Living Words

The God Who Dwells with Flesh

Daniel 2:1-49

by William Klock

It’s annoying when you can’t remember a dream, isn’t it?  You’re sleeping, you dream a very vivid dream, then you wake up, and in that state in which you’re still half asleep and only half awake your brain tells you that whatever it was you were dreaming about was vitally important.  But then you wake up—all the way—and it’s all gone—all, that is, except that urgent feeling that whatever it was you were dreaming about was so incredibly important.  That’s really annoying, isn’t it.  But then you brush it off.  It was only a dream.  You probably just ate too much pizza before bed.  Dreams seem important when you’re in the middle of one, but we all know that they really aren’t.  At most, maybe it’s just the subconscious trying to work something out while we sleep.  We move on.  But not everyone thinks—or has thought—of dreams that way.  The Babylonians, for example, thought of dreams as communication from the gods.  They made a science out of their interpretation.  They had voluminous texts that explained what the symbolism of dreams meant.  This was the sort of thing that Daniel and his friends were taught in their three years of training in Babylonian “wisdom”.  You can imagine that if Nebuchadnezzar had such a dream, he’d be more than annoyed that he couldn’t remember it when he woke up.  That’s how the second chapter of Daniel begins.  It’s a long chapter, so let’s get straight into it.  Here’s what we read:

In the second year of the reign of Nebuchadnezzar, Nebuchadnezzar had dreams; his spirit was troubled, and his sleep left him. Then the king commanded that the magicians, the enchanters, the sorcerers, and the Chaldeans be summoned to tell the king his dreams. So they came in and stood before the king. And the king said to them, “I had a dream, and my spirit is troubled to know the dream.” Then the Chaldeans said to the king in Aramaic, “O king, live forever! Tell your servants the dream, and we will show the interpretation.” The king answered and said to the Chaldeans, “The word from me is firm: if you do not make known to me the dream and its interpretation, you shall be torn limb from limb, and your houses shall be laid in ruins. But if you show the dream and its interpretation, you shall receive from me gifts and rewards and great honor. Therefore show me the dream and its interpretation.” They answered a second time and said, “Let the king tell his servants the dream, and we will show its interpretation.” The king answered and said, “I know with certainty that you are trying to gain time, because you see that the word from me is firm—if you do not make the dream known to me, there is but one sentence for you. You have agreed to speak lying and corrupt words before me till the times change. Therefore tell me the dream, and I shall know that you can show me its interpretation.” The Chaldeans answered the king and said, “There is not a man on earth who can meet the king’s demand, for no great and powerful king has asked such a thing of any magician or enchanter or Chaldean. The thing that the king asks is difficult, and no one can show it to the king except the gods, whose dwelling is not with flesh.”

 

Because of this the king was angry and very furious, and commanded that all the wise men of Babylon be destroyed. (Daniel 2:1-12)

Nebuchadnezzar was the greatest emperor the world had known.  We can only imagine how many wise men he had at his court, but the text makes a point of piling them up: He had magicians, enchanters, sorcerers, and Chaldeans.  Here’s the greatest king, to whom the gods gave the greatest dreams, and who had the greatest entourage of wise men to tell him what those dreams meant.  And so he summons them and you can imagine them streaming through the halls of the palace in all their finery, all ready to tell the king what he wants to know.  But then Nebuchadnezzar drops a bomb: “Tell me what I dreamed,” he commands.  And they look at him nervously and say, “Your Majesty, that’s not how it works.  You tell us the dream; we tell you what it means.”  And the king rages at them, “Tell me or I’ll have you all ripped limb from limb!”  And again they plead with him, “That’s not how it works.  That’s not how it’s ever worked!  No king has ever asked his wise men to reveal such a thing, you know that!  What you ask is impossible.  We can tell you what your dream means, but only the gods can reveal a dream—and the gods do not dwell with flesh.”  The gods do not dwell with flesh.

There it is.  The gods do not live with men.  That’s the setup.  Everyone in the world—or at least everyone in the pagan world—everyone knew that the gods were distant.  There were ways to get access to them—through temples and idols and offerings—but everyone also knew that the gods were notorious capricious when it came to answering.  They might.  They might not.  Usually not.  That’s why the king had magicians.  Magic is the “science” of figuring out the right formulas: what offerings, what incantations or prayers, what actions worked in the past so that we can try them again.  Sometimes it worked.  Mostly it didn’t.  Because the gods were far off and fickle.  If and when they spoke, the wise men were ready to apply all their learning to tell you what it meant, but first the gods had to speak.  If the king couldn’t or wouldn’t tell them what the gods had said, well, there was nothing they could do.

Maybe Nebuchadnezzar was a violent and capricious man—although the historical record doesn’t seem to indicate that—or maybe he sort of knew, deep down, that all the things they did—divining the will of the gods from the movement of the stars or the flight of birds or the entrails of an animal or the blobs made by oil poured into wine—maybe Nebuchadnezzar suspected it was all nonsense—that this whole enterprise of magic and dream interpretation and mantic wisdom was all really useless.  The gods were distant and silent and these guys gave the illusion of bringing them near, but it was all lies, all a sham. Maybe that’s why he lashes out at these men.  Whatever the case, the wise men can’t tell the king his dream, so he sentences them to death.  If it doesn’t work, burn it all down.  Maybe the gods will send someone wiser.

Enter Daniel and the God of Israel.  They stands in contrast to all the wise men and the gods of Babylon.  We get a sense of the frustration of the Babylonians.  Notice that they don’t even try.  They know it’s hopeless.  Their gods aren’t going to help them.  But Daniel—notice how different he is.  Picking up at verse 13:

So the decree went out, and the wise men were about to be killed; and they sought Daniel and his companions, to kill them. Then Daniel replied with prudence and discretion to Arioch, the captain of the king’s guard, who had gone out to kill the wise men of Babylon. He declared to Arioch, the king’s captain, “Why is the decree of the king so urgent?” Then Arioch made the matter known to Daniel. And Daniel went in and requested the king to appoint him a time, that he might show the interpretation to the king. (Daniel 2:13-16)

 

Notice how confident Daniel is in the Lord.  Before he’s prayed, before he’s spoken with his friends, Daniel tells the executioners to hold up and he makes an appointment with the king.  He’s absolutely certain that when the time comes, he’ll have the answer.  Remember that in the last chapter, the Lord gave wisdom to Daniel.  And now, in light of that wisdom, Daniel discerns that this is what he has to do.  It’s not mechanical or formulaic like it was for the Babylonian wise men.  He still goes back to his friends and tells them to pray for God to have mercy on them.  But in his God-given wisdom, Daniel knows what needs to happen.  To be clear, this doesn’t mean that God will always intervene in this way for his people.  This is an issue that crops up throughout the first half of Daniel.  The Lord will speak to Daniel.  The Lord will rescue Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah from the fiery furnace.  But that doesn’t mean the Lord will always speak or that he will always rescue his people from martyrdom.  Sometimes godly wisdom is to recognise when not to make this sort of commitment before God has spoken.  Sometimes godly wisdom is to prepare for martyrdom.  The point is that, in contrast to the gods of the pagans, the Lord, the God of Israel, is present with his people and he equips for each and every situation.  This is the God who dwells with men.  Continuing:

 

Then Daniel went to his house and made the matter known to Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah, his companions, and told them to seek mercy from the God of heaven concerning this mystery, so that Daniel and his companions might not be destroyed with the rest of the wise men of Babylon. Then the mystery was revealed to Daniel in a vision of the night. Then Daniel blessed the God of heaven. Daniel answered and said:

“Blessed be the name of God forever and ever,

         to whom belong wisdom and might.

He changes times and seasons;

         he removes kings and sets up kings;

he gives wisdom to the wise

         and knowledge to those who have understanding;

he reveals deep and hidden things;

         he knows what is in the darkness,

         and the light dwells with him.

To you, O God of my fathers,

         I give thanks and praise,

for you have given me wisdom and might,

         and have now made known to me what we asked of you,

         for you have made known to us the king’s matter.” (Daniel 2:17-23)

 

Notice how all of this stands in stark contrast to the Babylonian wise men, whose gods are distant and silent.  Israel’s God—despite seemingly having been defeated by the gods of Babylon, his temple vessels stored away in their treasury—Israel’s God has wisdom and might, he directs the seasons and raises up kings, he gives wisdom to the wise and knowledge to the understanding.  In this case, he has given wisdom and might to Daniel that he might save the lives of the pagan wise men.  What a potential witness to the pagans this is.  The Lord acts through Daniel on behalf of these men who think themselves wise, but who are really fools committed to false gods.

 

Therefore Daniel went in to Arioch, whom the king had appointed to destroy the wise men of Babylon. He went and said thus to him: “Do not destroy the wise men of Babylon; bring me in before the king, and I will show the king the interpretation.”

 

Then Arioch brought in Daniel before the king in haste and said thus to him: “I have found among the exiles from Judah a man who will make known to the king the interpretation.” The king declared to Daniel, whose name was Belteshazzar, “Are you able to make known to me the dream that I have seen and its interpretation?” Daniel answered the king and said, “No wise men, enchanters, magicians, or astrologers can show to the king the mystery that the king has asked, but there is a God in heaven who reveals mysteries, and he has made known to King Nebuchadnezzar what will be in the latter days. Your dream and the visions of your head as you lay in bed are these: To you, O king, as you lay in bed came thoughts of what would be after this, and he who reveals mysteries made known to you what is to be. But as for me, this mystery has been revealed to me, not because of any wisdom that I have more than all the living, but in order that the interpretation may be made known to the king, and that you may know the thoughts of your mind.  (Daniel 2:24-30)

 

All the things Daniel listed in his song of praise now come out in his explanation to the king.  This is Daniel’s moment to be light in the darkness, to make known the glory of the God of Israel.  This is why the Lord gives wisdom—so that the wise will put his glory on full display.  Brothers and Sisters, wisdom is not ultimately for us.  The Lord gives wisdom so that we can glorify him and so that we can lead others to glorify him.  Now, on to the dream itself, picking up at verse 31:

“You saw, O king, and behold, a great image. This image, mighty and of exceeding brightness, stood before you, and its appearance was frightening. The head of this image was of fine gold, its chest and arms of silver, its middle and thighs of bronze, its legs of iron, its feet partly of iron and partly of clay. As you looked, a stone was cut out by no human hand, and it struck the image on its feet of iron and clay, and broke them in pieces. Then the iron, the clay, the bronze, the silver, and the gold, all together were broken in pieces, and became like the chaff of the summer threshing floors; and the wind carried them away, so that not a trace of them could be found. But the stone that struck the image became a great mountain and filled the whole earth.

 

“This was the dream. Now we will tell the king its interpretation. You, O king, the king of kings, to whom the God of heaven has given the kingdom, the power, and the might, and the glory, and into whose hand he has given, wherever they dwell, the children of man, the beasts of the field, and the birds of the heavens, making you rule over them all—you are the head of gold. Another kingdom inferior to you shall arise after you, and yet a third kingdom of bronze, which shall rule over all the earth. And there shall be a fourth kingdom, strong as iron, because iron breaks to pieces and shatters all things. And like iron that crushes, it shall break and crush all these. And as you saw the feet and toes, partly of potter’s clay and partly of iron, it shall be a divided kingdom, but some of the firmness of iron shall be in it, just as you saw iron mixed with the soft clay. And as the toes of the feet were partly iron and partly clay, so the kingdom shall be partly strong and partly brittle. As you saw the iron mixed with soft clay, so they will mix with one another in marriage, but they will not hold together, just as iron does not mix with clay. And in the days of those kings the God of heaven will set up a kingdom that shall never be destroyed, nor shall the kingdom be left to another people. It shall break in pieces all these kingdoms and bring them to an end, and it shall stand forever, just as you saw that a stone was cut from a mountain by no human hand, and that it broke in pieces the iron, the bronze, the clay, the silver, and the gold. A great God has made known to the king what shall be after this. The dream is certain, and its interpretation sure.” (Daniel 2:31-45)

 

We can imagine Nebuchadnezzar listening intently to Daniel and saying, “Yes!  Yes!  That was the dream!”  A great statue with a head of gold, a chest of silver, a middle of bronze, legs of iron, and feet of iron and clay.  And Daniel explains that these are successive kingdoms.  That’s how the ESV translates it, at any rate, but the Aramaic word isn’t that specific.  It could refer to kingdoms or empires or to the reigns of individual kings.  The great Nebuchadnezzar is the head of gold, but those who come after will gradually diminish in their glory.  Not that they won’t be strong in their own rights, but nothing will be the same after Nebuchadnezzar.  And that final reign or kingdom, steel and clay, mixed and brittle, it will be ripe for a fall.  And that’s exactly what will happen.  A fifth king or kingdom will come, but this one will be different.  The other kings are the work and glory of men, but this stone is not cut by human hands.  It will strike the feet of the statue and bring it down.  It will fall to pieces and blow away like chaff in the wind—all but forgotten—while the stone grows and grows until it becomes a mountain that fills the whole earth—the only thing that matters.

If what we want to know is the identity of the kings or kingdoms, Daniel’s explanation isn’t all that helpful.  The gist of it—successive kings or kingdoms that are eventually brought down—that’s easy.  But if we want to know who or what they are, well, Jews and Christians have been speculating for two thousand years.  I strongly suspect that it referred to Nebuchadnezzar and the Babylonian kings who would succeed him, the stone being Cyrus, who would conquer the Babylonians, establish the Persian Empire—which would last far longer than that of the Babylonians.  Most important, Cyrus would send the exiles back home to rebuild Jerusalem and the temple.  Jeremiah prophesied exactly the same thing.  And that’s what happened.  But one of the interesting things with prophecy is that it often has a broader application.  It’s a bit like a collapsible telescope.  In fact, that’s the word—telescope—that bible scholars use.  We see it fulfilled in the historic events in which it was prophesied.  But sometimes, as much as the prophecy is obviously fulfilled—in this case with the fall of Babylon and return of the exiles—there are aspects of the prophecy that aren’t “fully” fulfilled.  The exiles return, the temple is rebuilt, but the presence of the Lord never returns, neither do the great glory days of Israel.  And so the prophecy, even though fulfilled, still points out into the future.  And I think that’s how the author of Daniel, writing in the years of terror under Antiochus Epiphanes applied it.  He saw not individual kings, but whole kingdoms.  And it’s remarkable how well those legs of iron and the feet of mixed iron and clay represent the kingdoms of Alexander the Great and then the squabbling generals who carved up his empire amongst themselves.  The Jews in those days were waiting for that stone—not cut with human hands, but sent by the Lord, like another Cyrus, maybe even this time the Messiah—they were waiting for it to come, to destroy the pagans, and to restore God’s kingdom.  And it did.  But again, as much as the prophecy was fulfilled, it wasn’t “fully” fulfilled.  It revealed the faithfulness of God, but pointed to the future and said, “There’s more and there’s better to come.”

And so the New Testament writers do the same thing, but in the feet of iron and clay they saw the Roman Empire, and in the stone not cut with hands, they saw the stone that the builders rejected, they saw Jesus the Messiah, and that mountain that filled the whole earth was his kingdom, the church, Christendom.  Now, how does Nebuchadnezzar respond?  Look at verses 46-49.  (I told you it was a long chapter.)

Then King Nebuchadnezzar fell upon his face and paid homage to Daniel, and commanded that an offering and incense be offered up to him. The king answered and said to Daniel, “Truly, your God is God of gods and Lord of kings, and a revealer of mysteries, for you have been able to reveal this mystery.” Then the king gave Daniel high honors and many great gifts, and made him ruler over the whole province of Babylon and chief prefect over all the wise men of Babylon. Daniel made a request of the king, and he appointed Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego over the affairs of the province of Babylon. But Daniel remained at the king’s court.

The Lord does not give his wisdom to his saints in vain.  Nebuchadnezzar’s gods were silent and his wise men were miserable failures, but through Daniel the God of Israel spoke.  Imagine the king’s surprise.  This was the god of a tiny, conquered people.  He’d taken that god’s sacred vessels and put them in the temple of his own gods.  And yet this God speaks.  His wise man, his prophet has wisdom like none the king has ever seen.  And so the great Nebuchadnezzar falls down at Daniel’s feet and worships.  We’ll miss the point if we get bogged down in worrying that the king is offering incense to Daniel.  He was a pagan and this is what pagans did.  The point is that in Daniel he saw this God of might and wisdom, this God who is present with men, in Daniel he saw this God at work and he gave him glory.  Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah—or Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego now—are sent off to oversee the provinces and Daniel is elevated to a high position in Nebuchadnezzar’s court.

Now, what does this mean for us?  Brothers and Sisters, Daniel reminds us to stand firm in faith, to trust the Lord, knowing that he is sovereign and that he is with us.  The world we know may be collapsing around us, the church and the gospel may be falling out of favour, fellow believers may be apostatising, the pagans may be coming for our children, they may come for us, but God is still in control.  He raises up kings and empires and he brings them down.  Whatever happens is a call to us to be faithful, to pray for wisdom, and to listen for what the Lord is teaching us so that the church might come out the other side of these events stronger, purer, and more beautiful.  Whatever happens we can know that our God is the Lord of all, maneuvering history towards its final goal of new creation.  And with that lesson, Daniel reminds that the Lord is always with us.  In contrast to the gods of the pagans, the God of Israel is near.  The stone that the builders rejected stands in solidarity with us.  He has given his life for us, he has risen from the grave for us, he has poured out his Spirit into us.  He has made us his very temple.  This Emanuel is God with us as no other people have ever known.  Think on that this morning as you come to his Table.  Eat the bread and drink the wine and know his death and resurrection for us.  Here we meet the stone not cut with hands.  Here we’re reminded that we are part of that great mountain that will fill the whole earth.  Here we know that God is with us—not only that our God dwells with flesh, but that in Jesus, our God has taken on our flesh himself.  Be encouraged and strengthened that you might stand firm and that you might be—like Daniel—a witness to the glory of God for the sake of the people around you.

Let’s pray: Gracious Father, we live in difficult days with the temptation to compromise and to give up all around us.  Remind us, we pray, that you are sovereign, that you are the Lord of history and King of kings and that you are with always present with us.  Take away our fears and our anxieties and fill us with your grace that we might stand firm in faith as a testimony to your goodness and your faithfulness; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit.  Amen.

And the Lord Gave

Daniel 1:1-21

by William Klock

We like to say that actions often speak louder than words.  When things are hard, it’s one thing for someone to promise they’ll be there for you, but it’s something else entirely when they actually are.  And we know from experience, some people are all talk.  They say they’ll be there, but they may or may not show up.  But we all know people who say they’ll be there and we know from our past experience with them that we really can count on them being there.  Some people just prove themselves to be imminently dependable.  When it comes to God, we should know that he is imminently more dependable than even the most imminently dependable human being, but sometimes we doubt—especially when the dark seems so utterly overwhelming.  Israel was no different in that way.  God had spoken.  They had his word through the Law and the Prophets, but still, some day it was just so hard not to doubt.  Think of those awful days for Second Century Judah that we read about last week in 1 Maccabees.  Pagans defiled the Lord’s temple.  Pagans were killing Jews for obeying the Lord’s law.  A lot of Jews were giving in and apostatising.  Their children were being enticed into a pagan way of life.  The faithful cried out to the Lord with pleas like that of Psalm 68, “Let God arise, and let his enemies be scattered!”  They prayed and prayed.  They were faithful and they watched as their friends and family were murdered for their faithfulness.  Where was God?  Did he really care for his people?  And so the author of Daniel looked back to the last time this happened, to the days of the Babylonian exile.  The purpose of Daniel was to remind the people of the Lord’s past faithfulness.  It was an exhortation to stand firm in faith, trusting in the Lord.  And so he begins in Daniel 1 and writes:

In the third year of the reign of Jehoiakim king of Judah, Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon came to Jerusalem and besieged it. And the Lord gave Jehoiakim king of Judah into his hand, with some of the vessels of the house of God. And he brought them to the land of Shinar, to the house of his god, and placed the vessels in the treasury of his god. Then the king commanded Ashpenaz, his chief eunuch, to bring some of the people of Israel, both of the royal family and of the nobility, youths without blemish, of good appearance and skillful in all wisdom, endowed with knowledge, understanding learning, and competent to stand in the king’s palace, and to teach them the literature and language of the Chaldeans.

 

In the third year of King Jehoiakim of Judah.  Assuming that number isn’t being used symbolically—which it might—these opening events of Daniel took place in 605 or 604 BC.  Jehoiakim was put on the throne as a puppet king of the Egyptians, but when Nebuchadnezzar defeated Egypt, Jehoiakim a puppet of the Babylonians.  Jehoiakim was an evil king.  The rabbis described him as a godless tyrant who engaged in incest and murder.  Through the Prophet Jeremiah, the Lord repeated rebuked him and warned him of coming judgement.  And here we see the beginnings of it.  What’s described here in Daniel 1 sounds very much like the siege that Nebuchadnezzar laid against Jerusalem in 598 BC—which would mean we need to do more work to sort out the date given—but it’s possible that the Babylonians began applying some of this sort of pressure earlier—a warning, letting Jehoiakim and his people know who was in control.  So Nebuchadnezzar, the greatest of the Neo-Babylonian emperors, came to Jerusalem and showed the city and the people who was boss.  He took sacred vessels from the temple.  The text isn’t specific, but it implies that these were vessels and tools associated with the altar and with sacrifices.  The point wasn’t their monetary value.  The point was that Nebuchadnezzar wanted to demonstrate the defeat of the God of Israel.  Taking the city showed the people that they were now the subjects of the Babylonian king, but taking the consecrated vessels of the Lord from his temple showed that Israel’s God was now subject to the gods of Babylon.

