost sheep.  And then he told a second story about a poor old widow hunting high and low for a precious lost coin.  And he told—you could see the joy on his face as he said it—he told how the shepherd rejoiced when he found his lost sheep and how the widow rejoiced when she found her lost coin.  And he looked at the Pharisees with that look that only Jesus could give and asked, “Wouldn’t you rejoice, too, if that were you?  The heavenly court rejoices like that when a sinner repents?  Why can’t you?”  And then the third story, the one about the presumptuous ne’er-do-well son who demanded an early inheritance from his father, then went off to live like a reprobate in a foreign, pagan land and only wised up when he squandered his last penny.  The lost son went home to his father, who rejoiced, just like the shepherd and the widow.  What was lost had been found.  But the boy’s older brother refused to join in the celebration.  He got angry and raged at his father: “This son of yours squandered your livelihood with his whores, and now you’ve killed the fattened calf for him!”  Like the Pharisees, he sat out in the darkness grumbling over repentant sinners.  They were the longsuffering faithful ones.  When the Messiah comes, he was supposed to throw a party for them!

 

That third story, the Parable of the Prodigal Son, is supposed to be our Gospel today, but it wasn’t always.  Back in the late 1920s the men who revised the Prayer Book—in the US and in Scotland—they changed it.  Before that—and still in Prayer Books in other countries—the Gospel for today is the bit of Luke that comes next, right after the story of the prodigal son.  It was that way for well over a thousand years.  In part they changed the Gospel for today because of the rise of theological liberalism.  They had a watered down doctrine of the inspiration of the Bible and they came to think that some parts of the Bible weren’t appropriate for public reading in the church.  But, I think, their main reason is that the traditional Gospel for today is really, really difficult.  Not necessarily difficult in the sense of being especially demanding on those of us who hear it (although it may be), but just plain difficult to understand.  What did Jesus mean?  It’s not easy to say.  And so, when the Prayer Book was being revised, the folks in charge of the lectionary took the opportunity to take out a hard passage and to slip in an easy and familiar one.  And I’ve always preached on that easy and familiar story of the prodigal son, but today—maybe despite my better judgement—I’d like to look at that other Gospel, the one Christians were reading on this day going back maybe as far as fifteen-hundred years.

 

Like I said, Jesus was telling those stories to the grumbling Pharisees in the fifteenth chapter of Luke, but then we turn the page to the sixteenth chapter and Luke said that “Jesus also said to his disciples…”  As Luke tells the story, there’s no break.  Maybe we can grant that the Pharisees, offended by Jesus’ parables, are walking away and it’s now just the disciples.  There’s a connection, somehow, between these two scenes.  Jesus was talking to the Pharisees and now he turns to his disciples and he also says:

 

Once there was a rich man [a tycoon] who had a steward, and charges were laid against him that he was squandering his property.  So he called him in and said to him, “What’s all this I hear bout you?  Present an account of your stewardship, because you cannot be my manager any longer.”

 

He's fired—and for cause.

 

So he [the now former manager] said to himself, “What am I going to do?  My master is taking my stewardship from me!  I can’t do manual labour and I’m ashamed to beg… Ha!  I know what I’ll do—so that people will welcome me into their houses after I’m fired from being steward.”

So he called his master’s debtors to him, one by one.  “How much,” he asked the first, “do you owe my master?”

“A hundred measure of olive oil,” he replied

“Take your bill,” he said, “sit down quickly, and make it fifty.”

“To another he said, “And how much do you owe?”

“A hundred measure of wheat,” he replied

“Take your bill,” he said, “and make it eighty.”

And the master praised the dishonest steward because he had acted wisely.  The children of this world, you see, are wiser than the children of light when it comes to dealing with their own generation.

So I tell you this: use unrighteous wealth to make friends for yourselves.  Then when it gives out, they will welcome you into eternal dwellings.

 

So what’s going on and what’s Jesus getting at.  The first part of that isn’t has hard as the second.  This man had a very desirable job.  Some men were known to sell themselves into slavery to be this kind of manger for a rich estate.  Think of Joseph in Egypt managing all of Potiphar’s affairs.  It was prestigious and the pay was very good, but it also obviously required a high level of trust.  The manager managed while the rich man was off in the world enjoying his profits.  But in this case something went wrong.  When Jesus talks about this man squandering the business, he uses the same word he used to describe the prodigal son squandering his inheritance.  While the cats away, the mouse gets to playing and suddenly the cheques going out to the rich man are getting smaller.  So the rich man comes home to fire his manager and to find someone who will keep the profits rolling in consistently.

 

But since they didn’t keep records the way we do, the rich man demands his manager—as his last duty—provide him with an accounting of the business that he can give to whomever he hires as his new manager.  But when the manager leaves the meeting, he’s not thinking about his accounting.  He’s desperately thinking how he can maintain the good life he’s become accustomed to.  He’s not going to go out and dig ditches and he’s too proud to beg.  But then that account.  He gets a brilliant idea.

 

He starts calling in the rich man’s debtors.  In each of them comes with the receipt for his loan.  The first man owes a hundred measures of oil.  The second one owes a hundred measures of wheat.  These are not small sums.  This is sort of the First Century equivalent of a military contract for feeding the army.  And he says to the first man, “Cross out one hundred and make it fifty.  To the second he says, “Cross out one hundred and make it eighty.”  You can imagine how happy the debtors were when they left those meetings.  They had a new best friend, which was exactly what the manager was going for.

 

But what’s he doing?  Because to us, at face value, it looks like he’s taking advantage of his master not knowing the business and now he’s ripping him off to ingratiate himself with these other men.  He was dishonest in his earlier management, but for what he does here, he gets praise from both the rich man and Jesus—and that doesn’t make sense if he’s just compounding his dishonestly and driving the business further into a hole.  This is why preachers avoid this parable and Prayer Book revisers drop it from the lectionary.

 

If, however, we dig up the cultural and historical background to a text like this, it clears a lot up.[1]  When we do that we find that even though the torah forbade charging interest, it was still a common practise.  They had ways to keep it off the books.  Maybe the manager would call it his “commission” or they’d pad the receipt. You couldn’t loan someone 10 denarii and write them a receipt for 10 denarii that also demanded an additional denarii each month or a penalty for late payment.  That was against the law.  But what you could do is loan someone 10 denarii and write them a receipt for 20.  They only borrowed ten.  You knew and they knew that the other 10 denarii were interest, but since the receipt simply indicated a debt of 20 denarii there was nothing anyone could do about it.

 

So we figure out that on top of squandering the rich man’s profits, the manager has also been charging interest or a “commission”.  That’s what he writing off when he tells these men to write down their receipts.  Over and over he does this with each of his master’s debtors.  Imagine how happy they are to have their debts cut so dramatically.

 

When he left the meeting with his master he was out of work and knew that no one would hire him.  Word would get around about his dishonesty.  But now he’s countered that.  He isn’t really being honest—he’s still motivated by self-preservation—but others might think that he’s turned over a new leaf and that he’s going to start doing business honestly.  Ultimately his goal is to ingratiate himself into their hospitality.  In verse 4 he thinks to himself that if he does this, these people will “receive” him into their houses.  In Greek he uses this same word when he tells each of his master’s debtors to “take”—literally to “receive”—their bills.  He’s expecting some quid pro quo, some tit for tat.  As they receive their reduced bills, with any luck he’ll receive their gratitude and hospitality.

 

And, as we read, in verse 8, the rich man, when he hears about all this, he commends him.

 

The master praised the dishonest steward because he had acted wisely.

 

To be clear, Jesus isn’t calling him the “dishonest steward” because he wrote off the interest.  That—even if the motive was selfish—that was actually an honest thing to do.  He was dishonest in his management—and, knowing how such people are, he’s probably still dishonest—but the point now is that he has acted wisely to preserve himself in a difficult situation.

 

That’s the parable itself.  Knowing the background behind first century management and lending practises helps us sort out the difficulties of the story.  But understanding what the manager was up to is only half the reason this parable is so difficult.  We still have to ask what Jesus’ point was in telling it. Jesus says to his disciples:

 

The master praised the dishonest steward because he had acted wisely.  The children of this world, you see, are wiser than the children of light when it comes to dealing with their own generation.

So I tell you this: use unrighteous wealth to make friends for yourselves.  Then when it gives out, they will welcome you into eternal dwellings.

 

I can’t help but think that even though Luke presents this as a parable, that it was probably a real story and that Jesus opened it saying something like, “You remember that guy—the guy who managed that huge estate over in Capernaum—the guy who got fired when he lost a whole year’s profit in a shady business scheme and then got fired—remember that guy?”  Just maybe the rich man in the story was one of those grumbling Pharisees.  I say that, because Jesus’ point is that people really do these kinds of things to save themselves from trouble.  They lie and they cheat and then when they get caught and trouble comes, like the dishonest manager, they scramble to fix things to stave off disaster.  And Jesus compares these shrewd or prudent “sons of this world” with the “sons of light”.  This is where the story becomes difficult again.  Who are the “sons of light”?  I’ve read some pretty good commentary that argues that the sons of light are Jesus’ followers.  Jesus has been preaching that judgement is coming and here he’s saying that they’d better use their worldly goods to find some way to escape it or find a way through it.  The problem is that if the sons of light are Jesus’ disciples too many parts of the story don’t add up.  It’s a good idea, but it comes from a common way of approaching the gospels that ignores the real historical setting in which Jesus was living and preaching and, instead, spiritualises or tries to universalise his message as if he could be preaching to anyone anywhere.

 

But Jesus didn’t come to just anyone and he didn’t come at some random time or some random place.  Jesus came at a strategic point in history and, more specifically, he came as the culmination and fulfilment of Israel’s story.  Israel’s mission was to carry the Lord’s blessing to the nations, but she failed.  And so Jesus came, not just as the Messiah—not just as the long-expected king in the line of David.  He also came as Daniel’s “Son of Man”—he came as Israel’s representative.  He took up her mission and where she had failed, he succeeded.  Where the Lord’s letter of redemption and restoration of creation had stalled out in Israel’s post office, Jesus delivered it to the entire world.

 

So at the core of Jesus’ ministry was the proclamation that in him the kingdom had arrived and that in him God is now king.  And for these three years he spent proclaiming that message and travelling throughout Galilee and Judea, what he was really doing was calling Israel—the children of light—to follow him.  He was picking up where she had failed, but she could still take part in his mission if she would only cast aside her wrong ideas about God and his plan and follow Jesus as he manifested his lordship to the world, by seeking out the lost and by conquering sin and death as he died on the cross and rose from the grave.

 

Jesus is preaching to Israel here.  He’s giving commentary on her history and calling her to repentance.  And that means that the rich man in the story is the Lord.  He is rich.  He created the cosmos and he created humanity so that he could share his riches of love and grace with us.  And when we rebelled and rejected him, he called Abraham to carry his message of grace to the nations.  Abraham and then Israel, the nation descended from him, were called to be the Lord’s managers in this world.  But just as the manager in the parable squandered his master’s riches, Israel squandered the Lord’s riches of grace.  And now judgement is coming.  The manager in the story saw judgement coming and had the sense to act decisively and to do something even though it meant giving up his riches.  But in contrast, as Israel faced the Lord’s judgement for squandering his riches, most of the people were going about their lives as if they had nothing to worry about.  The Sadducees were firm in their denial of any need to change the status quo.  Of all the people in Israel, the Pharisees knew that something had to change and that the people had to turn to God.  But the solution of the Pharisees was to turn the light they had been given into darkness.  Instead of using the law God had given Israel as a means of carrying light into the darkness, the Pharisees kept the light to themselves and condemned everyone left in the dark.  Instead of seeking out the lost, they condemned them.  The law wasn’t enough; they had to add to it, making it burdensome, not unlike the dishonest manager who had padded his debtor’s bills with heavy interest loads.

 

So in the parable, Jesus is warning Israel.  It’s not just that judgement is coming, but to escape judgment, God’s people had to act and they had to act now.  They had to repent and they had to repent now.  And that meant letting go and potentially giving up all the things they held dear.  We’ve seen Jesus pointing this direction throughout his ministry.  A new age and a new kingdom were coming in which blood ties with Abraham wouldn’t matter anymore—what will matter is allegiance to Jesus the King.  He is Israel himself and true Israelites, true sons and daughters of Abraham, will be those who find their identity in him.  They also had to let go of the land, because this new kingdom isn’t about a place—again, it’s about Jesus himself.  And they had to let go of the temple.  In this new kingdom the Lord’s presence is no longer found in temples of stone, but in hearts of flesh—in the hearts of those who are in Jesus and filled with the Spirit.

 

Jesus says, “Use unrighteous wealth to make friends for yourselves.  Then when it gives out, they will welcome you into eternal dwellings.”  These aren’t easy words to translate and it’s hard to say exactly what Jesus meant, but it seems that like the manager in the story, they—and we—need to be ready to give up the things of the kingdom that is passing away in order to be welcomed into the kingdom that is being inaugurated by Jesus.  This was Jesus’ word of warning to his disciples, to the Pharisees, and to the people of Israel.

 

And again, we need to remember the real history that surrounds and weaves its way through the New Testament.  Jesus wasn’t warning the Jews of some far off spiritual day of reckoning; he was warning of imminent destruction coming in a very tangible and earthly way—before this generation passes away, he said.  Interestingly enough, the Jerusalem Church escaped when the judgement Jesus warned about came to Jerusalem.  Josephus in his Jewish War and Eusebius in his History of the Church both tell us that the Christians received a divine warning and fled to Pella, in what it now Jordan.  They took the decisive action Jesus talks about in the parable, they left everything behind, and they were spared when the Romans destroyed the city and the temple.

 

Brothers and sisters, the fulfilment of Jesus’ promise of judgement in the First Century serves as a warning to us that his promise of final judgement will also be fulfilled.  And so we now need to ask if we’ve been good and honest stewards of God’s grace.  Have we been good and honest stewards of the Good News?  Have we lived it?  Have we proclaimed it?  Or have we kept it to ourselves?  Have we become self-righteous and used our kingdom status to condemn the lost rather than to seek them out?  Have we added heavy burdens to the Good News?  The heart of the Good News is that Jesus is Lord, but like the dishonest manager, are we trying to get our cut too—lining our pockets or feeding our spiritual pride?  Or are we preaching the unfettered Good News that Jesus is Lord and that at the cross and at the grave he conquered sin and death.

 

And to what do we hold too closely?  Is our priority in life the wealth that Jesus talks about in the story?  Whether rich or poor, we have a powerful tendency to hold on to money and possessions for security.  But brothers and sisters, money and possessions are part of the kingdom that is passing away.  Even the dishonest manager understood that.  All his profit would do him no good when judgement came, and so he let it go that he might find a way to survive in what was for him a new age.  The same goes for us.  Are we clinging to the things of this fading kingdom—to things that will not last or that will be of no value in the kingdom of God—or are we using them as tools to further God’s kingdom and God’s plans and to ensure that we have a place in his kingdom?

 

Let us pray: Grant us, Lord, we pray, the spirit always to think and do those things that are right; that we who cannot do anything good without you, may in your strength live according to your will; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.  Amen.

[1] See J. Duncan M. Derrett, “Fresh Light on St Luke xvi.1. The Parable of the Unjust Steward,” in New Testament Studies 7 (1960-61), pp. 198-219 and Joseph A. Fitzmyer, “The Story of the Dishonest Manager (Lk 16:1-13),” in Theological Studies 25 (1964), pp. 23-42.

