Living Words

The Revelation of Jesus the Messiah

Revelation 1:1-8

by William Klock

The book of Revelation has, I think it can very safely be said, produced more useless commentaries than any other book of the Bible.  Every generation churns out books, almost all of which are quickly and mercifully forgotten.  That said, our generation has turned writing and preaching nonsense about Revelation into an art form, but no generation in Church history has been immune.  In the last few years I’ve been invited to pick through the libraries of several retiring clergymen and have found a number of “gems”.  A book from the 70s about computerised credit systems and how they were connected to the “mark of the beast”, one outlining how Khrushchev is the antichrist—and another doing the same for Henry Kissinger, and yet another for Saddam Hussein.  Oops.  And one little book titled “88 reasons Why the Rapture will be in 1988”.  Oops again.  That author went on to pen another tract titled “89 reasons Why the Rapture will be in 1989.”  And there were some more recent—but already past-their-expiry-date—books about blood moons heralding the end.  And, of course, more recently there are so-called “Bible prophecy” folks finding the current pandemic in Revelation.  I had a phone call from a woman, nearly hysterical, who was convinced mRNA vaccines are the mark of the beast, that they’ll mess with your genes, erase your soul, and leave you eternally damned.  Revelation is for far too many people, at best, a book of doom and gloom, picked apart and explained and expounded by pessimists, and all too commonly at worst, a fertile ground for kooks and outlandish prognostications.  G. K. Chesterton quite accurately wrote, “Though St. John the Evangelist saw many strange monsters in his vision, he saw no creatures so wild as one of his own commentators.”[1]  These sorts of things end up undermining faith in God’s word and faith in God’s church.  And, Brothers and Sisters, if there’s anything you take away from these forthcoming sermons on Revelation, I hope it’s the opposite: that Revelation reveals the faithfulness of God in Jesus and is meant to strengthen our faith, enliven our hope, and embolden our mission.

Now, part of the problem is that Revelation is a notoriously difficult book.  It wasn’t meant to be.  The Christians to whom it was written, it’s safe to say, had no trouble understanding what it was that the Spirit was communicating to them through the pen of St. John.  It has become difficult for us thanks to our distance from the original context.  And because of this difficulty—and because all of you have, over the years been exposed to so many different ways of approaching Revelation, some better and some worse than others—I think it’s important to talk about these approaches.  That’s not something I normally do when I’m preaching, but bear with me this morning as I swap my surplice for an academic gown and play professor rather than pastor for a few minutes.

There are four basic approaches to Revelation.  And, of course, within each of those approaches you’ll find plenty of variation, but this is just an outline so that we can have some interpretive bearings.

The first approach is what we’ll call the “Futurist”.  I put it first because you may or may not be familiar with the other three, but I guarantee that everyone here has been exposed to this one.  While it’s not the dominant view historically, it is the dominant view today in North American Evangelical circles and it’s also the one that gets all the popular attention, because it’s the one that purports to tell the future.  This is the approach behind the sensationalist best-sellers and Bible prophecy teachers on TV.  Simply put, this approach to Revelation sees most, if not all, of the book’s events as taking place in the future.  This was the dominant view of the Church in the Second Century and well into the Third.  We don’t have many details of how they parsed everything out, because this view pretty quickly fell out of favour.  In part that was because the “future” came and events didn’t happen as these folks had thought they would.  (When “88 reasons Jesus is Coming Back in 188” didn’t pan out, they were smart enough not to write another tract on why he would come back in 189!)  Like our own era, it did produce some sensationalist and goofy predictions, but unlike our era, when those predictions failed this approach to Revelation simply fell out of favour.  But it also fell out of favour because, in the Third Century a new approach to interpreting the Bible arose that gave allegory primacy of place.  Futurist interpretations pop up here and there in Church history, but usually amongst weird or cultic sects.  That’s exactly what happened in the 19th Century.  That century was a breeding ground for odd, new approaches to biblical interpretation and numerous cults like the Jehovah’s Witnesses and Seventh Day Adventists, which put a lot of emphasis on weird eschatology.  The Plymouth Brethren, generally orthodox despite some odd beliefs, developed their own system—something now called “Dispensationalism”—but due to a number of factors, it didn’t die out like so many others.  It was there in relative obscurity for almost a century when three things happened: First, in 1909, a guy named C. I. Scofield published the first modern study Bible and incorporated Dispensationalism into its notes.  The Scofield Reference Bible quickly became wildly popular.  Second, in 1906, the Pentecostal movement began  and quickly latched onto Dispensationalism’s claim that the “last days” were about to begin as an explanation for why the Spirit had suddenly returned miraculous gifts to the Church.  And, third, in the heat of the Modernist-Fundamentalist controversies of the early 20th Century, Dispensationalists’ claim—a dubious one, but that didn’t matter much—it’s claim to be a consistently literal means of interpreting the Bible became very popular.  And within a couple of decades this odd, obscure, and very recent approach to the Bible became the dominant view amongst many Evangelicals—even to the point that anyone who doesn’t hold to it has often been viewed with suspicion or accused of being a “liberal”.  This is the school of interpretation behind the vast majority of “end times” and “Bible prophecy” literature since World War II.  But as prominent as it is, it’s not the only evangelical approach.  It took hold in many of the new Evangelical churches and denominations, but the older Evangelical traditions—Lutherans, Anglicans, Presbyterian and Reformed, and some Reformed Baptists—already had confessions of faith and established theological traditions that are at odds with Dispensationalism and especially its key defining feature, which is that it maintains a distinction between Israel and the Church.  Dispensationalists claim that when the Bible speaks of Israel, it refers and can only ever refer to ethnic Jews, and that the Church is a specifically gentile body.  Dispensationalism not only divides the people of God into two distinct groups, denying the continuity between the old and new covenants, but it also teaches that God essentially has two plans of salvation.  The Church is for gentiles and he’s got another plan for the Jews.  The entire Dispensational approach to Revelation is uniquely built around this belief, which makes it distinct from all other approaches.  For this reason classical, confessional Protestants have rejected Dispensationalism.  In the last few decades, I think mainly as a protest against Dispensationalism, there has been a movement to revive a more historical Futurist reading of Revelation.  It’s produced a number of very good, serious commentaries, but hasn’t gained much traction at the popular level.  The general problem with most Futurist approaches to Revelation, Dispensational or otherwise, is that they leave the book largely irrelevant to the people to whom John wrote it in the First Century.  It also ignores the overwhelmingly imminent and urgent nature of John’s message.  And that’s not to mention that this approach has an utterly abysmal track record of ever getting anything right.

 

The second approach is one we’ll call the “Idealist” approach.  This approach, in one form or another, has dominated the Church’s approach to Revelation from the Third or Fourth Century until the Seventeenth or Eighteenth and continues to dominate both Roman and many confessional Protestant circles.  It began as the Church Fathers placed emphasis on interpreting the biblical text allegorically instead of literally.  There have often been elements of this approach that have been Futurist, but the trend has been towards flattening the biblical narrative into sort of universal and timeless truths.  There have been some positives that have come out of this approach and it’s often been seen as the best way to let Revelation speak both to the original audience and to people today, but it falls short in that it largely ignores the original context and, as I said, in that it flattens out and often fails to account for the big biblical narrative.

Third is what we’ll call the “Historicist” approach.  This is often combined with various Futurist approaches and understands Revelation to be describing the history of the Church from beginning to end, so for example, while the seven churches addressed by John in Chapters 2 and 3 were real churches in Asia Minor, they represent progressively the Church from Acts up to the return of Jesus.  The rest of the book plays out the same way.  The major problem with this approach is that it accounts only for the church in the West and that every generation that uses it finds itself at the very end and has to massage the details to make them fit the new timeline.  Every few years it has to be scrapped and reconstructed.  Like the Futurist approach, this may appeal to people today, but it leaves the book largely meaningless to the original audience and simply ignores most of global Christianity in its artificially constructed timeline.

The fourth and last approach is what’s usually called the “Preterist” approach—“preter” meaning “something past”.  This approach has been around since at least the Eighteenth Century.  It understands most or all of Revelation to be describing events which took place in the First Century, typically centring around the fall of Jerusalem in a.d. 70 and reads Revelation in close connection with the apocalyptic teaching of Jesus.  Again, there are plenty of variations, but most Preterists hold that at least the last few chapters of the book remain in our future.  There is an heretical variant of Preterism holding that all of the events of Revelation have already taken place, but this isn’t very common.  The common criticism of Preterism is that while it makes a great deal of sense of the book for Christians in the First Century, it doesn’t leave much for us today.  This is, however, the approach that I’ll be taking here and I think it makes the best sense of the book within the context of the bigger biblical narrative.  I think this approach does the best job of reading Revelation as First Century Jews would have done with their deep grasp of the Old Testament and I think it takes account of what Revelation actually is—something we’ll get to shortly.  It’s also really the only approach that takes seriously the language of imminence we see both here in Revelation and in the apocalyptic teachings of Jesus.  When John says “soon” and when Jesus says “before this generation passes”, Preterists believe they really meant “soon” and “before this generation passes”!  I think, too, that Preterist and some Idealist approaches are commended by their optimism.  They see the Church, commissioned by Jesus and empowered by the Spirit, actually succeeding in the mission we’ve been given, rather than whisked—or “raptured”—away just as everything turns for the worst.

So, off with the academic gown and back on with the surplice, let’s look at the first Chapter and St. John’s introduction.  Revelation 1:1-8.

The revelation of Jesus Christ, which God gave him to show to his servants the things that must soon take place. He made it known by sending his angel to his servant John, who bore witness to the word of God and to the testimony of Jesus Christ, even to all that he saw.  Blessed is the one who reads aloud the words of this prophecy, and blessed are those who hear, and who keep what is written in it, for the time is near.

  John to the seven churches that are in Asia:

 Grace to you and peace from him who is and who was and who is to come, and from the seven spirits who are before his throne, and from Jesus Christ the faithful witness, the firstborn of the dead, and the ruler of kings on earth.

 To him who loves us and has freed us from our sins by his blood and made us a kingdom, priests to his God and Father, to him be glory and dominion forever and ever. Amen.  Behold, he is coming with the clouds, and every eye will see him, even those who pierced him, and all tribes of the earth will wail on account of him. Even so. Amen.

  “I am the Alpha and the Omega,” says the Lord God, “who is and who was and who is to come, the Almighty.”

 

This is the revelation—in John’s language it’s the apokalypsis, an unveiling, making something known.  Specifically, it’s the revelation of Jesus the Messiah.  John writes that God gave this revelation to Jesus to reveal to his servants—to his Church.  What does that mean?  Well, first, we know that these early Christians were struggling.  These were people who had heard the good news about Jesus, that he had died and risen and that he is Lord.  Some of them may even have witnessed those events first-hand.  And they believed.  In Jesus, the God of Israel was fulfilling his promises.  In Jesus, the God of Israel was making all things new.  In Jesus, the God of Israel had defeated sin and death and inaugurated new creation.  They saw the promises fulfilled.  They saw and experienced first-hand the transformation brought by Jesus and the Spirit in the Church.  And yet they struggled.  The good news was spreading.  Little churches were springing up all over the world.  But they faced opposition, persecution, and sometimes even martyrdom.  They proclaimed: “Jesus is Lord”.  And they believed it.  They saw the evidence first hand.  But Caesar’s claim to lordship was only growing stronger and his cult was spreading fast—and Christians were facing pressure to acknowledge him.  Great temples were being built in some of these cities.  And back in Jerusalem, as much as Jesus had denounced the unbelief of his own people, as much as he had pronounced judgement on them, they too were violently persecuting the Church.  What did it mean?  What was God’s plan?  Was their hope misplaced?  Was Jesus really Lord?

In those desperate days, God spoke to his Church.  Now, consider that in the days of the old covenant, the temple has been the place where earth and heaven met, the place where men and women went to meet God—often to pray and to wait for his revelation.  But now there’s a new covenant.  Now we meet God in Jesus the Messiah.  He is the new temple.  He is the one in whom earth and heaven, God and man have been brought together.  God gives his word to Jesus and we come to him to receive it.  There’s some deep covenantal truth in this first verse.

God’s revelation in Jesus is delivered by an angel to John.  It’s the angel who comes to him and acts as a kind of tour guide and expositor of the things he sees.  Briefly, who is John?  This has been debated since the Second Century and I don’t know that the question will ever have any ultimate resolution this side of the New Jerusalem.  The majority view has always been that the John who wrote Revelation is the same John who wrote the Gospel and the three epistles that bear that same name.  That’s John the Son of Zebedee or John the Apostle and Evangelist.  There may have been another well-known figure in the early Church known as John the Presbyter or Elder.  Some have said that he may be the author.  Some who don’t want to commit refer to St. John the Divine—the namesake of the parish down the hill on Fifth Street—who was maybe one of these two or maybe a third person.  At the end of the day I don’t think it really makes much of a difference and I’m happy with the evidence for John the Apostle—the author of the Gospel and epistles—also being the author of Revelation.  He describes himself as the one “who bore witness to the word of God and to the testimony of Jesus Christ, even to all that he saw” and I think that certainly sounds like the man who was Jesus’ close friend and who wrote the Gospel.  That he could introduce himself to these churches as simple “John”, not “John This” or “John That”, I think also points to his being the well-known John the Apostle.

“Blessed is the one who reads aloud the words of this prophecy,” John writes.  He’s not talking about reading Revelation as if it’s some kind of talisman—just pick something at random and read it and you’ll be blessed.  Again, he’s addressing these churches where it will be read aloud to the congregation—where God will reveal himself in Jesus through the reading of his word—and in that these people full of question and maybe even fears and doubts, will be blessed.  The word of God will strengthen their faith, their hope, and their joy.  It will prepare them for the difficult days to come.  And it will remind them of the faithfulness of God.

Brothers and Sisters, this is true about God’s word in general.  Read the Bible and be blessed as God reveals himself through his word to you.  But I encourage you to let God speak to you this week through the uniqueness of Revelation and to be blessed as your faith, hope, and joy are strengthened.  It takes about forty-five minutes to an hour to read the whole book and I guarantee that there are plenty of things you’ll do this week that take longer that won’t leave you as blessed as God’s word will.  As John writes, Jesus loves us, he has freed us from our sin by the shedding of his own blood, he has made us priests to God his Father.  And even after all of that, if we’re left wondering or left troubled by our situation, come to him and be reassured.  John writes at the outset to these churches: “Jesus is coming with the clouds…every eye will see him, even those who pierced him, and all tribes on earth will wail on account of him.”  John draws on the language of the Prophet Zechariah (12:10-14) to say that Jesus will vindicate the faith of his people.  As the Father has revealed his faithfulness to do what he has promised and as he had done so in Jesus, Jesus himself will be faithful to do what he has promised and to finish what he has begun.  Have faith.  Read his word—his self-revelation—and have even greater faith.