And along with those temple vessels, Nebuchadnezzar took with him a group of young men—the first of the exiles—so that they could be taught the ways of the Babylonians.  They were hostages. Nebuchadnezzar probably expected some of them to be sent back to serve a Babylonian administration in Jerusalem once they’d been convinced of Babylon’s superiority.  But, I think, taking these men from the royal and noble families, more than anything else, was meant to show the rulers of Judah that Nebuchadnezzar was now sovereign over them.  Even their children belonged to him and to his gods.

But notice that little note slipped into verse 2.  You might even have missed it.  Verse 1 tells us that Nebuchadnezzar came and laid siege to Jerusalem, but verse 2 tells us that it was the Lord who gave him King Jehoiakim and the temple vessels.  The Lord not only allowed this, he orchestrated it.  The Lord is the one who is sovereign, not Nebuchadnezzar…not Antiochus Epiphanes…not Ceasar…not Charles III or Justin Trudeau…the Lord, the God of Israel is sovereign over kings and nations—and, maybe most important, over his own people.  And in those few words in verse 2, we’re reminded of the Lord’s faithfulness—not just to rescue his people as he promised, not just to prosper his people as he promised, but also to discipline them when they were unfaithful, just as he promised he would.  And there’s something else that might slip by us.  In the biblical literature most closely related to Daniel, it’s usually “God gave”.  In fact, we’ll see that later on.  But here it’s “the Lord gave”.  This is not merely the God of Israel, but the God who is Lord over all—over every nation and over every king, even mighty Nebuchadnezzar.

Brothers and Sisters, whatever is happening today, remember that God is sovereign and in control.  That someone living through the terrors of the reign of Antiochus Epiphanes would point his people back to Daniel to remind them that the Lord is in control, ought to cause us to do the same sort of thing: to look back not only to the history of God and his dealings with his people, but to do that while hearing his words and his promises to them through the prophets.  Why would God allow Christendom to fall after two-thousand years?  Why is God allowing the church in the West to wither and die?  I think we need to look back to the story of God and his people.  In Israel he established an earthly kingdom to represent his rule in the world, to witness his light in the midst of the darkness.  He didn’t expect perfection, but he did expect faithfulness.  And when Israel refused to be faithful, the Lord disciplined her—as a witness to the nations.  He preferred to be known through his blessing, but if that wasn’t going to work out, his sovereign holiness would be shown through cursing and, eventually, through his restoration of his people in fulfilment of his promises.

Christendom, I think, has befallen much the same fate.  The gospel went out and it conquered an empire.  Christendom was born and, a lot like Israel, it represented Jesus’ rule on earth—prefiguring that day when the gospel and the church have finally accomplished their mission to usher in God’s new creation.  Christendom wasn’t perfect—not by any means—but it did represent a people and nations that lived the gospel—people who were faithful.  And the dramatic transformation that took place in the conversion of those pagan empires and nations into Christendom are profound witness to the power of the gospel—a witness I think we’re often unaware of, because we now live in a world transformed by that gospel.  But as the centuries passed, our gospel light began to waver and dim.  The gospel had once put an end to slavery in the Roman world, but then slavery was restored—to our shame.  Christian kings began to colonise and exploit less developed peoples.  And, yes, the Lord used those efforts to carry the gospel to new corners of the world and often to judge wicked peoples, but then those Christian kings plundered those nations and mistreated their people.  Wars broke out and Christian nation rose up against Christian nation.  I don’t think it should be any surprise that the Church in Europe began its rapid decline and godless philosophies and secularism quickly replaced it in the years following World War I—a war in which ostensibly Christian countries brutally fought each other for regional hegemony.  In the years after that war, Karl Barth wrote that his seminary student had lost the ability to smile.  The gospel light was all but stamped out.  The joy of Jesus was all but gone.  In the century since, Europe has become almost entirely secular.  And now here, across the Atlantic, the trend marches on.  And it shouldn’t be any surprise.  As a people we worship the gods of money and self, of materialism and sex and all of that.  We murder our children before they’re even born.  We here in North America were once Christian nations, but—as with Israel in the Old Testament—the Lord will not allow a wicked nation to represent him.  Discipline will come to both the nation and its church and I think that’s precisely what we’re seeing.  But how often do we hear Christians acknowledge that it is the Lord who has given us into the hands of our enemies?

If there’s something we can learn from Daniel—and from the bigger biblical story—it’s to recognise how the Lord works and, more importantly, that he is at work.  Brothers and Sisters, the Lord was as present with his people in Babylon as he had been in Jerusalem.  And while it’s a terrible thought to think that we might be living under the disciplining hand of the Lord, we can take comfort in knowing that we are, nevertheless, in his hand.  Let us pray that we will learn the lessons he wants us to learn and that he will restore his blessings.

Now, let’s continue with Daniel 1, picking up at verse 5 with those young men exiled to Babylon.

The king assigned them a daily portion of the food that the king ate, and of the wine that he drank. They were to be educated for three years, and at the end of that time they were to stand before the king. Among these were Daniel, Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah of the tribe of Judah. And the chief of the eunuchs gave them names: Daniel he called Belteshazzar, Hananiah he called Shadrach, Mishael he called Meshach, and Azariah he called Abednego.  (Daniel 1:5-7)

Again, it looks like Nebuchadnezzar has won.  These four men’s Hebrew names all reflected their faith in the God of Israel.  Daniel means “God is my judge”, Azariah “Yah is my help”, Hananiah “Yah has been gracious”, and Mishael “Who is what God is”.  They are all renamed.  It’s not clear exactly what all four of their new names mean, but they’re all intended to express that these four young men now belong to the gods of Babylon.  And the King of Babylon will now take care of them.  They will eat from his table as they’re trained in the superior wisdom of Babylon.  But, the story goes on:

Daniel resolved that he would not defile himself with the king’s food, or with the wine that he drank. Therefore he asked the chief of the eunuchs to allow him not to defile himself. And God gave Daniel favor and compassion in the sight of the chief of the eunuchs, and the chief of the eunuchs said to Daniel, “I fear my lord the king, who assigned your food and your drink; for why should he see that you were in worse condition than the youths who are of your own age? So you would endanger my head with the king.” Then Daniel said to the steward whom the chief of the eunuchs had assigned over Daniel, Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah, “Test your servants for ten days; let us be given vegetables to eat and water to drink. Then let our appearance and the appearance of the youths who eat the king’s food be observed by you, and deal with your servants according to what you see.” So he listened to them in this matter, and tested them for ten days. At the end of ten days it was seen that they were better in appearance and fatter in flesh than all the youths who ate the king’s food. So the steward took away their food and the wine they were to drink, and gave them vegetables.  (Daniel 1:8-16)

Why did Daniel and his friends reject the rich food of the king?  Our first guess might be that they insisted on keeping the dietary laws of the torah, but they refused the king’s wine and wine wasn’t part of those dietary laws.  We might guess that it was because the king’s food was first offered to idols, but the vegetables they ate would have been offered to idols like everything else.  Or maybe it was because to eat from the king’s table meant making a public display of accepting his lordship over them.  I don’t think it was any of these things.  First, this was temporary.  Daniel didn’t have any problem eating rich foods later in life.  And, second, they did this in private.  No one but the four of them and the steward knew about this arrangement.  I think the context of the story gives us the reason.  Nebuchadnezzar had taken them to Babylon; had renamed them, effectively submitting them to his gods; and he’d engaged them in this rigorous programme of reeducation for service to his court.  As I read this I remember learning about the Janissaries when I studied Islamic Civ.  The Janissaries were the elite corps of Ottoman troops, serving the sultan’s own household.  They were known for their discipline and, above all, for their loyalty to the sultan.  The creepy thing about the Janissaries was that the corps was made up entirely of men who had been stolen as young boys from the Christian families of the Ottoman Empire, a tax on those who refused to convert.  These Christian boys were converted to Islam to serve the sultan.  It sent a message: “You can refuse Islam, but at any time we can take your children and make them ours.”  I felt queasy the first time I read about that.  I think there’s more than a little of that same idea going on here—and in our present culture, too.

Maybe there was some doubt of the God of Israel in the minds of these four.  They knew the scriptures.  They knew the promises of God and they knew his faithfulness.  But here they were in Babylon, given the names of pagan gods, forced to learn the ways of Babylonian wisdom, and fed from this foreign king’s table.  I think we can forgive them for having faith, but still wanting some kind of confirmation.  If they were going to be the elite of the Babylonian court, would it be because of Nebuchadnezzar or because of the Lord.  And so they worked out a deal with the steward in charge of their food.  The chief eunuch wasn’t going to cooperate.  He was part of the programme, after all, but the steward—well, he could have all that food for himself.  And these four young men would know that if they prospered despite a meagre diet of vegetables and water, that the Lord was truly with them.  Nebuchadnezzar had no idea what had happened, but this was not for his benefit.  This was for the four young men, that they would know with absolute certainty that their God was with them in Babylon.

Continuing with the text at verse 17 we see what happened.

As for these four youths, God gave them learning and skill in all literature and wisdom, and Daniel had understanding in all visions and dreams. At the end of the time, when the king had commanded that they should be brought in, the chief of the eunuchs brought them in before Nebuchadnezzar. And the king spoke with them, and among all of them none was found like Daniel, Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah. Therefore they stood before the king. And in every matter of wisdom and understanding about which the king inquired of them, he found them ten times better than all the magicians and enchanters that were in all his kingdom. And Daniel was there until the first year of King Cyrus.

 

There it is again: “God gave”.  Just as he gave over Jehoiakim and Jerusalem, and his own sacred vessels from the temple into the hands of Nebuchadnezzar, he gave to Daniel, Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah.  When they stood before the king on exam day, they had ten times the wisdom and understanding, not just of the other young men in this programme, but of the experienced magicians and enchanters of the court.

And then that final note that anticipates the whole book of Daniel.  “Daniel was there until the first year of King Cyrus.”  That’s sixty-six years.  The Lord would be with Daniel and the Lord would preserve Daniel and he would outlast and outlive Nebuchadnezzar and all of his successors.  He would see the fall of the kings of Babylon and their conquest by the Persians.  This last statement makes the point that kings and kingdoms rise and fall, but the Lord is sovereign over all.

In closing I want us to think about these statements that it was God who gave.  First, that he gave his people over to Nebuchadnezzar in discipline.  We’ve looked at what that means.  But here we see God giving to these four faithful young men wisdom that they might persevere in faithfulness in those difficult times.  They were thoroughly steeped in the wisdom of Babylon, but it was wisdom the Lord gave them by which they persevered and that gave them favour in the eyes of the pagans.  What are we to do in the midst of trials?  What are we to do in a world in which the Lord has sovereignly allowed Christendom to collapse and his church to dwindle and fall into disfavour?  Brothers and Sisters, ask the Lord for wisdom.  Learn from the world, but listen to the Lord and pursue his wisdom.  That’s not an easy thing to do.  Torah, the law, that was black and white.  Do this and don’t do that.  Wisdom is harder.  Wisdom is knowing what to do in situations where things the answer may not be a matter of black and white.  Wisdom is knowing where to draw the line in those times when there’s no law to make it obvious.  Sometimes walking in wisdom is to walk a tightrope.  The church today is struggling to walk that rope.  Some Christians fall off one side into Progressivism or Wokeness or whatever you want to call it.  Other Christians fall off to the other side into and culture waring or Christian nationalism.  Some of us capitulate to our Babylonian conquerors, taking the path of least resistance, and end up in apostasy.  Others of us fail to recognise that the Babylonians are the agents of the Lord’s discipline and instead of listening for the Lord’s rebuke, instead of listening to hear what he would have us learn, we go to war with Babylon—a fight we cannot and will not win until we’ve first learned the lesson the Lord is teaching us.  What we need instead is the godly wisdom to remain faithful in our exile, while allowing the Lord to do a work of repentance and reform in the heart of his church.

Again, it’s not easy.  I guess you could say that’s why it’s called “wisdom” and why the scriptures call us so earnestly to seek after it.  Wisdom doesn’t fall in your lap.  The great sages of Israel tell us that the beginning of wisdom is to fear the Lord—again, to pursue him, to pursue his plans, to pursue his ways, to pursue holiness and to cast off all worldliness.  And to pursue the Lord, Brothers and Sisters, that means to steep ourselves in his word, in the very place where he reveals himself and his ways, where he speaks to us.  If you are not steeped in his word, you have no hope of obtaining godly wisdom.  But to pursue the Lord also means to speak to him.  Pray!  When was the last time you prayed for wisdom?  Let God speak to you through his word and then speak to him and while you’re speaking to him, while you’re worshipping him, ask for wisdom.  This is what we see of Daniel and his friends.  They were steeped in the law and the prophets, in the psalms and in the story of their people.  And they prayed.  And they worshipped the Lord.  Second, we need the fellowship of the church.  You can’t pursue the Lord on your own; you need his people.  Daniel, Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah, none of them went into this alone.  They stood firm and in doing so they stood together.  They strengthened and exhorted each other.  So should we.  We need not only the support of fellow believers in order to stand firm, but in the pursuit of godly wisdom, we need the witness and discernment of the Church—of all those who have gone before us and of those who stand with us today.

Brothers and Sisters, it’s hard.  I fully expect things will get harder.  And yet you and I have something far greater than Daniel and his friends had or that those faithful Jews living under Antiochus Epiphanes had.  They had the promises of the Lord to their people.  They had his promises in the Exodus and in Deuteronomy.  They had his exhortations and his promises and his warnings given through the prophets.  They had his words.  And they knew their story.  They could look back to the Exodus—and they did every year at Passover—and they were reminded of the Lord’s faithfulness.  Those men and women living in the days of Antiochus could look back to the faithfulness of God to Daniel and know that he would be just as faithful to them.  But Friends, consider that you and I not only look back on all of that, but we also look back to Jesus.  When we come to his Table, when we eat the bread and drink the wine, we participate in the events of that greater exodus by which the Lord fulfilled his promises to Israel.  We can look back to the cross and see the love and the grace and the mercy and the faithfulness of the Lord on display as it had never been before.  The Lord of glory humbled himself to become one of us and to shed his blood on a cross for our sake, to shed his blood that we might live with him and know his new creation.  And, too, he has poured out his own Spirit on us and made us his temple.  Brothers and Sisters, in Jesus and the Spirit we have the sure and certain assurance that God is with us, that we are in his hands, and that he will see us through the valley of the shadow of death to know green pastures and still waters.  He will see us through, as the Psalmist sang, for his name’s sake—for he has not only given us his promise, but he has sealed that promise with his own name, with his own reputation, and with his own blood.  In response, Brothers and Sisters, let us be faithful—faithful stewards of his word, faithful stewards of his gospel, and let us pray for and seek his wisdom that we might fear him and walk as a gospel people—light in the darkness.

Let’s pray: Almighty and everlasting God, mercifully look upon our infirmities and our trials; and in all our dangers and necessities stretch out your right hand to help and defend us; give us humility to know your chastisement; and pour out your wisdom on us that we might discern your will and walk in your way; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.  Amen.

Why Daniel?

1 Maccabees 1:41-61 & Zechariah 8:1-8, 20-23

by William Klock

The world is not what it once was.  My great-grandmother—the only one of my great-grandmothers I ever knew— was born in 1896.  When she died in 1993, I remember everyone talking about how much the world had changed in her lifetime and how she’d seen it all.  She was the daughter of Portuguese immigrants from the Azores, one of thirteen children in a close-knit family.  She grew up in Mission San Jose, a little town on the east side of San Francisco Bay.  It was centred on a church established by Father Junípero Serra, the 18th Century Franciscan missionary.  It was the Catholic California version of one of those New England Puritan towns centred on a white, clapboard Congregational church.  She could remember the days when no one had ever seen an automobile.  And she’d seen Neil Armstrong put that first human foot on the moon.  The Christmas I finally got the Atari 2600 I’d been begging for, she sat patiently and played Pac-Man with me, this woman who had grown up in a world not only without television, but even radios.  Hers was a lifetime of change.  It happened so fast.  From kerosene lamps to computers, from horse-drawn buggies to space shuttles, all in one lifetime.

Everyone talked about that century of progress in technological terms.  I don’t remember anyone talking about my great-grandmother having also seen the century of regress that happened simultaneously in religious, spiritual, and philosophical terms.  My grandmother had seen church attendance peak in the 1950s and then slowly decline.  The church that had once been the centre of the community in which she grew up is now little more than a tourist attraction.  She saw the decline of the family, the rise the “me” generation, and the sexual revolution.  She didn’t have the education that would have given her the philosophical language to describe those changes, but she knew them and felt them in her bones—and her bones ached terribly.  She knew sacrifice.  Her mother died when she was ten years old.  She dropped out of school after the fifth grade to take care of her family, doing most of the cooking and baking and housekeeping for her father and twelve brothers and sisters.  She knew what it meant to be part of and committed to a family and a community, to give and to sacrifice for the sake of others, and she couldn’t help but notice as her grandchildren and great-grandchildren and their (our) generations became focused on ourselves, on consumption, on materialism, unwilling to give, unable to comprehend the life she knew growing up.  Even though these things weren’t what people were talking about, these were far more significant, far more profound changes that took place during the Twentieth Century—far more important than telephones and TVs and airplanes and computers.

As a people we’ve adapted pretty readily from buggies to cars, from trains to aeroplanes, from telegraphs to texting.  It’s not to say technology hasn’t introduced its own problems.  But the other changes: the spiritual, the religious, the philosophical?  That’s another story.  And as much as the sexual revolution and the rise of rabid individualism were shocking and disorienting in a broad cultural sense for my great grandmother, the continuing spread and evolution of those same social, spiritual, and philosophical trends—and not least their acceleration—leaves most of us, I think, feeling like someone’s pulled the rug out from under us.

The pace of all this change spiritual and philosophical change is staggering.  The folks who promote all these changes like to pretend that nothing’s changed, but the rest of us are left breathless, troubled, even with anxiety about where things are headed and what it will mean for us.  There’s a cartoon where a Leftist, Progressive, Liberal man accusingly asks a traditionalist: “Who radicalised you?”  And the traditionalist leans in and says: “No one.  I’m just a normal person from five years ago.”  I think every one of us here can identify with that.  Just a few years ago the idea of people telling you their “pronouns” and expecting you to seriously play along was absurd.  Just a few years ago, most people would think you were crazy if you said that one day the City of Courtenay would be flying a rainbow “pride” flag from city hall and painting rainbow crosswalks downtown.  Just a few years ago, to look at the world and sort everyone into classes of “oppressor” and “oppressed”, to judge everyone on the basis of power and privilege or the lack thereof, that was the purview of a handful of Marxist academics.  And now, if you don’t support these things, people ask, “Who radicalised you?”  “Why can’t you get with the programme?”  Or they “cancel” you—something else we’d never heard of until a few short years ago.  If only we had the confidence to stand firm and respond like the man in the cartoon: “I’m just a normal person from five years ago.  You’re the ones who have lost your minds.”  Instead, we often feel as if we’ve been thrown into deep, murky water and are struggling to stay afloat while our feet scramble to find something solid on which to stand.

And speaking of something solid on which to stand, where is the Church in all of this?  We’re increasingly side-lined.  Our part of the world has always been the least-churched part of Christendom.  I like to think that there’s something providential in that—that God has us right where he wants us to teach us and to prepare us for the days ahead.  (This is, after all, why I think we need to study Daniel.)  Christianity has, at least in the eyes of the world out there, become pretty much irrelevant.  When I meet people in our community and talk to them about what I do, I realise that even a lot of older people, have no idea what we’re about.  They have as much idea of what goes on in a church as I have what goes on in the Legion Hall or the Masonic Lodge.  And they have as much interest in what goes on here as I have interest in the Legion or the Masons.  I’ve talked to people who don’t recognise a clerical collar, who don’t know what a pastor is, who know nothing about the Bible, and—one woman I talked to a few years ago—who thinks Jesus was a nice man who lived “a couple hundred years ago” and was “riffing off Buddha”.  The Dutch missiologist Stephan Paas describes this attitude towards the Church as “apatheism”.  Most people aren’t hostile towards us.  They just don’t care.  They think we’re quaint and maybe a little weird and that’s about it.