A Sermon for the Eighth Sunday after Trinity

Romans 8:12-17 & St. Matthew 7:15-21

by William Klock

Jesus sat on the mountainside with a great crowd of people spread out all around.  They hung on his every word as he announced the coming of God’s kingdom.  This is what Israel had been waiting for years—for centuries.  Here was the prophet like Moses, promised all the way back in Deuteronomy.  Here he was, like Moses, on the mountain.  But this time, instead of stone tablets with God’s law written on them, Jesus was describing a kingdom in which God’s law of love is inscribed on the hearts of its people—transforming them, setting them right from the inside out.  Just as the law given by Moses described the things that separated the people of God from everyone else—who was in and who was out—Jesus described what the people of God’s new kingdom were to be like—this new people, filled with the very Spirit of God.  But then, knowing how people are and knowing how Israel had fallen so many times in the past, Jesus ended his “Sermon on the Mount” with a series of warnings.  First he warned against going with the flow.  Repentance is hard and really changing is even harder.  Jesus was at odds with the leaders of the Jews—most of all because of the things he said about the temple.  Its days were coming to an end.  God would build a new one—but this one would be made, not of stone, but of people—men and women indwelt by God himself.  Jesus knew it would be easy for people to just stick with the old way of doing things and so he warned: “Go in by the narrow gate.  It’s a tight squeeze and not many will find their way through, but that’s the way to life.”  And then—this where today’s Gospel picks up—Jesus warns, “Watch out for false prophets!”  Oh, they knew all about that.  Everybody knew how, back in the days leading up the Exile, the real prophets had declared the word of the Lord and called Israel and her leaders to repentance, but that the kings and the priests, and most everybody else instead listened to the false prophets who assured them that, in fact, everything was fine just as it was and that they had nothing to worry about.  The false prophets led the people straight into judgement.  Nobody wanted a repeat of that!  But, of course, the problem with false prophets is that no one ever thinks their favourite prophet could possibly be false.  Jesus knew that in the coming years, spokesmen for the status quo—for the wide and easy way—would arise from amongst the scribes and the Pharisees and the Sadducees, and the Zealots and the Essenes and they would preach passionately that their way was the real way, the true way—God’s way.  Missiologist Ed Stetzer likes to say, “If you want people to like you, don’t become a pastor; sell ice cream.”  There’s an even better way: Assure people that God’s cool with them just the way they are and with the things they’re already doing.  People will love you to death.  That’s precisely what Jesus was warning the people about that day.

Let’s look again at our Gospel, beginning with Matthew 7:15.  Jesus said,

Watch out for false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inside they are ravenous wolves!  You’ll be able to tell them by the fruit they bear: you don’t find grapes growing on thorn bushes, do you, or figs on thistles?  Well, in the same way, good trees produce good fruit, and bad trees produce bad fruit.  Good trees can’t produce bad fruit, nor can bad ones produce good fruit!  Every tree that doesn’t produce good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire.  So, you must recognise them by their fruits.

 

And then, in verse 21, Jesus gets even sharper with his warning:

Not everyone who says to me, “Lord, Lord,” will enter the kingdom of heaven; only people who do the will of my Father in heaven.  [That’s the fruit we should be looking for.]  On that day lots of people will say to me, “Lord, Lord, we prophesied in your name, didn’t we?  We cast out demons in your name!  We performed lots of powerful deeds in your name!”  Then I will say to them, “I never knew you!  You’re a bunch of evildoers.  Go away from me!”

 

Judgement was coming to Israel.  We have a bad tendency to pull Jesus’ words and especially his warnings out of context, to pull them out of history, and to push them into some point far in the future and when we do that, we strip out the urgency.  One day there will be a judgement that comes to the whole earth, but Jesus’ horizon was the judgement that would come on Judah and on Jerusalem and the temple in about forty years—a judgement that would put an end to all the things and ways of the past and that would vindicate him and his people and this whole “new covenant”.  It would bring an end to the first act in the story and draw back the curtains on the second.

In light of that, I think it’s good to recap the story.  God’s creation was a disaster and it all went wrong because human beings rebelled against him.  Even wiping out the entire human race and starting over with the one, last righteous man and his family didn’t solve the problem.  So in that dark world the Lord called Abraham out of the nations.  He made himself known to Abraham and most of all he showed Abraham his goodness and his faithfulness so that Abraham could be a witness to that goodness and faithfulness.  And the Lord made Abraham into a people, a nation, and he did the same with them.  Over and over he showed them his goodness and his faithfulness.  He made them promises and then he did what he said.  When they were slaves in Egypt, he rescued them, he cared for them in the wilderness, and he led them into the promised land and gave them wells they hadn’t dug and cities they hadn’t built.  He gave them his law, he gave them a king, and most importantly he lived in their midst.  The other nations had temples and in those temples were idols of wood or gold or stone that were blind, deaf, dumb, and powerless.  But in the midst of Israel was the tabernacle where the glory of the Lord rested on the ark of the covenant.  A real, living God who was good and who was faithful and proved it to his own people before the watching eyes of the world.

Again, Israel was to be a witness to the nations.  The nations were supposed to see the goodness and faithfulness of the Lord reflected in the corporate life of his people.  As they lived in his presence and as they trusted in him and were obedient to his law.  They were also supposed to be the righteous benchmark by which the Lord would one day judge the nations when he came to put an end to their wickedness and to set his world to rights.

But over and over Israel failed to be that witness and to be that benchmark.  The Lord sent prophets to call his people to repentance, but they rejected his prophets.  Sometimes they even killed them.  Instead, they listened to false prophets who told them everything was fine.  The Lord even sent his people into exile.  The promised land was his.  It was holy.  And if they weren’t going to be holy too, then they could not live in his land or in his presence.  First the northern tribes were conquered and scattered by the Assyrians and then the southern tribes were conquered by the Babylonians.  Jerusalem and the temple were destroyed and the people were taken off in captivity to live in a foreign, pagan land.  The Lord was faithful to his promises when he disciplined his people, and, again, he was faithful to his promises when he returned them to the land.  But the people were still fickle.  They still served him with divided loyalties.

And so, after a long string of prophets whom the people rejected, the Lord finally sent his own son.  He sent his son to proclaim his soon-to-come judgement on Israel and to call his people to repentance.  But he also sent his son to be the faithful Israelite, the Israelite who would single-mindedly serve him, the Israelite who would obey the law, the Israelite who would be that holy and righteous benchmark, the Israelite who would ultimately die the death that his sinful people deserved and become a sacrifice for their sins.

The key point here with regard to today’s Gospel is that Jesus came to announce that the Lord was about to judge his people and to call them to repentance.  Those who refused to repent—those who listened to the false prophets, who carried on down the easy, wide way, would face death and destruction in a generation.  And with that announcement came a call to repentance.  There was a narrow way that would lead through that judgement to life.  It wasn’t an easy way.  Just as Jesus was mocked and rejected and eventually put to death, so those who repented and followed him would walk a similar path.  At the beginning of this same Sermon on the Mount, Jesus had said to them, “Blessed are you when people slander you and persecute you, and say all kinds of wicked things about you falsely because of me.  Celebrate and rejoice: there’s a great reward for you in heaven.  That’s how they persecuted the prophets who went before you.”  On the other side of that rejection was life—life in a new people of God who would be filled with his own Spirit and who, because of that, would have a righteousness greater than the Pharisees.  They would finally be the people who would be faithful to the Lord and, most of all, in whom the nations would see the goodness and faithfulness of the Lord, so that they, in turn, would come in faith to bring him glory.  The nations would see reflected in this new Israel the glory of a god unlike any of the gods they had ever known and so God’s glory would spread and his new creation would grow.  And all those who found themselves in Jesus the Messiah would find this gift of the Spirit a foretaste, a down-payment on that day when the gospel has done its work, when the glory of the Lord covers the earth as the waters cover the sea, and when death itself is finally defeated.  On that day God will raise them all to new life, just as he has raised Jesus, and they will live forever in his presence in a world set to rights once and for all.

But that narrow way in the meantime was going to be hard.  If it wasn’t slander and persecution, false prophets would try to lure them down the easy way—to go with the flow—straight into judgement.  And so Jesus warned them: Look for good fruit.  It’s not their zeal or even the miracles they might perform; pay attention to their fruit.  Do you see God’s new creation unveiled in them?   Do they show the life of the Spirit?  Or are they still invested in the ways and things that are passing away?  Are they still focused on a law written on stone or have their hearts been transformed by Jesus and the Spirit?  The prophets reflected the state of the nation.  In a few short years judgement would fall on Jerusalem and people would be crying out to the Lord for deliverance.  But the Lord knows his own by their fruit and these had borne none, because they’d rejected Jesus and instead listened to fruitless prophets.  In contrast, Jesus says, “Those who do the will of my Father in heaven”—those who have found their identity in me and have been filled with my Spirit—they’re the ones who will fulfil the law and, because of that, because of the fruit the Spirit causes them to bear, they’ll be known by the Father.

Now, to change gears just a little bit, this is where Paul picks up in our Epistle from Romans 8.  Jesus knew that his people would face rejection and opposition and persecution—even martyrdom—for the sake of following him.  He knew they would be confronted by false prophets who would tell them that everything was fine and that they were foolish for following Jesus.  And Paul was shepherding people in very similar situations.  He saw fellow Jewish believers, even out in the gentile world, being hassled and harassed by their fellow Jews for the sake of their faith in Jesus.  Sometimes their fellow Jews would even be so angry with them that they’d rat them out to the Roman authorities for being disloyal citizens of the empire.  But, too, the people in these churches in places like Rome or Asia Minor faced harassment from their pagan neighbours and even from the civil and religious authorities.  At the time Paul wrote this in the 50s, there wasn’t any official persecution of Christians by the Romans, but Paul could see that it was eventually going to come.  People don’t like it when you expose their sin and warn of coming judgement.  The Jews didn’t like it when Jesus did it.  And Paul, seeing it on a small scale already, knew that the gentiles wouldn’t like it when it was their turn.  Caesar definitely wouldn’t like it, because of course, to proclaim that Jesus is Lord is, at the same time, to proclaim that Caesar is not.  When persecution came, it would be easy for believers to turn away from Jesus because of their fear.  And there would be false prophets proclaiming to the churches that everything was fine, that compromise was okay—like the Judaisers in Galatians or the Nicolaitans in Revelation.

So Paul exhorts the Christians in Rome to stand firm.  The Lord has called them and made them his witnesses and they have no reason to fear.  Look again at Romans 8:12-21:

So then, brothers, debtors we are, but not to human flesh, to live our life in that way.  If you live in accordance with the flesh, you will die; but if, by the Spirit, you put to death the deeds of the body, you will live.  For all who are led by the Spirit of God, you see, are God’s children.  You didn’t receive a spirit of slavery, did you, to go back again into a state of fear?  But you received the spirit of sonship, in whom we call out “Abba, Father!”  When that happens, it is the Spirit himself giving supporting witness to what our own spirit is saying: that we are God’s children.  And if we are children, we are also heirs: heirs of God, and fellow heirs with the Messiah, as long as we suffer with him so that we may also be glorified with him.

 

“Look,” Paul is saying, “Israel was captive to the flesh.  They had God’s good law to live by, but it was written on tablets of stone and their hearts were full of the same poison as the hearts of the rest of the human race.  The Lord poured out his love on them and they should have loved him wholeheartedly in return, but their hearts were broken, set on sin and on self—and so they could never return the Lord’s love.  Not truly.  They had—and their descendants still have –reason to fear.  The Lord will judge their unfaithfulness.”  But, says Paul, “You are different.  Not only have you been forgiven through the atoning sacrifice of Jesus on the cross, but God has poured his own Spirit into you and that makes all the difference.  The Spirit renews your minds and regenerates your heart.  The law that was once written on stone—the law that we sum up in those words about loving the Lord with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength and your neighbour as yourself—the Spirit writes that law on our hearts.  If we are in Jesus the Messiah, the law is no longer a stone tablet we look at and say, ‘I wish I could do that.’  Now it’s written on our hearts.  It’s our desire.  It’s what we value, because of the Spirit.”  Paul says that we still have to put to death our old ways, but it’s this gift of God’s own Spirit that makes it possible.  And it’s always good to remember that the Lord does not give his gifts in vain.

Brothers and Sisters, it’s good at this point to pause and let this sink in.  I think we often forget that there’s a bigger purpose behind all of this.  We know that sin is wrong.  We know that through Jesus our sins are forgiven.  We know that the Spirit turns our hearts away from sin to righteousness.  We know that we’re supposed to put away the old man and put on the new and live in the Spirit.  But I think we sometimes forget that forgiveness and righteousness aren’t ends in themselves.  Again, remember the story.  Remember why God created a people for himself in the first place.  Think of Abraham in the midst of that big, dark world lost in sin and with no knowledge of the Lord.  Abraham and his family were to be witnesses to the Lord—to make him known, to be light in the darkness, to show that the Lord is good and faithful, different from the gods of the pagans, and worthy of the worship of the nations.  And this people, too, was to be the benchmark by which the nations were one day to be judged.  The old Israel failed and so God gave Jesus and the Spirit to create a new Israel—a new people to be both a light to the nations and the righteous benchmark by which they will one day be judged.  God’s people have always had this dual ministry to the world—to be both a priestly and prophetic people.  As priests we mediate the presence and knowledge of God to the nations and as prophets we stand as—or we should stand—as God’s benchmark of righteousness, calling the nations to repentance and showing forth his standard—showing the world what humanity was created to be.

If that seems like a lot.  If it seems like an impossibly high calling, Paul goes on saying that we were once slaves to sin, but through Jesus and the Spirit we have been set free and adopted as sons of God.  Brothers and Sisters, by the Spirit we are incorporated into the story of Jesus the Messiah.  Because we have the Spirit, we belong to him.  We are, as Paul so often likes to say, “in the Messiah”.  And if we go back a few verses, Paul tells us that the God who “raised Jesus the Messiah from the dead will also give life to [our] mortal bodies through his Spirit who dwells in [us].”  I think this part of Romans is usually read as if Paul is talking about conversion, but it’s really much deeper than that.  Paul is talking about how believers are taken up into the story of Jesus and participate in his suffering and resurrection.  To be filled with the Spirit is to be absolutely and completely assured that one day the Lord will raise our mortal (and in some cases martyred) bodies from the dead, just as he raised Jesus from the dead.  This is the root of faith.  This is what those Christians in Rome needed to remember and believe with all their hearts when persecution and tribulation came.

And if they’ll do that—in the power of the Spirit—Paul says they will become “sons of God”.  It’s about participation in the story and life in Jesus as adopted sons of God—it’s especially powerful when we let Paul’s words stand without changing it to sons and daughters or to children of God.  He writes “sons of God” for a reason, just as he writes about crying out “Abba, Father” for a reason.  Both make it clear he’s talking about our being incorporated into Jesus the Messiah and into his story.  Think back to Jesus crying out to his Father in Gethsemane the night before he was crucified.  Jesus’ people cry with him, “Abba, Father”.  The Lord is no distant god.  Brothers and Sisters, because we are in his Son by faith, we too are his sons and daughters and have the privilege to cry out to him as Father just as Jesus did.  And Paul recalls that prayer in the garden for a reason.  That was Jesus’ prayer to his Father, his prayer as he was about to face his own death, it was his prayer that his Father would take that horrible cup from him.  But it was also a prayer of faith as he submitted himself to his Father’s plan.  We know that Paul is saying to the Romans that when that same cup of persecution and maybe even martyrdom comes to them, they can cry out to their Father with the same confidence that Jesus did, they can submit in faith to his plan the same way Jesus did, and they can know that the Father holds them in his hands the same way he held Jesus.  And, I think most important, they can expect that the Father will vindicate them the same way he vindicated Jesus.  They can know that one day the Father will raise them from the dead to share in the life of his new creation.

If they will let themselves be taken up in the story of Jesus the Messiah—something they can’t do on their own power, but they can in the power of the Spirit—if they suffer with the Messiah and walk his narrow and difficult path, they will be heirs with him—and his inheritance, his glory will be theirs.

Brothers and Sisters, those first Christians, whether they were in Jerusalem and facing the wrath of their fellow Jews or whether they were in Rome facing the wrath of the pagans—in a few years facing the wrath of the Emperor Nero who would throw them to lions or burn them alive—Paul reminds them who they are in Jesus and the Spirit.  They are the people of God, a people washed clean by the blood of Jesus and a people made righteous by the Spirit, a people called to be prophets and priests.  Their calling was to stand before the tsunami of the world’s wrath calling sinful men and women to repentance, while mediating the loving grace of God—proclaiming the good news that Jesus has died, that he is risen, and that life, that participation in God’s new creation can be known through him.

