Living Words

The Fourth Sunday after Trinity: Suffering and Glory

Romans 8:17-23

by William Klock

On Monday I rode by gravel bike up Horne Lake Forest Service Road, up from the lake towards Port Alberni.  It’s a big loop through the forests and mountains—basically the middle of nowhere.  Before I left I created route using an app on my phone and then I made sure the map was loaded.  And by the time I got to Horne Lake there was no cell service, somehow the map “unloaded” itself, and all I had was a blank map with a blurry red line for the road and my little blue GPS dot telling me where I was on it.  None of the sideroads or trails were showing, none of the topographical lines were showing.  I didn’t know how far I was from the top or where to turn, all I could do after every junction was to check to make sure the little blue dot was still on the blurry red line and if, it wasn’t, turn around and go the other way and check again.  And then on my way down cell service returned, the map loaded, and right when I needed my GPS the most, it stopped working.  The map showed the road crossing Nile Creek, but when I got there I found a ravine about sixty feet deep and the bridge missing.  I couldn’t tell if I was on the right road or how far off course I might end up when I went bushwhacking down a deer trail to see if I could find a place to cross.  The whole time I was thinking how much more reliable it was in the old days with a topographic map and a compass.  Having that little “You are here” dot isn’t much good if you don’t have a map for reference.  And having a map isn’t very helpful if you don’t know where you are on it.  That—and some conversations I’ve had the last few weeks with other pastors—got me thinking about how we read the Bible and do theology and all of that.  It reminded me why I like what’s called narrative theology and why I think it’s important to always be telling the big biblical story.  The biblical story is the map.  Narrative theology shows us where we are on the map.  Both keep us firmly grounded in the story of God and his people.

We need that.  We grow up learning all the stories, but the Bible story book we read as kids—or read to our kids—often leave us with the stories disconnected.  We end up knowing Adam and Abraham and Moses and Jesus, but we struggle to know how their stories are related and part of the bigger story.  And that often continues on as adults.  And we struggle to know where we fit in to it.

I say this because our Epistle from Romans 8 this morning is one those wonderful, short passages that puts a map in front of us.  It shows us the big picture of the good news, of God’s redemption and renewal of humanity and of his entire Creation.  And it says, “You are here”.  Our Epistle this morning is St. Paul leading us right to the climax of his letter to the Romans and here he shows us the map: where we’ve come from, where we’re going, how it all fits together.

In the first half of Romans, Paul works his way through the story of Israel and all her ups and downs—and for Israel things were mostly “down”.  And now in Chapter 8 he begins talking about life in the flesh versus life in the Spirit and the law of sin and death versus the law of the Spirit.  This is where, in verse 11, he famously writes that if the Spirit who raised Jesus from the dead lives in us, the One who raised Jesus from the dead will also give life to our mortal bodies—if we are in Jesus the Messiah we live in hope of the same resurrection he has experienced.  But even more than that, Paul goes on to write, through our union with Jesus we are children and heirs of God, fellow heirs with Christ—that means sharing in Jesus’ inheritance.  But what is that?  Paul writes in verse 17 that it means to suffer with him so that we can be glorified with him.  The Christian life—life with Jesus—for Paul means two things: suffering and glory.  Suffering is a given as we long for glory.

Most Christians living through the last two thousand years have understood that suffering is part of our calling as we follow Jesus.  Jesus promised it.  The New Testament writers talk about it often—and most of them faced it themselves and were martyred for proclaiming the lordship of Jesus.  Many of our brothers and sisters today are persecuted for their faith in various parts of the world.  And yet in the West—probably in part because we haven’t faced persecution for such a long time—many Christians have no place for suffering in their theology.  Some even go so far as to say that if you’re experiencing suffering—sickness, poverty, rejection or anything else negative—it’s due to a lack of faith.  But that’s just the opposite of what Jesus taught and it’s just the opposite of what Paul teaches here.  The inheritance we share with Jesus is one of suffering that leads to glory.  What this means is at the centre of our Epistle and Paul goes on in verse 18:

For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us.

 

Are you suffering?  Paul shows the little blue you-are-here GPS dot on the map.  This is us.  Here’s where we’re at in the big picture, the big story.  And Paul says, “For I consider…”  That doesn’t mean this is his opinion.  He’s put his compass on the map and lined everything up and here’s where it points to and here’s where we are.  Knowing the Scriptures, knowing Jesus, working under the Spirit’s inspiration, this is the only conclusion he can reach.  He’s been building this argument for eight chapters in Romans and here he reaches the inevitable conclusion: those who will be glorified will first face suffering, but that this suffering can’t begin to compare with the glory to be revealed.

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

But what is the glory Paul’s writing about?  Our translation says that this glory is to be revealed “to us”.  By that he doesn’t mean that it’s God’s show-and-tell, that we’ll be spectators to this glory.  It means that we have a share in it.  Think of this glory as a gift given to us by God.  Remember what Paul said before: that if we are in Christ, then we will share in his inheritance—we will participate in his inheritance.

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

For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God.

 

Brothers and Sisters, God’s Creation is waiting for the great day when its true rulers will be revealed, the sons of God, and when it will be delivered from corruption.  Look at verses 20-22:

For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of him who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to corruption and obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God.  For we know that the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now.

 

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

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

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

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

Again, we need the big picture—we need to remember where things started.  In Genesis we read that the Lord created human beings to be his image bearers.  What does it mean to bear God’s image.  Well, consider that Israel’s pagan neighbours built great stone temples and then placed images of their gods in them.  Those images represented the gods’ rule or sovereignty over the land and people.  Genesis uses the same languages and imagery, except that in Genesis it’s the Lord himself who builds his own temple—the cosmos—and instead of placing an image of himself carved in stone or gold in it, he creates human beings, to live in his presence in the temple, but also to rule his creation justly and wisely—to have dominion and to subdue Creation in his name.  That’s what it meant for humanity to bear God’s image: to be his stewards, the priests of his temple.  But then we chose to rebel.  As Paul writes in Romans 1, we chose to worship the Creation instead of the Creator.  We subjected the Lord’s good creation to corruption.

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

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

And not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies.

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

And, Paul writes, we can hope because our God has given us the firstfruits of his new creation.  He’s given a down payment on what he has promised.  The present age and its rulers have been decisively defeated by Jesus at the cross and at the empty tomb and God’s new age has been inaugurated.  Jesus is ascended to his throne.  He is Lord.  He truly is God’s King.  He’s given us his Spirit—Paul describes the Spirit here as the firstfruits—and that’s because we live in the overlap between these two ages, these two kingdoms.  The Jews brought the firstfruits of the harvest—usually sheaves of grain harvested at the very beginning of the season—as offerings to God.  They offered them in good years and even in bad years in faith that God would provide the rest of the harvest.  And so the Spirit is the sign of hope for us.  The life he gives to us here and now is a reminder that encourages our faith and hope in the resurrection and the new creation to come.  We groan and we sigh, we wait longingly in eager expectation, but our hope is certain because God is faithful and keeps his promises.  The prophet Habakkuk wrote that one day the glory of the Lord will fill the earth as the waters cover the sea.  Brothers and Sisters, when that seems impossible, we only need remember the cross of Jesus, his empty tomb, and his gift of the Holy Spirit.

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

If you’re like me you might get discouraged thinking about the mission Jesus has given us.  It seems overwhelming.  The word is so broken and so dark.  It doesn’t seem like anyone is watching and no one wants to listen.  Sometimes it seems like you have to be a Peter or a Paul—someone important or high profile—to make a difference for the kingdom.  But Friends, never forget that for every St. Paul or St. Peter, there were thousands of ordinary saints manifesting Jesus in their ordinary lives, proclaiming the Good News, and building the kingdom right where they were.  We fulfil Jesus’ calling to us as we raise covenant children to walk with him in faith and to live the values of his kingdom.  We fulfil Jesus’ calling when we work for peace and reconciliation with our neighbours, in our workplaces, and in our schools.  We fulfil Jesus’ calling when we forgive as we have been forgiven.  We fulfil Jesus’ calling when we love the hard-to-love people around us, knowing that we ourselves are hard-to-love too, but that Jesus loved us enough to die for us.  We fulfil Jesus’ calling when we sacrifice ourselves, our rights, our prerogatives, our time, and our treasure in order to make Jesus and his love known.  In everything we do, we should be seeking to give to this groaning and suffering world foretastes of God’s glory, of God’s new creation.

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

The Third Sunday after Trinity: Pride and Humility

1 St. Peter 5:5-11 & St. Luke 15:1-10

by William Klock

St. Peter wrote his first epistle to the churches scattered and dispersed across Asia Minor, what we call Turkey today.  We don’t know exactly when he wrote it, but there are some clues.  He writes to them from “Babylon”, which almost certainly means Rome, and that narrows the date down to around 62 to 63—during the reign of Nero, but before Nero declared “open season” on Christians.  Rome was still a hard place to be as a Christian, but Peter was writing to his brothers and sisters in Asia Minor because it was particularly hard for them there.  If you think back to our study of Revelation, the situation of those seven churches to which St. John wrote just a few years later wasn’t very different from the situation these churches were in.  It wasn’t so much that the government was actively persecuting Christians, but that these Christians lived in the midst of a culture that was just generally hostile towards them.  The Church stood apart from the Greco-Roman culture and its way of life and its values and that meant that standing firm for Jesus and the gospel and the kingdom of God was a challenge.  On a good day your neighbours thought you were weird and on a bad day you might be cut off by your family, or lose your job because you refused to be part of a guild meeting that involved pagan worship, or you might catch the ire of some government official who suspected you of being disloyal because you refused to offer a pinch of incense to Caesar.  Most of the people in these churches were gentiles.  They had come out of that wicked and perverted and idolatrous Greco-Roman culture, so they knew what it would cost to follow Jesus.  They had heard the good news about Jesus and how, in him, the God of Israel had shown his goodness and faithfulness, and they had believed.  The gospel told a better story than any they’d ever heard.  The God of Israel revealed himself to be unlike any god they’d ever known or worshiped.  And the resurrection of Jesus pointed to a greater and more certain hope than any they had ever dreamed of.

But to most of the people around them, this good news was foolishness.  They hated it.  They despised the people who believed it.  Because if it was true, it meant everything they valued, the gods they believed in, and everything they hoped for was a lie.  And so the pagans around them opposed them and made life difficult for them.  And that’s why Peter wrote: to exhort them to stand firm in the truth they had learned and believed about Jesus.  He reminds them of the gospel.  He reminds them who they are: the new Israel and the temple of God’s own Spirit.  And Peter also reminds them that as they face opposition and persecution, Jesus and his own response to suffering and death is to be their model.  Why?  Because his triumphant resurrection is the root and source of their hope.  Jesus and the gospel will win the final victory, because Jesus and the gospel have already won the decisive victory.

And then Peter wraps up his epistle with an exhortation to humility, which we read a few minutes ago.

Brothers and Sisters, I don’t think I’ve ever preached on this passage when the Third Sunday after Trinity has come around.  I’ve always preached on the Gospel—on Jesus’ parables of the lost sheep and the lost coin.  I’ll come back to those in closing.  But it strikes me that this Spirit-inspired exhortation to humility is more important than ever as the pagan culture of our day spends this month celebrating an orgy of the very opposite—of pride.

For the month of June the secular, pagan culture around us has been shaking its fist at God.  Like Pharaoh, his world falling apart around him as the God of Israel revealed his might and his power, but refusing to give up his claims of divinity, refusing to let go of the belief that he was in control of reality and of his own destiny, our Postmodern culture devotes an entire month to the denial of sin and of shame; it devotes an entire month to celebrating its defiance of the very first command given by the Creator to the human race: “Be fruitful and multiply”.  Our culture devotes a month to celebrating sinful unions that go against the God-given nature of our bodies, unions that can never produce children, unions that deliberately undermine the institutions that God established as the root of healthy, flourishing human life: marriage and the family.  This is why St. Paul, in the first chapter of Romans, singles out homosexuality as the sin that marks out a society’s decline to the bottom of the moral sewer, because in embracing this sin, a society has given up on and rejected the very purpose for which we have been created, given up on and rejected the first of God’s instructions, and given up on and rejected the reality of the natural order of creation.  It marks out a culture that has embraced self-annihilation.

But somehow, these last few years, our culture has sunk even lower than Paul could envision a culture sinking.  We’ve gone so far as to deny the very reality of our sex, denying the blatantly obvious, denying our biology, denying the chromosomes that make us who we are, denying who God has made us, and claiming that men can be women and that women can be men.  It begins with a rejection of the Messiah and the gospel.  And then we reject the great story.  Postmodern culture hates these metanarratives, because they undermine who we think we are, they undermine our individualism, and because they show us our place in God’s great story when we’d rather be writing our own stories—as if we know better than God.  Our culture insists that everyone has the right to be whoever he or she wants to be, and so we finally reject reality itself.  A man can be a woman.  Or a woman can be a cat.  And the rest of us must bow to the will and beliefs of the individual and play along, denying reality ourselves.  In Orwell’s 1984, dissidents were threatened with whatever they feared the most until they finally broke down and confessed the lie that 2+2=5.  Today we’re boycotted or cancelled or accused of oppression.  Families are emotionally blackmailed into cooperation with threats of suicide.  “Would you rather have a dead son or a live, albeit pretend, daughter?” they ask to shame us into playing along with the lie.

It’s an orgy of pride.  And our culture has revamped its institutions to accommodate it: government, education, medicine, business.  What we used to call “counselling” has been almost entirely replaced with what’s now call “therapy”.  Because the last thing any prideful person wants to hear is that they are wrong.  Prideful people want to feel good about themselves and their choices, and so we now have armies of “therapists” who listen and nod and affirm and repeat the dishonest and death-dealing mantra, “You are enough”, instead of correcting or discipling or simply reminding us of our place in the great story and pulling us back to reality.  It’s the serpent in the garden all over again, assuring us that we can be our own gods, creating and defining our own realities and defining right and wrong for ourselves.  And the armies of therapists keep growing, because reality and the God it makes known will not go away, no matter how hard we try.  Depression has reached epidemic levels, especially in youth who have been indoctrinated into this way of thinking.  It’s what happens when we’re told to be ourselves, whoever that may be, but reality dictates otherwise.  You can have sex with people of the same sex forever, but such a union will never produce children and will never be a family and will never fulfil the purpose for which you were created.  You can dress in the clothes of the opposite sex, you can take the hormones of the opposite sex, you can even mutilate your body to make it look superficially like the opposite sex, but you can never really be the opposite sex.  And you can’t always just go off and be whatever you want to be.  Only a few people are cut out to be astronauts or literary geniuses or great artists.  And reality dictates that we have obligations to others—to mothers and fathers and to children—that outweigh our “dreams”.  And so rather than embracing the reality that God has given to us, we become resentful and depressed.  All because of pride.

But there is nothing new under the sun.  Julius Firmicus Maternus wrote against the pagan practises of the Fourth Century.  This is what he wrote about the priest of Cybele:

“In their very temples can be seen deplorable mockery before a moaning crowd, men taking the part of women, revealing with boastful ostentation this ignominy of impure and unchaste bodies.  They broadcast their crimes and confess with superlative delight the stain of their polluted bodies….They wear effeminately nursed hair and dress in soft clothes…having made themselves alien to masculinity.”  A century later St. Augustine wrote about the same priests, “Even till yesterday, with dripping hair and painted faces, with flowing limbs and feminine walk, they pass through the streets and alleys of Carthage, exacting from merchants that by which they might shamefully live.”[1]

Everything old is new again.  Today such people visit the local merchants and threaten to boycott them if they don’t display their rainbow in the window.  There is nothing new under the sun.  And rather than acknowledge reality, our culture comes after those of us who dare to speak the truth.  Our post-Christians age isn’t very different from the world in St. Peter lived and wrote his epistle.  The false gods have different names, but are still pretty much the same.  As the gospel has waned, pride reigns again and will brook no opposition.

But, Brothers and Sisters, gospel people aren’t immune from this cultural infection.  Pride creeps into our hearts and it creeps into our churches.  And we’re especially susceptible when it has become the water in which our culture swims, the air our culture breathes.  It becomes so normal, we become so acclimate to it that it gets by us—gets into us—unnoticed.  And so Peter, in chapter five of his epistle, begins by exhorting the shepherds of the flock to shepherd with humility, but then, in verse 5, he writes to the rest of the people in the churches:

Clothe yourselves, all of you, with humility toward one another, for “God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble.”

 

Clothes yourselves with humility.  Of all the virtues Peter could had told them to put on, he chooses humility.  Why?  Well, what does humility look like?  Back in Chapter 2 Peter points us to Jesus.  He is always our example when it comes to virtue.  In this case Peter wrote those familiar words in 2:21-23:

For to this you have been called, because Christ also suffered for you, leaving you an example, so that you might follow in his steps.  He committed no sin, neither was deceit found in his mouth.  When he was reviled, he did not revile in return; when he suffered, he did not threaten, but continued entrusting himself to him who judges justly.  He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree, that we might die to sin and live to righteousness.  By his wounds you have been healed.

 

Pride puts self first—even sometimes to the absurd point of denying reality itself as we see around us today.  Pride demands that everyone around us bow to our delusions lest they be exposed.  Pride demands everyone affirm us, lest we be reminded of our shame.  But humility.  Humility puts others first.  Humility gives.  Humility sacrifices.  Brothers and Sisters, if you want to see, if you want to understand humility, look to the cross.  Look to Jesus, scourged and beaten and bloody, dying the worst death imaginable, and doing so willingly and for the sake of the very people who had put him there.  That’s humility.  He was sinless, but died the death of the worst of sinners.  Harsh words were spoken to him, but he did not respond in kind.  He was beaten and scourged—God himself beaten and scourged, who could have called a legion of angels to rescue him or fire and brimstone to rain down on his enemies—but he chose not to threaten.  He could have vindicated himself, but instead he entrusted himself to his Father, who judges justly.  He died for us, sacrificing everything, that we might live.  That is humility.

And Peter writes to the churches saying that this humility is what should characterize us.  It’s what should set us apart from the world around us.  The world is full of pride.  The church should be full of humility.  Through the epistle Peter has addressed all sorts of relationships: masters and slaves, children and parents, husbands and wives, shepherds and their flocks—pastors and churches—and now he just addresses everyone.  Clothe yourselves with the same humility that you see every time you look to the cross, the same humility you see every time you come to the Lord’s Table and eat the bread and drink the wine remembering what Jesus has done for you.  That is the character of the Christian, because it is the character of Christ.  Humility is the polar opposite of how the words lives, but humility is what it looks like to live out the gospel ourselves and in community as the people of God—and we do this for the sake of the pride-filled world that hates us—just as Jesus did.

And, Brothers and Sisters, if we don’t clothe ourselves with humility there are consequences.  I was thinking about this as I reflected on Peter’s quote here from Proverbs 3:34.  “God opposes the proud, but gives grace to the humble.”  Let me read a bit more of the context of that passage from Proverbs.

The Lord’s curse is on the house of the wicked,

         but he blesses the dwelling of the righteous.

Toward the scorners he is scornful,

         but to the humble he gives favor.