But when the Church does stand up for something: for the gospel, for Jesus, for right and wrong, for truth—when we do make ourselves heard.  When we openly challenge the gods and kings of the pagans.  Well, then we’re in trouble.  People get angry and nasty.  And there are people in the church who will jump overboard lest any of the anger or nastiness fall on them, lest people “out there” think less of them or call them haters or bigots for refusing to go along with this rapid-onset cultural insanity.  And so we end up sidelined even more and to communicate with the world around us becomes an even more uphill battle than it was before.  Like the Christians in the First and Second Centuries who were falsely accused of being atheists (because they worshipped only one god, which was as good as worshiping no god in the Greco-Roman world); who were accused of incest (because they called each other Brother and Sisters); who were accused of cannibalism (because they ate the body and drank the blood of the Lord); who were accused of being politically disruptive troublemakers (because they refused to worship Caesar).  The accusations today are a little different: we’re “haters” because we insist that sin is sin and truth is truth; we’re “bigots” because we believe that Jesus, crucified and risen, is the only way to the Father; and we’re patriarchal, sexist, misogynists, because we talk of God as Father and Jesus as Son and believe that God created men and women to be different, but complimentary.

And it’s even more troubling—like the rug being pulled out again—when fellow Christians give in and capitulate to this increasingly anti-Christian culture.  For most of my life, the division between the liberal Mainline churches and orthodox Evangelical churches has been in the past.  As Evangelicals we’ve watched those churches that capitulated to the culture a hundred years ago become less and less relevant as they’ve dwindled down to almost nothing.  And we’ve thought the church was done with those sorts of mistakes—with capitulating to the demands of the culture to get by or to become socially acceptable.  You cannot worship Yahweh and Zeus at the same altar—not and keep your soul.  Our generation (yours and mine) not only recognised that move as a betrayal of Jesus and the gospel, but also that it didn’t work.  And yet a new generation is trying it all over again.  My own seminary, a bastion of Evangelicalism when I went there, seems now to be turning out pastors who are reshaping the church and the gospel in light of those Neo-Marxist categories of oppressor and oppressed, of privileged and unprivileged; and embracing expressive individualism and all that means in terms of identity politics and postmodern sexual ethics and ideas of sexual identity.  I’m part of an alumni group on Facebook.  If you dare to say the things the seminary upheld thirty years ago, you’ll be woke-scolded and shut down in that infuriatingly post-modern passive aggressive way we’re all starting to know so well.  They sound remarkably—and creepily—like the Director of N.I.C.E. in C. S. Lewis’ That Hideous Strength.  I listen to the sermons of some of those younger alumni and hear pastors who are leading their congregations in the process of “Deconstruction”, promoting a false gospel having more to do with Marx than with Jesus, and even defending sexual immorality.  Many of us here were forced out of the mainline Anglican churches as they followed a similar path decades ago, but now once strongly Evangelical denominations like the Christian and Missionary Alliance, the Mennonites, and the Canadian Baptists are spiralling that same drain—and their pastors, even as the go down the drain into apostasy and irrelevance, they’re rebuking and scolding those of us who are holding to the Bible with everything we’ve got, our solid rock in the midst of this raging sea.  Even our own Anglican Church in North America hasn’t been immune.  Barely a decade after our founding, having experienced all this wickedness, and we’re already having to confront a young generation who, with no personal experience of our old struggles, is ready to run straight back into that old folly.

What do we do?  The world is largely ambivalent to our message.  (I hand-delivered over a hundred invitations to Christianity Explored a few years ago to our neighbourhood and not a single person followed up, let alone showed up.)  And when we do speak up, when we do make ourselves noticeable, we’re shouted down, falsely accused of all sorts of things, and sent to go sit in the corner like bad children—and sometimes that’s exactly what we end up doing, because we don’t know what else to do.  So what do we do?

Brothers and Sisters, we’re not the first believers to face this, although after two thousand years of Christendom, it certainly feels like we’re the first.  And after two thousand years of Christendom, I think we’re struggling with how to respond to our world and with what to do.  Do we defend ourselves from the false accusations or do we go and sit in the corner?  How do we proclaim the good news when people are predisposed to dismiss it?  What do we do when our traditional methods of evangelism no longer work?  What do we do when the world pressures us to go along to get along?  And, I think the most important question of all, where is the Lord in all of this?  Brothers and Sisters, again, we’re not the first.

We could look back to the letters John wrote in the book of Revelation to the churches in Asia Minor—letters exhorting them to stand firm in faith, on Jesus and the gospel, because a storm of persecution was coming.  We looked at those letters two years ago.  Let’s look at another time of trouble for God’s people that most of us probably aren’t nearly so familiar with.  The books of First and Second Maccabees in the Apocrypha tell the story of Judah about 160 years before Jesus was born—in the time between the testaments.  The Jews had returned from the Babylonian exile, rebuilt Jerusalem and the temple, but still lived under Persian Rule.  The Greek conqueror, Alexander the Great, defeated the Persians in 331 BC and Judah became part of his empire.  Alexander, however, didn’t live very long and his generals divvied up his empire and then they and their descendants fought with each other for two-and-a-half centuries.  Poor Judah ended up caught in the middle of that.  Those Greek kings, for the most part, left Judah alone.  She had a special status as sort of a temple state, ruled by the high priest.  But things slowly went downhill.  The priesthood was bought and sold by corrupt men.  A lot of Jews gradually adopted the pagan ways and ideas of the Greeks and became less and less faithful to the torah.  But things really went bad for Judah under a king named Antiochus IV.  People called him “Epiphanies”—just like our current season of the church year—because he believed he was Zeus manifest (epiphany) in the flesh.  Antiochus was at war with Egypt and he wanted Judah to know that she belonged to him, not to the Egyptians.  He also wanted to get his hands on the temple treasury to fund his war efforts.  So Antiochus pillaged the temple, desecrated it with an altar of Zeus, and actively suppressed their Jewish way of life—their ability to live by the torah—and tried to turn them into good Greeks.  Here’s how the author of First Maccabees tells it.  Listen and see if any of this sounds uncomfortably familiar.

 

Then the king wrote to his whole kingdom that all should be one people, and that all should give up their particular customs. All the Gentiles accepted the command of the king. Many even from Israel gladly adopted his religion; they sacrificed to idols and profaned the sabbath. And the king sent letters by messengers to Jerusalem and the towns of Judah; he directed them to follow customs strange to the land, to forbid burnt offerings and sacrifices and drink offerings in the sanctuary, to profane sabbaths and festivals, to defile the sanctuary and the priests, to build altars and sacred precincts and shrines for idols, to sacrifice swine and other unclean animals, and to leave their sons uncircumcised. They were to make themselves abominable by everything unclean and profane, so that they would forget the law and change all the ordinances. He added, “And whoever does not obey the command of the king shall die.”

 

  In such words he wrote to his whole kingdom. He appointed inspectors over all the people and commanded the towns of Judah to offer sacrifice, town by town. Many of the people, everyone who forsook the law, joined them, and they did evil in the land; they drove Israel into hiding in every place of refuge they had.

 

  Now on the fifteenth day of Chislev, in the one hundred forty-fifth year, they erected a desolating sacrilege on the altar of burnt offering. They also built altars in the surrounding towns of Judah, and offered incense at the doors of the houses and in the streets. The books of the law that they found they tore to pieces and burned with fire. Anyone found possessing the book of the covenant, or anyone who adhered to the law, was condemned to death by decree of the king. They kept using violence against Israel, against those who were found month after month in the towns. On the twenty-fifth day of the month they offered sacrifice on the altar that was on top of the altar of burnt offering. According to the decree, they put to death the women who had their children circumcised, and their families and those who circumcised them; and they hung the infants from their mothers’ necks.  (1 Maccabees 1:41-61)

Immense pressure was put on the people to conform.  Many of their leaders were in on it.  Many, feeling the pressure and fearing men rather than God, capitulated.  But not everyone.

But many in Israel stood firm and were resolved in their hearts not to eat unclean food. They chose to die rather than to be defiled by food or to profane the holy covenant; and they did die. Very great wrath came upon Israel.

 

In the midst of that nightmare of persecution the book of Daniel was written.  (I know, you were starting to wonder what any of this has to do with Daniel.)  People were asking those questions: What do we do?  How do we remain faithful?  Where do we draw the line with these pagans and their demands?  And that all-important question above all else: Where is God in all of this?  Why is he allowing this to happen to us?  And so some anonymous writer, inspired by the Spirit, undertook to exhort his people by looking back to the last time Judah had faced tragedy and had been tempted to compromise with pagans: the Babylonian exile.  Specifically, he looked back to a man named Daniel.

In the centuries since Daniel had lived, he’d become the popular subject of stories about faithfulness and wisdom.  This man living during the reign of Antiochus collected some of those stories to form the first part of his book—stories written in Aramaic, which had become the common language of the Jews since their exile.  And then he wrote (in Hebrew) an apocalypse in the style of a prophecy told by Daniel, and in that apocalypse he recounts the history of Judah’s recent troubles, and through it all reminds the people that no matter what things look like, the Lord is sovereign over all—even pagan kings—and that he is with his people, even when it doesn’t seem like it.  And in the end, knowing the faithfulness of the God of Israel, he looks forward in hope to the vindication of his people and to the Lord finally setting things to rights.  Daniel is really quite a bit more complicated than that, but that’s it in a nutshell.  We’ll crack open the nut in the coming months and I trust we’ll be blessed, encouraged, and exhorted by what we find inside, especially knowing that it was written to people who felt as though the rug had been pulled out from under their feet and who were asking many of the same hard questions that we’re asking as God’s people today.

The answers aren’t always easy.  Sometimes we have to work out the math ourselves—like a “story problem”.  One of the interesting things about Daniel is that while we classify the book with the “Prophets” in Christians Bibles, the Jews placed this book in the section they call the “Writings”—all the books that aren’t Law or Prophet.  Not everyone agrees on why this happened, but the prevailing view seems to be that Daniel was seen early on as wisdom literature—like Job, Proverbs, and Ecclesiastes—those books where the big questions are worked out.  Where is God?  How does faithfulness work out practically in life?  Daniel does just that and one of the things I appreciate about the book of Daniel is that it shows us how we work out these questions, how we work out how to be faithful to the Lord in difficult times and difficult places, in light of what the big story of God and his people teaches us.  I had originally planned for our Old Testament lesson to be something from Daniel, but as I looked at the lectionary and the lesson it gives us from Zechariah 8, I realised that it’s perfect.  Whoever compiled and composed Daniel as an exhortation to the people of Judah living under Antiochus Epiphanies, not only looked back to Daniel’s experience in the Exile, but he also knew the story and the promises the Lord had made to his people before and during that exile—promises like the one we heard earlier from Zechariah:

Thus says the Lord of hosts: I am jealous for Zion with great jealousy, and I am jealous for her with great wrath. Thus says the Lord: I will return to Zion, and will dwell in the midst of Jerusalem; Jerusalem shall be called the faithful city, and the mountain of the Lord of hosts shall be called the holy mountain. Thus says the Lord of hosts: Old men and old women shall again sit in the streets of Jerusalem, each with staff in hand because of their great age. And the streets of the city shall be full of boys and girls playing in its streets. Thus says the Lord of hosts: Even though it seems impossible to the remnant of this people in these days, should it also seem impossible to me, says the Lord of hosts? Thus says the Lord of hosts: I will save my people from the east country and from the west country; and I will bring them to live in Jerusalem. They shall be my people and I will be their God, in faithfulness and in righteousness.

 

He knew that there were parts of this prophecy yet to be fulfilled and in those dark days, that unfulfilled prophecy gave him hope, because he knew from the history of people that the Lord always does what he promises.  In particular, there’s the second half of our lesson, from verses 2-23:

Thus says the Lord of hosts: Peoples shall yet come, the inhabitants of many cities; the inhabitants of one city shall go to another, saying, “Come, let us go to entreat the favor of the Lord, and to seek the Lord of hosts; I myself am going.” Many peoples and strong nations shall come to seek the Lord of hosts in Jerusalem, and to entreat the favor of the Lord. Thus says the Lord of hosts: In those days ten men from nations of every language shall take hold of a Jew, grasping his garment and saying, “Let us go with you, for we have heard that God is with you.”

 

The author of Daniel looked around at his people.  Even though many of the people he knew were doing their best to be faithful, he saw so much compromise.  No one was looking to the people of Judah and seeing the Lord in their midst.  The nations looked at Judah and saw a people who were conquered—and that meant their god was conquered too.  But because he knew that the Lord is faithful, he could look forward in hope to that day when the Lord would restore his people and make them what they were—what they are—supposed to be.  He could look forward to that day that you and I have seen fulfilled in Jesus the Messiah, when the men and women of the nations would finally, at last, take hold of a Jew—the Jew—and plead, “Let us go with you, for we have heard that God is with you.”

Brothers and Sisters, we have seen these prophecies fulfilled in Jesus. We are the gentiles who have grabbed hold of his blood-soaked garments and he has led us to the God of Israel.  We who were not a people, have through him, become his people.  We see promise after promise fulfilled in him, fulfilled in the pouring out of the Spirit, fulfilled as the gospel has gone out to the nations.  And we, too can look forward in faith knowing the Lord’s faithfulness—knowing, for example (again, just one of so many) that one day the knowledge of glory will cover the earth as the waters cover the sea.  Friends, no matter how difficult or dark the days, whether we walk beside still waters or through the valley of the shadow of death, though we know blessing or we know cursing, though we experience his approval or his discipline, the Lord is with us.  He has given his Son for our sake.  He has poured out his Spirit to equip us for his work.  He has given us his gospel to proclaim for the life of the world.  And he has done none of that in vain.  I think Daniel will help us answer those hard questions, but before we hear him speak, let’s commit to holding fast to the solid rock, to the basic truths we already know, revealed in Jesus the Messiah himself: that the Lord loves us, that the Lord has a glorious future for us and all of creation, that the Lord is with us no matter what.  And most of all that great truth revealed in Jesus and in his death and resurrection: that the Lord will go to any length to keep his promise to us.

As we prayed in our Collect, let us pray again: Almighty and everlasting God, you govern all things both in heaven and on earth:  Mercifully hear the supplications of your people, and in our time grant us your peace (and fill us with faith and hope); through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.  Amen.

The Epiphany: Manifest to the Gentiles

Ephesians 3:1-12 & St. Matthew 2:1-12

by William Klock

 

This morning the kids moved the magi from the credence table—their place in the East—and brought them to the manger to worship the new-born king.  In real life, the trek of the magi was a much longer.  The magi were astrologers from Persia.  Their journey was no easy thing.  Imagine their weeks on the trade routes, crossing rivers and deserts, passing through city after city and village after village, as they made their way to Israel and to Jerusalem.  They had seen a star and someway and somehow they had discerned from that star that the King of the Jews had been born.  And not only that, but that this King of the Jews, in particular, was unique—was worthy of this long journey and was worthy of the expensive gifts they brought, was worthy of their worship.  They knew of the birth of other kings—even other kings in Israel—but they didn’t undertake long journeys to honour them.  This was different.  Maybe it was something about the star.  Maybe they knew something about Israel’s prophets as the Jewish exiles rubbed shoulders with the people of the Babylonian and Persian empires.  However they knew, the magi were compelled to do the unthinkable—to make this great trek to visit, to pay homage to, to worship a foreign king—and in the ancient Near East, that meant to worship that king’s god.  Maybe they even knew that in this kingly baby, Israel’s God had taken on flesh.  We don’t know.  But something absolutely extraordinary drove them to worship this king of a conquered nation.  No one did that in the ancient Near East—and, especially, no one travelled great distances to do it or brought expensive gifts.  A conquered king was a loser and so were his gods.  But in this king, they recognised something that had never happened before in the history of the world and these foreigners, these gentiles, came to see, to confirm, to know, to honour—to give glory to this king and his God—maybe even having a sense that the two were one and the same.  It was an epiphany: God made manifest in Jesus.  First to his own people, represented by the shepherds we read about on Christmas, and now made manifest to the gentiles, represented by these kings from the East.

We’ll come back to magi and to our Gospel, but first, listen again to St. Paul in our Epistle, Ephesians 3, as he writes to his brothers and sisters in Ephesus:

 

  For this reason I, Paul, a prisoner of Christ Jesus on behalf of you Gentiles…

 

Ephesus was a predominantly gentile church that Paul had started when he visited the city on his second missionary journey.  Now he’s writing to them some years later as he sits in prison, having been arrested for proclaiming the good news about Jesus.  He goes on:

 

—assuming that you have heard of the stewardship of God’s grace that was given to me for you, how the mystery was made known to me by revelation, as I have written briefly. When you read this, you can perceive my insight into the mystery of Christ, which was not made known to the sons of men in other generations as it has now been revealed to his holy apostles and prophets by the Spirit.  This mystery is that the Gentiles are fellow heirs, members of the same body, and partakers of the promise in Christ Jesus through the gospel.

 

This was, as we say, Paul’s “thing”.  This was for him the great mystery—not “mystery” like Sherlock Holmes or Scooby-doo, but mystery in the sense of a great, earth-shattering revelation that changes everything.  We might say an “epiphany”.  For Paul the great mystery was first the revelation that Jesus really was the Messiah, but then when he’d had the chance to work through all the implications of that great truth he was confronted with this one: “that the Gentiles are fellow heirs, members of the same body, and partakers of the promise in Jesus the Messiah through the gospel.”  Most people would have thought this was a thoroughly un-Jewish thing to say.  Even that it was blasphemy that gentiles—unclean dogs!—were coheirs with the people of God.  A few of them, sure, but only after they’d been purified and circumcised and committed to observing torah.  And then they weren’t really gentiles anymore.  But Paul’s realised that, in fact, once you get the story of God and Israel straight, it would be hard to come up with anything more Jewish than this conclusion that the gentiles are, in Jesus, fellow heirs, members of the same body, and part of Abraham’s family.  This is what the story was working towards all along, even though hardly anyone realised it anymore.  As he says as he continues, ministering this truth was his calling:

  Of this gospel I was made a minister according to the gift of God’s grace, which was given me by the working of his power. To me, though I am the very least of all the saints, this grace was given, to preach to the Gentiles the unsearchable riches of Christ, and to bring to light for everyone what is the plan of the mystery hidden for ages in God, who created all things, so that through the church the manifold wisdom of God might now be made known to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly places. This was according to the eternal purpose that he has realized in Christ Jesus our Lord, in whom we have boldness and access with confidence through our faith in him.

 

The Jews of Paul’s day had got their own story wrong and no longer had any sense that “salvation is for the Gentiles”.  As far as they were concerned, they were God’s people, God cared about them, God would deliver them from their oppressors and put them on top, and one day he would rain down destruction on all the unclean people of the word.  Salvation was for the Jews, they might have said.  Even those first Jewish Christians were still thinking in this vein.  Jesus was their Messiah.  There were a few gentiles who believed, but they had to first become Jews.  And there were the Samaritans who believed.  That was a challenge to this kind of thinking, but until Paul, no one seemed to have this vision of the deliverance, of the salvation of the Gentiles—at least not on a large scale.

The irony is that today we’ve made the opposite mistake.  We’ve so dehistoricised, flattened out, and universalised the story that we’ve all but forgotten that “Salvation is from the Jews.”  “Salvation is from the Jews.”  That’s what Jesus said to the Samaritan woman and they ought to ring in our ears too.  They ought to remind us of the great story of the God of Israel and his people.  St. Paul writes in today’s Epistle to explain his unique apostolic ministry to proclaim the good news about Jesus to the Gentiles.  It has been my experience that many Christians have never stopped to consider just how odd Paul’s ministry would have seemed at the time.  They’ve never stop to think, because we have largely removed the gospel from its narrative and historical context and unnecessarily flattened it to communicate its universal nature.  Occasionally we need to recall that, even though “God so loved the world,” it is also true that “salvation is from the Jews”.  Why is that important?  Think again of the big story.  Out of a world that had lost all knowledge of him, the Lord chose and called Abraham and from him created a people whom he made holy and in whose midst he lived.  He gave this people his law and his presence and made them unique amongst the nations.  Jesus was born a Jew—one of those people.  He was the Jewish Messiah.  He fulfilled the Jewish law and the words of the Jewish prophets.  He proclaimed good news about a coming kingdom and a coming judgement to Jews and for Jews.  While gentiles were welcomed when they came to him, he made it clear that his ministry was to his own people.  The evangelists lay the blame for Jesus’ death with Jews.  The gentiles had their part in it—hinting that they would eventually also have a share in his resurrection—but it was Jesus’ own people who betrayed him and demanded his death.  Even in his death by crucifixion, Jesus foreshadows the means of execution that the unrepentant Jewish rebels would face when judgement came a generation later.  Jesus literally took the death of his people on himself in that sense.  It cannot be stressed enough that Jesus, the Jewish Messiah, lived and died for the sake of the Jews and to bring their story to its climax.