Brothers and Sisters, judgement fell on Jerusalem and the Lord proved himself faithful to his promises as he delivered the church there from destruction.  And the gospel went out to the Greeks and Romans and the Lord showed himself faithful again.  Through the gospel and through the faithful witness of his people, an entire empire believed.  With the biblical witness itself and with that history behind us, we have every reason to trust Jesus and the Spirit ourselves.  We now live on the other side of Christendom.  We don’t know what will happen.  The gospel marches on in other parts of the world, but in ours, darkness is creeping back in.  I doubt that we will know martyrdom the way Paul and so many of those First Century believers did, but we will know in some way the wrath of the world as we stand as prophets and priests, confronting a rebellious world.  Stand firm.  Do not listen to the false prophets who call for compromise and for the easy way.  Do not fear the wrath of the world, for we are in Jesus the Messiah and bear the life of God’s Spirit.  We are sons and daughters of the Father and no matter how bad things get, we can cry out with Jesus, “Abba, Father!” and know that he hears us.  He gave his Son for our sake, why would we think he would abandon us now?  And because we are united with the risen Jesus, because we are sons and daughters of God, we know that on the other side of all our troubles and sorrows lies our inheritance—as we confess in the Creed, the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come.

Let’s pray: Father, through the redeeming death and resurrection of your Son and through the regenerating work of your Spirit, you have made us your people.  You have given us the task to stand as both prophets and priests, confronting this rebellious world and mediating your grace.  Strengthen us, we pray, that we might stand firm in this calling no matter what trials and tribulations we may face.  Make us new by your Spirit, fill us with your grace, and remind us that we share in the inheritance of your Son, who has been raised from the dead, that we might confront temptation and fear with a faith confident in your faithfulness.  Through Jesus we pray.  Amen

A Sermon for the Seventh Sunday after Trinity

Hosea 14:1-9, Romans 6:19-23, & St. Mark 8:1-9

by William Klock

The Prophet Hosea lived in the midst of a wicked and idolatrous people.  God’s people had been split since the death of Solomon, the kingdom of Judah in the South and the Kingdom of Israel in the north.  Judah had its own problems with wickedness and idolatry, but compared to Israel Judah was a downright goody-two-shoes.  Hosea lived in the northern kingdom of Israel.  He could walk through the cities of Israel and see it all: drunkenness and sexual impurity of all kinds.  People mutilated their bodies and took their own sisters as wives.  Everywhere there was a general disregard for God’s law.  And the King.  Those were politically turbulent days, but instead of trusting in the Lord, the King made forbidden alliances with pagan nations and played the game of international politics and intrigue.  But worst of all was the idolatry.  There was a temple to the Lord at Bethel and another at Dan (and that was a problem in itself), but all over Israel, whether in the towns and cities or at the “high places” out in the country, there were temples and altars to Baal and to his consort, Asherah.  The Levites at Bethel and Dan went through the motions of worshipping the Lord, but as Hosea looked around him it seemed most people had devoted themselves to this pagan sky god and his fertility goddess wife.  Sacred prostitutes spilled out of the temples and into the streets, enticing the Lord’s people to what should have been unthinkable.  To Hosea it seemed like just about everyone in Israel, from the King down to the labourer in the market, had forgotten who they were and to whom they belonged.  They were the people who lived with the Lord in their midst.  They were the people chosen and called to show the nations the greatness of the God of Israel.  But no one cared about that anymore.  There was little difference anymore between an Israelite and an Assyrian or a Phoenician.  And to those pagans, the God of Israel was a joke—powerless, jilted by his own people, no one to be feared.

And then the Lord spoke to Hosea.  And the Lord told him to go and find one of those prostitutes spilling out of the pagan temples and to marry her.  He wasn’t just going to give Hosea a sermon to preach.  He did that too.  But, no, he was going to make Hosea himself a prophetic object lesson.  “Go, take to yourself a wife of whoredom and have children of whoredom,” said the Lord, “for the land commits great whoredom by forsaking the Lord” (Hosea 1:2).

Hosea’s life was to become a graphic reminder to the people of Israel that when the Lord had rescued them from Egypt, he had made her his people, the way a husband takes a bride.  He had loved her.  He had cared for her.  He had lavished good gifts on her.  And in return she had prostituted herself to other gods and forsaken his house.  In the same way, Hosea loved his wife, Gomer.  But repeatedly she abandoned him for other men and for her former life of prostitution.  Repeatedly Hosea went after her, buying her out of her bondage, restoring her to his house and to his loving care.  And in between he preached to Israel, reminding them of the Lord’s love and the Lord’s care and of the Lord’s faithfulness.  In between he preached to Israel and called her to repentance—to turn aside from the Baals and the Asherahs and to return to her first love, to return to the Lord.  To remember who she was and to whom she belonged.

Through Hosea the Lord warned the people that their betrayal would be costly, but he also reminded them of his love for them and of his faithfulness.  And he made them a promise.  We read part of that call and promise as our Old Testament lesson this morning.  Hosea 14:1-9.

Return, O Israel, to the Lord your God,

       for you have stumbled because of your iniquity.

Take with you words

       and return to the Lord;

say to him,

       “Take away all iniquity;

accept what is good,

       and we will pay with bulls

       the vows of our lips.

Assyria shall not save us;

       we will not ride on horses;

and we will say no more, ‘Our God,’

       to the work of our hands.

In you the orphan finds mercy.”

I will heal their apostasy;

       I will love them freely,

       for my anger has turned from them.

I will be like the dew to Israel;

       he shall blossom like the lily;

       he shall take root like the trees of Lebanon;

his shoots shall spread out;

       his beauty shall be like the olive,

       and his fragrance like Lebanon.

They shall return and dwell beneath my shadow;

       they shall flourish like the grain;

they shall blossom like the vine;

       their fame shall be like the wine of Lebanon.

O Ephraim, what have I to do with idols?

       It is I who answer and look after you.

I am like an evergreen cypress;

       from me comes your fruit.

Whoever is wise, let him understand these things;

       whoever is discerning, let him know them;

for the ways of the Lord are right,

       and the upright walk in them,

       but transgressors stumble in them.

 

The Lord called his people to repent, to turn aside from their idolatry, but he also promised that one way or another, he would heal their apostasy.  He will make them the people he chose and called them to be—his witnesses to the nations.

I brought home a pile of antique camp stoves this weekend along with a large box of paint cans for when I get around to restoring them.  It had me thinking of the last camp stove I restored.  I had trouble finding a green paint that matched the original colour.  When I did find a good match, it was expensive automotive paint.  It was a unique stove, so I splurged on the paint.  And it started out okay.  I sprayed the paint and the colour was pretty much perfect, but the colour itself was pretty thin.  I thought maybe the cans had been sitting on the shelf a long time and all the pigment was settled in the bottom.  They say to shake the can for one minute after the little mixing ball rattles.  I warmed the can a bit and shook it for ten minutes.  No change.  What I managed to paint looked great, but it took a lot more paint than expected, so I ran out.  I went back to the store for another expensive can, got home, shook it like crazy for ten minutes just to be sure.  And I started spraying.  And this can was full of colour.  But the first thing I noticed was that it wasn’t quite the same colour.  And then I noticed that it wasn’t laying down smoothly.  No matter what I did, it left a rough and blotchy texture on the surface.  And, of course, to get the colours to match, I had to spray the new paint over everything I’d already painted with the old paint.

And as I sat there looking at this mess of a project, I got discouraged and frustrated.  I’d invested a lot in that paint and had high hopes for what it would look like and in the end it failed me.  It didn’t do what it was supposed to do.  And it got me thinking about Hosea and Gomer and the Lord and Israel—and about the church and about me.  I invested in some cans of paint.  The Lord invested in a whole people.  I expected that paint to make an antique stove look good and to show off my handiwork.  The Lord expected Israel to show his goodness and glory to the nations.  I thought about giving up on that paint—throwing the stove back into the electrolysis tank and stripping it back to metal and starting over.  But that’s not what the Lord did with his people and it wasn’t what I was going to do with that paint.  I sent photos to a friend who used to work painting cars and he said, “Clear coat covers a multitude of sins.”  He was right.  So I sat down with those stove parts and some water and some fine-grit sandpaper, and I spent hours wet-sanding.  I sanded and sanded until the paint was smooth and my hands were stained green.  And when I was done it looked awful.  It was smooth, but it was cloudy and swirly and covered in fine scratches.  But it was ready.  All it took was one can of clear coat and a few minutes of spraying.  Clear coat covers a multitude of sins.  It fills in the fine scratches and imperfections and somehow it always comes out with a smooth, glossy finish.  It never fails.  The next evening I put everything together on the workbench and it looked great.  You’d never know what a mess it had been except for all the green under my fingernails.

And because I’m a preacher and the story of the God of Israel and his people is always on my brain, I thought about my friend’s joke about clear coat covering a multitude of sins and then I went for a bike ride and the whole time I was thinking about the ways that clear coat is like Jesus and the Spirit.  I know on some level there’s a heresy in there, but that’s the problem with every analogy and I wasn’t taking it that deep.  That expensive green automotive paint was Israel.  The Lord bought her out of Egypt, delivered her from Pharoah, and displayed to her and to the rest of the world his goodness and generosity in—at least a little bit—the same way I bought those cans of paint and showed the people, or at least the cashier at Lordco, the depth of my pockets.  And as the Lord set Israel to work to be a witness to his glory, I started spraying that paint to be a witness to my own handiwork—to photograph and post to the lantern and stove collectors’ forum on the Internet and on YouTube—to the great acclaim of my fellow collectors.  And just like Israel, that paint failed to perform.  It didn’t meet my expectations.  It made me look incompetent.  If I’d posted photos on the Internet without explanation, people would have mocked me for the sake of that paint that wouldn’t do what it was supposed to do.  Not so unlike the nations that mocked the Lord, the God of Israel, because of the faithlessness of his people—although certainly with far greater consequences.  And the sanding.  The hours and hours of sanding, scuffing up, knocking down, smoothing out that paint that just would not behave.  And not unlike Israel, even when I was done and everything was ready, it still looked awful—not at all what I expected.  The Internet would have mocked me even more if they’d seen it and thought that was the finished project.  But then the clear coat that covers a multitude of sins—at least in my own mind, so much like Jesus the Messiah, God himself, sent to be the faithful Israelite.  To give his life for the sake of their sins, his shed blood—dare I say—like the clear coat, filling in all the scuffs and scratches to the point you’d never know just how unfaithful that paint—or Israel—had been to its purpose and mission.  And then that gloss it leaves behind.  Even if that expensive paint had done everything it was supposed to do, even if it went down flawlessly, it would never have look as perfect and as glossy as that damaged, roughed-up paint looked after it was clear-coated.  Kind of like the people of God.  Even if she’d kept the torah, a people with the divinely given law carved on stone tablets will never show forth the glory of the Lord the way a people filled with his own Spirit will show forth his glory.

And so I took some photos and I posted them in the lantern and stove collectors’ forum and the likes and the comments with glowing praise started rolling in.  Brothers and Sisters, that what’s supposed to happen with the nations, when the world sees the handiwork of the God of Israel, the work of Jesus and the Spirit, in his people.  That’s why you and I are here today.  Because God disciplined and renewed his people by his Son and by his Spirit and that new people became witnesses of his glory.  In their story the nations saw the faithfulness of God and through their proclamation they heard how it was done through Jesus the Messiah and through God’s own Spirit.  And they came and gave him glory and believed in Jesus and that divine clear coat covered them just the way it had Israel, and they became—and eventually you and I became—part of the people of God and part of that community meant to continually witness his glory.

And yet somehow, despite all that the Lord has done for us, we still need to be reminded who we are, to whom we belong, and what he’s called us to do and to be.  Last week we heard Paul’s words from Romans 6, reminding us of our baptism.  In the waters of baptism, he writes, we have died and risen with the Messiah.  We’re like Israel, passing through the Red Sea.  When she went in, she belonged to Pharoah, slaves to the Egyptians, but when she came out the other side she belonged to the Lord, free to serve him in his goodness, his bride and a beloved member of his household.  In today’s Epistle, Paul carries on a few verses later, again, Romans 6:19-23.

For just as you once presented your members as slaves to impurity and to lawlessness leading to more lawlessness, so now present your members as slaves to righteousness leading to sanctification.

   For when you were slaves of sin, you were free in regard to righteousness.   But what fruit were you getting at that time from the things of which you are now ashamed?  For the end of those things is death.  But now that you have been set free from sin and have become slaves of God, the fruit you get leads to sanctification and its end, eternal life.

 

Remember that Paul was writing to an audience that was mostly Jewish or at least steeped in the Jewish scriptures and in the Jewish identity.  When Paul wrote about slavery and freedom, the first thing that came to mind was the Lord’s deliverance of Israel from her slavery in Egypt.  There had been a time when their ancestors had no choice but to obey the will of Pharaoh.  But as Moses led them through the Red Sea and delivered them from that bondage, so Jesus has led us through the waters of baptism and delivered us from our bondage to sin.

That doesn’t mean that the life we have in Jesus is always easy.  The Lord led Israel through the wilderness before taking her into the promised land and Jesus leads us through a wilderness of our own on our way to the age to come.  He promised that his disciples would be rejected—some would even die—on account of him.  We live in the overlap of the ages, but the Lord has a purpose in that.  We, his church, are his means of proclaiming the good news about Jesus and we are witnesses of his glory to the world so that the nations will believe and give him glory.  When it was finished, I posted photos of my stove project to the Internet and everyone liked the photos and posted comments giving me praise for what I’d done.  Do you ever stop to think that the Lord is, right now, doing the same sort of thing with us?  He’s bought us with the blood of his Son, he’s washed away our sins, and he’s filled us with his Spirit, regenerating our hearts and renewing our minds.  He’s made us new creations and he’s sent us out into the world and the world is supposed to see his new creation in us and glorify him and believe.  When the world looks at the Church, it’s supposed to see, to have a foretaste, of God’s new creation and of the age to come in which all the pain and sorrow and sin and tears—even death itself—have been wiped away and everything set to rights.

Before Jesus washed us clean and filled us with the Spirit we were slaves to sin and sin leads to death and we see it all around us.  It’s the way of this fallen world.  But in Jesus and the Spirit the Lord has set us free, in Jesus and the Spirit he is sanctifying us—that means he’s making us holy, making us into the people he intends for us to be—stripping away the old, worn paint and the rust, cleaning off the grime, sanding and prepping, painting and sanding and painting and sanding and clear-coating and all of that until his handiwork is perfect and holy and fully witnesses his glory—and causes the whole world to take note and not just to like and comment, but to come to him in faith to worship and to praise.  And one day the Church will be everything he’s working to make it and one day we will have proclaimed the good news about Jesus everywhere, and then every enemy will be defeated and this in between time will finally come to an end as the age to come finally arrives in all its fullness—like Christmas when all the decorations are finally up and the tree is in the living room and the presents are ready to be opened and the turkey’s on the table.

In the meantime, in this overlap of the ages, Brothers and Sisters, we need to remember who we are and to whom we belong.  We need to remember the hope that lies before us.  Even having been washed by Jesus and filled with the Spirit, the false gods of the world and the lusts of the flesh can be tempting.  Like Gomer, leaving her loving husband and returning to her old life of prostitution.  Like the Israelites in the wilderness.  We grumble.  And our bellies grumble and we think back with longing to the fleshpots of Egypt, forgetting that in Egypt we were slaves to sin and subject to death.  Brothers and Sisters, look around—or as Paul wrote in last week’s Epistle, “consider”, “reckon”, look around you, look where you’ve come from and look at what God had done in Jesus and do the math.  The presents may still be in the attic and the turkey may still be in the oven, but thanks to Jesus and the Spirit all the signs are there.  The Christmas lights are up, there are ornaments on the tree, and we can smell the turkey roasting.  Trust him.  Everything about the story shouts at us that the Lord is faithful and fulfils his promises and so we know that Jesus will finish what he has started.  And if the Gospel lesson today tells us anything, it’s that the Lord will always look after his people in the wilderness.  He fed Israel with manna from heaven.  He fed the multitude with seven loaves and a few small fish.  Brothers and Sisters, come to his Table this morning, eat the bread and drink the wine, and remember that he will feed us too.  Here he reminds us what he’s done for us through the death of his Son and the gift of his Spirit.  Here he reminds us who we are, of the family to which we belong, and of our hope—where we’re headed.  Here he lovingly feeds and clothes us, so that the world might see his faithfulness and give him glory.

