Living Words

The Fourth Sunday in Advent:

The Voice Crying in the Wilderness

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

by William Klock

The days have been getting shorter and shorter. I walk home from the church in the dark most days. Just before the snow fell I rode my bike up the Mountain on the logging roads to Lost Lake and found myself riding back down in the dark, which came more quickly than I anticipated. I was glad I took my headlight with me. The short days can be very dreary. It occurs to me that this is why Christmas lights are so popular, bringing some light and cheer into the darkness. Whether people realise it or not, in Jesus the light has come into the darkness and even people who wouldn’t know the gospel from a hole in the ground live in that light. Jesus has changed everything—even for people who think Christmas is just about Santa and Rudolph and Frosty. The light has come into the world and the world has not overcome it.

But think about Israel in the time of the Gospels. In the time of Mary and Joseph, of Elizabeth and Zechariah, of John the Baptist and of Jesus, of Herod. The world was dark…oh so dark. The nation was enslaved to false gods and to wicked kings who, themselves, claimed divinity. St. Paul writes of demonic forces that enslaved the nations—forces broken and defeated by the gospel—but that victory was decades away. The world was dark. Even little Israel, called to be the light of the world, lay in spiritual darkness. The candlestick in the temple was kept lit, but the cloud of glory that had once filled the holy of holies, the very presence of God, had been absent for five-hundred years. God’s people were ruled by pagans and pretenders. And apart from a faithful remnant, the nation had been consumed by the darkness, a holy people in little other than their calling. But the people knew the words of the prophets, the promises of their God. It would not be this way forever. That’s the setting for today’s Gospel, which begins at John 1:19. Here’s what John writes:

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

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

“Well, then,” they ask, “who are you?” John first denies that he’s Elijah and then he denies that he’s “the prophet”. What’s that about. Well, first, Malachi had prophesied that Elijah, Israel’s greatest prophet—after Moses, that is—would return one day. This is what he wrote:

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

We have a pretty good sense, based on the literature of the time, that a lot of people interpreted this to mean that Elijah himself would literally return in the flesh. Sort of like a King Arthur to return to rescue Britain at its darkest hour. Some people connected this Elijah Redivivus with the coming of the Messiah. Considering that Elijah, rather than dying like everyone else, was swept up by a fiery chariot into heaven, it’s not surprising that people would take Malachi this way. I suspect this sort of literal fulfilment of the prophecy is why John denied that he was Elijah. In contrast, in last week’s Gospel, we saw Jesus affirm that John was indeed the one to come in fulfilment of Malachi’s prophecy. Maybe John was just exceedingly humble, maybe it never occurred to him that he was, indeed, fulfilling Malachi’s prophecy, but it may have been that he knew he wasn’t literally Elijah returned as many expected.

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

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

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

They asked him, “Then why are you baptizing, if you are neither the Christ, nor Elijah, nor the Prophet?” John answered them, “I baptize with water, but among you stands one you do not know, even he who comes after me, the strap of whose sandal I am not worthy to untie.”

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

These are the two sides of the gospel coin: Jesus’ advent brought mercy to the repentant, but it also brought judgement on the unrepentant within Israel. What’s significant for us here, Brothers and Sisters, is that this exchange between John and the Pharisees reminds us of the Messiah’s place in Israel’s story and of the faithfulness of God to his promises. It is this manifestation of the Lord’s faithfulness (and of his goodness, mercy, grace, and wisdom) to Israel—something we see brought to its climax in the coming, the death, the resurrection, and the ascension of Jesus, that has drawn us to the God of Israel and that, by faith, has incorporated us into the people of God. Through our incorporation into this people, through our being made adopted sons and daughters of Abraham, we’ve come to know God’s mercy and the life of the Spirit, too. Because of the faithfulness of God, revealed in Jesus and in power of the gospel, the darkness that Mary and Joseph, Elizabeth and Zechariah, John the Baptist and Jesus knew, that deep, deep darkness full of false gods and wicked kings and demonic power is but a shadow of its former self. The light has come into the darkness, his gospel has thrown those powers down and lit up the world. And you and I live in the glory of that light. And this is where our Epistle today takes off. There are practical implications of our being incorporated into the story of the people of God.

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

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

What specifically prompted Paul to write this? Well, just two verses earlier, Paul exhorted two women, Euodia and Syntyche, to agree with each other. They had once been fellow labourers with Paul, but had apparently had some kind of dispute or falling out. In response, he calls the Philippian Christian to rejoice in the Lord. Instead of a public display of disunity or resentment or anger—whatever it was that was going on between these two women, the Church was to put joy on display, to celebrate the life of God. They were people of the light, but they were living in the dark. It was imperative that they come back into the light. Paul then writes:

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

The King James says, “Let your moderation be known unto all men.” “Moderation” or “reasonableness” aren’t really very helpful translations. Paul uses the same word in 2 Corinthians 10 to describe the meekness of Jesus as a model for Christians. What Paul’s getting at there is that Jesus is the King. The gospel reveals and proclaims him in all his divine majesty. And yet it also reveals his gentleness. And it’s not just gentleness. It’s the sort of gentleness that only the one who is truly the Lord of the cosmos can show. This is the gentleness we see revealed as Jesus, the one to whom heaven and earth belong, humbles himself to be born one of us, to die on the cross, and to show mercy to his enemies. This kind of meekness or gentleness is unique to Jesus, and yet Paul stresses that as his people, as stewards of the gospel, we’re called to witness this same gentleness ourselves. As it should be the resolution to so many disputes in the Church, it was the resolution to whatever had driven Euodia and Syntyche apart.

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

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

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

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

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

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

I said last Sunday that we are called both to proclaim and to live the gospel. This is that living it, right here. And coupled with our proclamation, to truly live in light of Jesus and what he reveals about God, should cause the world to stand up and take note. It will result in many giving glory to God for his faithfulness and then coming to him in faith as we have. And it will threaten many who are invested in the pagan and fallen systems of the world. Like John the Baptist, we are a voice in the wilderness. The difference is that Jesus has now been enthroned as Lord.

But we need to ask: Does the world see our joy? Are we the voice crying in the wilderness? Are we the royal heralds the Lord has called us to be, summoning the word to let go of its false gods and to come to the Lord Jesus? Two years ago the government barred us from meeting as it tried to slow the spread of COVID. A lot of people were shouting about persecution. Brothers and Sisters, I really think we were dealing with something worse than persecution. Here’s what I mean. Persecution happens when people fear the Church and fear our witness. Last week I mentioned Rod Dreher’s new book, Live Not by Lies. In that book he talks about his conversations with people who lived under Communism in Eastern Europe. The Soviets clamped down on Christians because they understood that the gospel, that the message that Jesus is Lord was a threat to their atheistic philosophy. And it wasn’t theoretical. It was often Christians who took a stand against the Communists and they did so in light of the gospel. And they were persecuted horribly for their stand for Jesus.

Brothers and Sisters, that’s not what we saw here. When the health threat passed, the orders banning public gatherings were lifted. You can agree or disagree with the wisdom or rightness of those health orders, but it wasn’t persecution. It was something worse. It was indifference to the Church. The government isn’t afraid of us or our message. It’s not afraid we’ll undermine its often godless and immoral dictates and agendas. They aren’t hostile to us. They’re simply indifferent. As far as the Health Minister or Provincial Health Officer were concerned, churches (and synagogues, mosques, temples, and gurdwaras) are just hobbies and social clubs and if that’s all we are, well, we can suspend our gatherings or take them online. Leaders in previous generations, in the midst of national crises, called the Church to prayer. They understood the value of God’s people gathered together to pray for the community, the nation, and the world. But not anymore. I’m not aware of any time when our Prime Minister, Premier, or Provincial Health Officer ever asked Christians (or anyone else, for that matter) to pray for the province or the nation. It didn’t occur to them that prayer is important or makes a difference—or, for that matter, that God is in control. And we really have ourselves to blame. Why? Because we have not been the witnesses God calls us to be. We have been mealy-mouthed and, quite often, just plain silent in our proclamation and because we have been half-hearted and unfaithful in our gospel living. Like old Israel, we pray to God, but we’ve failed to tear down the old altars to Mammon and Aphrodite and Caesar. We name Jesus, but we deal dishonestly in business, we sell our souls to the commercialism that surrounds us, we look to politics or to science as our saviours, and we dabble in the sexual immorality of the age. We’ve failed to proclaim the gospel and we justify it, saying that we’ll preach it with our lives. But if we stop to ask what the world sees in our lives, is it really very different? Does the world see us rejoicing in the Lord? Does the world see us manifesting the merciful gentleness of Jesus? Does the world see us living in faithful prayer and trusting in God, or does it see people just as anxious as everyone else? Does the world see the peace of God ruling our hearts and minds? Does the world see us, holding high the gospel, as a challenge to its gods and kings? It should. But sadly, I think that for the Church at large, the answer more often than not is “no”.

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

Brothers and Sisters, the Church today has so failed at being stewards of the gospel that we’re provoking neither response: neither hostility and persecution on the one hand, or a harvest of new believers attracted to our faithful preaching and living. The Advent message is to be prepared. Jesus has given us a gospel mission to take the good news of his death, his resurrection, and his lordship into the world. Brothers and Sisters, pray that we will be faithful to our mission—faithful enough to provoke persecution, because that’s the kind of faithfulness that also reaps a harvest people for the kingdom. Pray for the holy boldness of John the Baptist. Pray that we will be the salt of the earth and the light of the world. Pray that the joy of the Lord will overcome us. Brothers and Sisters, Rejoice! Rejoice in the Lord always. Again, I say rejoice.

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

The Third Sunday in Advent: Faithful Stewards

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

by William Klock

Short of pulling vegetables out of the ground or carving up an animal, bread is one of the simplest of all the foods humans eat.  At its most basic, it’s simple and easy to make.  You mix flour and water and put it in an oven.  It can get more complicated.  You can add leavening and other things.  But there’s a reason why nearly every human culture has not only developed some kind of bread, but also eats it as a staple.  I’m not a baker, but even I can make bread—at least the simple kind and with the help of a bread machine.  Just follow the simple instructions.  But from time to time I’ve failed at the task.  There was the time I was in too much of a hurry to follow the bread machine instructions to use room temperature milk and eggs.  The mixture was too cold and the yeast didn’t rise.  Or there was the time I decided to get fancy—to bake something beyond my abilities, a Gugelhupf cake for extra credit in my German class.  I don’t know where I went wrong, but trying to get fancy ended up with a brick coming out of the oven.  I say all of this because the Bible talks quite a lot about bread.  Jesus said of himself that he is the bread of life.  And the Church’s ministry is a lot like bread in the same way.  We minister the good news to the world.  We share the bread of life.  Our message and our calling are simple.  Just do what Jesus told us to do.  Proclaim the simple message.  But we often get it wrong.  We try to get fancy, thinking we can improve on it.  Or we look at some part of it and think, “Oh…they won’t like that,” so we leave it out, as if we know better than Jesus. The end result—like my failed cake or loaf of bread—doesn’t do anyone any good.

This is where our lessons today point us.  If the over-arching theme of advent is to be prepared, we’re reminded today, we’re exhorted today to be faithful in doing what the Lord has called us to do.  To follow the simple instructions.  God’s people have always had a very specific calling, whether we’re talking about his people in the Old Testament or his people in the New.  Jesus has established his church to carry on what has always been Israel’s mission, ever since Abraham, but now to carry it out in light of Jesus the Messiah.  To be light in the darkness.  To reveal and to proclaim the glory of God and to draw the world to him.  To make the good news of Jesus, crucified, risen, and Lord known.  Now, there’s a lot of room for creativity in how we fulfil our mission, but Jesus also gave us very, very clear instructions and if we throw out the core of our mission in the name of creativity or flexibility or pragmatism, we’re going to fail.

Our men’s breakfast group has just begun reading Rod Dreher’s book Live Not by Lies.  The last few years, Dreher has been writing about what the Church, particularly in North America, needs to be doing as we enter a new dark age.  His concern is that Christians are woefully unprepared to live as a minority community, let alone to live in an environment that is becoming increasingly hostile to us.  For the last couple of generations we’ve been failing to instil lasting faith in our children and have lost them to the culture.  In the last decade, our people, our leaders, and our churches have been falling like dominos to Postmodern apostasy.  And there’s a reason for this.  We’re trying to bake bread our way, instead of following the recipe God gave us.  We’ve sidelined what Jesus told us to do and have put other things at the centre of what we are.  We’ve changed and watered down the message.  We’ve muddled the truth to the point that many Christians can no longer distinguish between God’s truth and the world’s lies.  And, all too often, we’ve stopped trusting in the Holy Spirit to do the work of converting hearts and minds and have been trying to do it ourselves.

Our lessons today focus our attention on the faithfulness of God’s ministers.  The Epistle focuses on St. Paul and the Gospel on John the Baptist.  The choice of lessons is linked to the Ember Days that fall later this week.  The Embers Days come around four times a year and, at least historically, were the traditional times for ordinations.  With that in mind, our advent lessons today call the clergy to faithfulness to our mission and remind the Church of the importance of faithful ministers.  But even though today’s focus is on what we might call “professional” ministers, there’s a broader application for all of us, because every Christian is a steward and minister of the gospel.

Let’s begin with our Epistle, 1 Corinthians 11:1-5.  And we’ll want a little background to understand it.  The Church at Corinth had a lot of problems and a big part of it was that many were having trouble setting aside their old, pagan ways.  They had compromised much.  There were some serious sins in the church that needed to be dealt with, but weren’t.  People were justifying them by appealing to Christian liberty.  There were also divisions within the congregation.  Paul had founded this church, but the people didn’t want to listen to him anymore.  They’d become enamoured of other preachers.  There’s nothing to indicate these other preachers were preaching anything apart from the gospel.  The problem in Corinth wasn’t their fault.  The problem was that Paul was about the least flashy person you could imagine and when other preachers came along who were more attractive and who were better speakers than Paul—that was something the Greeks valued very highly—they kicked Paul to the curb.  Not only would they not listen to him, he wasn’t even welcome anymore.  They judged him a loser.  That’s what’s behind our Epistle today.  Let’s read:

This is how one should regard us, as servants of Christ and stewards of the mysteries of God.  Moreover, it is required of stewards that they be found faithful.  But with me it is a very small thing that I should be judged by you or by any human court.  In fact, I do not even judge myself.  For I am not aware of anything against myself, but I am not thereby acquitted. It is the Lord who judges me.  Therefore do not pronounce judgment before the time, before the Lord comes, who will bring to light the things now hidden in darkness and will disclose the purposes of the heart.  Then each one will receive his commendation from God.

 

I’ve always wondered how hard it was for Paul to write this, especially the bit about “This is how you need to regard me: I’m a servant of Christ and a steward of God’s mysteries.”  Good clergymen tend to err on the side of humility, even to a fault.  The only guys I’ve ever known to say things like this have been egotists who never should have been in ministry in the first place.  But Paul had one advantage that only the apostles had and that was that they had known Jesus in the flesh and had been commissioned by him personally.  I can’t say that and neither can anyone else alive today.  That said, there is a place for God’s stewards to assert their calling in the face of unjust judgement.  Most of us, when faced with unjust criticism nod humbly, say nothing, and take it to God, but Paul reminds us that there is a time to speak up against these kinds of judgements.  I think that goes for every Christian, too.  We’re all ministers of the gospel, but we live in an age that is becoming increasingly hostile to the gospel and to gospel people.  Sometimes there’s some legitimacy to the criticism and hostility.  Sometimes Christians and sometimes churches have failed and done awful things.  But those are the outliers.  Most of the criticism we face is simply the result of people who hate Jesus and the message of the cross and anyone who proclaims it.  As Dreher points out, most of us are not prepared for this.  Here we are, ministers of the gospel and stewards of the mysteries of God and increasingly we’re just letting the false judgements and accusations of pagans back us out of the room.  We go silently and sit facing the corner like disciplined children—and I think a lot of the time we actually feel guilty when we hear these accusations, even though we know better.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Sunday Next Before Advent: The Faithfulness of God

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

by William Klock

How much do you know about the Prophet Jeremiah?  We read the books attributed to the prophets, but we don’t often enough take the time to look at who wrote them, and when and why?  But we can’t understand the book unless we know these things.  Jeremiah is often called “the Weeping Prophet”.  His was a ministry of woe.  The Lord called him to his office during the reign of King Josiah, in about 626 b.c., and his ministry continued for about forty years, up to the conquest of Jerusalem by the Babylonians and the beginning of the Exile.  And Jeremiah was not called to preach sunshine and rainbows.  Other prophets (false prophets) of the time were condemned for preaching “Peace! Peace! When there was no peace.”  Jeremiah was called to preach the Lord’s coming judgment on Judah in the midst of a long string of wicked kings and national apostasy.

Jeremiah, again, began his ministry during Josiah’s reign.  In contrast to those who came before and after, Josiah was a good king.  He introduced reforms and called the nation to repentance and to faith.  He renovated the temple in Jerusalem and purged pagan worship from the nation.  He had altars to Baal torn down and pagan priests executed.  He even dug up the bones of pagan priests and burned them on their pagan altars as an act of desecration.  He restored the regular observance of the Passover.  And as much as the Lord, through Jeremiah, acknowledge the goodness of what Josiah had done, the corruption, the idolatry, the apostasy of the nation was deeply rooted and none of it would be enough.  Even as the King was doing all these good things, the message of the Prophet was still one of looming judgement.  Josiah’s reforms would not last.  He died fighting the Egyptians and was followed by a fairly brief series of kings who did what was evil in the sight of the Lord.  The same went largely for the people of Judah.  Josiah desired reform, but his people did not share his desire.  Jeremiah’s prophecy announced the Lord’s coming judgement, which would culminate in a final curse of exile from the promised land.  Jeremiah rebuked the kings and people of Judah for their idolatry, for their pride, for their failure to keep the Sabbath, but above all, he rebuked Judah’s unjust social, political, and economic structures.  Jerusalem, announced Jeremiah in 5:1-9, had become worse than Sodom.  There wasn’t a just person to be found to give the Lord a reason to spare the city from judgement.