We can’t just skip all that to get to John’s announcement that God so loved the world that he gave his Son, because when we do that, we short-circuit the story, we leave out most or all of the bits that show us how God, in Jesus, has been faithful to his promises made under the old covenant.  And in that, we cast a veil over his glory.  It was necessary for Jesus to fulfil the story of his own people, because only then would the Gentiles see the faithfulness of Israel’s God, be drawn to what they saw, give him glory, and in the process be incorporated into the new people of God by faith.  In this, too, we see that the means by which the Gentiles are incorporated into the new Israel fulfils the message of Israel’s prophets and glorifies the Lord.  While it is certainly true that a dehistoricised and flattened gospel has brought millions to the Lord Jesus, it is also true that communicating the gospel within its context communicates the faithfulness of God as the basis for our own faith with far greater depth and builds upon a firm foundation whereas so much that passes today for evangelism and Christian faith is merely subjective.  We try to draw people to Jesus by appealing to their needs and wants, but what we see in Paul’s ministry—and what we see especially in Revelation—is the gentile nations being drawn to the God of Israel by the revelation of his glory in Jesus the Messiah.  In the New Testament, the gentiles come to Jesus, because in him they see a God who is faithful and worthy of glory—a God unlike anything or anyone known in the pagan world.  Again, Christians today need to understand just how weird Paul’s ministry would have seemed in his day—even, at first, to the other apostles.  Again, most believed that the good news about the Jewish Messiah was for other Jews, and of little interest (or even relevance) to gentiles.  Jesus radically changed what it meant to be the people of God, but in many respects, it was not until St. Paul emerged from his wilderness sojourn that this dramatic change was really grasped by the fledgling Church.

Of course, Israel’s ministry to the Gentiles was there all along.  The Lord set Israel apart before the watching nations.  She was to be his witness.  Through her he would restore and reconcile humanity to himself.  But as Paul points out in our Epistle, this “mystery” was largely lost on Israel—on previous generations.  And yet there it was from the beginning, all the way back in Abraham’s day—if anyone was paying really close attention—that the Lord’s intent was to one day bring the Gentiles into his family and to make them fellow heirs with those who were children by birth rather than adoption.  This truth had been revealed by the Spirit to the prophets of old and, in the same way, had been revealed to the apostles—who took some time to parse it out—and to Paul it was a personal commission: to proclaim the good news about Jesus to the Gentiles.  Paul adds here that this mission is not simply to ordinary people, nor is it a matter of personal piety.  As Gentile believers come into their inheritance in the Messiah, the Church becomes both a witness and a challenge to the rulers of the Gentile world.  This diverse body of Jews and Gentiles of every sort, living in unity the inheritance given them by Jesus, announces that he is Lord and that a new age is breaking in.  Just as was the case with Israel, the lords of the earth can submit in faith to the lordship of Jesus or face the judgement to come.

Now we turn over to today’s Gospel, Matthew 2:1-12, which dovetails with what Paul has written in the Epistle.  Here’s the truth that Paul writes, manifest in the story of Jesus.  Matthew writes:

 

  Now after Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea in the days of Herod the king, behold, wise men from the east came to Jerusalem, saying, “Where is he who has been born king of the Jews? For we saw his star when it rose and have come to worship him.” When Herod the king heard this, he was troubled, and all Jerusalem with him; and assembling all the chief priests and scribes of the people, he inquired of them where the Christ was to be born. They told him, “In Bethlehem of Judea, for so it is written by the prophet:

         “‘And you, O Bethlehem, in the land of Judah,

                  are by no means least among the rulers of Judah;

          for from you shall come a ruler

                  who will shepherd my people Israel.’”

  Then Herod summoned the wise men secretly and ascertained from them what time the star had appeared. And he sent them to Bethlehem, saying, “Go and search diligently for the child, and when you have found him, bring me word, that I too may come and worship him.” After listening to the king, they went on their way. And behold, the star that they had seen when it rose went before them until it came to rest over the place where the child was. When they saw the star, they rejoiced exceedingly with great joy. And going into the house, they saw the child with Mary his mother, and they fell down and worshiped him. Then, opening their treasures, they offered him gifts, gold and frankincense and myrrh. And being warned in a dream not to return to Herod, they departed to their own country by another way.

 

While St. Luke recalls the events of the night Jesus was born and shows us the shepherds visiting one of their own, one who will follow in the footsteps of David as both king and shepherd, St. Matthew tells of Jesus’ birth in passing and puts all the emphasis on Jesus as King.  Magi, these astrologers from an eastern land, have seen a heavenly sign that heralds the birth of a king in Israel.  They desire to pay him homage and to give him gifts.  As I said earlier, they knew that this was no ordinary king.  There had been no star heralding Herod’s birth.

Naturally, they look for the King of the Jews in Jerusalem.  Herod knows nothing of the birth of a king, but was politically astute enough to recognise the political nature of the magi’s claim and paranoid enough to take action.  Matthew makes it clear that if Jesus is indeed the King, then Herod is not.  Again, Matthew emphasises the kingship of Jesus in the report of the priests to Herod.  They cite Micah 5:2—and it’s not clear if this is their paraphrase or Matthew’s—but they point Herod to Bethlehem.  And yet, in the paraphrase we see again an important bit of context.  Micah speaks, not of a universal king per se, but of one who will be king over Israel.  This king will shepherd the Lord’s flock—a bit from verse 4 that the priests add to their paraphrase of verse 2.  The Messiah is the King of Israel.  It is only once Micah has established that the Messiah will be King over Israel that he goes on to tell us that this King “shall be great to the ends of the earth” (5:4).  Both the Magi and the priests highlight Jesus’ kingship specifically over Israel.  Again, “salvation is from the Jews”.  It is because Jesus is King of Israel, in fulfilment of the Lord’s promises through the prophets, that the good news about him goes out to the Gentiles.  The magi are the first, who foreshadow the future.  Matthew bookends his Gospel with Gentiles.  Here the magi come at Jesus’ birth, Gentiles come to worship a very uniquely Jewish king and to give him glory.  And at the end of the Gospel, Matthew records the commissioning of the disciples to “go and make disciples of all nations”.  The good news is only good news to the Gentiles because it reveals that the God of Israel is unlike the gods of the nations: he does what he says he will do and he fulfils his promises to his own.  Think again of Revelation and how the nations there, the nations that worshiped the beast and frolicked with the great prostitute, discovered in the downfall of the beast that the kings and gods of this world can’t hold a candle to the God of Israel revealed in Jesus, to his power and might, and most importantly, to his faithfulness.  Specifically, he fulfils his promises to his people in Jesus.  It is this faithfulness just as much as the amazing report of Jesus risen from the dead and the defeat of his enemies that draws the Gentiles to give glory to the God of Israel and to submit in faith to Jesus, the King of the Jews.  Of course, this carries the same ramifications for Caesar and the other rulers and gods of this age as it did for Herod.  This is what Paul stresses in the final verses of our Epistle.  Their days are numbered, for as the royal summons to the King goes out, Jesus “shall be great to the ends of the earth”.

Brothers and Sisters, the gospel about Jesus is good news, because it reveals the faithfulness of God.  He does what he says he will do.  He fulfils his promises.  He does so like no other.  And that’s reason for us to trust him, to give him our allegiance, to worship him and to give him glory.  And to proclaim his good news to the world.

I want to close with the Collect for today, because it offers a wonderful comparison between the magi and ourselves.  They were drawn to Jesus by sight and we by faith, and so we look forward in hope to the day on which we, too, will see his majesty on full display.  It’s the prayer of Gentiles who have seen the glory of the God of Israel revealed in the life, the death, and the resurrection of Jesus the Messiah.  It is a thanksgiving for what God has done in Jesus, creating a new Israel in which the Gentiles are fellow heirs, and it looks forward in hope to the day in which Jesus will set the cosmos to rights and to be revealed in all his glory as both King and God.

 

Let’s pray: O God, who by the leading of a star manifested your only Son to the peoples of the earth: mercifully grant that we, who know you now by faith, may at last behold your glory face to face; through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord, who is alive and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.  Amen.

The Sunday after Christmas: In the Fullness of Time

Isaiah 7:14-16, Galatians 4:1-7, & St. Matthew 1:18-25

by William Klock

St. Luke tells the story of Jesus’ birth, from the perspective of Mary.  In Luke’s Gospel we see an angel come to a young girl to announce that she will bear Israel’s Messiah.  We get a sense of her excitement.  Everyone was, after all, waiting for the Messiah.  Most people would have expected him to be born in a palace, so imagine Mary’s utter shock to learn that she was to be the one.  Yes, her family had descended from David, but they weren’t royals by any stretch of the imagination.  They were just simple, common people.

St. Matthew, on the other hand, tells the same story from the perspective of Joseph.  He was anything but excited to hear the news that Mary was pregnant.  It’s not hard to imagine the disappointment, the embarrassment, even the shame that he felt.  “It’s not another man,” Mary told him.  “I’m pregnant by the Holy Spirit.  That’s what the angel told me.  I don’t understand how it can be, but he told me that this child is the Messiah.”

Joseph knew where babies come from.  This was going to bring shame on him and so, Matthew says, Joseph made plans to quietly separate from Mary—to break off the engagement.  Hopefully he could distance himself from the whole fiasco, save some face, move on with life, and maybe find someone more respectable to marry.

But then the angel appeared to Joseph.  “Joseph, son of David!” the angel greeted him.  Joseph was also a descendant of King David, but so were a lot of people.  This was the first time anyone had ever addressed Joseph as if he were a prince.  But the angel’s making a point: Joseph is part of the royal family—the family from which the Messiah would come.  “Joseph, don’t be afraid to follow through with this marriage to Mary.  She wasn’t lying when she told you she was pregnant by the Holy Spirit.  She’s not crazy.  A miracle has really happened.  She’s going to have a son.  And, listen, when he’s born, you are to name him ‘Jesus’.  Why?  Because he’s the one who will save his people from their sins.”

“Joseph, don’t be afraid!”  This is where Mary’s story and Joseph’s story intersect.  When the angel appeared to Mary he said the same thing to her: “Don’t be afraid!”  This is what happens every time someone in the Bible is met by an angel or given a message from God: Don’t be afraid.  God announces that he’s about to do something.  Maybe what he says he’s going to do is itself scary and frightening.  Maybe it just seems crazy and impossible.  Sometimes it’s something that sounds incredibly foolish.  This announcement about the baby, conceived by the Holy Spirit and the angel’s urging Joseph to go ahead and marry Mary pretty well hits all these points.  If any two people needed this exhortation to “Fear not!”, Joseph and Mary needed it.

But maybe we need it too as we read the Christmas story.  Is it really necessary to emphasise this particular part of the Christmas story?  I know a lot of people believe it, but they don’t want to talk about.  It’s fine for us, but people out there are going to think we’re superstitious or naïve for believing in a virgin birth, because these things don’t happen in the real world.

There are people who throw this story out because they associate it with the later legend that grew up about Mary’s supposed perpetual virginity and the teaching closely associated with it that sex is sinful or dirty.  Of course, the Bible says none of these things.  The Gospel-writers give us every reason to believe that after Jesus was born, Joseph and Mary went on to have a perfectly normal married life and to have other children.  The reason Matthew and Luke tell us this story is because they believed it was true.  They had their own reasons to be afraid in telling it.  The pagans told stories about half-human men and women fathered by the gods.  Ancient mythology is full of those stories.  Matthew may have been afraid that people would think he was somehow borrowing from these myths.  He surely knew that some people would say that in reporting that Mary was pregnant by the Holy Spirit he was just covering for some indiscretion on Mary’s part.

Other people have said that Matthew invented this part of the story so that he could claim Jesus’ birth was a fulfilment of Old Testament prophecy—the verse he quotes from Isaiah 7.  What’s interesting about that is that there is no evidence whatsoever that anyone before Matthew had ever thought of Isaiah’s prophecy being fulfilled in the birth of the coming Messiah.  No one had ever made the connection.  Isaiah’s prophecy was fulfilled in the days of King Ahaz.  Everyone knew that.  It was actually Matthew, knowing what Isaiah had said and the history that surrounded that prophecy, who saw there a sort of prefiguring of Jesus.

There are all sorts of ways that people find something to be afraid of in this story—all sorts of reasons people find to reject it.  Neither Matthew nor Luke asks us to simply take their word for it.  Notice that Matthew, in particular, connects the story of Jesus’ birth with a much bigger story—with the story of Israel and of Israel’s God.  It’s almost as if he was anticipating that someone would say, “Virgin birth?  Right, Matthew.  At your age, how can you not know where babies come from?  To the person who says, “The world doesn’t work this way” and to the person who might say, “God doesn’t work this way”, Matthew says, “Wanna bet?”  And he points us back to look at just how God has worked in history.

This is the point of Matthew’s quote from Isaiah 7 about the virgin conceiving and bearing a son named Immanuel.  Matthew ties the birth of Jesus into the larger story of redemption and the larger story of Israel and Israel’s God.

So roll the clock back about 730 years before Jesus was born.  That’s when the events of Isaiah 7-9 took place.  It was a time in Israel’s history when things were looking very bad.  The kingdom had been split for roughly two hundred years: Israel in the north and Judah in the south.  Ahaz was king of Judah.  Ahaz is one of those guys we read about in the book of Kings of which it is said, “He did evil in the sight of the Lord”.  It’s worth noting that in pragmatic political terms, Ahaz was a pretty good king.  He played the political and foreign policy game in a way that kept Judah safe.  But that isn’t how God judges kings.  The Lord had told his people to trust in him, not in foreign alliance with pagans, not in horses, not in chariots.  But those were the things Ahaz trusted in.  Assyria was the great power of the day and it threatened everyone around.  Israel and Syria made an alliance with each other for their security, but they still weren’t strong enough.  The kings of Israel and Syria put pressure on Ahaz to bring Judah into their alliance.

Ahaz could see that there was no hope in aligning himself with Israel and Syria and, instead, submitted Judah to the sovereignty of the Assyrians.  While he was in Assyria he fell under the influence of Assyrian religion.  When he returned to Jerusalem, he built an altar like ones he had seen in Assyria and had the temple re-arranged to accommodate it.  He introduced Assyrian astrological practises to Judah.  He even sacrificed one of his sons to the Assyrian god, Moloch.  In the midst of this, the Prophet Isaiah came to Ahaz.

Isaiah was sent by the Lord to Ahaz the first time as the kings of Syria and Israel were urging Ahaz to ally with them against Assyria.  Isaiah didn’t go alone.  The Lord told him to take his son, Shear-jashub, which means “A Remnant shall return”.  The message the Lord was sending through Isaiah and his son was a familiar one: “Don’t be afraid”.  Israel and Syria were threatening to swoop down on Jerusalem with their combined armies, but the Lord said to Ahaz: “It shall not stand”.  The Lord was urging the king to trust in him.  He also said, through Isaiah, “If you do not stand firm in faith, you shall not stand at all.”

Ahaz waffled rather than standing firm.  The Lord warned him not to ally with Israel and Syria and Ahaz didn’t, but it wasn’t because of the Lord’s warning.  Ahaz was afraid of Israel and Assyria and so, rather than trusting the Lord to take care of Judah, he was considering submitting himself and his people to Assyria.  And so the Lord sent Isaiah to him again with another warning.  This is the passage that Matthew draws on.  Isaiah said to the king:

Look, the young woman is with child and shall bear a son, and shall name him Immanuel.  He shall eat curds and honey by the time he knows how to refuse the evil and choose the good.  For before the child knows how to refuse the evil and choose the good, the land before whose two kings you are in dread will be deserted.

 

What the Lord was saying to Ahaz was, “Look.  Trust in me.  Don’t trust in horses, don’t trust in chariots, don’t trust in pagan kings and pagan gods.  Trust in me and I will take care of you.  I am your God and you are my people.”  The Lord had Isaiah mention a young woman.  The Hebrew word refers to an unmarried girl.  Some Bible versions translate this as virgin, because, being unmarried, the girl was presumably a virgin, but this isn’t a reference to Mary or to an earlier miraculous virgin birth.  We don’t know who this girl was, but it seems to be someone known to the king.  It might have been one of the women in Isaiah’s circle of disciples or it may have been a princess in the king’s family, but whoever it was, Isaiah tells the king that she’s going to have a child and he is to be named Immanuel.  Immanuel means “God is with us”.  And the Lord tells the king that by the time this child is eating solid food, by the time he’s old enough to know the difference between good and evil, he, the Lord himself, will put an end to the threat posed by the kings of Israel and Syria.  Again: Don’t trust in horses.  Don’t trust in chariots.  Don’t trust in pagan kings and pagan gods.  Trust in the Lord and walk with him.

That wasn’t the end of it.  The Lord sent Isaiah a third time to the king.  This time a woman referred to as “the prophetess”—probably Isaiah’s wife—had borne a son named Maher-shalal-hash-baz, which means “the spoil speeds, the prey hastens”.  The Lord’s message was again for Ahaz to trust in him.  Before this child was old enough to say the words “father” and “mother” the Lord would deal with the threat of Israel and Syria.  Again, don’t trust in pagan kings and pagan gods, trust in the Lord.  “God is with us,” declared Isaiah.  “The Lord of hosts, him you shall regard as holy; let him be your fear, and let him be your dread.  He will become a sanctuary, a stone one strikes against; for both houses of Israel he will become a rock one stumbles over—a trap and a snare for the inhabitants of Jerusalem.”

Now, is the Lord faithful?  Does he do what he promises?  Of course.  What the Lord promised was exactly what happened.  In a short time the king of Assyria crushed Syria and Israel.  The northern kingdom was destroyed and the people scattered.  The Lord delivered the people of Judah.  Ahaz, not surprisingly being the wicked king he was, made an alliance with Assyria anyway and brought the worship of the Assyrian gods to Israel.  His son, Hezekiah, spent most of his reign trying to undo the evil his father had done.  Judgement eventually came on Judah too, just as it had on Israel, because the kings of Judah—with a few notable exceptions—failed to trust in the Lord.

Now, back to Matthew.  Why does he quote this prophecy about Immanuel that was fulfilled seven hundred years before?  Matthew does this because in the story of Isaiah and Ahaz we see how God works.  We see God’s goodness and his faithfulness to his people and his call to his people to consistently trust in him.  We also see God’s warning of judgement when his people are unfaithful to him and to the calling he has given.  Israel was, yet again, in another awful political spot in Matthew’s day.  This time it was Rome, not the Assyrians.  Just as Ahaz turned to horses and chariots and to forbidden alliances instead of trusting the Lord, the Jews of Matthew’s day were trusting in all sorts of things other than the Lord.  Jesus spent his entire ministry rebuking these different parties and interest groups.  The Zealots were ready to take up arms in a violent revolution.  The Essenes went off to hide in the desert and denounced everyone else as unfaithful.  The Sadducees sort of took the “If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em” tack.  All of them needed to be reminded of who they were and to whom they belonged—and in whom they had every reason to trust.

Isaiah made use of three different children.  Matthew could have pointed back to any one of them.  Just think, we could be singing “O come, O come, Maher-shalal-hash-baz” every Advent.  But Isaiah points back specifically to the child named Immanuel, “God with us”, because it is a poignant reminder that in Jesus, God truly is with his people.  This is what the people of Matthew’s day needed to hear as a call back to faith in the Lord and in the Lord alone.  But in an even deeper way, in Jesus, the Lord is with us in a way he never has been before.  Whereas in Isaiah’s day, the virgin and her child were a sign that the Lord was about to act, this time it was the child in whom the Lord was coming to take the decisive act in Israel’s history.  In this baby born of Mary and the Holy Spirit—God became incarnate, God became one of us—to once and for all deliver his people from bondage and to make all things new.  And this leads Matthew directly to the angel’s instruction to Joseph: You shall call him Jesus, for he shall save his people from his sins.

Jesus, Yeshua and its slightly longer form, Yehoshua (Joshua in English) were common names.  It means “Yahweh Delivers”, which made it a popular name amongst Jews, but it was made even more popular because the most famous Joshua of all time was the Joshua who took over from Moses and led the Israelites into the promised land.  Jesus is not only God with us, but he is the one who will, like Joshua, fulfil what was begun in the Exodus.  Joshua led the people into the promised land and Jesus will free his people from their bondage to sin and death and lead them into the life of the age to come.  Matthew highlights the important truth for us that Jesus didn’t just appear at any old point in history to any old group of people.  He came in the fullness of time, as St. Paul writes in our Epistle from Galatians.  He came when the time was just right.  He came as part of a much bigger story.  He came as the fulfilment of a promise to a people who had struggled, themselves, to be faithful.  He came to die for the sins of his people, to make them clean, and to fill them with his Spirit—again, to fulfil the story and to make good on God’s promises—so that they—and, eventually, so that we, incorporated into their story—can truly love God with hearts and minds made new.

This is what Paul is getting at in our Epistle, Galatians 41-7, where he writes:

When the fullness of time had come, God sent forth his Son, born of woman, born under the law, to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons. And because you are sons, God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, “Abba! Father!” So you are no longer a slave, but a son, and if a son, then an heir through God.

Brothers and Sisters, this is the story into which we have been baptised.  Think about that.  What’s the formula we use in baptism?  It’s in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  I don’t think we think about this in terms of the story of redemption—at least not as much or as often as we should.  We too often think of this formula as specifying which God we’re putting our faith in.  You know, I’m not baptizing you into the Mormon God or into Zeus or Krishna or the Great Spirit.  I’m baptizing you into the Triune God who exists as Father, Son, and Spirit—three in one and one in three.  That’s part of it, but the more important aspect of it is that this is the God who has acted in history to redeem us and to redeem his Creation.