Let’s pray: Lord of all power and might, the author and giver of all good things:  Graft in our hearts the love of your Name; increase in us true religion; nourish us with all goodness; and bring forth in us the fruit of good works; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.  Amen.

A Sermon for the Sixth Sunday after Trinity

by Matthew Colvin

Matt. 5:20-26

20 For I tell you, unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.

     21 "You have heard that it was said to those of old, 'You shall not murder; and whoever murders will be liable to judgment.' 22 But I say to you that everyone who is angry with his brother will be liable to judgment; whoever insults his brother will be liable to the council; and whoever says, 'You fool!' will be liable to the hell of fire. 23 So if you are offering your gift at the altar and there remember that your brother has something against you, 24 leave your gift there before the altar and go. First be reconciled to your brother, and then come and offer your gift. 25 Come to terms quickly with your accuser while you are going with him to court, lest your accuser hand you over to the judge, and the judge to the guard, and you be put in prison. 26 Truly, I say to you, you will never get out until you have paid the last penny.

Have you ever stopped to think just how unusual a sermon is in our day? Where else do you sit for half an hour and listen to someone talk in person, without interruption, applause, or any dialogue? Let alone, actually believe it.

You were all kind to me last week as I filled in for Pastor Bill. Well, almost all of you. Luke Galloway wasn’t having it. I don’t blame him. But it raises the question of why you should believe any of what I say here at all. What authority is at work in a sermon?

We mentioned last week that the authority of experts does not challenge us too much: experts put their knowledge at our disposal; they submit it to us for our consideration. It’s true that some of what a pastor says might fall under this category: we are supposed to know the Biblical languages and to be trained in explaining the meaning of the Bible. But when I say, “The Greek word means this,” you should take that with a grain of salt unless I also show you how it fits and makes better sense of the Biblical passage. That is, when we preach the Word, we are following St. Paul’s example, who urges the Corinthians, “I speak as to reasonable men; judge for yourselves the things I say.” (1 Cor 10:15)

Why, then, do we wear robes? Why, in the words of one pastor who does not wear robes, does “someone important get to dress up like Saruman”? Ultimately, that is a symbol that the Reformed Episcopal Church has given the pastor to preach the word with their authority: that the church’s bishops have examined a man and found that his doctrine is in conformity with the church’s teaching. We are not lone rangers. We take ordination vows, and that means we are not free to teach our own doctrines, but those of the church. We subscribe to the Nicene Creed, which means that we are not free to to start teaching Arianism. We follow the 39 Articles in the back of your BCP, which means that we will not suddenly come into the pulpit and start teaching that you’re going to Purgatory, or that you should bow down and worship the bread in Holy Communion. We are men under authority, and ultimately, that means we are under the authority of Jesus.

Now what if I showed up on Sunday with my sermon engraved on two tablets? Not two iPads, but two actual tablets of stone. That would be sending a message about the authority of the sermon, wouldn’t it, and it would be a very different message than is communicated by robes and stoles and appeals to Greek lexicography.

But in our gospel lesson this morning, that, or something equivalent to it, is what Jesus has done: he sits down on a mountain, showing that he is about to fill the role of Moses, who went up on Mt. Sinai to receive the covenant God made with Israel after He brought them out of Egypt.

The Sermon on the Mount is Jesus’s most comprehensive and public announcement of his teaching about the coming kingdom of God — by which we mean, the coming day when Israel’s God would be publicly acknowledged as reigning through the person of his anointed king, the Messiah. It is nothing more or less than the announcement of a new covenant, a new moment in the history of Israel as a people, right up there with the covenant with Abraham, the covenant at Mount Sinai, or the covenant with David. That is Jesus’s message throughout his earthly ministry: “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is near.” The climactic moment in Israel’s story was about to happen.

What is at stake here is what it means to be Israel, to be the people of God. The Pharisees have one way of doing this; Jesus has another. They are not compatible. And Jesus does not mince words: “For I tell you, unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.”

I often have to remind my high school students that the word “Pharisee” was a self-laudatory epithet: they called themselves the P’rushim, meaning “separated ones.” Separated from what? Well, to understand that, we need to go back to the time between the testaments, when the Greco-Syrian empire under Antiochus IV Epiphanes attempted to melt down Israel and amalgamate it with Greek culture. In order to make the Jews assimilate, Antiochus banned copies of the Torah, prohibited circumcision and sacrifices to the Lord, and compelled the Jews to eat pig meat and profane the Sabbath. In other words, everything that marked the Jews as separate from the Gentiles was targeted by Antiochus’s laws.

In reaction to this, the Jews rebelled under the leadership of Mattathias Maccabee and his sons, especially Judah Maccabee. With the help of an alliance with Rome, they eventually succeeded in defeating Antiochus and rededicating the Temple in Jerusalem which he had defiled by sacrificing a pig on the altar. And alongside this military victory, the Maccabees also used violent force to pressure Jews to keep the law. It was a really difficult time to be a Jewish mother: if you had your baby boy circumcised, Antiochus’s officers would kill you and your baby. If you didn’t have your baby boy circumcised, the Maccabees would do it by force. If you refused to sacrifice to Zeus, Antiochus’s officers would kill you. If you did sacrifice to Zeus, the Maccabees would kill you.

The operative word in the Maccabees’ resistance to the Greco-Syrian empire was “zeal.” It did not denote a mere enthusiasm. No, it was a violent upholding of the Torah covenant against those who would annihilate it, against the Jewish renegades who were ready to lose their Jewishness and become part of the Greco-Syrian melting pot. In this, the Maccabees were following an earlier template: In Numbers 25, Balaam had a similar idea, albeit with a different method. After the king of Moab, Balak, hired him to curse Israel, and Balaam couldn’t do so because God caused blessings to keep coming out of his mouth instead, Balaam decided that if he couldn’t curse Israel, he would lead them into idolatry. And the best way to do that was sex: he got foxy Midianite or Moabite women to seduce the Israelites and lead them to worship Baal of Peor. And we’re told that:

…Behold, one of the people of Israel came and brought a Midianite woman to his family, in the sight of Moses and in the sight of the whole congregation of the people of Israel, while they were weeping in the entrance of the tent of meeting. 7 When Phinehas the son of Eleazar, son of Aaron the priest, saw it, he rose and left the congregation and took a spear in his hand 8 and went after the man of Israel into the chamber and pierced both of them, the man of Israel and the woman through her belly. Thus the plague on the people of Israel was stopped. 9 Nevertheless, those who died by the plague were twenty-four thousand. (Num. 25:6-9)

This is what is meant by “zeal.” We get a couple other instances in the NT. Saul of Tarsus, before he was stricken blind and came to believe in Jesus and became the apostle Paul, was full of zeal: he was “ravaging the church, and entering house after house, he dragged off men and women and committed them to prison.” (Acts 8:3) And again, Saul was “breathing threats and murder against the disciples of the Lord.” (9:1) This is what zeal looked like: Saul being a good Jew was very concerned that other Jews were being unfaithful to the covenant of Moses, and the way to put a stop to this was to use violence against them, because that is what the Maccabees had done. Indeed, when we find Jesus described as full of zeal, he too is violent: flipping over tables. “Zeal for your house has consumed me.”

The Pharisees

The Pharisees were the spiritual heirs of the Maccabees. They looked around and saw Israel under the domination of the Romans. And they adopted the Maccabees’ recipe for what to do when Gentiles were dominating you: namely, “obey the Torah even harder.” And especially those parts of the Torah that set Jews apart from Gentiles: keeping the Sabbath, observing Kosher food laws, circumcision, sacrifices at the Temple, and following the cleanness laws that were required for entering the Temple — but following them all the time, even when you weren’t going to the Temple.

These were the religious conservatives. They were the people who took the Bible seriously. They weren’t like the Sadducees, working hand in glove with the Romans. The Pharisees believed in the resurrection of the dead. They were looking for the arrival of the Messiah and the coming kingdom of God.

All of which makes it all the more remarkable that Jesus says, “unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.”

Nowadays, if I were to call someone a Pharisee, it would not be a compliment. Sort of like how the popularity of the name Adolph went downhill after the 1940s. Except in this case, there is just one man who trashed the name “Pharisee” and turned it into an insult forever after: Jesus. We don’t have time today to do a thorough survey of everything Jesus said about them, but just consider how effective his techniques were. Tell me the next word: “Woe to you, Scribes and Pharisees, __________.” Or the unforgettable visual images: trying to do eye surgery with a railroad tie sticking out of your own eye socket; fishing around for gnats in your soup while balancing a camel on a spoon; absurdly washing only the outside of a bowl or cup and leaving the inside filthy.

You have heard it said

To combat the Pharisees’ way of being Israel, Jesus sets forth his own teaching. He introduces it with one of the most provocative rhetorical devices: the contradiction. “You have heard it said…but I say to you.” Many people misunderstand this. You have heard it said (!!!) that Jesus is quoting the Torah and then correcting its teaching. But I say to you that in this same chapter, verse 17, Jesus has already disavowed any intention of changing or altering the law and the prophets. His intention is rather to attack the Pharisees and their interpretation.

So how does it work? “You have heard it said” — in Judaism, the verb to “hear” (Heb. shama’, cf. the Shema’ in Deuteronomy 6:4) is closely associated with literal, or overly literal interpretation. Shamu’a and mishma’  are both abstract nouns that mean “literal meaning” as well as “that which is heard.” Likewise, hashshome’a, “he who hears” is often used in the sense of “he who sticks to the superficial, literal meaning of Scripture.” Jesus, then, in introducing his teaching on anger, opposes it to the simplemindedly literal interpretation of the Pharisees: In other words, “You have heard it said, you shall not murder, and you think wrongly that this commandment is just concerned with murder. It is not. It is concerned with the roots and causes of murder; likewise, with the effects and consequences of those causes, other than outright murder.” Or, “You have heard it said, ‘you shall not murder, and only he who murders is liable to the judgment,’ but this is a misinterpretation, for many other offences than simple murder are liable to the judgment.”

In every case where Jesus introduces some received interpretation of the Law with “You have heard it said”, he immediately juxtaposes, “But I say to you.” Here, Jesus gives his own authoritative exposition of the Torah. Note that he does not appeal to any other authority: There is no, “Rabbi Ela said that Rabbi Shimon ben Lakish said that Rabbi Meir used to say…” That’s an actual quotation from the Talmud, by the way.

The sermon on the mount continues for three chapters, until Matthew 7:29. At at the end, we are told the crowd’s reaction: “the crowds were astonished at his teaching, for he was teaching them as one who had authority, and not as their scribes.” That is, despite not having been trained by any rabbi, and despite not having authorization as a scribe to propound binding interpretations of the Torah, and without saying “Rabbi X said in the name of Rabbi Y,” Jesus was declaring, “But I say to you…” That is, on his own authority as the Son of God, not the derived authority of his doctoral dissertation supervisor.

Jesus constantly warned against the Pharisees. Why? Because they represented a very real danger. It is a danger that is peculiarly powerful for people who love God and take the Bible seriously and feel culturally and morally besieged.

We are in a very similar situation, brothers and sisters. You are in the REC. It confesses the Bible to be the inspired word of God; it recites the Creed on a weekly basis; it has bishops, conforming to the polity that characterized the ancient church and the vast majority of church history since then; it stands for orthodoxy and Biblical morality in the face of howling winds of cultural change and creeping sexual perversion and transhumanism, all encouraged by the false eschatology of progress and a false faith in technology. If we are not careful to obey Jesus’s teaching, it will be very easy to fall into Pharisaism, and to pray like the Pharisee in Jesus’s parable: “I thank you, Lord, that I am not like other men, leftists, weirdos with dyed hair, or those rainbow flag alphabet soup people. I attend church every week and give a tenth of everything I get.” The danger, that is, is to adopt a view of the church as the beleaguered remnant waiting for God to smite its cultural and political enemies, and to focus on performative acts of boundary-marking. In other words, to focus on being pure and separate, in the hopes that God will reward your heightened effort at boundary marking by destroying those on the other side of the boundaries and rewarding you.

Jesus’s teaches something different from the Maccabees, both about how to be Israel, and about how to relate to those on the other side of the boundaries of the faith.

23 - “If you are offering your gift at the altar” — even if you are in the middle of the most important performance of Israelite piety, the central act that enabled Israel’s God to dwell with His people. This is a shocking inversion of how the Pharisees thought things worked: for them, if you declared some money “qorban”, then you were excused from supporting your aged parents with it; for them, if an apparently dead body were on the side of the road, a priest or Levite on his way to the temple would be fully justified in avoiding it in order to remain in a state of cultic purity so that he could do his work in the temple. The laws of purity and religion were thus exalted over the duties toward neighbours and other human beings.

Jesus has the OT on his side on this point: the opening of Isaiah rebukes the Israelites for their chutzpah in offering sacrifices and celebrating new moon feasts and other religious observances while perpetrating the worst sorts of social injustice: “Bring no more vain offerings; incense is an abomination to me. New moon and Sabbath and the calling of convocations— I cannot endure iniquity and solemn assembly. 14 Your new moons and your appointed feasts my soul hates; they have become a burden to me; I am weary of bearing them. 15 When you spread out your hands, I will hide my eyes from you; even though you make many prayers, I will not listen; your hands are full of blood…Everyone loves a bribe and runs after gifts. They do not bring justice to the fatherless, and the widow's cause does not come to them.”

The idea that you can please God by meeting the external requirements, while simultaneously engaged in the worst sorts of injustice toward your fellow men is formalism. Think of a mafia boss who orders a hit on his enemies or pulls out a tommy gun and mows down sixteen rival mobsters on Saturday; the following morning, he shows up at Mass, dips his fingers in holy water, makes the sign of the cross, receives a wafer on his tongue and a blessing from the priest. Mobsters trust in formalism.

God is not fooled.

It was easy for faithful and believing Jews in Jesus’s day to fall into hating the Romans. They were polytheist Gentiles, sexually immoral, and overweening in their obnoxiousness toward the Jews. Jesus mentions “Those Galileans whose blood Pilate mingled with their sacrifices.” The Romans had installed the wicked Idumean dynasty of the Herodians as rulers over Israel. Roman soldiers had the right to Shanghai any Jew and force him to carry his heavy soldier’s pack for a mile.

Against all this, Jesus tells his disciples to “put away your sword” and to “turn the other cheek” and “go two miles”. In the face of the power and authority of the Roman governor, he answers Pilate not a word. He does not compete on the Romans’ level. He knows that their empire will be His whenever He wants. “Do you think that I cannot appeal to my Father, and he will at once send me more than twelve legions of angels?”

The Sermon on the Mount teaches a different way of being the people of God: not the Pharisees’ way of exaggerated purity, social pressure, and violent insurrection. It is a way that manifests itself in a totally different attitude toward the Gentiles: one of compassion, not hatred. Not endorsement of the Gentiles’ sins or their idolatry or their sexual immorality or infanticide. But a willingness to lay down His life also for them.

A crucified Messiah implies a crucified Israel. That, in fact, is what we are called to be: Israel for the sake of the world. And that is what we find in our Epistle lesson this morning, as St. Paul urges in Romans 6:

 Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? 4 We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life.

     5 For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we shall certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his. 6 We know that our old self was crucified with him in order that the body of sin might be brought to nothing, so that we would no longer be enslaved to sin.

Followers of the crucified Messiah are to be Israel for the sake of the world. Accordingly, we are to pray for the world — which we are about to do now.

A Sermon for the Fifth Sunday after Trinity

by Matthew Colvin

As you know, our family lives in Port Alberni. When we first moved there, I met some guys on the tennis court, and when I told them I was new to town, their immediate question was, “Do you fish?” I said no. “Then what are you doing here?” — as though it were inexplicable why anyone would live in Port Alberni without catching fish.

And sometimes, because the Barclay Sound is so pretty, and because I have enjoyed a cruise down the Alberni Inlet on the MV Frances Barclay, and because all my friends own boats, I say to my wife, “Maybe we could get one.” And then she reminds me that I hate doing maintenance on things, and that a boat is a hole in the water that you throw money into.

But maybe the biggest objection, for me, comes from Psalm 107:

“They that go down to the sea in ships, and occupy their business in great waters;

These men see the works of the Lord, and his wonders in the deep.

For at his word the stormy wind ariseth, which lifeth up the waves thereof.