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

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

The kings of Israel should have been faithful shepherds looking after the flock of Israel.  Jeremiah calls to mind David, the shepherd-king.  The king after God’s own heart, who, despite his great failures, still sought the Lord and his will for his people.  In contrast, the leaders of Judah in Jeremiah’s day did the opposite.  They abused the sheep and led them into idolatry.  “Thus says the Lord,” prophesies Jeremiah ominously, “You have not attended to the sheep, so I will attend to you.”  The failure of Judah’s kings would result in the scattering, the exile of the people.  Israel was called to be the people who lived with the Lord in their midst, but to live in the Lord’s presence meant living according to his way and his law.  Israel, from the king down, had failed.  They were called to be a light to the nations, but instead, the nations mocked her saying, “Where is your God?”  Judah would be judged.  But it won’t end there.  Look at verses 3-4:

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

 

The Lord will restore the faithful remnant of the flock and will provide faithful shepherds to care for them.  Specifically, Jeremiah goes on beginning at verse 5:

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

Brothers and Sisters, our Old Testament lesson today reminds us of Israel’s calling and Israel’s failure.  And in the midst of Israel’s faithlessness, it reminds us of the Lord’s faithfulness.  Nothing will stop his plan to set his fallen creation and fallen people to rights.  When his people fail, he will send a king to set them right.

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

Mark Nine: Biblical Discipleship

by William Klock

I grew up where white oaks grew everywhere, but here they’re relatively uncommon.  The Comox Valley is right on the northern edge of their native growth zone.  Apparently, in the latter half of the 19th Century the climate here was more ideal for them.  Acorns that fell to good soil had a pretty good chance of becoming trees.  Now the climate’s changed and getting those acorns to turn into trees is much more complicated.  Every year—except this year!—the oaks around the church here drop their acorns and time and again I’ve tried to grow trees from them.  I’ve never had any success.  But trying to grow acorns into trees has a lot in common with the subject of discipleship and that’s the last mark of a healthy church to be covered.  Brothers and Sisters, a healthy church will have a concern for discipleship, for its members to grow in the faith.  But back to my attempts to grow oak trees.  The first year I  was here I gathered several handfuls of acorns on a Sunday morning.  I left them on my desk, figuring I’d do something with them later.  I was gone for a few days and came back to discover little worms crawling all over the place, building little cocoon-like webs around my lamp and between my books.  I tossed them all in the garbage.  The next year I did a little research—emphasis, I suppose, on little—and put the acorns I’d collected in damp potting soil in the refrigerator.  I took them out in the spring only to find the potting soil full of little dead worms and rotten acorns.  A few years later I researched how to collect acorns and how to sort out the good ones that the worms hadn’t got to yet.  I put them in the refrigerator over the winter and in the spring I planted them in little plastic cups to sprout.  And sprout they did.  But they were outside, there was a late freeze, and they all died.  I had better luck the next year.  They sprouted in the little cups, then I transferred them into gallon pots.  They grew for a while, then stopped.  I did more research and found it was because the little cups and then the gallon pots had caused the roots to curl up into a ball.  Oak trees need to start with a long, straight tap root.  Instead of using small cups and then gallon pots, I should have planted them in 2’ lengths of PVC pipe and then transplanted them into the ground when the roots emerged from the bottom.  I did transplant several, but none survived the winter.  At that point I decided it was too complicated.  But that was, I think, the most success I’d ever had with growing anything from seeds.  Usually, I plant seeds at the wrong time of year, or I forget to water them, or I water them too much, or the rabbits come and nibble away the stalks when they emerge.  It takes the right conditions for plants to grow.  They need sunlight and water and oxygen.  They need to be given the proper space to grow.  They need the right temperature.  And they need to be protected from the critters that eat them.  But given those things, they grow, because that’s what God made them to do.

God’s people aren’t all that different.  Listen to the first three verses of Psalm 1:

Blessed is the man

         who walks not in the counsel of the wicked,

nor stands in the way of sinners,

         nor sits in the seat of scoffers;

but his delight is in the law of the Lord,

         and on his law he meditates day and night.

He is like a tree

         planted by streams of water

that yields its fruit in its season,

         and its leaf does not wither.

In all that he does, he prospers.

 

This was written in the context of the old covenant so we might change it a little bit here and there, but it’s basically true for the Christian.  Plant yourself in God’s word—which is itself an act of faith and obedience—and steer clear of wickedness, sin, and the ungodly, and the Spirit will cause you to grow.  God gives us means of grace: his word, his Spirit, his sacraments, his Church, and they are to us what sunlight and water are plants.

We’re like plants in other ways, too.  Things that are alive grow.  We were once dead, but God has grafted us into his Son, he’s filled us with his Spirit, and we grow.  Jesus says, “I am the vine; you are the branches.”  Live vines grow, don’t they?  So should Jesus’ people—and not just individually.  Together we’re this vine called the Church.  We grow together, rooted in Jesus, and supporting each other.  St. Paul, in Romans 8, describes the growth that God gives his people as being “conformed to the image of his Son”.  Or, as he writes in 1 Corinthians 3:18:

We all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another. For this comes from the Lord who is the Spirit.

 

God has made us alive and living things grow.  And growth is essential.  Think of our study of Revelation and Jesus’ repeated exhortations to his people there to persevere in faith and holiness in the face of persecution and even martyrdom.  Brothers and Sisters, that kind of perseverance not only requires life, but it also requires growth.  Think of a salmon.  It spends its life in the ocean, growing and building strength so that it can return to the river where it was born, wage a vigorous battle upstream, fighting the current all the way, so that it can spawn and reproduce itself, creating the next generation.  God’s people aren’t all that different.  The salmon remind me of the well-known quote from Nikolaus von Zinzendorf: “Preach the gospel, die, and be forgotten.”  We grow strong over time on God’s grace by word, by sacrament, by prayer, by fellowship and we persevere, fighting against the currents of the world.  We raise our own children to do the same and we proclaim the good news about Jesus, we witness his kingdom, and by that the Spirit raises up the next generation to continue the battle.  If we have produced a new generation of disciples, Brothers and Sisters, we have done well.  But take away the means of grace, and we die before the mission is ever accomplished.  Some years ago I went to an ecumenical clergy breakfast at the hospital.  They had a morning prayer service led by some liberal Presbyterians.  Another pastor said to me afterward, “What was that?”  They prayed and they sang, but it all felt utterly dead and completely disconnected from God.  The feeling was palpable to many of us there and it made sense.  It was sad, but it made sense.  These were folks who had given up on the authority of God’s word and, like dead salmon, were floating downstream—floating with the world’s currents, wherever they might lead.

And that highlights the importance of discipleship.  Our growth as disciples, our growth into Christ’s likeness, our growth in the fruit of the Spirit and in holiness is essential—and a healthy church will have a healthy concern for it.  Living things grow.  Living things fight the current.  Dead things don’t.  And so Paul writes to the Ephesians:

Speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ, from whom the whole body, joined and held together by every joint with which it is equipped, when each part is working properly, makes the body grow so that it builds itself up in love. (Ephesians 4:15-16)

If we will lean on God and immerse ourselves in the means of grace he has given, he will grow us.  To quote Paul again, this time as he wrote to the Colossians: Jesus is “the head, from whom the whole body, nourished and knit together through its joints and ligaments, grows with a growth that is from God” (Colossians 2:19).

Notice: Jesus is the head.   We don’t cause the growth.  The best preacher or the best Bible study leader in the world cannot grow Christians.  Only God’s word and Spirit can do that.  Paul again to the Corinthians, “I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the growth.  So neither he who plants nor he who waters is anything, but only God who gives the growth” (1 Corinthian 3:6-7).  Even when Paul congratulates the Thessalonian Christians on their growth, he gives the thanks to God for it.  Look at 2 Thessalonians 1:3:

We ought always to give thanks to God for you, brothers, as is right, because your faith is growing abundantly, and the love of every one of you for one another is increasing.

 

And knowing that it is God who grows his people, Paul prayed for them to grow.  For the Thessalonians he prayed:

May the Lord make your love increase and overflow for each other and for everyone else….May he strengthen your hearts so that you will be blameless and holy in the presence of our God and Father when our Lord Jesus comes with all his holy ones. (1 Thessalonians 3:11-13)

He prays similarly for the Colossian Christians:

And we pray this in order that you may live a life worthy of the Lord and may please him in every way: bearing fruit in every good work, growing in the knowledge of God. (Colossians 1:10)

Or let’s flip over to 2 Peter and hear what he has to say.  Here’s 2 Peter 1:5-8:

For this very reason, make every effort to supplement your faith with virtue, and virtue with knowledge, and knowledge with self-control, and self-control with steadfastness, and steadfastness with godliness, and godliness with brotherly affection, and brotherly affection with love.  For if these qualities are yours and are increasing, they keep you from being ineffective or unfruitful in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ.

 

And if we flip back to Peter’s first epistle, in 2:2-5, he writes this:

Like newborn infants, long for the pure spiritual milk, that by it you may grow up into salvation—if indeed you have tasted that the Lord is good.  As you come to him, a living stone rejected by men but in the sight of God chosen and precious, you yourselves like living stones are being built up as a spiritual house, to be a holy priesthood, to offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ.

 

Brothers and Sisters, our growth in the Lord, our growth in faith, our growth in holiness ought to be a priority—for each of us individually, but also collectively as the Church.  As the writer of Hebrews tells us, “Let us consider how to stir up one another to love and good works” (Hebrews 10:24).  Christian growth, discipleship, whatever we want to call it, will always be a priority for a healthy church.

Now, in case I haven’t been clear, Christian growth—and, again, by that I mean discipleship or Christian maturity—that is not the same thing as Church growth, by which I mean the numerical growth of the Church in general or of the local church.  Our age has developed an obsession with the latter, and while we don’t usually outright ignore discipleship, we often inadvertently sacrifice it for the sake of church growth.  We put the cart before the horse.  And, sometimes as I’ve said before, we confuse the things that are our responsibility with the things that are God’s.  Discipleship—the growth and maturing of God’s people—needs to come first.  That doesn’t mean we sideline missions and evangelism until we’re all mature.  It just means that we trust God to do his part while we do ours.  When we prioritise evangelism and mission, we usually end up compromising the very things that are needed to grow God’s people—like tree-planters who want a huge forest and plant a ton of trees, but don’t properly prepare the soil, or neglect to water them.  When we put evangelism or missions first, we often downplay things like expositional preaching, a biblical understanding of the gospel and of conversion, we downplay the need for commitment and discipline—because we want to see bigger numbers and these other things have a tendency to scare people away.  If you plant oak trees, they will make more oak trees if you plant them and care for them properly in the first place.  If you just poke a ton of acorns into the ground—at least around here—you’ll end up with very few full-grown trees capable of reproducing themselves.  But that’s often how Christians do things these days.  Friends, real Christians who truly know the love, the grace, the mercy of God revealed in Jesus will enthusiastically proclaim that good news and, with the help of the Spirit, make new Christians—but we’ll do it God’s way and trusting him to bring the fruit.  It’s relatively easy to fill a church with people; it’s a lot more work to fill it with actual disciples, but that’s what we’ve got to do, because only true disciples will go out and make more disciples.  This is why understanding these marks of a healthy church is important.

And all these other marks we’ve looked at over the last two months will grow disciples.  To briefly recap:

A healthy church will have a commitment to expositional preaching, whether that’s preaching the lectionary or preaching through whole books or parts of books.  The point is that such a church’s preaching will be rooted in God’s word.  The preacher’s agenda will be God’s agenda.  The words and ideas preached will not be the preacher’s, but God’s.  There will always be parts of the Bible that Christians would rather avoid, but expositional preaching challenges the preacher and the church to hear those hard things, to wrestle with them, and to be obedient to them.  Brothers and Sisters, my thoughts will not give you life.  Only God’s word can do that.  And that’s what we must preach.

An expositional ministry in the pulpit also establishes where our values lie.  A people who value Bible-centred preaching is more likely to be a people who are themselves Bible-centred—who invest time in reading and study and praying the scriptures themselves and who gather together to read, and study, and pray them.  And we do this knowing that God’s word give life.  It’s the raw material the Spirit works with to grow us in faith, in obedience, and in holiness.

Preaching grounded in the Bible will give a church biblical theology.  It will bring us closer to the God who has saved us, because it ever more reveals who he is.  Biblical theology also reveals who we are and what God wants for us.  Biblical theology tells us the story into which God has called us.  Biblical theology causes us to grow in our love for God, our love for each other, it causes us to grow in holiness, and it gives us our mission—to proclaim the good news about Jesus and to make disciples.

Biblical preaching and biblical theology will lead us to a right and biblical understanding of the gospel—of the good news about Jesus, crucified, risen, and ascended.  A biblical understanding of the gospel reminds us that human being stand before God as rebellious sinners condemned to death, but it also reveals God’s loving faithfulness at the cross, and as we look on the risen Messiah we are reminded that by faith, that God has redeemed us and made us his own sons and daughters.  A biblical understanding of the gospel reveals the sinfulness of sin and the amazing graciousness of grace, it teaches our hearts and minds to love the one who sacrificed himself for our sake, and it drives us out those doors in to the world to proclaim what he has done.

A biblical understanding of the gospel, like these other things, lies at the root of discipleship.  Getting the gospel wrong undermines everything else.  If, for example, we confuse the gospel with messages of prosperity, we will never understand the meaning of sacrifice.  We will never understand God’s discipline.  When life is difficult or persecution comes to the Church, the prosperity gospel will turn out to be rocky soil and those planted in it will wither and die, while those who have put roots deep into the soil of the biblical gospel will thrive in the midst of trials.  There are many false gospels.  Many confuse good works for the gospel, many today are preaching self-love or self-esteem or self-actualisation as the gospel.  None of those messages will save and none will make disciples of Jesus who will persevere hardship and make new disciples of Jesus who will carry on the mission Jesus has given us.

A biblical understanding of the gospel will ensure that we have a biblical understanding of conversion and as we understand conversion, we’ll understand that to be a Christian is to be transformed by God’s word and Spirit.  It’s to understand that the change that takes place in our lives is the fruit of God’s grace at work in us.  A biblical understand of conversion will make us a humble people, not proud of our works, but a people ever more reliant on the grace of God.  And the more we rest in his grace, the more he will continue to grow us.

A biblical understanding of evangelism ensures we know what a Christian actually is.  Mark Dever makes this observation, “The lack of spiritual growth in people who call themselves Christians is often an evidence that they have been wrongly evangelized.  We have taught people who are not Christians to think of themselves as though they are…The church is not finally a booster organization.  We’re telling people a serious message about their condition before God, and about the tremendous news of the new life God is offering them in Christ.  And we’re inviting them to enter into that life by dire and desperate means—repentance and faith.”[1]  Too often we throw acorns on the ground and call them trees.  We not only ignore the hard work needed to make them grow, but we’re too ready to call them trees when there’s no evidence of transformation and growth.  Filling pews isn’t the same as making disciples, but it’s a lot easier to do the former than the latter.  In a culture obsessed with numbers-based success, it’s easy to just count noses and pat ourselves on the back.  But a biblical understanding of the gospel, of conversion, and of evangelism will ensure we’re actually making disciples.  It also ought to prompt us to be growing as disciples ourselves, because you can’t make disciples if you aren’t one yourself.

A biblical understanding of church membership, which is rooted in God’s sacraments is also essential to discipleship.  The sacraments remind us that we are God’s people.  We have taken hold of his promise by faith in our baptism and we come each Sunday to the Lord’s Table, where we participate again in the death and resurrection of Jesus.  God renews his covenant with us.  That not only strengthens our faith and renews our hope, but in reminding us that we are his covenant people, it reminds us of God’s faithfulness to us and of the obligations covenant membership has for us.  Biblical church membership reminds us of our commitment to God—just as it reminds us of his commitment to us.  And it commits us to one another, to walk with each other, to exhort and rebuke each other, to experience joy and sorrow with each other, to love and to forgive each other.

Biblical church membership leads to biblical church discipline, without which we have little accountability to grow as disciples of Jesus.  God has made us his people that we might give him glory and cause the nations to give him glory as they see our witness.  Church discipline holds us accountable to that mission and keeps us faithful witnesses.

And, finally, biblical worship that is centred in word and sacrament brings all these things together as it gathers the people of God together to hear him speak, to be reminded of his covenant grace, and ultimately to give him glory in response.  All of these marks send us out into the world to be the people God has called us to be, to do the work he’s given us, to be salt and light and to proclaim the good news about Jesus, but all these marks also draw us back together in corporate worship so that we can be refreshed and refilled, so that we can be reminded once again of what God has done for us in Jesus, and—most of all—so that together we can give him glory and have our faith and hope renewed.  And then we go back into the world again to do and to be the people Jesus has made us.

And that’s the note I want to end on.  A healthy church tells the story of God and his people, draws us in, and makes each of us integral parts of it.  A healthy church binds us closely to Jesus and to each other so that we can accomplish the mission he has given us.  Let me close with a quote from Tom Wright’s little book, Simply Christian.

“According to the early Christians, the church doesn’t exist in order to provide a place where people can pursue their private spiritual agendas and develop their own spiritual potential. Nor does it exist in order to provide a safe haven in which people can hide from the wicked world and ensure that they themselves arrive safely at an otherworldly destination. Private spiritual growth and ultimate salvation come rather as the byproducts of the main, central, overarching purpose for which God has called and is calling us. This purpose is clearly stated in various places in the New Testament: that through the church God will announce to the wider world that he is indeed its wise, loving, and just creator; that through Jesus he has defeated the powers that corrupt and enslave it; and that by his Spirit he is at work to heal and renew it.