The wise will inherit honor,

         but fools get disgrace. (Proverbs 3:33-35)

“The Lord’s curse is on the house of the wicked, but he blesses the dwelling of the righteous.”  For the last couple of hundred years our culture has become increasingly focused and centred on the individual.  That hasn’t been all bad, but it hasn’t been all good either.  It’s part of how we got where we are today with every man doing what is right in his own eyes.  But it means that when we think about how we relate to God, we do so almost always on individual terms.  We think of salvation in individualistic terms.  We think of judgement and blessing in individualistic terms.  Increasingly we think that we can be Christians in individualistic terms—forget church, I’ll just read my Bible and pray at home.  This is individualism gone to seed.  It means we hardly ever—or maybe we don’t at all—think about how our choices impact the Church.  It’s what leads us to hop from church to church, never really committing, always looking for some new experience or looking to have our needs met.  And it’s what leads us to think that what we do in our personal lives, or as families, or when no one else is watching, it’s what leads us to think that these things have no repercussions for the larger church.  But if we read the Bible carefully, we see that this isn’t how God works.  He works with people and he calls us into community.  We can’t be in covenant with him without also being in covenant with each other.  Israel as a nation was repeatedly punished for the sins and unfaithfulness of her leaders.  Or there’s that one particularly dramatic and troubling case of Achan in the book of Joshua.  He secretly stole some treasure from the ruins of Jericho, treasure that the Lord had claimed for himself, treasure that was forbidden to the people.  Achan, just one man, stole it and hid it in his tent and because of that, in the next battle, the Lord was not with his people.  They were defeated.  People died.  And when Achan was discovered, he was executed—and his whole family with him.  It’s a sobering reminder that, up until a hundred or two hundred years ago, most people understood.  We balk at it.  We’re perplexed by it.  Because we’re so focused—often unhealthily so—on the individual.  But this is what Proverbs is getting at.  The Lord will curse and the Lord will bless individuals, yes, but he will also curse and bless households—the household of Israel, or even the household of the church.  What we do and how we live isn’t just a personal matter, it has consequences for good or ill for the whole church.

Our witness is both individual and corporate.  There were faithful men and women in Israel, men and women who held their light high, who lived passionately and faithfully as people who lived in the presence of the Lord.  But they weren’t the ones the world was watching.  The world was watching the hypocritical kings and priests who lived sinful lives, who set up altars to false gods in the temple, who trusted in horses and chariots.  Those kings and priests destroyed the witness of the nation and the nation as a whole was punished so that the gentile nations could see that the God of Israel took seriously the covenant he had with his people.

This is why, in Revelation, Jesus warns the churches that if they are not faithful—if they are lukewarm, if they do not recover their love for him, if they do not repent of the sin they’ve been tolerating in their midst, if they keep tolerating false prophets and teachers—he will take away their lampstands.  The Lord will discipline his church.  The good news is that it’s not about our perfection, but about where our hearts are.  No church is perfect.  And Peter’s telling us that if we will clothe ourselves with Jesus-like humility, the Lord will bless our faithfulness.  Humility sacrifices self for the sake of our brothers and sisters, for the sake of Jesus, and for the sake of the gospel.  Humility puts an end to those sins committed in secret and to sins that we justify for selfish reasons, and to open sins that undermine our witness before the world.  As the humility of Jesus has brought us together in one body, as we clothe ourselves with humility we commit ourselves to one another in love and grace.

It's not easy, but Peter reminds us that we do this in light of the hope that Jesus gives and knowing that whatever hard things we face, they are not unique to us.  Let’s look again at the rest of the Epistle:

Humble yourselves, therefore, under the mighty hand of God so that at the proper time he may exalt you, casting all your anxieties on him, because he cares for you.  Be sober-minded; be watchful. Your adversary the devil prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour.  Resist him, firm in your faith, knowing that the same kinds of suffering are being experienced by your brotherhood throughout the world.  And after you have suffered a little while, the God of all grace, who has called you to his eternal glory in Christ, will himself restore, confirm, strengthen, and establish you.  To him be the dominion forever and ever. Amen.

 

It's hard.  And Peter knew that it was only going to get harder.  But he reminds them of the story and the story reminds us of our hope.  When the world comes after us, our problem is that we want to vindicate ourselves and that usually ends up with us lashing out in kind.  But our pride will never defeat the world’s pride.  Instead, Peter urges us to remember that as God, the just judge, vindicated Jesus when he raised him from the dead, so he will vindicate us.  We just need to stand firm in humility as Jesus did.  Our hope lies not in our present circumstances, but in Jesus.  By his death and resurrection he has defeated sin and death.  That was the hard part.  And so we look forward in hope—standing firm in faith (and in humility)—knowing that he will one day finish what he started.  And we remember that he tarries so that we, his church, can do the work of the kingdom in the meantime—seeking out the lost, proclaiming the good news, that the Lord might bring them back to the sheepfold.

Our Gospel today gives us those vivid and dramatic pictures of the shepherd out looking for his lost sheep.  Ninety-nine were safe, but he cared even for that one—cared enough to go out in the danger of the night to find it and to carry it back home.  And the story of the woman, searching high and low for her lost coin, finally moving everything and sweeping the whole house in order to find it.  And both rejoiced—almost excessively.  I always wondered if the other shepherds were annoyed when he woke them.  “It’s just one sheep.  Let us sleep!”  And I wonder how much of that silver coin it cost the woman to throw her party to celebrate that it was found.  But that’s the point.  The Lord cares more than we can fathom for those who are lost.  As much as we celebrate baptisms in the church here, I think the celebrations in heaven over those baptisms must be a thousand times greater.  But the more we clothe ourselves with humility, Brothers and Sisters, the more I think we’ll gain that heavenly perspective.  The more we clothe ourselves with humility, the more driven we’ll be to do the work of the kingdom—to make Jesus and his good news known, to shine our lights brightly into the darkness, even as we face opposition, mockery, and even persecution.  And, too, as we clothe ourselves with Jesus-like humility, we will come to understand better and better the story we’ve been called to tell—the story about humanity and the God of Israel, about Jesus and the cross, about this great exodus from sin and death and the hope of this world set to rights—the story that is not only the antidote to pride, but the story that ultimately returns and reconciles all the lost sheep, all the lost coins, and all the prodigal sons and daughters to the God who gave his life for us.  Brothers and Sisters, stand firm in faith, clothe yourselves with humility.  The Christians to whom Peter and John wrote did just that and because of their witness the prideful and perverted culture of the Greeks and Romans was conquered by the gospel.  That’s what the gospel does.  That’s what the gospel will do again, conquering our prideful and perverted culture, if we will only stand firm in faith, living and proclaiming the good news about Jesus.

Let’s pray: O Lord, hear us in your mercy, we pray, and grant that we, to whom you have given the desire to pray, may be defended and comforted by your mighty aid, and strengthened in all dangers and adversities, through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.  Amen.

[1] Quoted in Will Roscoe, “Priests of the Goddess: Gender Transgression in Ancient Religion”, History of Religions, Vol. 35, No. 3 (February 1996), 195-196.

The Second Sunday after Trinity: Love in Deed and Truth

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

by William Klock

We read a portion of St. John’s first epistle this morning.  He writes to the churches saying, “Little children, let us not love in word or talk but in deed and in truth” (1 John 3:18).  “Little children”.  Not just “children”, but “little children”.  The Greek word for children is tekna.  But then there’s teknia, John’s choice of words.  They add an “i” to make the usual word diminutive—cutesy, tender, and endearing.  I think you’re probably all familiar with that often abused Aramaic word that Jesus used: abba.  It means “father”, but it’s warmer, closer, more personal, which is why sometimes people try to get that sense with “papa” or even “daddy”.  It’s what a child would call his own father.  “Little children” isn’t quite like that, but I think it’s close.  John was a very old man by the time he wrote the words of today’s Epistle.  He had become a spiritual father to these people, and so he calls them “little children” to convey something of that relationship.  But it also fits the context, because he’s got some hard words for them—something they desperately need to hear, but that won’t be easy—so John addresses them as a father lovingly speaking to his little children.  Teaching little children about love isn’t easy.  It’s easy to tell children about love.  But getting them to understand, that’s the hard part.  And getting them to love and to love consistently, that’s even harder.  I can remember being very young and singing songs about loving Jesus and praying prayers that expressed my love for him.  And I would pray for Daddy and Mommy and my sister, Jackie, and then five minutes later Jackie would do something that made me angry—or maybe she didn’t do anything at all—and I would do something mean and unloving to her.  And I would get spanked and Dad or Mom would send me out to apologise and to give her a hug and to saying, “I love you.”  But then a few days later it would happen all over again.  And as adults, sometimes we aren’t all that different.  We can still act like “little children”.  Only now it’s our brother or our sister at church or our husband or wife or our children or someone at work.  Talking about love is easy and cheap; actual loving in deed and in truth can be difficult and costly.

We profess love for God.  We come to church and sing songs about our love for him.  We recite the summary of the law every Sunday—reminding ourselves of our duty to love God and to love each other.  But something happens—maybe even on the way home—and we so quickly become selfish, spiteful, and even vengeful.  About twenty-five years ago, back when cable internet service was a new thing and whole neighbourhoods shared a single cable line, one DSL provider aired a serious of hilarious commercials that took place on a fictional street where everyone shared the same cable internet line.  The bandwidth shortages turned friends and neighbours into enemies.  One man was whacking his weeds and, when the neighbour turned his back, reached over the fence, and ran his weed-whacker through his flowers.  Another neighbour returned the favour, shooting a stream of water from his hose through the open sunroof of the car in the next driveway.  Another neighbour woke to find “Web Hog” spraypainted across his garage door and his cable line cut.  Eventually, as the commercials progressed, the neighbourhood looked more and more like a war zone, all because of this escalating tit-for-tat over limited internet bandwidth.

It was funny.  But it also tapped into the reality of human nature.  It’s amazing how mean and unloving we human beings can be even over petty things—and it only escalates from there.  As I said back in Eastertide when we were looking at St. James’ epistle, our first response when things go wrong is all too often to think that adding a good helping of our own anger to the mix is what will fix things—and then things spiral out of control.  But Jesus shows us a better way.  At the cross our sin and evil, the power of the devil, all of it rose up to its full height and did its worst, we struck down the very man who was God incarnate come to set this broken world to rights, and instead of striking down his enemies, instead of raining down fire and brimstone on them, he took every last bit of their hate and returned it with love and he broke the cycle.  He shed his blood for the very men and women who rejected him as Messiah and who demanded his crucifixion.  As we heard Jesus say in our Gospel last week, “Greater love has no man than this, that he lay down his life for his friends.”  Brothers and Sisters, that’s love.  That’s the better way—to return hate with love.  And it’s hard, because it’s going to cost us, but it’s the way—the only way—into God’s kingdom, because this kind of love is the defining way of God’s kingdom.  That’s why God has called his people from the beginning to love him and to love our neighbours—whether that was by hearing and obeying the law of Moses in the days of the old covenant or hearing and obeying the law of the Spirit in the days of the new.  We are God’s means of bringing light into the darkness of the world, and so he calls us to be the people who exemplify what it means to live with God in our midst.  We are witnesses of his love and his goodness and his faithfulness and it is in our midst that the world should have a foretaste of what it will one day look like when God finally defeats every last enemy and sets it all to rights.

But, like little children, we too often forget what it’s all about.  We forget that we’re part of God’s kingdom by grace.  We forget the costliness of love.  We forget that we are stewards of God’s light, we forget that we’ve been given this good news about Jesus, so that we might proclaim it to the world, bringing others into the light.  And instead we become proud of ourselves for having the light and we keep it to ourselves instead of holding it high, we condemn the people out in the dark as if we weren’t once out in that same darkness ourselves.  God’s people have always struggled with this.

At the beginning of Chapter 14 of his Gospel, Luke tells us that one Sabbath Jesus was invited to have dinner at the house of a prominent Pharisee and that there was a man there who had dropsy or oedema.  The whole thing looks like a setup.  Looking at the man and then turning to these authorities on the law, Jesus asks them if it’s legal to heal on the Sabbath.  Luke says that they were silent.  Jesus then healed the man and sent him on his way and we can gather that the lawyers and Pharisees all looked very offended and scandalised—even though they had to have known that this is exactly what Jesus would do.  Jesus then asked them, “Which of you who, if your son or your ox fell into a well on the Sabbath wouldn’t immediately pull him out?”  And despite the answer being obvious—of course they’d pull out him out!—they didn’t know what to say.  They knew whatever they might say would condemn them.

But what’s that all about?  Well, remember that for the Jews of Jesus’ day and especially for the Pharisees, there were three main things that set them apart from everyone else in the world: circumcision, the Sabbath, and their diet.  At least one of those things comes into play here.  The Pharisees were zealous to keep the Sabbath holy and that meant absolutely no kind of work.  The Lord had given them this commandment to keep the sabbath as part of that whole matrix of laws meant to set them apart and to distinguish them from the nations.  Everyone else lived in darkness, but Israel—they were the people who lived with the Lord in their midst. But these men has forgotten that at the heart of the law, the driving force behind it, was love.  Every part of it in some way was meant to exhibit a love for God or a love for neighbour—or both at the same time.  And keeping the sabbath showed a love for God, but it was never meant to show love for God to the exclusion of love for neighbour.  The law itself—and this is what Jesus is getting at—had provisions.  If your child fell in a well on the sabbath, the Lord granted permission to do the work necessary to get him out—because the law also taught the people about the Lord’s love for them.  The Pharisees knew this, but like little children they’d become petty.  Jesus had broken the law.  How dare he show God’s love to a crippled man on the sabbath when he could have asked the man to come back on Monday!  Well, that, and if he was crippled, he must have done something awful to deserve such punishment from God.  Who was Jesus to overturn such a verdict?  This is what they’d made of the law, but this was not how it was supposed to be.  As Jesus warned in the Sermon on the Mount, they’d been given the light, but they’d turned it into darkness.  How would the nations ever see the God of Israel at work in such a people?  How would the nations ever be so amazed that they’d come to give him glory?

I suspect this was a setup meant to trap Jesus.  The man was most likely a beggar who showed up at the door for scraps.  Beggars did that all the time when rich people were having banquets.  But to see what Jesus would do, the host allowed this man to actually slip into the banquet.  And instead of throwing him some scraps and sending him on his way, Jesus welcomed the man into the banquet and healed him.  And they acted shocked and appalled.  But they knew from the beginning that this is what he would do, because it's what he’d been doing throughout his ministry.  It’s what he was known for.  But Jesus, wise as always, turned the tables back on them.

The Pharisees didn’t know what to say, but Jesus launches in to two parables.  The first addresses all the social posturing that went on at these banquets.  Everyone was invited for a reason and ultimately in order for the host to show off the status he had in the world and, hopefully, to elevate himself even higher.  The second parable is today’s Gospel reading and it begins at verses 12-14:

He said also to the man who had invited him, “When you give a dinner or a banquet, do not invite your friends or your brothers or your relatives or rich neighbors, lest they also invite you in return and you be repaid.  But when you give a feast, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind, and you will be blessed, because they cannot repay you.  For you will be repaid at the resurrection of the just.”

 

Jesus strikes at the Pharisees’ source of security.  The resurrection of the dead was one of the key doctrines of the Pharisees.  They knew that when the Messiah came, he would judge the wicked and resurrect the righteous.  And, of course, they were the righteous who would be resurrected.  And here Jesus tells them: “The resurrection you’re sure of—you’re going to miss it if you don’t change—if you don’t repent.  You’re convinced the Lord will reward you for your righteousness, but until you start showing mercy and grace to the poor, to the unclean, and to the outsider, you will never understand true righteousness.  If you want to take part in the coming resurrection of the dead, you need to start bearing fruit that reflects grace.  You need to get your head around the fact that for all your righteousness and law-keeping, you too are sinners.  You won’t be saved from the coming judgement because of your family or your intellect, your law-keeping or your spirituality.  Only those who can humbly acknowledge their sinfulness and who are ready to trust in God’s grace—and are humble and gracious enough to share it with sinners even worse than themselves—only they will be resurrected when the Lord comes.

But Jesus’ fellow dinner guests still don’t get it.  One clueless soul chimes in, cheerfully declaring: “Blessed is everyone who will eat bread in the kingdom of God!”  He doesn’t understand that Jesus is telling him that if he doesn’t repent of his self-righteousness, if he doesn’t humble himself before God, he won’t eat bread in the kingdom of God.  And so Jesus tells a second parable that’s even more vivid and that strikes even harder at the Jews’ source of security.  Look at verses 15-20:

But he said to him, “A man once gave a great banquet and invited many.  And at the time for the banquet he sent his servant to say to those who had been invited, ‘Come, for everything is now ready.’  But they all alike began to make excuses.  The first said to him, ‘I have bought a field, and I must go out and see it.  Please have me excused.’  And another said, ‘I have bought five yoke of oxen, and I go to examine them. Please have me excused.’  And another said, ‘I have married a wife, and therefore I cannot come.’

Remember, again, how important an event like this was in the First Century.  This wasn’t just a matter of putting a roast in the oven and inviting friends to eat and play cards after dinner.  If they call at the last minute to say they can’t make it, you might be disappointed, but you can do it again next week.  A banquet like the one Jesus describes was a major social event.  The guest list was carefully made to everyone’s mutual social advantage.  To top it off, a big banquet was an expensive affair—you couldn’t just postpone it because your guests backed out at the last minute.  And for that matter, as a guest to a banquet like this, backing out was a huge social snub.  For all their excuses, what these guests are really doing is orchestrating a rejection of their host.

What’s interesting is that the man hosting the banquet simply decides to throw all social propriety and the whole hierarchical system of their world out the window.  If the people of his own social class will have nothing to do with him, he’ll have nothing to do with them.  Look at how he responds:

So the servant came and reported these things to his master. Then the master of the house became angry and said to his servant, ‘Go out quickly to the streets and lanes of the city, and bring in the poor and crippled and blind and lame.’  And the servant said, ‘Sir, what you commanded has been done, and still there is room.’  And the master said to the servant, ‘Go out to the highways and hedges and compel people to come in, that my house may be filled.  For I tell you, none of those men who were invited shall taste my banquet.’” (Luke 14:21-24)

When the rich won’t come, he rounds up the poor.  Notice that his servant literally has to bring them or even compel them to come to the banquet.  The poor and crippled and blind and lame knew that they didn’t belong.  When they heard the invitation from the servant, they would have thought it was a joke.  Banquets were all about quid pro quo and tit for tat.  They had nothing to offer this rich man who invited them.  In Israel it should not have been like that, but Israel had become very worldly.  The Pharisees kept the law—at least outwardly—but they’d forgotten it’s heart of love.  And so the rich man sends his servants out to round up these outsiders and to bring them to the banquet to enjoy his gracious hospitality.  The rich man rejects the whole system of patronage and debts and reciprocal favours—none of those who rejected his invitation will ever sit at his table.  Instead, he’s going to share his hospitality with the people who haven’t earned it and can never repay it.

Luke doesn’t tell us how the Pharisees responded or if they even understood, but it’s hard to think that it didn’t sink in on some level.  Everyone in the Jewish world, and especially the Pharisees, were waiting for the Lord’s return.  The prophets had talked about that great day in terms of a great banquet and this banquet idea then became a common image of the coming Day of the Lord.  Israel’s God would return to judge and to cast down the nations (and the unfaithful within Israel) and then would throw a great feast for his beloved people.  The closest things they had to describe it was their entry into the promised land, the land of milk and honey, and the prosperous days of King David.  It would be like that, only a thousand times more so.  And now Jesus explains that he’s come to open the door to that great banquet.  This is what Israel has been waiting for all these years.  And yet Jesus rebukes them.  This isn’t the first time the Lord has extended his invitation.  For centuries he had called to his people through the prophets, but they had refused to hear the prophets and had even killed some of them.  And now Jesus has come and he’s travelled through Galilee and Judea, inviting everyone to the banquet, but like the people in the parable, they all have excuses.