They are carried up to the heaven, and down again to the deep; their soul melteth away because of the trouble.” (107:23-26)

That is why I am a landlubber from the fishing capital of Canada. Unlike St. Peter.

We have already met Peter in chapter 4 of Luke, because Jesus has healed his mother in law from a fever. And we know, also, that Peter and Andrew his brother were looking for the coming of the Messiah.

Jesus’s preaching has been in synagogues in Nazareth and in Capernaum in chapter 4. But now, he has a larger audience, and the venue is moved outdoors: the crowd first surrounds him and is “pressing in upon him” — not the last time we will see crowds behave this way: remember the reaction of his disciples when the woman with the bleeding comes up behind Jesus and touches his robe. “You see the crowd pressing around you, and yet you say, ‘Who touched me?’” This is the behaviour of crowds also in our own day in the presence of someone they have come to see. Jesus at first is standing by the shore of Genessaret, but he then finds a solution to the crowding problem: by getting into a boat, and putting out from the land a little bit, he is able to continue teaching, in his usual seated posture that he had taught in also in the two synagogues, but now with a boundary of water between him and the crowds. In the event, it will be those who are with him in the boats who become his followers, as though they were with him on the other side of the waters of baptism.

One might wonder why there is mention of two boats, not just the one that Jesus sat in. This is what we call a narrative seed. Some of you may have heard of the term “Chekhov’s gun.” The Russian playwright Anton Chekhov said, “If you say in the first act of a play that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, then in the second or third act it absolutely must go off. If it’s not going to be fired, it shouldn’t be hanging there.” In this case, the second boat will be needed in verse 8 when there are too many fish for the one boat to handle.

If you’ve ever seen a stage magician, you’ll recall how they always take pains to demonstrate how difficult the trick is: they’ll cut a watermelon with the sword they’re about to use on the lovely assistant; or fan the cards to show that the deck isn’t rigged; or bring up a burly member of the audience to demonstrate how the chains the magician is going to escape from are really strong.

God or Jesus isn’t a stage magician, of course. But he does like to demonstrate the difficulty of his miracles. Remember Elijah pouring water three times over the altar before the fire of God fell from heaven to burn it up in front of the prophets of Baal? Or Jesus choosing to heal, not a man who had recently become blind, but one who was more than 30 years old and had been blind from birth? Or Jesus pointedly asking the disciples to show him the five loaves and three fish first before proceeding to feed the five thousand with them?

In the present story, we are told that “the fishermen had got out of the boats and were washing their nets.” This tell us that they were using trammel-nets, made of linen, which needed to be washed after use. If the linen nets were not washed and dried promptly after use they would rot from the various organic matter stuck in them after use. Further, this washing was invariably done in the morning. Why?

Because until the introduction of modern nets made of transparent nylon, fishing with linen nets had to be done at night. During the daytime, the fish could see the nets and avoid being caught by them. So Jesus has found Peter and his partners at precisely the wrong time to catch fish: not only are they done for the day, not only are they already washing their nets, but the sun has now risen, which means it is not possible to catch fish with nets now.

Jesus also isn’t concerned with fishermen’s timetables.  When does he tell them to let down their nets? Nothing to do with with daylight or the schedule of net-cleaning. No, “When he had finished speaking.” At his convenience. Jesus appears to think he is “the main character,” as the kids say these days. Because, well, he is.

Put yourself in Peter’s shoes. You’ve been working all night. Fishing is hard. You’re in a boat with probably three other men. You have to pull in heavy nets; you may have to dive into the water to wrestle them or unsnag them from something. You are drenched, weary, and have caught nothing. You have washed your nets, maybe mended them if they broke. You’re done for the day. And now this Jesus fellow tells you to start all over, and drawing on his vast knowledge of …carpentry? — he tells you to start fishing in the daytime, when you know, from years of experience on the sea, that you will catch nothing.

All of which makes Peter’s address of Jesus a little more amusing. He calls him ἐπιστάτα. The ESV says, “Master,” but it is probably best translated “boss.” “Boss, we have toiled all night and caught nothing! But at your word I will let down the nets.”

“Boss” – the Greek means literally the one who is stationed over something, has authority over it. In this case, the something over which Peter acknowledges Jesus’s authority is Peter’s boat and indeed his entire business, his profession of fishing, a matter to which he was likely born and bred – like his business partners James and John, whose father Zebedee was with them in the boat, Peter is trained in a thousand little details of skill and technique: the behaviour of fish, the tides, the weather, the use and care and washing and repair of nets; the handling and maintenance of boats; and likely also the salesmanship required to sell his fish, if not to those who would eat them, then to fishmonger middlemen. This was his life, deeply embedded in the community of his town on the shore of the Sea of Galilee, Sea of Tiberias, or Lake Genessaret, depending on who you asked for its name. Indeed, we know from the Talmud that "throughout inland Palestine, Tiberias was the only place where wholesale trade in fish was conducted, and (2) that this wholesale trade in fish was in season in Tiberias probably in the months that were most suitable for the loading and export of fish." So Jesus is there at the Port Alberni of Palestine, boldly giving a command to fishermen who have grown up and make their living catching and selling fish from this lake.

And the command that Jesus gives Peter is, quite frankly, absurd: to dirty the nets again after already cleaning them; to let them down in the daytime, when the fish will have no trouble seeing them, rather than at night, which every fisherman knows is the right time to catch fish; and to do it, moreover, in the same location where, as Peter explains to him, “we have laboured all night and have caught nothing.”

So why does Peter obey him? Because he accepts his authority, which is not the authority of an expert. The thousand details of the fisherman’s trade are indeed matters of expertise, but Jesus does not urge Peter to cast in his nets on the basis of his expertise. The authority of expertise, if you stop and think about it for a moment, is an authority that makes no claims upon our sense of ourselves and our authority to decide things: it rather submits itself for our consideration, as having knowledge of particulars that we could have too, if we invested the effort.

No, Peter’s faith is not faith in expertise. Rather, it is the same faith that we will see later, in what might well be the same boat, certainly on the same sea, in awe at Jesus’s authority: “Who is this, that even the wind and waves obey Him?” It is faith in the Messiah. It is loyalty to Israel’s God.

More than any disciple, his personality shines out in the gospels: he is a man who wears his heart on his sleeve, ready, out of love for Jesus, to undertake bold actions and to follow Jesus: “Lord, if it is you, command me to come to you on the water”; “Even if all forsake you, yet I will not.” “Lord, it is good for us to be here; let us make three tents.” But at the same time, he is not always able to see through his bold beginnings to their end: so we will see him swearing he doesn’t know the man; weeping when the cock crows; beginning to sink in the waves.

But this is not one of those moments of weakness. Here, he recognizes in Jesus the holiness of the Lord: “Depart from me, for I am a sinful man.” Peter does not know that Jesus is Israel’s God yet. But he knows that He is at least close to Israel’s God. Here we recognize the attitude of the prophets of old, for instance, Isaiah 6:5: "Woe is me! For I am lost; for I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips; for my eyes have seen the King, the LORD of hosts!"

This is the moment when Peter makes a sudden break with his past life. We recall Elijah calling Elisha by throwing his cloak over him while he was plowing. There, too, the master called his pupil in the middle of his work at his job; there, too, the disciple experienced a complete upending of his life. In both cases, the disciple will see His master taken up into heaven; both Elisha and Peter will then be filled with the spirit of their teacher; and from that point, they will show complete fearlessness and boldness.

Yes, Peter stumbles several times. Sometimes he is overcome by fear – of the waves, or of persecution and death. Other times, he stumbles because of his deeply ingrained respect for, and assumptions about propriety: as when he rebuked Jesus for saying that He would be rejected and killed ("Lord, this will never happen to you"); or when he objected to Jesus washing his feet; or when, in Acts, he was told to sacrifice and eat a giant picnic blanket of unclean animals and replied, "By no means, Lord; for I have never eaten anything that is common or unclean." (Acts 10:14) But none of these stumbles is permanent. Why? Because Jesus tells him, “Simon, Simon. Satan has asked to sift you like wheat. But I have prayed for you, that your faith may not fail. And when you have returned, strengthen your brothers.”

Jesus has just demonstrated that if he wanted to, he could make Peter and the sons of Zebedee into fishing millionaires, the tycoons of the Lake of Genessaret. And because of this, they trust him to the end. But not, notice, in order to get rich: having received the demonstration of Jesus’s ability to provide wealth in the context of their business as fishermen, they now leave that business. Later, in the story of the rich young ruler, after that man goes away sad because he had great possessions, Peter pipes up, “Lord, we have left everything to follow you.” And they have. After they saw the demonstration, they didn’t care about getting rich as fishermen. They saw what their hearts had longed for. They wanted to be with Jesus. Peter does not treat Jesus as a way to get rich. We read in Acts 3, when Peter heals the lame man at the Beautiful Gate of the Temple, that the lame man first looked at him, hoping to receive something, “But Peter said, "I have no silver and gold, but what I do have I give to you. In the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, rise up and walk!" (Acts 3:6) No, Peter is not concerned with silver or gold or catching fish anymore. Jesus has demonstrated that to him a second time when he asked about the Temple Tax, and Peter found a coin inside a fish. Perhaps earlier than any other disciple, he understood well that he should “seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness” — that is, God’s faithfulness to keep his promises to His people, especially the promise to send the Messiah and to forgive their sins — “and all these things shall be added unto you.”

Jesus tells Peter two things: first, “Do not be afraid.” Second, “from now on, you will be catching men.” The verb for “catching” is a little bit misleading, since we usually think of “catching” men as something that kidnappers do, or the police with a fugitive. But that’s not the connotation of the Greek word ζωγρῶν, literally, “catching alive.” It is not usually a fishing word, though it is an accurate enough description of the usual methods of catching fish: nets and hooks, that result in live fish flopping around. It’s not a word you would use for throwing dynamite in a pond or poisoning all the fish. But its usual usage is in contrast to killing: in the Iliad, it’s the word used for Diomedes or Achilles sparing an enemy warrior’s life and taking him captive for a ransom instead. But in Jesus’s usage here, in connection with the net, it is a vivid metaphor: Peter’s concern now is to seek the coming kingdom of heaven, which Jesus in Matthew 13 says, “is like a net that was thrown into the sea and gathered fish of every kind. When it was full, men drew it ashore and sat down and sorted the good into containers but threw away the bad.” (I have a running joke with my daughter about how many gross and disgusting things there are in the sea. But Jesus here means the wicked.) At any rate, Peter does indeed “catch men.” He preaches more boldly than anyone in the book of Acts; and he is the means by which Gentiles are first brought into the church.

Peter, thus, trusts Jesus after this demonstration of his ability to provide in a single night the catch of a week or more. He and his fellow fishermen will all be martyrs, after all; yet to them applies Jesus’s promise that they will sit on twelve thrones judging the twelve tribes of Israel. In the end, Jesus will eat fish with them again, likewise on the shore of the Sea of Galilee, but this time without the crowd, after his resurrection. And then we will see him in the book of Acts boldly telling the Sanhedrin to judge whether it is right to obey them or to obey God. We will see him stretching out his hands and going where he does not want to go — to prison at the hands of a king named Herod, awaiting execution during Passover week, like his Lord Jesus. In Peter’s case, we see the truth of George MacDonald’s statement: “The Son of God suffered unto the death, not that men might not suffer, but that their sufferings might be like His.” And no one more than Peter.

In him we see the truth of Ignatius of Antioch’s words in his letter to the Philadelphians around 100 AD:

“For my own part, I know and believe that He was in actual human flesh, even after His resurrection. When He appeared to Peter and his companions, He said to them, ‘Take hold of me; touch me, and see that I am no bodiless phantom’. And they touched Him then and there, and believed, for they had had contact with the flesh-and-blood reality of Him. That was how they came by their contempt for death, and proved themselves superior to it. Moreover, He ate and drank with them after He was risen, like any natural man, though even then He and the Father were spiritually one.”

Have you thought about why we love Peter? It is because he is so understandable, so relatable. And he stands forth as these things because God chose him and made the gospel writers depict him for us — not as the infallible Pope, but as the fullest example and pattern of the discipleship of a follower of Jesus. In Peter we see the longing for the kingdom of God, the fierce loyalty and sense of propriety (Lord, you will never wash my feet!), the wrongness and error that beset us all, but also the gentleness of Jesus in dealing with Peter, in restoring him; and then the mature disciple in the book of Acts, who has fully comprehended Jesus’s teaching and his resurrection, and is able to do great things, including suffering for the name.

Let us pray.

Grant, O Lord, we beseech thee, that the course of this world may be so peaceably ordered by thy governance, that thy Church may joyfully serve thee in all godly quietness; through Jesus Christ our Lord.  Amen.

A Sermon for the Fourth Sunday after Trinity

Romans 8:18-23

by William Klock

The world is not as it should be.  We know it in our bones.  Around us we see glimpses of what the world should be like: when we see the beauty of flower or the sunset or the majesty of a waterfall, when we see a newborn baby or the love shared between husband and wife or parent and child, when someone goes out of their way to do some good deed for no other reason than that it needs to be done.  But the world is also filled with pain and suffering and tears.  We hurt each other terribly.  We lie, cheat, steal, and kill.  We act selfishly.  And then we all eventually die and it can seem so pointless.  Everyone sees it.  The gospel is God’s answer: God humbling himself in Jesus, taking on the flesh of his broken people and suffering the death that they deserved for their rebellion against him.  Allowing sin and death to do their worst and rising triumphant over them.  Suffering birthed God’s new world in the midst of the old.  That’s God’s solution.  But as our culture has gradually forgotten the gospel, we’ve come to address this problem by becoming increasingly obsessed with the therapeutic.  In the midst of a broken world, everything has become about feeling good.  Buy this and you’ll feel better.  Do this—and this usually involves spending money on something—and you’ll feel better.  We created a whole “therapy” industry to make ourselves feel better in general and better about ourselves.  It shouldn’t be any wonder that the great modern heresy is the so-called Prosperity Gospel, which promises that the Christian life is all about health and wealth—feeling good.  But even otherwise orthodox churches have often embraced the therapeutic, whether it’s in our preaching or our worship.  Everything is increasingly focused on “me” and on me feeling good.  It’s the very opposite of God’s solution to a world and a people broken by sin and death.

And yet, when we go back to the New Testament, particularly if we listen to Jesus, there’s a lot—a lot—of talk about suffering.  Jesus even promises that his people will suffering.  “If they hate me, they will hate you—because a servant isn’t greater than his master.”  “Blessed are you when people slander and persecute you and say wicked things about you on account of me.  Celebrate and rejoice, because there’s a reward for you in God’s kingdom.  That’s how they persecuted the prophets who were before you.”  Jesus promised his people suffering, whether it was in the gospels or in his vision to John that we have in Revelation.  You can’t go out into the world to declare that Jesus is Lord without making people angry.  You can’t go out into the world to tell people and to show people that God’s new creation is breaking into and transforming the old, without upsetting the way things are.  The people invested in the old age will get angry.  But it’s not just persecution.  Even as Jesus calls us to lift the veil on God’s new creation, to show in the present what God has in store for the future, we suffer.  Because the world still is not as it should be.  Jesus’ people suffer from poverty from hunger from sickness.  We suffer the effects of sin in the world just like everyone else.  We’re all—you and I—getting older year by year and feeling it.  And one day we’ll die.  Because instead of stepping into history in judgement and wiping every last vestige of sin from his creation so that it could all be set to rights, Jesus first stepped into the middle of history to offer us redemption, so that we won’t have to face his wrath on that day when he finally comes—so that we, poor sinners, can instead have a share in his new creation.  Brothers and Sisters, we desperately need this gospel perspective.  And this is what Paul’s getting at in our Epistle form Romans 8.  He writes in verse 18:

This is how I work it out. The sufferings we go through in the present time are not worth putting in the scale alongside the glory that is going to be unveiled for us.

 

“This is how I work it out…”  That doesn’t mean this is Paul’s opinion.  “This is how I work it out” means that Paul, knowing the Scriptures, knowing the story of Israel and Israel’s God, knowing Jesus, working under the Spirit’s inspiration, this is the only conclusion he can reach.  He’s been building this argument for eight chapters in Romans and here he reaches the inevitable conclusion: those who will be glorified will first face suffering, but that this suffering can’t begin to compare with the glory to be revealed.