And the last line there in verse 8 points us to the ultimate purpose of everything that has happened and everything that will happen.  “I am the Alpha and the Omega,” says the Lord God, “who is and who was and who is to come, the Almighty.”  Jesus has come so that the world will know the Lord God, the one who is both the source and the goal of all of history.  That’s what “Alpha and Omega” is getting at.  The first and the last letters of the Greek alphabet.  Rebellious humanity has rejected and forgotten him, but Jesus has come to make him known—in judgement on those who persist in their rebellion and for salvation to those who believe.  For he is the Almighty, the pantokrator, the Lord of hosts, whose dominion encompasses the cosmos.

So clearly Revelation is important.  But as I said, it’s not an easy book to understand.  What can we do that will help us understand beyond just being careful and prayerful as we read?  Brothers and Sisters, in these first verses John tells us just what kind of a book this is and that’s a good starting point.  First, it’s a letter.  And not just any letter.  Like the epistles, it’s a letter written to a specific, real, historical people.  In the case of Revelation, it was written to a cluster of seven churches in Asia Minor—Western Turkey.  It was God’s Spirit-inspired word directly to them and only indirectly to us.  That means it had to make sense to them.  When we don’t understand something, we often make the mistake of reading it through our present situation and cultural lens, but we can’t do that with the Bible.  Before we can start talking about how a text relates to us, we first have to ask what it meant to the people to whom it was originally addressed.

Second, John writes that this is a prophecy.  And as we read it, we see that John not only writes in the tradition of the Old Testament prophets, but that he is constantly drawing on those prophets and their language and imagery.  This is, I think, the biggest obstacle we face in understanding the book.  John’s readers were steeped in the Old Testament (and in a certain way of reading it) that very, very few people are today.  The average Christian, at best, knows the Old Testament only as disconnected Bible stories and struggles to string them together into a full narrative.  Many know familiar passages from the Prophets, but don’t know anything of the context or history those prophets were addressing—and then just assume that the prophets speak directly to us or to current events.  In contrast, for the early Christians the Old Testament was their culture and many knew large sections by heart.  We’re not nearly so steeped in the scriptures and so we miss the connections and we misunderstand—or we try to understand them through categories that we do know and make a mess of things.  We read about weird astronomical happenings and instead of looking back to the use of such imagery in the prophets, we look to literal events in our own day—like the “blood moons” fiasco of a few years ago.  We hear about weird grasshoppers or scorpions and instead of looking to the Old Testament, we try to see how their descriptions fit with modern military hardware and interpret them as tanks and helicopters.

Third, and this follows closely on the last point, we need to read Revelation with the big narrative of God and his people constantly in mind.  Getting back to my earlier example, an interpretation that divides the people of God in two rather than stressing the unity and continuity of the people of God between the old and new covenants, can’t be right because it simply doesn’t fit the narrative.  Of course, this assumes we’ve got a good grasp of that big story—which is why I so often put the stress I do on exactly that.

Finally, Brothers and Sisters, as we read Revelation we need to keep our eyes on Jesus.  He is the central figure through whom the Father reveals himself and his faithfulness.  In his death and resurrection he has accomplished the purpose of God.  In him we see not only the love of Jesus, but also the love of the Father for sinners.  The Father gave his Son and that Son gave himself for the sake of his rebellious creatures.  He is the firstborn of the dead.  He is the king.  And there’s an obvious promise there as we look around us and see that the work of his kingdom has yet to be fulfilled.  The God who has proved himself to be faithful has more work to do and in that we can find faith and hope.  In that we find reason to worship the King both for what he has done and for what we know he will do.  Christ has died.  Christ is risen.  Christ will come again.

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

[1] Orthodoxy (Hendrickson, 2006), 13.

Sermon for the Sunday Next Before Advent

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

by William Klock

The Prophet Jeremiah, author of today’s Old Testament lesson, lived in Judah about six-hundred years before Jesus was born.  His ministry spanned the years between the reign of King Josiah and the defeat and sack of Jerusalem by the Babylonians.  Josiah was a good king.  He introduced reforms and called the nation to repentance and to faith.  He renovated the temple in Jerusalem and purged pagan worship from the nation.  He had altars to Baal torn down, 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.  But 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 lesson begins at 23:5, but we get a sense of the problem if we look at the first four verses of the chapter:

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

The kings of Israel should have been faithful shepherds looking after the flock of Israel.  Jeremiah calls to mind David, the shepherd-king.  The king after God’s own heart, who, despite his great failures, still sought the Lord and his will for his people.  In contrast, the leaders of Judah in Jeremiah’s day did the opposite.  They abused the sheep and led them into idolatry.  “Thus says the Lord,” prophesies the 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 as we’ve seen in our study of Exodus, to live in the Lord’s presence, meant living according to his way, 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 in today’s Old Testament lesson beginning at verse 5:

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

Brothers and Sisters, our Old Testament lesson today reminds us of Israel’s calling and Israel’s failure.  And in the midst of Israel’s faithlessness, it reminds us of the Lord’s faithfulness.  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, seemingly 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 sack lunch: a few fish and a little bread.  It might as well be nothing in light of the size of the crowd.  But I don’t think Andrew would have bothered telling Jesus about this boy if he hadn’t thought that Jesus could make use of it somehow.  What could Jesus possibly do with so little?  The situation seemed totally impossible, and yet the Lord had provided for his hungry people in the wilderness all those centuries before.  Why not again?  And so Andrew gives us a hopeful sign.

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

Hezekiah found himself in another hopeless situation.  The Assyrians had besieged Jerusalem.  The messenger of the Assyrian king called up to Hezekiah’s men on the walls of the city that he would destroy them and that it would be because Hezekiah had purged Judah of its altars and shrines to the Assyrian gods.  The Assyrian king sent a message to Hezekiah, warning him that the Lord would not be able to deliver him.  Hezekiah no doubt had advisers who saw the situation as hopeless.  Some would have advised him to surrender to the Assyrians and to bow before their gods.  Others would have urged him to form an alliance with the Egyptians, which would have involved their gods as well.  To many, it would have seemed that Hezekiah was out of options.  He knew better.  The King took the message from the Assyrian king and went to the temple.  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 the table, we experience his faithfulness ourselves as we eat the bread and drink the wine.  Here is our manna in the wilderness.  Finally, having known the faithfulness of God, we’re summoned ourselves to walk in faith, trusting that the Lord will finish what he has begun, that he will do what he has promised.

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

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

A Sermon for the Twenty-fourth Sunday after Trinity

St. Matthew 9:18-26

by William Klock

How do we respond to Jesus?  Our Gospel today is taken from Matthew 9.  It’s a part of the Gospel story that we need to take in context.  If we were to go back a chapter we’d see Jesus repeatedly issuing a call.  When Jesus calls, you can’t not respond.  Everyone responds.  Some people responded in faith and followed Jesus.  Other people responded by turning and walking away.  And in between Jesus’ calls and the responses of the people, Matthew intersperses a sequence of miracles.  They remind us of the big picture.  Jesus wasn’t just a good teacher.  He wasn’t just a prophet.  He wasn’t just a miracle worker.  He was the Messiah and he had come in fulfilment of God’s promises.  Human sin has made a mess of the world.  Jesus came in response and to fulfil God’s promise to set Creation to rights.  The miracles remind us that the gospel isn’t just good advice—another good teaching to help get your life in order or another miracle-worker to temporarily fix your problems.  The gospel isn’t just another idea or philosophy on the smorgasbord.  Again, the gospel is not good advice.  The gospel is good news.  Something to sample—as if it might be right for you, or maybe not.  The gospel is the good news that in Jesus, Creation’s true Lord has come.  God has sent his king—the King—and that makes the gospel a royal proclamation that God’s kingdom is coming and it makes the gospel a royal summons to submit in faithful obedience to King.  How do we respond to that royal summons, Brothers and Sisters?

One man came to Jesus and said, “I will follow you everywhere,” but when Jesus explained what it meant to follow him—“Foxes have holes”, he said, “and birds have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.”  The man decided it was too much.  He walked away.  Another man said, “I’ll follow you, Jesus, but first I have to go bury my father.”  Jesus said, “No…if you’re going to follow me, follow me.  Let the dead bury the dead.”  The man wasn’t willing to make that kind of commitment.  Brothers and Sisters, repentance is the first step in following Jesus—setting aside everything and committing to the King and to the King alone.  That’s a hard thing to do.  But that’s the nature of it.  A few years ago Tom Wright published a book about all of this and titled it The Day the Revolution Began.  I like that title.  It captures that fact that in coming as God’s King, Jesus has established a new order.  The old kings, the old gods, the old philosophies, the entire old regime was defeated at the Cross.  It’s all passing away.  And so to take hold of Jesus really does require letting go and turning away from everything else.  Now, Matthew follows this immediately with an account of Jesus calming a storm on the Sea of Galilee and casting out a legion of demons.  Matthew reminds us that in Jesus, God was fulfilling his promises.  Repentance is hard, but when you see the evidence that God’s King has come and that God’s promises are being fulfilled, the decision is an easy one even if it means following a difficult and narrow path.

In contrast, Matthew then tells his own story.  He was working his job as a toll collector when Jesus called him.  Talk about being invested in the old regime!  But Matthew recognised the King, he left his job and followed.  And, right away, Matthew tells another story about Jesus fulfilling God’s promises and setting right what sin and death corrupted—about Gods’ new world breaking in through the Messiah.  Look at Matthew 9:18-19.

While he was saying these things to them, behold, a ruler came in and knelt before him, saying, “My daughter has just died, but come and lay your hand on her, and she will live.”  And Jesus rose and followed him, with his disciples.

 

Mark and Luke tells us this man was a ruler of the local synagogue and that his name was Jairus.  All of this happened after Jesus returned from his short trip across the Sea of Galilee and Matthew implies that Jairus was practically waiting for Jesus’ boat on the beach.

Knowing who he was and showing him respect, the crowd let him through to Jesus.  He was desperate and sought out Jesus in faith.  He also came in humility, falling at Jesus’ feet.  He begs Jesus to come and heal his daughter who is sick and at the point of death.  A lot of the Jewish leaders rejected Jesus.  A lot of them were looking for dirt they could use against him.  But not all of them.  Back when Mary first heard that she was going to bear the Messiah she had sung out:

He has brought the mighty down from their thrones

         and exalted those of humble estate. (Luke 1:52)

The Gospels show us a lot of Jesus exalting the humble.  Mary’s prophetic line about bringing down the mighty from their thrones is mostly in expectation of future judgement, but here we see one of the mighty humbling himself before Jesus.  His daughter was dying and he had a sense of what Jesus could do.  He’d heard about the healings Jesus had performed.  He’d probably heard about Jesus raising the widow’s son at Nain.  He could see God’s future in the present wherever Jesus went.  And so he begs Jesus to heal his daughter.  Notice that he doesn’t come, like the people of Nazareth, to insist that Jesus work a miracle because he deserves it.  He comes in humility.  That’s the sort of request that Jesus responds to.  Matthew doesn’t tell us anything about a conversation between the two men.  Jairus humbly asked and Jesus went with him.

But as they head off to Jairus’ house, Jesus is stopped.  Again, Mark and Luke tell us that they he was overwhelmed by a crowd.  And in the midst of the choking crowd, a woman approaches Jesus.  Look at verses 20-21:

And behold, a woman who had suffered from a discharge of blood for twelve years came up behind him and touched the fringe of his garment, for she said to herself, “If I only touch his garment, I will be made well.”

 

To modern people this woman simply sounds like a sick person in the crowd.  For First Century Jews she represented a lot more than that.  What Matthew describes is a menstrual disorder of some kind that caused her to bleed perpetually.  And he highlights just how long this has been going on: twelve years.  She’s been bleeding for as long as Jairus’ little daughter has been alive.  In his Gospel, Luke also highlights the physical seriousness of her problem.  At one point she’d had money, but now she’s destitute.  She spent it all on doctors and none of them had been able to help her.  But it’s not just that this woman has a medical problem that no one’s been able to heal in twelve years.  This woman’s biggest problem is that she’s unclean.

Menstruation, according to the torah rendered a woman unclean.  It also rendered anyone who touched her unclean until sundown.  We don’t have time this morning to get into why that was the case.  It wasn’t a sin issue, at least not in the way we normally think about sin.  It was an issue of ritual purity, something vitally important to the system of temple and sacrifices and what that meant for this woman is that she’s been unclean for twelve years.  She was shut out of the temple, shut out of the sacrificial system, shut out of the synagogue, and because contact with her brought uncleanness, she was shut out of society.  She might as well have been a leper.

This now gives us a sense of the risk she was taking that day.  The crowd was pressing in on Jesus and this woman was working her way through the crowd to get to him.  Everyone she touched was rendered unclean, even if they had no idea who was bumping and jostling into them.  And by touching Jesus, she rendered him unclean too—or she should have.  But she catches up to him, touches his robe.  At this point Luke slows the story down to give us some insight into what’s just happened.  She’s been healed.  She got what she wanted.  Now she tries to quietly slip away through the crowd.  But Jesus stopped everything.  The crowd quickly goes quiet.  Here’s what Luke writes:

And Jesus said, “Who was it that touched me?”  When all denied it, Peter said, “Master, the crowds surround you and are pressing in on you!”  But Jesus said, “Someone touched me, for I perceive that power has gone out from me.” (Luke 8:45-46)

 

Imagine what’s going through that poor woman’s head at this point.  “Ack!  Somehow he noticed!”  And so she hunches a little lower and shrinks back further into the crowd.  She’s afraid.  If Jesus exposes her the crowd of people she just rendered unclean is going to be really angry.  Jesus might be angry.  She made him unclean too.  Imagine the crowd going dead silent.  No one knew what was happening, but something was wrong.  Jesus was asking who had touched him.  “Maybe,” they thought, “Jesus just realised that someone had picked his pocket.”  Peter reminds us of the crowd pressing in on Jesus.  “Master, Anyone could have touched you.  What’s the big deal?”  No one says a word and the woman shrinks back even more in fear.  What if she’s found out?