It’s worth noting the excuses given in the parable.  One man says that he’s bought five yoke of oxen sight-unseen and has to check them over.  Another has bought a field sight-unseen and needs to go have a look at it.  The third just got married and has obligations to his new bride.  The first two excuses peg these men as very wealthy.  Five yoke of oxen would only be needed to plough a very large tract of land.  A wealthy absentee landlord was the sort of person who would buy a field without first seeing it.  But all three of these excuses go back to the law given in Deuteronomy.  A man who had built a new house, but hadn’t dedicated it yet, a man who had bought a field, but hadn’t enjoyed its produce, and a newly married man were all excused from going off to war.  And now these guests twist those laws as excuses to reject their host’s banquet.  But this is what Israel had done with the law: twisting it into something it was never meant to be.  And it’s that twisting of the law that was particularly exemplified in the Pharisees.  Jesus didn’t meet their expectations of the Messiah.  His banquet included too many sinners, unclean people, and outsiders.  They had gutted the torah of its loving heart.  And so they rejected the invitation.  And in response Jesus issues a warning here: If you continue to reject my invitation I will turn from you and take my invitation to the unclean and to the sick and to the poor—and even to the gentiles—and having rejected me, you will never taste of my goodness or of the salvation I’ve brought to the world.

But the parable, I think, has another level of meaning.  Imagine Luke writing a generation later.  Even if greater Israel had rejected Jesus’ invitation, thousands of Jews had accepted it.  The first Christians were all Jews, and then an amazing thing happened: the Good News went out to the hated Samaritans—and many of them accepted the invitation.  And then it went out to the Gentiles—and thousands of them accepted it too.  And suddenly those first Jewish Christians were in a situation very much like the Pharisees had been.  They were Jews.  They were the chosen.  They were the clean people.  They were the righteous and holy people.  Even an apostle like Peter struggled to go and pray with a gentile convert.  It’s a reminder that even we who have received the grace of God, are still prone to forgetting that we come to his Table not because of our own merit, but only because of Jesus and only because of grace.  We need to remember that grace when we’re tempted to think that there are people who don’t belong here.  Brothers and sisters, none of us belongs here.  We’re only here because God is gracious and sent his Son to die and rise from the dead for our sake.  Through Jesus, the God of Israel reaches out to everyone with his promise of forgiveness and redemption and the life of the age to come if we will only repent and believe and take up his way of love and light.

But this now takes us back to Jesus’ call in verses 12-14: “When you give a dinner…do not invite your friends…lest they also invite you in return and you be repaid.  But when you give a feast, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind, and you will be blessed, because they cannot repay you.  For you will be repaid at the resurrection of the just.”  Dear friends—St. John would say, “Little children”—as you come to the Lord’s Table this morning, think on the fact that he has invited us here from the highways and hedges.  We didn’t belong here, but Jesus has washed us clean and grafted us into his family as adopted sons and daughters.  Because of him, because of his loving sacrifice for us, we do belong.  But having been invited, he now calls us to be hosts ourselves.  Lest we forget.  Lest we think that we’ve earned our place here at the Table.  Lest we ever think that others don’t belong, Jesus now calls us to go out to the highways and the hedges—to go to the place we may have forgotten where he once found us.  He calls us to look for the poor, the unclean, and sinners, not to condemn them, but to invite them to the Lord’s banquet—to invite them to receive the grace of God just as we have.  To invite them to come and be forgiven, healed, set free, and washed clean by Jesus.  Here he shows us what true love looks like, the love that he has shown us in giving his own life on the cross, and now he sends us out to live and to share and to show that same love in the power of his Spirit.

Let us pray: Father, you delight to show mercy to sinners and you graciously sent your Son to suffer the punishment we deserve.  We have received your grace and have been given new life.  Remind us to set aside all thoughts of self-righteousness.  Give us opportunities now to share your mercy and grace with others, give us eyes to see those opportunities, and a love for sinners that we might never let those opportunities pass us by.  We ask this through Jesus Christ our Lord.  Amen.

Feast of St. Barnabas: You Are My Friends

Acts 11:22-30 & St. John 15:12-16

by William Klock

Today the usual scripture lessons for the Second Sunday after Trinity gets bumped as the Church commemorates St. Barnabas.  Most of what we know about St. Barnabas is found in the book of Acts, although Paul mentions him in some of his epistles.  We know that his given name was Joseph, that he was a Levite, and that his family came from the island of Cyprus.  For centuries Jews had been scattered all over the known world—we call that the Jewish Diaspora—and Barnabas was part of that.  “Barnabas” was what the other apostles called him and it means something like “son of exhortation” or “son of consolation”.  The word can refer to encouragement and exhortation, but it can also refer to comfort and consolation and in some way Barnabas was characterised by this—obviously enough that that’s what the others named him.  I take that to mean he was a great preacher and that he was probably also very caring in the way he ministered the gospel and the grace of God to others.

And, I guess it should be obvious from the fact that the feast refers to him as St. Barnabas the Apostle that he was an apostle.  I don’t think I’ve ever preached on what it means to be an apostle.  But since there are plenty of folks running around today claiming to be apostles, I think it’s worth taking a minute to define what makes an apostle.  It’s a little difficult, because the New Testament uses the word and title in quite a few different ways.  The word itself simply refers to someone who is sent by another.  The Church Father, Origin, gives the basic definition: “Everyone who is sent by someone is an apostle of the one who sent him.”[1]  In the civil sphere it could refer to all sorts of representatives: envoys, ambassadors, and people like that.  And in the Bible, an apostle is a messenger—it could be a human being or it could be an angel—sent by God—and that includes Jesus—to deliver a message or to proclaim the gospel.  In the very broadest biblical sense of the word, we are all apostles.  But the New Testament also uses “apostle” in a narrower sense, which is usually how we think of it.   The problem of false apostles goes all the way back to the days of the early church, so we see the actual apostles, the ones who had lived with and been sent by Jesus himself, hammering out a definition in Acts.  In Acts 1:21-22 they defined an apostle as “one of the men who have accompanied us during all the time that the Lord Jesus went in and out among us, beginning from the baptism of John until the day when he was taken up from us.”  They especially emphasized that the apostles were witnesses of the resurrected Jesus.  In 2 Corinthians, Paul adds that the real apostles were known by “the signs of an apostles”, which meant “signs and miracles and wondrous deeds”.  And Peter stresses that the duty of the apostles was to teach the words of the prophets and of Jesus to the churches.  That first part is why Paul, at least at first, was seen as an outsider by the other apostles—and, of course, it didn’t help that he’d been one of their greatest enemies before he met Jesus.  Paul hadn’t walked with Jesus during his ministry, but because of his encounter with Jesus on the road to Damascus, he was an eyewitness to the resurrection and he was commissioned and sent by the Lord just as the others were.  But that was a unique situation for Paul.  Barnabas was not one of the twelve, but Jesus had many other disciples.  Tradition says that Barnabas was one of the seventy that Jesus sent out earlier in his ministry and that made him a bona fide apostle.  So if you meet someone and he (or she) tells you that he’s an apostle, you can say, “Awesome!  So am I!”  And if he tries to tell you that it’s something else, that he’s got special authority that other Christians don’t have, or if he says that he speaks for the Lord in a way other Christians don’t, well, I’d probably run away—because no one alive today is going to have those credentials.  My observation is that most folks making this claim today, make it because they’re preaching false gospels and false doctrines.  If you’re preaching the Bible, that’s all the authority you need, but these folks are preaching something else and so they claim to be apostles teaching new revelations from God.  Run away from anyone who does that.

So our Epistle today, from Acts 11, tells us that Barnabas was a member of the Jerusalem church.  And Luke writes that after the martyrdom of Stephen, a number of people from the church there were in fear of their lives and ran off—some as far away as Phoenicia, Cyprus, and Antioch in Syria—where they began proclaiming the gospel amongst the Jews of those places.  Some of those who heard and believed in Antioch were what Luke calls “Hellenists”—Greek-speaking Jews of the Diaspora, people like Barnabas.  When the apostles in Jerusalem heard this, they naturally sent Barnabas to Antioch to be their representative and to give leadership to the churches that were starting to form there.  And verses 23-24 say:

When he came and saw the grace of God, he was glad, and he exhorted them all to remain faithful to the Lord with steadfast purpose, for he was a good man, full of the Holy Spirit and of faith. And a great many people were added to the Lord.

 

It fits right in with his nickname, “son of exhortation”.  He came to a group of new believers, many of them believing but struggling as new believers often do, and he exhorted them.  Luke says he was a good man, but first and foremost, Barnabas ministered to these brothers and sisters in the power of the Spirit and, empowered by the Spirit, the gospel did what it always does: it brought many to the Lord.

And it would seem that many of those people were Gentiles.  That posed a problem for the early church.  They were Jews.  Jesus was their Messiah.  He’d come to announce coming judgement on faithless Israel, to deliver those who would follow him, and to create a new Israel.   So Jesus and the gospel were very much part of their story.  Jesus changed everything.  But there was still a lot that was the same.  Even though this new people gathered to worship on Sundays, they continued to gather with the synagogues and to visit the temple.  They kept the torah: they circumcised their children, they observed the Sabbath, they watched what they ate.  And if there were any Gentiles—and there were some, but not very many, and most of them were pretty keen on the torah already—they expected those Gentiles to be converts to Judaism if they were going to follow Jesus.  But as more and more Gentiles heard the message, as those first Jewish believers saw the promises spoken by the prophets beginning to come true—as Gentiles saw that God was with them, took hold of them, and followed them back to their meeting places to give glory to the God of Israel—well, it started raising questions.  Did Gentiles really need to be good Jews to be good followers of Jesus?  Did they have to be circumcised?  Did they have to keep the Sabbath and watch the things they ate?  These kinds of questions confronted that growing community in Syrian Antioch—and they confronted Barnabas.  And then, Luke says, Barnabas thought of his old friend Saul, who was in Tarsus.  Tarsus was just around the northeast corner of the Mediterranean from Antioch.  It wasn’t an easy journey overland, but it was a quick trip by ship.  Luke doesn’t give us all the details, but I suspect that when the two of them had been together in the past, Barnabas had listened as Saul spoke out loud, working through this very problem of the inclusion of Gentiles in the covenant community.

You see, if we go back to Acts 9, we read about Saul’s encounter with Jesus on the road to Damascus and his coming to faith.  At first the Christians were afraid of him, because they’d heard how he had persecuted the church in Jerusalem, wreaking havoc amongst those who invoked the name of Jesus.  But then he began preaching there and the Christians loved him, but he was preaching the good news about Jesus in the synagogues and, Luke says, giving proof that Jesus really was the Messiah, so then the non-believing Jews became afraid of him and hatched a plot to kill him.  But the secret got out, Saul’s friends heard about it, and lowered him over the wall in a basket at night.  At that point, Saul decided to go to Jerusalem to join the disciples—the Twelve.  But they wanted nothing to do with Saul and didn’t believe his story.  This was the man that stood by supervising the stoning of Stephen.  This was the man who arrested their brothers and sisters and had them dragged before the Jewish authorities to be put to death.  But Barnabas believed.  It sounds as though Barnabas had heard confirming reports of what Saul had been doing in Damascus.  And so after the other disciples had driven Saul away, Barnabas went after him, brought him back to the others, and pleaded his case, telling them how Saul had met the risen Jesus on the road to Damascus and telling them of the reports of his powerful preaching of the gospel there.  And the others believed, they received Saul, and pretty soon he was boldly preaching Jesus in Jerusalem.

So Barnabas travelled to Tarsus and set out to look for Saul, and when he found him, he took him back to Antioch.  And for a whole year, Luke says, Barnabas and Saul met with the church there and taught the people.  And Luke gives an interesting little side note, that this is when and where Jesus’ disciples were first called Christians—or you could say, “Messianists”, since Christ isn’t Jesus’ name, it’s his title, the Greek way of saying “Messiah”.  It shows that the good news was getting around, and whether people really believed or not that Jesus was actually the Messiah, they knew that that’s what these “Christians” believed, and that’s what they called them: followers of the Messiah.

Saul—whom we usually refer to by his Greek name, but we don’t see that in Acts until he and Barnabas are sent off on their first joint missionary journey—but Saul or Paul gets all of our attention.  That’s for good reason.  But without Barnabas acting as his advocate, we may never have heard anything about Paul.  He wasn’t just the “son of exhortation” to the saints at Jerusalem, but he was the “son of exhortation” for Paul when he was rejected by the other apostles, and he was the “son of exhortation” when he went to Tarsus to find the very man whom he knew would have the solution to this problem of the Gentiles.  And he was surely the “son of exhortation” when, with Paul, he took up a generous collection from amongst the saints in Antioch, so that the two of them could deliver it to Jerusalem for the relief of the church there, when they were hit by the prophesied famine.

Now let’s look at our Gospel today.  I cam across something interesting when I was researching why our lectionary gives us our Epistle and Gospel today.  The Gospel is about love and I thought that was interesting.  We often talk about St. John as the apostle of love, because he’s the one who so stressed Jesus’ theme of love in his Gospel and in the epistles he wrote.  Today’s Gospel might seem more appropriate for his feast day.  But our Gospel today, John 15:12-16, was originally, back in the middle ages, what’s called a “common Gospel”.  In this case, it was a common Gospel lesson appointed to be read on the feast of any apostle for which there wasn’t some other Gospel lesson appointed.  And while, gradually and through the years, various other Gospels were appointed to be read on the feasts of the other apostles, this common Gospel about love stuck to St. Barnabas and his feast day.  And while we don’t know very much about him, it fits.  It fits with what we know of his defense of Paul, it fits with what we know of his care for his poor and struggling brothers and sisters, and it fits with the nickname the other apostles gave him: “son of exhortation”.

Let’s look at that short Gospel again.  It’s John 15:12-16, part of the long discourse that Jesus spoke to his friends after the Last Supper, before he was arrested and taken off to be crucified.  Here’s what Jesus said to them:

This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.  Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends.  You are my friends if you do what I command you.  No longer do I call you servants, for the servant does not know what his master is doing; but I have called you friends, for all that I have heard from my Father I have made known to you.  You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you that you should go and bear fruit and that your fruit should abide, so that whatever you ask the Father in my name, he may give it to you.

 

I have to think that these words—and so many others like them—that Jesus spoke to his disciples were running around the head of Barnabas all the time.  “This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.”  You and I might just hear in that that Jesus is give us something to do—another commandment that we didn’t have before.  But “commandment” said something very clear to anyone who was Jewish.  “Commandment” pointed them straight to torah, to the law.  The torah was full of commandments.  Thou shalts and thou shalt nots, over and over and over.  And you’ll remember that that law was about showing the people of Israel how to live as the Lord’s covenant people.  He had called them, he had delivered them from Pharoah’s bondage, he had brought them through the Red Sea, and at Mt. Sinai he gave them his law.  The law was the covenant charter.  The Lord promised to be their God and he promised to give them the promised land and to be with them and to make them fruitful and to multiply them in that land.  And, for their part, they promised to be his people, to worship him and him alone, and to be a light to the nations—to show everyone what it was to live in the presence of our Creator.  And the law was what set them apart from everyone else in the world: initiating them into the covenant by circumcision, reminding them of the covenant in the Passover, showing them how to be holy, and giving them instructions for making things right with their God after those times they would break his commandments.  The law was their way of life as the Lord’s people.  And Jesus’ disciples were all steeped in it.  It defined them as a people.

And now, as he’s about to give his life for theirs, he says to them, “This is my commandment…”  He’s repeating what he told them two chapters earlier at the start of his discourse, those words that we read every year on Maundy Thursday, “I give you a new commandment—that you love one another.”  Those words, “I give you a new commandment” would have got the attention of Jesus’ disciples.  If anyone else had spoken those words, it would have been tantamount to blasphemy.  A “new” commandment?  Impossible.  The Lord had given his law through Moses and he gave it carved on stone to make a point that it was to stand unchanged, unchanging, and forever.  For Jesus to say that he was giving them a new commandment was like saying that he was giving them a new law—as if I stood here and announced that I’m giving you a new book to add to your Bibles.

But then what Jesus said: “love one another as I have loved you”—that, without the “as I have loved you” part, that was already in the law.  “You shall love your neighbour as yourself: I am the Lord,” said Leviticus.  So, on the one hand, this was just kind of reiterating what they already knew to be in the law, but the way Jesus said it—the part of about giving a new commandment—that sounds like Jesus was giving a new law.  And that’s just what he was doing.  It’s where the torah was pointing all along, but now that love becomes the great theme.  As William Cowper wrote in that great hymn we sometimes sing: “Redeeming love has been my theme and shall be ’til I die”.  The law is, at the same time, the same and profoundly different and new and all because of Jesus.  It’s that “as I have loved you” part.  The disciples wouldn’t have understood quite yet, but they would soon.  Jesus hints at it.  “Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends.”  We have often taken this verse out of context.  There are times when giving your life for the sake of your friends—or your enemies—is the ultimate demonstration of love, but Jesus wasn’t talking here about just anyone giving his life for his friends.  He was talking very specifically about the sacrifice that he was about to make, the sacrifice that would literally change everything and the sacrifice that would become the cornerstone of this new commandment.

Think about the old law.  We sum it up every Sunday in the words of Jesus: Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength, and your neighbour as yourself.  And there are parts of the law, torah, that are easy to understand in light of that.  If you love your neighbour, you don’t steal his stuff, you don’t tell lies about him, you don’t kill him, you don’t move the boundary markers of his property, you don’t speak harshly to him.  But there are a lot of things in the law that don’t translate nearly so easily.  There were some things in the law that God’s people just had to do in obedience, trusting that it made sense—that somehow it equated to either “Love God” or “Love your neighbour”.  Under the old covenant, Jesus says, these men were like servants.  They did what their Lord told them to do, even when they didn’t understand or it didn’t make sense.  But Jesus says that those days are over.  He calls them his friends, not his servants, and he tells them that—well, first, because he’s going to die for them as a demonstration of just how much he loves them as friends, but also because his death and resurrection will establish a new covenant and it will be like the sun has risen and driven away every shadow like the light of the sun at noon, because of that everything about this new covenant will make perfect sense in light of what Jesus has done.  If someone just tells you to love your neighbour, that leaves all sorts of questions.  What about this situation or that situation?  What if your neighbour is annoying?  What if your neighbour does something to offend you?  What if your neighbour sins against you?  What if loving your neighbour means you come up short-handed or hurt?  And, of course that ever-present question: Who am I obligated to consider or to treat as a neighbour?  But Brothers and Sisters, when the cross of Jesus stands before us at the centre of this new covenant, every one of those questions fades away and the answer stands out clear and bright as day.  At the cross Jesus has shown us what love looks like.  If we love like Jesus, it doesn’t matter if your neighbour is annoying, if he sins against you, or even if loving him means coming up short yourself.  Jesus gave his life.  That’s love.  Period.  And that Jesus-like love is the law of the new covenant.  It’s what shapes the life of us, this new covenant people.  It’s the fruit we bear.