Think about what a powerful statement that was when Paul wrote this.  When he writes that word “suffering” most of us probably read into that whatever our own trials and tribulations are.  That’s fine.  But what did Paul have in mind?  Later in the chapter, in verses 35-36 he writes that nothing will separate us from the love of the Messiah—nothing—and then he goes on to detail the sorts of suffering that he and other Christians were facing—things people might think mean that God doesn’t love them, things they might think show a lack of faith, things that might separate them from Jesus.  Here’s his list: hardship or distress, persecution or famine, nakedness or peril or sword.  And he quotes from Psalm 44: “For your sake we are being killed all day long; we are accounted sheep to be slaughtered.”  These things are far worse than the sorts of suffering any of us are likely to face.  And as horrible as this suffering was, none of it could compare with the glory to be revealed—no amount of suffering could make the glory not worth it.

But what is the glory Paul’s writing about?  I like the translation that this glory is “going to be unveiled for us”, but we have to be careful.  That can make it sound like we’re going to be spectators, when the sense of what Paul’s saying in Greek is that this glory will be revealed towards us or into us.  It’s a sense of this glory being bestowed on us as a gift.  You and I will participate in glory.  And this makes perfect sense when we consider that just before this Paul said that if we are in the Messiah, then we will share in his inheritance—we will participate in his inheritance.

And what’s the inheritance?  Well, who is Jesus?  He is Lord.  His glory is revealed or it’s unveiled in his glorious and sovereign rule of Creation and Paul is saying here that the glory we wait for with eager longing, the glory that is the basis for our hope as Christians is not glory in the sense many people often think.  We often think of “glory” as a place or a state of being.  When a Christian dies we often hear people say that he or she has gone on or been promoted to “glory”.  Brothers and Sisters, “glory” isn’t going to heaven when you die.  As Jesus’ glory is his sovereign rule over Creation, so the glory to be revealed in us is our participation, our sharing in the sovereign and saving rule of Jesus—being restored to original vocation and taking part in God’s creation set to rights.  And this is why he says what he does in verse 19:

Yes: creation itself is on tiptoe with expectation, eagerly awaiting the moment when God’s children will be revealed.

 

If our hope, if our glory—as it is so often wrongly portrayed—was for the destruction of this world and an eternity of disembodied existence in heaven with God, then the Creation would have no reason to eagerly long for that glory to be revealed.  What Paul describes here is the opposite: God’s Creation is waiting with eager expectation for the great day when its true rulers are revealed, the sons and daughters of God, and when it will be delivered from corruption.  Look at verses 20-22:

 

Creation, you see, was subjected to pointless futility, not of its own volition, but because of the one who placed it in this subjection, in the hope that creation itself would be freed from its slavery to decay, to enjoy the freedom that comes when God’s children are glorified.  Let me explain.  We know that the entire creation is groaning together, and going through labor pains together, up until the present time.

This is where we need to stand back and look at the big picture.  Everything Paul’s saying here is dependent on that.  It’s the big picture the Bible gives of us of God’s Creation, from beginning to end.  We read in Genesis that God created and that everything was good.  We even read there that when he created human beings he looked at his handiwork and declared us not just “good”, but “very good”.  But we look around us now and have to wonder what happened.  War is always raging somewhere, there’s violence everywhere, there’s greed and corruption everywhere.  Justice is in short supply and so are the basic things that people need to survive—maybe not in our part of the world, but for billions of others.  And yet even if we don’t pay attention to the big evils that play out on the international scene—or even on the local scene, for that matter—we only have to look at the struggles that we have ourselves and that we share with our family and friends to keep away from sin and to do good.  Hate is easy; love is hard.  Paul knew it.  The Roman Christians knew it.  We know it.

Paul tells the story of Creation in the book of Romans, but he tells it as Israel’s story.  We don’t have time to run through the whole book this morning obviously, but Paul’s point is that the whole Creation is enslaved in the same sort of way that Israel was in Egypt.  And right there we get a glimmer of hope.  Remember, when Israel went down to Egypt—remember the story of Jospeh being sold into slavery by his brothers and winding up in prison in Egypt?—it was all according to the Lord’s plan.  The Lord arranged for Joseph to become a slave in Egypt so that through him he could rescue his people.  Egypt started out good for Israel.  When things turned around under a new king who enslaved Israel, it wasn’t because the Lord had ceased to be good and it wasn’t because the Lord was no longer in control.  Instead, we learn later that the Lord allowed the Israelites to become slaves in Egypt so that he could then manifest his glorious sovereignty to everyone—to Israel in rescuing her and to the Egyptians by showing his power over her false gods and over her mighty horses and chariots.  In the Exodus, the Lord marked Israel forever as the people he had freed from slavery, people to whom he had given a new life.  That became their national identity, celebrated every year in the Passover.

In all of that Paul is working up to his point here.  As the Lord allowed Israel to fall into bondage to Egypt, so he has allowed his good Creation to be subjected to death and decay.  We may look around and wonder if things are hopeless.  Every time one war ends and we see peace break out another war begins somewhere else.  We work hard to lift this group out of poverty, but then that group over there falls into it.  We cure one disease only to have two new ones crop up.  Isaiah wrote about a day when the lion would lie down with the lamb and we look around us and wonder if that’s ever going to happen.

And Paul assures us: Yes, it’s for real.  This is God’s promise.  No matter how bad things are, this is still his good Creation and he has promised to put everything to rights.  Even as he cast Adam and Eve from the garden he was promising them that he would one day overcome sin and restore everything to the way it should be.  Genesis shows things going from bad to worse.  It shows us humanity losing even the very knowledge of God and sinking into paganism and idolatry.  But then it tells us how God came to Abraham and established a covenant with him.  The Lord promised that through Abraham and his family he would restore not only humanity, but all of Creation and here Paul reminds us what that means, what it looks like and why the Creation itself would long for it to happen.

Again, we need the big picture—we need to remember where things started.  In Genesis we read that the Lord created human beings to be his image bearers.  Theologians have argued for two thousand years over what exactly that means, but in the last century, as we’ve been able to read the Old Testament in light of other Jewish and Ancient Near Eastern literature we’ve realised that the language of Genesis is temple language.  Israel’s pagan neighbours built great stone temples and then placed images of their gods in them.  Those images represented their gods’ rule or sovereignty over the land and people.  And Genesis uses the same language and imagery, except that in Genesis it’s the Lord himself who builds his own temple—the cosmos—and instead of placing an image of himself carved in stone or gold in it, he creates human beings, to live in his presence in the temple, but also to rule his creation justly and wisely—to have dominion and to subdue Creation in the Lord’s name.  That’s what it meant for humanity to bear God’s image: to be his stewards, the priests of his temple.  But then we chose to rebel.  As Paul writes in Romans 1, we chose to worship the Creation instead of the Creator.  We subjected the Lord’s good creation to corruption.

Now, in light of that, it should make sense that Creation is longing for the day when our inheritance is revealed.  That’s the day when Creation will be set free from the corruption we brought on it.  That’s the day when we, Creation’s stewards will be restored and renewed and put back in charge, reigning with Jesus.  Again, think back to Israel.  He chose and called her, he rescued her, he made her his people, he made her a model for the nations to bring healing and restoration.  But she rebelled and she rejected her mission.  And yet the Lord didn’t give up and he didn’t change his plan to redeem his Creation through Israel.  He simply sent a faithful Israelite—he sent Jesus.  And Jesus not only redeemed Israel by dying in her place, he established a new Israel in his own person, a new people to be a light to the nations—this time equipped by the Holy Spirit.

This is what Paul is getting at in verse 23.  It’s not just the Creation that groans in eager longing:

Not only so: we too, we who have the first fruits of the Spirit’s life within us, are groaning within ourselves, as we eagerly await our adoption, the redemption of our body.

The Lord hasn’t given up on his Creation any more than he gave up on Israel.  Creation is eagerly waiting for its rightful stewards to be set right.  On that great day the Lord will make all things new and restore his redeemed people to their rightful place as good, wise, and just rulers of Creation—as the faithful priests of his temple.  This is what it means for our glory to be revealed.  The big picture, the story of redemption, reminds us that this was how it was supposed to be from the beginning.  And so we groan and we wait eagerly too.  We live in the mess we’ve made here in the world.  We live with sin and with sickness and with death, and yet we live in hope, knowing that what God has begun in Jesus he will one day complete.

And we can hope because our God has given us the firstfruits of his new creation.  He’s given a down payment on what he has promised.  The present age and its rulers have been decisively defeated by Jesus at the cross and the empty tomb and God’s new age has been inaugurated.  Jesus is Lord.  He truly is God’s King.  He’s given us his Spirit—Paul describes the Spirit here as the firstfruits—and that’s because we live in the overlap between these two ages, these two kingdoms.  The Jews brought the firstfruits of the harvest—usually sheaves of grain harvested at the very beginning of the season—as offerings to God.  They offered them in good years and even in bad years in faith that God would provide the rest of the harvest.  And so the Spirit is the sign of hope for us.  The life he gives to us here and now is a reminder that encourages our faith and hope in the resurrection and the new creation to come.  We groan and we sigh, we wait longingly in eager expectation, but our hope is certain because God is faithful and keeps his promises.  The prophet Habakkuk wrote that one day the glory of the Lord will fill the earth as the waters cover the sea.  Brothers and Sisters, when that seems impossible, we only need remember the cross of Jesus, his empty tomb, and his gift of the Holy Spirit.  God has already done the hard part.  He is the God who is faithful.  He will not abandon either his promises or his investment.  We can be sure that he’ll finish what he’s started.

But in the meantime our faith is not a complacent faith.  We haven’t been redeemed by Jesus and given the gift of the Spirit so that we can retreat into a sort of personal holiness or private piety while we wait for Jesus to return.  Not at all.  Jesus has inaugurated this new age in his resurrection and somehow someday the making new that began in his resurrection will encompass all of Creation and you and I are called, in the power of the Spirit, to embody that renewing work here and now.  How is Habakkuk’s prophecy going to be fulfilled?  How does the knowledge of the glory of the Lord spread to cover the earth?  Brothers and Sisters, that’s our mission.  We’re called to proclaim to the world the Good News that Jesus is Lord and that his kingdom is here and now.  Our mission is to call the world to repentance and faith.  But don’t forget: We are also called to live out repentance and faith in our lives in such a way that we lift the veil on the kingdom and that we give a glimpse to the world of what heaven on earth looks like.  So far as we are able to do so today, we are called to exercise the good dominion that was given to Adam—we are called to be stewards of God’s temple, of his Creation.  Jesus has led the way for us here, the second Adam.  In his earthly ministry he made his Father’s new creation known in practical ways to the people around him and so should we.  In a word full of sin we should be visible in seeking after holiness.  In a world full of war and injustice, we should be visible and at the forefront working for peace and justice.  In a world full of hurting and sickness, we should be seeking to make the healing ministry of Jesus known.  In a world full of anger and hate, we should be working for forgiveness and reconciliation.

If you’re like me you might get discouraged thinking about the mission Jesus has given us.  When I think of these things I think of things that we as Christians can do to bring Jesus and his glory to the world in “big” ways.  I think of Christians working on the big international scene or I think of missionaries going to far off countries.  And then I get discouraged.  That’s far away.  It’s bigger than me.  But Friends, never forget that for every St. Paul or St. Peter, there were thousands of ordinary saints manifesting Jesus in their ordinary lives, proclaiming the good news, and building the kingdom right where they were.  We fulfil Jesus’ calling to us as we raise covenant children to walk with him in faith and to live the values of his kingdom.  We fulfil Jesus’ calling when we work for peace and reconciliation with our neighbours, in our workplaces, and in our schools.  We fulfil Jesus’ calling when we forgive as we have been forgiven.  We fulfil Jesus’ calling when we love the hard-to-love people around us, knowing that we ourselves are hard-to-love too, but that Jesus loved us enough to die for us.  We fulfil Jesus’ calling when we sacrifice ourselves, our rights, our prerogatives, our time, and our treasure in order to make Jesus and his love known.  In everything we do, we should be seeking to give the world signs and foretastes of God’s new creation.

Let us pray: Heavenly Father, as we asked earlier in the collect we ask again for grace that to pass through the trials of this life without losing the things of eternal importance.  Remind us that the suffering we experience cannot begin to compare with the glory to be revealed to us.  Remind us always of the suffering that Jesus endured for our sake that in love and gratitude we might suffer too for the sake of making him known.  And as we think of Jesus’ death and resurrection and as we live the life given by your Spirit, fill us with hope and faith, knowing that the glory inaugurated in us today will one day be fully accomplished in our own resurrection and the restoration of all your Creation.  Amen.

A Sermon for the Third Sunday after Trinity

St. Luke 15:1-10

by William Klock

The Pharisees and the scribes were angry with Jesus.  Our Gospel, taken from Luke 15 if you’re following along, begins as Luke tells us:

All the tax collectors and sinners were drawing new to listen to Jesus.  The Pharisees and the scribes [they were the legal experts] were grumbling.  “This fellow welcomes sinners!” they said.  “He even eats with them!”

 

But why would they be angry about that?  You might remember the story I read with the kids a few weeks ago, the one about the “Super-Extra-Holy People”.  Those were the Pharisees.  And you’d think that seeing sinners repent, seeing sinners change their ways, seeing sinners welcomed back into the covenant community, you would think that the Extra-Super-Holy People would be thrilled to see that happening.  But they weren’t.

To understand why, we need to understand a bit about these Super-Extra-Holy Pharisees.  They were an interest group.  They were mostly rich people.  Some of them were part of the Sanhedrin, which was the governing council of the Jews.  But they weren’t really the gatekeepers of Judaism.  They had their own ideas of what it meant to be a proper Jew.  But they didn’t have the authority to say who was in or who was out.  The priests in the temple, they were the gatekeepers—literally.  It was up to them who could come into the temple and who could not.  They were the ones who offered sacrifices for the people.  They had the control, not the Pharisees.  But the Pharisees could still make their views known.  They could be spiritually ostentatious in public.  They could talk—even if the priests didn’t care and even if they annoyed the common, ordinary, every-day people who went about their faith and their law-keeping in the usual way.  They could look down their noses at Jesus and they could argue with him, but they couldn’t do anything to him.  That’s why, as we saw last week, they lurked around, watching him in the hopes he’d do something or say something that they could report to the authorities—something arrestable and punishable—because they didn’t have that kind of authority themselves.

But what were the Pharisees actually about?  Well, they longed for the Lord’s return.  The people had returned from their exile in Babylon, they’d rebuilt Jerusalem and the temple, but the Lord’s presence—his shekinah—had never come back to rest in the holy of holies.  And God’s people were still living under the boot of foreign pagans.  First it was the Persians, then the Greeks, and now the Romans.  It wasn’t supposed to be that way.  And so they decided to be Super-Extra-Holy.  Pretty literally.  They did this by taking the torah’s laws for the priests and the temple and they applied it to themselves.  To enter the temple, the Lord required ritual purity.  It reinforced the idea of the holiness of God and of his presence to the people, because in ordinary life you dealt pretty regularly with impurity.  Impurity wasn’t a bad thing in itself.  There were some sins that would leave you unclean, but mostly impurity came from ordinary things like menstruation or sex or contact with a death, whether human or animal.  In most cases, you waited for a day, then bathed, and you were ritually clean again.  But unless you were a priest, it wasn’t a big deal, because you only really had to be ritually pure if you wanted to go to the temple and most people only did that on the great feast days.

But the Pharisees, they saw that the world is not as it should.  They knew that earth and heaven were created to be one, overlapping unity.  They knew that human beings were created to enjoy God’s presence, but that human sin had created a rift between earth and heaven and human beings and God.  They longed to see things on earth as they are in heaven.  They knew, the one place in the whole world where earth and heaven, where our realm and God’s realm overlapped was the temple.  So they resolved to live their lives as if they were perpetually, every day, living in the temple.  Like the priests, they kept themselves ritually pure all the time.  Maybe if everyone did that—or at least tried—the Lord would finally return to his people and his presence would again fill the temple and he would defeat Israel’s enemies.  But, of course, only rich people could afford to live that way, so not very many people did.