We are baptised in the name of the Father meaning that we are being incorporated into the family of the God of Israel whose kingdom will come in judgement and restoration.  It means we are being baptised into the family that Isaiah called on to trust wholly in our God, for he is good and faithful.  When we look around at the sin and pain in the world, we can know that we belong to the God who is making all things new.  He is our God and we are his people.  As Jesus said and as Paul writes here, through our union with his Son, Jesus, we are the Father’s adopted sons and daughters and can approach him as “Abba, Father”.

We are baptised into the name of the Son, who in his own baptism committed himself in obedience and in faith to the saving plan of his Father—trusting not in human means and human plans, but in the goodness and faithfulness of the God of Israel.  Baptism into the name of the Son, also expresses a commitment to taking up our crosses as we follow him, knowing his promise of rejection, persecution, and even martyrdom for those who follow.  We are baptised, as Paul writes, into his death.  But we are also baptised into his resurrection.  When we are tempted to fear, we need only remember our baptism.  God has vindicated his Son and he will vindicate his adopted sons and daughters as well.

And, finally, to be baptised into the name of the Holy Spirit is to be baptised into both a new life and a new mission.  Jesus gave the Spirit to his people to fulfil what had been promised long before—to give fallen men and women new hearts capable of trusting, obeying, and loving God.  But the Spirit also makes us a prophetic people—a people called to proclaim the good news to the world, the good news that this Jesus, born of Mary, who died and rose again, is the world’s true Lord.  It is a call to the world around us to stop trusting in horses and chariots, in money, power, and sex, false gods and pretender kings, and to come to Jesus and to be baptised as we have—to submit to the Father’s plan, to take up our crosses daily as we follow the Son into the life of the age to come, and to take up this Spirit-filled ministry of proclamation until he comes again.  There is no doubt that the task we have been given is a hard one, but Brothers and Sisters, today we are reminded: God is with us.

Let us pray: Almighty God, you have given your only-begotten Son to take our nature upon him, and to be born of a pure virgin:  Grant that we, who have been born again and made your children by adoption and grace, may daily be renewed by your Holy Spirit; through our Lord Jesus Christ, to whom with you and the same Spirit be honour and glory, now and for ever.  Amen.

The Fourth Sunday in Advent: Testimony

Philippians 4:4-7 & St. John 1:19-28

by William Klock

As we make our way through Advent the days get darker and there’s something oh so appropriate about that as we prepare ourselves to celebrate the birth of Jesus.  It’s a reminder of the state that Israel was in as the gospel story began—in those days of Mary and Joseph, Elizabeth and Zechariah, and King Herod.  The world was dark.  The nations were enslaved to false gods and pagan kings.  Even little Israel, called to be the light of the world, lay in darkness.  The candlestick in the temple was kept lit, but the cloud of glory that had once filled the holy of holies, the very presence of God, had been absent for five-hundred years.  God’s people were ruled by pagans and pretenders.  And apart from a faithful remnant, the nation had been consumed by the darkness, a holy people in little other than their calling.  But the people knew the words of the prophets, the promises of their God.  It would not be this way forever.  That’s the setting for today’s Gospel, which begins at John 1:19.  Here’s what John writes:

This is the testimony of John [the Baptist], when the Jews sent priests and Levites from Jerusalem to ask him, “Who are you?”  He confessed, and did not deny, but confessed, “I am not the Messiah.”  And they asked him, “What then? Are you Elijah?” He said, “I am not.” “Are you the Prophet?” And he answered, “No.”  So they said to him, “Who are you? We need to give an answer to those who sent us.  What do you say about yourself?”  He said, “I am the voice of one crying out in the wilderness, ‘Make straight the way of the Lord,’ as the prophet Isaiah said.”  (John 1:19-28)

The Pharisees sent Levitical and priestly inquirers to interrogate John, to find out who he was—or at least who he thought he was.  If someone showed up with a message from God, the Pharisees were sure to show up and to ask questions to see if he was legit.  The Jews really were expecting someone.  John anticipates this in his answers.  They ask who he thinks he is and the first thing he says is, “I am not the Messiah.”  That’s who everyone was really anxious to see.  The Messiah would lift the darkness.  The Messiah would fix everything that was wrong with the world.  The Messiah would deliver his people and reign as David had long ago.  There had been others in recent memory who had claimed to be the Messiah and things hadn’t gone well for them.  I expect the Pharisees expected the same was true of John, but hey, you never know.  Eventually the real Messiah would come, they were certain of that, so they might as well ask some questions.

“Well, then,” they ask, “who do you claim to be?”  John first denies that he’s Elijah and then he denies that he’s “the prophet”.  The bit about Elijah goes back to the prophet Malachi.  He had prophesied that Elijah, the greatest of Israel’s prophets (or at least the greatest after Moses) would return one day.  This is what he wrote:

Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet before the great and awesome day of the Lord comes.  (Malachi 4:5)

We have a pretty good sense, based on the literature of the time, that a lot of people interpreted this to mean that Elijah himself would literally return in the flesh.  Sort of like King Arthur to return to rescue Britain at its darkest hour.  It made sense.  Remember that Elijah didn’t die.  He was caught up into heaven in a chariot of fire.  Some people thought he would come back as the Messiah.  John’s answer is interesting, because in last week’s Gospel we heard Jesus himself say that John was the one who fulfilled Malachi’s prophecy.  John was indeed the one.  But John didn’t see it that way.  He hadn’t come to earth in a fiery chariot from heaven.  He was the son of Zechariah the priest and his wife, Elizabeth.

John also denies, too, that he’s “the prophet”.  This is a reference to a passage in Deuteronomy 18 in which the Lord promises that he will one day raise up a prophet like Moses, who will declare the Lord’s own words.  Like the Elijah who was to come, many associated the prophet with the Messiah.  “Nope,” John says, “that’s not me either.”  But here’s the point.  Even if they were wrong about who the Messiah would be and when and how he would come, the Jews were living in hopeful expectation of the Messiah.  They were in their own Advent.  The days were dark.  They were supposed to be the people who lived with the Lord in their midst, but his presence had been gone for five hundred years.  They’d returned from exile, but without the Lord’s presence and with foreign pagans ruling over them, they might as well have still been in exile.  They longed for the light to dawn in the darkness and they trusted it would happen, because they knew their story.  They knew that the Lord is faithful to fulfil his promises.  They belonged to him.  Just as he’d once rescued them from Pharaoh, he would rescue them from Caesar.

John was sure of all this, too.  He may have denied that he was the one prophesied to come like Elijah or Moses—and it’s worth noting again that in Matthew and Mark Jesus actually did affirm that John had come in fulfilment of the Elijah prophecy—but John knew the story, too, and he knew his place in it.  When the Pharisees finally let John speak for himself, he told them: “I am the voice of one crying out in the wilderness, ‘Make straight the way of the Lord.’”  He quotes straight from Isaiah 40:3.  I think this gets at the reason John answered “No” to the questions about Elijah and the Prophet, but given the chance to identify himself, he looks back to this prophecy of Isaiah.  This passage from Isaiah is just as Messianic, but John saw in it the heart of his role and his ministry.  And while there were people who confused the one coming like Elijah or Moses with the Messiah, this voice crying in the wilderness is clearly the Messiah’s forerunner—or at least that’s how John saw it.  He was not the Messiah.  He was the one sent ahead to prepare Israel to receive the Messiah.

And then the question they pose about baptism gives him a chance to expand on this.  Baptism was an act of cleansing that fit well with what the Messiah might be and do when he came.  But John has just denied that he is the Messiah.  “So,” the Pharisees wonder, “why is John baptising people if he’s not the Messiah?”  Look at 25-27:

They asked him, “So why are you baptizing, if you are neither the Messiah, nor Elijah, nor the Prophet?” John answered them, “I baptize with water, but among you stands one you do not know, he who comes after me, whose sandal straps I’m not worthy to untie.”

Baptism was a symbol of cleansing and of ritual purity.  At this point the other gospel-writers are helpful as they expand on John’s answer.  Mark tells us that John’s was a baptism of repentance—it was a preparatory act in light of the coming judgement the Messiah would bring.  And Matthew and Luke also report John continuing about this one who will come, this one greater than John: “He will baptise you with the Holy Spirit and with fire” (Matthew 3:11, Luke 3:16).  In other words, John is calling Israel to repentance in anticipation of the Messiah, who will fulfil the Lord’s promises to set Israel to rights by filling his people with his own Spirit.  The law written on stone tablets would finally be inscribed on the hearts of God’s people so that they could finally fulfil his law of love.  But the Messiah was also coming in judgement.  He would baptise the repentant with God’s own Spirit, but he would baptise unrepentant Israel with fire.

These are the two sides of the gospel coin.  You can’t have one without the other.  Jesus’ advent, on the one hand, brought mercy to the repentant, but on the other it also brought judgement on the unrepentant within Israel.  What’s significant for us here, Brothers and Sisters, is that this exchange between John and the Pharisees reminds us of the Messiah’s place in Israel’s story and of the faithfulness of God to his promises.  It is this manifestation of the Lord’s faithfulness (and of his goodness, mercy, grace, and wisdom) to Israel—something we see brought to its climax in the coming, the death, the resurrection, and the ascension of Jesus, that has drawn us to the God of Israel and that, by faith, has incorporated us into the people of God.  Through our union with Jesus, through our incorporation into this people, through our being made adopted sons and daughters of Abraham, you and I have come to know God’s mercy and the life of the Spirit, too.  Because of the faithfulness of God, revealed in Jesus and in the power of the gospel, the darkness that Mary and Joseph, Elizabeth and Zechariah, John the Baptist and Jesus knew, that deep, deep darkness full of false gods and wicked kings and demonic power is has been driven away by the light.  The light has come into the darkness, his gospel has thrown those powers down and lit up the world.  And you and I live in the glory of that light.  And this is where our Epistle today takes off.  There are practical implications of our being incorporated into the story of the people of God.

Paul writes those wonderful and challenging words in Philippians 4:4:

Rejoice in the Lord always; I say again, rejoice.

What specifically prompted Paul to write this?  Well, just two verses earlier, Paul exhorted two women, Euodia and Syntyche, to agree with each other.  They had once been fellow labourers with Paul, but they’d had some kind of falling out.  There’s something providential in the fact that Paul doesn’t give us the details, because with no details I think we all end up thinking of the fallings out we’ve had with other brothers and sister in the Lord.  This isn’t just about two women in Philippi.  It’s about each of us.  In response to that falling out, Paul calls the Philippian Christian to rejoice in the Lord.  Instead of a public display of disunity or resentment or anger—whatever it was that was going on between these two women, the Church was to put joy on display, to celebrate the life of God.  They were people of the light, but they were living in the dark.  It was imperative that they come back into the light.  Brothers and Sisters, Jesus and the gospel should overcome and drown out the darkness whenever it tries to creep into the Church.  Here’s how it works.  Paul writes:

Let your gracious gentleness be known to everyone.  (Philippians 4:5a)

Gracious gentleness—or gentle graciousness.  Paul uses the same word in 2 Corinthians 10 to describe the meekness of Jesus as a model for Christians.  This is gospel light lived out.  What Paul’s getting at is that Jesus is the King, but in him we see this amazing display of gracious gentleness.  This is the gentleness we see revealed as Jesus, the one to whom heaven and earth belong, humbles himself to be born one of us, to die on the cross, and to show mercy to his enemies.  This kind of meekness or gentleness is unique to Jesus, and yet Paul stresses that as his people, as stewards of the gospel, we’re called to witness this same gentleness amongst ourselves.  As it should be the resolution to so many disputes in the Church, it was the resolution to whatever had driven Euodia and Syntyche apart.

Brothers and Sisters, when we demand our rights, when we grasp for power, when we nurse grudges, we undermine our witness to the world—we exhibit the very darkness from which we’ve been delivered by the one who is light.  In contrast Paul calls us to rejoice in the Lord and to manifest Jesus-like gentleness in our relationships.  Remember, as people whom God has graciously and mercifully forgiven and restored to himself, we ought to witness that in our own joyful unity in Jesus.  Consider that every time we hold a grudge, allow a relationship to break down, or follow the world’s advice to cut those problem or negative people out of our lives, we undermine the Church’s witness to the world.  But that’s not all. Paul goes on:

The Lord is at hand; do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God.

 

There’s that Advent theme again: Jesus has given us a job to do.  He’s given us treasure to steward in his absence.  In the meantime, rather than being anxious, we should take our needs to God.  Jesus made the same point in the Sermon on the Mount.  The pagans worry about what they’ll eat, what they’ll wear, and where they’ll sleep.  God’s people should know better than to worry unduly about these things.  God will provide just as he always has.  He is faithful to his promises and the story of his dealings with Israel is the proof.  So go to the Lord with your needs and ask.  And while you’re at it, give thanks, because you know his faithfulness and his love.

This is part of the witness of the people of God—it’s how we are light in the darkness—and it ties back into rejoicing.  When Paul talks about rejoicing, at least part of what he’s got in mind is a public display or a public witness.  The pagan Greeks in Philippi regularly held public celebrations to honour their gods.  In the decades before Paul wrote, new rites to honour and to celebrate—to rejoice in—Caesar had been introduced and embraced by the people.  And yet the pagans, as Jesus said, were always anxious.  Why?  Because their gods never delivered.  Pagan religion was a non-stop game of trial and error, trying to guess what the gods wanted, trying to guess what you may have done wrong to offend them, and then guessing at what you might offer to appease their anger or to ingratiate them to you in order to get what you needed or wanted.  The pagan gods were silent and they were notoriously capricious and unreliable.  And in this context Paul exhorts the Philippian Christians: Rejoice yourselves.  Let the pagans see you celebrating the fact that the Creator of the universe has, through Jesus, made you his own and lives in your midst by his own Holy Spirit.  Let the pagans, who know only mean and capricious gods and who live in a dog-eat-dog world, let them see the gracious gentleness of God in you.  Live in such a way that they see in you the God who humbles himself to die for the sake of his enemies.  And let the pagans see you living in faith, praying in confident thankfulness to the God whose story reveals an unfailing pattern of promise and fulfilment.  Shine the light of Jesus into the darkness of the world.  And the result of all this?  Look at verse 7:

And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.

 

I think we tend to look at Paul’s exhortation here as something we should do in order to experience the peace of God ourselves, but given the context in Philippians, I think Paul’s point is actually more about our witness.  If we truly live as stewards of the good news about Jesus, if we truly live as people who know the faithfulness of God revealed in Jesus and particularly in his death and resurrection, the peace of God—rather than the strife and anxiety of the world—will guard our hearts and minds in a way that will astound the pagans around us.

I said last Sunday that we are called both to proclaim and to live the gospel.  This is that living it, right here.  And coupled with our proclamation, to truly live in light of Jesus and what he reveals about God, should cause the world to stand up and take note.  This is sort of our way of being John the Baptist in our own age.  And as it did for John, for us—if we are faithful—it will result in many giving glory to God for his faithfulness and then coming to him in faith as we have.  And it will threaten many who are invested in the pagan and fallen systems of the world.  We are now the voice in the wilderness.

So we need to ask: Does the world see our joy?  Are we the voice crying in the wilderness?  Are we the royal heralds the Lord has called us to be, summoning the word to let go of its false gods and to come to the Lord Jesus, calling the world away from sin and self and to come to the cross?  And we need to ask how the world is responding to us.  If we’re faithfully proclaiming the good news about Jesus, if we’re faithfully calling people to repent and to believe, if we’re faithfully proclaiming that Jesus is Lord and that this kingdom has come—well—people will respond in one of two ways.  Either they’ll believe or they’ll get angry—as Herod got angry with John.  There’s some of both out there in the world, but overwhelmingly, when I look at how people respond to or think of the church these days and in our part of the world, it’s just indifference.  Why?

Because we have not been the witnesses God calls us to be.  We have been mealy-mouthed and, quite often, just plain silent in our proclamation, because we have too often sought to please people rather than God, and because we have been half-hearted and unfaithful in our gospel living.  Like old Israel, we pray to God, but we’ve failed to tear down the old altars to Baal and Asherah—or Mammon or Aphrodite or Caesar.  We name Jesus, but we deal dishonestly in business, we sell our souls to the commercialism that surrounds us, we look to politics or to science as our saviours, and we dabble in the sexual immorality of the age.  We’ve failed to proclaim the gospel and we justify it, saying that we’ll preach it with our lives.  But if we stop to ask what the world sees in our lives, is it really very different?  Does the world see us rejoicing in the Lord?  Does the world see us manifesting the gracious gentleness of Jesus?  Does the world see us living in faithful prayer and trusting in God, or does it see people just as anxious as everyone else?  Does the world see the peace of God ruling our hearts and minds?  Does the world see us, holding high the gospel, as a challenge to its gods and its kings and its sins?  It should.  But sadly, I think that for the Western Church at large, the answer is often “no”.

And, all too often, when we do proclaim the gospel, we do so without power or authority.  We hold the gospel out as good advice, rather than as the good news that it is.  Friends, the gospel is the royal summons to submit in faith to Jesus, the world’s true Lord—the Lord who has come with mercy so that the repentant will escape when he comes one day in judgement.  This was the power behind John the Baptist’ preaching.  But all too often we present the gospel as just another option on the religious smorgasbord—something you might want to try. See if you like it.  See if it works for you.  If not…oh well.  Brothers and Sisters, that’s not the gospel.  The gospel is good news to the people living in the midst of darkness: the king who will set the world to rights has come.  And that means the gospel, when preached as it should be, will challenge and upset the Herods and Caesars of our age and all those invested in the false gods of the world.

The Advent message is to be prepared.  Jesus has given us a gospel mission to take the good news of his death, his resurrection, and his lordship into the world.  Brothers and Sisters, pray that we will be faithful to our mission—faithful enough to provoke persecution, because that’s the kind of faithfulness that also reaps a harvest for the kingdom.  Pray for the holy boldness of John the Baptist and the gracious gentleness of Jesus.  Pray that we will be the salt of the earth and the light of the world.  Pray that the joy of the Lord will overcome us.  Brothers and Sisters, Rejoice!  Rejoice in the Lord always.  Again, I say rejoice.

Let’s pray: O Lord, come among us, we pray, with your power and strengthen us with your great might; that whereas, through our sins and wickedness we are grievously hindered in running the race that is set before us, your bountiful grace and mercy may speedily help and deliver us; through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord, to whom with you and the Holy Spirit, be honour and glory, now and for ever.  Amen.

The Third Sunday in Advent: Faithful Stewards

1 Corinthians 4:1-5 & St. Matthew 11:2-10

by William Klock

As Advent continues, our lessons continue to call us to be prepared.  Christ has died.  Christ is risen.  And Christ will come again—to finally bring to completion what he began that first Christmas and that first Easter.  And as we continue with this theme of being prepared, our lessons today focus our attention on the faithfulness of God’s ministers.  The Epistle focuses on St. Paul and the Gospel on John the Baptist.  The choice of lessons is linked to the Ember Days.  They fall later this week.  You all know what the Ember Days are, right?  The Embers Days come around four times a year and, at least historically, they were the traditional times for ordinations.  So with that in mind, our advent lessons today call the clergy to faithfulness to our mission and remind the Church of the importance of faithful ministers.  But even though today’s focus is on what we might call “professional” ministers, there’s a broader application for all of us, because, Brothers and Sisters, never forget that every Christian is a steward and minister of the gospel.  We’re all ministers and as our Declaration of Principles makes abundantly clear, Christian ministers are not “priests” in any other sense than that in which all believers are what Peter called a “royal priesthood”.

So let’s start with our Epistle, 1 Corinthians 4:1-5.  And we’ll want a little background to understand it.  The Church at Corinth had a lot of problems and a big part of it was that some of them were having trouble setting aside their old, pagan ways.  They had compromised much.  There were some serious sins in the church that needed to be dealt with, but weren’t.  People were justifying them by appealing to Christian liberty.  Some of them were even patting themselves on the back for their tolerance.  (There’s nothing new under the sun, is there?)  There were also divisions within the congregation.  Paul had founded this church, but the people didn’t want to listen to him anymore.  They’d become enamoured of other preachers.  As far as we know these other preachers were faithful to the gospel.  The problem in Corinth doesn’t seem to have been their fault.  The problem was that Paul was about the least flashy person you could imagine and when other preachers came along who were more attractive and who were better speakers than Paul—that was something the Greeks put a lot of value on—the church kicked Paul to the curb.  That, and they didn’t like him trying to hold them accountable.  Not only would they not listen to him, he wasn’t even welcome anymore.  They judged him a loser.  That’s what’s behind our Epistle today.  Let’s read:

This is how we should be thought of, as servants of the Messiah and stewards of the mysteries of God.  Moreover, it is required of stewards that they be found faithful.  But with me it is a very small thing that I should be judged by you or by any human court.  In fact, I do not even judge myself.  For I am not aware of anything standing against me, but that isn’t what vindicates me. It is the Lord who judges me.  Therefore do not pronounce judgment before the time when the Lord comes.  He will bring to light the things now hidden in darkness and will lay bare the intentions of the heart.  Then each one will receive his commendation from God.