But Jesus explains: “No.  It wasn’t that someone bumped into me.  Someone came in faith, touched me, and power went out from me.”  It might sound like Jesus is talking about some kind of magic, but that’s not it.  God was at work through Jesus.  The woman had touched Jesus and somehow God had done something through that touch.  Jesus knew someone had been healed, but he also knew that there’s more to healing than physical wellbeing.  It wasn’t enough for this woman’s bleeding to have stopped.  That was only the physical manifestation of the problem.  For there to be full healing, for there to be shalom, there was a spiritual problem to be addressed too.  Ritual impurity was transferred by contact.  That woman had made a lot of people in that crows ritually impure—but they had no idea.  They just felt a bump or a jostle as the woman passed.  But when she touched Jesus in faith, he felt something.  It wasn’t her impurity being transferred to him, but his purity being passed to someone else.  And that was something—somehow—he could sense.  Luke doesn’t say how long the silence lasted, but finally the woman realised there was no escape.  She came trembling.  Her faith was weak and being choked by the fear of the crowd, but even her weak faith finally brought her forward.  Again, from Luke’s account:

And when the woman saw that she was not hidden, she came trembling, and falling down before him declared in the presence of all the people why she had touched him, and how she had been immediately healed.  (Luke 8:47)

Trembling the woman confesses what she’s done.  The people around her would have been furious.  They would have been outraged.  If Jesus hadn’t been there they might have stoned her.  This woman had no business there.  Everyone around her was now unclean.  But Jesus forces her out into the open to reveal his ministry and to reveal what real, saving faith looks like.  She was an outsider.  She lived apart from everyone.  She was an outcast.  But more importantly, because she was unclean, she didn’t even have access to God through the normal channels of the torah.  She might have been thinking that Jesus was just as angry as the rest of the crowd.  She might have been afraid he was going to do something awful.  But her faith was more powerful than her fear.  And in response to her faith, Jesus says in verse 48:

“Daughter, your faith has made you well; go in peace.”

 

Jesus understood her real problem even if she didn’t.  She just wanted to be healed physically.  Once the blood stopped she was ready to go home.  But Jesus knew that her bigger problem was being an outsider.  She was an Israelite by birth, but her physical disease had essentially forfeit her membership in Abraham’s family.  And now Jesus, as the king and representative of God’s kingdom, addresses her, comforts her, calling her “Daughter”.  He welcomes her into the kingdom.  He assures her of her inheritance.  That’s what she needed most of all.  And Jesus not only tells her, but tells the whole crowd that it’s her faith that has made her well.  It wasn’t some magical force that she connived out of Jesus.  It was faith in this man she’d heard about.  It was faith in this one who was so obviously by his preaching and by his miracles the Lord’s Messiah who had come to set the word to rights.  And so she came to Jesus the Messiah in faith, knowing that if he could set Israel to rights, if he could set the world to rights, he could surely set her to rights too.  She trusted enough to risk the crowd.  And her faith overcame the fear of public exposure and public shaming.  And because of that faith, Jesus sends her off in peace—he sends her off not only physically healed, but spiritually restored, and spiritually restored because she’s been welcomed into the kingdom.

All this is wonderful, but what about Jairus’ daughter?  As Mark and Luke tell it, the situation is even more desperate and discouraging.  When Jairus came to Jesus his daughter was at the point of death—not quite dead yet—hence emphasis on the crowd and the delay it caused.  Luke tells us:

While he was still speaking, someone from the ruler’s house came and said, “Your daughter is dead; do not trouble the Teacher any more.” (Luke 8:49)

 

It’s too late.  While the crowd and the sick woman delayed Jesus, the girl had died.  Maybe the servant hadn’t seen what had just happened.  That, or he just plain didn’t understand Jesus—who he was and what he was about.  A woman had just come to Jesus in faith knowing that he was the Messiah and Jesus now shows that her faith was well-placed and justified.  Luke says that Jesus addressed Jairus and the messenger:

But Jesus on hearing this answered him, “Do not fear; only believe, and she will be well.” (Luke 9:50)

 

Matthew then carries on and writes:

And when Jesus came to the ruler’s house and saw the flute players and the crowd making a commotion, he said, “Go away, for the girl is not dead but sleeping.”  (Matthew 9:23-24)

Jesus goes to Jairus’ house anyway.  When they arrive they discover funeral mourners are already there and getting things started.  Jesus sends them packing.  Matthew says “They all laughed at him”.  “Jesus, We’re in the funeral business.  This is how we make our living.  We know a dead person when we see one.  Faith, shmaith—she’s gone!”  But consider that the woman in the crowd could have said the same thing.  “Faith?  I’ve spent my life savings on doctors and none of them could heal me.  And maybe the Lord could heal me—but I’d have to find some way to get into his presence first and I can’t because I’m unclean.  It’s hopeless!”  But that’s not what she believed.  She had faith.  And Jairus has faith too.  That he came to Jesus in the first place shows that he had faith, but that faith was strengthened by what he saw in the crowd and that faith was demonstrated as he invited Jesus home, even after his servant had told him that it was too late.  And so as the crowd laughs at him, Jesus goes into the house.

But when the crowd had been put outside, he went in and took her by the hand, and the girl arose.  And the report of this went through all that district. (Matthew 9:25-26)

People—including the disciples—doubted.  They lacked faith.  And Jesus responds to them not only by working miracles, but by specifically working the miracles that the Old Testament prophets had said the Messiah would work.  Isaiah had prophesied that he would preach good news to the poor and that he would give life to the dead.  And that’s just what Jesus does.  The woman in the crowd: Jesus gave her life her back—physically, socially, spiritually.  She was a daughter of Abraham, but because of her sickness she was unclean, an outcast, and shut out from the presence of God.  She was doomed.  But because of her faith, Jesus gave her new life and restored her to the fellowship of God’s kingdom.  If there was ever a case of good news being preached to the poor, that was it.  And from there he goes to Jairus’ daughter and literally raises the dead to life.  He confirms the faith of Jairus and his wife.  Jesus doesn’t tell them to go in peace as he did the woman.  He doesn’t call Jairus “Son”—he didn’t need that specific reassurance—but, nevertheless, their faith has brought them into the kingdom too.

Jesus is ushering in the kingdom.  He’s giving healing and restoration and calling people into that kingdom.  And at the same time he’s establishing his identity.  Think about it.  There were two common things that the average person ran into fairly regularly that would render them unclean: death and blood.  Both were common and both were things everyone avoided.  And both are here.  The unclean woman comes to Jesus, touches him, and instead of Jesus turning to the crowd to ask who just made him unclean, he does just the opposite: “Who just caused power to go out from me?”  The uncleanness couldn’t touch Jesus.  Just the opposite, in fact.  Jesus’ cleanness, his vitality, his life flow to those who come to him in faith.  And it’s for that reason that he didn’t hesitate to go and lay hands on the dead girl.  He made a point of touching the dead so that everyone could see that it’s death that has to worry about coming into contact with Jesus, not the other way around.  There’s a joke: When the Bogey Man goes to sleep, he checks under his bed for Chuck Norris.  Brothers and Sisters, when Death goes to sleep, he checks under his bed for Jesus—or something like that.  When Jesus comes, demons flee, disease is undone, sin is forgiven, and even death runs from his life-giving touch.

Brothers and Sisters, Jesus foreshadows here what he’ll do at the cross.  He doesn’t flee from our sickness and our sin.  No, just the opposite.  He embraces us as sick and unclean and as tainted by death as we are in our sin.  At the cross he took our sin upon himself.  He suffered death for our sake.  He suffered and died, taking our punishment on himself, but even the grave couldn’t hold him.  On the third day he burst forth full of life, having conquered sin and death.  The revolution had begun.  And so we come to him in faith and he embraces us.  He takes our sin himself and releases us to go in peace, cleansed and made whole, and welcomed into his kingdom.  And he fills us with his Spirit, his Sons and Daughters, and he sends us out to proclaim the Revolution and to make it known.

Remember, God sent his Son into the world to redeem us from sin and death, from sickness and pain.  These are problems that we human beings have brought on ourselves because of our sin.  In the midst of suffering I’ve often had people ask why God is punishing them.  Friends, that’s not how God works.  Jesus tells us in John’s Gospel, “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.  For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him” (John 3:16-17).

Jesus didn’t come to heap more misery and judgement on us.  He came to heal and save because we were already suffering from the consequences of our sin, because we already stood condemned and judged.  Remember, the Jews were suffering—they were living miserable lives in a sort of exile—they were supposed to be the people who lived with God in their midst, but when they returned from exile and rebuilt the temple, the divine cloud of glory never returned—and so their prayer and hope was that God would return and that when he did he wouldsmite all the pagan gentiles causing their misery.  Brothers and Aisters, in Jesus God did come to visit his people, but in Jesus we see that our real problem isn’t the evil people around us, the people persecuting us or causing our misery.  The real problem is our own subjection to sin and the death that our sin has brought into the world.  Not one of us is free from the corruption of sin.

If God had come to visit his people as the Jews expected it would have meant judgement and damnation for us all—Jew and gentile alike.  But instead, in his lovingkindess, God visited his Creation by sending his Son to take our sin upon himself, to die the death we deserve, to make us clean and to set us free.  He sent his Son so that when he does come at the end of history to judge the living and the dead, those who have believed in Jesus, those who have repented, submitted to his lordship, and trusted in his victory over sin and death, those who have become a part of the revolution, those who live in hopeful faith of God’s new world, will be spared the punishment of sin.  Jesus came to forgive and to welcome us into the kingdom he is establishing and which will be consummated on that last day.  And so remember, God doesn’t afflict us.  Just the opposite.  He so desires to help us out of the trouble brought by our sin that he spared not his own Son.

And as he welcomes us into his kingdom, he sends us out into the world.  As Jesus shared in our suffering in order to make us clean, he now sends us out to embrace those still subject to sin and death.  Friends, Jesus had no reason to fear uncleanness because he was full of life.  And we have no reason to fear uncleanness either.  Jesus has washed us clean.  He’s filled us with his own Spirit.  He’s given us his own life.  And now he calls us to go out into the world to preach good news to everyone else mired in and suffering the consequences of sin—to proclaim the good news that in the Lord Jesus sin and death are defeated and creation is finally being set to rights.  As we once came to him in faith, trusting in his victory over sin and death, let us go out in that same faith, trusting that through his church—through us and in the power of the Spirit—he will make his saving and redeeming victory known to the world.

Let us pray:  Gracious Father, thank you for sending your Son into the world that we might be forgiven our sins and restored to life.  Strengthen our faith that we might always trust in the life, the death, and the resurrection of Jesus, that we might always remember that he has conquered sin and death, and that we might go forth into the world in power to share his victory and to share his life.  We ask this in his name.  Amen.

A Sermon for All Saints’ Sunday

St. Matthew 5:1-12, Revelation 7:2-17, and Wisdom 3:1-9

by William Klock

The Feast of All Saints is one of oldest feasts on the Church’s calendar.  We have evidence of sermons preached on this occasion as far back as the Third Century.  Those early Christians observed it to commemorate the many martyrs of those early centuries—brothers and sisters who gave up their lives, rather than deny their faith in Jesus.  As the empire eventually converted and martyrdom became less common, the feast gradually came to encompass all the saints, all our brothers and sisters who have gone before us, not just those who were martyred.  But the theme of martyrdom—and of the Christian hope held so tightly by those martyrs—lies at the heart of our lessons today.  Jesus has inaugurated the age to come, but it has not yet fully displaced the old evil age—and that old evil age continues sometimes to grind down the faithful.  The world shouts, “Good riddance.”  In the words of our Old Testament lesson from the Wisdom of Solomon, “In the eyes of the foolish they seem to have died” and “in the sight of men they were punished”, but the reality is that their hope was not in vain, “The souls of the righteous are in the hand of God, and no torment will touch them…They will govern nations and rule over peoples, and the Lord will reign over them forever.”  Apocryphal that text may be, but it highlights the truth of God’s kingdom and its conflict with the world.  The kingdom of God seems upside-down—but only because the values of fallen humanity were upside-down already.

This is what lies behind our Gospel lesson, the Beatitudes, the first part of Jesus’ “Sermon on the Mount”.  Jesus begins his famous sermon with a list of people who are “blessed”.  That’s language straight from the Lord’s covenant with Abraham.  Remember, the Lord called him and promised not only that he would bless Abraham, but that through him he would bless the nations.  To be

“blessed” isn’t so much about being happy or prosperous, but about being the people God had called his people to be, about being the people who live with God in their midst—it’s about being kingdom people.  Israel had mostly failed at this, but there was always a faithful few who really did have a sense of what God had called them to do.  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—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 at all.  Again, think of 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.

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.  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 the mother of the Lord’s Messiah she doesn’t get full of herself.  There were plenty of people who would have.  No, 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 many of 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, many of 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 a sort of 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 acknowledge your sins and 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 sin.  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 Son as an atonement for their treason.

Everything Jesus describes here was aimed at Israel’s failure to be God’s people, to be salt and light, as he says in the verses that follow.  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 like rough-and-tumble Peter the Fisherman, tax collectors like Matthew and Zacchaeus whom everyone hated, even a Roman centurion or two.  People whom the world saw as nobodies—or worse as undeserving a place in the kingdom—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, too, that the people who chose to follow him would be persecuted and many would die.  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.  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.  As God’s people pull his future into the present and lift the veil on Creation set to rights, those invested in the way things are will fight back.  When God’s people declare that Jesus is the world’s true Lord, the Caesars of this age and their supporters will lash out to silence the challenge.

The martyrs are a testimony to Jesus’ promise.  And when you see your brothers and sisters being carted off to die—whether by the Jewish authorities, or the Roman, by Communists or Fascists, by Islamic or Hindu terrorists or pagan tribesmen, it’s easy to fear.  Are we really blessed when we are persecuted for the sake of righteousness?  This was the purpose behind St. John’s “revelation”.  The church was on the verge of being plunged into violent persecution—a time of trial and tribulation.  Would their faith hold?  And what about those who died for the sake of faith in Jesus?  And so God gave John a vision.  Just as Jesus had promised, judgement was coming, first on unbelieving Israel and then on the pagan word of the Greeks and Romans.  The scroll of judgement is brought forth—this in the fifth and sixth chapters of Revelation—sealed with seven seals, which only the lamb—now come as the lion of Judah—can open.  As the judgement is unleashed on Jerusalem, the saints are reminded that God is in control.  The judgement plays out here just as Jesus had said it would.  And, too, the Lord marks out his own.  That’s where our lesson today from Revelation picks up.  The winds of judgement are poised to bring destruction to Jerusalem.  This is the great day of the wrath of God and of the lamb.  But what of the faithful?  The opening of the scroll is stopped for their sake.  Look at Revelation 7:2-3.