The church exists, in other words, for what we sometimes call ‘mission’: to announce to the world that Jesus is its Lord. This is the ‘good news,’ and when it’s announced it transforms people and societies. Mission, in its widest as well as its more focused senses, is what the church is there for. God intends to put the world to rights; he has dramatically launched this project through Jesus. Those who belong to Jesus are called, here and now, in the power of the Spirit, to be agents of that putting-to-rights purpose. The word ‘mission’ comes from the Latin for ‘send’: ‘As the father sent me,’ said Jesus after his resurrection, ‘so I am sending you’ ( John 20:21).”[2]

Let’s pray: Almighty Father, when we rebelled against you and corrupted your creation, you could have destroyed us and wiped us from its face, but instead you set forth to make yourself known to a people who had forgotten you and to restore us to your presence.  You established a people to be your light in the midst of the darkness, and you gave your own Son to humble himself as he became one of us and lived and died and lived again to give life to this people—to us, to your Church.  Keep us faithful to you, to what you have made us, and to the mission you have given us, we pray.  Grow us by your word and fill us with your Spirit.  Give us the grace to persevere and courage to proclaim your good news.  Make us good stewards of your grace and cause our labours to bear fruit and your kingdom to grow so that you are glorified.  Through Jesus we pray.  Amen.

[1] Nine Marks of a Healthy Church (Wheaton, Ill.: Crossway, 2004), 209.

[2] Simply Christian (New York: Harper Collins, 2006), epub edition.

A Sermon for All Saints’ Sunday

St. Matthew 5:1-16

by William Klock

What does it mean to pray, “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.”  “Thy will be done” is pretty straightforward—at least it should be.  It’s not an anxious prayer, as if God’s will were in danger of not being done if we don’t pray hard enough.  No, it’s a prayer for something we know is going to happen.  God is sovereign.  His will—all the good things he intends for the world in his faithfulness—will be done.  Our prayers aren’t going to make that true, but in our prayers we express our faith in his sovereignty and our longing to see his will and his plans for this world come to pass.  But “Thy kingdom come”?  What is God’s kingdom?  Is it now or is it future or is it both now and future?  Is it heavenly?  Is it earthly?  We ask in the Lord’s Prayer that as it is in heaven so may it be on earth.  What does that mean?  The Gospels are all about the kingdom.  Mark and Luke talk about the Kingdom of God.  Matthew talks about the Kingdom of Heaven, which doesn’t mean the kingdom is “up there” somewhere.  It’s just a Hebraic way of speaking of the kingdom of God.  Earth is our sphere and heaven is God’s.  They’re supposed to be united, to overlap, to be together.  That’s what we see symbolised by the Garden in the beginning of Genesis.  But sin—our sin—divided and separated them.  But God will not leave heaven and earth sundered.  He will not leave us cut off from his presence.  He gave Israel the temple.  The temple was the one place where earth and heaven once again met.  It was the one place on earth where human beings could go to be in the presence of God.  This is why it was so remarkable that at Jesus’ baptism, heaven was opened.  For just a moment there at the Jordan, earth and heaven were brought back together.  It showed dramatically that Jesus was the one who would bring back together what our sins had broken apart.  In Jesus—the god-man, the man of both earth and heaven—the King had come.  In Jesus the kingdom of God, the kingdom of heaven was breaking in and God was beginning the work of restoring his Creation.  This is what we anticipate, this is what we long for in faith and hope when we pray: “Thy kingdom come, on earth as in heaven.”

This is what lies behind our Gospel lesson, the Beatitudes, the first part of Jesus’ “Sermon on the Mount”.  In fact, the Lord’s Prayer is something Jesus gives us later on in this sermon.  But he begins his sermon with this list of people who are “blessed”.  But who are they?  Well, as much as Israel had failed in her mission to be the light of the world, there were still some people in Israel who really did have a sense of what God had called them to do.  There was always a faithful remnant.  We see them in people like John’s father, Zechariah, in Mary and in Joseph, in Simeon and in Anna.  But the thing was that none of these people were the sort most people expected to be exemplifying the kingdom of God.  Sure, they were faithful in their simple ways, but they weren’t important, they weren’t rich, they weren’t powerful—they were nobodies.  They were the people being ground up in the gears turned by the bigshots, whether that was the Romans or the Herodians or the corrupt Sadducees who controlled the temple and the priesthood.  And yet it says something that it’s with these people that the Good News begins.  And it’s with these people—and the people like them to whom Jesus had been ministering in Galilee—it’s with them that he begins his most important sermon on the kingdom.  Jesus says:

“Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” (Matthew 5:3)

I think we have a tendency to read this and think that what Jesus is saying is that if we behave a certain way—in this case, if we’re poor in spirit—then we will somehow earn or be worthy of God’s blessing.  But that’s not it.  It helps if we go back to Abraham.  In Genesis 12 God calls Abraham and he says to him, “I will make of you a great nation and I will bless you and make your name great.”  The Lord reiterated and renewed this promise to the generations that came after Abraham.  This was his promise to Israel, “I will bless you” and this was at the core of Jewish identity.  To be blessed was to be part of the covenant people of God.  When Jesus talks about people who are blessed, he’s answering the question of who belongs to the people of God.  But here’s where he turns things upside-down—at least that’s how it seemed to so many of the people who heard him.  Most people just assumed that because they were descendants of Abraham, were circumcised, ate the right food, observed the Sabbath, and stayed away from Gentiles that they were “blessed” because they were God’s people.  But here’s the thing: the Lord’s blessing wasn’t blessing for the sake of blessing.  There was more to the promise.  He said to Abraham, “I will bless you…so that you will be a blessing.”  A blessing to whom?  The Lord says to all the families of the earth.  Israel was to be like salt, preserving the earth.  Israel was to be a light, shining in the darkness and leading the nations back to the knowledge of God.  In fact, after these Beatitudes, that’s the next thing Jesus goes on to preach about: salt and light.  If you’re not being salt and light, you’re not blessing and are not blessed—you’re not part of the kingdom.  As we’ve seen in our study of Exodus, Israel was the people who lived in the presence of God and who witnessed him to the nations.

This is what blessing is about.  The people Jesus describes here are the people through whom God makes his kingdom known.  They’re the people who already understand and are already living the life of the kingdom.  Jesus’ ministry was a prophetic one announcing the coming judgement on Israel and calling forth the faithful, the repentant, the kingdom folks who would be the nucleus of a new covenant, a kingdom people on the other side of that judgement.  So he starts with the poor in spirit.  I can’t help but think of Mary.  When she finds out that she’s going to be pregnant with the Lord’s Messiah she doesn’t get full of herself.  There were plenty of people who would have.  Instead, she bursts out into a song of praise and the first things she sings is, “My soul doth magnify the Lord…for he hath regarded the lowliness of his handmaiden.”

Most people expected God to usher in his kingdom by coming to the important people, the wealthy people, the powerful and politically connected people.  Most people expected the Messiah to ride into Jerusalem like King David, in a chariot with a sword and with an army.  Instead he came to a poor young girl.  And it was people like Mary, people who were poor in spirit who came flocking to Jesus and in and through them the kingdom of God burst into the world.  The humble came to Jesus in faith and he opened their blind eyes, he healed their paralysed legs, he healed their diseases, he cast out their demons, he even raised their children from death.  Meanwhile the powerful people, like the Sadducees, fumed that Jesus was offering forgiveness of sins without sending these people to the temple to offer sacrifices.  Meanwhile the Pharisees, people who thought of themselves as righteous, were fuming because Jesus was welcoming the unclean and the sinful.  But Jesus says that the kingdom won’t be found with the powerful or the self-righteous, but with those humble enough to follow the king born in a stable.

The rest of the Beatitudes go the same way.  Jesus says:

“Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.

“Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.

“Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied.

“Blessed are the merciful, for they shall receive mercy.

“Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.

“Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God.” (Matthew 5:4-9)

Israel was in exile and the people longed for consolation, but most wanted that consolation to come in the form of a Messiah who would put their enemies to the sword.  Jesus says that, no, those who will be comforted, those who will show the kingdom, are those who mourn the sins of Israel and who are ready to repent and turn back to God.  Israel wanted to inherit the earth, but Jesus reminds them that their inheritance will come not through those who are full of pride, not through those who think they’re better than everyone else because of their descent from Abraham or their circumcision or their diet, but it will instead come through those who are meek.  Israel longed for justice—which is probably a better translation than “righteousness” in this case, but the justice Israel wanted had more to do with vengeance on her enemies and Jesus is saying, again: No.  Your hunger for justice will only be satisfied when you are willing to set aside your rights in favour of humility and gentleness.  Israel longed for mercy.  She longed for deliverance.  But Jesus warns that mercy is only for the merciful, not the vengeful.  Israel longed to see God, but Jesus warns: You will never see God so long as your outward acts of piety are a cover for oppressing the poor, the widow, and the orphan.  The kingdom is manifest by those who aren’t just outwardly pure, but who are pure of heart.  And, of course, Israel saw herself as God’s son.  The people longed for God to vindicate them by establishing them once again as a nation over their enemies, but Jesus warns: If you want to be God’s sons you need to show the peacemaking character of your Father.  You’re out for vengeance, you’re calling for the blood of your enemies, if you had the chance you’d kill them in their beds and then tell the world that you were acting out the justice of God on the enemies of his people.  But people like that will never be sons of the God who seeks not vengeance on his enemies, but offers them mercy and forgiveness and reconciliation.  The violent will never be sons of the God who seeks to make peace, even offering his own life for the sake of their treason.

Everything Jesus describes here was aimed at Israel’s failures to be God’s people, to be salt and light.  God had blessed Israel to be a blessing, but they wanted to keep his blessing to themselves, which is why he’d taken it away and sent them into exile.  And most still hadn’t learned.  But there was this remnant: again, people like Mary and Zechariah and Simeon who were already showing the world what the kingdom was like, people who were already living out the character of God.  People whom the world saw as nobodies, but who were in reality already sharing the Lord’s blessing to the world.  This is what John the Baptist had been about: calling the people of Israel to repentance, calling them to turn aside from their sin, their folly, from their false views of the kingdom so that they would be prepared for the Messiah.

But, Jesus warns, if you are faithful in being the sorts of people who carry God’s blessing to the word, be prepared for trouble.  In verses 10-12 he goes on:

“Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

“Blessed are you when others revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for so they persecuted the prophets who were before you.”

 

I expect Jesus was anticipating where his own ministry was headed when he preached these words.  He’d already experienced the anger of his own people.  When he preached in his hometown of Nazareth the people tried to throw him off a cliff.  He knew that most people were not going to receive what he’s saying here and he knew that he was going to be rejected and that he would suffer and be killed.  And he knew that the people who chose to follow him would be persecuted too.  At the Cross the present evil age was dealt a death blow.  In rising from the grave Jesus inaugurated the age to come.  The present age is passing away and the age to come is breaking in, but Jesus knew that his people would live in the overlap.  God brought salvation and renewal this way for a reason.  The people of Jesus’ day wanted it to come all at once, but God chose to bring it slowly.  People today have the same sort of expectation.  They ask how a good God can allow so much evil in the world.  But in asking that question, in asking why God doesn’t come and deal with evil we’re showing the same sort of self-righteous mindset that dominated Israel.  We’re forgetting that for God to come and deal with evil means that God will not only have to deal with our enemies and the people who cause us grief, but that he’ll also have to deal with us.  Brothers and Sisters, we’re all sinners.  We’re all responsible for the mess this world is in—some more, some less—but we’ve all contributed to it.  And so God sent Jesus to deal with that sin and to inaugurate his kingdom, but he also delays, and in that he gives sinners a chance to repent and turn to him.  It also means that those who, in this in-between time, insist on revealing the kingdom, those who insist on confronting the sinful systems of the old age through their poverty of spirit, through their meekness, through their mercy, through their peacemaking will face the same backlash that Jesus faced.

Brothers and Sisters, we are called to turn the world upside-down and the world isn’t going to like that.  But the fact is that the world we confront is actually already upside-down.  It’s been corrupted by sin.  When we exemplify mercy and meekness and peacemaking and purity of heart what we’re doing is showing people how the world was in the beginning and how it’s really supposed to be—and how, one day, it really will be again.  We’re giving the world a glimpse of creation set to rights.  We’re giving the world a glimpse of God’s future.  But in the meantime that world will fight back.  The Jews stoned Stephen for preaching that Jesus really was the Messiah.  Throughout the first centuries of the Church, many were martyred because they proclaimed that Jesus is Lord, which also sent the message loud and clear that Caesar is not—and Caesar didn’t like that.  And it continues today.  Even if we don’t face death, we face the pushback and the scorn and the hatred of those who are invested in the gods of money and power and sex and politics and self, those who are proud and merciless and war-making, those who represent the values of the present evil age will see us as the enemy.  And yet, Jesus says, this is good.  Blessed are you, for in your rejection and even in your persecution, you are manifesting the kingdom of heaven—you’re being the blessing you have been called to be and you have a share in the kingdom.

Jesus goes on in verse 13:

“You are the salt of the earth, but if salt has lost its taste, how shall its saltiness be restored? It is no longer good for anything except to be thrown out and trampled under people’s feet.

“You are the light of the world. A city set on a hill cannot be hidden. Nor do people light a lamp and put it under a basket, but on a stand, and it gives light to all in the house. In the same way, let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father who is in heaven.” (Matthew 5:13-16)

Jesus challenges Israel.  She is to be the salt of the earth.  She is to be the light of the world.  This was Israel’s calling, it was her vocation right from the beginning, again, going back to Abraham.  God called Israel to be a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.  She was called to serve the Lord and to show the world what faith in him looked like—a tiny nation surrounded by great empires, but living faithfully for the Lord and trusting him to take care of her: the new creation in miniature.  She was to be like a city set on a hill.  Jesus was thinking about Jerusalem, up on the mountain above the countryside.  The Prophets had said that Jerusalem was to be a place where the Lord was glorified by his people so that the nations would see and come flooding through the gates to come and meet the God of Israel in his temple.

But Israel had done just the opposite.  She worshipped the gods of her pagan neighbours.  Instead of trusting in the Lord to care for her, she forged forbidden alliances with the nations.  Instead of trusting in the Lord she trusted in horses and chariots.  She did everything in her power to make herself and the God to whom she bore witness a laughingstock amongst the nations.  The nations knew that Israel worshipped a God who was different from all the other gods.  The nations knew that Israel was called to be different.  But when they saw Israel’s unfaithfulness they mocked the God they should have praised, asking “Where is her God?”

Israel was supposed to be like a lighthouse, shining God’s light to the nations, but instead she’s removed the glass and surrounded the light with mirrors.  She prided herself on being a people of light and condemned the people outside for being lost in the dark.  But they were in the dark because of her refusal to share the light.  And eventually her light turned to darkness.  She rebuilt her temple after the exile, but the Lord’s presence never returned.

Jesus now invites those who are poor in spirit, those who are meek, those who mourn, those who are merciful, those who are pure in heart, those who are peacemakers, those who are ready to face persecution to come and find out what really being Israel is all about.  If they will follow him they will be the true or the new Israel.  They will share the Lord’s blessing with the nations.  They will be salt.  They will be light, making the Lord known and fulfilling his call to Abraham.

In the Sermon on the Mount Jesus was issuing a challenge to Israel.  But, Brothers and Sisters, it’s now a challenge to us.  You and I have been incorporated into Jesus and into his new Israel.  We have been made sons and daughters of Abraham.  And so Abraham’s vocation has been passed on to us.  We are called to proclaim the King and to make his kingdom known.  And we have our own temptations today that lead us away from our mission.  We are just as prone as Israel was to forgetting who our real enemies are.  We are just as prone to forgetting that God’s kingdom is made manifest through mercy and grace.  And the Church in every age is always tempted to put her light under a basket, to remove the glass from the lighthouse and to replace it with mirrors and then call ourselves the people of the light while the world perishes in darkness.  We are tempted to seek the kingdom through pride, arrogance, bullying, and war as the people of Jesus’ day were.  We’re tempted to compromise the kingdom by looking to the powerful and the connected for deliverance or by forgetting that we are a people called to sacrifice our rights and ourselves for the sake of the kingdom.

But, Brothers and Sisters, one thing has changed.  Jesus has poured his life into us.  He has brought the dry bones of Israel to life by the power of the Holy Spirit.  In our baptism we have been freed from our bondage to sin and united to the life of Jesus.  Our hearts, which were once fixed on self, have been turned to God.  Our minds, which once saw the kingdom as foolishness, have been renewed and set on the kingdom of heaven.  That’s not to say that we don’t still struggle, but this is why Jesus invites us to his Table.  Friends, here at the Lord’s Table Jesus gives us a foretaste of the kingdom.  In the bread and wine our Lord pulls God’s future into the present, in the bread and wine, for just a moment he gives us a glimpse into heaven and shows us the kingdom and he reminds us that we live in faithful hope for that day when every tear has been wiped away and God had set everything to rights.  Brothers and Sisters, if you struggle to share God’s blessing with the world, if you struggle to be meek, to be merciful, to be pure in heart, to be a peacemaker; if you struggle to offer yourself as a living sacrifice, come this morning and be strengthened.  Come this morning and have your eyes set once again on the kingdom.  Come to the Table today and have your hope restored.  Today, as we read in our Old Testament lesson, we are tested like gold in the furnace (Wisdom 3:6), “But lo”—as we sang—"There breaks a yet more glorious day; The saints triumphant rise in bright array; The King of glory passes on his way.  Alleluia, alleluia.”

Let us pray: Gracious Father, let us never forget that you have blessed us to be a blessing.  You have called us to be the salt of the earth and the light of the world.  You have called us to live in such a way that the nations, seeing us, will be drawn and come streaming into your kingdom.  We confess our failures and pray for the strength and the courage and most of all the faith, not only to live in hope of your kingdom, but to offer ourselves as living sacrifices for the sake of the world.  Strengthen us we pray, through our Lord Jesus Christ who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever.  Amen.