So the Pharisees were well-meaning.  They understood God’s grace.  Contrary to popular opinion, they weren’t trying to earn their way into God’s favour.  But there’s something that seems to happen whenever people start looking for ways to be holy above and beyond the ordinary or when we start making rules for ourselves that God didn’t give us in the first place.  It happened with monastics in the Middle Ages, when celibacy became a sign of being Super-Extra-Holy and ordinary Christian—who were faithfully fruitful and multiplying as God commanded in the beginning—were made to feel unholy and second-class.  It happened with the Methodist Holiness Movement in the Seventeenth Century, with what started out as Wesley’s desire to simply see Christians being more faithfully holy turning into a movement where Christian brothers and sisters were frowned on for putting sugar in their tea rather than drinking it black and giving the money to the poor.  It eventually led to people thinking that the gift of God’s Spirit was a separate event in the life of the Christian that you had to earn by reaching a certain level of holiness—turning the Christian life completely upside-down.

So wanting to be more holy is a good thing, but certain ways of doing it seem to have a powerful tendency to make us self-righteous.  Even when we know that being God’s people is all about grace, we can still act very self-righteously.  It happened to the Pharisees and it can happen to us.  And so they rightly saw that the world is not what it should be.  It’s full of sin and pain and tears and that’s all because of unholiness and sin.  They knew that only God can ultimately set it to rights, but they also knew that God’s people—whether Israel in the Old Testament or the Church in the New—we’re called to live God’s law—the torah in the Old Testament and the law of the Spirit in the New—we’re called to live God’s law and through that to became pockets of God’s new creation, his future world set to rights, we’re called to be pockets of that here in the present.  But some people out there are obstinate in their sin.  Some people are really awful sinners and we can literally watch as they make a mess of the world around them.  They do things that drag others into sin.  For the Pharisees that was the tax collectors, who collaborated with the Romans and who stole from their own people.  It was prostitutes, who not only sinned themselves, but who enticed others into sin.  Pharisees could see the fallout as men destroyed their lives and families because of prostitution.  These things were grievously wrong and sinful.  They were choices people made and they were conscious rejections of God’s covenant.  They weren’t just sinners, they were traitors, and they were very tangibly making the world a worse place.  And so the Pharisees—and I’m sure even ordinary people in Israel—they longed for the Lord to deal with these sinners.  And that’s good.  And I expect they prayed: Lord, bring Matthew the tax collector, bring Mary the prostitute, to repentance—or judge them.  Either way, put an end to the sin.  And, again, that’s what God does with sinners.  They were right to pray that way.

But, again, something happens when we start making rules for ourselves that mark us out as super-extra-holy.  First, we forget that even if our sins aren’t as heinous, none of us is ever perfect or sinless.  We all contribute in some way to the mess this world is in and the pain and the tears of the people around us.  But, maybe worse, we can start to resent when those really bad sinners don’t get their just comeuppance.  Self-righteousness creeps in and grace and mercy get pushed out even though we know better, and we start longing to see God’s judgement fall on sinners and we become resentful when they do repent—like the men in Jesus’ parable who were angry when they, who had worked through the heat of the day, received the same wage as the men who had only worked an hour.  The Pharisees expected the Messiah to come in judgement on the unfaithful in Israel, to smite the tax collectors and the prostitutes and all the other sinners, but instead Jesus was eating with them.  The Pharisees knew that if Jesus was the Messiah, sharing a meal with him was like a promise of the great banquet that the Lord had promised the prophets, the great banquet that would take place when Israel was restored, when the world was set to rights, and when sinners were wiped from the earth for ever.  That banquet was for people like the Pharisees.  The tax collectors and sinners were supposed to be outside in the dark, weeping and gnashing their teeth—suffering the Lord’s wrath because they’d missed their chance for repentance.  Even though they knew that being the people of God was about grace, the Pharisees had managed to become self-righteous.

But there was a second thing about the Pharisees.  Remember that they were all about the temple.  They weren’t priests.  They couldn’t live in and around the temple the way the priests did, so they had their way of bringing the temple to them by following the purity codes for the priests in their everyday lives.  They wanted to see things on earth as they are in heaven.  But as they followed Jesus around and watched him, one thing that we might miss, but that stood out like a sore thumb to them, was that he bypassed the temple.  According to the law, for a sinner to be right again with the Lord, he had to repent of his sins, he had to make restitution for his sins, and he had to offer a sacrifice at the temple.  But time after time, they watched as Jesus simply forgave sinners and sent them on their way.  There’s only one time recorded in the Gospels when Jesus sent someone to see a priest, and that wasn’t a sin issue.  That was the leper he healed.  He sent them man to the priest—maybe to the temple or maybe just to a local priest—so that his healing could be verified and he could be readmitted to society.  But when it came to sinners, Jesus bypassed the temple, the priests, and the sacrificial system entirely.  That absolutely infuriated the Pharisees.  The Messiah—so they thought—should have been reinforcing the importance of the temple, but instead Jesus was bypassing it.  In fact, when he did go to the temple, he upset everything and brought the sacrifices to a halt while people ran around to collect all the animals he’d scattered.  And then he was announcing that he would destroy and rebuild it in three days.  This, I think more than anything else, made the Pharisees angry.  In Jesus, the God of Israel was doing something new.  In Jesus, the God of Israel had begun the process of uniting earth and heaven, when he took on human flesh.  In Jesus, the God of Israel had begun the work of creating a new people for himself, a people who instead of having a temple, would themselves be the temple as he poured his own Spirit into them.  That’s why Jesus was bypassing the temple and offering people forgiveness apart from the priests and sacrificial system.  This is why Jesus was announcing and acting out prophecies of the temple’s destruction.  But the Pharisees just couldn’t let go of the temple.  They’d more or less made an idol of it—one that would become symbolic of unbelieving Israel’s continuing rejection of the Jesus as Messiah.  The rabbis were the spiritual descendants of the Pharisees and to this day, rabbinic Judaism is still fixated on the temple.  When the Lord sent the Romans in judgement to destroy Jerusalem and the temple and to expel the people from the land, it was not only an act of judgement for their rejection of Jesus, but a not-so-subtle way of announcing that the days of the old covenant were through.  The temple had served its purpose.  Its role is now fill by Jesus and his people.  And yet unbelieving Israel continues to gather at the Western Wall, the last remnant of the temple’s foundation, to pray—continuing to obstinately reject the Messiah.  The Pharisees, with their fixation on the temple and its holiness codes, were the embodiment of what it meant and what it looked like to refuse what God was doing in Jesus.

So Jesus responded with three parables.  We read the first two in our Gospel today.  The third is the parable of the prodigal son.  Here’s how Jesus responded to their obstinate rejection.  Again, Luke 15.

Jesus told them this parable.  “Supposing one of you has a hundred sheep,” he said, “and you lose one of them.  What will you do?  Why, you’ll leave the ninety-nine out in the countryside, and you’ll go off looking for the lost one until you find it!  And when you find it, you’ll be so happy—you’ll put it on your shoulders and go home, and you’ll call your friends and neighbours in.  ‘Come and have a party!’ you’ll say.  ‘Celebrate with me!  I’ve found my lost sheep!’”

 

Shepherds weren’t really the Pharisees kind of people, but they might have owned flocks that other people took care of.  They knew the value of livestock and, being rich men, they counted their beans and knew the value of every one of them.  They could understand the fear the shepherd felt for his lost sheep.  Could he find it?  Would he find it?  And if he did, would it be too late?  Would he find the corpse eaten by wolves?  I don’t know a thing about shepherding, but I get it.  And I can identify with the joy of the shepherd when he got home, carrying that lost sheep, and called his friends to rejoice with him.  We all sympathise with the shepherd and so did the Pharisees.  And notice that the parable is actually one long question that Jesus puts to them.  “If this happened to you, wouldn’t you rejoice?”  Of course they would.

And then skipping now to verses 8 and 9 Jesus tells them a second parable.  This time it’s not one of ninety-nine that’s lost; it’s one of ten.  (In the third parable it’s one of two.)

“Or supposing a woman has ten drachmas [those were little silver coins] and loses one of them.  What will she do?  Why, she’ll light a lamp, and sweep the house, and hunt carefully until she finds it!  And when she finds it she’ll call her friends and neighbours in.  ‘Come and have a party!’ she’ll say.  ‘Celebrate with me!  I’ve found my lost coin!”

 

I get this.  A couple of weeks ago I was restoring an old lantern and when I went to put it back together I was missing a small part.  They haven’t made that part since the 1950s.  I couldn’t find it.  I looked online at the place that sells that sort of thing and they didn’t have any.  I went to the collector groups online to ask if anyone had a spare.  No one did.  So I swept the whole garage and then I went through the dustpan with a magnet.  Nothing.  So I moved everything away from the walls and swept again.  Again with the magnet.  Nothing.  This time I took everything out of the garage and swept everywhere.  Finally the magnet found that little part.  I went back to the Facebook group.  “I found it!”  And everyone rejoiced with me.

But notably we’ve gone from a shepherd well enough off to have ninety-nine sheep to a woman with only ten drachmas.  They were probably her bridal headdress, but that there were only ten coins says that she was poor.  Headdresses with hundreds of coins were common.  We can imagine this woman—an elderly widow—taking out her precious bridal headdress and putting it on to remember that day so long ago.  And when she goes to put it away she notices one of the ten coins is missing.  She doesn’t see it anywhere and panics.  The sort of house a woman like that lived in was small and dark—hard to see anything small—so she sweeps the whole house.  And finally she finds it and she’s so excited she runs to tell her friends so that they can share her joy.  And, again, there’s that question.  “If this happened to you, wouldn’t you rejoice?”  Of course they would.

Two-thousand years distant we understand the stories, we sympathise with the shepherd and with the woman.  I bet that everyone who reads these stories immediately thinks of some time when something like this happened to them and the Pharisees were no different.  Jesus really drives the point home: If we can rejoice over a lost sheep or a lost coin that we’ve found, how much more ought we to rejoice over a lost sinner who repents.  Jesus strikes at their self-righteousness and lack of mercy.  God had once rescued them when they were lost in Egypt and slaves to Pharaoh.  He’d delivered Israel and claimed them as his own.  He even named Israel his son.  He naturally grieves over those who reject his gracious covenant and he just as naturally rejoices when they receive his grace and return.  I fully expect the Pharisees understood this was what Jesus was getting at, but just to make sure he says it out loud at the end of each story:

“Let me tell you: that’s how glad they will be in heaven over one sinner who repents—more than over ninety-nine righteous people who don’t need repentance…[and]…that’s how glad God’s angels feel when a single sinner repents.”

 

Their idea of “on earth as it is in heaven” had gradually come to mean condemning sinners and consigning them to God’s judgement.  But Jesus is saying, if you want to see what’s going on in heaven stop looking to the temple.  That worked in the past, but in me God is doing something new.  Again, this is part of the reason why Jesus was forgiving sins and declaring people clean.  He was acting out and showing people how he is the new temple.  In him heaven and earth have come together.  In Jesus we have the firstfruits and a foretaste of God’s redemption and his new creation.  So in these parables Jesus is telling the Pharisees, if you want to manifest on earth what is happening in heaven, look at what I am doing, not at the old temple.  And in Jesus and in his banquets with tax collectors and sinners we see that God truly loves sinners and that he’s sent Jesus not to condemn us in our sin, but to rescue us and to lead us back to him in repentance and faith.  We’re reminded here of Jesus’ words in John 3:16-17:

“This is how much God loved the world: enough to give his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him should not be lost, but should share in the life of God’s new age.  After all, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but so that the world could be saved by him.”

 

The restoration of sinners was so important to God, that he was doing something dramatically new—and instead of rejoicing over what Jesus was doing, the Pharisees were rejecting him.  The Pharisees were partly right.  They were right to look forward to a day of coming judgement when God’s Son would come to condemn sinners and to vindicate the righteous.  What they got wrong was that it never occurred to them that God would send his Son, not just at the end of history, but would first send him into the middle of history, to call sinners to repentance and to offer himself as a sacrifice for their sins.  To step into the middle of history to set a group of people to rights so that they would be his means of proclaiming his kingdom and his gracious forgiveness of sins—his gospel—to the world, so that when he does return at the end of history we won’t be condemned.  In this we see the love of God.  He didn’t cast humanity from his presence with a “Good riddance!”  We sundered heaven and earth and when we did, God set in motion a gracious plan to bring us back together.

Brothers and Sisters, Jesus has sought us out in our lostness, he’s forgiven us, and now invites us to his Table.  He’s given himself as a sacrifice for our sins and this morning he invites us to his heavenly banquet.  But how do we come?  Again, this is the meal Jesus gave us to make sense of the cross.  He is the Passover lamb sacrificed for our sins.  By his death he frees us from our bondage to sin and death and leads us into new life and new creation.  In Jesus we see grace.  We don’t deserve any of this.  We’re the rebels; we’re the sinners; we’re the God-haters.  One day he will wipe such people from creation so that it can be finally, once and for all set to rights.  We deserve nothing but death, but in his grace Jesus offers us forgiveness and restoration and life.  And when we take hold of his grace in faith he tells us that the whole heavenly court rejoices.  What was lost has been found.  What ran away has been restored.  Someone who had been an enemy of God, is now a friend—even a son or a daughter.

But we’re always at risk of forgetting that we come to the banquet only by grace.  It’s interesting that in the gnostic pseudo-gospel of Thomas, the parable was changed.  In that telling of the story, the shepherd explains to the lost sheep that he sought it out because he loved it and he valued it more than the others.[1]  We’re prone to twisting the story the same way in our own minds—thinking that we’ve been invited here to the Table because we deserved to be here.  But that’s not the story Jesus tells.  The one sheep that was lost was no more valuable than the other ninety-nine.  The one coin lost was no different than all the others.  In fact, in the parable of the Prodigal Son, which follows them, the son who was lost was an utter twit and many people justly wonder why his father didn’t simply disown him.  The only difference between the one and the ninety-nine and the one and the ten is that the one was lost.  Brothers and sisters, we are not here because we’ve earned God’s love.  We’re here by his grace.  We are here because he rejoices in redeeming sinners.  We’re here because it pleases him to forgive his enemies and restore them to his fellowship.  In this we see his glory.

Jesus upset the Pharisees because he made manifest on earth the reality of heaven that they had forgotten.  He revealed that the Lord is a God who loves his enemies and desires to save them.  We pray the words from Jesus’ prayer: “on earth as in heaven”.  But do we live out the reality of heaven in our lives by reaching out to sinners with the love and grace and joy of heaven?  It’s easy to fall into self-righteousness and it’s easy to live with an attitude of condemnation.  Brothers and Sisters, remember this morning that we come to the Lord’s Table because of his love and grace.  We come as sinners forgiven.  When you go, don’t leave all of this at the door of the church, but take it with you so that you can encounter the world with grace and with the same love that God has shown you in Jesus.

Let us pray: Loving and gracious Father, help us to grasp your deep, deep love for sinners and the profound graciousness of grace.  Remind us of the joy in your courts over sinners who were lost and now found.  And, Father, help us to love our fellow sinners as you have loved us and show us ways in which we can make the reality of heaven known here on earth.  We ask this through Jesus the Messiah our Lord.  Amen.

[1] Gospel of Thomas 107.

A Sermon for the Second Sunday after Trinity

1 John 3:13-24 & St. Luke 14:16-24

by William Klock

It was the Sabbath.  Jesus and his disciples were in town and Jesus did all his usual things: healing the sick, giving sight to the blind, opening the ears of the deaf, casting out demons.  And he’d said and preached and proclaimed all the usual things: “Repent, because God’s kingdom has come.”  The poor heard God’s good news.  Others were challenged.  They begged Jesus to read the scripture lesson in the synagogue service, so he did, and then he said some profound and eye-opening things about it.  Some of the Pharisees were intrigued by Jesus.  Some of them didn’t know what to think.  Some of them were angry.  Some of them had already determined to trap Jesus.  If they gave him enough rope, he’d eventually hang himself.  He’d say or do the wrong thing and then they could all point at him and tell everyone, “See!  See!  We warned you from the beginning that he’s out to lunch,” and everyone would lose interest and Jesus would go back to Galilee and be forgotten—or, maybe if they were lucky, what he said or did would be bad enough they could have him arrested.