Of course, this new law of love is overwhelming.  The disciples didn’t yet understand.  Today’s Gospel tells us what the new law is and that the cross of Jesus is the lens through which we understand it, and it’s his cross—his death for us—that motivates our love for him and for each other.  But if this is all we have from Jesus, the new covenant people will fail at this new law as miserably as the old covenant people failed at keeping the old law.  So it’s providential that we remember St. Barnabas and celebrate his feast day so close to Pentecost.  Our Gospel today comes from the same discourse we’ve been reading throughout Easter and Ascensiontide in preparation for Pentecost and so we can’t read today’s Gospel without also remembering Jesus’ promise and gift of God’s own Spirit to indwell his people.  When we hear his commandment to love each other unconditionally and to the uttermost end it sounds impossible.  And then we see his own sacrifice for us at the cross and our hearts well up with gratitude and we know that what he deserves from us in return is that same kind of love—for him and for each other.  And we want to love that way.  But on our own—even as our hearts well up with gratitude for what he’s done for us—we can only get so far, because the cost is too great or because that person or this person is just too much or too hard.  Brothers and Sisters, that’s when the Spirit does his work.  He transforms our affections so that our hearts well up not only with our own gratitude for what Jesus has done for us, but our hearts also well up and overflow with the very love of God.  We see that love in Barnbas.  He risked everything for the sake of his Lord, Jesus, and to proclaim the good news of the cross and the resurrection.  He new that it might cost him everything to come to the defense of Saul, whom his friends had unanimously rejected.  And we see the love of Jesus, implanted in him by the Spirit, as he worked for the relief of his brother and sister saints when they were starving.  It was an act of love that demonstrated the unity of God’s people, the gentiles and the hellenised Jews, giving generously from what they had, to provide for the Jewish believers in Jerusalem.  And we also see that love—love for Jesus and love for neighbour, as he set off, first with Paul and later with John Mark—those are wonderful stories in themselves, but they’ll have to wait for another time—but in them we see again a love that only the cross of Jesus can motivate and that only the Spirit can keep alive, a love that risks everything for the sake of Jesus.  Brothers and Sisters, that the same love we know ourselves, the same love we’re reminded of when we come to the Lord’s Table to participate in the great events of our salvation, the same love that the Spirit has poured into our hearts just as he did Barnabas.  So go forth to love and serve the Lord, my friends, and as you do so, let St. Barnabas the Apostle be a reminder of just what that looks like.

Let’s pray: O Lord God Almighty, who endowed your holy apostle Saint Barnabas with special gifts of the Holy Spirit: Do not leave us destitute of your many gifts, nor of grace always to use them to your honour and glory, through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.  Amen.

[1] Jo. 32.17, ed. Preuschen 1903: 453, 17

Trinity Sunday: Born of Water and the Spirit

St. John 3:1-17

by William Klock

Years ago in my life as a computer tech, I made a house-call to the home of an elderly couple whose children had signed them up for Internet service as a Christmas present.  I went out to get this couple set up with a modem and all the software they’d need to get online and to communicate with their family.  I quickly set everything up and then had the woman sit down next to me so that I could show her how everything worked.  I clicked on the “Connect” button and we listened as the modem made those familiar touch-tone dialling sounds, connecting to the Internet service provider.  But then the modem on the other end picked up and this woman, startled, jumped out of her seat when loud noises started emitting from the modem.  You remember those noises.  Static and beeps and bwongs and more static and more beeps and bwongs until the connection was made.  It was so normal to me that it didn’t occur to me to warn her that the modem was about to make some funny noises.  She thought something was broken or that the modem or the computer was about to catch on fire.

So I had to explain the concept of network “handshaking”.  When your modem connects to another modem over the phone lines, they send signals back and forth until they find something that works for them—something that’s sort of mutually intelligible and reliable.  Sometimes you might have an old, slow modem.  Sometimes—maybe if you dial up at a busy time of day—instead of getting one of the ISP’s fancy new modems, you get one of the old, slow, back-up ones.  And sometimes—especially back in those days—it could be hard to get a good line with a clear signal.  So the two modems send packets of data back and forth and check with each other to make sure that what’s received on one end matches what was sent on the other.  And when ideal, it happens quickly and the data might go back and forth at high speed, and other times—those times when the static and the beeps and the bwongs go on and on and on—the line might not be so good and the data’s getting corrupted or your modem is slower than the one on the other end and it keeps having to negotiate downward to a slower speed until it finally finds one that your modem and the line can handle.

She sat there for a minutes and then turned to me and said, “That sounds like God trying to talk to me.  He tries to tell me something and I’m too slow or too thick to understand or too stuck in my own way to obey.  Sometimes he calls back later.  Sometimes he just keeps telling me until he’s dumbed it down to the point that I can finally understand it.  But he doesn’t give.  Everything he has to say is important and he always makes sure I get the message, even if it takes a long time.”  I kind of laughed and said, “Yes, something like that.”  What I was thinking was, “You and me both, Lady.  You and me both.”  Do you ever feel like that?  I know the Lord does.  He’s been feeling like that since he created the human race.  But it must be especially frustrating when your own people are blind or dumb or confused or just plain obstinate and don’t get the message.  Thankfully our God is patient—and we see that too, all the way through the story of God and humanity.

In today’s Gospel we read about the encounter between Jesus and Nicodemus.  It’s an interesting scripture lesson to have on Trinity Sunday and that’s because long before Trinity Sunday was Trinity Sunday, it was simply the Sunday after Pentecost.  Usually our major feast days like Christmas and Easter, Ascension and Pentecost have lessons that focus on the events we’re remembering, but there’s usually a Sunday before or after where the lessons then explain the significance of those events.  So our lessons today originally did that for the feast of Pentecost.  But when Trinity Sunday came along no one changed the lessons, because here we see the Trinity revealed in the exchange between Jesus and Nicodemus, we see the Trinity revealed as Israel’s story reaches its climax in Jesus and as the Spirit is poured out on God’s people.  Really, our readings from John’s Gospel through Easter and Ascensiontide keep pointing us to this.  Over and over we hear Jesus explaining to his disciples that the Father has sent him to set his people to rights, but that that’s not all there is to it.  Jesus also tells them that he can’t stay with them forever.  First, the Father has sent him to give his life to make his people new, but even after he’s been raised from the dead, second, he still has to go—to return to the Father, so that the very Spirit of the Father, of the God of Israel can be sent to make real in his people the new life, the new covenant that has been established by the death and resurrection of Jesus, his Son.

And, of course, as we read in the lessons from John, everyone was confused by the things Jesus said.  Which, of course, highlights just how much they needed the Spirit and that highlights why it was so important that Jesus leave them so that he could send the Spirit.  In Jesus the new Israel was born and our Gospel today sort of bridges the gap between the old Israel at Mt. Sinai and the new Israel at Pentecost.  Everyone kind of had a sense that the Lord was working through Jesus, even if they didn’t really understand it completely.  At the very least, everyone could see as they watched the things Jesus did and listened to the things he said, that he had come from and was acting on behalf of the God of Israel.  There was no question about it.  Some people were thrilled.  Some even believed.  Others got angry.  And that was true even of the leaders of Israel.  And so, we read, Nicodemus came to Jesus.

John says that Nicodemus was both a Pharisee and a ruler of the Jews and since elsewhere John distinguishes between these two terms, we can conclude that Nicodemus was a member of the part of the Pharisees and that he was also probably a member of the Sanhedrin, the governing council of the Jews.  He was a very important person.  And John says he came to Jesus at night.  I used to think this was probably because Nicodemus, as a leading figure amongst the Jews, was afraid to be seen visiting Jesus by day, but as the years have gone by and I’ve read John’s Gospel over and over and over, I’ve noticed that John otherwise portrays Nicodemus as a very brave character.  In Chapter 7 we see him standing up to the chief priests and Pharisees when they wanted to arrest Jesus.  He reminded them that the law required them to give Jesus a fair hearing and in return he was accused of having become one of Jesus’ disciples.  Nicodemus very bravely exposed the irony of the leaders of Israel.  They were zealous for the law, but they failed to follow it—or at least they were happy to ignore it—when it wasn’t inconvenient.  And then in Chapter 19, in contrast to the disciples who had fled and gone into hiding out of fear that the authorities would come for them next, Nicodemus made a point of bringing a large quantity of expensive spices for the anointing of Jesus’ body.  These aren’t the actions of someone who was afraid of being seen with or associated with Jesus.  I think it’s more likely he came to see Jesus as night, because it was the only chance he had to visit Jesus when he wasn’t being overwhelmed by the crowds.  Nicodemus had some important questions to ask and he wanted to hear the answers—and as a leader of the people, he had the privilege of coming to Jesus “after hours” so to speak, of having a private audience.

So John says that he came to see Jesus that night.  He’d been watching and listening to Jesus.  He saw that the God of Israel was clearly at work in and through Jesus, it was just that—like most everyone else in Israel—he struggled to reconcile what Jesus was doing and saying with the expectations they all had of the Messiah.   So he asks Jesus, “Rabbi, we know that you’re a teacher who’s come from God.  No one could do these signs you’re doing unless God is with him.”

Nicodemus knew the story.  He knew the God of Israel.  But he knew there was more to it.  As he’d watched and listened to Jesus he’d figured that out.  Jesus was talking about the Lord doing another great work, of the Lord leading his people in another exodus, this time more significant than the last one from Egypt.  And he warned about a judgement soon to come on those who refused to repent of their old ways and to get in line with the Lord’s plans.  It didn’t fit into the expectations of the people of Israel and especially not into what the Pharisees expected, but there had to be something to it, because the Lord was so clearly with Jesus.

And Jesus picks up on the question implied in Nicodemus’ statement.  He says, “The central truth you’re missing, Nicodemus, is that you’ve got to be born again to see the kingdom of God.”  Nicodemus understood so much.  If anyone wanted to see God’s will done and his kingdom come on earth as in heaven it was the Pharisees.  That’s what they lived for.  And Nicodemus saw it in Jesus, but Jesus wasn’t preaching what the Pharisees were preaching.  Nicodemus didn’t understand.  Like one modem trying over and over to talk to another modem and just not making the connection, he struggled to reconcile his expectations with what Jesus was saying.  And Jesus says that what he’s missing, what he needs to make the connection is this new birth, this being born again.  And it’s important to understand that as much as Jesus is saying, “You, Nicodemus, must be born again—which is how the ears of modern Christians have been trained to hear this in individualistic terms—Jesus’ stress is on Israel, on the whole people.  In verse 7 he says, “Do not marvel that I said to you, ‘You must be born again.’”  When he says “You must be born again,” that’s plural, it’s “you all must be born again”.  Israel as a people had been born the first time when they passed through the waters of the Red Sea and Jesus is saying that now Israel had to be born a second time.  This is why John was out in the wilderness baptizing in the Jordan, but that wasn’t all.  Israel had been baptised in water before and it wasn’t enough.  Now they needed to be baptised in both water and the Spirit.  The Spirit would finally make the connection.  As Jesus had said over and over in various ways, he, Jesus, was sent by the Father, but that it would be the Spirit—the “Helper”—who would come after, who would testify to them about this truth and then that through them, this Spirit would testify to the rest of Israel and even to the nations…fulfilling the prophets, effectively creating a new Israel, and through this new people, fulfilling the mission the Lord had given to them from the beginning: to fill the world with the knowledge of him as the waters cover the sea and to testify to the nations in such a way that the nations would flock to the God of Israel to give him glory.

But Nicodemus didn’t get it.  And part of that was because the Spirit had not yet come to testify about Jesus.  So he asked Jesus, “How can I be born again?  I know you’re not talking about returning to my mother’s womb, but what do you mean?  A person is only born once.”  And as he answers Nicodemus, this is where Jesus switches from saying things like “Unless one is born again” to “Unless you—all of you—are born again”.  Because it’s not so much about one person being born again or even about a whole bunch of individuals being born again.  It’s about Israel as a people being born again so that she could be put back on track to fulfil her mission—the one given to Abraham almost two thousand years before.  And this idea of birth would have resonated particularly with someone like Nicodemus, because to be a Jew was all about being born as part of Abraham’s family.  Other things like circumcision and what you ate (or didn’t eat) were important and especially so for the Pharisees, but those things were important because they identified you as part of Abraham’s family.  They also drew a clear boundary between those who were in the family and all the uncircumcised, unclean gentiles were most definitely not.

What Jesus is saying now is that being born into Abraham’s family in the way the Jews had been thinking about it all this time wasn’t enough.  In fact, it never had been enough.  And Nicodemus should have known this.  For two millennia people were being born into Abraham’s family and God’s kingdom still hadn’t come.  For two millennia people were born into Abraham’s family and still the Gentiles hadn’t experienced the Lord’s blessing through them, at least not on the large scale envisioned in the Scriptures.  Just the opposite.  Zechariah had spoken of a day when the Gentiles would be grabbing hold of Jews by their coattails saying, “Take us with you, because we hear that God is with you!”  Instead, because of the way most of Abraham’s children were living, the nations mocked them and taunted them saying, “Where’s your God now?”  It takes more than being born of the flesh of Abraham.  It even takes more than being born of water, as Israel had been in the Red Sea.  And as a man devoted to the law, to torah, Nicodemus should have understood this.  The Pharisees were all about exhorting their fellow Jews to be better keepers of the law, but it wasn’t working.  They of all people should have been looking forward to the day when the law would no longer be written on tablets of stone, but engraved on the very hearts of the people by the Holy Spirit.

So Jesus says to Nicodemus, “Truly, truly, unless you’re born of water and the Spirit you cannot enter God’s kingdom.  Flesh gives birth to flesh, but the Spirit gives birth to spirit.”  Israel needs something more than a biological inheritance.  What does Jesus mean, though, when he talks about being born of water and the Spirit?  This is was what John the Baptist was preaching about.  God was about to lead his people in a new exodus.  As Israel had been led through the waters of the Red Sea to become a covenant family, so John was calling people to pass through the waters of the Jordan—a step of repentance and faith—and into a new covenant.  They all needed that baptism of repentance.  They needed to turn aside from their own misguided expectations of the kingdom and of the Messiah and from their failures to be faithful to the Lord and his covenant.  But remember what John promised.  When people asked if he was the Messiah he said that he was only the forerunner.  John said, “I baptise you with water, but he will plunge you into the Holy Spirit.”  And that’s just what Jesus does.  As we recalled last week on Pentecost, Jesus takes those who have repented, who have turned aside from every false lord, from every false god, from every false source of security in order to take hold of him in faith by passing through the waters of baptism and he plunges us into the Holy Spirit.  And it’s the Spirit who does the work of transforming us.  It’s the Spirit who regenerates us.  It’s the Spirit who causes us to be born again as he takes our old dead wood and unites it to the life of Jesus, causing us to bear fruit.  And it’s the Spirit who finally makes that connection between God and us.  Without the Spirit we’re sort of like modems perpetually beeping and bwonging and never quite connecting, but then the Spirit comes to us and testifies about Jesus and the Father and it clicks, it comes into focus, it connects.

In our baptism we’re back at the Red Sea.  There was the parted sea and God calling Israel to pass through to freedom and new life on the other side.  There was no receiving of the law in Egypt; they had to cross to the other side of the sea to find covenant with the Lord.  And so we stand at the waters of baptism today.  In them Jesus gives his promise: Repent, turn aside from every false way, trust me, follow me in faith and you will find forgiveness of sins and new life through the Spirit.  To pass through the waters of baptism is to take hold of Jesus’ promise and to be born again of water and the Spirit—and to made part of this new covenant people ready and equipped to live and to proclaim his kingdom.

But, again, this didn’t fit what Nicodemus knew.  “How can this be so?” he asks.  And Jesus asks a bit incredulously, “How can you not know this?  You’re one of the teachers of Israel!”  Nicodemus knew the story.  He understood how Israel had so miserably failed in her mission.  As a Pharisee he was abundantly aware of this problem.  Jesus tells Nicodemus: God has heard your cries and is visiting his people and he’s doing it in me.  I’m the son of man, the one spoken of by Daniel all those years ago.  I can tell you reliably the things of heaven because I’m the one who has come down from heaven.

At this point, I think, all this started to connect with Nicodemus.  He started to understand, because now Jesus really starts to correct what was wrong with Israel’s thinking about herself, about what it meant to be God’s people, and about what it would mean for the Lord to come to deliver them.  Jesus reminds Nicodemus of an event from Israel’s time in the wilderness.  The Israelites grumbled against Moses—which was ultimately grumbling against the Lord—and so he sent poisonous snakes into the camp.  They bit people and many of those who were bit died.  But the Lord also gave Moses the remedy.  He told Moses to cast a snake out of bronze and to mount it on a pole.  Anyone who would look up to the bronze snake would be healed.

And now Jesus says, “Just as Moses lifted up that snake in the wilderness, so the son of man must be lifted up so that all who believe in him may have eternal life.”  Jesus is pointing to his own crucifixion.  As the snake was the affliction of the people lifted up for them to look at, so Jesus would take the affliction of Israel on himself—he would suffer the punishment for their sins—and be lifted up on the cross.  He would be lifted up for all to look upon—to see the horror and the gravity of their sin, to see that the wages of sin is death.  But they would also see Jesus taking it all on himself and in that, the horror and ugliness of his being raised up would become an act by which he is ultimately glorified.  In the cross we see the love of God made manifest in Jesus.  And Jesus says in the familiar words we all know, “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.  For God sent not his Son into the world to condemn the world; but that the world through him might be saved.”

Jesus corrects the central error in the thinking of Israel in his day.  They were hoping and praying for the day when the Lord would come, not just to vindicate his people, but to judge their enemies—to rain down fire and brimstone on the Romans and all the other gentiles.  But instead Jesus tells Nicodemus that he’s come not to condemn, but to save all who will look to him.  All.  The Jews thought the Lord, when he came, would vindicate them for their faithfulness, but Jesus says to Nicodemus, even the most righteous of you need this new birth, this salvation if you want to know God’s vindication.  And it’s not just for you.  The Jews looked forward to the condemnation he would bring, but Jesus says he’s come not to condemn, but to save.  And this is where the part about being born again of water and the Spirit comes into play.  Being born of water and the Spirit supersedes biology and genealogy.  In Jesus God opens his arms to welcome Jew and Gentile alike.  It was the Jews first, because if the Lord is faithful—and he is—he had to first fulfil his promises to his own people, but most importantly, in that act of faithfulness, the nations would take note of the God of Israel.  In Jesus, the nations would see that the God of Israel is not like the puny, selfish, fickle, and powerless gods they have known, and they would then flock to this God who is truly good and faithful.  Abraham’s family is integral to the story and the plan, but Jesus reminds us that genes and DNA were never really what made anyone part of Abraham’s family; it was about faith.  It was faith for Abraham himself and it was faith in God’s promises for all who followed after: for Isaac and Jacob, for Joseph and Moses and Joshua, for gentiles like Rahab and Ruth, and even for the great kings like David and Solomon.  And God’s promise was that through his covenant people, through these people who knew him in faith and were reconciled to him by faith, he would bless the nations.  It happened here and there in the Old Testament.  Rahab and Ruth are two of many small-scale testimonies to that, but here we finally see the Lord’s promise coming to full fruit.  It’s what we celebrated last week on Pentecost as Jesus sent the Holy Spirit on these men of Israel gathered from around the world.  They had heard Peter preach about Jesus and what he’d come to do.  They rallied to Jesus in faith and in response Jesus poured his Spirit into them.  Finally, through Jesus, Israel became the source of blessing she was intended to be—not by flesh, but by the Spirit—as these men and women took the good news to the nations: Jesus is Lord.  He has conquered sin and death.  In him is the forgiveness of sin, in him is life, in him God has returned to his creation as King.  And in him—the Incarnate Word—God makes himself known.  In Jesus, God Incarnate, we have the restoration and fellowship with our Creator that he has been working towards ever since the day we rebelled and were cast out of his presence.  In Jesus, God’s kingdom—his new creation—has been inaugurated, in us and through us in the world.  Brothers and Sisters, we are that people the God of Israel was working to create, to forge, to make new all those millenia.  In Jesus and in us, his people, the promises made to Abraham are being fulfilled and we see that the blessing of God to the nations is for them to know him and to be reconciled to him in Jesus and the power of the Spirit.