Mark Eight: Biblical Worship

by William Klock

On February12, A.D. 304 a group of men was brought before the Roman proconsul in Carthage.  The charge against them read, “These men, being Christians, have held an assembly for the Eucharist, in violation of the edict of the Emperors Diocletian and Maximian.”

“What is your position?” the Proconsul asked of the first prisoner.

“I am a senator,” the man responded.  His name was Dativus.

“Were you present at the assembly?”

“I am a Christian and I was present in the assembly.”

Immediately, the Proconsul ordered him to be hung on the rack, where barbed hooks tore his body.  After that, Saturninus, the presbyter, was brought in and asked, “Did you, contrary to the orders of the emperors, oversee the assembly of these men?”

Saturninus responded, “Yes.  We celebrated the Eucharist.”

“Why?” asked the Proconsul.

“Because the Eucharist cannot be abandoned,” said the presbyter.

Immediately he, too, was taken to join Dativus on the rack.

Next, Felix, one of Saturninus’ sons and a reader in the church, was brought before the Proconsul.  “I am not asking if you are a Christian.  That’s not my concern.  But were you at the assembly and do you possess copies of the scriptures?”

Felix answered, “As if a Christian could exist without the Eucharist, or the Eucharist could be celebrated without Christians!  Don’t you realise that a Christian is defined by the Eucharist?  We cannot exist without it!  And we always read the Lord’s scriptures when we assemble for the Eucharist.”

The Proconsul flew into a rage and ordered Felix beaten with clubs.

Lastly, Hilarion, another son of Saturninus, was brought before the Proconsul.  “Will you follow your father and your brothers?” He was asked.

“I am a Christian,” he boldly said, “And I became one, along with my father and brothers, of my own will.”

The Proconsul bellowed out threats of torture.  Little did he know that he was not going up against men, but against God himself in his holy martyrs.  The Proconsul ordered the boy taken away and for his hair to be shorn and his nose and ears to be cut off.

And Hilarion simply replied, “Do what you will.  I am a Christian.”

And as he was led away, the whole court heard the boy crying out with joy, “Thanks be to God.”  In all, forty-nine members of the church in Abitinae were martyred on that day and in the days that followed.[1]

The story of those brothers and sisters is not unique.  From the time of the Apostles until the time of Constantine, Christians gathered together to worship—to read the scriptures, to pray, to sing, to eat the Lord’s Supper—and they did so under threat of violence and sometimes even martyrdom.  “Day by day we are besieged; day by day we are betrayed,” wrote Tertullian.[2]  But no matter the risks involved, Christians continued to gather.  They had found the treasure hidden in the field.  They had found the pearl of great price.  They had given their allegiance, to the exclusion of all others, to the Lord Jesus.  And they lived in sure and certain hope that his kingdom was coming “on earth as in heaven”.

What brought them together?  If it was just a longing for fellowship with God, they could do that at home in private.  They could pray, they could sing.  Those were the days before mass-produced Bibles, but they could, at home, recite passages from memory or read hand-copied portions of scripture.  But they risked their lives to gather together for corporate worship.  It was the Lord’s Supper that reminded them, as it does us, “that we are true members of the mystical body” of God’s Son.  St. Paul uses that language of the body a lot.  As we are in Jesus the Messiah, so we belong one to another.  We are a family, a covenant people with a God-given mission that cannot be accomplished unless we all bring our parts together to build up the whole.  And the Lord’s Supper reminded them that it was all absolutely worth it, because the Supper recalled the events—the death and resurrection of Jesus—in which God poured out his love, his grace, his mercy and revealed his faithfulness in all its—in all his—glory, while also pointing them to his future glory when he will finish what he has begun and set all things to rights.  No command of Caesar could compete with the glorious calling of God.

Yes, the New Testament commands us to gather together for corporate worship.  Hebrews 10:24-25 tells us:

Let us consider how to stir up one another to love and good works, not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another, and all the more as you see the Day drawing near.

 

And Paul so frequently, particularly in Romans and 1 Corinthians, stresses our unity in Jesus and the nature of the Church as being like a body in which we all have our part.  But even without those commands and instructions to gather together, the Lord’s Supper reminds us who we are, that we’re not loners, that Christianity isn’t just “me, my Bible, and Jesus”, but that we are a covenant people knit together in love and grace in Jesus and the Spirit.  Even if all we had was the Lord’s Supper, we would still be compelled, like those early believers, to gather together to worship the God who reveals himself in and through Jesus.

So we’ve been looking at the marks of a healthy church.  If we don’t gather, there is no church.  The Church gathers to worship.  Period.  So the question is not whether or not we will gather, but what our gatherings should looks like.  What does the Bible tell us about corporate worship?

Well, first, there’s no book or chapter in the New Testament that gives us specific instructions outlining liturgy or posture, how often we should observe the Lord’s Supper, how many songs we should sing, how long the sermon should be, or anything like that.  The New Testament does have plenty to say about worship, but what it says is largely about our unity in worship, our serving others in worship, giving ourselves as living sacrifices in worship—and when it comes to specifics, it’s usually Paul stepping in to tell churches what not to do.  The Bible gives us freedom in our worship, and so some churches use a liturgy with set prayers and others use a set order of service with extempore prayers, some churches have elaborate ceremonial—whether that involves incense, postures, vestments, and the like or fog machines, high-tech lighting, dancing, and multi-piece bands, while other churches do things very simply and without any fuss.  We are free to construct our worship—within reason—so long as it glorifies God and has him at its centre and focus.  In light of contemporary trends, biblical worship, it must be stressed, involves the people of God as participants.  Worship is not a show or a concert.

Now, I could just end things here by pointing you to the Prayer Books in the pew racks in front of you.  What does biblical worship look like?  It looks like the Book of Common Prayer.  It could look like something else, but the BCP is the finest example of biblical worship I can think of.  Our liturgies have survived virtually unchanged for five-hundred years and continue a liturgical tradition that goes back at least a thousand years before that.  It has proved itself.  The only reason people started tampering with the Book of Common Prayer was because their theology changed—and not for the better.  There’s a reason why Lutherans, when they needed a common service in English, borrowed heavily from the Common Prayer tradition.  There’s a little book titled The Minister’s Handbook, which is popular with free-church ministers.  It’s essentially a prayer book for people who don’t have the Prayer Book and need to know what to do and say at a wedding or a baptism.  It’s mostly just excerpts from the Book of Common Prayer.  When the United Church drafted its Book of Order, it borrowed heavily from the Book of Common Prayer.  Brothers and Sisters, never take our liturgical heritage or the Prayer Book for granted.  It is, arguably, the richest treasure of worship ever produced by Christendom.  And virtually all of it is from the Bible, either directly quoted or paraphrased in some way.

But I don’t want to just defend the Common Prayer tradition, or liturgy in general, this morning.  Why has the Book of Common Prayer stood the test of time?  Because it brings together the elements of biblical worship.  But what are those elements?  Well, let’s look at our controlling narrative again.  Good worship not only tells the story, but involves us in it.  Think back to those forty-nine martyrs in Carthage.  This is what compelled them to gather together even though it meant death.

So, once again, think back to the beginning.  God created human beings to bear his image.  That means to serve as his regents in Creation—in this temple that he built for himself.  This is why St. Paul writes in Romans that Creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God.  When we rejected our vocation, Creation lost her stewards and the Lord lost his priests.  Everything fell apart.  But in the midst of the darkness, the Lord called forth Abraham and created a people for himself.  He delivered them from slavery in Egypt, he gave them his law, and most importantly, he took up his dwelling in their midst.  And as they lived to give him glory and to witness his presence and his mighty deeds, they became a light to the nations, looking forward to a day when nations would come streaming to the temple to know the living God for themselves and to give him the glory he is due.  The prophets looked forward to the day when the knowledge of the Lord’s glory would cover the earth as the waters cover the sea.

Old Testament Israel gives us models for biblical worship.  We see her songs of the Lord’s mighty deeds—songs like the Song of Moses or the Psalms.  We see her prayers for deliverance—from her earthly enemies and from the sins and the lack of faith that so often compromised her witness—prayers for deliverance made in faith and rooted deeply in a sureness of God’s covenant faithfulness.  We see her songs of hope, knowing the Lord’s past faithfulness, and looking forward to the day when he would not only save Israel, but set all of Creation to rights.  But most importantly for us, we see Israel’s story reach its climax in Jesus—and in his death, his resurrection, and his ascension.  This is our exodus.  As Israel was delivered from her bondage to Pharoah, so the cross and the empty tomb are our deliverance from sin and death.  Baptism is our Red Sea and the Lord’s Supper is our Passover, whereby we participate in God’s mighty deeds and find our place in his covenant people.  And now, like Israel, we sing and we proclaim what he has done to give him glory and to make him known that others will be moved to give him glory too.  Everything we do as his people is meant to give him glory—or it should!  Think of Jesus’ words in John 15:8, “By this my Father is glorified, that you bear much fruit and so prove to be my disciples.”

Now, how does that controlling narrative, how does that story shape our worship?  First, it means that word and sacrament will be at the centre of our worship.  The Bible never tells us directly how frequently we should observe the Lord’s Supper, but the implication of what we read in Acts and the Epistles certainly suggests that the first Christians observed it at least every Sunday.  The English Reformers, particularly Thomas Cranmer, designed our liturgy around a weekly observance of the Lord’s Supper, but people were so used to only participating in the sacrament four times a year that weekly Communion didn’t take and Morning Prayer became the staple of weekly worship in most Anglican churches until the Twentieth Century.  Whatever the case, biblical worship will include baptisms, whenever they are called for, and the Lord’s Supper on some sort of regular schedule.  The one thing we can’t do is discard them entirely.  If we fail to observe the sacraments we disobey Jesus himself and cease to be a church.  I think when we realise that the Supper is as an act of covenant remembrance and renewal, it becomes more natural to observe it weekly.

Biblical worship listens to God and tells the story.  That means it will include the reading of scripture.  Always.  Preferably at least a passage from the Old Testament and another from the New—and preferably tied together so that we see the interconnectedness of the old and new covenants and the faithfulness of God is revealed to his glory.

Brothers and Sisters, our calling as God’s people is to glorify him and to proclaim his mighty deeds and the good news about Jesus so that the world will give him glory.  We can’t do that unless we know who he is and what he’s done.  And that doesn’t just go for corporate worship.  Scripture ought to be central to our lives in general.  We ought to be steeping ourselves in God’s word on a daily basis—listening to him—so that we can know him and what he’s done.  I don’t know if it’s because we’re lazy or if we think that Christian maturity comes by osmosis or just with time, but Brothers and Sisters, if you don’t feed on God’s word, you will not grow.  It’s the Spirit who grows us, but he grows us with the word.  Steeping ourselves in the word during the week is one of the ways we prepare ourselves to gather together on Sundays.  One of the trends of contemporary worship is this idea that the service has to start by getting the worshippers in the “right” mood.  That’s borne in part out of the faulty notion that good worship makes us feel a certain way, but I think the bigger reason for this is that too many of us simply aren’t preparing for worship over the six preceding days of the week.  We treat worship as a Sunday thing, then we go home and unplug ourselves from God and from his word and from prayer until Sunday comes around again.  That’s not the kind of life that drove Saturninus and Dativus and their congregation to risk death in order to gather at the Lord’s Table.

So the reading of the word will be central.  And so will the sermon.  Biblical worship will include a sermon that explains and applies the word.  There’s nothing inherently holier about a longer sermon than a shorter sermon, but good biblical exposition and application takes time and it rarely happens in the ten- or twelve-minute homilies that have become commonplace today.  And as much as modern people may think it’s the Anglican way, it most definitely is not.  I’ve edited several volumes of sermons by popular Anglican preachers of the past and you’d be hard-pressed to read those sermons out loud in less than an hour.  Let me stress that those were popular preachers.  A few centuries earlier, in the decades following the Reformation, it was common for people to hear a sermon on Sunday morning, go home for lunch, and then return to the church to hear another sermon or two in the afternoon.  Puritan preachers were often given hourglasses—as in they actually measure out a full hour—and were told how many turns of the glass they could preach.  Because God’s people were hungry for his word.  Today we’ve lost that hunger and it’s no wonder that the Church in the West is foundering and that we struggle to tell the story anymore.  How can we proclaim what we don’t know?

The second focal point of our biblical corporate worship is the sacraments—particularly the Lord’s Supper.  Baptism, when it is done, ought normatively to take place in the corporate gathering, because it is the rite by which we are included in the covenant people.  It is our Red Sea by which we pass from bondage in Egypt into life in the presence of the Lord and his people and it’s right that those people be there to welcome each new member as he or she rises from the sea.  I pray that we would have reason to do that every Sunday someday, but in the meantime we include baptism as necessary.  But weekly observing the Lord’s Supper, well, it is meet and right so to do.

Word and sacrament complement each other.  Different churches and different preachers will take different approaches to how we read scripture.  We use a lectionary.  Others may read through whole books of the Bible systematically week by week.  However we do it, though, our reading of the word will range over all sort of subjects and genres and not everything we’ll read is about the gospel—at least not directly.  The focus of the readings and the sermons will cover all sorts of different subjects—and that’s good.  But the Lord’s Supper (and baptism, when the occasion arises) grounds us week in and week out in the death and resurrection of Jesus and reminds us what he’s done for us and who he has made us.  As the annual observance of the Passover was for each generation in Israel a new participation in the events by which the Lord had made them his people, so each observance of the Lord Supper is for us a new participation in the events by which Jesus has delivered us from sin and death.  And notice that there’s both a vertical and a horizontal element to that.  When we come to the Table we are reminded that we belong to God through Jesus, that he has redeemed us and made us his own, but it also reminds us of the horizontal—that he has made us a part of this covenant people called the Church and that we are brothers and sisters in Jesus, and that we belong to each other, that we are one body.  At the Table God’s love is poured down on us, but then it also flows out horizontally from each of us to the others.

The scripture lessons and the sermon can’t cover these fundamental truths every single Sunday, but we are reminded and confronted by them every single time we come to the Lord’s Table.  Our culture today is almost entirely oriented on the individual and that his infected Christian thinking and the Church.  We have no trouble remembering the vertical—me and God—but we too often downplay or forget altogether the horizontal—the fact that even as God saves us individually, in doing so he makes us part of a people who cannot be effective in our mission and who cannot ultimately be healthy if we do not live this new life together as a family.  Again, this is a powerful corrective to modern error.  Too much of contemporary worship is people coming together to sort of have their individual worship experiences in a group setting.  Worship has become a performance.  The lights are turned down so we can’t see each other—we just focus on the “leaders” at the front.  The band—or in some places the choir or the organ—is so loud that you can’t hear yourself sing, let alone the person next to you.  A friend of mine who advocates that kind of worship tells me that it’s an “immersive” model in contrast to a “participatory” one and that it’s just how our culture has gone.  In folk cultures everyone is involved in music, but in ours, music has largely been relegated to professionals.  The rest of us just sit and listen.  Even at home, we put on our headphones, close our eyes, tune everything else out, and immerse ourselves in the performance.  Brothers and Sisters, that may be the way our culture has gone, but the Church cannot go there.  That “immersive” model of worship is incompatible with biblical worship in which we all participate.  Worship is not a concert or a show for the worshiper to passively receive.  Worship is the service of God’s people to him.  The lights should be on so we can see each other.  And the accompaniment should be just that: accompaniment.  It shouldn’t drown out our voices, because the most important thing about congregational singing is that it’s just that: congregational singing—our voices raised together as one to give God the glory he is due.

I think if we get these two things right in our worship—word and sacrament—we will get the story right and that’s really what it’s all about.  As we hear his word, God draws us in with the story.  In Baptism and the Lord’s Supper he incorporates us into the story and gives us a place in it.  And now equipped by word and Spirit, he sends us out to tell the story ourselves so that others will be drawn in.  There are other essential parts to worship—we sing and we pray, we confess our sins and receive assurance of pardon, we bring our tithes and offerings—but they revolve around the word and sacrament that stand in the middle.  They are our response to the story, to what God in Jesus has done for us and for the world.  Each of those parts of our worship could merit a whole sermon on its own, but I just want to close with one example, again taken from our Common Prayer tradition, and that’s the Gloria.

When the Prayer Book was first written in 1549—and for a long time thereafter—there were no hymns.  Much of the liturgy itself was sung.  The Psalms were sung.  But there was one hymn included in the liturgy for the Lord’s Supper and Thomas Cranmer made sure that it stood at the end of the service, because the hymns we sing in worship are essentially response to what God has said and done in word and sacrament.  In the service we hear his word and he renews his covenant with us at the Table, and then we sing in response, “Glory to God in the highest”.  This is what he created us to do.  When Jesus gave his life on the cross and rose from the grave, it was to create a people, full of God’s own Spirit, who will give him glory.  And, Brothers and Sisters, we give him glory—it starts here on Sunday, but ought to carry on in our whole lives the rest of the week—we give him glory that one day all the nations will give him glory too.

Let’s pray: Almighty God, to whom all hearts are open, all desires known, and from whom no secrets are hidden: cleans the thoughts of our hearts by the inspiration of your Holy Spirit, that we may perfectly love you, and worthily magnify your holy name, through Christ our Lord.  Amen.

[1] Adapted from the Acts of St. Saturninus in Migne, Patrologia Latina, Vol. VIII, 688ff.

[2] Apology 7.