Then I saw another angel ascending from the rising of the sun, with the seal of the living God, and he called with a loud voice to the four angels who had been given power to harm earth and sea, saying, “Do not harm the earth or the sea or the trees, until we have sealed the servants of our God on their foreheads.”

 

The imagery here is drawn from Ezekiel.  The prophet was shown a vision of Israel’s idolatry and then a vision of a “man clothed in linen” who was directed by the Lord to “put a mark on the foreheads of the men who sigh and groan over all the abominations that are committed in it” (Ezekiel 9:3-4).  Immediately after, the Lord sent six other men through Jerusalem, beginning at the temple, to slay men and women, young and old, but they were to “touch no one on whom is the mark” (9:2, 5-6).  What the Lord did in Ezekiel’s day is about to happen again, but the Lord will spare the faithful.  Those who are sealed by the angel are announced in verse 4:

And I heard the number of the sealed, 144,000, sealed from every tribe of the sons of Israel.

The text goes on to list specifically twelve thousand from each of the twelve tribes.  This is the remnant of faithful Israel, much like those marked out in Ezekiel’s vision centuries before.  This is the Jewish church of Jerusalem and Judea, those Jews who heard the good news and embraced Jesus the Messiah.  Those Jews who were appalled by Israel’s abominations.  Those who were about to face violent persecution at the hands of their fellow Jews.  The Lord will not abandon them, even though they die.  He places his mark on them and seals them as his own.  And their faithfulness to Jesus the Messiah is the means by which the nations are brought to the cross.  They are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, and they know blessing as a result, because it is through their faithfulness to Jesus that they fulfil the Abrahamic covenant’s call to be a blessing to the nations.

John hears the announcement of the sealing of the Jewish church, and then he sees a vision of a multitude that could not be numbered, drawn from the nations:

After this I looked, and behold, a great multitude that no one could number, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, clothed in white robes, with palm branches in their hands, and crying out with a loud voice, “Salvation belongs to our God who sits on the throne, and to the Lamb!” (Revelation 7:9-10)

And jumping down to verse 13:

Then one of the elders addressed me, saying, “Who are these, clothed in white robes, and from where have they come?”… And he said to me, “These are the ones coming out of the great tribulation. They have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb.  (Revelation 7:13-14)

John’s vision now draws on the imagery of the prophet Daniel, who wrote of another time of great distress through which the Lord saw a faithful remnant of his people.  The wise amongst them were refined through persecution that they might “shine like the brightness of the sky above” (12:3) so that they would “turn many to righteousness”.  Faithful Israel, through her unwavering allegiance to Jesus in this time of trial would serve as the witnesses—witnesses to the faithfulness of God revealed in Jesus—witnesses that will bring the nations to faith in the Lord.  The faithfulness of the 144,000, of the Jewish martyrs, their robes soaked in their own blood, brings that multi-ethnic multitude to Jesus that he might wash their robes in his blood and make them part of his people.  As Zechariah had prophesied, ten men from the nations, of every tongue, will take hold of the robe of a Jew and say, “Let us go with you, for we have heard that God is with you!” (8:23)

Jeremiah says something very similar.  Jeremiah 31:7 cries out for the Lord to save the remnant of Israel and in response, the Lord will bring a great multitude from the farthest parts of the earth.  John’s vision here draws on Jeremiah’s imagery.  There the Lord will keep Israel “as a shepherd keeps his flock.  They shall “come and sing on the height of Zion”.  They “shall hunger no more” and God will “turn their mourning into joy”.  He will “comfort them, and give them gladness for sorrow”.  And here John sees this new, multi-ethnic Israel, gathered from the nations, “before the throne of God” where they “serve him day and night in his temple.”  He will “shelter them with his presence.  They shall hunger no more, neither thirst anymore.  For the Lamb in the midst of the throne will be their shepherd, and he will guide them to springs of living water, and God will wipe away every tear from their eyes” (Revelation 7:15-17).

Brothers and Sisters, as they remind us of the witness of those Christians who have gone before us, today’s lessons call you and I to faith and to hope.  We’re reminded today of the way in which the faithfulness of the people of God, their faithfulness to Jesus as Lord, their faithfulness to his kingdom, even in the midst of persecution, was the means by which God brought the nations to Jesus.  It’s also a witness to the faithfulness of God, who gathers his people to himself.  He gives his own Spirit to his people that they—that even we—might face persecution in faith.  Today we see him embracing his people and wiping away their tears.  Revelation tells us the story of our brothers and sisters who lived in the First Century—of those Jewish believers who faced persecution and martyrdom at the hands of unbelieving Israel and of that multitude drawn because of their witness from the pagan Greco-Roman world.  They, too would face persecution at the hands of an empire that would, because of their witness, eventually be brought in submission to the lordship of Jesus.  And yet there’s obviously more to the story of Jesus’ people.  What we see in John’s vision is intermediate and temporary.  The martyrs held close by God as saints on earth and in heaven await the consummation of history, that day when the faithful will follow Jesus in his resurrection, when all things are made new, when heaven and earth are rejoined, and when men and women once again dwell in the presence of the Lord.

Brothers and Sisters, we don’t know what will happen between now and then.  We may face our own time of great tribulation one day, but even if we don’t, we continue in the ordinary fight of Christians in every generation against the world, the flesh, and the devil.  We face the ordinary troubles of life in an imperfect world and the difficulties of being faithful witnesses of Jesus in a culture that worships its own versions of Caesar and Mammon, Mars and Aphrodite.  Let us, like the saints who have gone before, stand firm in faith as stewards of the good news of Jesus and his kingdom, knowing that our God is faithful to his promises.  Let us be the people blessed to be a blessing, living out the life and values of Jesus’ kingdom, pulling God’s future into the present and lifting the veil on Creation set to rights, even though it may mean opposition and persecution.  Jesus has promised to hold us close, even in death, until that day when he makes all things—including us—new.

Let’s pray:  Almighty God, you have knit together your elect in one communion and fellowship in the mystical body of your Son Christ our Lord: Give us grace so to follow your blessed saints in all virtuous and godly living, that we may come to those inexpressible joys that you have prepared for those who truly love you; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who with you and the Holy Spirit lives and reigns, one God, in glory everlasting.  Amen.

A Sermon for the Twenty-second Sunday after Trinity

St. Matthew 18:21-35

by William Klock

 

“Lord, how many times do I have to forgive my brother when he sins against me?” asks Peter in our Gospel.  “Is seven times enough?”  I imagine Peter lying awake in the middle of the night ruminating on something Jesus had said that day and realising that it changes everything.  But he’s wondering exactly how it changes everything—more specifically, how much it changes everything.  Someone had repeatedly done Peter some wrong.  It’s not hard to imagine impetuous Peter, always ready for a fight, taking revenge.  He probably wasn’t a guy you wanted to make angry.  But Jesus changes all of that.  Perhaps as they made their way around Galilee with Jesus, Peter ran into some old fishing rival—a guy who in the past, day after day, had done something that made Peter angry—maybe that had brought them to blows.  And last week while they were passing by that little beach where the fishermen would hang out, that guy—Peter gets steamed just thinking about it!—that guy had done it again.  The old Peter would have thrown a punch, but something Jesus had said made him stop and instead he forgave.  But then today it happened again, that old nemesis just egging him on, trying to provoke him into another fight.  And again—even though it took every ounce of self-control he had, his face red, the veins in his temples throbbing, the muscles in his neck straining and his fists clenching—Peter held back.  And now he’s lying there thinking: “I know it’s going to happen again—and again.  How many times do I have to forgive?”  And so, first thing in the morning, he brings his question to Jesus.  But think of the implications.  Old Peter wouldn’t have forgiven at all or maybe, if it was a friend, he’d forgive once.  After that all bets were off what he might do in return.  But he knows that Jesus is teaching grace.  Jesus is offering forgiveness—and often to the sorts of people that most people thought didn’t deserve to be forgiven.  Peter wants to be like Jesus.  He had faith that in Jesus the Messiah God’s kingdom is finally breaking into the world and he so longs to be a part of that kingdom.  So he asks Jesus what he would do.  “Lord, is seven times enough?”

But think about that.  If seven times is enough, what happens after that?  Imagine Jesus saying, “Yes, Peter, seven times is enough.  If your brother sins against you seven times, forgive him.  But if he sins against you an eighth time, Buddy, you just turn around and pop him one right on the nose.  If he sins against you an eighth time, teach him a good lesson and make sure he never does it again.  But Peter, self-control is a good thing, so consider that maybe if he sins against you an eighth time, don’t knock his teeth out like you would have in the old day, just avoid him, hold a grudge, be angry, and get really bitter about it.  If he sins against you an eighth time, don’t sock him one, but do cut that guy out of your life, Peter; you don’t need that kind of negativity.”  Can you picture Jesus saying that?  Neither can I.  And yet this is how we often think.  Often it’s the “common sense” advice our culture gives these days.  Be gracious at first, but if it keeps happening you’ve got to deal with it.  Don’t let them push you around.  Teach them a lesson.  Stand up for yourself.  Maybe we know better than to throw a punch or get revenge so we just cut the offender out of our lives.

But Jesus tells him: “No, Peter.  I wouldn’t say seven times.  How about you forgive him seventy-seven times?

You see, here’s the difference.  Peter’s wanting to know where grace ends and Jesus is telling him, “Peter, grace doesn’t end.  That’s the whole point.  That’s what makes grace grace.  You forgive and you forgive and you forgive—as many times as your brother or your sister sins against you, you forgive.  That’s grace.”  And that’s a hard thing for us to swallow.  It’s nice to talk about forgiveness, but at some point, we think, we have to protect our rights.  I have a right not to be sinned against, we think.  And we’re right, but that’s just the point—that’s what makes sin sin and it’s this forgoing of our rights that makes grace grace.  And this is foolishness—at least it’s foolishness to anyone who hasn’t grasped what God had done for us in Jesus.

We can cut Peter a little slack for not getting the point.  The Cross was still in his future.  He didn’t yet grasp the full extent of what God was going to do for him in Jesus.  But this is the point of the story Jesus tells him:

Imagine a king.  He’s overspent and his treasury is running low, so he brings in the royal accountant to advise him.  The accountant, of course, advises that it would be a good idea if he were to economise and stop spending so much, but he also points out that the king might be able to pay the bills if he called in some old loans.  The accountant points out one man in particular.  The king had loaned him ten thousand talents.  That’s a lot of money.  It’s the First Century Jewish equivalent of a gazillion dollars.  It’s a crazy and unreasonable amount—kind of like the national debt—so it’s no wonder the king’s treasury is empty.

The king calls this man to court and insists he pay back the gazillion dollars, but this man doesn’t have the means to pay it back any more than our government has the means to pay back its debt.  But the king’s got his own bills to pay.  He needs something from this man, so he orders him to be arrested along with his wife and children and sold as slaves.  He won’t get his gazillion dollars back, but at least he’ll have something.

But the man falls at the king’s feet in tears and he begs.  He begs for mercy.  “Please don’t sell me into slavery.  I’ll pay back every penny,” he cries.  “Somehow I’ll pay it all back, just don’t sell me into slavery.”  It’s a pathetic scene.  There was no way he could pay it back, but the king decides to have mercy on him.  He knows he’ll never see his money.  What he’d get by selling the man as a slave wouldn’t pay his debts anyway, so he graciously decides to forgive this man’s debt.  Imagine the relief of the debtor as he left the king’s palace.  It had been bad enough to have that huge debt hanging over his head, but then to be threatened with slavery—and now it’s all gone.  He should have been the happiest man in the world that day.

But he wasn’t.  He’s been humbled and he’s a prideful man.  So, instead of going home to tell his wife the good news he remembers a guy to whom he’d loaned money himself—some of that gazillion dollar loan that he’d spread around.  This man owned him a hundred denarii.  A hundred denarii isn’t anything to sniff at.  It’s a lot of money.  A hundred days’ wages for a working man.  But it’s nothing like the gazillion dollars the first man owed the king.  It’s your new car versus the national debt.  But having been forgiven this huge and unpayable debt, the man leaves the palace to find the man who owes him money.  When he finds him he grabs him by the throat, throttles him, and demands full payment.  And just as the first man had fallen on his knees before the king and begged for mercy, this second man falls on his knees and does the same.  He too promises to pay back every penny—just not today.  But that’s not good enough.  The first man has him thrown into prison until he can make good on the debt.

But that’s not the end of it, Jesus says.  Word gets around and eventually the king hears what happened.  We can imagine how angry he would be.  He calls the first man back to the palace.  “You wicked servant!  You scoundrel!  You good for nothing!” the king shouts at him.  You begged to be forgiven and in my mercy I forgave your entire debt.  Shouldn’t you have shown mercy to your friend the way I showed mercy to you?  And so the king in his anger had him sent to prison, just as he had sent his friend to prison.  Jesus says he was handed over to the jailers or the King James reads “tormentors”.  The sense of the word Jesus uses is that the folks into whose “care” this man has been entrusted will extract from him everything they possibly can by any possible means.  It’s an ominous ending to the story.

And Jesus adds one short but equally ominous explanation: This is what my heavenly Father will do to you, unless each of you forgives your brother from your heart.  We say, “Wait.  What did you just say Jesus?”  And he says, you heard me, “This is what my heavenly Father will do to you, unless each of you forgives your brother form your heart.”  Think about it.  The lesser loan for a hundred denarii had to come out of the ten thousand talents the king had loaned the first man.  With that loan forgiven, there was absolutely no need to collect on the second, lesser loan.  It would cost the forgiven man nothing—aboslutely nothing—to show grace to his friend.  Consider that when God forgives our sins against him, we’ve been freed from our debt.  We have no reason to go after our fellow sinners for the debts they owe to us.  We do, however, have good reason to forgive them.  Each time we forgive, we share a little bit of the forgiveness God has given us.