Let us pray: Almighty God we praise you this morning for the grace you have shown us.  Even as we rebelled against you, our good Creator, you were setting in motion our redemption: Father sending, calling, electing; Son speaking, coming, dying, rising; and Spirit uniting, renewing, regenerating, empowering.  In the redemption of the world we see the glory of the Trinity and the majesty of the Unity and in gratitude we fall before you with the angels to sing, “Holy, holy, holy Lord God almighty.”  By your grace, keep us strong in faith, O Lord, but keep us also faithful in our witness and our ministry to make your redeeming love known to the world.  We ask this through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord, who lives and reigns together with you and the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever.  Amen.

Whitsunday: The On-Earth-As-In-Heaven People

Acts 2:1-11

by William Klock

Last week as we remembered Jesus’ ascension we read Luke’s account of the risen Jesus and his final days with the disciples.  He writes in Acts 1:

And while staying with them he ordered them not to depart from Jerusalem, but to wait for the promise of the Father, which, he said, “you heard from me; for John baptized with water, but you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit not many days from now.  (Acts 1:4-5)

That was all just fine, but what they really wanted to know was when the kingdom was coming.  For years they’d been asking it in one way or another: When will you bring the kingdom?  When will you take your throne?  When will you set the world to rights?  Are we there yet?  How much further?  And, remember, in answer to their question Jesus ascended, up on the clouds, into heaven, to take up his throne, to rule and to reign.

And as he did that, he commissioned his disciples to do something that I don’t think they expected.  He commissioned them to be his royal heralds, to go out and to proclaim this good news to Jerusalem, to Judea, even to Samaria, and then to the ends of the earth.  Now, this wasn’t the first time Jesus had sent his disciples out to proclaim the kingdom, but when he’d sent them out before, it was to a people who were also asking those “Are we there yet?” questions: When will the Messiah come?  When will the kingdom come?  When will the God of Israel set this broken world to rights?.  And the disciples went out and told the people that in Jesus the Messiah had come and that the kingdom was in sight.  But now Jesus is sending them out to proclaim that in his resurrection and ascension the kingdom has come and that was no small task.  Because even though the disciples had seen their risen Lord and even though they saw him ascend, things weren’t what they or anyone else had expected.  They thought everyone would be resurrected all at once.  They though the Messiah would put down the enemies of God’s people and cast down their empires.  They expected a king like David who would punish evil, wipe away all the problems, and make everything as it should be.  Instead, the wrong people were still in control, evil people still did evil things, so much was still wrong with the world—and yet Jesus had inaugurated something, he really had risen from the dead, and they’d seen him ascend to his throne with their own eyes, so they knew he was truly Lord and that the kingdom had come.  The Lord’s plan was to work through them, to spread the good news and to tell the world that Jesus is Lord, and to grow the kingdom.  That wasn’t what anyone expected, but they should have, because that’s how the Lord had been working in the world ever since he called Abraham out of the land of Ur and set him apart from everyone else, and made him and his family a witness to the world—that one day, through this people, the whole earth would know the Lord and his greatness and his goodness and his faithfulness and come to give him glory.

I wonder if we, too, don’t forget this sometimes.  We might know better deep down, but we kind of assume that the Christian life is, more or less, a personal thing.  We raise our kids in it.  Maybe we talk to a few close people about it.  But we act as if our duty is mostly just to be good, godly people until Jesus comes back and sets everything to rights—as if he’s the one who’s going to make it all happen by doing all the hard work.  Sure, there are some people called to be missionaries who go off to faraway places where they’ve never heard of Jesus, but for most of us, it’s just a personal, individual sort of thing.  Even the dominant eschatology of our day assumes that things will just get worse and worse until Jesus zaps us all out of here and rains down fire and brimstone on this awful, corrupt world.  But that’s never what the story was about and that’s never where it was headed.  The Lord called and created a people to make him known with the expectation that eventually that people—not in their own power, but in his—but that people would really make him known until, as the prophets Isaiah and Habakkuk both said, the knowledge of his glory would cover the earth as the waters cover the sea.

Maybe we forget our part in this kingdom mission because it seems so impossible.  What?  Us?  Grow the kingdom until the knowledge of the glory of the Lord covers the earth?  What?  Us?  Bring the nations to give him glory?  That’s too big for us?  We’ll just be holy over here and wait for Jesus to come back and do the impossible stuff.  And at this point, Jesus’ disciples had no idea just how big and impossible the task was.  Taking the gospel to the gentiles wasn’t even on their radar.  They were still thinking it was a message for Jews.  It would be a few years before the full extent of it even sank in.  And this is why Jesus told his friends to stay in Jerusalem and to wait.  In his resurrection he was vindicated as the Messiah.  In his ascension he took his throne and sent the clear message that the kingdom has come.  But before the disciples could go on with the work of the kingdom, they needed something that God’s people had never had before—at least not in this way.  They needed the power of the Holy Spirit to truly be the new Israel, to carry on the mission the Lord had given to Abraham and Isaac, and to all of Israel: to bless the nations by making him known to them.  Without the Spirit, Jesus’ disciples would have the same problem God’s people had always had and after a time, when the excitement wore off, they would become fickle and faithless and their loyalties would be divided and they would fall into sin and the nations would mock them, this time jeering, “Where’s your Jesus now?”  No, they needed this gift of the indwelling Spirit to set their hearts on God and to write his law of love on their hearts—truly transforming their affections.  And it was this Spirit who would empower them to go out into a hostile world with the good news about Jesus and to live out his love and his grace and his justice, carrying the kingdom to the ends of the earth.  That’s why they had to wait in Jerusalem.

I don’t think they really had any idea what was about to happen.  They didn’t even really understand the full extent of the mission he’d given them.  They were just excited because of his resurrection and his ascension and Luke says that while they waited in Jerusalem that they spent their time in the temple praising and blessing God.  And then comes our Epistle today.  Look at Acts 2.  Luke writes,

When the day of Pentecost arrived…

 

Let’s stop there.  This isn’t an incidental detail.  It’s integral to the story.  As integral as Jesus having been born a Jew.  As integral as his death and resurrection taking place at Passover.  “Pentecost” just means “fiftieth” in Greek.  Greek-speaking Jews gave the festival this name because it fell fifty days after Passover, but its biblical name was the “feast of weeks” and it was connected with the wheat harvest.  It was when the Lord commanded his people to bring him their firstfruits.  That’s the very first part of the harvest.  It was an offering to the Lord and it was an act of faith on their part.  Other peoples brought offerings to their gods after the harvest had been brought in, once they knew what they could spare.  But Israel gave in faith from the very first of the harvest, trusting the Lord to give the rest.  So Pentecost was a feast of expectation and faith.

But Pentecost was also the feast when Israel celebrated the giving of the law, the torah, at Mt. Sinai.  That’s where the significance of “fifty” comes from.  Again, it follows fifty days after Passover and you’ll remember that Passover commemorated Israel’s exodus from Egypt: their slavery, Moses and the Lord’s command to Pharaoh, “Let my people go!”, the plagues, the blood on the doorposts, the sparing of Israel’s firstborn sons, the flight from Egypt, the rescue at the Red Sea.  Passover was a festival of the Lord’s deliverance of his people and it celebrated that great even in which Israel was born as a nation.  And each generation participated in those events anew as they gathered year in and year out in their homes to share the Passover meal.  It marked them out as the Lord’s covenant people.

But that wasn’t the end of the story.  From the Red Sea, the Lord led his people into the wilderness and fifty days later he gave them his law.  He called Moses up to Mt. Sinai and when Moses came back down he brough the law with him, carved on stone tablets.  In the Exodus the Lord had made Israel his people.  At Mt. Sinai he showed them what it meant and what it looked like to be his people.  So at Passover the Jews celebrated their redemption.  At Pentecost they remembered that the Lord had redeemed them for a purpose: to live a new kind of life in order to fulfil his purposes and their calling.

Can you see how this all fits together with the events of the Gospels?  Easter is our Passover, when we remember how, through Jesus, the Lord redeemed us from our bondage to sin and death and made us his people.  And now, on Pentecost—this is our Mt. Sinai.  Let’s continue with Acts 2:

When the day of Pentecost arrived, they were all together in one place.  And suddenly there came from heaven a sound like a mighty rushing wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting.  And divided tongues as of fire appeared to them and rested on each one of them.  And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit gave them utterance.

 

In Exodus we’re given an awesome picture of the holiness of God as his presence descended on the mountain in smoke and fire and thunder, and here the Spirit comes again like a storm, in this mighty rushing wind and fire descends upon his people.  And here Luke tells this new story to parallel the old.  As Moses went up on the mountain to the Lord, so Jesus has ascended into heaven.  And now Luke wants us to understand that Jesus, just as he promised he would, has come back down.  Moses came down with tablets of stone to tell the people how to live as the Lord’s covenant people.  And now Jesus has returned, he’s come down from heaven in the person of the Holy Spirit, to write his law of love on the very hearts of his people.

Don’t misunderstand.  That doesn’t mean that Israel had a harsh and rigid law written on stone and that Jesus’ people just “follow their hearts” or something like that.  There’s a sense in which that’s true, but definitely not in the sense that the world talks about following your heart.  Following our hearts is what has got us into trouble and made a mess of this world, because apart from Jesus and the Spirit our hearts are set on sin and self.  That’s the point here.  The law written on stone showed Israel how to live as God’s holy people, but it couldn’t change the affections of their hearts.  The Spirit, on the other hand, takes away the need for those stone tablets by changing our very hearts, filling them with a love for God and a desire for holiness, and by turning us away from sin and from self.

And notice how the wind and the fire come from heaven.  Through the Spirit the creative and renewing power of the Lord—the very breath that he breathed into humanity to give us life in the first place—it descends on his people to accomplish his work on earth.  Jesus taught his disciples to pray “on earth as it is in heaven” and Pentecost was the firstfruits of an answer to that prayer.  Sometimes Christians treat the presence and gifts of the Holy Spirit as things that raise us up above the world or that make the world irrelevant, but it’s really just the opposite.  The Spirit is the life-giving breath of God that gives us a foretaste of the resurrection and of the life we hope for one day in this world set to rights.  As the Spirit sets our hearts on God, he makes us the “on earth as it is in heaven” people, the people who not only show the world what God’s kingdom looks like, but who actually live out his kingdom and its values of love and grace and mercy and justice in the midst of a world that values all the opposites of those things.

But the first manifestation of the Spirit’s “on earth as it is in heaven” ministry is what we see here.  Luke says, first, that Jesus’ people were all together when this happened—they were united—and then the first manifestation of the Spirit was this amazing speech in other languages.  But what exactly was it?  Let’s keep reading from verse 5:

Now there were dwelling in Jerusalem Jews, devout men from every nation under heaven.  And at this sound the multitude came together, and they were bewildered, because each one was hearing them speak in his own language.  And they were amazed and astonished, saying, “Are not all these who are speaking Galileans?  And how is it that we hear, each of us in his own native language?  Parthians and Medes and Elamites and residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya belonging to Cyrene, and visitors from Rome, both Jews and proselytes, Cretans and Arabians—we hear them telling in our own tongues the mighty works of God.”

 

Jews had spread out across the known world and festivals like Passover and Pentecost brough them back to Jerusalem.  The Spirit came on Jesus’ disciples with fire and the sound of a mighty rushing wind, but what everyone else couldn’t help but notice was the ruckus they made as they began to speak in these other languages.  And it got their attention.  The disciples were a bunch of rubes from Galilee, way up north, or at least that’s how people in Jerusalem would have seen them.  Galileans spoke Aramaic and Greek—the local languages—but they weren’t cosmopolitan enough to speak all these other languages.  And yet these men visiting Jerusalem from places like Egypt and Asia and even from places like Parthia, beyond the borders of the empire, heard these Galileans speaking in their own languages.  That made them stop and take note.  But what they were saying caught their attention even more.  Luke says they were telling of the mighty works of God.  In the context here that can mean only one thing.  They were proclaiming the good news about Jesus.  That he had come proclaiming the kingdom and calling the people to repentance, that he had been crucified, that he had risen from the dead, and that he had ascended, and is now Lord—and maybe most of all, that he had done this in fulfilment of the Lord’s promises and to show the Lord’s faithfulness.  Many of these visitors had, no doubt, heard about Jesus and how he’d been crucified just a few weeks before.  Some of them had probably heard rumors that he’d risen from the dead.  If they’d been spending any time around the temple, they would have heard and seen the disciples praising God for what he had done in Jesus—and they probably thought they were crazy.   But now they hear these bumpkins from Galilee declaring the might works of God miraculously in their own languages and they stop.  And they listen.  And some of them, Luke says, sneered at the disciples thinking they were drunk.  But that’s when—if we were to continue on from today’s Epistle in Chapter 2—that’s when Peter stood up addressed them, saying, “It’s nine o’clock in the morning.  It's hardly the time of day for men to be drunk.  No, what you’re seeing is the fulfilment of the words spoken by the prophet Joel when he spoke of the Lord’s promise to pour out his Spirit and to redeem his people.  And Peter went on to tell the men there, again, of the might y deed of God: of Jesus, of his death, of his resurrection, and his ascension.  And he walked the men through the scriptures they knew so well and through the promises the Lord had made to his people, and he showed how Jesus had and was fulfilling them.  He finished his sermon, Luke says, proclaiming:

“Let all the house of Israel therefore know for certain that God has made him both Lord and Christ, this Jesus whom you crucified.”  (Acts 2:36)

And the men who were listening were cut to the heart and cried out to Peter, “What should we do?”

And Peter said to them, “Repent and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins, and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit.  For the promise is for you and for your children and for all who are far off, everyone whom the Lord our God calls to himself.”  And with many other words he bore witness and continued to exhort them, saying, “Save yourselves from this crooked generation.”  So those who received his word were baptized, and there were added that day about three thousand souls. (Acts 2:38-41)

The “on earth as it is in heaven” people began to grow.  The rest of the book of Acts is Luke’s testimony to the mighty deeds of God through these people, empowered by Jesus and the Spirit.  We see the gospel—and with it the kingdom—going out from Jerusalem, to Judea, and then to Samaria, where it united Jews and Samaritans for the first time.  And then see it go out to the nations, to the gentiles, the book ending with Paul proclaiming the good news about Jesus in Rome, right under Caesar’s nose.  And Acts shows us churches sprouting up across the world.  Acts is the firstfruits of the kingdom harvest—a harvest that would, eventually include the whole Roman Empire and beyond.  And, Brothers and Sisters, Pentecost reminds us how.  Without it we might be tempted to give up, to retreat into the church building, and wait for Jesus to come and do it all himself.  But Pentecost reminds us that going all the way back to Abraham, the Lord has been calling and creating and empowering a people to make him known to a world lost in darkness, a people to be light, a people—like the disciples that day in Jerusalem—to proclaim to the world the mighty deeds of the God of Israel.  A people to proclaim the good news that in this Jesus who was crucified, who has risen from the dead, and who has ascended to his throne to rule and reign, that he is and that he will set this world to rights.  But, maybe most importantly, Pentecost reminds us that Jesus has called us and made us this people, not only to go out and to tell, but to go out and live and to do and to make and to build and to show his kingdom on earth as it is in heaven.  We do that as we live the fruit the Spirit has given and as we show the world, in real, practical, hands-on ways what God’s new creation is like, living his love and his mercy and his grace and his justice and working for those things in the world.  It is an impossible task, but Pentecost also reminds us that we are not called to do it in our own power or on our own terms, but as we are empowered and guided by Jesus and the Spirit.

Let’s pray: O God, who on this day taught the hearts of your faithful people by sending to them the light of your Holy Spirit: Grant us by the same Spirit to have a right judgment in all things, and evermore to rejoice in his holy comfort; through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord, who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.  Amen.

A Sermon for Ascension Sunday: Jesus is Lord

Acts 1:1-11 & St. Luke 24:49-53

by William Klock

“Are we there yet?”  We pestered my dad with that question over and over and over.  And, of course, when he said, “No!”  We always followed it up with, “How much longer?”  When I was in elementary school we moved to Oregon and it meant a ten-hour drive to visit my grandparents in Sacramento or eighteen hours to visit my grandmother in Santa Barbara.  And all those pestering questions came back on my head when I became a parent.  Alexandra was a good traveller, but kids are kids, and so on those eight-hour trips to visit her grandparents in Kelowna we got it, “Are we there yet?”

And the people of Israel asked the same question of the Lord.  Not in those words, but still the same sort of question: “When will your kingdom come?”  “When will you deliver us?”  “When will you set this messed-up world to rights?”  “Are we there yet?”  “How much further?”  Just like I knew our destination on those family road trips, Israel new her destination.  She had the Lord’s promises.  And she’d made this trip before.  The Lord had delivered her from Egypt and taken her to the promised land.  And he'd delivered her from Babylon.  And from the wicked rule of the Greeks.  He would do it again.  But “How much further?”  Every year Passover reminded them, of what the Lord had done and of his promises for the future.  “Are we there yet?”  And when Jesus came, the people asked him the same questions.  If he was the Messiah—and his friends really believed he was—how much longer would it be?  If there were any doubts, Easter confirmed it.  The Jews, with the help of the Romans, had crucified Jesus.  They rejected his messianic claims and killed him to make sure no one else would believe.  But then God raised him from the dead.  In that act God overturned their verdict on Jesus.  The Resurrection was and is the great announcement from heaven that Jesus is the Messiah and the world’s true Lord.  And so his friends believed, but the world around them looked no different.  The wrong people were still in charge.  And so I have to think they asked all the more urgently during those forty days after Easter: “Are we there yet?”

When we asked my dad, “Are we there yet?” and “How much longer?” he pointed us to the milage signs along the highway and taught us how to estimate the time.  The sign says that Santa Barbara is 300 miles away, we’re going 55 miles per hour, divide 300 by 55 and you get something not quite five-and-a-half.  That’s how many hours it will take.  I did the same thing when Alexandra would ask.  How many kilometres away does the sign say Kelowna is?  We’re driving about 100 km/hr.  That means every 100 km is about an hour more of driving.  And during those forty days, as the disciples ask “Are we there yet?” and “How much further?” Luke says that Jesus opened the scriptures and explained it all to them so that they would understand the story, his place in it, and theirs too.  And in him they had a foretaste of what was to come, of the resurrection of the dead and of new creation.  Jesus had changed.  It was still him, but he was something more.  He was hungry and ate fish on the beach with them like he always had, but somehow he appeared and disappeared like they’d never seen anyone do.  The new Jesus was at home on earth as he was in heave, but he was also as at home in heaven as he was on earth.