One of the leading Pharisees lived in this town.  He invited Jesus to his house for lunch as everyone was filing out of the synagogue.  It would have looked bad if he hadn’t.  But he and some of his friends had an idea.  Luke, in Chapter 14 of his gospel, says that they were keeping a close eye on Jesus.  In fact, we might translate Luke’s words to say that they watched him lurkingly—just waiting for him to do or say the wrong thing.  They lurked on Twitter and had scoured their way through ten years of Jesus’ tweets.  Nothing.  (Actually, no.  Jesus wasn’t on Twitter—he’s too smart for that.)  So it’s no surprise then that as Jesus arrived at the Pharisees’ house for lunch, he met a man whose limbs were swollen with dropsy.  The Pharisees probably hadn’t invited the man.  The rabbis taught that dropsy was the Lord’s punishment for secret sexual sins.  But in those days, doors were open, people came and went from banquets.  The poor and needy would show up looking for handouts.  On any other day, this Pharisee probably would have shooed away the man with dropsy, but not today.  He wanted to see what Jesus would do.  It was a given that Jesus healed the sick—but would he do it on the Sabbath?

And, of course, Jesus saw right through the whole scheme.  Seeing the man, he turned first to the Pharisee and to his lawyer friends—the local torah scholars and experts on the law.  And Jesus put them on the spot.  “Is it lawful to heal on the sabbath or not?” he asked.  They should have seen that coming, but they didn’t.  They wanted to trap Jesus, but now he’s got them trapped.  No matter what they said, they’d condemn themselves.  And so while they stood there looking awkward, Jesus healed the man with dropsy and sent him away.  And then he turned back to the Pharisees and to the lawyers and said, “Suppose one of you has a son—or an ox—that falls in a well.  Are you going to tell me you won’t pull him out straightaway even on the sabbath say?”  And, of course, they just looked at him.  They had nothing to say that wouldn’t condemn them.  Because, of course, if their son or their ox fell in a well, even on the sabbath, of course they’d pull him out.

It was hard to hear.  The Pharisees were right about a lot of things. They knew that Israel was supposed to be a pocket of God’s light in the middle of a dark world.  They were the people who lived with the living God in their midst.  They were his people, graciously chosen, delivered from bondage, and made holy for just this task: to be light in the darkness.  The Pharisees were zealous for the law because they were grateful for God’s grace.  Not all of the people in Israel were as faithful as the Pharisees.  They tried to live their lives—even the little things—as if they were in the temple, in the presence of God.  They saw themselves as walking manifestations of God’s light and of his kingdom—walking pockets of what the world is supposed to be like.  And Jesus just exposed them, because as much as they were right on a lot of things, they’d forgotten the most important thing.  The law was about more than do this and don’t to that.  It was about loving God and loving neighbour.  It was about showing others the same grace, the same lovingkindness that God had shown to them.  They knew that deep down, but somehow, through the generations, they’d forgotten that aspect of it.  Instead of being a light to lighten those lost in the dark, they were being light to shame and condemn those lost in the dark—and that’s not light at all.

Jesus had already spoiled the party, so he just kept going.  Luke tells us in 14:7 that Jesus noticed how each guest claimed the best seat he could, so he told them that God’s people should, instead, be humble.  “If you go to a wedding and just assume you can sit in the seat of honour, the host is going to tell you to move so the real guest of honour can sit there and you’ll look like a fool in front of everyone.  No.  Instead, be humble.  Take the lowliest seat and let your host offer you a better place.”

They were starting to figure out what Jesus was getting at.  He said, “Everyone who pushes himself forward will be humbled, and everyone who humbles himself will be honoured.”  They knew this wasn’t just about banquets.  Jesus was saying that the way these leaders of Israel were behaving at banquets had become representative of how they thought of themselves in relation to God and to each other.  They acted like God had chosen them because they were special when it was really the other way around: They were special because God had chosen them.  They knew better—just like we do.  They knew God chose Israel because he is gracious.  But they didn’t act like it.

So Jesus says: If you truly want to represent God and his kingdom, stop thinking so loftily of yourselves, stop avoiding the people who aren’t like you and who don’t share your status, and start throwing banquets for the crippled, the lame, and the blind.  Rejoice when sinners repent.  Rejoice when God saves the lost.  That’s what God has done for you, after all—you’ve just forgotten.

Some of them understood what Jesus was getting at, but not everyone.  Some poor, clueless soul shouted out at that point, “A blessing on everyone who eats bread in the kingdom of God.”  He totally missed the point.  Blessed, indeed, is everyone who will eat bread in the kingdom of God, but who will be there.  That was Jesus’ point.  These people were sure they’d be there, but in so many ways the way they acted and the way they saw themselves said otherwise.  They weren’t the walking pockets of the kingdom they thought they were.  For all their holiness, they were really more like walking pockets of darkness.

So in response, Jesus told them another parable.  This is our Gospel today.

Jesus said, “Once a man made a great dinner, and invited lots of guests.  When the time for the meal arrived, he sent his servants to say to the guests, ‘Come now.  Everything is ready!’  But the whole lot of them began to make excuses.  The first said, ‘I’ve just bought a field, and I really have to go and see it. Please accept my apologies.’  Another one said, ‘I’ve just bought five yoke of oxen, and I’ve got to go and test them out.  Please accept my apologies.’  And another said, ‘I’ve just got married, so naturally I can’t come.’  So the servant went back and told his master all this.

As they sat eating what was probably a simple sabbath lunch prepared the day before, Jesus brings to mind an elaborate and expensive feast—the sort of thing that took days to prepare and that cost so much that the man throwing the part would send out invitation months in advance.  We only do that today for a wedding, but imagine him, like a bride and groom, sending out invitations with RSVP cards to his friends and business associates.  The RSVP cards came back and everyone said they’d be there, so he made all the arrangements.  So much wine and so much fruit.  So much meat and so much bread.  He arranged for musicians and dancers and other entertainers.  He got his house ready.  And then the day of, he put on his finest clothes, threw open his doors—and no one came.  So he sent his servant out to find out what was up with his guests.  They all had excuses.  This one bought a field sight unseen and had to go have a look at it.  This one bought a bunch of oxen and just had to try them out.  Another just got married.  Obviously his honeymoon was more important than this man’s great feast.

Imagine all the effort and expense that this man invested.  It was a huge deal for him.  But no one else cared.  No one else valued all that he had done for them.  Imagine how you’d feel if no one came to your wedding banquet after they all returned their RSVP cards saying they’d be there.  Jesus says the man was angry, but he wasn’t going to let all his expense and preparations go to waste.

‘Go out quickly,’ he said to his servant.  ‘Go into the streets and lanes of the town and bring in here the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind.’  ‘Alright, Master,’ the servant said, ‘I’ve done that—but there’s still room.’  ‘Well then,’ said the master to the servant, ‘go out to the highways and the hedges and make them come in, so that my house may be full!  Let me tell you this: none of those people who were invited will get to taste my dinner.’

When his rich friends won’t come, he invites—even rounds up—the poor.  Notice that his servant literally has to bring, to compel them to come to the banquet.  Imagine what the poor people in the town thought at the invitation.  Imagine what the blind beggar sleeping in a ditch thought when this rich man’s servant pulled him up and dragged him into a fancy house full of fancy food.  They would have thought it was a joke, at least until they actually got there.  That’s why the servant had to compel them to come, because they knew how these things worked.  They didn’t belong.  But the rich man brought them in.  He brought them all in.  And they had the time of their lives—and, I think, so did he.

Now, Luke doesn’t tell us how the Pharisees responded.  In the next verse he jumps to a completely different time and place.  But we know.  We know that this just made them angrier and more hostile to Jesus—not every last one of them, but most of them.  Eventually they’d be angry enough that they’d conspire to have Jesus arrested.  But why did the things that Jesus did and said at that sabbath lunch make them so angry?

Well, remember that the Jews, and especially the Pharisees, were waiting for the Lord’s return.  The prophets had talked about that day in terms of a great banquet and this banquet idea then became a common image of the coming Day of the Lord.  Israel’s God would return to judge and to cast down the nations (and the unfaithful within Israel) and then he’d throw a great feast for his beloved people.  The closest things they had to describe it was their entry into the promised land, the land of milk and honey, and the prosperous days of King David.  It would be like that, only a thousand times more so.  When Jesus told a story of a man preparing a great feast, everyone listening knew he was talking about the Lord and how he would come to deliver his people and set everything to rights and usher in the age to come—the age when they would feast in his presence.  And now Jesus explains that he’s come to throw open the doors to God’s great banquet.  This is what Israel has been waiting for all these years.  And yet Jesus rebukes them.  This isn’t the first time the Lord has extended his invitation.  For centuries he had called to his people through the prophets, but they had refused to hear the prophets and had even killed some of them.  The Pharisees knew that and they were committed to making sure they didn’t do the same thing.  Except that’s exactly what they were doing.  This time God has spared no expense.  His people had rejected and killed the prophets.  This time he’s sent his own son, who humble himself to be born in their flesh.  He’s travelled through Galilee and Judea, calling everyone to the banquet, but like the people in the parable, they all have excuses.

It’s worth noting the excuses given in the parable.  One man says that he’s bought five yoke of oxen sight-unseen and has to check them over.  Another has bought a field sight-unseen and needs to go have a look at it.  The third just got married and has obligations to his new bride.  All three of these excuses have echoes that go back to the law in Deuteronomy.  A man who had built a new house, but hadn’t dedicated it yet; a man who had bought a field, but hadn’t enjoyed its produce; and a newly married man were all legitimate excused from going off to war.  And now these guests twist those laws as excuses to reject their host’s banquet.  But this is what Israel had done with the law: twisting it into something it was never meant to be.  And it’s that twisting of the law that was particularly exemplified in the Pharisees.  Jesus didn’t meet their expectations of the Messiah.  His banquets included too many sinners, unclean people, and outsiders.  Those were the people that the Pharisees had showed up with their own holiness.  The Messiah was supposed to come and feast with people like them, while raining down fire and brimstone on all those unholy people.  And so they frowned as Jesus forgave sins and welcomed home the prodigals.  The Pharisees had gutted the torah of its loving heart and that was profoundly exemplified by their angry glares as Jesus healed a sick man on the sabbath.  There could be no better way to celebrate the sabbath than to dance and sing and glorify God for his lovingkindness, but instead they tisked and frowned and gave Jesus disapproving how-dare-you scowls.  The angels rejoiced in heaven to see God’s mighty works—but here on earth the people most expecting it, the people most longing for it, frowned and disapproved because God didn’t do his mighty works according to what they thought the rules were.  That was their attitude towards Jesus’ entire messianic ministry.  The banquet had come, but now they wanted nothing to do with it.  And so Jesus warns them: I’m going to take my invitation to the unclean and to the sick and to the poor—and even to the gentiles—and having rejected me, you will have no share in God’s new creation.  If I were to let you in, you’d only mess it up—because you don’t know what love is.

The parable was a warning.  Matthew records it too, and I expect he was thinking of his people, most of whom continued to rejected Jesus even as their judgement day was so close.  But think of Luke.  He was one of those gentiles.  He was one of those poor men, sleeping in a ditch while the rich man prepared his banquet.  Maybe he didn’t even know the banquet was going to happen.  He saw the caterers coming and going, wondered what it was all about, but he never expected to be there.  He’d never received an invitation, but more importantly, he wasn’t even the right sort of person.  He was a gentile—uncircumcised and unclean.  Jews didn’t associate with his sort.  And then the rich man’s servant came, woke him up with a kick, and said, “Hey!  My master’s thrown a banquet and no one came, so now he’s inviting you to know his goodness.”  For Luke, that servant seems likely to have been the Apostle Paul.  And Paul gave Luke a firm gospel shove into the banquet.  And before he knew it Luke was dancing and singing and praising and glorify the God of Israel—the God of those weird, annoying Jews—and this God was like none of the gods he’d ever known.  This God was good and loving and most of all faithful.  And even though Luke, as a gentile, had no right to be at the banquet, he was welcomed in because when he heard about this Jesus, this Messiah who had died and risen from the dead, and he believed and he was caught up in God’s great redemptive act of new creation.

In fact, this unexpected and undeserved invitation to the banquet so transformed Luke that before too long he joined Paul as they set sail for Europe as gospel heralds—to proclaim to the lordship of Jesus.  A few years later he would join Paul on another missionary journey.  And about ten years after they’d left Troas that first time, Luke would journey with Paul on his final voyage, the one that took him to Rome to appeal his case before Caesar.  And not only was Luke, with Paul, singing the glories of Jesus and the God of Israel through Greece and on to Rome, he also talked to those who had met Jesus and he recorded their stories and wrote his gospel and then followed it up with the book of Acts.  Luke learned profoundly what grace is.  He knew profoundly the love of God.  Because even though he was a foreigner, through Jesus, the God of Israel had made him a son and even poured his own Spirit into him—including Luke in promises he had no natural right to be part of.

Brothers and Sisters, Luke is us.  Like Paul hauling him out of the ditch and sending him into the banquet, the Lord’s servants have come to us, proclaiming the good news about Jesus, hauling each of us out of our own ditch, giving us a gospel kick in the pants, and (with the Spirit’s help) propelling us into God’s great banquet.  We need a reminder of this, because we’re prone to taking our place before the Lord for granted.  The Pharisees had their way of taking their family status for granted and we have our ways, but however we do it, it always seems to stem from forgetting that whether Jew or gentile, whether we were born into the family or whether we came later, we forget that it is by the gracious lovingkindness of God—who gave his son to die so that we who were his enemies can be here as his sons and daughters.

Our Epistle today continues with this short course of readings from John’s first letter.  John writes in Chapter 3,

We know that we have passed from death to life, because we love the family.  Anyone who does not love abides in death.  Everyone who hates his brother or sister is a murderer, and you know that no murderer has the life of the coming age abiding in him.  This is how we know love: [Jesus] laid down his life for us.  And we too ought to lay down our lives for our brothers and sisters.  Anyone who has the means of life in this world, and sees a brother or sister in need, and closes his heart against them—how can God’s love be abiding in him?  Children, let us not love in word or in speech, but in deed and in truth. (1 John 3:14-18)

Does God’s love abide in us?  I think that all too often, we come to the banquet, to the Lord’s Table.  We eat the bread and we drink the wine, but we’ve forgotten the amazing sacrifice of love in which we participate here.  We take the Lord’s feast for granted.  Or maybe we eat it for the wrong reasons.  But we find some kind of assurance here, the Table reminds us that we belong to God and to his family, but then we go out in to the world—or maybe we even interact with our brothers and sisters here—and instead of being pockets of gospel light in the darkness, instead of being pockets of God’s future here in the present, we’re darkness.  We call ourselves God’s sons and daughters, we follow the rules, but there’s no love.  We eat the Lord’s bread and we drink the Lord’s wine and we should be reminded of God’s great provision for us, of his great blessings, but we ignore the needy.  Here we’re reminded that in Jesus and because of his death on our behalf, we’ve been given life and have a share in God’s new creation, but too often we keep it to ourselves instead of taking it to the highways and hedges.  Here we have the means of life, the gospel, the good news about Jesus, crucified and risen.  We know the gracious lovingkindness of God.  We don’t belong here, but he’s invited us anyway.  He’s forgiven our sins and filled us with his Spirit and given us a promise of new creation.  And we go out to a world in need, people suffering physically and people dying spiritually, and we close our hearts against them.

So, Brothers and Sisters, come the Lord’s Table this morning and be reminded that in Jesus, God has humbled himself and given his life for our sake.  This is the defining act of love.  But don’t just remember.  The Lord’s Supper is more than an intellectual exercise.  As we eat the Lord’s bread and drink his wine, we participate in that great act of love ourselves.  Be shaped, be transformed by the love of God made manifest at the cross.  Every time you come to the Table and participate in God’s perfect love, let it more and more define you.  Abide in God’s love and, more and more, let God’s love abide in you, that you might truly be a gospel light in the darkness.

Let us pray: Father, you delight to show mercy to sinners and you graciously sent your Son to suffer the punishment we deserve.  We have received your grace and have been given new life.  Remind us to set aside all thoughts of self-righteousness.  Give us opportunities now to share your gracious love with others—with each other and with the world, that everyone we encounter may be transformed by your gospel.  We ask this through Jesus Christ our Lord.  Amen.