It helps, too, to remember sin from God’s perspective.  We have a tendency to think of ourselves as just ordinary, run-of-the-mill sinners—good people who mess up a little bit now and then—but then we look at others—especially the people who have sinned against us, the people against whom we hold grudges, the people we don’t like—and we think of them as being really big sinners.  But, Brothers and Sisters, from the perspective of God’s perfect holiness, the difference between my sin and your sin or even the sins of the most awful people we can imagine is like the distance between Courtenay and Victoria when you look at a map of the whole world.  From our perspective on the ground it seems like a long way.  It takes a couple of hours to drive.  But then you look at a map of the world or you look at a globe and you can’t even put your finger on Victoria without covering up the whole Island.  From that perspective the difference is nothing.  From the perspective of God’s infinite and perfect holiness there’s simply no significant difference between your sinfulness and my sinfulness or your neighbour’s sinfulness.

Now, that said, Jesus’ point is not that we just pretend the offense or the sin didn’t happen.  Forgiveness isn’t the same thing as ignoring the offense.  Just before this in Chapter 18 Jesus tells the disciples that what we’re after is reconciliation.  If your brother sins against you, Jesus says in verse 15, go and talk to him about it one on one.  Our tendency when someone offends us is to get angry.  We retaliate.  We yell or we throw a punch.  We call the cops.  Or we just shut that person out of our life.  But that’s not what Christians are called to do.  Go and talk to the person about it.  He may apologise and you can be friends again.  It may be that he didn’t even realise he’d done something wrong.  It might be that you misinterpreted the incident.  So go and talk about it between the two of you, sort it out, apologise and forgive as the situation requires, and be restored.  But, Jesus says, if he won’t listen to you, don’t just write him off.  Go back with one or two others and try again.  Again, the goal is reconciliation and restoration.  If that still doesn’t work, then Jesus says to “tell it to the church”—let the presbyters or the bishop go to this person and talk to him about it.  If that doesn’t work, then that person is to be treated, Jesus says, like a tax collector or a Gentile—like an outsider.  The “churchy” term for this is excommunication.  An unrepentant sinner is to be treated like a non-Christian.  But excommunication isn’t meant to be revenge or retaliation.  It’s a warning from his fellow Christians: If you’re not going to bear the fruit Christians are supposed to bear—especially repentance—then you’re no longer welcome at the Lord’s Table.  This is a place for people who have repented and committed to following Jesus and you’re doing just the opposite.  And, as Paul points out later in the New Testament, our hope and prayer is that this person will snap out of it and repent and start being the Christian he’s claimed to be—that he’ll be restored and really start living the life the Spirit has given him.  Unrepentant sin really does need to be addressed.  Forgiveness doesn’t set it aside.  Sometimes, for example, there are unavoidable civil consequences for some sins.  But forgiveness seeks to bring to bear the sacrifice Jesus has made at the cross on our human conflicts.  It seeks to restore an unrepentant believer and it seeks to show God’s grace and mercy to unbelievers.

But that doesn’t fully answer why Jesus says so solemnly that those who refuse to forgive will themselves be refused forgiveness.  Some people try to explain away the plain meaning of what Jesus says here.  I was once talking with one man who had been holding a grudge for so long that it had consumed everything.  The grudge had become his reason for living.  I pointed him to Jesus’ parable here and this ominous warning and his response was that it couldn’t mean what it looks like at face value because if it did then Jesus would be saying that we’re saved by our works.  “God’s forgiveness covers everything,” he told me, “even our unforgiveness.”

And yet this is the whole point of the parable.  The king’s mercy forgave the first man’s debt—but not when he refused to forgive his friend’s debt.  And Jesus really does say, “So also my heavenly Father will do to every one of you, if you do not forgive your brother from your heart.”  And it’s not just Jesus who makes this point.  We come back to this throughout the New Testament.  The loving grace of God is the defining truth of the kingdom and we experience it radically when we repent and turn to Jesus in faith.  Our sins are forgiven.  The small sins, the big sins, the monstrous sins.  The blood of Jesus washes us clean.  And we who were alienated from God are not only welcomed back into his presence., we’re actually made his temple as he pours his Spirit into us.  God in us.  Because of the cross.  Because of grace.  And, Brothers and Sisters, if we’ve truly experienced God’s grace in that way—and by that made his people—we demonstrate it by sharing it with others.  By forgiving—not once, not twice, not seven times, not even seventy-seven times, but as often as we are sinned against.  To refuse to be gracious with others, as the man in the parable, is not only to offend the one who has first shown us grace beyond measure, but is ultimately to reject that grace.  And that’s why Jesus gives Peter the warning he gives.  His people—the people who have known God’s grace—the grace John Newton wrote about that “saves a wretch like me”—will, in turn, be marked out by that grace in their own lives.  Today is Reformation Day and I can’t let that pass without the reminder that we are saved by grace through faith.  That was the rallying cry of the Reformation.  But it’s just as true that real faith that has known the grace of God in turn inevitably manifests itself in transformation—by the renewal of the mind, by the regeneration of the heart by word and Spirit.  God’s people are known, marked out by the grace they then show to others.  And so Jesus warns, if your life isn’t marked by a desire to share God’s forgiveness, well, you are not mine.  You’re not part of the true Israel.  And that’s not where you want to be—against he’s speaking to Peter and the other disciples—that’s not where you want to be when judgement comes on Jerusalem.  Unbelieving Israel will be handed over to the tormentors until she has paid her debt.  Or, as Jesus puts it in Luke 21, “Jerusalem will be trampled underfoot by the Gentiles, until the times of the Gentiles are fulfilled.”  Our eschatological horizon has shifted, but the warning is as true today as it was then.  Grace is always the hallmark of the people of God.

I know, it’s easy to say.  It’s not so easy to practise.  I think Jesus gets at the key at the beginning of the chapter.  The disciples came to him and asked who the greatest in the kingdom would be.  “Hey Jesus, which one of us is your favourite?”  But instead of giving the answer they wanted to hear, Jesus picked up a child and said, “Unless you change and become like children, you will never get into the kingdom of heaven.  You’ve got to become humble, like this child, then you will be great in the kingdom of heaven.”

Why do we struggle to forgive?  Because we think we’re something, because we demand our rights, because our pride has been hurt.  Because we’ve thought of ourselves more highly than we ought.  Someone sins against me and my first thought is for my rights.  My pride keeps me from seeking reconciliation with the jerk who sinned against me—with that loser who doesn’t know Jesus, with that jerk who needs God’s judgement.  Pride keeps us from forgiving.  It was pride that drove the man in the parable to have his friend thrown into prison.  He should have been joyful that the king forgave his debt, but instead he was angry and resentful for having been humbled before the king.  And so, because of his pride, he went looking for someone lower than himself, someone over whom he had power—someone he could kick around so that he could recover his lost dignity and feeling of superiority.  And it’s the same with us when we kneel before God and receive his forgiveness and then go out to assert our rights or lord our power over another by refusing to forgive.  It makes our show of humility before God just that: a show, a sham.  This is why we can’t receive God’s forgiveness unless we’re willing to be forgiving ourselves.  If we truly are humble before God we will be humble before others too.

These past few weeks we’ve heard Paul in our Epistles urging us to live the life the Spirit has given.  That includes loving each other, showing mercy to each other, patiently bearing with each other—showing forgiveness to each other.  As you come to the Lord’s Table this morning, think of the fact that in Jesus, God humbled himself for our sake.  St. Paul writes in Philippians:

Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility count others more significant than yourselves.  Let each of you look not only to his own interests, but also to the interests of others.  Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men.  (Philippians 2:3-7)

Have this mind among yourselves.  If you’re counting the times you’ve forgiven someone, you don’t have the mind of Christ.  If you’re holding a grudge you don’t have the mind of Christ.  Brothers and Sisters, Jesus gave his life for ours.  Jesus humbled himself for our sake.  It takes humility to open our hearts, to admit our sin and to repent.  It takes humility to receive the grace offered by a beaten man hanging on a bloody cross.  But if we are humble enough to open our hearts to such grace, our hearts will inevitably be humble and open to others, ready to share God’s grace with the worst of sinners that they, too, can know the reconciling love of God in Jesus.

Let us pray: Gracious Father, we pray as Jesus taught us: forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors.  May those be more than words we say.  Forgiving is so often hard to do.  Break our pride.  Make us truly humble.  And teach us to share your grace with others, that as you have forgiven us, we will forgive others—not grudgingly, but each time with greater and greater joy—joy to spread your grace around us, joy to see others experience the love of Jesus.  We ask this in his name.  Amen.

A Sermon for the Twenty-first Sunday after Trinity

Ephesians 6:10-20

by William Klock

I expect that most of you, even if you haven’t read it, have heard of C. S. Lewis’ little book, The Screwtape Letters.  It’s a work of genius.  Lewis wanted to write a hard-hitting book on spiritual warfare.  Instead of writing a treatise on the subject, he wrote a collection of fictional letters from “Uncle Screwtape” to his young nephew, “Wormwood”.  Wormwood is a young, unexperienced, and incompetent demon who has just been given his first charge, whom they refer to as “the subject”.  He’s been given the task of ensuring that “the subject” does not go over to the enemy’s side and become a Christian.  He is to guide the subject, instead, to “our Father Below”.  Wormwood assumes the best way to do this is to tempt his subject into extravagantly wicked sin and it doesn’t go well for him.  The subject quickly becomes a Christian instead.  Uncle Screwtape, however, out of his abundance of experience advises a more subtle approach.  “The safest road to hell,” he advises Wormwood,” is the gradual one.”  It’s a book that can hit very close to home.

One of the points that Lewis highlights is that most people would rather just ignore the forces of evil.  Most people prefer to think that the devil is just an old superstition.  In popular culture we portray him as a cartoon with horns and a tail—a character no sensible person would take seriously.  Uncle Wormwood points out: this is good.  People have no defence against an enemy they don’t believe exists.  And, of course, the other extreme is what we see in those people who see devils lurking under every rock and behind every tree.  A friend of mine blamed the devil when his little daughter, who was just learning to walk, fell down the stairs.  Never mind that he left the baby gate open and was so engrossed in what he was doing that he’d let her wander out of sight.  It’s in vogue in some Christians circles to blame the sins of Christians on demonic possession or oppression.  Exorcism becomes the answer to everything.  But this is just a shortcut to holiness and like so many shortcuts, it’s not going to get your there.  Our culture is lazy and wants instant gratification and this is just a case of that laziness creeping into the Church.  The New Testament—especially St. Paul—is clear that sanctification, the work of holiness, is hard work and nowhere does Scripture tell us exorcism can be a shortcut to sanctification.  So we’ve got to find the balance—and I think if we’ve immersed ourselves in Scripture we’ll find that balance—avoiding both extremes: discounting the devil altogether on the one hand and on the other looking for him behind every tree and assigning him god-like power.

But if the devil is real and if we’re really in a war, what do we do?  We all struggle.  We struggle with impure thoughts.  We struggle with anger.  We struggle with bitterness.  We struggle with ingratitude.  We struggle to forgive others.  We struggle to trust Jesus instead of money or sex or politics.  We struggled to read our Bibles.  We struggle to pray.  And an awful lot of the time we can often feel very alone in that struggle.  We look around the church and think that no one else here faces the struggles that we do, or if they do, these things are no longer a struggle for them because they’re such mature Christians.  Brothers and Sisters, a lot of that is because most of us have learned to put on a good front.  We don’t talk with each other about our struggles with sin.  We’re afraid of being embarrassed.  All because we’re also struggling with pride!  And the end result is that our brothers and sisters (1) think they’re going it alone, (2) have unrealistic expectations about what it means to be a Christian, and (3) we all miss out on the benefits of walking together, supporting each other, and praying with and for one another.  Brothers and Sisters, Scripture calls us to walk together into holiness.  We won’t get there if we try to go it alone.

Now, as far as the devil goes, as I said, we often give him far too much credit.  As I talk with Christians I find that many of us have elevated the devil to god-like status.  We think of him as having virtually unlimited power and attributes that belong only to God.  We need to remember that he’s a finite created being.  He’s not a god.  He doesn’t know all.  He can’t read your mind.  He’s not everywhere at once.  And he’s got a limited number of fellow devils to do his work.  And it only makes sense that they’re going to deploy themselves where the battle is most urgent and where they can do the most damage.  Remember that in our baptismal vows we renounce not only the devil, but also the world and the flesh.  Most of us don’t need any demonic help to fall into sin.  The world and the flesh give us fight enough!  But it’s hard—often impossible—to know the source of our temptations.  At the end of the day it doesn’t really matter.  We’re in a fight and in our Epistle this morning St. Paul tells us how to do battle.  What he tells us here applies no matter where the source of temptation comes from.  Look with me again at Ephesians 6, beginning at verse 10.  Here’s what Paul tells us:

Finally, be strong in the Lord and in the strength of his might.

 

We’re in a battle and it’s not a battle we can win on our own power.  The Lord has to win this one.  But that’s easy to say.  How do we do it?  Well, Paul now gives us an image of a soldier putting on his armour and taking up his weapons:

Put on the whole armor of God, that you may be able to stand against the schemes of the devil.  For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.  Therefore take up the whole armor of God, that you may be able to withstand in the evil day, and having done all, to stand firm.

 

Put on the armour that God’s given you.  But first, Paul backs up for a couple of verses.  Before we jump into the fight we need to remember who we’re fighting.  We get the sense earlier in Paul’s letter to the Christians in Ephesus that they needed this warning.  They were fighting each other.  Paul had to remind them back in Chapter 4: Walk with each other in humility, gentleness, patience, and bearing with each other.  Maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace, he told them.  Don’t shoot your own.  That’s a sure-fire way to lose before you start.

But remember, too, that our fight is not against flesh and blood.  Brothers and Sisters, remember this.  We fight not against flesh and blood.  We forget this much too easily.  Think of Israel in Jesus’ day.  The reason the people rejected Jesus was because he was directing his fight at the wrong thing—or so they thought.  Most Jews were convinced that the Romans were the enemy.  The Pharisees were convinced everyone who didn’t obey the torah as faithfully as they did was the enemy.  The Messiah was supposed to do battle with the Romans or with the unrighteous.  But, instead, Jesus spent much of his time rebuking the people who were pushing that sort of thinking.  The Romans weren’t the enemy.  Sin and death were—and still are—the enemy and they’re the common enemy of all humanity, Jew and Gentile alike.  The Romans killed Jesus and people saw him as a loser, when in reality, by his death and resurrection Jesus was dealing a death blow to sin and death.  So remember who the enemy is.  It’s not your brother or your sister with whom you have a disagreement.  It’s not even the people who follow false gods and believe false philosophies and do wicked things.  The enemy is the devil and the corruption that sin and death have brought to into the world and the flesh.  Deal with the world, the flesh, and devil; deal with sin and death; and everything else sorts itself out.