Mark Seven: Biblical Church Discipline

by William Klock

The first question of the Westminster Shorter Catechism famously asks, “What is the chief end of man?”  And the answer, drawing on scriptures like Psalm 73, Romans 11:36, and 1 Corinthians 10:31, is that, “Man’s chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy him forever.”  God created human beings to give him glory.  He created us to bear his images—to be the priests and stewards of his temple and to exercise his dominion over creation.  We rejected the vocation he gave us, and ever since then, God’s great project of redemption and renewal—of new creation—has been working towards our restoration to that vocation.  One day, when the project is completed, redeemed humanity will once again live to the glory of God.  In the meantime he has called forth, created, redeemed, and renewed a people for himself—a people who, however imperfectly, exist to give him glory.  Not only that, but this people—you and I—exist to make the living God known to the nations: his faithfulness, his love, his mercy, his mighty and saving deeds, so that one day the nations will bring him the glory he is due.  One day the knowledge of his glory will cover the earth as the waters cover the sea.

Jesus said to Israel, “Let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father who is in heaven” (Matthew 5:16).  That was Israel’s mission, just as it is the mission of the new Israel.  It has always been the mission of the people of God and will always be.  A couple Sunday’s ago, we read that passage from Micah 4 that looked forward to the day when the nations would come streaming to the Lord saying, “Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, to the house of the God of Jacob, that he may teach us his ways and that we may walk in his paths” (Micha 4:2).  And this past summer we looked at John’s vision in Revelation, the fulfilment of that prophecy, where the nations that once thumbed their noses at God, are seen streaming into the New Jerusalem to give God glory.

Although we see the theme all through the New Testament, Revelation very dramatically reminds us that in the Church, God has created a people who—just like Jesus—have given up everything in order to know him, to live in his presence, and glorify him, and by their witness—even sometimes a witness that leads to death—to draw the nations to him.

Brothers and Sisters, this means that as the people of God, as the Church, we are accountable not only to God, but to each other for our witness.  The Protestant Reformers understood how important this is.  Over these last weeks I’ve quoted several times from the confessions and formularies of a variety of Protestant traditions: Lutheran, Reformed, Presbyterian, and our own Articles of Religion.  All of them affirm in some way that a true church is found where God’s word is faithfully preached and where the sacraments ordained by Jesus, Baptism and the Lord’s Supper, are administered.  But in conjunction with the administration of the sacraments, those confessions also stress the essential nature of church discipline.  The Belgic Confession, after listing the preaching of the gospel and administration of the sacraments as marks of a true church, adds: “if church discipline is exercised in punishing of sin.”[1]  The Scots Confession puts it this way, “Lastly, Ecclesiastical discipline uprightly ministered, as God’s word prescribes, whereby vice is repressed, and virtue nourished.”[2]  Article XIX of our Articles of Religion, again, puts it all this way: “The visible Church of Christ is a congregation of faithful men, in the which the pure Word of God is preached, and the Sacraments be duly ministered according to Christ’s ordinance, in all those things that of necessity are requisite to the same.”  “All those things that of necessity are requisite to the same” covers a range of “things” from the ordering of ministers and liturgies to, notably, church discipline.  In our case, the specifics are found in the rubrics at the end of the liturgy for the Lord’s Supper—those instructions the minister is bound to follow.  Here’s what we read there (this can be found on page 116 of the Book of Common Prayer if you want to follow along):

If among those who come to be partakers of the Holy Communion, the Minister shall know any to be an open and notorious evil liver, or to have done any wrong to his neighbours by word or deed, so that the congregation be thereby offended; he shall warn him, that he presume not to come to the Lord’s Table, until he have openly declared himself to have truly repented and amended his former evil life, that the congregation may thereby be satisfied; and that he has recompensed the parties to whom he has done wrong; or at least declare himself to be in full purpose so to do, as soon as he conveniently may.

 

The same order shall the Minister use with those, between whom he perceives malice and hatred to reign; not permitting them to be partakers of the Lord’s Table, until he know them to be reconciled. And if one of the parties, so at variance, be content to forgive from the bottom of his heart all that the other has trespassed against him, and to make amends for that wherein he himself has offended; and the other party will not be persuaded to a godly unity, but remain still in his frowardness and malice; the Minister in that case ought to admit the penitent person to the Holy Communion, and not him that is obstinate. Provided, That every Minister so repelling any, as is herein specified, shall be obliged to give an account of the same to the Ordinary, within fourteen days after, at the farthest.

Years ago another evangelical pastor started asking me questions about the Prayer Book, so I loaned him a copy.  A couple of weeks later he came back with his finger on these rubrics and said—with a lot of consternation—“You don’t actually do this, do you?”  I said that we do and that up to the late 19th and early 20th Centuries, so did virtually everyone else in Christendom.  It’s there in our liturgies, our confessions, our formularies and books of order regardless of what tradition you’re a part of.  What happened?  Because today church discipline is virtually unheard of—and it’s not because Christians today are somehow more holy and less in need of it than previous generations.  Gregory Wills, in his book, Democratic Religion, writes, “After the Civil War…observers began to lament that church discipline was foundering, and it was.  It declined partly because it became more burdensome in larger churches….Urban churches, pressed by the need for large buildings and the desire for refined music and preaching, subordinated church discipline to the task of keeping the church solvent.  Many…shared a new vision of the church, replacing the pursuit of purity with the quest for efficiency.”[3]  And as the church in the West has bought into our culture’s therapeutic values, there’s little chance of any major change in course in the foreseeable future.  Today’s conventional wisdom says that you grow churches by toning down talk of commitment.  Forget opening the doors wider—just take away the walls.  Let anyone and everyone come to the Table, whether they’re baptised or not.  That used to be the position of theological liberals, but it’s now commonplace in many evangelical churches.  Accountability?  Maybe you’ll have small groups where people are voluntarily accountable to each other—maybe—but to the church?  It’s almost unheard of.  Everything is meant to make us feel good, whether it’s the preaching or the music.  Historic Christian worship was always built around giving glory to God.  It’s often now built around the worshipers themselves and giving them a feel-good experience.  Even the gospel we often preach has become focused on the therapeutic.  Paul writes that when the Spirit gets hold of us, he transforms our hearts and we confess the lordship of Jesus—we repent, we turn from sin and idols, we embrace rejection, suffering, even martyrdom for the sake of Jesus, all to give glory to God.  But today’s gospel often has little if anything to do with that.  It’s about God making us feel good, giving us what we want—all too often it’s a message promising material prosperity rather than what Jesus promised: that we will take up our crosses and follow him in the way of sacrifice.  Today’s gospel is far too often all about “me”.  God is here for us, not we for God.  And so we balk at the very idea of such accountability.  But there it is.  And the Reformers didn’t make it up.  Writing about eighty years ago, in his wonderful little book Life Together, Dietrich Bonhoeffer summed it up so well: “Nothing can be more cruel than the leniency which abandons others to their sin. Nothing can be more compassionate than the severe reprimand which calls another Christian in one’s community back from the path of sin.”[4]  Discipline was once the norm.  And all of this is deeply biblical.  So let’s look at the Bible and as we do that, keep the big biblical story in the back of your head and be thinking about the fact that our vocation is to give God glory and witness him in a such way that his kingdom is made known and the nations come to bring him glory too.

So, first, let’s turn to 1 Corinthians 5.  Here’s what Paul writes:

It is actually reported that there is sexual immorality among you, and of a kind that is not tolerated even among pagans, for a man has his father’s wife.  And you are arrogant! Ought you not rather to mourn? Let him who has done this be removed from among you.

 

It's hard to be any clearer than that.  Notice that Paul doesn’t go on the hunt for sin.  This sexual immorality was right there in the open.  And the church tolerated it to their shame.  It doesn’t sound as if they were turning a blind eye.  That Paul rebukes them for their arrogance says that they were proud of themselves for their tolerance.  But as he points out to them, this sin was scandalous even to the pagans.  What kind of witness did they have?  Maybe they thought they were witnessing the love of Jesus by being so tolerant, but that’s not the way it works.  “Let him be removed from among you,” Paul insists.  He goes on:

 

  For though absent in body, I am present in spirit; and as if present, I have already pronounced judgment on the one who did such a thing.  When you are assembled in the name of the Lord Jesus and my spirit is present, with the power of our Lord Jesus, you are to deliver this man to Satan for the destruction of the flesh, so that his spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord.

Notice—this is vitally important—church discipline isn’t done to be vindictive.  It’s done to purify the witness of the church, but it’s also done in the hope that it will bring the unrepentant sinner to repentance that he will be spared from God’s judgement.

  Your boasting is not good. Do you not know that a little leaven leavens the whole lump?  Cleanse out the old leaven that you may be a new lump, as you really are unleavened. For Christ, our Passover lamb, has been sacrificed.  Let us therefore celebrate the festival, not with the old leaven, the leaven of malice and evil, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth.

 

At the Passover the Israelites purged their homes of leaven and ate unleavened bread, remembering the new life the Lord had given them when he delivered them from Pharaoh’s bondage.  Just so, as we come to the Lord’s Table, we are reminded of the new life we have in Jesus and the Spirit.  This Supper is for those who have believe, who have repented, who have been baptised—who have given their full allegiance to Jesus and his kingdom.  Those who have not have no place here until they do.

 

  I wrote to you in my letter not to associate with sexually immoral people—not at all meaning the sexually immoral of this world, or the greedy and swindlers, or idolaters, since then you would need to go out of the world.  But now I am writing to you not to associate with anyone who bears the name of brother if he is guilty of sexual immorality or greed, or is an idolater, reviler, drunkard, or swindler—not even to eat with such a one.  For what have I to do with judging outsiders? Is it not those inside the church whom you are to judge?  God judges those outside. “Purge the evil person from among you.”

 

Paul quotes Deuteronomy, recalling Israel’s duty to holiness: “Purge the evil person from among you”.  Again, Paul doesn’t tell us to go turning over rocks looking for sin.  The sins he lists here as examples are sins that are flagrant and public—obvious to most if not to all, a scandal to the church, and that compromise the witness of the church to the world—even though in some cases, the world might think we should tolerate such sins.

But this is remedial discipline.  This is what happens when the church has failed in discipleship and in the early stages of discipline that we often don’t even think of as discipline.  So I want to back up and look at where discipline starts.  Let’s look at Hebrew 12:1-14, where we see that discipline is inherently positive and part of God’s design.  It’s on the long side and our time is limited, so I won’t offer any commentary.  Just hear God’s word.

Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight, and sin which clings so closely, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God.

  Consider him who endured from sinners such hostility against himself, so that you may not grow weary or fainthearted.  In your struggle against sin you have not yet resisted to the point of shedding your blood.  And have you forgotten the exhortation that addresses you as sons?

“My son, do not regard lightly the discipline of the Lord,

         nor be weary when reproved by him.

For the Lord disciplines the one he loves,

         and chastises every son whom he receives.”

  It is for discipline that you have to endure. God is treating you as sons. For what son is there whom his father does not discipline?  If you are left without discipline, in which all have participated, then you are illegitimate children and not sons.  Besides this, we have had earthly fathers who disciplined us and we respected them. Shall we not much more be subject to the Father of spirits and live?  For they disciplined us for a short time as it seemed best to them, but he disciplines us for our good, that we may share his holiness.  For the moment all discipline seems painful rather than pleasant, but later it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness to those who have been trained by it.

  Therefore lift your drooping hands and strengthen your weak knees, and make straight paths for your feet, so that what is lame may not be put out of joint but rather be healed.  Strive for peace with everyone, and for the holiness without which no one will see the Lord.

Brothers and Sisters, the Lord disciplines his children because he loves them—he loves us—and he calls his church to discipline because of that same love.  He desires what’s best for us and what’s best is holiness.  And now one more passage.  Like I said, scripture doesn’t tell us to go turning over rocks looking for the sins of our brothers and sisters.  It tells us what to do when sin confronts us—either something open and scandalous as in Corinth, or when we find ourselves sinned against by a brother or sister.  Look at Matthew 18:15-17.  Here’s how Jesus tells us to deal with the sins of others.

If your brother sins against you, go and tell him his fault, between you and him alone.  If he listens to you, you have gained your brother.  But if he does not listen, take one or two others along with you, that every charge may be established by the evidence of two or three witnesses.  If he refuses to listen to them, tell it to the church. And if he refuses to listen even to the church, let him be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector.

 

If your brother (or your sister) sins against you, go and talk to him (or her).  But before things even go that far, consider the love we ought to have for one another as brothers and sisters in Jesus.  Peter writes:

Above all, keep loving one another earnestly, since love covers a multitude of sins.  (1 Peter 4:8)

Have you ever thought about that?  If we really are loving each other as we should, I think this part probably tends to happen without us even thinking much about it.  We just forgive and move on.  Love covers a multitude of sins and our desire ought to be for fellowship and community with each other.  People leave the church.  It happens over and over and it so often happens over things that are so small in the grand scheme of things.  Something is horribly wrong with our perspective.  I was sitting at lunch on Tuesday with some other pastors and one was on the verge of tears talking about differences over pandemic politics decimating his church, people leaving because their views were different from those of others.  Another pastor talked about his continuing struggle to hold his church together.  He figured it was split 50/50 on these issues and they’ve only managed not to split over it because the pastors have made a point of avoiding those issues.  And I have to wonder, would these same people leaving the church over differences of opinion on government policy relating to a temporary problem, would they abandon their biological brothers and sisters, mothers and fathers the same way?  I doubt it.  Because family is important.  And yet consider Jesus’ words:

But he replied to the man…“Who is my mother, and who are my brothers?”  And stretching out his hand toward his disciples, he said, “Here are my mother and my brothers!  For whoever does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother and sister and mother.”  (Matthew 12:48-50)

Brothers and Sisters, in Jesus we have a bond with each other stronger than blood—because of his blood.  And that ought to translate into a deep and profound love for each other that only overcomes out various differences—that love also ought to cover a multitude of sins.  To quote from Bonhoeffer’s Life Together again, “I can no longer condemn or hate a brother for whom I pray, no matter how much trouble he causes me.”[5]

But back to Matthew 18, sometimes a sin or an offense has to be dealt with.  Jesus says to go to your brother to talk to him about it.  Communicate.  Sometimes that’s all it takes.  The single biggest cause of marital breakdown is a lack of communication.  You’ve probably seen that meme with the couple sitting on the couch or lying in bed, their backs to each other.  Both look very concerned…even upset.  And the wife is thinking, “I bet he’s thinking about another woman.”  And the husband is thinking, “I’ve tried everything.  Why won’t my motorcycle start.”  She’s getting worked up and angry, assuming that because he’s not talking, he’s thinking about another woman.  No.  He’s just trying to think through a problem.  But these things blow up and marriages fall apart.  Because people don’t talk.  So go to your brother, go to your sister and talk.  It often turns out that sin or offense was unintentional.  It’s often the case that you’ve been like the wife in the meme, thinking it’s one thing, when in reality it was something else entirely.  We’re Christians after all, people of the Spirit, manifesting his fruit.  We don’t often go out of our way to deliberately offend each other.  Go in Christ-like love, assuming the best of each other, and with a desire for reconciliation.

But maybe the sin was real.  Still, go and talk about it.  Hebrews calls us to exhort one another to love and good works.  Confronted by his sin, your brother—more often than not, if he really is full of the Spirit—will realise what he’s done, he’ll be sorry, and he’ll make things right.  And, Jesus says, “you have gained your bother.”  Remember, our desire is to glorify God and we do that by maintaining the unity and the witness of the Church.  We not only manifest the life of the Spirit when we reconcile with one another in love, but we witness the love of God for sinners—modelling to others and to the world what God, in Jesus, has done for us.

But, Jesus says, maybe your brother won’t listen.  Step two is to go back to him with one or two witnesses.  This means that you’ve brought the grievance to at least another brother or sister.  Maybe you’re out of line with your accusation.  Involving another person or two may, in itself, clear up the problem.  But if they agree that you’ve been wrong and that the other person has sinned, then you all go to him.  If this doesn’t resolve the situation, Jesus says, you take the matter to the assembly—in this case that means the local church.  At this point the presbyters or the bishop must confront this man with his sin.  And if he still refuses to listen, Jesus says he is to be treated as a gentile or a tax collector.  That means he’s to be treated as someone outside the community—in Israel as someone unclean and in the Church as someone who has forsaken his baptism and is now barred from the Lord’s Table.

But, again, the point is not vindictiveness.  The goal is restoration, as Paul stresses in 1 Corinthians 5.  This man may well be a believer, but in refusing to repent of his sin, his life does not match his profession and so, in an effort to restore him, he is barred from the sacramental life of the Church—from the markers of membership.  Especially thinking from the perspective of the new covenant, what is the church’s goal when it comes to gentiles and tax collectors?  It’s not to kick them to the curb and to walk away.  These are people who need to hear the gospel—the good news about Jesus.  Excommunication isn’t the same as shunning.  Excommunication shows us those who need to be evangelized anew and brought back to Jesus.

So to summarise: The Church is called to discipline her members for their own sake and for the sake of the larger church.  It is a call to the sinner to holiness.  It is a reminder to the rest of us of the need for holiness.  And it is essential to the integrity of the wider church’s witness.  Brothers and Sisters, if we desire to glorify God and if we desire to see the nations glorify God because of our witness, we have to deal with sin within the Church and deal with it in the way scripture tells us.  Again, it’s not optional, which is why all of our confessions and formularies, canons and liturgies stress church discipline as essential to the nature of the Church.  Stop practicing it, and we cease to be the church in the same way that we cease to be the church if we stop preaching God’s word or if we stop administering his sacraments.

And, I think, our abandonment of discipline lies behind the rapid decline of the Western church over the last century.  Consider Jesus’ warnings to the churches in Revelation.  The Laodiceans were neither hot nor cold.  The Ephesians had lost their love.  The Thyatirans tolerated “that woman Jezebel” who enticed the people to idolatry and sexual immorality.  And Jesus warned them, “Repent…If not, I will come to you and remove your lampstand from its place” (Revelation 2:5).  In the West we have lost our first love.  We are all too often lukewarm.  We have corrupted the gospel and centred it on ourselves instead of on God.  We have turned worship into little more than a therapeutic exercise.  And we tolerate nearly anything and everything in our churches.  Preachers mock the very concept of repentance and are shocked by the idea of discipline.  Our salt has lost its savour.  Our light has grown dim.  Our lives misrepresent the Lord and the kingdom we proclaim with our mouths.  Will it be any wonder if that Lord removes our lampstand?  Brothers and Sisters, let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father who is in heaven.