 

I’ve always wondered how hard it was for Paul to write this, especially the bit about “This is how we should be thought of: I’m a servant of the Messiah and a steward of God’s mysteries.”  Good clergymen tend to err on the side of humility, even to a fault.  The only guys I’ve ever known to say things like this have been egotists who never should have been in ministry in the first place.  But Paul had one advantage that only the apostles had and that was that they had known Jesus in the flesh and had been commissioned by him personally.  I can’t say that and neither can anyone else alive today.  That said, there is a place for God’s stewards to assert their calling in the face of unjust judgement.  Most pastors, when faced with unjust criticism just nod humbly, say nothing, and take it to God, but Paul reminds us that there is a time to speak up against these kinds of judgements.  And not just “pastors”.  I think this goes for every Christian.  We’re all ministers of the gospel, but we live in an age that is becoming increasingly hostile to the gospel and to gospel people.  Sometimes the criticisms we receive can be justified.  Sometimes Christians and sometimes churches have failed and done awful things.  But those are the outliers.  Most of the criticism we face comes from people who hate Jesus and the message of the cross, who don’t want to hear about sin and don’t want to repent, who have their own ideas of what the world should be like and only want new creation on their terms, not God’s.  Jesus warned us this would happen, but most of us still aren’t prepared for the attacks.  And so even though we’re ministers of the gospel and stewards of the mysteries of God, all too often we let the false judgements and accusations of pagans back us out of the room.  We go silently and sit facing the corner like scolded children—and I think a lot of the time we actually feel guilty when we hear these accusations, even though we know better.

Brothers and Sisters, Paul stresses that ministers are to be found faithful.  That goes for apostles and for pastors and for all of us.  Yes, we need to weigh criticism.  We need to ask if there’s anything to it.  Sometimes there may be.  Maybe we’re not being faithful to Jesus’ instructions and we need to hear it.  But Jesus’ instructions aren’t hard to understand or discern.  As a minister, I’m called to preach the word, especially the gospel about Jesus, and to administer the sacraments.  It’s not quite that simple, but that is the core.  And for all of us, we’re called to proclaim the gospel about Jesus to the world around us and to live in a way that accords with being the people of God.  We proclaim Jesus and we live the life—the fruit—of the Spirit.

We need to reflect on our lives in light of that and ask if we’re being faithful.  This is one of the reasons we need to steep ourselves in God’s word.  If we don’t know what God expects, how will we be faithful?  It’s a bit like a bread recipe—one of the simplest things in the world.  But first you have to read it and then you have to follow it.  Start changing things up and you spoil the bread.  But that’s what we all too often do.  It’s not that we’re not well-intentioned.  We want to see things happen, but sometime we get impatient.  We take shortcuts.  Or we think we can make better bread by changing the recipe.  People out there don’t like to hear about sin, so we’ll tone that part of our preaching down.  People out there don’t like commitment, so we’ll make church commitment-free.  People out there don’t like liturgy and sermons, so we’ll have a rock concert and preach pop-psychology instead.  People don’t feel like getting up on Sunday mornings and driving to church, so we’ll broadcast it to their TVs and computers instead.  We’re not confident in the power of the gospel and the Spirit to change hearts and to bring them to Jesus, so we instead build churches around programmes and activities that people do want or we use manipulative techniques to get them to believe.  We make the gospel about them and not so much about Jesus and the glory of God.  These things can and often do bring short-term gains, but in the long-term they’ve been a disaster.  We wonder why people won’t commit, why they’re still worldly, why we’re losing our children, and why we’re seen as increasingly irrelevant.  It’s like we’ve tried to bake bread by replacing the flour with glitter.  The end product might look exciting, but in the end it’s not only unable to nourish, it’s slowly poisoning us.  In contrast, the real work of the gospel is rarely flashy.  Sometimes it brings persecution and even martyrdom.  It means relying on God, not ourselves.  And it means being in it for the long-haul.  Consider Israel.  God called Abraham and it was two thousand years before Israel’s story culminated with Jesus.  And the in-between was as full of hardship, slavery, judgement, and exile as it was prosperity and growth.  And that was God working with a single, small people.  Brothers and Sisters, our mission is the world.

So be faithful to the gospel, build churches around word and sacrament, pray and fellowship together, raise covenant children who know Jesus.  Proclaim the good news and call your friends and family and neighbours to take up their crosses daily and to follow Jesus.  And let them see you do it—when it’s a joy to follow Jesus and when you struggle to bear that cross.  And as we do that, remember that the judgement that matters is not the judgement of other people or the world, but of God.  That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t have an ear to the ground.  That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t listen to the world’s judgements.  Sometimes we need to know how the world sees us—even if it’s false—so that we can better know what we’re up against.  So that we can better respond with the gospel.  And, sometimes, the world’s rebukes may have some truth to them.  Jesus promised that his people would be persecuted for his sake, but we need to make sure that we’re actually being persecuted for his sake and for our faithfulness to his word.  I know some Christians who claim they’re being persecuted, but when you get down to it, it’s just that people don’t like them because they’re jerks, not because they’re preaching Jesus.  People will still hate us for preaching Jesus, but Friends, we do need to be sure that as we preach Jesus and as we stand firmly on the Scriptures that the world rejects, we remain committed to being a godly people in every respect.  We need to live the gospel as much as we preach the gospel.  We’re to announce God’s judgement on sin, yes, but we’re also to announce God’s mercy to repentant sinners.

So that’s the Epistle.  Let’s turn over to today’s Gospel in Matthew 11as we continue with this theme.  Again, what does it look like to be gospel ministers who are prepared.  John the Baptist.  In the Gospel, John has gone from announcing the coming kingdom and baptising people in the Jordan to being locked up in prison.  He got there by way of criticizing Herod.  It wasn’t just some off-the-wall criticism.  Tied up with his announcement of the kingdom was John’s denouncement of Herod for marrying his former sister-in-law.  Herod couldn’t help but draw a connection between John’s fiery preaching and himself.  If John was saying that the King was soon to come, it meant John was saying that Herod wasn’t really the king.  So poor John is now in Herod’s dungeon and he’s frustrated and confused.  He’d been faithful in his divine calling to herald the coming Messiah—his cousin, Jesus—and he’s landed in prison.  No big surprise there.  He wasn’t the first prophet to offend a king and end up in prison.  But Jesus—the Messiah—was on the outside, preaching, teaching, healing, forgiving, having dinner with tax collectors and sinners…and leaving John to rot.  Something was wrong with Jesus’ priorities, or so John was beginning to think.  We’ll pick up from there:

Now when John heard in prison about the deeds of the Messiah, he sent word by his disciples and said to him, “Are you the one who is to come, or shall we look for another?”  (St. Matthew 11:2-10)

I don’t think John was really doubting whether Jesus was the Messiah.  I think this was his way of saying, “Um…Jesus.  Shouldn’t the Messiah be getting his faithful herald out prison?”  Of course, that also meant all the other things to go along with it.  A simple jailbreak wouldn’t do.  The jailbreak would have to be part of a wholesale overthrow of Herod and the Romans—which, of course, is what most people expected the Messiah to do.  Here’s what Jesus says to John’s men in return:

 “Go and tell John what you hear and see: the blind receive their sight and the lame walk, lepers are cleansed and the deaf hear, and the dead are raised up, and the poor have good news preached to them.  And blessed is the one who is not offended by me.”  (Matthew 11:5-6)

You see, John expected the Messiah to be like Elijah, confronting the prophets of Baal and calling down fire from heaven.  John wanted to see fire and brimstone.  There is a place for that.  In a sense John wasn’t wrong.  Jesus is the Judge and, you can be sure, he will judge the world and everyone in it.  There will be a time for fire and brimstone and judgement.  I suspect that being a fire-and-brimstone sort of prophet—and that is what John was called to be so there’s nothing wrong with that—I suspect that being that kind of guy means that you get a little fixated on judgement.  And Jesus responds by saying something like, “You expected Elijah…and you’ve got Elijah…but before I come in judgement, there are a lot of people…people like the widow of Zeraphath…people who need to know God’s mercy.”  As Jesus says in John’s Gospel: “I came not to condemn, but to redeem.”  Brothers and Sisters, remember: Sinners already stand condemned.  Judgement is coming.  Announcing that judgement and calling people to repentance was John’s mission.  But before the judgement comes, what Israel needed most was to know God’s mercy, to know his salvation.  This is why Jesus’ road to the throne had to be by way of the cross.

So Jesus corrects John.  He sets him straight about the Messiah.  But he then turns to the crowd and praises John:

As they went away, Jesus began to speak to the crowds concerning John: “What did you go out into the wilderness to see? A reed shaken by the wind?  What then did you go out to see? A man dressed in soft clothing?  Behold, those who wear soft clothing are in kings’ houses.  What then did you go out to see?  A prophet?  Yes, I tell you, and more than a prophet.  This is he of whom it is written,

“‘Behold, I send my messenger before your face,

         who will prepare your way before you.’ (Matthew 11:7-10)

Even though Jesus’ mission was one of humility and of mercy, Jesus praises the faithfulness of John to his ministry as the fiery herald of judgement.  Again, John was expecting the Messiah to come like Elijah, bringing confrontation and fire from heaven, but what Jesus says—albeit a little obliquely for reasons that get beyond our lesson today—what Jesus says here is that John is the prophet like Elijah.  John is the fire-and-brimstone preacher.  John is the herald announcing judgement and calling the people to repentance.  Jesus quotes from Malachi 3 and confirms two things: John is truly the one sent to herald the Messiah and, two, that means that Jesus truly is the Messiah—the one whom Malachi said would come both to refine Israel and to make her offerings pleasing to the Lord and to judge the unrepentant.

Now, in the short-term this was bad news for John.  It was bad news for Jesus, too.  Both the Messiah and his herald would be put to death.  But death was not the end.  As it turns out, we know, it was by the death of Jesus that deliverance was bought and in his resurrection he was vindicated and the unjust verdict on him overturned.  In his resurrection and his ascension, Jesus was confirmed as the Messiah, as Lord.  In that we see the faithfulness of God to his promises and knowing God’s faithfulness, we have hope.  As St. Paul wrote to the Romans: “If we have been united with him in a death like his, we shall surely be united with him in a resurrection like his” (Romans 6:5).  This is one of those parts of the gospel that we often prefer to ignore or to leave out of our preaching, because it offends.  We’ve sort of got the opposite problem John had.  John was fixated on judgement and on fire from heaven.  Like so many Jews, he wanted to see God vanquish Israel’s enemies and he nearly forgot about God’s mercy.  Our problem is the opposite.  We’ve become so afraid of preaching about sin and about judgement, that we can’t even preach mercy and grace anymore—because mercy isn’t mercy and grace isn’t grace if we’re not guilty of anything and if there is no judgement headed this way.  And if we gut our preaching of mercy and grace, we can talk all day about the love of God, but there will be no depth to it.  We will make the cross of Jesus pointless.  Why?  Because we can only begin to plumb the great depths of God’s love when we see that he gave his Son to die for our sake—for the sake of sinners who would otherwise stand condemned to destruction.

And that brings us back to the recipe for bread.  Brothers and Sisters, bread is simple and often kind of boring.  But if you make it right, it nourishes.  It keeps us alive.  There’s a reason why Jesus used it as a metaphor for himself when he said, “I am the bread of life.”  There’s a reason why it’s a symbol over and over in the story of God’s people for his faithful care and sustenance.  And it points to the way God works and the way his gospel and his word work in the world.  It’s hardly ever flashy.  And you have to be patient, because it takes time to rise and it takes time to bake.  But like the Messiah, who humbled himself to take on lowly human flesh, who humbled himself to be born of a lowly virgin, and who humbly went to death on a cross, the simple bread of the gospel, the good news that Jesus died, that he rose, and that he is Lord, brings life to the world.  To preach it faithfully means to preach it whole and to preach it pure.  Friends, be faithful stewards.  Stick to the recipe.  Preach the Lord Jesus, crucified and risen to give forgiveness and life to sinners.  Pursue holiness.  Build churches centred on the faithful preaching of God’s word and the administration of the sacraments, where, knowing God’s faithfulness, God’s people sing and pray together, where they raise covenant, gospel children, where we live as people who know the hope of God’s life in the age to come.

Let’s pray: O Lord Jesus Christ, who at your first coming sent your messenger to prepare your way before you: grant that the ministers and stewards of your mysteries may likewise so prepare and make ready your way by turning the hearts of the disobedient to the wisdom of the just, that at your second coming to judge the world we may be found an acceptable people in your sight; who lives and reigns with the Father in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.  Amen.

The Second Sunday in Advent: Read, Mark, Learn, and Inwardly Digest

Romans 15:4-13 and St. Luke 21:25-33

by William Klock

The theme of Advent—a bit like the Boy Scouts—is “Be prepared!”  As we acclaim in the Lord’s Supper: Christ has died.  Christ is risen.  Christ will come again.  Our lives should be entirely reoriented around these three central truths.  Our lessons last Sunday called us to be prepared because Jesus, in his death and resurrection, has changed and is continuing to change everything.  And today, on this Second Sunday in Advent, our lessons point us to the scriptures, to the Bible, to God’s word.  Who is God?  Who is Jesus?  Who is the Spirit?  The answers are in the scriptures, where God speaks and act and makes himself known to us.  Why should we repent and believe this good news called “gospel”?  Because the story told in the scriptures reveals the faithfulness of God.  How can we be prepared for his new creation?  We immerse ourselves in his word.  There he shows us what that new creation looks like, where he calls us to repentance, where he calls us to holiness and a new kind of life.  This is why in the Collect today we pray that we might be “read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest” the scriptures: so that we can be prepared.  Knowing God, trusting Jesus, and living the life of the Spirit don’t happen apart from our immersing ourselves in the Bible.  So St. Paul’s exhorts us in our Epistle.  Look at Romans 15:4:

Whatever was written in the past was written for our instruction, so that through endurance and through the encouragement of the scriptures we might have hope.”

 

Hope.  I don’t know that we think about this often enough.  We talk a lot about the need for faith, but Brothers and Sisters, where does faith come from?  Faith is rooted in hope.  In the midst of the darkness, Jesus has come as the light and he points us to the day when the light has driven away the darkness forever.  In the midst of sin and suffering and death, Jesus promises a day when sin and death will be no more and when he wipes away every tear.  Jesus gives us hope and as we entrust ourselves to him for that hope, that’s faith.

And that’s why Paul points us to the scriptures as the root and source of our hope.  The scriptures give us hope by telling us a story.  The story of the God who created the cosmos and of his people.  The Bible is full of many different kinds of literature.  There’s history and hymns and parables and prophecy.  There’s story and there’s doctrine.  But it all comes together around the story of God and his people.  In that story he introduces himself to us.  That story teaches who he is.  And it gives us reason to trust him, to love him, and to praise him.  The major theme of Advent is the coming of Jesus and our need to be prepared.  As we read the lessons here we’re told of God’s promises to his people and his fulfilment of them and in that we learn of the faithfulness of God.  He is trustworthy and so we can trust the promises he has given to us.  And on this Second Sunday of Advent these two themes—the call to be prepare and the call to the Scriptures—they intersect.

Let’s continue with our Epistle.  Again, we’re looking at Romans 15.  Paul wrote these words to a church that was struggling with conflict—largely a conflict between Jewish and Gentile believers.  Because of this conflict, they were unprepared to fulfil the mission Jesus has given his Church—to proclaim and to live the gospel for the sake of the world and to the glory of God.  So Paul’s exhortation was for them to be one, to be unified in Jesus the Messiah.  But as with so many things, it’s often easier to say that sort of thing than to do it.  The gospel brings us together, but so many things in this world compete with it to drive us apart.  Again, Advent calls us to be prepared.  We each face our own struggles in being faithful to Jesus and to each other.  We often try and we often fail.  What do we do?  Well, St. Paul brings us back to the foundational truths of our faith.  This is what we need to build on.  He brings us back to the story of God and his people and, particularly, to Jesus and his place in that story.

In verses 1-3 Paul gets at the solution to the divisions within the Roman church:

We who are strong have an obligation to bear with the failings of the weak, and not to please ourselves.  Let each of us please his neighbor for his good, to build him up.

 

Build your neighbour up.  Again, easy to say.  Not always easy to do.  We need to have the right motivation.  Jesus needs to be at the centre.  That’s the only way we will ever truly love each other.  Jesus’ incarnation and Jesus’ cross must be behind us and before us.  This is Paul’s point in verse 3, where he quotes Psalm 69:9.

For the Messiah did not please himself, but as it is written, “The reproaches of those who reproached you fell on me.”

 

All by itself, this verse from the Psalms is a good reminder to bear with others and to put them first.  Jesus did that and we would do well to follow his example.  But Paul’s really getting at something much deeper.  For someone like Paul to quote a verse from a psalm, especially to a Jewish or early Christian audience that was steeped in the psalms in a way that modern Christians—sadly—rarely are, that was to bring the whole psalm to mind.  This isn’t the first time in Romans that Paul has cited from Psalm 69.  He uses it as a lens through which to understand the times the church was facing in those days.  Psalm 69 was a lament.  David had sinned and was suffering the fallout of that sin, but to make matters worse, his enemies were piling on, taking advantage of his suffering.  They were kicking him while he was down.  The Psalm begins:

Save me, O God!

         For the waters have come up to my neck.

I sink in deep mire,

         where there is no foothold;

I have come into deep waters,

         and the flood sweeps over me.  (Psalm 69:1-2)

David cries out to the Lord, he calls for judgement on his enemies, and it ends with praise, knowing that the Lord will vindicate his servant, even though he hasn’t done so yet.  How could David pray that?  Because he knew that the Lord is faithful to his promises, that gave him hope, and because of that he had faith—and he lived out that faith.  But, Psalm 69 isn’t just David’s song.  It became Israel’s song.  This was Israel’s story just as much as it was David’s.  She sinned, she suffered, and then her enemies took advantage of that suffering to make things even worse, and so the nation cried out to the Lord for deliverance and in hopeful praise, knowing his promises and his faithfulness to always do what he said.  And now, knowing Jesus, who represents Israel much as David did, but in a far deeper way, Paul overlays Psalm 69 on the ministry of Jesus as Messiah.

Today’s Collect, again, urges us to “read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest” the Scriptures so that we might in our own journeys hold fast to the hope given us in Jesus.  St. Paul shows us how to do that.  In a day when far too many Christians think the Old Testament is irrelevant, Paul reminds how important it is to remember that those scriptures were written for our learning.  Paul knew those Scriptures inside-out and outside-in.  He knew they were the story of his people.  And when he met the risen Jesus on the road to Damascus, Jesus didn’t make those scriptures irrelevant.  Just the opposite, Jesus revealed himself to Paul as the beginning and the end and the centre of those scriptures—and of Israel’s story.  That wasn’t an easy thing to absorb, but Paul knew he had to.  He retreated for a few years into solitude to think it through and to work it all out.

The story Paul knew was about his people, brought by the Lord into covenant with himself, who were to bring his redemption to a fallen humanity and a fallen world.  The story had been worked out through a great deal of grief and suffering—a lot of it brought on themselves by their sin—but it would eventually come to its glorious fulfilment in the Messiah, who would represent them, and who would vindicate them somehow through his own suffering.  And now, in Jesus, it had all happened.  This was the big shock for Paul.  He and so many others had been waiting for an end to the story, but the moment he met the risen Jesus, he was forced to acknowledge that Jesus really is the Messiah—and as the Messiah, Jesus is the end, or better, the fulfilment of it all.  From Jesus he then read backwards and came to understand the story of the people of God through Jesus.  That’s not an easy thing to do.  Again, Paul had to go off into solitude for a good long while to sort it out for himself.  Thankfully, he’s done the heavy lifting for us.

Paul shows us how this kind of Jesus-centred approach to the story is done in the verses that follow.  Here’s what he writes:

May the God of endurance and encouragement grant you to live in such harmony with one another, in accord with the Messiah, Jesus, so that together you may with one voice glorify the God and Father of our Lord Jesus the Messiah.  Therefore welcome one another as the Messiah has welcomed you, for the glory of God.  (Romans 15:5-7)

Paul highlights the humility of Jesus.  First, he humbled himself to be born one of us and then he humbled himself further, not only taking on himself the jeers and rejection of his people, but ultimately submitting himself to the humility of death on a cross.  In our Gospels the last two weeks we saw Jesus hailed as King.  By rights, Jesus could have taken his throne by violence, but to take his throne that way would not have fulfilled his messianic mission.  Instead, Jesus humbled himself in obedience to his Father’s plan of redemption.  That’s the model.  It was the model already established in Israel’s story.  The Messiah of the servant people had to be a servant, himself.  And that’s now the model of the Church’s life, too.  The Church cannot fulfil her mission by demanding our rights.  That’s not to say that there isn’t a place for “rights” in the world.  That’s not to say that the Church shouldn’t take a stand to protect the rights of others when necessary.  What it means is that to walk with Jesus, to be stewards of his royal summons and the fruit of the Spirit, means putting others before ourselves.  The Roman Christians needed to follow Jesus’ example in this in order to settle their differences—not just for their own sake, but for the sake of the calling the Lord had given them.  This is the really important part for Paul.  Getting along is great, but getting along for the sake of getting along, unity for the sake of unity isn’t the point.  Being united and loving one another, showing Jesus-like humility prepares us for something bigger.  This is about the Church’s stewardship of the gospel.