Now, back to the armour of God.  What does it look like?  First, verse 14:

Stand therefore, having fastened on the belt of truth…

 

Remember that the message we proclaim is true.  Everything stands or falls on this.  Every other bit of armour hangs on this piece.  Jesus is Lord.  It’s the message carved on the lychgate that we pass under when we come to the Church.  It’s the good news that we proclaim.  Jesus is Lord.  Caesar isn’t lord.  Money isn’t lord.  Sex isn’t lord.  Power isn’t lord.  Reputation isn’t lord.  Self isn’t lord.  Jesus is Lord.  In his death and resurrection he inaugurated his kingdom.  It’s breaking into the world and nothing will stand before it.  If that is true, it changes literally everything.  This is the truth that holds everything else together.

Second, Paul writes:

…put on the breastplate of righteousness…

 

A soldier’s breastplate protected his vital organs from injury from a frontal attack and Paul tells us to put on “righteousness” or “justice” the way a soldier would buckle on his breastplate.  I say “justice” because it might better carry the sense of what Paul is getting at.  When we think of “righteousness” the first thing we often think of is holiness or sinlessness and so we might think Paul is saying to buckle on holiness as if it were a breastplate, but that’s not it.  What he’s getting at is our reliance on the truth that the Lord God is the world’s one true Judge and that, as Judge, he intends to—actually, he’s in the process of—setting this broken world to rights.  He set this process in motion when he vindicated Jesus by raising him from the dead.  In the Resurrection he, as Judge, ruled Jesus to be in the right.  And part of the Good News is that if we are in Jesus, if we’ve repented and let go of everything that is not Jesus and instead trusted in the truth that he is Lord, then we are vindicated by the Judge too.  This is what it means to be “justified”.  Yes, we are sinners, but because we are in Jesus, we are in the right before God.  It’s this truth that protects our vitals from attack.

Next, in verse 15:

…as shoes for your feet…put on the readiness given by the gospel of peace.

 

Stand firmly in another truth: the truth that in Jesus you and I are at peace with God—we have been reconciled to him.  Paul wrote about this back in Chapter 2 when he said:

Remember that at one time you Gentiles in the flesh…remember that you were at that time separated from Christ, alienated from the commonwealth of Israel and strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world.  But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ…. He came and preached peace to you who were far off [that’s the Gentiles] and peace to those who were near [that’s the Jews].  For through him we both have access in one Spirit to the Father.  So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God.  (Ephesians 2:11-13, 17-19)

The devil, not to mention the world and the flesh, will do everything to make you forget that Jesus has restored you to God’s friendship and fellowship.  The devil will do everything to make you forget that you have been forgiven and declared just before God.  That’s what “the satan” means.  It’s a Hebrew title that means “the accuser”.  He will accuse you and try to demoralise you and try to knock you off your feet, so stand firm in the gospel, the Good News, of peace.

Fourth, look at verse 16:

In all circumstances take up the shield of faith, with which you can extinguish all the flaming darts of the evil one.

Paul compares the attacks of the enemy to flaming arrows.  They don’t just pierce, they set fire—and things burn down.  Our enemies cause us to doubt.  We face circumstances that can drive us to hopelessness.  We can be beaten down so that we see no way out or we become so obsessed with what’s happening today that we forget our future hope.  And so Paul tells us to shield ourselves with faith—faith in Jesus, what he has done and what he will do.  Remember our Eucharistic acclamation.  Remember the “mystery of faith”: Christ has died.  Christ is risen.  Christ will come again.  Jesus in his resurrection, Paul writes to the Corinthians, is the firstfruits of the resurrection to come—that day at the end of the age when he raises the faithful dead to life and sets the world to rights once and for all.  We live in hope of life and of new creation.  We are people of the Resurrection.  And Jesus has given us the Holy Spirit as a down-payment and a foretaste of the resurrected life of the kingdom.  When tempted to doubt, take up the shield of faith.

The final defensive piece of equipment is the helmet:

…and take the helmet of salvation…

 

Brothers and Sisters, remember that Jesus has already won the key battle.  He won it when he rose from the grave that first Easter morning.  Death was crushed that day.  These battles we fight are all secondary and we can stand and fight our way through them confident in the knowledge that Jesus has already saved us from our ultimate enemy.

But these are all defensive pieces of armour.  The Lord will keep us standing fast and he’ll keep us from defeat if we’ll remember his truth and his salvation, but he also expects us to take the battle to the enemy.  And so Paul tells us in verse 17:

…and [take] the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God…

 

When I was a kid I had a leather Bible cover with a sword on it.  The Bible is the word of God, inspired by the Spirit, but Paul’s being more specific here.  This is the same “word” he writes about in Chapter 5 where he talks about Jesus having cleansed the Church through the power of his word—his gospel or good news—again the truth on which our faith and our peace and our justification rest: Christ has died.  Christ is Risen.  Christ will come again.  Brothers and Sisters, protected by the Lord’s might we are called to go out into the world as heralds, proclaiming that Jesus has died and risen again and that he is Lord.  We’re called to proclaim this to a world where Caesar is lord, where money is lord, where sex is lord, where power is lord, where self is lord.

It’s interesting that Paul borrows all this imagery from Isaiah’s prophecy—passages where it’s the Messiah who puts on things like righteousness and faithfulness and peace as pieces of his armour.  The Messiah goes on the offensive with a sword that proceeds from his mouth.   Paul draws on the well-known passage:

How beautiful upon the mountains

         are the feet of him who brings good news,

who publishes peace, who brings good news of happiness,

         who publishes salvation,

         who says to Zion, “Your God reigns.” (Isaiah 52:7)

And through Jesus the Messiah the Lord God does reign.  Through Jesus the Messiah his kingdom is established.  And here Paul’s using this language describing the work of the Messiah to bring peace and salvation and he’s applying it to us, to you and to me.  We are called to carry on his work, calling the world to repent because Jesus’ kingdom is breaking in.  The present evil age is passing away and the age to come is breaking in.

But Paul lists one final thing.  Without it the armour and the word will never accomplish what they should.  He goes on:

… praying at all times in the Spirit, with all prayer and supplication. (Ephesians 6:18)

Don’t stop praying.  Why?  Because prayer is communion with God.  Notice, Paul mentions prayer and supplication as two things.  Supplication is prayer.  Specifically, it’s prayer in which we ask for something.  Paul is about to ask the Ephesians to pray for him because he’s in prison—not so much that he’s released, but that he will be effective in proclaiming the Good News despite his situation.  I think Paul makes this distinction between prayer and supplication for a reason and that’s that there’s more to prayer than asking.  Jesus tells us to pray for our daily bread, for grace to forgive, and that we might be delivered from trial.  As we put on all these pieces of Gospel armour and as we take up the sword of the Gospel to go into battle we need to pray about the specifics of the battle we’re about to face.  And we need to remember what prayer is.  Again, prayer is communion with God.  It’s not just asking him for stuff; it’s communion with him.  And when it comes to the battle, we need to be in communion with him just as much as we need to remember truth and righteousness and faith and the word.  Communion is the reason Jesus died and rose again.  God created us in the beginning for fellowship with himself and it’s to restore our fellowship with him that he sent his Son to be a means of forgiveness, and it’s to have fellowship with us that he gave us his word through the prophets and apostles and evangelists.  We hear the truth of the good news. We read the words of the Lord in Scripture.  He speaks to us.  In prayer we speak back to him.  And while we may ask him for help and for the necessities of life and for success in the battle, more than anything else prayer is our time to respond to his good news and to his Word, to his grace and to his provision with praise and thanksgiving.  When people tell me that they struggle to pray, they usually go on to say that they feel that they’ve got little or nothing to say beyond asking for things.  Brothers and Sisters, if you’ve got nothing to say, it’s because you haven’t been steeping yourself in the word and allowing God to first speak to you.  If you’ve got nothing to say to God, you haven’t been meditating on the deep, deep love he’s shown us in sending his Son to die for our sins.  Friends, prayer is our opportunity to respond to our God who has given himself in Jesus and who has spoken to us in his word.

Perhaps the reason we struggle with prayer is the same reason we struggle with these other pieces of armour and even with the sword.  We can’t put on what we don’t know.  We can’t wield what we haven’t taken seriously.  Steep yourselves in the word and meditate on the good news that Jesus has died, that he has risen, and that he is Lord of all.  If you struggle to do that.  If you don’t know where to begin, one of the greatest resources the Church has ever produced sits in the racks in front you: those maroon books.  The Book of Common Prayer is a guide and template for prayerful communion with God—by yourself, with your family, with others, with your church.  It immerses you daily in Scripture, it leads you in confession of sin, it reminds you of the good news that Jesus died and rose for you.  It teaches you to pray the psalms back to God, making his word your own prayers, and it guides you in prayers of thanksgiving and praise and supplication.  If you don’t know where to start, I can’t think of a better place.  Take one and start letting God speak to you and then start praying back.  That’s communion.

As we sing in the well-known hymn, “Soldiers of Christ, arise, and put your armour on.  Strong in the strength which God supplies through His eternal Son.”  Put it on: truth, righteousness, peace, faith, and salvation.  Charge into the battle with the good news that Jesus who died and rose again is the world’s true Lord.  And pray.  Gird yourselves with prayer—living out the communion with God that the good news makes a reality.  But Paul assumes we’ve got a grasp of these things already.  You can’t put on what you don’t have.  Dear Friends, immerse yourself in Scripture.  Hear God’s word and let it permeate your life.  Memorise it.  Meditate on it.  Meditate on the good news—on the deep, deep love of God revealed in Jesus at the Cross.  Meditate on Jesus, risen from the dead and what that means for each of us.  Meditate on the hope we have in Jesus and the Spirit—hope of life and communion with God.  And pray.  Let these things so permeate your heart and mind that communion with God becomes your great desire—so that you can thank him and praise him for who he is, for his love, mercy, and grace.  Then, Brothers and Sisters, take the light Jesus has given you and charge into the darkness.

Let us pray:  Gracious Father, through Jesus you’ve given us pardon and peace.  You’ve called us into battle and given us everything we need.  Teach us now how to value and to use the gifts you’ve given to us that we might be effective in the calling and mission you’ve given us, to carry the light of Christ to people lost in darkness.  We ask this in his name.  Amen.

A Sermon for the Twentieth Sunday after Trinity

St. Matthew 22:1-14

by William Klock

Jesus’ words in our Gospel today can be difficult for many people.  We too often build up an image of Jesus in our minds—and it’s a false image—of a warm and fuzzy Saviour who throws a party and welcomes everyone.  We latch onto the Jesus who speaks the words of John 3:17, “God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.”  But we ignore the implications of that salvation.  What did Jesus come to save the world from?  Well, from the judgement to come, the judgement that will crush evil forever and wipe it from the face of his creation.  Jesus is the Saviour who delivers the condemned who put their faith, their trust, their lives in him, but he’s also the one who will one day set his creation to rights and pronounce judgement on those who insist on rebelling against him.  Our Gospel today reminds us that Jesus is both the merciful Saviour and the righteous Judge.  Here’s what St. Matthew writes in Chapter 22:

And again Jesus spoke to them in parables, saying, “The kingdom of heaven may be compared to a king who gave a wedding feast for his son, and sent his servants to call those who were invited to the wedding feast…  (Matthew 22:1-3a)

As modern people we’re prone to missing what this is about.  We read what Jesus says here and all we think of is a wedding.  Maybe, as we imagine it in our heads, we try to flesh it out with details we think would be part of a wedding in First Century Judea, but it’s still “just a wedding”.  But for people living in First Century Judaea the wedding and the specific characters Jesus mentions were significant.  They knew immediately that Jesus wasn’t just talking about any old king or about any old wedding—or about any old guests, for that matter.  Jews knew their Scriptures and they knew Jesus was drawing all of this imagery from them.  It’s the same for the parable Jesus had just told in the last chapter—the one we call the Parable of the Wicked Tenants.

It helps to look at that parable first.  That parable was about a vineyard, carefully planted and cultivated by a man and then leased out to tenants while he went to a far country.  When the harvest came he sent his servants to collect the produce, but the tenants decided to keep it for themselves.  They beat, stoned, and even killed the servants who were sent by the man.  Finally, Jesus said, the man sent his son.  Surely the wicked tenants would respect his own son.  But they kill him too, thinking that if the man had no heir, their theft of the vineyard would be all the more secure.  But Jesus warned: When the owner of the vineyard does finally come back, he’ll put to death the wicked tenants and lease the vineyard to tenants who will give him its produce.  And it’s at this point that Jesus says the words that are probably familiar to you: “The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone.”  To us it may all be a little cryptic.  But Matthew says that the priests and the Pharisees were furious.  You see they knew exactly what Jesus was talking about.  They understood the imagery.  If you told a story about a man planting a vineyard, every Jew knew immediately that you were talking about the Lord establishing Israel—rescuing her from Egypt and settling her in the Promised Land, flowing with milk and honey.  They understood that, just like the vineyard owner in the story, the Lord expected Israel to make something of what he had given her.  He expected a return on his investment, so to speak.  Israel was supposed to bear good spiritual fruit.  And they believed that’s what they were doing.  They hadn’t always been very faithful.  They knew that, the Pharisees especially, but they believed they were doing better.  That’s what the Pharisees were all about: modelling holiness and urging everyone in Israel to do it too.  Then the Lord would come, judge Israel’s enemies, and establish his kingdom.  This is where our parable today picks up.  Isaiah describes the Messianic kingdom in terms of a great banquet that the Lord would prepare for Israel after he judged and vanquished her enemies.  As he once had rescued Israel from the Egyptians and led her into a land of milk and honey, he would once again rescue her from the Romans and usher in a golden messianic age.

Isaiah wrote:

On this mountain the Lord of hosts will make for all peoples

         a feast of rich food, a feast of well-aged wine,

         of rich food full of marrow, of aged wine well refined.

And he will swallow up on this mountain

         the covering that is cast over all peoples,

         the veil that is spread over all nations.

He will swallow up death forever;

and the Lord God will wipe away tears from all faces,

         and the reproach of his people he will take away from all the earth,

         for the Lord has spoken.

It will be said on that day,

         “Behold, this is our God; we have waited for him, that he might save us.