Let’s pray: Heavenly Father, you have created us, you have redeemed us, you have brought us together as your Church for the sake of your glory.  You have washed us clean and filled us with your own Spirit that we might glorify you by our life together.  Forgive us for our failures to be the salt and light you have created us to be.  Forgive us for our failures to be the holy community you have made us.  Fill us anew with a passion for your glory that we might desire, in all we do and say, to honour you and to make your glory known to the world.  Through Jesus we pray.  Amen.

[1] Article XXIX

[2] Article XVIII

[3] Quoted in Mark Dever, Nine Marks of a Healthy Church (Wheaton, Ill.: Crossway, 2004), 180.

[4] Trans. Daniel W. Bloesch (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2015), 83.

[5] Ibid, 64.

Mark Six: A Biblical Understanding of Church Membership

by William Klock

As we continue our look at the marks of a healthy church, we come today to something of a mid-point.  For that reason I want to back up to where we started.  When we set out, one of the things I explained was the way in which the Protestant Reformation changed how we think about the Church.  The Roman Church, for example, claimed to be the one true church based on its having a line of bishops in succession from St. Peter.  The Reformers, however, defined a true church on the basis of its fidelity to word and sacrament.  And this was written into the confessions and formularies of reformed churches across Europe.  The Lutheran Augsburg Confession, for example, says: “This [the Christian Church] is the assembly of all believers among whom the Gospel is preached in its purity and the holy sacraments are administered according to the Gospel.  For it is sufficient for the true unity of the Christian church that the Gospel be preached in conformity with a pure understanding of it and that the sacraments be administered in accordance with the divine Word.”[1]  John Calvin, in his Institutes of the Christian Religion, wrote: “Wherever we see the word of God purely preached and heard, and the sacraments administered according to Christ’s institution, there, it is not to be doubted, a church of God exists.”[2]  Or the Belgic Confession of the Continental Reformed churches: “The marks by which a true Church is known are these: If the pure doctrine of the gospel is preached therein; if she maintains the pure administration of the sacraments as instituted by Christ…”[3]  And, jumping up north, this is what the Scots Confession says: “The Notes, therefore, of the true Kirk of God we believe, confess, and avow to be, first, The true preaching of the word of God; into the which God has revealed himself to us, as the writings of the Prophets and Apostles do declare. Secondly, The right administration of the sacraments of Christ Jesus, which must be annexed to the word and promise of God, to seal and confirm the same in our hearts. Lastly, Ecclesiastical discipline uprightly ministered, as God’s word prescribes, whereby vice is repressed, and virtue nourished.”[4]  And of course our own Article XIX: “The visible Church of Christ is a congregation of faithful men, in the which the pure Word of God is preached, and the Sacraments be duly ministered according to Christ’s ordinance, in all those things that of necessity are requisite to the same.”

Faithfulness to God’s word and to the sacraments ordained by Jesus are the central marks of a real church.  And, I appreciate and think it’s worth noting again the words of the Augsburg Confession, which stress that these two things not only define us and establish our boundaries, but we also share them as the basis for our unity.  We don’t have to agree on every theological detail.  We don’t have to agree on precisely how the sacraments work.  But if we faithfully preach God’s word and observe his sacraments, we can be sure that we are united in the same Messiah.  Our unity does not come from bishops or a line of succession.  It does not come from perfect doctrinal uniformity.  It does not come from geography or culture or language.  It comes from our being in this Jesus whom we know by word and sacrament.

So far, the marks—or maybe I should call them “sub-marks” we’ve been looking at all related to or are derived from the first of those two great marks of the Church: faithfulness to the word of God.  We preach the word and as we do, that word informs and shapes our understanding of God, of the gospel, of conversion, and of evangelism and mission.  Today I want to switch gears and begin to look at points that follow from that second great mark of the Church: the ministration of the sacraments.  Now, there is a sense in which even the administration of the sacraments and everything connected with that is derivative of our preaching of the word and our submission to it.  Without scripture, we would neither understand the sacraments nor know what to do with them.  But I think it’s worth changing gears a bit at this point and continuing forward with the next marks of a healthy church and understanding them as derivative of or connected to the sacraments—to Baptism and the Lord’s Supper.

So, first, if observing these two sacraments, Baptism and the Lord’s Supper, if observing them marks us out as Christians, that means they have something to say to us about who belongs to the Church—about the subject of “membership”.  And membership is a subject worth talking about, because not everyone agrees on what constitutes membership in a church or in the Church.  In the early Church, people believed and were baptised and then the baptised gathered regularly—weekly as far as we can tell—and celebrated the Lord’s Supper together.  That was it.  The churches were small and it was clear who was a member and who wasn’t, because to be baptised in Jesus the Messiah was a big deal.  To gather together, often when it meant punishment or martyrdom, not to mention living daily for Jesus, well, that itself spoke of a real and serious commitment.

But jump forward several hundred years and—at least in theory—everyone in Europe became a Christian.  Everyone was baptised.  Everyone went to church and received the Lord’s Supper (even though it wasn’t offered to them very often).  Many of those people were truly committed to Jesus and gave him their allegiance, but many did not.  And so there were various reform movements down through the ages, with folks trying to reach those nominal believers.  And it’s worth noting that those movements—where they were successful—whether the Franciscans or the Dominicans, the Protestant Reformers or, later, Puritans or the Baptists or the Methodists, those movements were founded on the renewed preaching of God’s word, because they knew that it is God’s word and God’s word alone that breathes life into dead bones.

But even the Reformers accepted that the sacraments are the markers of membership in the Church.  They knew that there are many who are baptised and rarely thereafter darken the doorway of a church.  They knew that there are many who come regularly to church and who receive the Lord’s Supper, but who fail to understand what it’s all about or who simply have other motives for coming and participating.  There are many who never show the change that comes with faith in Jesus and the gospel.  And so they put emphasis on the need for fathers and mothers to teach their children and to be faithful in family worship.  They developed catechisms, to teach both children and adults what it means to be a Christian.  The rite of Confirmation was repurposed in the Reformation churches as an opportunity to catechise children on the cusp of adulthood—to make sure they understood the faith into which they had been baptised as infants.  But everyone agreed: Baptism and the Lord’s Supper were the marks of the new covenant people of God.

But not quite everyone.  The Anabaptists (the forerunners of the Mennonites and Amish) and later the Baptists tweaked the formula.  Only those adults who could give a credible profession of faith in both word and manner of life, only they were baptised.  Not infants, not children, not young adults—only grown men and women who credibly professed and lived out their commitment to Jesus.  But even there, Baptism and the Lord’s Supper remained the markers of membership in the Church.  A person enters this covenant people by faith by passing through the waters of Baptism and then the covenant people meet regularly to renew that covenant in the Lord’s Supper.

I didn’t set out to give a history lesson this morning, but as I was working through this matter of church membership, I realised that few people today have ever really thought about this—even a lot of pastors.  Today it’s common to admit people to the Lord’s Supper whether they’re baptised or not.  It’s common to admit people as members of a local church regardless of whether they’ve been baptised.  Sinner’s prayers, altar calls, bowed heads and raised hands, and walking aisles have often replaced baptism as the means of entry into the covenant.  And as our culture has become increasingly commitment-phobic, many churches have done away with any kind of membership altogether.  In many otherwise evangelical churches, baptism has become optional.  In rarer instances, so has the Lord’s Supper.  And in the case of groups like the Salvation Army, both Baptism and the Lord’s Supper have been done away with entirely.  In many Anglican churches, like ours, we’ve inherited a somewhat confusing practise of sort of informally adding to the role any baptised person who attends as a “baptised member” and then having a separate list of “communicant members”, who are those who have been confirmed—which means they’ve been officially received as members by the bishop.

So what, according to the Bible, constitutes membership in the Church?  Well, let’s go back to the Bible and back to the big story.  That’s our controlling narrative after all.  Notice how the Lord has always set his people apart.  There has always been a rite of initiation, a rite that marks a person out as a member of the covenant people—a rite by which the Lord marks out his own.  And there has always been a rite of covenant renewal and remembrance by which later members of the covenant family recall and participate for themselves in the great historical action of the Lord to redeem and to set apart this people.

In the old covenant that first rite was circumcision.  Bible scholars debate over why specifically circumcision, but this cutting of the organ of procreation was probably meant to be a reminder of the Lord’s promise to Abraham that he would make of him a great nation.  But even before the law was given, this rite marked out the Lord’s people as his own.  The sign was given to the adult who joined the community, but most importantly to the infant children of its members.  It wasn’t optional.  The uncircumcised has no part in the life of the covenant people and neglecting to include one’s children was a serious offense.  Consider the story of Moses on his way back to Egypt.  The Lord, we’re told sought to kill him, but the Lord’s anger was placated when Moses’ wife circumcised their son, doing herself what Moses had neglected.  Is salvation by faith?  Yes it is and it always has been.  And circumcision was for the people of Israel, an act of faith in the Lord’s promise to Abraham—both for themselves and for their children who were to inherit that promise.  The children of covenant members were to be raised as full members of the covenant people, with all the rights and obligations that came with membership.  A covenant child was to be raised in faith, never to know a time apart from this people who lived with the living God in their midst.  From before they could even remember, they bore his covenant sign.

And then came the Exodus, when the Lord delivered his covenant people from Egypt.  And he gave them the second rite, the rite of Passover.  “Rite” is really too sterile a word.  Passover was a meal—a meal that gave meaning to the events of the Exodus, that reminded the covenant people of what the Lord had done for them, and a meal through which every succeeding generation participated for themselves in those saving events and came to know their own place in the people of God.

And, of course, there was the torah, the law—the covenant charter between the Lord and his people that outlined what life in this covenant people was to look like.  And, if you can be included in a people, you can also be excluded, and so the torah specified what that looked like, whether it was the death penalty for certain severe offenses to temporary “exile” in cases of impurity, and everything in between.

Now, the new covenant people.  I hope the parallels are already starting to come into focus.  We see the same pattern in the Church, because of course, the new covenant is the fulfilment of the old and carries on the same mission that the people of God has always had: to make the living God known to the nations as he works to set his fallen creation to rights.  The old makes sense of the new.  We are his priestly people, mediating his presence to the world. We are his prophetic people, calling the nations to repentance and faith.  We are his kingly people, announcing the royal proclamation that Jesus is Lord and preparing the nations for his dominion.  The difference is that this new people is not defined by circumcision, Passover, or torah, but by Jesus and the life of the Spirit.  And we enter that life in our baptism, just as the Israelites entered God’s covenant by means of circumcision.  As circumcision marked out the Israelite, so baptism marks out the Christian as belonging to the Lord.  And as circumcision was, so baptism is a fitting and appropriate sign in that it reminds us of the Lord’s promise in Jesus to wash us clean from sin.  Specifically for those first Jewish believers, it spoke to them of forgiveness for having failed to keep the old covenant, but for each of us as we pass through the baptismal waters in faith, we are forgiven our own past unfaithfulness.  And our baptism links us to the Lord’s saving acts in the past—with Israel’s exodus from Egypt.  The font is our Red Sea and through these waters the Lord leads us into a new life in his presence.  Peter told them men present on Pentecost to repent and to be baptised.  Jesus, earlier, called his hearers to believe and be baptised.  Repentance and belief are necessary, but Paul reminds us repeatedly that it is our baptism that formally unites us to Jesus.  You can repent and believe all day long, but baptism is the means God has given us make us his.  It is his promise to us in visible, tangible form.  “For as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ,” he writes in Galatians 3:27.  And, “In one Spirit we were all baptized into one body—Jews or Greeks, slaves or free—and all were made to drink of one Spirit,” in 2 Corinthians 12:13.

And, despite what our Anabaptism and Baptist brothers and sisters might say, just as with the sign of the old covenant, baptism rightly belongs to our children.  Consider that at the very first, the new covenant people was made up entirely of old covenant people.  Think of Peter’s sermon on Pentecost.  He finished by announcing to his hearers, “This promise is for you and for your children” (Acts 2:39).  Children were included in the old covenant.  Again, not to include your children got you excluded from the old covenant.  And here Peter announces a new and better covenant in Jesus.  And it’s being announced to people who are already members of the old.  Imagine those men who were baptised excitedly going home to their families to tell them about this new and better covenant, but then telling their children: “Sorry, you’ve been part of the Lord’s people, you’ve participated in the Passover every year you’ve been alive, but now that there’s a better covenant, you’re no longer part of it, you can’t participate in the new covenant meal—at least not until you’re an adult and can make the choice for yourself.  Even then, you can’t be baptised until everyone’s reasonably certain you really believe.”  That would hardly be a new and better covenant.  The Lord has always fully included the children of covenant members in his people.  The family is one of the primary means of grace—it always has been—for raising, first, new Israelites, and now, new Christians.

I know there is concern for children who are baptised, but for whatever reason never develop their own faith, who have no commitment, who leave the church but think, “I’m fine.  I’ve been baptised.”  Brothers and Sisters, God is concerned about those people too.  It was as great a problem in Israel as it is in the Church.  And yet he has always insisted on the inclusion of our children in the covenant.  It is his gracious means and we need to trust him.  Our duty is to be faithful in raising our own covenant children and—for the leadership of the Church—to do our best to ensure those who bring their children for baptism are, themselves, faithful and aware of what they’re doing.  Some fall away, but we trust the Lord knows what he’s doing when he insists we include our children in the covenant.

So baptism corresponds to circumcision and initiates us into the new covenant.  In the same way the Lord’s Supper corresponds to Passover.  The meal itself, when Jesus instituted it the night before he died, was a Passover meal reinterpreted around what he was about to do.  Again, this was the meal by which the Lord’s people in the old covenant recalled and participated themselves in the events by which he had made them his people.  Consider that neither Jesus nor his disciples had been there when Israel painted the blood on their doorposts, when the angel of death passed through Egypt, when the Lord parted the sea and then drowned Pharaoh’s army.  But part of the Passover meal and the liturgy associated with it, involved—and still involves—the participants talking about those events as if they themselves were part of them.  And Jesus took that meal and recentred it on himself and on his saving death.  The cross and the empty tomb were about to become a new exodus.  And through that new exodus the Lord would create a new people.  Brothers and Sisters, in the Lord’s Supper we recall—and not just recall, but participate in—those mighty, saving deeds by which the Lord has led us out of our slavery to sin and death.  The Supper reminds us that by virtue of our baptism into Jesus, we are the Lord’s covenant people.  And it reminds us of the life to which we have been called.  The Lord led Israel through the sea and on the other side he gave them his law and took up his presence in their midst.  And so with the Church, the Lord has led us through the sea of baptism, by Jesus’ death and resurrection he has delivered us from our slavery to sin and death, and he has, in a new and better way, made himself present in our midst.  He has filled us with his Spirit and he has written the law of his Spirit on our hearts.  He has taken our hearts of stone and replaced them with hearts of flesh, ready to be the people who will mediate his presence and proclaim his good news to the world.

Biblically speaking, these two things, Baptism and the Lord’s Supper, mark us out objectively as members of the Church.  We can point subjectively to the life of the Spirit.  Every believer will show the fruit of the Spirit.  Every believer will show a love for God and a love for others, for example.  Perhaps what we need to be reminded of most in this day where everything is about the individual: Every believer who professes love for Jesus will also love his body and be eager to gather with it.  But these things aren’t as easy to pin down objectively.  Next week, Lord willing, I’ll address the topic of church discipline, which addresses those times when our lives fail to match up to our profession.  But this change that takes place in us because of Jesus and the presence of the Spirit doesn’t happen at the same pace for everyone.  It’s not usually linear.  And none of us is perfect.  Being immature in the faith isn’t the same as not being in the faith.  And so we come back to the sacraments as the marks of the Christian.  Have you been baptised into Jesus?  Do you regularly receive his invitation and come to the Table to participate anew in his death and resurrection?  If the answer is yes, then you belong to God.  He has marked you as his own.  And he will work in you day by day by his grace to conform you to the image of his son.

What about all the other membership-related things we and other churches do in addition to Baptism and the Lord’s Supper?  What about Confirmation or reception by a bishop?  Or membership covenants?  Churches have a variety of ways for people to formally identify with the local church or with the denomination.  Baptism and the Lord’s Supper are the biblical markers of membership in the Church.  Does that make those other practises bad?  Not necessarily.  Just because the Bible doesn’t tell us specifically to do something doesn’t mean we can’t or shouldn’t do it.  There are good reasons to have means for people to formally identify with a local church and to commit to the people there.  There are good reasons to have means for people to submit themselves to the doctrine and discipline of a local church or denomination.  In a day when there are a lot of people who drift from one church to another—which is not a good thing—we need means of encouraging people to commit to a specific congregation.  Speaking as your pastor, I need to know to whom I have an obligation of pastoral care and you show me that by your commitment to this congregation.  When someone attends here a few weeks, then does the same at three or four or five other churches and then makes her way back here months later for another few weeks—it’s hard to care for, to exhort, to discipline people like that, or even to know if I should.  Anything else we do with regard to church membership ought to reinforced Baptism and the Lord’s Supper as marks of membership.  If what we do detracts from or becomes a substitute for the sacraments, then we’ve lost a biblical understanding of membership.

Finally, in closing, I want to remind you of the “why” to all of this.  It can be easy to get so focused on the what that we forget the why—that we forget our mission and the reason why membership in the church matters.  Brothers and Sisters, God has called us together, he has marked us out, he has given us his grace so that we can make him known.  St. Paul wrote to the Ephesians, “Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her.”  We are the people redeemed by his blood and that makes us, as a people, living witnesses of God’s love and mercy and grace.  Our Baptism, our participation in the Lord’s Supper, they are not merely for us.  They are for the life of the world as we reveal to the people around us what it is to be part of God’s new creation and what it looks like to live in the presence of the living God.  One day the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord as the waters cover the sea.  Dear Friends, that day will come, because of God’s word, because of God’s Spirit, but most importantly, because he has created a people for himself, marked by the waters of baptism and fed with his body and blood, whose faithful presence and witness in the world makes him known and reveals his glory.