And here’s the thing that’s really neat here.  We see Paul applying the same principles—working back from Israel’s story—again as he writes about the mission of the church.  Here’s what he writes in verse 8:

For I tell you: The Messiah became a servant to the circumcised people in order to show God’s truthfulness, in order to confirm the promises given to the patriarchs, and to bring the nations to glorify God for his mercy.

 

He’s saying that there’s a connection between the promise God made all those centuries ago to Abraham and this group of struggling Christians in Rome.  First—and he brings us back to the humility of Jesus—the Messiah humbled himself and became a servant to the circumcised people.  That’s the Jews, the people of the old covenant, Abraham’s family.  Jesus became a servant to them.  Paul’s talking about how Jesus died for their sins.  I know we like to quote John 3:16 and talk about how Jesus died for the whole world.  Jesus did die for the sins of everyone, but we need to be careful when we say that, so that we don’t short-circuit the story.  Jesus died for the sins of his own people.  Even the way in which he died, crucified by the Romans, was the very death that the unrepentant Jews would face a generation later.  Jesus died for his own people in order to establish a new covenant and a new covenant people—a new Israel.  It’s vitally important to remember this, because Jesus did this in order to show that God is faithful to his promises.  First, in Jesus, God was faithful to his promises to renew his people—to redeem them from sin and to fill them with his own Spirit and to gather them to himself from the nations where they had been scattered.  Think of that remarkable scene at Pentecost, Jews from all over the world brought together and unified by the good news and the pouring out of God’s Spirit.  But then, as a result of this amazing work done through Jesus and the Spirit, the Gentiles can’t help but notice.  Israel had been unfaithful to God and because of that the Gentiles mocked her and they mocked the Lord.  “Where is your God?” they would jeer.  And yet now, even despite Israel’s faithlessness, God fulfilled his promises in this group of people proclaiming Jesus as Messiah, and the Gentiles couldn’t help but take notice.  God had done something amazing with his own seemingly hopeless people and it prompted the Gentiles—a few at first, but eventually they far outnumbered the Jews themselves—it prompted the gentiles to glorify the God of Israel and to want to know more.  As Zechariah had prophesied:

In those days ten men from the nations of every tongue shall take hold of the robe of a Jew, saying, ‘Let us go with you, for we have heard that God is with you.’”  (Zechariah 8:23)

And Paul makes this point in our Epistle, quoting more psalms that tie the mission of the Church to the Lord’s promises to Abraham and to Israel’s mission.  In verse 9 Paul quotes Psalm 18:49. This is the Psalmist celebrating the victory that God had given him—one that even the Gentiles would take note of.

“That is why I will praise you among the nations,

         and sing to your name.”

 

And next Paul quotes Moses in Deuteronomy as he calls the nations to rejoice along with Israel over the victory of God:

“Rejoice, O nations, with his people.”

 

And, similarly, Psalm 117:1

“Praise the Lord, all you nations,

         and let all the peoples extol him.”

 

And he ends with Isaiah 11:10:

“The root of Jesse will come,

         even he who arises to rule the nations;

in him will the nations hope.”

 

“In him will the nations hope.”  We’re back to hope again—the root of faith.  The root of Jesse—remember we talked about the new shoot growing out of the dead stump Sunday before last—the Messiah will not only set Israel to rights and rule over the nations, but he will do it in such a way that he will become their hope as well.  Paul is showing that all along, ever since Abraham, God’s purpose was to work through Israel, not just for the sake of Israel, but for the sake of the whole world.  Jesus became a servant of the circumcised, so that the watching gentile nations (the uncircumcised) see what he was doing and would glorify God and be drawn to him in faith.  Jesus has done his part.  Now the Church is called to do hers—to proclaim to Jews and Gentiles alike what the God of Israel has done through Jesus.

Paul saw an urgency in this calling and we get a sense of why in our Gospel.  Today’s Gospel is taken from Luke 21, from what’s often called Jesus’ “Olivet Discourse”—a talk Jesus had with his disciples near the end of his ministry.  In it he told them about the coming judgement on Jerusalem and on unrepentant Israel.  Here’s what Jesus says:

“There will be signs in the sun and the moon and the stars, and on the earth the nations will be in distress and confusion because of the roaring of the sea and the waves.  People will faint with fear and from imagining all that’s going to happen to the world. For the powers of the heavens will be shaken.  (St. Luke 21:25-26)

In the verses just before this, Jesus gives us the setting.  Armies have surrounded Jerusalem and the city will be trampled underfoot.  In our verses here he draws on the language of the Old Testament prophets to describe the turmoil of those days.  Isaiah, for example, wrote of the judgement that was to come on Babylon, saying that the “the sun will be dark at its rising, and the moon will not shed its light” (13:10).  Ezekiel uses the same kind of language to describe the judgement that was coming on Egypt (32:7) and Joel to describe the calamity that was coming to Jerusalem in its destruction by Babylon (2:10).  If we take these images literally, we end up missing the fulfilment of these prophecies.  It’s apocalyptic—over the top—language meant to give a sense of disaster and everything falling apart.  The Lord holds creation together in his hands, he sustains it all, but in his judgement it’s as though he’s withdrawn his hands, creation comes apart and chaos takes over.  It makes sense.  Those who reject the Lord get a taste of what it’s like to live without him.

Continuing to draw on the language of the prophets, Jesus goes on:

Then they will see “the son of man coming on a cloud” with power and great glory.  Now when these things start to happen, straighten up and lift your heads, because the time has come for you to be redeemed.”  (Luke 21:27-28)

Jesus takes this language straight from Daniel 7:13.  The son of man—the one who represents Israel, the Messiah whom the people rejected and crucified, the Messiah for whom the little community of Jewish Christians has been persecuted—the Messiah will come on the clouds with power and glory.  This is not an image of Jesus’ final return at the end of time.  It can’t be, as we’ll see just a few verses on, because it’s already happened.  Instead, the passage Jesus draws on in Daniel describes the son of man, not coming on the clouds down to the earth, but ascending on the clouds up to the Ancient of Days, to receive “dominion and glory and a kingdom” (7:14).  What Jesus is describing is his own vindication as Messiah and the vindication of those who have believed in him, despite being persecuted by their fellow Jews.  He goes on in verses 29-33:

He told them this parable: “Look at the fig tree, and all the trees.  When they are well into leaf, you see for yourselves and know that the summer is already near.  So also, when you see these things taking place, you will know that the kingdom of God is near.  Truly, I say to you, this generation will not pass away until all this has taken place.  Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away.

 

Jesus’ friends will follow in his footsteps as they face rejection and persecution.  He has given them the task of proclaiming the good news about him in Jerusalem and Judea and to the whole world.  Like the old prophets, their task is to issue the royal summons, calling scattered Israel to the King.  Many will hear the summons and believe, but they will face persecution and death at the hands of their brethren who reject the Messiah.  But both Jesus and his people will be vindicated when unbelieving Israel faces judgement.  And Jesus gives them hope and a sense of urgency.  This time of awful persecution will not last forever.  Within their generation it will come to an end.  But that also means that the clock is running on their mission to carry the gospel to their fellow Jews.  This is why St. Paul urged his readers in last Sunday’s Epistle to wake up and to put on the armour of light.  The night is far gone and the day is at hand.

Jesus’ final words in the Gospel bring us back full circle to the petition of our Collect.  Jesus assures his disciples that his words will not pass away.  Specifically, he’s assuring them that what he’s said will happen within their lifetime will indeed happen.  And, of course, from our perspective we can look back to the events leading up to Jerusalem’s destruction in a.d. 70 and see that God is, indeed, faithful and that his word is true.

But, of course, the destruction of Jerusalem and the vindication of Jesus’ people in that time isn’t the end of the story.  It took the other disciples time to see that there was more to the fulfilment of Israel’s story, but Paul had worked this part out as we see in our Epistle.  The Lord did not save the faithful remnant of Israel for their sake alone.  Israel’s calling was always to be a light to the Gentiles.  Israel’s calling was always to carry the Lord’s salvation to the nations.  And so in the events of a.d. 70, we see again the faithfulness of God in the vindication of Jesus the Messiah and of his people, and we see another horizon, one in which the gospel goes out from Jerusalem and Judaea to Samaria and eventually to the whole world, not only summoning the scattered sheep of Israel, but drawing in the nations as they see the faithfulness of God and come to him in faith to give him glory.  And here we have no timeline and no expiration date.  We have only the promise that one day the knowledge of the glory of the Lord will cover the earth as the waters cover the sea.  There will be ups and downs as history shows, but the kingdom of Jesus will go marching on until, empowered by the Spirit, the Church fulfils her gospel mission.  It may be a thousand years or a hundred thousand years, but we can trust that as God has been faithful in the past, he will be faithful to the very end.  His Word does not return void.  He has not poured out his Spirit on his Church in vain.  Our hope is sure and certain because his word tells us so.  And in that, Brothers and Sisters, we ought to find exhortation to be faithful ourselves; to live in humble unity, one for another; to live and to proclaim the gospel boldly and courageously until our Lord returns to bring all of God’s promises to the final fulfilment.

Let’s pray: Blessed Lord, who caused all holy Scriptures to be written for our learning: help us so to hear them, to read, mark, learn and inwardly digest them that, through patience, and the comfort of your holy word, we may embrace and for ever hold fast the hope of everlasting life, which you have given us in our Saviour Jesus Christ, who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.  Amen.

The First Sunday in Advent: Jesus Changes Everything

Romans 13:8-14 and St. Matthew 21:1-13

by William Klock

Advent reminds us that Jesus has changed everything.  The world around us celebrates the beginning of the new year on January 1st, but for the Church the new year begins today, the First Sunday in Advent.  Again, because Jesus has changed everything.  As we approach Christmas, when we recall and celebrate Jesus’ birth, Advent calls us to reflect on what Jesus has done: in his incarnation, in his death, in his resurrection, in his ascension.  Advent calls us to count the cost of discipleship, of following King Jesus.  Advent comes, like John the Baptist, and calls out to us: Repent, for the kingdom of God has come.  Let go of everything that is not Jesus, then take hold of him in faith with both hands and follow him into God’s new creation.  Let him set you to rights so that you can be part of this new age in which he—through the gospel, through the gospel, through the Spirit—is setting the world itself to rights.

The Gospel this morning stands as a signpost to the kingdom.  St. Matthew shows us Jesus the Messiah, Jesus the King, and he gives us a glimpse of his kingdom.  Look at Matthew 21:1-6.

  When they came near to Jerusalem, and arrived at Bethphage on the Mount of Olives, Jesus sent two of the disciples on ahead.  “Go into the village in front of you, and immediately you will find a donkey tied up, and a foal with it.  Untie them and bring them to me.  And if anyone says anything to you, say, “The Lord needs them needs them and he’ll send them back straightaway.”

  This happened so that the prophet’s words might be fulfilled:

“Tell this to Zion’s daughter:

Look now!  Your king is coming to you;

Humble and mounted on a donkey,

And on a colt, a donkey’s foal.”

  So the disciples went and did as Jesus had told them.  They brought the donkey and its foal, and put their coats on them, and Jesus sat on them.

 

Matthew draws on the scriptures and on Israel’s story to give depth to what he writes.  Specifically, here, he draws on Zechariah’s prophecies that look forward to the Messiah and to the day when the Lord would come in judgement on Israel’s enemies.  When Matthew says that Jesus came to the Mount of Olives, this isn’t just a casual geographical reference.  Jesus’ ministry was full of acted out prophecies and here he chooses this spot knowing that it was the spot, according to Zechariah, where the Lord would stand when he brought judgement.  And Matthew draws on Zechariah again to explain Jesus’ strange command to the disciples to fetch a donkey.  This was not how kings made their triumphal processions.  At least, not ordinary kings.  They were carried by their servants or they rode on horseback or in a chariot.  But Zechariah, hundreds of years before, had highlighted the humble nature of the coming Messiah.  He was the one who would ride to his coronation on the back of a humble donkey.

So Matthew makes it abundantly clear who Jesus is.  He is the Messiah whom the people had hoped for.  But he also highlights the nature of Jesus’ rule.  The people expected a king who would come to overthrow the Herodians and the Romans with violence.  Matthew reminds them, by showing how Jesus fulfilled Zechariah’s prophecies, that Jesus will take his throne by a very different sort of path.  Yes, he is the judge.  Yes, he will deliver Israel.  Yes, he will set his people and this broken world to rights.  But it’s not going to happen the way people thought, at least not yet.

As the crowds gather to line Jesus’ way into Jerusalem, Matthew continues to draw on Israel’s story.  Look at verses 8-11:

The great crowd spread their coats on the road.  Others cut branches from the trees and scattered them on the road.  The crowds who went ahead of him and those who were following behind shouted out, “Hosanna to the son of David!  Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord!  Hosanna in the highest!”  And when he came into Jerusalem, the whole city was stirred up.  “Who is this?” they asked.  And the crowds said, “This is the prophet, Jesus, from Nazareth in Galilee.”

 

The crowds surround Jesus and sing royal hymns.  They hail him as the “son of David”.  Here was the Messiah, the Lord’s king.  And in telling the story, Matthew again draws on two events in Israel’s story that the people would have known well.  First, as he tells how the crowd was spreading their coats on the ground, it would have been hard for his Jewish readers to miss the reference to King Jehu’s anointing.  In 2 Kings 9 we read about Jehoram.  He was King of Israel, the son of the wicked King Ahab.  And in Jehoram, the apple had not fallen far from the tree.  He was as wicked as his father, so the prophet Elisha ordered that Jehu, instead, was to be anointed King in his place.  He announced that Jehu would bring the Lord’s judgement on the wicked house of Ahab.  As Jehu was anointed by the prophet, the men who were gathered cast their coats on the ground before him and blew a trumpet.  Matthew uses the imagery not only to make sure we know that Jesus is the Lord’s anointed King, but also to hint that Jesus is also the King who will bring the Lord’s judgement on the wicked.

But the other grand image that Matthew draws on here and that leads into the next scene is that of Judas Maccabeus.  2 Maccabees 10:7 describes the people hailing Judas as king by laying wreathes and palm branches at his feet.  Judas had not only defeated Israel’s enemies, but he had purified the temple from its defilement by the Greeks.  Judas’ kingdom inspired hope, but it did not last.  And now Matthew shows us Jesus, following in Judas’ footsteps to the temple.  This time it’s different.  This time is for real.  Look at verses 12-13

And Jesus came into the temple and drove out all who were buying and selling in the temple.  He overturned the tables of the money-changers and the seats of those who sold doves.  “This is what the scriptures say,” he said to them, “‘My house shall be called a house of prayer,’ but you make it a den of robbers.”

 

Jesus’ purification of the temple had at least as much to do with rebuking the people for what the temple had become ideologically as it did with the buy and selling.  The selling of animals for sacrifice was a necessary part of what the temple was and, since the temple used its own currency, someone had to be there to make change.  The more serious issues was that the temple had become a symbol of the violent revolution—a revolution like the one Judas Maccabeus had led—that had become the hope of the people.  But that’s not how God’s kingdom would come.  That wasn’t what Jesus was about.

What was really important about this was that Jesus’ disruption of the temple put a temporary stop to the sacrifices that day.  This was another acted-out prophecy that brought to a culmination all of his declarations of forgiveness and healing that had bypassed the temple, the sacrificial system, and the priesthood.  This was Jesus’ announcement that the temple’s days were numbered.  God was about to do something not only new, but better.  Jesus points here to a coming new covenant in which he would take on the role of the temple himself, in which he would be the mediator between God and human beings, he would be the one in whom forgiveness of sins would be found, he would be the one to bring God and man, heaven and earth back together.

So the Gospel today shows us this vignette from Jesus’ ministry, showing us that in his first advent, Jesus was revealed to be the King whom God had promised to his people.  It also hints at the fact that, while Jesus has inaugurated something new, even now, two thousand years later, we await its final consummation. We still wait for Jesus’ second advent.  And this leads us into our Epistle.  Let’s look at Romans 13, beginning at verse 8:

Don’t owe anything to anyone, except the debt of mutual love, for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law.  For the commandments, “You shall not commit adultery, You shall not murder, You shall not steal, You shall not covet,” and any other commandment, are summed up in this saying: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”  Love does no wrong to a neighbor; so love is the fulfilment of the law.  (Romans 13:8-10)

A shockwave went out across the world that first Easter morning when Jesus burst from his tomb.  The work of new creation was begun that day.  And yet, except for Jesus’ followers, no one else seems to have noticed.  It’s often remarkable to me these days, that even though the gospel conquered an empire and transformed Western Civilisation, that even in a post-Christians age, our world is still shaped by ideas like grace and mercy that were foreign to those pre-gospel civilisations, most people seem oblivious to it all.  The present age rumbles along, its rulers go on ruling, and people carry on with their business.  The old gods remain, even if we aren’t so crass as to build temples with statues of them.  We may not worship Caesar or Aphrodite or Mammon, but we still worship money and sex and political power.  St. Paul knew that it’s surprisingly easy for even Jesus’ own people to forget that the kingdom is breaking in and the old powers have been stripped.  It’s easy for us to fall back into the ways and priorities of the present age and to give half-hearted allegiance to Jesus.  That had been Israel’s problem all along.  Brothers and Sisters, it should not be ours.  Jesus has filled us with his own Spirit.  The law that was once external and written on stone has now been inscribed on our hearts and our hearts have been turned to God.  As Israel had the Exodus behind them and an annual Passover celebration to remind them who they were and the glories that the Lord had done for them, we have the cross and the empty tomb behind us and the Lord’s Supper to remind us—and as Jeremiah prophesied for us last Sunday, the Exodus pales in comparison to the glory revealed at the cross.  Problem solved!  Or so you’d think.  But we still need nearly constant reminders, we need to recall Jesus, his death and resurrection, we need God’s word and we need his grace.  And so Paul reminds us that, as Jesus’ people, it is essential to live the law of love that the Spirit has inscribed on our hearts.

Paul puts all of this in terms of the torah and, specifically, the second table of the Ten Commandments: Don’t commit adultery, don’t steal, don’t covet—just don’t wrong your neighbour.  To love is to fulfil that law.  Paul uses the Greek word agape, which describes the sort of love that gives of oneself as it puts others first.  This is the love that Jesus showed us on the cross as he took on himself the sins of the very people who had rejected and despised him.  This is the love that defines the kingdom and that the Spirit has poured into our hearts.  Be in debt to no one, Paul writes, except to know that for the sake of Jesus and his kingdom, you owe everyone you meet a debt of love.  Imagine how effective the Church would be if we truly lived this way, coupled with being faithful proclaimers of the good news about Jesus.

Instead, though, we’re too often like the man who knows he’s going to be late for work, but keeps hitting “snooze” on his alarm clock, rolling over, and going back to sleep.  Paul goes on:

This is all the more important, because you know what time it is.  The hour has come for you to wake from sleep.  For salvation is nearer to us now than when we first believed.  The night is nearly over; the day is at hand.  (Romans 13:11-12)

Paul knew that Jesus would return.  Jesus had promised that the Lord would come in judgement on an unrepentant Jerusalem within a generation.  I think, too, that Paul saw another horizon beyond the destruction of Jerusalem.  After the Lord judged unrepentant Israel and vindicated his faithful people, a time would follow in which the gentiles would come streaming in, having seen the faithfulness of Israel’s God.  While the other apostles were carrying the gospel to their fellow Jews, Paul had received a calling to carry it to the gentiles—so that they would hear the good news about Jesus, so that in that good news they would know the faithfulness of Israel’s God, and ultimately that they would come to the God of Israel to give him glory.  The time was coming for the King’s return in judgement, first on the Jews, and eventually on the gentiles.  He would finish what he had started.  The present evil age and its false gods and false kings would be done away with and God’s new creation would be born.  Jesus’ first advent was the alarm going off.  Jesus had announced a coming judgement, but in his life, death, and resurrection had established a means of reconciliation with God.  That day the first rays of the sun had begun to peek over the mountaintops.  And now, Paul’s saying, the full day will soon be upon us.  So get out of bed and get dressed for work!