         This is the Lord; we have waited for him;

         let us be glad and rejoice in his salvation.” (Isaiah 25:6-9)

This is what the people hoped for.  This is what they expected the Messiah would bring to Israel.  It’s what Jesus was calling to mind when he told a story about a king throwing a wedding feast.  And it was a feast for the faithful of Israel.  And this explains why the priests and Pharisees were so angry with Jesus.  They were the ones who were supposed to be at that feast.  In the imagery of the first parable, they saw themselves as the good tenants whom the Lord would reward, but Jesus is painting them as the bad guys.  He takes the language they knew so well from Daniel about the stone—and they all knew that the stone represented the Messiah and his kingdom, the Messiah and kingdom they so longed for—and he says: Nope.  I am the stone and you’ve rejected me. You are the wicked tenants.  You are the ones who will be crushed by the stone.

Now he launches into this parable about a king and his banquet.  The symbolism was clear.  They were already fuming and they probably already had a good idea where Jesus was going with this.  The king threw a banquet, he sent his servants to tell the invited guests it was time to come, but Jesus says:

…they would not come.  (Matthew 25:3b)

Like the wicked tenants who refused to give the vineyard owner his due, the people invited to the wedding refuse to come.  Jesus goes on in verses 4-6:

Again he sent other servants, saying, ‘Tell those who are invited, “See, I have prepared my dinner, my oxen and my fat calves have been slaughtered, and everything is ready. Come to the wedding feast.”’  But they paid no attention and went off, one to his farm, another to his business, while the rest seized his servants, treated them shamefully, and killed them.

 

Do you see the similarities with the Parable of the Wicked Tenants?  Different setting.  Different imagery and symbolism from the Old Testament.  But it’s the same plot, the same story.  Israel’s religious leaders, whether it was the corrupt Sadducees who controlled the temple and the priesthood or whether it was the other pressure groups—the Pharisees urging everyone to be more holy or the Zealots urging everyone to take up arms in open rebellion against Rome—they’re all like these guests invited to the wedding feast.  The King is throwing a party, but they’ve refused.  They’ve got their excuses.  One has a farm he has to take care of and another has his business.  Luke recounts the same parable, but includes more details.  In his version one man has just bought a bunch of oxen sight unseen and has to go check them over.  Another just bought a large tract of land, again sight unseen and has to go look at it.  Jesus is describing wealthy people here.  The poor couldn’t afford these sorts of things.  And in Luke’s version a third man bows out saying that he’s just got married himself and can’t come.  Israel’s King—that’s the Lord and they knew this—he’s throwing the banquet that Isaiah and the other prophets described, it’s the banquet everyone’s been anticipating, but now the guests of honour are refusing to come.

It might not seem like such a big deal to us.  It’s not that big of a deal to turn down a wedding invitation today, but in their world it was a big deal.    It was a slap to the king’s face.  And an even bigger offense when we realise that what Jesus is saying here is that the king throwing the banquet is the God of Israel and that this banquet is big one, the great eschatological banquet, the one they’ve place their hopes in, the one where Israel celebrates with her God the day when he finally sets the world to rights.  So Jesus is saying: It’s here.  And you’ve rejected the king’s invitation.  And you’ve rejected his son.  And that’s just what’s been happening in Jesus’ ministry.  He began in Galilee, the area where he had grown up.  The people liked his miracles, but they didn’t like his message.  When he preached in the synagogue in Nazareth, his hometown, the people were so angry they tried to throw him off a cliff and stone him.  At the point that he’s telling these stories now he’s travelled to Jerusalem—his final trip there—and now it’s not just the hoi polloi in the country rejecting him, but the religious leaders—Jerusalem herself.  And in rejecting Jesus, they’re rejecting the Lord.  He’s sent his Messiah, but having seen him they don’t want him.  He’s not doing and saying what they expected.  He’s not saying the things they want to hear, so they’re going to get rid of him, just as their forefathers had got rid of the prophets the Lord had sent.  But Jesus tells them that there are consequences.  Verse 7:

The king was angry, and he sent his troops and destroyed those murderers and burned their city.

 

When Jesus said this it was easy to blow off.  They didn’t want to hear talk of judgement unless it was on their enemies, but this is just the problem.  Everyone wants to claim God’s promises, but few want to take up the responsibilities.  Everyone want to hear about judgement when it’s aimed at our enemies—and we so often just assume as these people did that God is on our side and that we’re his friends—all those passages about his judgement are for other people, usually our enemies and the people we don’t like.  But what Jesus is saying to these people, these Jewish leaders and their followers, is that they’ve picked the wrong side.  The Lord has been patient.  He sent judges and kings and prophets.  They refused to listen.  They even killed some of them.  And despite all that God’s now sent his own Son to set the people right.  This is their last chance.  Reject the Son and there’s no one else to send but the army that will come in judgement to wipe out the city.  Consider that even still the Lord was patient for another forty years.  For another generation the apostles followed the judges, kings, and prophets and Jesus himself, calling Israel to repentance.  The doors to the wedding feast were closing, but people could still get in.  And then the judgement came.  The Lord sent in the Romans, they burned the city, they tore the temple down, and they slaughtered the people.

But there was good news to be told to.  It wasn’t good news to the people who were originally invited.  It wasn’t good news to those left outside gnashing their teeth.  But it is good news others.  Look at verses 8-10:

Then he said to his servants, ‘The wedding feast is ready, but those invited were not worthy.  Go therefore to the main roads and invite to the wedding feast as many as you find.’  And those servants went out into the roads and gathered all whom they found, both bad and good. So the wedding hall was filled with guests.

 

The Lord’s banquet will not go unenjoyed or uneaten.  The rich refused, so he sent the messengers to the poor and guests came in droves to fill the banquet hall.  We don’t have to read very far in any of the Gospels to see who came.  The tax collectors came, the prostitutes came, the sick came, the blind came, the lame came, the lepers came, rough-and-tumble fisherman came, the nobodies came.  Even a few Gentiles came—and that may have been the most scandalous of all.  It turns out they’d been invited all along, but the messengers either hadn’t bothered to tell them or the rich had convinced them that this banquet wasn’t for them, but now they’re amazed and joyful and overwhelmed with gladness to find out that the King desired their company.

Here’s the picture of Jesus everyone really likes.  In his love he’s thrown the doors wide open.  Everyone—ev-ry-one—is invited in.  But so often we twist it a bit to fit the false image of Jesus’ we’ve created.  We hear Jesus’ come-as-you-are and whoever-you-are invitation, but we twist it to mean that Jesus is fine with us being in the banquet and staying just as we’ve come.  God loves us just the way we are, we often say.  And we usually say this sort of thing to justify certain types of behaviour.  Sexual immorality is so commonplace and so acceptable in our culture now that it’s tempting for churches to use this to justify turning a blind eye on it.  If we tell people they need to stop sinning they’ll leave, we think.  Or we just use it as an excuse to conform to the values of the world.  But, I’ve noticed, just as often it’s an excuse we use to justify ourselves when our own sin is brought to our attention and when we’re called to repent.  It’s just another way of saying, “Hey, don’t you judge me!”  It doesn’t have to be sexual sin.  It can be greed or gossip or bitterness or anger or a host of other sins we tolerate.

But consider, when the lepers and the blind came to Jesus’ banquet Jesus didn’t assure them they were just fine as they were.  The whole reason they were there was because of his promise of deliverance and healing.  When prostitutes and sinners came to Jesus he didn’t say, “You’re fine.  God loves you.  Each to his own.”  No.  That just cheapens the love of God.  That’d be no different than Jesus telling the leper, “God loves you just as you are” and then leaving him a leper.  No, God’s love is greater than that.  Yes, God loves sinners and he loves them—he loves us—so much that he sent his own Son to die in our place and to rise to give us life.  He loves us so much that he won’t let us remain subject to the bondage of sin and death.  As he healed the lepers so Jesus in his love calls to sinners: “Repent, be transformed, and enter the kingdom—enter the banquet.  Experience creation, experience your humanity as God meant it to be from the beginning.”  God loves sinners more than to leave them sinners.  God loves sinners so much that he gave his Son to deliver sinners from our sin.

This explains the last part of the parable.  Look at verses 11-14:

“But when the king came in to look at the guests, he saw there a man who had no wedding garment.  And he said to him, ‘Friend, how did you get in here without a wedding garment?’ And he was speechless.  Then the king said to the attendants, ‘Bind him hand and foot and cast him into the outer darkness. In that place there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.’  For many are called, but few are chosen.”

 

This is the part everyone asks about.  Wait?  What?  Why did Jesus throw the man out?  Where did all these other people get their fancy wedding clothes at the last minute?  Why doesn’t this guy have them and how is that his fault?  Again, this isn’t the Jesus we’ve often become comfortable with.

But here’s Jesus’ point.  The tax collectors and the prostitutes, the blind and lame, the lepers and the Gentiles—they didn’t bring any fancy wedding clothes with them.  Jesus gave them to them when they came.  The wedding clothes we put on for the Lord’s great banquet are things like love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, and self-control.  They’re the clothes St. Paul is talking about when he says to put off the old and put on the new.  These are the clothes Paul’s writing about, for example, in Colossians: “Put on then, as God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, compassionate hearts, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience” (Colossians 3:12).  These are the clothes Paul is talking about in Romans when he writes, “But put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh” (Romans 13:14).

Brothers and Sisters, these are the clothes—clothes of holiness and righteousness—that Jesus gives us himself so that we can enter the wedding feast.  By his death he forgives our sins and by his resurrection he gives us a new life.  In our baptism he strips off our filthy rags and pours the Spirit into us and clothes us with the beauty of holiness.  The wedding garments are here at the font.  Put them on, be transformed, be freed from sin and death, and join the feast.  But if you refuse to put them on, you reject the King’s Son, just as the priests and the scribes and the Pharisees did, just as the people of Nazareth did, just as Pilate and the crowds on Good Friday did.  And judgement is coming.  As it came on faithless Jerusalem it will come again on those who reject the King’s invitation.  That’s the bad news.  But the good news is that there is no condemnation for those who are in King Jesus, for those humble enough to turn aside from our old ways and to be delivered by Jesus and to be washed by his blood and clothes in garments of spotless white.

Brothers and Sisters, he offers a foretaste of his feast today as we come to his Table.  He welcomes us here and he clothes us with holiness.  Let us not only remember his love and his grace as we come this morning, but think too about the clothes you’re wearing.  Are you still wearing the wedding garments he gave you in your baptism?.  As you come to the Table take an evaluation.  Maybe you’ve exchanged the shirt Jesus gave you for the old one you used to wear.  Maybe it’s your socks or your tie.  Maybe it’s something as seemingly inconsequential as your shoelaces or your belt-buckle, but consider.  Here again Jesus invites us to his banquet.  Here again he’s holding out the wedding garments again for us just in case we might have set a piece aside.  Take it up and put it on, then come to taste and see the goodness of the Lord and have your hope renewed.

Let us pray: Gracious Jesus, thank you for inviting us into your Father’s banquet.  Thank you for stripping off our filthy rags, washing us clean, and clothing us in holiness so that we can enjoy the life of your kingdom.  But we ask for grace.  We ask for the grace to be faithful in living the new life you’ve given.  Keep before us always and each day your love for us, the love that moved you to die on our behalf, keep that love ever before us that we might always desire to love you in return, to trust your goodness, to trust your faithfulness, to be obedient, and to keep these new clothes you’ve given us unstained.  You’ve made us holy.  In your grace and by your Spirit, keep us holy we now ask.  Amen.

A Sermon for the Nineteenth Sunday after Trinity

Ephesians 4:17-32

by William Klock

A couple of weeks ago we had dinner at Atlas Café and while we were there overheard an altercation between a couple and their waitress.  They were angry with her because they weren’t checking vaccines cards right.  They were asking to see them and to see photo ID, but they weren’t using the verification app to scan the cards.  These people were very upset and were taking it out on the waitress.  I felt bad for the waitress.  Lots of people just doing their jobs are being unfairly hassled—whether it’s because they check vaccines cards or they don’t, because they require masks or they don’t, you name it and someone’s going to be unhappy about it these days—they’re hassled because they’re just following policy that their management has set, and much that to fulfil requirements set by the government.  But it’s the people up front who have little or nothing to do with policy that take the abuse.  Maybe someone needs to be challenged about this or that policy, but to be effective those challenges need to be directed to the right people.  We often expend a lot of effort in very ineffective ways.  My wife often reminds me of this.

I mention this to illustrate the wrong way we often go about trying to address behaviour.  In our Epistle St. Paul tells us not to act like Gentiles, not to lie, not to steal, not to be angry, not to let unwholesome talk come out of our mouths.  He also talks about how we ought, instead, to be kind and loving and truthful with each other.  And we all know that there are areas of our lives that need to change, that need to be more Christ-like.  Where do we start?  It’s easy to try to address our behaviour, our actions first.  How many times have we tried to do that and failed?  This is what Paul’s getting at in today’s lesson.  Going after the behaviour is like going after the employee when what you really need to address is the management.  In our case it’s our sinful and muddled minds.  We’ve got to address what’s in our heads (and in our hearts) first. This is what Paul writes in Ephesians 4:17:

Now this I say and testify in the Lord, that you must no longer walk as the Gentiles do, in the futility of their minds.

 

Just like us, the Christians in Ephesus manifested Jesus and the life of the Spirit, while still struggling to overcome the sins of their old lives before Jesus.  Sanctification is a process, but that doesn’t mean we should be complacent about it.  And so Paul says, “You’ve got to stop walking, you’ve got to stop living the way the Gentiles do.”

And we respond, “That’s great, Paul, but I keep trying and it’s a constant struggle.  I don’t seem to be getting anywhere.”  And Paul responds and he says, “That’s because you’re putting the cart before the horse.  You’re getting upset with the employees when the problem is the manager.  You’ve got to address management.  Fix that and the rest will sort itself out.  And so Paul points to the real problem.  The Gentile behave the way they do because their minds are set on futile things.  The Greek word he uses for “futile” describes something that is empty or that has no value.  When the Gentiles act the way they do, when they live sinful lifestyles, when they look to Caesar or to money or to reputation for security, when they worship false gods and are sold out to the flesh it’s because these are the things on which their minds are fixed.  He goes on in verses 18-19:

They are darkened in their understanding, alienated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them, due to their hardness of heart.  They have become callous and have given themselves up to sensuality, greedy to practice every kind of impurity.