Let’s pray: Father, we come this morning and give you thanks for having graciously brought us into this family we call the Church.  You have washed us clean, you feed us at your Table, you call us your own sons and daughters.  You have poured your own Spirit into us, that we might be conformed to the image of your true son, Jesus.  May we be as committed to this family as you are.  Deliver us from the consumerist mindset of our age, that we would come to give, not so much to get.  We pray that by your word and Spirit you will make us ever more faithful to you and to this mission to make your good news known to world around us.  Through Jesus we pray.  Amen.

[1] Article VII

[2] IV.i.ix

[3] Article XXIX

[4] Article XVIII

Mark Five: A Biblical Understanding of Evangelism

by William Klock

In early 2007 Bishop Dorrington reached out to me to ask if I’d be interested in coming to pastor Living Word Church.  The first thing that told me this might be a healthy church was that you had started as a group of about a dozen after leaving St. Peter’s, and that you’d grown to around sixty to seventy people.  Not just that, but most of those people added to your number were previously unchurched and nominally churched.  That told me you were a people committed to evangelism and a commitment to evangelism is one of the marks of a healthy church.  Let me be clear, it’s not about the numbers.  A people can be committed to evangelism and still not see much numerical growth.  And there are sadly plenty of churches with impressive numbers, that have utterly failed to truly evangelise people.  Our work is to proclaim the good news.  Changing hearts and turning them to God is the unique work of the Holy Spirit.  Get that reversed—and it happens all too often—and you’ve got a recipe for an unhealthy church.

So, first, what is evangelism?  In short, it’s the proclamation of the evangel, the good news.  But, of course, it’s not quite that simple, is it?  In a very real sense it should be.  But we’ve got so many conflicting ideas about evangelism circulating around us that it complicates the whole thing.  But at its very simplest, at its very core, evangelism is telling others the good news that we have experienced ourselves.  Stefan Paas is a professor of missiology in Amsterdam.  I read his recent book on evangelism in a secular age earlier this year and found he had a lot of excellent insights (and not a few problems, too), but I like the perspective he gives.  Think of it this way:

“Human life is inescapably missionary.  Everybody evangelizes.  Whenever people become impressed by certain experiences, views, products or services, they feel the need to commend them to others.  Whenever people are struck by their own success or by the failure of others, they feel the responsibility to share something of their own blessings with others.  Clearly, there is nothing high and lofty about ‘mission’ as such.  It is fully wedded with our social nature; we are witnessing, sharing, helping beings.  ‘The word is near you, on your lips and in your heart…’ (Rom. 10.8)”[1]

Have you ever thought about it that way?  When we have a good experience somewhere, we tell our friends so that they can share our good experience.  We spread the word about restaurants, mechanics, dentists, fishing holes, and hiking trails—and we make converts.  Back when I first started working as an Apple technician, Apple’s marketing department was actually called “Apple Evangelism” and it wasn’t surprising to me that so many people converted from Windows to Mac with an almost religious zeal.  This kind of telling is just what we do.  It’s in our nature.  And yet, there’s something different about actual evangelism, about the gospel—isn’t there?  Nobody’s going get angry with you for telling them they should give your favourite restaurant a try.  You’re not going to lose a friend by giving them the name of your dentist or your mechanic.  And, of course, that’s because none of these other things calls us to a completely new kind of life.  But this very basic human phenomenon really does get to what evangelism is at its core.  It’s not complicated.  It’s simply telling others the good news about Jesus that has been utterly good for us.  Yes, the thing that makes it different is that if it’s true it doesn’t leave you any choice.  You’ve got to repent, believe, and be baptised…and no restaurant or mechanic demands that kind of commitment…but it really is that simple when you boil it down.  In Jesus, God has done something wonderful for us and it should be instinctive for us to want to tell the people we know.  Paas goes on and writes this:

“Like all people in all times and places the first Christians were social beings; they were steeped deeply in all kinds of communicative behaviour.  It would certainly amount to over-theorizing in most cases to ask about the missionary ‘methods’ that they used.  They did what all people do: they bonded with friends, talked with relatives, raised their children, they ate together, played together, worked together.  And of course they shared the ‘tidings of great joy’ they had heard; they ‘gossiped the gospel’.”[2]

The gospel also went out in more formal ways.  Paul deliberately set out on journeys with a missionary purpose.  He went to the synagogues to confront his fellow Jews and he went to the town centres to preach and to confront the Greeks and Romans.  And some people are called to that kind of evangelism.  But, Brothers and Sisters, have you ever considered how simple everyday evangelism really is?  God, in Jesus, has done something amazing and you have experienced it.  Do you gossip the gospel…as Paas puts it?

As we’ve been working through what it looks like to be a healthy church, I’ve been trying to frame these marks with the big narrative of scripture and I think that big story helps bring into focus what it means to evangelise and to be an evangelistic people.  The first thing the story helps us to get right is our purpose as the people of God.  Right from the beginning, when God created human beings, his purpose for us—the vocation he gave us—was to be his image in creation.  Other peoples built temples for their gods and put images of wood or stone in those temples—the images of their gods—to represent their rule on earth.  The point—or one of the points—of the Genesis story is to tell us that God created his own temple—and that makes him truly sovereign and better than all the other gods—and instead of putting a stone idol in it to bear his image and to represent his rule, he put human beings in that temple to be his stewards, his regents—first and foremost, his priests.  We were created to serve him.  Of course, part of that is serving each other.  He loves us and so we love each other, as St. John writes.  But it all first comes back to the fact that we exist to serve God.  Even today, our calling to proclaim the good news to the world is to make him know so that others will give him glory and commit themselves to his service.

Sometimes we forget this.  We are called to serve others.  We are called to be a light to the nations.  But sometimes we forget that these things grow out of our duty to God.  In the Anglican Church in North America we have a diocese called “Churches for the Sake of Others” or locally, there was a church that used the motto, “In the Valley for the Valley”.  I’m sure these folks are well-meaning, but it’s not surprising when their mission drifts and starts to be consumed by social and political agendas and, as C4SO’s bishop put it this week, “hankering after cultural acceptance”.  If we aren’t anchored first in our duty to God, our duty to others can easily be swept off-course.  If our churches exist “for the sake of God”, the “for the sake of others” part will come naturally.  If we’re in the Valley for God, the part about being “for the Valley” will come naturally and—more importantly—will square with God’s mission for the world, not the various human agendas that are out there.

Second, the big biblical story gives us our model for evangelism.  Before his ascension, Jesus commissioned his disciples:

“All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me.  Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age.”  (Matthew 28:18-20)

“Go.”  I think that word “go” sums up how most of us have been conditioned to think about evangelism—often so much so that we feel guilty or we feel like we’re falling short if we don’t leave everything behind to go to a far off country to proclaim the good news.  Brothers and Sisters, let me suggest that scripture’s narrative tells us that when it comes to the mission of the people of God, we ought to think first not of “go” but of “presence”.

Think of Israel in the Old Testament.  God chose them as a people and lived in their midst.  His presence was with them, first in the tabernacle, and then in the temple in Jerusalem.  As his people, he set them apart by giving them his law, and their calling was to be a light to the nations.  Their witness was meant to reveal the Lord, his love for his people, and his mighty deeds to the nations, so that the nations would come to Jerusalem to give glory to the Lord and to learn his ways.  We see this model throughout the prophets, but here's what we read in Micah 4:1-2.

It shall come to pass in the latter days

         that the mountain of the house of the Lord

shall be established as the highest of the mountains,

         and it shall be lifted up above the hills;

and peoples shall flow to it,

and many nations shall come, and say:

“Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord,

         to the house of the God of Jacob,

that he may teach us his ways

         and that we may walk in his paths.”

For out of Zion shall go forth the law,

         and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem.

 

The Lord did send some of his people out on rare occasions to the nations.  He did that with Jonah.  But his mission for Israel was primarily through his presence in the temple, in the midst of a priestly people who then mediated that presence—they made it known—to the nations and drew them to the Lord.  This is what we see fulfilled in Revelation with the New Jerusalem and the nations streaming to it to worship God.  This model of mission is what Jesus gets at in the Sermon on the Mount when he reminds the people of their calling to be salt and light and the city on a hill.  He said,

In the same way, let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father who is in heaven.  (Matthew 5:16)

Let your light so shine before others, so that they will be ultimately moved to give glory to God.  That’s Israel’s mission in a nutshell right there.  And, of course, it didn’t work.  Israel—or most of Israel—hid her light under a basket.  The Lord came in judgement.  He threw the unsalty salt into the street where it was trod underfoot.  But he also came himself in Jesus, died and rose from the grave, and did so to create a new people, forgiven and full of his own Holy Spirit.  And here’s where Jesus’ great commission enters the story.

The old temple in Jerusalem was gone—or about to be gone at the time Jesus spoke—and a new temple was created.  Instead of an earthy temple of bricks and mortar in which the Lord was present in the midst of his people, through Jesus and the Spirit he made the members of this new people, themselves, to be his temple and the place of his presence.  “Living stones,” St. Peter calls us, built on Jesus, the living cornerstone.  And so Jesus sent his people out—not all of them, but some of them—to establish outposts of this new, living temple, first throughout Judea, then Samaria, and throughout the Roman Empire.  The Lord’s temple gradually established in every city and town, establishing his presence amongst the nations, and building the kingdom of God and declaring the Lordship of Jesus in anticipation of the Empire’s conversion.

Brothers and Sisters, Jesus shares his ministry with us.  That means we are a priestly people.  We mediate the presence of God to the world.  We are a prophetic people, meaning that we are called to proclaim the good news about Jesus, crucified and risen, we are called to confront the world with the good news that he is Lord, and we have a duty to call the world to repentance and faith—to allegiance to him and to his kingdom.  And Jesus shares his dominion with us.  We are a royal people who anticipate the day when we will rule with our Lord.  The church mediates God’s presence and proclaims his good news and his kingdom where we are.  There will always be those called, like Paul, to “go”—to establish beachheads of the kingdom in other places, but for most of us our calling is to be gospel people right where we are, to be the church—the tabernacle of God’s Spirit—and to mediate this God who is present with us to the people and to the community around us.

But what is it that we need to communicate?  When I talk about presence, it’s easy to think that all we need to do is be good Christians and people around us will become Christians by osmosis.  There’s a popular saying, falsely attributed to St. Francis: “Preach the gospel at all times.  Use words if necessary.”  It gives people an out and reinforced this idea that we fulfil our calling and avoid offence by witnessing with our lives.  Brother and Sisters, our lives should be a witness of Jesus and gospel.  We are to be salt and light.  We are to be the light on the hilltop.  But you can’t preach the gospel without words.  It’s the way God works.  As I’ve stressed so many times, his word gives life.  We ought to live our lives and we ought to live together as the Church in such a way that we make the people around us constructively curious.  But at some point we will have to use words and explain what it’s all about.  That’s the challenge.  Sometimes we’re afraid of offending people or of being rejected.  Sometimes we just don’t know what to say.  And that last part is getting increasingly difficult.  Just a few decades ago, most people in our culture had respect for Christians and had a general idea of what Christianity is about—even if some of their ideas were wrong.  We largely all shared a common understanding of the nature of sin.  That’s not really the case anymore and that means we need to be prepared more than in the past.  We need to know our Bibles.  We need to know the story.  We need to understand what the gospel is.  And it means that effective evangelism is going to take place in the context of long-term relationships with people—not in a short encounter while you sit next to someone on an airplane or in the doctor’s waiting room.  In many ways that’s a good thing, because it’s in those relationships that we have the opportunity show the gospel and to make them curious.

But at some point we will need to tell people the story and we will need to explain to them what God has done in Jesus and what each of us needs to do in response.  We need to tell them the truth and to be honest with them.  They’re not joining a social club.  Jesus has died to forgive sins and he has risen to give life.  He has ascended and reigns as Lord.  He gives his Spirit to those who repent and believe to transform them from the inside out.  He is making all things new and the point of all of this is to make a new and holy people ready to be part of God’s new creation and live, once again, as his priests and stewards.  When a person passes through the waters of baptism, it’s to take hold of this good news and its promise, and to cross into a new life and a new world on the other side.  Repentance is costly.  It means living God’s new creation now—being heaven-on-earth people—even when it’s counter to everything around us.  It means letting go of our idols and our sources of security in order to trust in God and to commit to his vision for humanity and the world.  But in doing so we are set free from our bondage to death to share the presence of the living God.

And not everyone will be receptive.  Brothers and Sisters, remember that changing a person’s heart is not our duty.  Again, evangelism goes wrong when we confuse our part with God’s part.  Speaking at the Lusanne conference on evangelism back in 1974, the great evangelical Anglican preacher, John Stott, said:

“Evangelism must not be defined in terms of its results, for this is not how the word is used in the New Testament. …There is no mention whether the word which was “evangelized” was believed, or whether the inhabitants of the towns and villages “evangelized” were converted. To “evangelize” in biblical usage does not mean to win converts (as it usually does when we use the word) but simply to announce the good news, irrespective of the results.”[3]

That conference went on to give this definition of evangelism in what’s known as the Lausanne Covenant:

“To evangelize is to spread the good news that Jesus Christ died for our sins and was raised from the dead according to the Scriptures, and that, as the reigning Lord, he now offers the forgiveness of sins and the liberating gifts of the Spirit to all who repent and believe.”[4]

Brothers and Sisters, we do the telling.  The Spirit does the converting.  Getting that wrong inevitably leads to all sorts of pragmatic and manipulative practises.  We water down the message to make it more palatable.  We use manipulation to win people over.  We start acting like salesmen and all too often we end up treating the gospel as if it were a car with a bunch of flaws to be hidden from the customer.  And we start treating our listeners like customers and laying high pressure sales techniques on them to produce a decision.  Friends the gospel itself is powerful—more powerful than you or I can ever be.  Proclaim God’s word and let the Spirit do the work.

Keeping this perspective also keeps us from feeling as though we’ve failed.  Many Christians don’t evangelise because they don’t think they’re able to convince someone to choose Jesus and some have been crippled by what they see as past failures.  Hear me: If someone doesn’t believe, it’s not your fault.  That part’s not up to you; it’s up to God.  Again, trust God’s word and God’s Spirit.  And sometimes you may end up surprised at the ways the word and the Spirit work.  Charles Spurgeon tells how George Whitfield,

“he great eighteenth-century evangelist, was hounded by a group of detractors who called themselves the “Hell-fire Club.”  When Whitfield would stand outside preaching this little group of guys would stand off on the side and mimic him.  They didn’t believe a word of it.  The ring leader was called Thorpe.  One day Thorpe was mimicking Whitefield to his cronies, delivering his sermon with brilliant accuracy, perfectly imitating his tone and facial expressions, when he himself was so pierced that he sat down and was converted on the spot.”[5]

Brothers and Sisters, sometimes our duty is merely to plant the seed.  Sometimes it’s to water what someone else has planted.  Sometimes we reap the harvest that results from decades of others planting and watering.  But never forget that it is the Spirit who brought the growth.

Now, let me close with one last very important thing.  Knowing that the fruit of our evangelism is not produced by us, but by the Spirit, Brothers and Sisters, pray.  J. I. Packer, in his wonderful little book Evangelism and the Sovereignty of God, wrote this:

“In evangelism…we are impotent; we depend wholly upon God to make our witness effective; only because He is able to give men new hearts can we hope that through our preaching of the gospel sinners will be born again.  These facts ought to drive us to prayer.  It is God’s intention that they should drive us to prayer.  God means us, in this as in other things, to recognise and confess our impotence, and to tell Him that we rely on Him alone, and to plead with Him to glorify His name.  It is His way regularly to withhold His blessing until His people start to pray. ‘Ye have not, because ye ask not.’ ‘Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you: for every one that asketh receiveth; and he that seeketh findeth; and to him that knocketh it shall be opened.’  But if you are too proud or lazy to ask, we need not expect to receive.  This is the universal rule, in evangelism as elsewhere.  God will make us pray before He blesses our labours in order that we may constantly learn afresh that we depend on God for everything.  And then, when God permits us to see conversions, we shall not be tempted to ascribe them to our own gifts, or skills, or wisdom, or persuasiveness, but to His work alone, and so we shall know whom we ought to thank for them.”[6]

Friends, pray.  Pray you will be captivated by the glory of the gospel yourself, by love and faithfulness of God made manifest in Jesus and that your daily life will make the people around you constructively curious.  Pray that God will give you a heart for the lost.  Pray for opportunities to proclaim the good news.  Pray for the eyes to see those opportunities.  Pray for the boldness and courage to take advantage of them when they come.  Pray for the words to say—but don’t let that be an excuse for not being prepared in advance!  And most of all, pray for the Spirit to be at work in the hearts of those to whom you preach.  Pray.  Pray.  Pray.  And with that, Brothers and Sisters, let’s pray:

Almighty God and Father, be at work in our hearts by your Holy Spirit and fill us with passion, with enthusiasm, with gratitude, with joy for what you have done through Jesus.  He died and rose again to deliver us from sin and death and he has ascended to your right hand and reigns with power and authority.  You have shown us your glory and I pray that your Spirit will give us a passion to make your glory known—to be salt, to be light, to be a city on a hill—to cause the nations of the earth to come streaming to your temple to give you glory and to know your ways.  Be at work in our hearts we pray.  Fill us with a desire to proclaim your good news.  And be at work in the hearts of the people who hear our proclamation.  Make them fertile soil for the word that we plant.  Cause your word to take root and grow that all the world might give you glory we pray.  Amen.