In our Epistle we read those first eleven verses of the book of Acts and then in the Gospel we read the last verses from St. Luke.  Luke says that forty days after the resurrection, Jesus led his disciples out of Jerusalem and up to the Mount of Olives.  He promised them that John the Baptist’s prophecy would soon be fulfilled.  He was going to send his Spirit to baptise them with fire.  They didn’t know what that meant.  In fact, it didn’t even seem very important to them at the time.  They wanted to know about the kingdom!  “Are we there yet?”  That’s what the Messiah was about—he was supposed to come and restore the kingdom of Israel.  When he rode into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday they were thinking that maybe now he would finally throw off the poor rabbi disguise and restore the kingdom, throwing out the Romans and taking up David’s throne.  But instead Jesus allowed himself to be arrested, beaten, and killed.  They were despondent.  But then on Sunday he rose from the dead.  Maybe this was finally it.  But through the next forty days Jesus simply taught them the Scriptures.  The disciples were excited to have Jesus back with them.  They were excited about his resurrection, although they didn’t fully understand what it meant at this point.  And so there on the Mount of Olives they asked again: Jesus, it’s great you’re alive again.  We appreciate all the Bible teaching.  But when are you going to bring the kingdom?  And in response Jesus once again promised them the gift of the Holy Spirit to empower their witness and then told them that it wasn’t their place to know the times and seasons fixed by the Father.  But then Jesus did something amazing: he ascended into the clouds.  There were the disciples staring into the sky, probably with their mouths agape, as Jesus disappeared from their sight.  And they just stood there, staring and staring until the two men, the two angels, broke into their wonder and amazement saying, “Hey, you men of Galilee!  Are you going to stand there forever staring into space?  Jesus went up to heaven and he’s coming back.  Didn’t he give you something important to do in the meantime?”

Why were the disciples standing there agape?  You and I would too if we saw our friend ascend into the clouds.  That’s not something that people do.  But for the disciples it was more significant than we might think.  It’s tied to Jesus’ last words and it’s tied to both the Old Testament and the symbolism of imperial Rome.  First, that great messianic passage in Daniel 7:13-14 that gives a dramatic visual of the son of man rising to his heavenly throne to rule:

I saw in the night visions,

and behold, with the clouds of heaven

         there came one like a son of man,

and he came to the Ancient of Days

         and was presented before him.

And to him was given dominion

         and glory and a kingdom,

that all peoples, nations, and languages

         should serve him;

his dominion is an everlasting dominion,

         which shall not pass away,

and his kingdom one

         that shall not be destroyed.

 

But, as I said, this symbolism was important to the Romans, too.  Julius Caesar took on the trappings of divinity when he became emperor of Rome.  After his death the senate declared him divine.  The later emperors of Rome followed suit.  On their deaths the Senate declared that they had ascended to heaven as gods and they were depicted in imperial imagery ascending into the clouds.  If you go today to the ruins of the Forum in Rome and stand under the Arch of Titus, you can look straight up and see the emperor depicted, ascending into the heavens.

That was the imagery that surrounded Jesus at his ascension.  He didn’t have to ascend into the clouds the way he did.  Heaven isn’t literally up there somewhere above the clouds.  Even the Romans understood that heaven was simply the realm of the gods in contrast to the earth, which is the realm of human beings.  And so Jesus didn’t have to fly up into the clouds to leave the realm of human beings for the realm of God.  He simply could have vanished from the disciples’ sight.  But instead he chose to leave in a way that drew on this imagery familiar to both the Jews and the Gentiles.  Everyone knew that Caesar didn’t actually fly up to heaven.  The comet commemorating his divinity on Roman coins was just a symbol.  But Jesus did it for real.  Why?  Because it sent the message that Jesus is the Messiah, confirming the prophecies of Israel’s scriptures, and at the same time declaring that Jesus is Lord.  “Caesar is Lord” was the creed of imperial Rome.  But Caesar was just a pretender.  He brought peace to the world, but it was a temporary peace forged by violence and intimidation.  Jesus, on the other hand, really is Lord.  In contrast to Caesar who conquered his enemies with the sword, Jesus conquered his enemies by humbling himself and dying on a cross.  And in return, God exalted Jesus and seated him at his right hand—in the place of heavenly honour.  Caesar pretends at being Lord, but Jesus really is.  That’s the first take-away from the Ascension story as St. Luke tells it.

But the other take-away is the one that upsets much of the popular theology of today, and that’s that the kingdom is here and the kingdom is now.  The kingdom is not coming in the future.  It’s not coming after a rapture of believers.  It’s not coming before or after or in the middle of a Great Tribulation.  And it’s not something we have to go to heaven to experience.  The disciples asked Jesus when the kingdom was coming and Jesus responded by telling them that it was not for them to know.  I suspect he may have said that with a smile and a wink, because the next thing we see is Jesus ascending.  Just as the Ascension sends the message loudly and clearly that Jesus is Lord, it also sends the message loudly and clearly that his kingdom is here and now.  They asked him when the kingdom was coming and in response he gave them a dramatic visual that they’d never forget: They saw the King ascend to his throne.  Brothers and Sisters, the Ascension of Jesus tells us very dramatically and unmistakably that the kingdom is here and now.  King’s don’t sit on thrones to rule over nothing.  Why is the Ascension important?  Again, it tells us dramatically and unmistakably that the King is on his throne and that his kingdom has already been inaugurated.

All of this is important, but what does it mean that Jesus is reigning and that the kingdom is here and now?  For that we need to look at the big picture.  In the beginning God created the Cosmos to give him glory.  At the centre of it was a garden and in that garden the Lord placed human beings to tend and to keep it.  Everything about the garden points to its being the Lord’s temple.  When the Israelites built the tabernacle, the design was meant to mimic the garden.  It was in the garden that human beings lived in the presence of the Lord.  And later it was in the tabernacle and then the temple that the Lord manifested his presence in the holy of holies.  The temple was the place where heaven and earth met and where the people went to meet with, to worship, and to fellowship with the Lord.  The temple pointed back to the garden.  When humanity sinned, the garden was lost.  Adam and Eve were cast out and an angel placed at the entrance to guard it.  And from there the story of humanity goes from bad to worse.  And yet the Lord never abandoned his Creation.  The creation was meant to give God glory and when it turned on him, instead of destroying it, God chose to manifest his glory by renewing it—by making a new creation.  And as humanity lost all knowledge of the Lord, he called Abraham to himself and through Abraham created a new humanity in the family of Abraham.  Through Abraham, the Lord began the work of restoring the garden.  “In you all the families of the earth shall be blessed,” God promised (Genesis 12:3).

And yet think about a garden.  You can’t plant a garden in the wilderness and expect it to flourish on its own.  Enemies and wild animals will raid the garden and steal the fruit.  Without cultivation and protection the wild will quickly overcome the garden.  And so the Lord provided for the protection of his new garden.  He sent Jacob and his family to Egypt, where the king looked on them with favour, provided for them, cared for them, and protected them.  When the king of Egypt became hostile, the Lord himself rescued his new creation—Israel—and led her into the wilderness and to the promised land.  He fed her in the wilderness and he drove out her enemies from the land.  Eventually the Lord gave her a human king to protect his new creation from the wilderness—from the hostile enemies—that surrounded her.  But through it all, it was ultimately the Lord who was King and who protected his people.  Isaiah declared that “the Lord reigns” when Israel was faced with conquest by the Babylonian empire.  The Babylonian king and the Babylonian gods had no power over Israel no matter how bad things got.  In Daniel’s vision ferocious beasts represent the kingdoms of the earth that had conquered and dominated Israel, but in that vision the Lord takes the kingdom away from those monsters and delivers it to the saints and ultimately to the Son of Man—to Jesus.  Even when the Lord uses earthly kings to discipline his people, he continues to care for them.  That’s the purpose of his kingship and his kingdom: the care and cultivation of his new creation.

And all this comes to full fruit in Jesus.  He has come as the Son of Man, the representative of Israel.  He has come as the Messiah—the true and eternal king in the line of David.  He has come to bring the Lord’s new creation to full fruit—to suffer for his people and to give them his Holy Spirit that they might truly be the new creation that Israel was supposed to be—that they might be the true sons and daughters of Abraham.  But not only that, he has also come to establish a kingdom over which he will rule himself—a kingdom to protect and to safeguard the new creation—the Lord’s garden as it grows and flourishes and spreads throughout the world.  This is the story of the book of Acts.  We read the beginning this morning: Jesus ascended into the clouds to take his heavenly throne.  Jesus is Lord; Caesar is not.  Jesus’ kingdom is the real deal, the one that will last; Caesar’s is the cheap imitation.  The rest of Acts is the story of the church, of the new creation, of the kingdom spreading throughout the world: from Jerusalem, to Judea, to Samaria, and to the whole world.  And Acts ends dramatically with Paul in Rome, in chains, proclaiming the lordship of Jesus right under Caesar’s nose.  Through the suffering, persecution, and martyrdom of the saints, the kingdom of Jesus has triumphed and will continue to triumph.  The Dutch theologian Abraham Kuyper summed it up well in that famous line of his: “There is not one square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is sovereign over all, does not cry, Mine!”  Others, like Caesar may make their claims, but the reality is that Jesus is Lord of all.

Brothers and Sisters, we are God’s new creation.  The wilderness has surrounded the Lord’s garden.  Earthly empires and kings have tried to steal its fruit, they’ve tried to stamp it out and burn it down, but King Jesus has preserved it.  Because of his preservation, past generations have carried the good news that Jesus is Lord from Jerusalem to Judea to Samaria and to all the world.  Because King Jesus has preserved it we know and believe that good news here in Canada, half a world away from that mount from which Jesus ascended to his throne two thousand years ago.  Because King Jesus continues to preserve his new creation, we can have confidence to go out in faith, to charge into the darkness with the light of Christ—think of that vision of John’s in Revelation, the saints riding out with Jesus, a gospel calvary carrying the good news that Jesus is Lord to the whole world—and we know that no matter what happens, the kingdom of God is here and know and growing and that nothing will stop it until fills the whole earth—just as Daniel saw it would.  As St. Paul writes in 1 Corinthians, this new creation of which we are a part is protected by the one who has been given all authority and who will reign until every last enemy is put under his feet, even death itself.

Brothers and Sisters, our hope as Christians is in that day.  Death is the last enemy to separate earth and heaven and on that day, when Jesus finally defeats it, he’ll return from his throne on the clouds as the angels told the disciples.  As the joyful people of Rome went out to join their triumphant Caesar as he marched into the city as the conquering hero, St. Paul says that the people of Jesus will meet him in the air to accompany him as returns to earth the conquering hero—as he comes accompanied by heaven itself and restores heaven and earth, God and man.

In the Old Testament the temple was the one place on earth where heaven and earth met and where the Lord could be known.  When Jesus came he became the temple for us.  The amazing thing is that Jesus didn’t leave it at that.  He sent his Holy Spirit to fill and indwell us.  We, his Church, are now the temple.  We are now the place where heaven and earth connect and where the Lord is made known.  And that’s our mission.  Carved on our lychgate are those familiar words: “Jesus is Lord”.  We pass beneath them as we come to the church to meet and to worship, but have you ever thought about what they really mean?  The next time you walk under those words remember the Ascension.  Remember that Jesus is seated on his throne, that his kingdom is here and now, and that he has made us his people.  Jesus has restored us to the vocation for which we were created.  He has restored God’s image in us.  He has made us the people in whom heaven and earth meet.  He’s given us the gospel message: the King who died and has risen from the grave is Lord.  And he sends us out like Adam and Eve with that good news, to be fruitful and to multiply—to carry the royal summons to our friends, our families, and eventually to every corner of creation, spreading his kingdom.  We’ve seen the Conqueror mount in triumph and now we go out as his army.  But not an army like those of Rome sent out to conquer barbarians with the sword.  Jesus calls us to charge into the darkness bearing his light, to suffer and even to die for the sake of the lost, as we seek to make known his love, his peace, his justice, his mercy, and especially his grace.

Let us pray: Grant, we pray, Almighty God, that as we believe your only-begotten Son our Lord Jesus Christ to have ascended into heaven, so we may also in heart and mind there ascend, and with him continually dwell; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.  Amen.

The Fifth Sunday after Easter: Doers of the Word

St. James 1:22-27

by William Klock

Social media is a funny thing.  You hear about people saying something to their husband or wife about some product or some thing they might buy and minutes later Facebook and Amazon and Google are showing you adverts for exactly that product or thing even though you’ve never looked it up online.  I think that happened to me, but instead of books or bike parts or swim suits or lanterns—which is what I’d have expected—YouTube and Facebook for the last couple of months have been flooding me with short videos on the theme of “Ask a rabbi…” or “Ask an orthodox Jew” and so I’ve been seeing all these videos on Judaism and some are interesting and others are exasperating and others just make you scratch your head and a lot of them make me thankful that Jesus came.  But one of things that comes up a lot in these videos is doctrine.  “What do Jews believe about heaven and hell?” or “What do Jews believe about sin…or forgiveness…or salvation?”  All sorts of doctrinal questions.  And it’s striking just how often these rabbis—and it doesn’t matter if they’re liberal or conservative—it’s striking how often they’ll answer these doctrinal questions, but they’ll start out by saying something like, “Judaism doesn’t really care what you believe.  It cares about what you do.”  “Salvation”, for example, just isn’t a concern in Judaism as it is in Christianity.  For them, if you’re Jewish that means you’re part of the covenant people and your life is about obeying the torah, because obedience to torah—the things you do—are what mark you out as different from everyone else and confirm your membership in the covenant.  Judaism is a religion of works, but Christians often misunderstand that, thinking Jews are trying to earn their way into heaven.  That’s not it at all.  They’d say something like, “We’re already God’s people; now we’re proving it by what we do.”  You can believe whatever you want, just so long as it doesn’t interfere with living according to torah.

 

Of course, that’s not what the Lord intended for his people.  Good works grow out of a heart tuned to God and this is why Jesus came: to forgive his people, to fill their hearts with God’s own Spirit, and to set their affections on him.  But even as Christians it’s all too easy to fall into the ditch on the opposite of the road.  We become very concerned about right belief, and downplay the doing part of our faith.  There are Christians who take our affirmation that we are saved by faith and not by works to such extremes that they get angry with anyone who says that real faith is proved by good works.  Other times, it’s not that we forget the sinfulness of sin and the need for good works to give evidence of our faith, but that we become selective about the sins we condemn and the good works we do.

The last month or two I’ve been following a certain discussion forum online where a group of folks—some of them clergymen, I’m sad to say—have been discussing theology.  And things quickly went from “discussion” to all out verbal brawling—anger, name calling, all sorts of nasty stuff—and all of it for the most part over disagreements about, of all things, the Lord’s Supper—one of the central things Jesus gave us as a sign of our unity in him, of his love for us, and our love for him and for each other.  This is the sort of thing I see as a clergyman, but this disconnect between what we believe and what we do happens in all sorts of ways.  We know Christians who wholeheartedly believe that their sins have been forgiven by the death of Jesus, but they hold grudges and refuse to forgive others.  We know Christians who have known and affirm the generosity of God, but they are greedy and miserly towards others.  We know Christians who come to church on Sunday and glorify God with their mouths, but go out into the world and use the same mouth to tell lies and to cheat or to say filthy things.  This week I was reading the introduction to a new book on Genesis, where the author went to great lengths to stress the truthfulness of God’s word, but then wrote things that were hurtful and untrue about people who disagree with his interpretation, because doing that, I guess, is easier than engaging with people who differ from you and has the benefit of scaring people way from even considering those different points of view.  But if we value truth as a doctrine, that value for truth ought to work its way out in our lives and in our speech—even if it’s sometimes inconvenient.

This is what St. James is getting at in our Epistle, when he writes:

But be doers of the word, and not hearers only…

 

Don’t just hear it.  Don’t just believe it.  Do it!  It helps to understand that for the Jews, speaking Hebrew, to hear and to obey were inextricably linked together.  The Hebrew word for “hear” is a call not just to the ears, but to the heart, and to hear is to respond, whether it’s for the Lord to hear the cries of his people in their bondage and to come to their deliverance or for Israel to hear the word of the Lord and to take it to heart and do it.  We have a word in English that we don’t use anymore that is very similar: hearken.  Don’t just hear, but take note, take what you hear to heart.  Do it.

Brothers and Sisters, words are important—and the word of God especially so.  As I’ve said so many times, God’s word brings life.  By his word he created life in the beginning and when we were mired in sin and in slavery to death, he heard out cries for deliverance and sent his word again, this time in human flesh, in Jesus, to die and to rise from death that we might know life again.  This is at the core of Easter and so, these last two Sundays of Eastertide we read from St. James’ epistle about the power of God’s word to bring us life and to transform us.  But first he contrasts God’s word with our words, which are so often spoken in anger or spoken, not to heal or to give life, but to hurt.  This is in the first chapter of James.  Our Epistle begins at verse 22, but I want to back up a bit into last week’s Epistle, to verse 19.  Here’s what James writes:

Know this, my beloved brothers: let every person be quick to hear, slow to speak, slow to anger; for the anger of man does not produce the righteousness of God.  Therefore put away all filthiness and rampant wickedness and receive with meekness the implanted word, which is able to save your souls. (James 1:19-21)

“Be quick to hear, slow to speak, slow to anger.”  How many times would that have saved you a world of hurt if you’d only heard and obeyed?  On the Internet.  In an argument with your wife or your husband?  At work?  With your kids?  But no.  We get angry, because the kids broke something, because your wife bought something or your husband forgot to say where he was going or because a co-worker did something stupid or because someone is wrong on the Internet.  Here’s what happens.  When things go wrong, it’s all too easy to suddenly get stupid.  We get this dumb idea in our heads that what the word needs to set it straight or what the situation needs to get it back on track is a taste of our anger.  Maybe that’s why angry words seem to prompt angry words in return and then the angry words spiral out of control.  But that’s what happens all too often.

Now, there can be a place for anger.  So often we get angry because the world isn’t what we know it should be.  Sometimes—a lot of the time—that’s just our pride being hurt or our selfishness being tweaked, but when we see real wrongs being done, when we see real injustice in the world, there is a place for just and righteous anger.  Godly anger over sin and injustice is often precisely what we need to get us up and out into the world to help the needy or the hurt, to stand up for the defenceless, or otherwise to speak out and to work for wrongs to be righted.  St. Paul writes in Ephesians 4:26, “Be angry” but then there’s an “and”, a big “and”: “and do not sin.”  Deal with what needs dealing with and “do not let the sun go down on your anger,” because that “gives opportunity to the devil”.  If you’re angry because your pride has been hurt, put a stop to it right there.  Swallow your pride and move on.  If you’re angry because something is truly wrong, use that anger productively to set things right, but do not sin in the process.  Two wrongs won’t make thing right.  And righteous or not, don’t let your anger fester.  Deal with it one way or another, because simmering anger is fodder for the devil and for all sorts of sin.  We all know that from experience.  Let your anger simmer and before too long you’re thinking about payback and revenge and neither of those things have any place in the Christian life.  That was our lesson two Sunday’s ago: As he has vindicated Jesus, so the Father will one day vindicate us.  We don’t need to vindicate ourselves.