And then he shifts the metaphor.  From “Get out of bed you sleepy-head” he takes a more serious tone.  It’s one thing to sleep in when you should be getting ready for work.  It’s a far worse thing to be out carousing all night when you know you’ve got work to do in the morning.  He goes on:

The night is nearly over; the day is at hand.  So let us cast off the works of darkness and put on the armour of light.  Let us walk properly as in the daytime, not in orgies and drunkenness, not in sexual immorality and sensuality, not in quarreling and jealousy.  Instead, put on the Lord Jesus, the Messiah, and make no allowance for the flesh, to gratify its lusts.  (Romans 13:12-14)

Laziness is bad and there are too many lazy Christians, but even worse are people who know they should be living for Jesus and the age to come, but are instead living for the present wicked age and its false gods and kings.  Paul makes a list of the wicked things people do under cover of darkness: they indulge their appetites, they get drunk, they get involved in all sorts of sexual sins.  But Paul doesn’t stop there.  Because most Christians don’t do those sorts of things, so Paul goes on with the list, from orgies and drunkenness to quarrelling and jealousy.  I think Paul puts it this way, because we’re rightly horrified by those “really bad” sins, but then he follows up with sins that are all too common amongst Christians.  He puts these “respectable sins” in the same category with those unthinkable sins.  It’s another wake-up call.  Some churches have self-destructed because of sexual immorality.  Many of us came from one of those churches.  But far more are torn apart by things like quarrelling and jealousy.  Christians get angry with each other, their relationships break down, sometimes churches even split.  These are the works of darkness and they’re just as bad and just as unbecoming the people of God as drunken orgies are.  Going back to the first part of the Epistle, people who love their neighbours don’t fight and don’t become jealous any more than they get involved in sexual immorality.

Instead, as befits living in the day, we put on the “armour of light”.  Paul hints at the fact that living as people of the day when we’re surrounded by people of the darkness is going to be a struggle and, some days, a downright battle.  We put on the armour of light.  What is that?  Paul goes on to put it in terms of putting on the Lord Jesus, the Messiah.  But then what does that mean?  Paul uses this put on/put off metaphor a lot in his epistles and the gist of it is that we need to remember that we belong to the Lord and that he has made us new.

Think of the Israelites.  Pharaoh had claimed them as his slaves, but the Lord had freed them.  But it wasn’t freedom for freedom’s sake.  The Lord freed Israel from Pharaoh’s cruel bondage so that the people could serve him.  They went from belonging to a cruel king to belonging to the King—a king who loves his people.  The Lord would live in the midst of his people, that was his promise.  And, for their part, the people would live as befits people who belong to and fellowship with the Lord—that was the torah and the tabernacle.

Brothers and Sisters, the same goes for us as Christians.  Through Jesus, the Lord has delivered us from our bondage to sin and death and has made us his own.  We once were in bondage to the darkness, but now have the privilege and joy of serving the light.  Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 6:9-11:

Don’t you know that the unjust will not inherit God’s kingdom?  Don’t be deceived!  Neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor effeminate, nor sodomites, nor thieves, nor the greedy, nor dunkards, nor revilers, nor robbers—none of these—will inherit the kingdom of God.  That is, of course, what some of you were!  But you were washed clean; you were made holy; you were put back to rights—in the name of the Lord Jesus, the Messiah and in the Spirit of our God.

Brothers and Sisters, as Jesus changes everything, he has changed us.  We’re not just the people who live camped around the tabernacle, like Old Testament Israel.  We’ve been united with Jesus, who is himself the tabernacle, Emanuel, God with us.  He’s redeemed us from our bondage to sin and made us holy.  And he’s made us, his very people, a temple into which he pours God’s own Spirit.  It is astounding what Jesus has done for us, but somehow we’re still prone to forgetting.  We hear the alarm sounding, we see the sun peeking through the curtains, and we roll over and go back to sleep.  We do that because we’ve forgotten the joy of our salvation.  We do that, because we’ve failed to steep ourselves in God’s word.  We do that because we’ve neglected the fellowship and worship of the saints.  We do that because we’ve forgotten that God has made us stewards of his grace and of his good news.  We do that, because we’ve failed to think on and to meditate on the amazing and gracious love God has shown us in Jesus.

Brothers and Sisters, the Lord knew we sometimes we would forget these things.  That’s why he’s given us means of grace to “stir us up” as we prayed in last week’s collect.  He’s given us each other.  Friends, the Church is a place where we confront each other in our sins and exhort each other to love and good works.  He’s given us his word to prick our consciences when we go astray, to remind us of God’s faithfulness when we’re struggling to trust, and to show us the incredible depths of his love when we’re tempted to take a ho-hum approach to our faith.  He’s given us the sacraments.  In our baptism he has washed us clean and plunged us into his Spirit.  In that water he made each of us his own, just as he made Israel his own when she passed through the Red Sea.  And in the Lord’s Supper he gives us a means of participating in the very events—in the death and resurrection of Jesus—that mark our exodus from the bondage of sin and death.

Friends, be prepared.  Knowing that that King has come and that he will come again, avail yourselves this Advent of the means of grace.  Whether you’ve been carousing as if it were night, or you’ve been sleeping in while the alarm beeps away, or even if you’ve been busy about the work of the kingdom, steep yourselves in God’s word, be reminded of the sinfulness of sin and of the love and the grace and the faithfulness of God towards us sinners.  Meditate on the cross and on the empty tomb.  Remember the baptismal water through which you once passed and find assurance that you belong to Jesus and that he has called you to the life of his kingdom.  And, finally, come to his Table.  Here is not only the manna in the wilderness for a hungry people.  Here is the bread and wine by which we participate in the death and resurrection of the King and find our identity as the people of God.

Let’s pray: Almighty God, give us grace to cast away the works of darkness, and put on the armour of light, now in the time of this mortal life in which your Son Jesus Christ came to visit us in great humility; that in the last day, when he shall come again in his glorious majesty to judge both the living and the dead, we may rise to the life immortal; through him who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.  Amen.

The Sunday Next Before Advent: Stir up, O Lord!

Jeremiah 23:5-8 & St. John 6:5-14

by William Klock

The Prophet Jeremiah lived in Judah about six-hundred years before Jesus was born.  His ministry spanned the years between the reign of King Josiah and the defeat and sack of Jerusalem by the Babylonians.  Josiah was a good king.  He introduced reforms and called the nation to repentance and to faith.  He renovated the temple in Jerusalem and purged pagan worship from the nation.  He tore down the altars to pagan gods and executed their priests.  He even dug up the bones of pagan priests and burned them on their pagan altars as an act of desecration.  He restored the regular observance of the Passover.  But Josiah’s reforms would not last.  He died fighting the Egyptians and was followed by a fairly brief series of kings who all did what was evil in the sight of the Lord.  For the most part, the same went for the people of Judah.  Josiah desired reform, but his people did not share his desire.  Jeremiah’s prophecy announced the Lord’s coming judgement, which would culminate in a final curse of exile from the promised land.  Jeremiah rebuked the kings and people of Judah for their idolatry, for their pride, for their failure to keep the Sabbath, but above all, he rebuked Judah’s unjust social, political, and economic structures.  Jerusalem, announced Jeremiah in 5:1-9, had become worse than Sodom.  There wasn’t a just person to be found to give the Lord a reason to spare the city from judgement.

Our lesson begins at 23:5, but we get a sense of the problem if we look at the first four verses of the chapter:

“Woe to the shepherds who destroy and scatter the sheep of my pasture!” declares the Lord.  Therefore thus says the Lord, the God of Israel, concerning the shepherds who care for my people: “You have scattered my flock and have driven them away, and you have not attended to them.  Behold, I will attend to you for your evil deeds, declares the Lord. (Jeremiah 23:1-2)

The kings of Israel should have been faithful shepherds looking after the flock of Israel.  Jeremiah calls to mind David, the shepherd-king.  The king after God’s own heart, who, despite his great failures, still sought the Lord and his will for his people.  In contrast, the leaders of Judah in Jeremiah’s day did the opposite.  They abused the sheep and led them into idolatry.  “Thus says the Lord,” prophesies Jeremiah ominously, “You have not attended to the sheep, so I will attend to you.”  The failure of Judah’s kings would result in the scattering and exile of the people.  Israel was called to be the people who lived in the Lord’s presence.  They were to be light to the nations.  They were, by their life, supposed to cause the nations to give glory to God.  But they did none of that.  Israel, from the king down, had failed.  The nations mocked her saying, “Where is your God?”  Judah would be judged.  The land would vomit her out.  Like Adam and Eve, she would be driven from the Lord’s presence.  But that was never to be the end of the story.  Look at verses 3-4:

Then I will gather the remnant of my flock out of all the countries where I have driven them, and I will bring them back to their fold, and they shall be fruitful and multiply.  I will set shepherds over them who will care for them, and they shall fear no more, nor be dismayed, neither shall any be missing, declares the Lord.

 

After a time of judgement, the Lord would restore the faithful remnant of the flock and would provide faithful shepherds to care for them.  Specifically, Jeremiah goes on in today’s Old Testament lesson beginning at verse 5:

“Behold, the days are coming, declares the Lord, when I will raise up for David a righteous Branch, and he shall reign as king and deal wisely, and shall execute justice and righteousness in the land.  In his days Judah will be saved, and Israel will dwell securely. And this is the name by which he will be called: ‘The Lord is our righteousness.’  (Jeremiah 23:5-6)

The Lord will not leave his people without a just and righteous king forever.  He will “raise up for David a righteous branch”.  What does that mean?  It’s the same imagery we recall at Christmas from Isaiah’s prophecy:

There shall come forth a shoot from the stump of Jesse,

         and a branch from his roots shall bear fruit.  (Isaiah 11:1)

The line of David, the kings who had descended from him were like a tree.  It had rotted and withered and the Lord was forced to cut it down, but from the stump that, to all appearance was dead, the Lord would raise up a fresh, healthy, new shoot, a branch.  He would not only be a faithful shepherd of the Lord’s flock, but like David, he would rule with wisdom, justice, and righteousness.  In him the people of God would be saved.  And the Lord sets this king in stark contrast with Zedekiah, the last, sorry king of Judah.  Ironically, the name Zedekiah means “the Lord is our righteousness”.  Zedekiah made a joke of his own name.  Zedekiah was a puppet king setup by the Babylonians.  He was an evil and faithless man.  The Lord had called his people to trust in him and never to compromise.  Zedekiah represented the utter failure of Judah and her kings to trust in the Lord.  They trusted in horses, they trusted in chariots, they trusted in espionage and forbidden alliances with foreign nations, and, yes, they prayed to the Lord, but they hedged their bets with sacrifices to pagan gods.  But this branch of David’s line whom the Lord promised to raise up, he would truly be what the kings of Israel were called to be.  He would be one who would exemplify that statement of faith, that proclamation that “the Lord is our righteousness”.  He will deliver the people of God, he will restore them to the Lord’s presence, and he will set everything to rights.  In fact, what this new king will do will be so dramatic, it will become the defining event in the life of the people of God.  Look at verses 7-8:

“Therefore, behold, the days are coming, declares the Lord, when they shall no longer say, ‘As the Lord lives who brought up the people of Israel out of the land of Egypt,’ but ‘As the Lord lives who brought up and led the offspring of the house of Israel out of the north country and out of all the countries where he had driven them.’ Then they shall dwell in their own land.”

 

The coming king will deliver the Lord’s people.  Where the old kings led them into judgement, in the coming king the faithful remnant will be vindicated and declared to be in the right.  The coming king will gather the scattered people of God from the nations and restore them to his presence.  And we see here that this is more than a homecoming.  The deliverance and restoration brought by the coming king will redefine the people of God.  Whereas the exodus from Egypt had been, for the better part of a millennium the event that defined Israel, the event in which she was formed as a nation and gained her identity, in which she was declared to be God’s beloved, firstborn son, this new exodus will come to define this restored people.  No longer will the people of God be defined by the exodus from Egypt.  In future they will be defined by this new exodus by which the great shepherd-king will establish a new people gathered from the nations.

Brothers and Sisters, our Old Testament lesson today reminds us of Israel’s calling and Israel’s failure.  And in the midst of Israel’s faithlessness, it reminds us of the Lord’s faithfulness.  He will fulfil his promises to his creation and his people to rights, rescuing them from sin and death.  When his people fail, he will send a king to set them right.

In the Old Testament we hear the promise.  In the New we see the fulfilment.  In today’s Gospel we read the familiar story of the feeding of the five thousand.  Let’s read it again.  John 6:5-14.

Lifting up his eyes, then, and seeing that a large crowd was coming toward him, Jesus said to Philip, “Where are we to buy bread, so that these people may eat?”  He said this to test him, for he himself knew what he would do.  Philip answered him, “Two hundred denarii worth of bread would not be enough for each of them to get a little.”  One of his disciples, Andrew, Simon Peter’s brother, said to him, “There is a boy here who has five barley loaves and two fish, but what are they for so many?”  Jesus said, “Have the people sit down.” Now there was much grass in the place. So the men sat down, about five thousand in number.  Jesus then took the loaves, and when he had given thanks, he distributed them to those who were seated. So also the fish, as much as they wanted.  And when they had eaten their fill, he told his disciples, “Gather up the leftover fragments, that nothing may be lost.”  So they gathered them up and filled twelve baskets with fragments from the five barley loaves left by those who had eaten.  When the people saw the sign that he had done, they said, “This is indeed the Prophet who is to come into the world!”

 

The lectionary leaves out the first four verses of the chapter.  Because of that we miss two important details.  The first is the time and the second is the place.  John tells us in verse 4 that “the Passover was at hand”.  Remember what the Passover was all about.  Passover was the annual festival in which the Jews recalled the events of the Exodus—those events that Jeremiah points to as defining the very identity of Israel as the people of God.  In the Exodus the Lord had delivered them from their Egyptian slavery, he had defeated Pharaoh and the gods of Egypt, he had given them his law and the tabernacle and had taken up his dwelling in their midst, and he had led them through the wilderness.  Each new generation of Jews, as they took part in the Passover meal, became participants in the events of the Exodus, in the establishing of the Lord’s covenant.  This is one of three places in his Gospel, where John identifies events in the ministry of Jesus with the timing of the Passover.  The other two are his cleansing of the temple and his death and resurrection.  These are the events in which the Lord fulfilled his promise through Jeremiah of a new exodus and the formation of a new Israel, a new people.

The other important detail in those first verses is the place.  This took place on the far side of the Sea of Galilee.  Jesus has led the people into the wilderness and he’s taken up his seat on a mountain.  Again, John stages the story using the imagery of the Exodus.  We have a great crowd of people in the wilderness.  They’re hungry for supper, but there’s no food to be had.  The only thing missing is the grumbling, but these people were just hungry to hear Jesus.  This time it’s Jesus who realises the people’s need before they realise it themselves.

Jesus turns to Philip and asks what’s to be done to feed all these people.  Now, Philip—a good Jew whom I’m sure knew his people’s story—should have recalled the manna in the wilderness, but he wasn’t thinking of Jesus on that level just yet.  Andrew, on the other hand, has met a boy who happens to have brought a sack lunch: a few fish and a little bread.  It might as well be nothing in light of the size of the crowd.  But I don’t think Andrew would have bothered telling Jesus about this boy if he hadn’t thought that Jesus could make use of it somehow.  What could Jesus possibly do with so little?  The situation seemed totally impossible, and yet the Lord had provided for his hungry people in the wilderness all those centuries before.  Why not again?  And so Andrew gives us a hopeful sign.

Brothers and Sisters, this is how the people of God are called to respond in hopeless situations, not like the faithless kings of Jeremiah’s day, who were disobedient and put their faith in horses, chariots, foreign kings, and pagan gods.  As I read of Andrew bringing that little lunch of fish and bread to Jesus, surrounded by that huge crowd and thinking of our earlier lesson from Jeremiah about the wicked kings of Judah, I’m reminded of one of Judah’s faithful kings, Hezekiah.

Hezekiah found himself in another hopeless situation.  The Assyrians had besieged Jerusalem.  The messenger of the Assyrian king called up to Hezekiah’s men on the walls of the city that he would destroy them and that it would be because Hezekiah had purged Judah of its altars and shrines to the Assyrian gods.  The Assyrian king sent a message to Hezekiah, warning him that the Lord would not be able to deliver him.  Hezekiah no doubt had advisers who saw the situation as hopeless.  Some would have advised him to surrender to the Assyrians and to bow before their gods.  Others would have urged him to form an alliance with the Egyptians, which would have involved their gods as well.  To many, it would have seemed that Hezekiah was out of options.  He knew better.  The King took the message from the Assyrian king and went to the temple.  He prayed.  Sometimes that’s all you can do.  And the Lord sent Isaiah to Hezekiah with a message of reassurance:  The king of Assyria will not enter Jerusalem.  “I will defend this city to save it for my own sake and for the sake of my servant David” (Isaiah 19:34).  And that very night an angel struck down 185,000 men in the camp of the Assyrians.

Andrew now, like Hezekiah taking Sennacherib’s letter to the temple and not knowing what to do, only that the Lord would do something, Andrew now brings the boy and his lunch to Jesus.  The Lord will provide.  Somehow.  In some way.  And Jesus does just that.  He took the bread, gave thanks to God, and started breaking it into pieces and somehow there was still bread in his hands as the baskets began to fill.  And the same with the fish.  And everyone had their fill.  Just like they did in the wilderness after they’d left Egypt.  And yet there’s an element of the story here that points to this new exodus that’s taking shape being even greater than the first.  In the first exodus, there was no manna left over.  There was always enough to satisfy the needs of the people, but if you tried to gather extra and to keep it, it rotted away and produced worms.  Jesus feeds these people in the wilderness and there are twelve basketfuls left over—presumably food the people took home with them to eat and to be reminded the next day of what the Lord had done.

Now, Hezekiah’s faith came to mind as I read about Andrew, but as Jesus divided up the bread and fish, what I think would have come to the minds of the people was a different Old Testament character.  John, I think, tells the story to deliberately recall the prophet Elisha and, in particular, the events of 2 Kings 4.  There was a famine in the land and Isaiah had a band of followers to provide for.  A man brought them twenty loaves of bread and a sack of grain, but it wasn’t nearly enough to feed Elisha’s men.  That didn’t concern Elisha.  He gave the sack of bread to his servant and commanded him to give it to the men so that they could eat.  His servant balked at that.  “How can I can set this before a hundred men?” he asked.  Elisha commanded him again to take it to the men and said, “Thus says the Lord, ‘They shall eat and have some left.’”  And, somehow, the men ate their fill and, just as the Lord had promised, there were leftovers remaining (2 King 4:42-44).

Now, back to our Gospel: The people on that mountain with Jesus put the pieces together: Passover, wilderness, bread from heaven, baskets of leftover bread.  And they declare that Jesus is “the prophet who is to come into the world.”  Jeremiah’s new exodus is somehow underway, with Jesus at its head.  Their acclamation is taken straight from the Lord’s promise to Moses in Deuteronomy 18: “I will raise up a prophet like you from among their brothers.  And I will put my words in his mouth, and he shall speak to them all that I commanded him” (Deuteronomy 18:18-19).  The new exodus has begun.  Jesus is the prophet who was promised, a prophet like Moses, a prophet like Elisha—and yet a prophet even greater.  Verse 15 says:

Perceiving then that they were about to come and take him by force to make him king, Jesus withdrew again to the mountain by himself.

 

“King” means “messiah”.  Now, did the people really understand who and what the messiah was to be?  Not really.  Almost no one fully understood that until after the events of Jesus’ death and resurrection.  But that doesn’t mean the people that day, filled miraculously with bread and fish, didn’t recognise the messiah in Jesus.  All the pieces were there.  Here was the good shepherd who cared for the sheep when no one else would.  Here was the prophet who would lead the people like Moses in the long-awaited exodus.  If Jesus was those two things, then he also had to be the long-awaited branch that Jeremiah had prophesied would come from the root of David.  Jesus saw the recognition dawn in their eyes and he withdrew.  The time wasn’t right.  This wasn’t how the Messiah was to come into his crown or to take his throne.  Nevertheless, as we draw the lines that connect the promises of God in Jeremiah to their fulfilment in John’s Gospel, we should be overwhelmed by the faithfulness of God.  He does what he promises.

Brothers and Sisters, the Lord invites us to his table this morning and here we again recall his faithfulness.  Here, like the Jews participating in each new generation in the events of the Exodus and finding their place in the people of God, we find our manna in the wilderness, we recall and participate in the death and resurrection of Jesus, and are reminded that we are his people and that, just as was promised so long ago, he has delivered us from our bondage to sin and death.  The sheep that were scattered, have been drawn together by the God of Israel.  You and I have heard the story of God’s faithfulness.  We have come to Israel’s king and submitted ourselves in faith.  And now, here at the table, we experience his faithfulness ourselves as we eat the bread and drink the wine.  Here is our manna in the wilderness.  Finally, having known the faithfulness of God, we’re summoned ourselves to walk in faith, trusting that the Lord will finish what he has begun, that he will do what he has promised.

In our Collect we asked the Lord to “stir up our wills”.  We may have come to the end of another Church Year, but the story is hardly over.  Advent is almost here and with it the reminder that Jesus is coming and that as we wait for him, he’s given his Church a mission and his own Spirit to ensure that mission is fulfilled.  He has made us stewards of the good news that he is this world’s true Lord.  We have our own parts to play in this story.  And so we petition the Lord in faith, knowing that he is faithful to fulfil his promises.  Whether it takes a hundred years or a hundred thousand years for the world to answer the king’s royal summons to faithful allegiance, he will be with us and he will equip us for every good work.

Let’s pray: Stir up, O Lord, the wills of your faithful people; that we may produce abundantly the fruit of good works, and receive your abundant reward, through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.  Amen.