[1] Pilgrims and Priests (London: SCM Press, 2019), 6.

[2] Ibid. 7

[3] https://lausanne.org/content/john-stott-biblical-basis-of-evangelism

[4] https://lausannecanada.com/lausanne-covenant

[5] Charles H. Spurgeon, The Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit (Pasadena, Texas: Pilgrim, 1974), 34:115, cited in Mark Dever, Nine Marks of a Healthy Church (Wheaton: Crossway, 2004), 141-142.

[6] J. I. Packer, Evangelism and the Sovereignty of God (Downers Grove, Ill.: IVP Academic, 1991), 122

Mark Four: A Biblical Understanding of Conversion

by William Klock

“It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me.”  St. Paul wrote those words in his epistle to the Christians of Galatia.  I can think of few statements more counter-cultural than that.  Again, “It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me.”  I noted three weeks ago that our current culture despises meta-narratives—those big, over-arching stories that give meaning to life.  To grant legitimacy to such narratives, means surrendering yourself to the meaning they give.  Our culture, instead, values the individual.  We make our own truth.  We define our own reality.  We choose our own values.  We are subject to no one.  We will not be oppressed by having the meaning of someone else’s grand narrative forced on us.  In contrast to Paul, the post-modern person is fully self-actualised and might say, “I live, because I know who I am and live my truth authentically and without inhibition.”  Or, more simply, there’s the affirmation so popular these days: “I am enough.”  Post-modernism is full of conversion stories about discovering oneself, about learning to put oneself first, about learning to reject any outside imposition on one’s identity or values.  “Deconstruction” has been the method by which many former Evangelicals have too often walked this path into apostasy, creating a faith they can live while being true to themselves.  But against it all stand Paul’s declaration of faith.  “It is no longer I who live, but Christ [the Messiah] who lives in me.”

Last week we looked at what it means to have a biblical understanding of the gospel—of the good news about Jesus.  We looked at Peter’s sermon on Pentecost, found in Acts 2, and we heard his appeal to the people there when they asked how they should respond to the good news about Jesus and his kingdom.  Peter said to them, “Repent and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus [the Messiah] for the forgiveness of your sins, and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit” (Acts 2:38).  What does that look like in practice?  Or what’s the result of repenting, of being baptised, of being forgiven, and of being indwelt by the Holy Spirit?  Paul sums it up beautifully in those few short words, “It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me.”  This morning I want to unpack that as we look at the fourth mark of a healthy church.  I’ve struggled with what to call it.  We could call it having a biblical understanding of conversion, but conversion isn’t a common biblical term.  It’s really only used once in the way we use it.  We could say “a biblical understanding of regeneration”  or maybe “of renewal”.  Those are good New Testament terms that describe what happens to us when we believe and are baptised.  But all these ideas point to the fact that something changes in us when we submit ourselves to the good news.  Maybe we could use a phrase Paul liked to use.  We need a biblical understanding of being “in Christ”.  Or we could just say that we need a biblical understanding of what it means to be or—or more specifically—to become a Christian.  I’m still not sure which is best, although I’ll have to pick one so I can put a title on this sermon when it gets uploaded to the website in a couple of hours.  But I think you get the idea.  This morning we’re talking about what the Bible says happens—or how we should understand what happens—when we respond to the good news in repentance, belief, and baptism.

I think that’s the best place to start.  Something happens.  When we repent, believe, and are baptised something changes.  It has to.  I’ve been trying to frame these marks of a healthy church by the great narrative of the scriptures and, if it tells us nothing else, the Bible’s big story tells us that change is essential.  The story begins with God creating everything—the world, people, everything—and stressing that it was all good.  And then we human beings rebelled against God.  We believed the serpent’s lie that we could be gods ourselves.  We foolishly abandoned the life God gave us in his presence and became subject to sin and death.  And we proceeded to make a mess of his good creation—of the world, of ourselves, of our relationships—everything.  And the story shows us over and over and over and over that left to ourselves, we only make everything worse.  We’ve tried philosophy after philosophy, government after government, god after god and keep finding ourselves in the same predicament.  Something has to change if the cycle is ever to be broken.

Even when God called Abraham and from his family created a people for himself, even as he gave them his law and lived in their midst—they were a people dramatically changed and set apart from the nations—even they continued to need this change.  Repeatedly the Lord promised that he would set things right.  He promised that he would work through this people whom he had called and chosen.  But to get from fallen creation to new creation requires a change.  Human hearts must be changed.  From self and from sin and from idolatry our hearts must be turned back to God and to his kingdom.  And so he promised his people: the day would come when he would forgive their sins and set them to rights by means of his own Spirit.  Jesus fulfilled those promises.  By his death he forgives sins, by his resurrection he has defeated death, and by the gift of the Holy Spirit he has infused the life of God into his people.  Jesus and the Spirit effect our needed change.  And, again, the story hammers at this need as we’ve seen in our study of Revelation.  When creation is finally and truly set to rights, there will be no place for the cowardly, the faithless, the detestable, murderers, the sexually immoral, sorcerers, idolaters, or liars (Revelation 21:8)—in short, those who continue to live for themselves.  God’s new creation has room only for those who have been created anew by his Spirit.  The Lord promised through Ezekiel:

I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you. And I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. (Ezekiel 36:26)

“I am enough,” is a proclamation that no change is necessary and it will leave you for dead, Brothers and Sisters; wiped from creation along with every bit of sin and rebellion that remains on that last day.  With Paul we must declare, “It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me.”

So change is necessary.  And we know change is possible—not on our own, of course, but through the work of Jesus and the Spirit.  If God has promised that he will do it, he surely will.  So what is this change?  Well, first lets get some fairly common misconceptions out of the way so we know what it’s not.

This change—conversion, regeneration, renewal, however we describe it—is not mere intellectual assent, as if the gospel is a bit of theological truth and once you’ve heard it and accepted that it’s true, you’re good.  There is a segment in Evangelical Christianity that has been so ardent in avoiding any hint of works-righteousness, that they’ve fallen into the opposite error.  When I was a university student I received a t-shirt as a gift: the “Theology Shirt”.  It listed several dozen theological positions and had check boxes you could mark with a permanent marker so that everyone could know exactly what sort of theology nerd you are.  As I looked at it one of them confused me.  There was a check-box for “Lordship Salvationist”.  Huh?  So I did some research and found that there’s a formal controversy about whether or not you must make Jesus your Lord in order to be counted as “saved”.  There are a lot of folks, in an effort to avoid any hint of works-righteousness, who say all you have to do is believe that Jesus is the Saviour—you don’t actually have to assent to his lordship.  Ideally you do, but it’s not a requirement—because then salvation would be by works, or so they claim.  But this has given rise to all sorts of problems in contemporary evangelism.  It’s a lot easier to get people to give their intellectual assent to the lordship of Jesus than it is to convince them to actually give themselves wholly over to his sovereign and sanctifying rule.  When I was a kid we were involved with a children’s ministry where the goal was essentially to just get kids to pray the “sinner’s pray”, then they’d count that kid as belonging to Jesus and good forever, regardless of whether or not that child ever followed through.  That’s not change.  Now I’m getting into next week’s topic, but this highlights that this new life is not the work of the evangelist, but the work of the Spirit.  Neither you nor I can bring about change in another person’s heart.  Only the Spirit can do that.  We preach—that’s our job; the Spirit’s job is to change the heart.  So this change is not mere belief.  And Peter’s sermon should make that clear.  Belief is coupled with repentance and baptism and results in a complete change of life.

Another thing this change is not is a new moral resolve.  Sin is obvious to most of us and the vast majority of people would rather be part of the solution than the problem and so they resolve to be better, more moral, less sinful—there are all sorts of ways to put.  Popular culture says that bad people go to hell and good people go to heaven, so many people put some effort into being good—or at least to tilt the scale in that direction.  Part of the problem with all of this is that we establish our own standards of right and wrong instead of God’s standard and, this is just another case of human beings trying to fix the world on our own and that’s something that has never worked.  But even when we do accept God’s moral standard as the rule, if you try to make it on your own, you’ll eventually have to compromise and lower the standard.  The change we need certainly involves a moral renovation on our part, but it’s not one we can perform on ourselves.  Only the Spirit can remove our hearts of stone and replace them with hearts of flesh.  Only the Spirit can fill us with a hatred for sin and a love for God that will move us to repentance and bring about the change we call new creation.

And while we’re talking about what this change is not, I think it’s worth noting a common and popular corruption of the gospel message that arose with the 19th Century Holiness or Higher Life Movement and influenced the Pentecostal and Charismatic movements.  This is the idea that conversion and being in Christ comes first and that the indwelling of the Holy Spirit comes later—or even that one can legitimately be in Christ and never receive the Spirit.  It is the Spirit who effects the change and it is the change the Spirit effects that is the whole point of the new covenant.  The law is no longer written on stone, an external source calling us to change.  The law is now written on our hearts by the Spirit, who changes us from the inside out.  And it’s this change, the renewed heart and the presence of the gifts of the Spirit, a hatred for sin, the confession that Jesus is Lord, these are what manifest the indwelling of the Spirit in the new believer.  The Spirit is not an accessory to the faith for mature believers or a new spiritual level to unlock as we progress.  The Spirit is, quite literally, the heart of the Christian life from the very beginning.

So back to my earlier question: What is this change?  The story points us in the right direction.  This change is a change of heart, one that undoes our rebellion against God and turns our love and our loyalty back to him.  It’s a change that aligns our loyalties and values with those of his kingdom and his new creation.  It’s a change that produces a longing for life in his presence.  Instead of grasping after his throne for ourselves, our greatest desire is to give him the glory he is due.  And it’s a change that longs for God’s new creation, for its fulfilment, and for us to be a part of it.

This is why Peter stressed repentance and baptism on our part.  Repentance means to turn around.  For the Jewish men there on Pentecost it meant not just turning from sin, but letting go of all the wrong ideas and expectations they’d had about the Lord and about his Messiah and about his kingdom.  Everyone had something to let go of.  The Zealots had to let go of their violent political ambitions that they hoped would bring the kingdom.  The Pharisees had to let go of the boundaries they’d drawn.  And as the good news went out to the gentiles, repentance meant turning away from their own idolatries, sins, and sources of security.  Repentance is a change of loyalties.  We turn aside from everything that is not Jesus so that we can give him our all.  We don’t know with certainty what baptismal formula was used in those early days, but our own clearly emphasizes this repentance when the candidate is asked:

Do you renounce the devil and all his works, the vain pomp and glory of the world, with all covetous desires of the same, and the sinful desires of the flesh, so that you will not follow, nor be led by them.

And, of course, that was Peter’s second instruction: repent and be baptised.  So often the death and resurrection of Jesus are compared by the New Testament writers to Israel’s exodus from Egypt, but where that was a deliverance from bondage to Pharaoh, Jesus delivers us from bondage to sin and death.  In the old exodus, the Lord led his people to the Red Sea and parted the waters.  On the other side was a promise of new life in his presence.  The waters of the Red Sea pointed forward to our baptism.  The baptismal waters represent God’s promise of forgiveness and new life and so, like Israel passing through the Red Sea in faith, we pass through the waters of baptism and we come out the other side into a new life.  Baptism is the means the Lord has given us to take this step of faith, to repent and to take hold of his promise.

And, Peter says, when we take this step of faith, our sins are forgiven—we are made right with God—and we are filled with the life of the Spirit.  And it’s the Spirit who renews our minds and regenerates or hearts, who turns our desires from self to a love for God and a desire for holiness.  The Spirit does a work of new creation in us that anticipates the resurrection that will take place at some point in the future.

It's a bit of an odd thing.  Peter talks about repenting and being baptised and then receiving the Holy Spirit, but the scriptures tell us that it is the Spirit already working in us that moves us to repent and believe in the first place.  On the one hand we’re told repeatedly that we have to act.  Think of Jesus and his urgent words to Israel: “Repent, because the kingdom is here.”  Or when Nicodemus came to him in the night and Jesus stressed: “You must be born again.”  But we’ve have the Lord’s words through Ezekiel: “I’ve got to remove your heart of stone and I’ve got to give you a heart of flesh.”  And we’ve also got Ezekiel’s vision of the valley of dry bones.  What brough the bones back to life?  They didn’t come back to life on their own.  The life came in response to hearing the word of God.  The word and the Spirit work together to bring us to repentance and faith, which is why Jesus could say a few chapters later in John 6:

No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him.

 

Or as St. Paul wrote the Corinthians:

We preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God.  (1 Corinthians 1:18-24)

Or consider Paul’s words to the Ephesians:

For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God.  (Ephesians 2:8)

The English Reformers expressed this need for the Spirit’s work in our hearts in Article XVII of our Articles of Religion:

Wherefore, they which be endued with so excellent a benefit of God, be called according to God’s purpose by his Spirit working in due season: they though Grace obey the calling: they be justified freely: they be made sons of God by adoption: they be made like the image of his only-begotten Son Jesus Christ: they walk religiously in good works, and at length, by God’s mercy, they attain to everlasting felicity.

That this change is the fruit of God’s word and of God’s Spirit ought to be a source of assurance for us.  Consider his promise to his people in Isaiah 55:10-11.

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.

 

God’s word does not return empty.  It accomplishes that which he purposes.  Again, the conversion of the heart is not something that lies with us, but with him.  We preach the word and the Spirit brings life.  And this shouldn’t just inform how we proclaim the good news, it should also be an encouragement for the Christian who lacks assurance of his own standing with God.  Brothers and Sisters, if you’re worried about where you stand with God.  If you’re concerned about holiness and troubled by your sin.  That right there is evidence that the Spirit is doing his work in your heart.  Maybe you’ve never repented and if that’s you, repent now and the Spirit will continue to do his work in your heart.  If you have repented, keep repenting.  If you’ve been baptised, remember God’s promise to you as you passed through those waters and continue each day to renounce the world, the flesh, and the devil and to hold tightly to Jesus and the Spirit will continue to do his work in you.  God’s promises are sure and his word and his Spirit accomplish what he gives them to do.

Finally, now, what does this change look like?  Since I’ve stressed the work of the spirit in our lives so much today, I might as well start there.  This change will manifest itself as we bear the fruit of the Spirit.  The life transformed by the good news about Jesus will manifest love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control—the values of the kingdom.  We will grow to hate sin and to love holiness and we will do what whatever it takes to separate ourselves from sin and to attach ourselves to holiness.  We will seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, trusting that he will take care of everything else.  We will be on-earth-as-in-heaven people—not just committed to holiness in our own lives, but committed to bringing God’s love and mercy, his justice and peace to the world around us.

Second, we will have a hunger for God’s word.  God works in us by his word and Spirit.  As we immerse ourselves in his word he speaks and his Spirit then applies it to our hearts.  Those in whom God has begun this great change, those who have known the love of God revealed at the cross in Jesus and who grow more and more to love him in return will desire to hear his voice and to know his will.  If you don’t communicate with your spouse, you’ll struggle to every know him or her, you’ll never know what his or her desires are, and as a result you’ll struggle to please him or her.  Just so, if we fail to let God speak to us through his word, we will never fully know him, will never fully know his desires for us, and will struggle to please him.  If we are in Christ, if the Spirit lives in us, we will hunger for God’s word, we will submit ourselves to it, and we will let it shape and transform us.

And third, this change will give us a love for the Church.  You cannot profess to love Jesus while despising and being apart from his body.  There is no such thing as a loner Christian.  The people of God are a community and as a community we walk together, we do life together, we work for his kingdom together.  Here we exhort and teach each other, we learn to love and to forgive each other, we study the scriptures and grow with each other.  Here we learn to bear each other’s burdens, to cry with each other and to rejoice with each other.  Through the Church Jesus invites us to his Table where we participate each time in the mighty acts of God through which he has delivered us from sin and death.  What the Lord did for Israel in the Passover meal, reminding them of their identity in him and shaping them as a people, he does for us in the Lord’s Supper.  The great change does not happen apart from the Church.

Does this change happen instantly and all at once?  No.  Our culture is obsessed with shortcuts and instant gratification, but there are no shortcuts to holiness.  God works in us by his Spirit and his Spirit works through these means of grace he has given: through his word, through his Church, through his sacraments.  If we will eat the food he has given, his Spirit will put it to work to strengthen our faith and to grow us into the likeness of Jesus.  As Paul wrote to the Philippians

I am sure of this, that he who began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ. (Philippians 1:6)

It will take time—just as God’s work to renew the whole of creation is taking time—but because this work is the fruit of God’s word and God’s Spirit, it will surely be accomplished.  When I was a kid we had a Polaroid.  You’d take a photo, the camera would spit it out and then you’d have to wait what seemed an interminably long time for the image to slowly develop.  We’d run around the room waving it in the air or putting it under the light thinking that would make the image appear faster.  It didn’t.  Everything the photo needed was there already.  You just had to wait for the chemicals to do their work.  And just so with the Christian life, Brothers and Sisters.  We get impatient.  Sometimes we try shortcuts.  Sometimes we’re tempted to give up.  Don’t.  Rest in Jesus.  Immerse yourself in his word.  Come to his Table.  Live this new life as part of his body.  Pray.  And his Spirit will make you the new creation God intends for you to be.

Let’s pray: Sovereign and gracious Father, we give you thanks that the power for our renewal lies not with us, but with you.  If it were up to us, we would be dead in our sins forever, but by your grace we have been given the gift of faith, we have been forgiven, and we are being made new day by day.  Teach us to trust in your grace.  When we are tempted to think that we can do it, remind us of your grace so that we fall back to reliance on your word, on your Spirit, so that will never neglect the means of grace that you have given: your church, your sacraments, a life of prayer.  We repent, we believe, we’ve passed through the waters of baptism to receive your promise.  You have adopted us, your sons and daughters, and have filled us with your Spirit.  Make us new by your sovereign grace we ask, so that we may truly say with Paul, “It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me.”  Amen.