In short, James says, “the anger of man does not produce the righteousness—or, maybe better here—the justice of God.  In other words, your anger is not what will set this broken world to rights.  I know it always seems like it will at the time, but it won’t.  Just consider: You think your anger will set things right so you lash out at that other person.  And now what are they thinking?  They’re thinking the same thing: All the situation needs is a little bit of their anger to fix it so they lash out at you.  And all it all does is make everything worse.  Brother and Sisters, James reminds us to instead be quick to hear, slow to speak, and slow to anger.  God is the one who will bring justice to the world and right the wrongs.  If we have been wronged, God will vindicate us.  The best thing we can do is to respond with the fruit of the Spirit.  Where the world is broken, where relationships are broken, we should be asking ourselves how we can bring to bear the things that God’s Spirit gives: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.  Our anger won’t help God make things right.  And so James warns:

Therefore put away all filthiness and rampant wickedness and receive with meekness the implanted word, which is able to save your souls.

 

Do you see what he did there?  More often than not, when we get angry, it’s because our pride has been hurt and that kind of anger tempts us to lash out—it tempts us to respond to a hurt or a wrong with some kind of sin.  Filthy words, brawling, that sort of thing.  In contrast, James says that when our pride is threatening to take control of us, we need instead to meekly receive—to hearken to—the word that God has implanted in us.  If this were St. Paul, he’d be reminding us to put off the old man and to put on the new.  The pride and anger are the old man talking, but in Jesus and the Spirit God has made us new.  James puts it in terms of the word by which God has forgiven us and made us a new creation.  I think James had Isaiah 55:10-11 in mind when he was writing this.  That’s where the Lord, through the Prophet, says:

For as the rain and the snow come down from heaven

         and do not return there but water the earth,

making it bring forth and sprout,

         giving seed to the sower and bread to the eater,

so shall my word be that goes out from my mouth;

         it shall not return to me empty,

but it shall accomplish that which I purpose,

         and shall succeed in the thing for which I sent it.

 

This is one of my favourite passages in all of Scripture.  When I look at myself and get frustrated with my own sin and my own shortcomings and my own failures to be faithful to God, I remember what he says about his word here.  And as a pastor, when I’m discouraged with ministry and when it seems like nothing is happening or people aren’t maturing or when I see sin and shortcomings and failures to be faithful in the church, again, I come back to what the Lord says about his word here and I go back to the word, because God’s word is the source of life.  When I’m frustrated or disappointed with myself, I read and meditate on Gods’ word.  When I’m frustrated with ministry, I preach God’s word.  Because nothing else I can do will bring the life of God to myself or to other people—only his word can do that—and he promises through Isaiah that his word always accomplishes what he purposes and it always succeeds in that for which he sends it forth.  So I preach his word to myself and I preach his word to you and trust him to cause it to bear fruit in me and in you,  because he says that that is what he will do.  God’s word is life.

Brothers and Sisters, do me a favour.  Hold up your right hand.  Okay, now stick out your right index finger.  Good.  Now stick that finger in your ear.  Because I don’t want what I’m about to say to go in one ear and out the other.  And what I want to say is this: Don’t let God’s word go in one ear and out the other.  James writes, “But be doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves.”  Don’t just listen to the word.  Don’t just read it.  Hear it, Brothers and Sisters.  Hearken to it.  If it helps, read your Bible with your finger in your ear to remind you to pay attention.  These are God’s words and they are life!  Too often we come to church and hear the word or we sit down at home and read the word, but we don’t actually hear it, we don’t let it sink in, we don’t let it take root like a seed, and so we don’t become doers of the word, letting it make a difference and transform us.  If we just let the word go in one ear and out the other we’re in danger of deceiving ourselves.  We think, “I’ve read the Bible or I’ve listened to it in church and I’ve done my duty,” but Friends, if the word doesn’t take root in our hearts and minds, if it doesn’t make a difference, we miss out on the life of God.  He promises that his word will accomplish what he purposes—that it will make a difference, that it will bring new life—but first we have to hear it, not just listen, but hear it, take it in, obey it, and let it change us.

James uses an illustration here.  Look at verses 23-25:

For if anyone is a hearer of the word and not a doer, he is like a man who looks intently at his natural face in a mirror.  For he looks at himself and goes away and at once forgets what he was like.  But the one who looks into the perfect law, the law of liberty, and perseveres, being no hearer who forgets but a doer who acts, he will be blessed in his doing.

 

You walk past a mirror, have a look, then walk away and forget.  In one ear and out the other.  That’s not how we should approach God’s word.  And how do we know if we’re really letting God’s word take root and grow in us?  We know it’s growing in us when we go from being mere hearers to being actual doers of that word.  When we don’t just know in our heads that truth is important, but when we stop telling lies, when we stop misrepresenting people, and speak the truth.  When “love your enemies and do good to them” goes from being something in your head to something you actually live out.  When love your wife or submit to your husband translates into loving your wife or submitting to your husband in real and practical ways.  When the Lord’s Supper goes from being something you eat to something you live out in your interactions with your brothers and sisters in the Lord, showing love and living in the unity Jesus has given us.

And notice how James makes this point.  He takes us back to his own roots.  He was a Jew.  He was circumcised into the Lord’s covenant people when he was eight days old.  He grew up living torah, because he was one of the covenant people and that’s what covenant people did.  That’s how they were faithful to the Lord in return for his faithfulness to them.  And they learned the torah, the law, by reading and studying God’s word.  And as much as Jesus changed everything, he didn’t change the fact that the Lord continues to live in covenant with his people.  Jesus established a new covenant, but it’s still a covenant.  And the Spirit has given a new law, but it’s still a law.  God’s people are still called to be different from the world.  As he marked out the Jews with circumcision and called them to live according to the torah, so he marks out the people of Jesus with baptism and calls us to live the law of the Spirit—what James calls the “perfect law, the law of liberty”.  Faithful Jews were doers—keeping the sabbath, eating clean foods and not eating unclean foods, all of that.  Some people think that Jesus has freed us from all of the doing, but it’s really just the opposite.  Jesus calls us to even more and better doing, the difference is that instead of pointing to a list of laws written on stone and saying “Do that”, he fills us with God’s own Spirit, gives us his own example of love at the cross, rises from the dead and gives us a foretaste of his new creation and says “Do that in the power of the Spirit”.  And this new law, instead of burdening us, actually ends up freeing us from all those things that used to weigh us down: anger and filthiness and wickedness and replaces it all with the fruit of the Spirit—again— love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control as the Spirit and the word work in us to redirect the affections of our hearts from sin and from self to love for God and love for each other.

And so James sums it up in verses 26 and 27, writing:

If anyone thinks he is religious and does not bridle his tongue but deceives his heart, this person’s religion is worthless.  Religion that is pure and undefiled before God the Father is this: to visit orphans and widows in their affliction, and to keep oneself unstained from the world.

 

God’s word and God’s Spirit will transform us.  It doesn’t happen in an instant, so we have to be careful here.  Our expectations for a new Christian aren’t the same as they are for a mature Christian, but still, a Christian will show the transforming work of God’s life-giving word in his life.  And so James says that if you think you’re religious—note that “religion” isn’t the bad word some people make it out to be today.  Religion is our service to God.  There’s good religion and there’s bad religion as we’ll see in a bit.  So if you think you’re serving God but you don’t have a bridle on your tongue—that’s not the only thing that might show this, but since James has been talking about anger and sinful words, this is the example he uses here—if you speak hateful and hurtful and untrue things, you’ve deceived yourself.  You’ve been letting God’s word go in one ear and out the other.  You haven’t actually heard it and so it hasn’t taken root and it’s not growing in your heart.  It calls into question your profession of faith and your place in the covenant.  We enter the covenant through faith in Jesus.  And we show our membership in the covenant by doing the word, by living the law of the Spirit.  And if you aren’t living the law of the Spirit, well, it begs the question: Are you really a member of the covenant?  Is your faith in Jesus real?  Because a Christian without the fruit of the Spirit, a Christian who is worldly and doesn’t bridle his tongue, well he’s like a Jew who labours on the sabbath or loves eating pork.  He’s a contradiction.

In contrast, true religion, real service to God looks like this: visiting orphans and widows and keeping yourself unstained by the filthiness of the world.  James could have listed any number of things here, but he’s certainly practical and these are things that stood out in the First Century and made people take note of Christians and the Church.  It was a dog-eat-dog world, but the Christians took care of each other and they took care of the poor and vulnerable, because that’s what love in action looks like and because that’s what new creation looks like.  And in a world of filth, where culture was crude and vulgar and religion often involved ritual drug use and prostitution, God’s people stood apart—much as the Jews of the old covenant had stood apart.  Jesus’ people, transformed by word and Spirit, should stand as beacons of his new creation, by our lives and by our proclamation, lifting the veil on what God has in store for this broken world.

So Brother and Sisters, be Easter people.  If you have believed that Jesus died and rose from the dead to forgiven our sins and to make us part of his new creation, prove it.  Really be Easter people.  Immerse yourselves in God’s word and hear what he has to say.  Don’t let it go in one ear and out the other.  Let it sink in and take root and grow.  And then be the new creation that God’s word will make us if we give it the chance and as God’s word transform.  He will make us, as he promised, the firstfruits of his new creation—a and that, Brothers and Sisters, is how he is setting the wrongs of this world to right.  Not by our anger, but by his word and by his Spirit.

Let’s pray: O Lord, from whom all good things come: Grant to us, your humble servants, that by your holy inspiration we may think those things that are good, and by your merciful guidance put them into practice; through our Lord Jesus Christ, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.  Amen.

The Fourth Sunday after Easter: Justice and Judgement

St. James 1:17-25 & St. John 16:5-15

by William Klock

I don’t like the news.  Watching it or reading it.  I don’t like it.  I try to pay attention to the top headlines via the Internet so that people don’t think I live under a rock, but otherwise I don’t like the news.  Occasionally I tune the Apple TV to Global when I’m making dinner and it seems that it’s just one injustice after another.  And in the mornings while I eat breakfast I go online and my custom homepage lists headlines for me—and even when I prioritise the subjects that really interest me, there too, it’s one evil after another and injustice piled on injustice.  If there’s a bright side, at least the injustices that makes the headlines make the injustices I experience seem fairly insignificant.  People getting scammed, people being hurt and taken advantage of, maybe the worst are the people trampled by the government—the very institutions that are pledged to protect them.  And so often there’s nothing they can do.  I remember the story of a Pakistani elder from a few years ago.  Somehow he mistakenly ended up on a US government “kill list”.  He’d repeatedly been the subject of drone attacks that endangered not only him, but his friends and family around him.  And there was nothing he could do.  He even managed to travel to Britain where he hoped he could get a hearing and somehow find justice.   The world is filled with this sort of thing.

And then you turn to the Psalms.  At Morning Prayer this past Friday Psalm 26 was appointed, a psalm where David cries out to the Lord for justice and for vindication:

Vindicate me, O Lord,

         for I have walked in my integrity,

         and I have trusted in the Lord without wavering.

Prove me, O Lord, and try me;

         test my heart and my mind.

For your steadfast love is before my eyes,

         and I walk in your faithfulness. (Psalm 26:1-2)

Or consider Psalm 43, which opens with very similar words:

Vindicate me, O God, and defend my cause

         against an ungodly people,

from the deceitful and unjust man

         deliver me!

David was feeling crushed by the weight of injustice, but he knew he was in the right and so he cried out in desperation to the Lord to hear his case and to vindicate him.  Like the man who mistakenly ended up on the kill list of a superpower too big to care.  Like the man who gets injustice from the very police charged with seeing justice done.  Like the man seeking justice, but forever finding himself tied up in red tape and surrounded by uncaring bureaucrats.  They know they’re in the right.  If only there were a righteous judge to hear my case, they think, then I would receive justice.

This was the national theme of Israel.  It started in Egypt when the Israelites were slaves.  They cried out to the Lord, he heard them, and he sent Moses to deliver them and then Joshua to lead them as they defeated the Canaanites and took possession of the promised land.  There’s even an entire book of the Old Testament called “Judges”.  It’s the history of the time between Joshua and Saul, the time between Israel’s conquest of Canaan and Israel’s demand that God give her a king like the other nations.  Over and over during the period of the Judges this or that Israelite tribe as overrun and oppressed by their enemies—often the very people the Lord had told them to destroy when they entered Canaan, but whom the Israelites had not destroyed.  Judges has a pattern: Foreigners oppress the Lord’s people, the Lord’s people cry out for deliverance, and the Lord sends a judge to deliver the people from their enemies.  In the Old Testament that’s what judges do—they act on the Lord’s behalf to vindicate his people and to deliver them.

But it didn’t end when Saul was made king.  Nearly the entire history of Israel from the Judges to the time of Jesus shows this same pattern.  Whether it was the Assyrians or the Babylonians or the Persians or the Greeks or the Romans, Israel kept finding herself overrun by foreign empires and armies and living under their oppressive rule.  Some of the psalms that cry out to God the Judge came out of just this kind of oppression.  The Israelites knew that their God was good and that he was just.  He had vindicated their faithfulness in the past and they had faith he would vindicate it again.

When the Israelites envisioned justice they often described it in terms of the law court, where the plaintiff and defendant would go before a judge, each would make his case, and the judge would decide between them.  To “go home justified”—do you remember that’s how Jesus puts it in the parable of the Pharisees and the tax collector?—to go home justified was to have the judge decide in your favour and to confirm your righteousness—to vindicate you before the face of your enemy.  And so the Israelites envisioned themselves bringing the Babylonians or the Greeks or the Romans or the Herodians to court for oppressing them.  The Israelites had never done anything to deserve this, they thought, and so they expected the Lord, the just Judge, to vindicate them and to rule against their enemies.  One day the Judge would deliver them again just as he had so many times in the past.

But, of course we know if we’ve Israel’s story, that she often wasn’t as innocent as she thought.  The prophets Isaiah and Jeremiah and Daniel turned this court scene back on Israel.  Israel had it backwards.  It wasn’t Israel that should be bringing her case against the pagan empires before the Lord, but that the Lord should be bringing his own case against rebellious and unfaithful Israel.  The Babylonians or the Assyrians were actually the Lord trying to get his people to wake up to their sins and to repent and to be faithful to him.  Needless to say, the prophets weren’t very popular when they said these things.

But there was hope too.  Those same prophets rebuked Israel on the one hand, but they also gave the people hope.  Someday the Lord would rule in favour of his people and against the pagan nations that oppressed them.  God would vindicate his people and rule that the nations were in the wrong.

This is how the Jews thought about themselves and about the world and it’s the narrative that makes sense of our Gospel this morning about Jesus sending the Holy Spirit.  Today’s Gospel, like last week’s, is a small portion of what’s often called Jesus’ “Farewell Discourse” from John’s Gospel.  It’s a long discourse that Jesus gave to his disciples between the end of the Last Supper and his arrest in the Garden of Gethsemane and it’s full of this back and forth between promises of persecution for his sake and exhortation to keep the faith.  Our passage today comes immediately before last week’s.  Today’s passage begins at John 16:5, but if we go back to verse 1, Jesus says to his disciples:

“I have said all these things to you to keep you from falling away. They will put you out of the synagogues. Indeed, the hour is coming when whoever kills you will think he is offering service to God.  And they will do these things because they have not known the Father, nor me.  But I have said these things to you, that when their hour comes you may remember that I told them to you.” (John 16:1-4a)

Jesus by this point has already explained to them that fairly soon he’s going to be leaving them.  That was bad news enough.  But now he tells them that after he’s gone, persecution is coming.  The unbelieving Jews will throw them out of the synagogues.  Some of Jesus’ people will even be martyred for their faith.  And they’ll be tempted to throw in the towel and give up on Jesus.  In verse 6 Jesus says, “Because I have said these things to you, sorrow has filled your heart.”

But in truth, Jesus’ leaving isn’t actually a bad thing.  They shouldn’t be too quick to mourn.  He goes on in verse 7:

Nevertheless, I tell you the truth: it is to your advantage that I go away, for if I do not go away, the Helper will not come to you. But if I go, I will send him to you.

 

The Helper Jesus promises to send is the Holy Spirit.  John uses the Greek title parakletos and you’ll see it translated in different ways: helper, comforter, advocate.  The Greek word literally means one who is “called alongside”.  Jesus uses it in the legal sense of one who will act as an advocate in court.  And here Jesus takes his disciples back to this heavenly court scene that was such a major theme in Israel’s history and self-identity.  But this time it’s the disciples, Jesus’ followers, the new Israel in the place of the plaintiff and the world—the Gentiles and unbelieving Israel—pitted against the Church.  Jesus is leaving.  The disciples don’t like that idea, but it’s actually a good thing, Jesus says.  Once he’s taken his heavenly throne, Jesus can send the Holy Spirit to come and plead his people’s case before the Lord and when he does so he will vindicate his people, he will see that they are sent home justified by proving that it’s the world in the wrong.

Jesus says that the Spirit will prove the world in the wrong on three counts.  Look at verses 8-11:

And when he comes, he will convict the world concerning sin and righteousness and judgment: concerning sin, because they do not believe in me; concerning righteousness, because I go to the Father, and you will see me no longer; concerning judgment, because the ruler of this world is judged.

 

So first, the Spirit will convict the world concerning sin.  Sin at its heart is rebellion against God.  It’s a refusal to trust in God’s goodness.  Adam and Eve sinned when they believed the serpent’s lie that God was holding out on them and ate the fruit God had told them not to eat.  You and I were never created to determine good and evil for ourselves.  We’re finite beings.  We can only see so far and know so much.  God intended for us to trust in his perfect goodness and to obey him.  The Father sent his Son, Jesus, to provide forgiveness and reconciliation and get us back on track walking in trust, but again the world chooses to rebel.  The “world” rejected Jesus and murdered him and the world continues to reject him even today.  And the Holy Spirit will expose all of this in the heavenly court.

Second, Jesus says the Spirit will convict the world concerning righteousness.  Some translations read “justice” instead of “righteousness”, which fits the law court scene better.  In biblical terms to be declared righteous or justified is to have the court decide in your favour.  Jesus says that the world is convinced that it is in the right.  The world sits in the courtroom sure it will win the case.  The Jews believed they were in the right to kill Jesus and then to persecute his followers.  Caesar truly believed that he was lord and so he persecuted those who insisted instead that Jesus is Lord.  Even today people and governments persecute and kill Christians because they see us as a threat to their security or to their values.  And even if it’s not out-and-out persecuting Christians, the world often sits smugly in its sins.  Today we see the world declaring various sins to be virtuous and condemning Christians and anyone else who says otherwise as being intolerant, bigoted, or judgemental.

But Jesus says that again the Spirit will convict the world.  And the Spirit will do this by pointing to Jesus—the same Jesus rejected and murdered by the world, but now risen from the dead and seated at the right hand of his Father.  The world was convinced it was in the right when it passed sentence on Jesus, but in the Resurrection and Ascension of Jesus God himself has overruled the world’s unjust judgement and vindicated his Son.  And if God has vindicated Jesus, he will also vindicate all those who follow Jesus in faith.

Finally, Jesus says that the Holy Spirit will convict the world concerning judgement.  In its rebellious spirit, the world thought it could condemn Jesus and it continues to think that it can condemn us.  Again, the world is convinced of its own righteousness.  But in his death and resurrection Jesus has proved the world to be in the wrong.  Not only has God overruled the world’s false judgement on Jesus (and not only will God overrule the world’s false judgement on us), but by his death Jesus has defeated the power of sin and in his resurrection Jesus has defeated death itself.  Sin and death are the powers the devil has used since the beginning to enslave humanity, but Jesus has broken the power of both.  The devil has been defeated by Jesus.

Brothers and Sisters, because we have the Holy Spirit as our advocate we can face suffering, we can face the rejection and hate of the world for the sake of Jesus and continue to live in faith that the Judge of all the earth will do what is just.  Again, in Jesus’ resurrection the unjust verdict of the world was overturned and Jesus was vindicated as the one in the right.  And as he was vindicated in his resurrection so shall we one day be vindicated in ours.

But as I’ve said before, the point of all this isn’t for us to simply hunker down inside the church and wait for Jesus to come back.  He’s given us work to do in the meantime.  God’s people have always had work to do.  The Lord came into the darkness of the world when it was utterly lost in paganism and he chose Abraham to be his representative to be a light in that darkness.  He blessed Abraham so that Abraham could be a blessing to the world—so that the world could once again know God’s goodness, repent, and return to him.  That mission became the mission of Israel and, since by faith you and I are grafted into Israel, Abraham’s mission has become our mission.  And Jesus doesn’t stop with the Holy Spirit vindicating us in the heavenly court.  The Holy Spirit, Jesus says, will speak to us.

When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth, for he will not speak on his own authority, but whatever he hears he will speak, and he will declare to you the things that are to come.  He will glorify me, for he will take what is mine and declare it to you.  All that the Father has is mine; therefore I said that he will take what is mine and declare it to you.  (John 16:13-15)

Jesus is the Word and the Spirit will make him known to us.  In our baptism Jesus pours the Holy Spirit into us and it’s the Spirit who then unites us with Jesus, who regenerates our hearts and renews our minds, changing our affections and giving us understanding.  The Spirit makes the Word known to us.  He unites us with Jesus, the Word Incarnate.  He breathes out the Word written—Holy Scripture—through the Prophets and Apostles and through Jesus.  Through the Spirit the Father makes himself known to us, calls us back into his fellowship, and sends us out to do the work of his kingdom.  But that’s just it.  If we are in Christ we have the Spirit and all of this should transform us.  This is why in our Epistle St. James exhorts us:

Be doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves. (James 1:22)

And he goes on a few verses later to say:

Religion that is pure and undefiled before God, the Father, is this: to visit orphans and widows in their affliction, and to keep oneself unstained from the world. (James 1:27)

Brothers and Sisters, the world is a mess.  It’s a mess because of sin.  We’ve all contributed to it.  Jesus has set in motion the process through which he will make all things new, through which he will redeem his Creation and he calls us to be part of that.  But notice—and this is vitally important for us to realise: Jesus doesn’t redeem us to remove us from the mess.  Just the opposite, in fact.  Jesus redeems us so that we can go right back into the mess and start cleaning things up.  The Word isn’t something we merely hear; it’s something we’re called to do.  Jesus came to bring good news to the poor, release to the captives, and sight to the blind.  To bring justice and righteousness to those most desperately in need of it.  To make all the sad things come untrue.  He ate with tax collectors and sinners—with people who weren’t just suffering from the mess others made, but the very people at the heart of a lot of the mess-making.  James warns us not to get back into mess-making ourselves, but he also tells us that like Jesus we need to be in the thick of it working to make things right and working to point the world to the one who is making all things right.  The world will hate us.  Jesus promises it.  We will probably suffer for being light in the darkness, but Jesus calls us to walk in faith, trusting that the God who raised him from the dead will act justly and righteously with us too.  Being justified ourselves we are to go into the world, as the Lord said through the prophet Micah: “to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God.”  We’ve all heard the good news.  Brothers and Sisters, we need to ask ourselves what we’re doing to be faithful stewards of the good news and the grace of God?  What are you doing with it?  The Spirit has equipped and empowered each of us.  What can you do to make Jesus known in practical ways, to proclaim good news, to be light in the darkness, to help others who are still mired in the mess made by human sin?

Let us pray: Heavenly Father, we live in a world that often hates us.  Let us never be afraid to be doers of your Word.  We have been justified by Jesus.  Remind us that we have no reason to fear the world’s accusations.  We live in hope of life.  Give us courage to stand up to the darkness and to be ministers of your light and your grace and your mercy.  As we have been rescued from our bondage to sin and death, give us courage to go into the world with the good news that others might be freed to know your grace.  We ask this through Jesus Christ our Lord and Saviour.  Amen.

The Third Sunday after Easter: Easter in Between

1 Peter 2:11-17 & St. John 16:16-22

by William Klock

The disciples were confused.  John captures it well in our Gospel.  After the Last Supper, while the disciples were with him in the upper room, Jesus began taught them and that discourse runs from John 13 to John 17.  These chapters are full of hard saying—and they were particularly hard for the disciples for whom the events of Jesus betrayal and death and resurrection and ascension were still in the future.  Jesus talks about loss and sadness and he talks about joy and he talks about perseverance in the face of opposition.  But they sat there confused.  Every time they though Jesus was starting to make sense, he’d say something and they’d be lost again.

In that part of his discourse we read this morning, he says things like, “I’m going to my Father”, “Soon you will see me no more, but soon after that you’ll see me again”, and “Truly, truly you will weep and mourn while the world rejoices, but then we’ll see each other again and the tables will be turned and you’ll be the ones rejoicing.”

And, of course, the disciples are left shaking their heads in confusion and asking each other what all this means: “Where’s Jesus going?  Did he tell you he was going somewhere?”  “What does he mean he’s going to his Father?”  They didn’t understand because none of this had happened yet.  They didn’t understand because they were still thinking of the Messiah in the terms that most of the Jews were thinking of him—sure Jesus looked humble and meek now, but pretty soon he was going to throw off the poor, itinerant rabbi disguise and take care of business.

They also didn’t understand because Jesus is weaving two and probably three promises together here.  As the discourse unfolds, John will separate each of them out.  But Jesus makes his point with a lot more punch by simplifying everything.  This is Easter and this is what it means to be Easter people.  Jesus is going to be arrested, mocked, beaten, and crucified.  He’ll be dead for three days.  His friends will mourn, they’ll be afraid, Sunday will find them hiding behind locked doors, fearing that the authorities will come for them next.  But on Sunday Jesus will rise from death and his new creation will dawn.  While they’re weeping and afraid, Jesus will be setting lose the power that will begin making all things new.

Jesus’ promise to send the Holy Spirit is tied in here too.  Jesus will die—he’ll be away—and then he’ll rise from the grave—he’ll be back and they’ll see him again.  But then again, Jesus will only be with them a short while.  After forty days he’ll ascend to his Father, he’ll take up his throne to rule his kingdom, but they’ll see him again in the person of the Holy Spirit, whom he will send so that they’ll not only understand all of this, but so that they’ll be empowered to live the new life he’s promised.

But there seems to a third promise packed in here too and that’s the promise of Jesus’ final royal return at the end of the age, when all his enemies have been put under his feet and he comes back with his heavenly entourage to take up his eternal throne.

At each level, Jesus’ promise is a promise of difficulty, whether it it’s the fear and grief they felt during those three days after his death, whether it’s the time of prayer and waiting between his ascension and Pentecost, or whether it’s the time in which we live today, ambassadors living in hostile territory, proclaiming that Jesus is Lord, while we wait for his royal return.  The new creation is born out of the pain of the old the way a baby is born out of the pain of labour and childbirth.  The Christian life makes a lot more sense when we look at it through this promise of Jesus—when we remember that he didn’t promise that life would be easy, that all of our prayers would be answered the way we want, or that life would be full of health and wealth once we choose to follow him.  No.  Over and over Jesus promises just the opposite.  Being a disciple is like living through childbirth.  Jesus promised that the world would hate us.  No unregenerate person wants to admit that Jesus is the true Lord, because doing so means being confronted by the reality of their own sin and rebellion, doing so demands repentance as the only logical response and most people don’t want to repent, they don’t want to give up everything to embrace Jesus.  And on top of that, every one of us still has to live with the consequences of human sin—with sickness and poverty and with death.  The old has to die in order to be reborn.  But we face these things in hope.  The baby will be born, the labour will be over, and when we see the baby all the pain and all the tears will be overcome and driven away by the joy of that new life.  Brothers and Sisters, the resurrection of Jesus is the evidence that Jesus’ promises are coming true and that God’s new world is being born.

And all of this has implications for how we live in this in-between time.  It has implications for how we face the world and how we face all the sad and awful and difficult things that crop up in life because of our fall and humanity’s separation from God.  This is what St. Peter gets at in today’s Epistle.  Peter begins his first letter writing to his fellow Christians as exiles living in a great dispersion in hostile and foreign territory.  It’s an image he picked up from Judaism.  The Jews were scattered all over the world, but no matter where they lived, they identified themselves as Jews and they showed it by the way they lived.  And Peter begins with that imagery as he addresses fellow believers in Jesus.  Times are hard, life is hard—and a lot of that trouble is the direct result of choosing to follow Jesus—but right from the get-go Peter writes a joyful, “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ!  Because through his mercy he has given us a new birth into a living hope.”  Death and decay are all around, but through Jesus God has given us the hope of life and, Peter goes on, “He’s given us that hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.”  Each of us faces death—it might be from sickness, it might be from accident, it might be in the arena at the command of Caesar—but in Jesus we have “an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading, kept in heaven for us.”  It’s the life we had in the garden when we lived in God’s presence and had access to the tree of life.  It’s the opposite of most everything we see around us.  And we live in hope of that great day when it’s no longer kept safe for us in heaven, but when Jesus returns to rule, when heaven and earth are brought back together as they were in the garden, when we can live in the presence of God having been fully purified and made new.  In the meantime, Peter writes, we live for a little while suffering trials—but through these trials the dross is burned away and our faith is strengthened and purified like gold in the crucible.

This is what St. Peter’s first letter is about: hope in the midst of suffering and living in this world and this age full of hope and knowing that Jesus is in the process of making all things new.  It’s about being Easter people who live in light of the resurrection, charging into the darkness with the light of the gospel.

In the first part of Chapter 2, the part immediately before today’s Epistle, Peter urges his fellow Christians to set aside sin.  He draws on a whole bunch of images from the Old Testament that point to the Church as the new Israel.  He describes each of us as a living stone, precious to God, and being gathered together and built up as the Lord’s new temple—this time not a temple of bricks and mortar, but a living temple filled with the Holy Spirit.  Jesus is the cornerstone and just as he was rejected by the world, so will we be, but again, that’s all the more reason to have hope in the promises of Jesus.  We are following where he has already gone.  And so, Peter says, like Israel of old, we are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s own people called to proclaim the mighty acts of Jesus, who has called us out of darkness and into light.

Peter understood what it meant to live in this in-between time.  He understood what Jesus meant when he described our life with him as a woman in the middle of labour, but labouring with hope of the joy that is to come: pain and suffering and tears today, but joy tomorrow.  But that’s just it.  Our hope for tomorrow is expressed—it becomes a witness to the world—in how we respond to the pain and suffering and tears we have today.  We don’t just proclaim that Jesus is Lord with our mouths.  Brothers and Sisters, we are called to live out his lordship in our lives—we’re called to make it practical in ways that the world around us—so that the very people often causing the pain and suffering will see our faith and so that our lives will be to them a witness to Jesus’ lordship.  Look at 2:11-12:

Beloved, I urge you as sojourners and exiles to abstain from the passions of the flesh, which wage war against your soul.  Keep your conduct among the Gentiles honorable, so that when they speak against you as evildoers, they may see your good deeds and glorify God on the day of visitation.

 

When I was in high school I competed in a state-wide vocational skills contest.  I was in the architectural drafting competition.  I won first place in my county and then went to Seattle for the state competition.  There were close to a thousand kids there and we pretty much took over a large hotel.  At breakfast the first morning the person in charge of organizing the competition took the stage and reamed us out.  Some of us—not me!— had been so noisy and rowdy during the night that several dozen people had actually checked out of the hotel and the hotel manager was threatening to bill our group for what they lost.  The man who took the stage reminded us that we represented a highly respected national vocational educational association and that we’d tarnished its image with our bad behaviour.

Peter’s giving a similar warning.  When he says that we are sojourners and exiles he’s reminding us that we belong to Jesus.  We’re citizens of his kingdom.  We represent him to the world around us.  Think again of the good news that we proclaim: Jesus is Lord.  He has conquered sin and death.  He is God’s true King.  For the Christians of the First Century this was a profoundly political and subversive thing to say.  Everyone knew that Caesar was lord.  To say that Jesus is Lord was to say that Caesar was not.  Caesar didn’t like that.  The people who really did see Caesar as their lord didn’t like that either.  And they threw all sorts of accusations at those first Christians.  Christians might as well be atheists, people said, seeing as they worshiped only one God.  Christians were disloyal, refusing to profess the empire’s creed.  And while the specifics may have changed over the last two thousand years, you and I face the same sort of hostility.  We’re considered narrow and intolerant because we believe in only one God and because we believe Jesus is the way and the only way to life.  We’re narrow and bigoted for calling certain things “sin” and for holding a biblical worldview.  And we’re upsetting to people who trust in themselves or trust in their money or who trust in their government when we proclaim that only Jesus is worthy of our trust and worship.

And so Peter warns us: Be good ambassadors.  Yes, sin is a real temptation, but walk in the Spirit and keep your conduct honourable.  Don’t give unbelievers, don’t give non-Christians reason to speak evil against you.  If they hate you and if they persecute you, let it be for your unfaltering faith in Jesus, not for your hypocrisy, not for the sin you commit while pointing out their sins.  Let them hate you for standing for the truth, not for being sinful in the ways that you defend it.  In other words, live as befits a holy people; no matter how bad it gets, don’t respond to the world in worldly ways.  Live your lives in a such a way that by your response, your persecutors will see the light of Jesus and his kingdom in you.

In verses 13-15 Peter focuses specifically on what all this means for how we interact with our civil authorities and rulers.

Be subject for the Lord’s sake to every human institution, whether it be to the emperor as supreme, or to governors as sent by him to punish those who do evil and to praise those who do good.  For this is the will of God, that by doing good you should put to silence the ignorance of foolish people.

 

The creed or the pledge of allegiance of the Roman empire was “Caesar is Lord”.  To proclaim that Jesus is Lord is to also proclaim that Caesar is not.  That didn’t go over well in the First Century.  Many Christians were martyred for their witness to the lordship of Jesus.  Plenty of Christians were tempted to treat the civil authorities with disrespect.  After all, they represented Caesar who was just a pretender at the true lordship and divinity of Jesus.  Many Christians would have been tempted to mock Caesar and his rule.  And many, seeing their brothers and sisters taken off in chains, crucified, or fed to lions, might have wondered if it wasn’t then time to take up arms against the local authorities.  That was the direction many of the Jews were headed in and it would have been easy for Christians to follow them.

But Peter says “No”.  As part of our witness that Jesus is Lord, we Christians must submit ourselves to earthly rulers—even the evil ones who cart us off to prison or to the arena because of our faith in Jesus.  If the consequence of following Jesus is persecution, or imprisonment, or even death, so be it.  If that’s hard to swallow, just remember that by submitting ourselves to the injustices of earthly rulers we follow in the footsteps of Jesus.  I’m pretty well convinced that this is what Jesus was referring to when he told the disciples to “render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s”.  As the Father vindicated Jesus, so the Father will vindicate us.  We are not called to vindicate ourselves.  As the Father vindicated Jesus, so he will one day vindicate us.

It’s true that Scripture gives us a sustained rebuke of corrupt and wicked earthly rulers.  They are contrary to God’s will, contrary to his plan.  But it’s also true, right from the beginning in Genesis 2, that God created us human beings to rule his Creation.  Humans were meant to rule Creation.  What that would have looked like had Adam not sinned, whether God would have established some sort of righteous monarchy or some sort of holy anarchy, is hard to say, but it is clear that God has established human rulers.  It’s just that human rulers are sinful and have done a bad job of ruling.  Nevertheless, order is better than chaos and if history shows us anything, the violent overthrow of one ruler usually just results in more violence and more overthrows and a spiral into chaos.  Earthly rulers are God’s plan; it’s their sin that’s not.  But even sinful rulers are instruments of God’s common grace, bringing order and restraining at least some sin.

Jesus calls us to follow his example of submission, even in the face of persecution and death.  Yes, refuse to participate in or to support the evil of our earthly rulers, refuse to remain silent when confronted with evil, speak out against it—that’s part of following Jesus—and never treat them like the gods they so often act like they are—but be prepared to suffer for it just as Jesus did.  Again, our Father will vindicate us just as he vindicated Jesus in his resurrection.  Our calling is not to be revolutionaries of the sort who respond to violence with violence.  Jesus shows us a better way.  By our peaceful and humble witness we shame those who would criticise us or who wish us ill.

Jesus shows us a better way.  Jesus broke the cycle of violence begetting violence.  He submitted to his death at Caesar’s hands.  When he was reviled he did not revile in return.  When he suffered he did not threaten.  No, instead he entrusted himself to his Father who judges justly.  This is where the rubber meets the road.  This is where following Jesus is so hard, but it’s precisely what Peter has in mind in our Epistle.  When we suffer violence, our natural instinct is to respond with violence.  When someone infringes on our rights, our natural response is to fight back.  But that’s what human beings have been doing from the beginning and all we see is sin begetting more sin, violence begetting more violence, and vengeance begetting more vengeance.  Again, Jesus has made possible a better way.  Jesus suffered violence and gave back forgiveness.  He broke the cycle and made a way for peace and reconciliation and he calls us to do the same in our public life—with each other, with the people around us, and even with our rulers—even the evil and corrupt ones.  By his suffering Jesus brought forgiveness of sin to us, and now Jesus works through us.  We forgiven sinners are now called to suffer as he did and to return sin and violence with forgiveness.  Forgiveness spreads, the cycle of sin is broken, and Jesus makes new.

And so Peter sums up:

Live as people who are free, not using your freedom as a cover-up for evil, but living as servants of God.  Honor everyone. Love the brotherhood. Fear God. Honor the emperor.

 

Through his death and resurrection Jesus has freed us from our bondage to sin and that changes everything—and not just us; it changes the whole world even if the world doesn’t realise it yet.  And that’s just it.  This is why we who have experienced the power of the cross and the empty tomb, this is why those of us who know Jesus is Lord and who know the true King are called to proclaim his death and resurrection and his lordship to the world.  This is why our humble witness is so important.  And so Peter warns us: our freedom can never be an excuse or cover for sin.  Just the opposite: we’ve been freed from sin to serve the Lord and that’s what the world needs to see us doing.  And in serving the Lord we show honour to everyone.  Let the world see us loving each other as Christians.  Let the world see us fearing the Lord.  And let the world see us honouring the emperor—and anyone else who would do us harm.  Of course we refuse to collaborate with evil.  Of course we proclaim that Jesus is Lord, not Caesar.  But one of the most powerful witnesses to Jesus we can have is to suffer unjustly for the sake of righteousness and to respond to violence and injustice with forgiveness.  That is what the cross is all about and we can face it in faithful hope knowing that Jesus not only died, but also rose from death and has promised the same to us.  Again, he says in the Gospel: “You have sorrow now, but I will see you again, and your hearts will rejoice, and no one will take your joy from you.”

Let us pray: Heavenly Father, in the collect we asked for grace to live in a way that accords with our profession of faith in Jesus.  We ask again, as we live with Jesus, as we steep ourselves in your word, as we receive your grace in our Baptism and at your Table, as we live our common life together, teach us what it looks like to live as people who have been transformed by the death and resurrection of Jesus, give us grace and courage to witness this life to the world, and help us to keep our witness consistent, loving each other, serving you, showing honour to all those around us—even our persecutors—and especially give us the grace to return evil with forgiveness as Jesus has done for us.  We ask all this through him, our Lord and Saviour.  Amen.