 

Paul writes very nearly the same description of fallen humanity in Romans 1.  They exchanged the truth of God for a lie and chose to worship the creature rather than the Creator.  They claim to be wise, but in reality they’re fools with minds fixed on foolish and pointless things.  And the result of rebelling against God with the mind is that one rebels against God in one’s actions.  We become callous, no longer driven by kindness and love and mercy.  We give ourselves over to sensuality of any and every sort, seeking not the good of others, but to use others for our own selfish gain.  We become greedy, no longer satisfied with what God has given, no longer trusting in his goodness to provide, but taking and thieving what he’s given to others.  We rebel against our holy God and end up in the muck—living in impurity.  All because the mind has rejected God and as a result the heart has become hardened against him.

I can’t help but think of Pharaoh.  Through Joseph the Lord had blessed Egypt and saved them from starvation during the great famine, but as Exodus begins we’re told that there was a new Pharaoh who didn’t know Joseph, which meant he didn’t know the Lord who had saved his people either.  It’s hard to imagine that Pharaoh was accidentally ignorant.  He had to know where all these Hebrews had come from.  No, he chose not to acknowledge the God of Israel.  In his mind he rebelled against God.  And as so often happens when we’ve believed a lie and are confronted by the truth, when Moses came to him as the Lord’s messenger, saying “Let my people go!”, Pharaoh’s heart protected his mind from the truth.  His heart hardened.  And then the plagues came, revealing the power and authority of the God of Israel and the powerlessness of Pharaoh and his gods.  But instead of accepting the truth, each time his heart hardened all the more.  He rejected God and look at his actions: he was callous, he was greedy, he was willing to murder babies in order to protect his throne and his pretended divinity.

Without Jesus our minds are set on futile things and our hearts are hardened to throw up an emotional wall to protect our minds from confrontation by the truth of God.  And this is why Jesus pours his Spirit into us.  Jesus in his love cracks the wall, he starts knocking bricks out, he climbs over the top and he gets our attention and the Holy Spirit goes to work.  He renews our minds and he regenerates our hearts.  And that’s what Paul’s getting at here.  The Gentiles, the unbelievers, are still entrenched behind that wall and as Christians we’ve got no business still living like that.  He writes in verses 20-24:

But that is not the way you learned Christ!—assuming that you have heard about him and were taught in him, as the truth is in Jesus, to put off your old self, which belongs to your former manner of life and is corrupt through deceitful desires, and to be renewed in the spirit of your minds, and to put on the new self, created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness.

 

He’s telling the Ephesians—and he’s telling you and me—that our minds shouldn’t be stuck on futile things anymore, assuming that is, that we’ve been taught the truth about Jesus.  No, our minds as Christians should be full of Jesus and his truth.  Our minds should be full of the truth that in Jesus the divine Word of God humbled himself and took our flesh upon himself, that Jesus born of Mary died the death that we sinners deserve and that he rose again to unleash his life into the world.  That he ascended to his Father to reign as King and that one day he will return when every enemy has been put under his feet.  On that day he will judge the quick and the dead and we who have believed in him will be resurrected just as he was, we’ll be given the life of the age to come—the life that Adam and Eve rejected when they first sinned and were driven from the presence of God and from his life.  In the Lord’s Supper we proclaim the mystery of faith: Christ has died.  Christ is risen.  Christ will come again.  Those are three basic truths of that message we call the Good News.  Jesus died for our sins.  Jesus rose to give us life.  Jesus will come back to resurrect his people and restore his fallen creation.  Brothers and Sisters, somehow and on some level everything we do in life ought to be driven by this Good News, by these truths.  The knowledge that God’s love for us is so great that while we were yet sinners he gave his Son to die for us ought to set our minds marveling at the incredible love of our God for us.  Each time we think of Jesus and the Cross our minds ought to be driven to plumb the great depths of God’s love.  And the knowledge of the love of God demonstrated so profoundly in Jesus should naturally drive us to love him in return.  The fact that Jesus has given us life and poured his Spirit into us as a down payment on the life of the age to come ought to motivate us to live that new life here and now.  And the fact that Jesus is one day coming back to consummate his kingdom rule ought to give us a natural motivation to proclaim the good news that he is Lord in the hope that everyone we know might be prepared for that day.

Jesus has renewed our minds, Paul says, and not only that, but he’s made us new.  In places like Romans and Colossians Paul talks about having been buried with Jesus in our baptism and raised with him to new life.  In Colossians he urges us, since in Jesus we’re dead to the old way of life, he urges us to live the new life Jesus has given.  These are all just alternative ways to describe the life of the Spirit who renews our minds and regenerates our hearts.  The old self is dead and the Spirit has made us new.  It’s a foretaste of the resurrection that Jesus has promised.  What happened to Jesus on Easter will one day happen to us and we’ll be raised to the life of God, but in the meantime he’s given his Spirit.  And in the power of the Spirit we have a joyful responsibility to put off the old way of living and put on the new.  We all know that it’s not always easy.  If it were easy Paul wouldn’t have to tell us so many times and in so many ways that this is what we need to do.  It’s just that we’re so used to the old way.

I was thinking this week that it’s time to replace my shoes.  I’ve got a new pair in the closet that I picked up on sale almost two years ago, because—well—shoes don’t last forever.  But they’re not broken in.  I put them on, took a few steps, and ended up putting my old, worn-out shoes back on.  They’re more comfortable.  I’m used to them.  And just so with life.  As unbelievers we cultivated sinful habits and ways of thinking.  We let our hearts harden and build that wall to protect us from the truth.  It takes time and effort to tear that wall down.  We might now have our minds set on Jesus, but it takes time to retrain our actions to be in accord with that new truth.  But change we must.  Again, we can’t keep walking like the Gentiles.  We don’t have the excuse of minds set on futility.  Our minds have been confronted with the reality of Jesus, crucified, risen, and coming again.  We need to be walking in the righteousness and holiness he gives.

In the rest of the chapter Paul goes on to describe what this looks like with specific examples.

Therefore, having put away falsehood, let each one of you speak the truth with his neighbor, for we are members one of another. 

 

If our minds are set on Jesus who is the way, the truth, and the life, how can we let lies come from our mouths?  Truth in the mind should manifest as truth in our speech.

Be angry and do not sin; do not let the sun go down on your anger, and give no opportunity to the devil.

 

Anger is natural.  Paul doesn’t say not to get angry.  He says not to let anger lead to sin.  Anger can be righteous.  It motivates us to address wrongs and injustices and sin.  But some anger, especially anger we let stew in our hearts gives opportunity for sin to take root.  It leads to things like resentment, bitterness, enmity, and strife.  These are the things that rob us of the joy we have in Christ and they undermine the love we’re called to have for each other.  They’re the things that tear apart churches and that undermine our witness to the Good News of Jesus.

 

Let the thief no longer steal, but rather let him labor, doing honest work with his own hands, so that he may have something to share with anyone in need.

 

Stealing is wrong.  That’s a no-brainer.  But Paul goes a step further.  Being diligent in honest work and earning a living gives us the opportunity to share with and care for others.  The world lies and tells us that it’s every man for himself.  Jesus reminds us that as he gave himself for us, we ought to give ourselves for others.  The world also lies and tells us that work is bad, but when we go back to the beginning of the story in Genesis one of the things that hits us right between the eyes as truth is that God created us for work, it’s our divine calling, it’s how we serve God.  In fact, working faithfully in service to him is how we bear his image.  The problem is that our work has been spoiled by sin.  We’ll have to wait for Jesus’ return before we’ll see an end to fighting thistles and weeds with the sweat of our brows, but Jesus nevertheless gives us reason to be diligent in our work, doing everything as unto the Lord.  In Jesus work becomes a means of worship.

Let no corrupting talk come out of your mouths, but only such as is good for building up, as fits the occasion, that it may give grace to those who hear.

 

If our minds have been renewed, there should be nothing corrupt coming out of our mouths.  I know that’s often hard, but instead, with minds full of grace, we should be using our mouths to bring that grace into the world in what we say and how we say it.

 

Finally, Paul writes in verse 30:

And do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God, by whom you were sealed for the day of redemption.

 

I think he’s pretty well covered all of us here, but just in case you don’t struggle with any of these sins, Paul’s still got you covered: Don’t grieve the Holy Spirit by how you live and act.  That means that we need to live as people on whom God has placed his Spirit as a mark.  I had a friend who said he wouldn’t put a fish sticker on his car because he knew he was an offensive driver and he didn’t want to discredit Jesus or the Church.  We think that a sticker on our car or maybe a cross hanging around our neck marks us out as God’s people.  They might, but what really marks us out is the Holy Spirit.  Jesus has redeemed us and given us a promise of life in the age to come, but until that time comes, he’s given us his Spirit to give us the ability to live that future life—or at least some real semblance of it—right now.  The Holy Spirit takes God’s future and pulls it into the present for us.  The Holy Spirit gives us reason to trust in the promise of Jesus and because of that we have hope.  Brothers and Sisters, that hope should shape everything about how we live today and it should be the first thing the world notices about us.

And so Paul can end saying:

Let all bitterness and wrath and anger and clamor and slander be put away from you, along with all malice.  Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ forgave you.  (Ephesians 4:30-32)

We all know people who are bitter and angry.  I remember counselling someone once who was overflowing with bitterness, but he said, “This is just who I am and I’m not going to change!”  He thought that by being bitter he was being free and that I was trying to chain him up by telling him to stop being bitter, but in fact it was bitterness that had him in bondage.  His mind was captive to futility and his bitterness was the evidence.  But the Spirit frees us from that kind of bondage.  The Spirit sets our minds on Jesus and the natural and free outflowing then ought to be an outpouring of Christ-likeness in our lives: things like love and kindness and grace.  The fruit of the Spirit.  And, Friends, in doing that we manifest Jesus and his kingdom, we manifest our hope to the world around us.

I think this is part of what St. Paul was getting at when he wrote to the Philippians, telling them to “work out their salvation”.  “Work out your salvation” doesn’t mean that we save ourselves through good works.  What Paul’s getting at is the practical outworking of the Spirit having renewed our minds.  The Spirit has thrown out the filth, the lies, the rebellion so that we can think straight about the Lord Jesus and so that we can set our minds on the hope of the world and the age to come.  Paul’s given this list of dos and don’ts, but his point isn’t to put us into some new kind of bondage.  He’s trying to show us the mind of Christ so that we are set free to really and truly live out the Good News.  It’s like learning the rules of spelling and grammar.  Those rules aren’t there to bind us up.  They’re there so that once we’ve learned them we can be free to speak and write and express ourselves.  And so Paul shows us Jesus and he reminds us what Jesus has done for us and what his new world is going to be like and he turns us loose, and says: work out what the salvation Jesus has brought us looks like within the unique particulars of your life and personality and gifts.  What does it look like be faithful to Jesus and to live out the Christian hope for you.  How can you in your life and vocation and with your unique gifts live and think as a day-dweller in the midst of a world still in the dark?  Brothers and Sisters, this is what it means to have the mind of Christ.  In Jesus the Spirit has set our minds on something worthwhile and of value.  Christ has died.  Christ has risen.  Christ will come again.  Now let that truth work out into your actions and in your day to day life.  Be transformed by the renewing of your mind.

Let us pray: Heavenly Father, as we acknowledge in the Collect, on our own can do nothing to please you.  Our minds are set on sin and rebellion, but in our Baptism Jesus has plunged us into the Holy Spirit and changed everything.  By your Spirit, Father, set our hearts and minds on Jesus that we might live our lives in ways pleasing to you, in ways that honour the Lord Jesus, and in ways that manifest his kingdom in the world around us.  Through him we pray.  Amen.

A Sermon for the Eighteenth Sunday after Trinity

St. Matthew 22:34-46

by William Klock

The theologian Karl Barth is said to have once replied to an interviewer, “The answer is Jesus, now what’s the question.”  Everything eventually went back to Jesus for him, nothing was ever about Professor Barth.  He was once asked when he was saved.  He replied: a.d. 33.  It wasn’t about him; everything was about Jesus.  Despite his shortcomings, Barth knew that Jesus is the centre of, the answer to everything.

And, Brothers and Sisters, this is why it’s so important we understand who Jesus is.  We have the Nicene Creed—and the Athanasian Creed, for that matter—because there were those in the Church who got Jesus wrong.  Arius, for example, denied that Jesus is God.  That was the hot issue in the early Fourth Century and one of the reasons why the Council of Nicaea was called—and why the men there drafted the first version of the creed we still recite every Sunday seventeen hundred years later.  Who is Jesus?  He is “the only Son of God, eternally begotten of the Father, God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten, not made, of one being with the Father.”  As true as all these statements are, as useful as they have been in guarding the Church from heresy these many centuries, this is not the language of the Bible.  It’s the language of the Greek philosopher Plato, whose teaching had been revived and repopularised by a man named Plotinus about seventy-five years before the Council of Nicaea met.  The Church Fathers of that time latched onto the language and categories of this “Neoplatonism” to express the truths of important doctrines like the Trinity and the Incarnation.  But this was something new.  The writers of the New Testament, men like Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, Paul, and Peter never turned to philosophy, let alone pagan philosophers, to explain who Jesus is.  They followed precisely where Jesus had trod before them and drew, again not on philosophy, but on the imagery and narrative of Israel’s scriptures—on the Old Testament.  And our Gospel lesson today is one of the greatest of these passages, recorded by Matthew and quoting Jesus himself.

The passage, again Matthew 22:34-46, comes near the end of Jesus’ ministry.  It records another of his disputes with the Pharisees, this time in Jerusalem during that final week that led him to the cross.  That week began with his triumphal entry into the city and his cleansing of the temple.  It follows on the heels of that encounter he had with the Sadducees—the one where they asked him about a hypothetical woman who outlived seven different husbands.  If the resurrection of the dead is truly our hope, they asked—and remember they were the ones who didn’t believe in the resurrection of the dead—then to which of those seven husbands will she be married in the age to come?  It was a silly question meant to trap Jesus and he famous responded and shut them down saying that the God of Abraham is not the god of the dead, but of the living.  And that’s the end of Jesus’ disputes with the Sadducees.  They’ve got nothing more to say.  Our Gospel passage follows immediately.  Matthew writes in verse 34:

But when the Pharisees heard that he had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together.

 

Now it’s the Pharisees turn to be shut down by Jesus.  This will be his last dispute with them.  The next chapter, Chapter 23, is a long denunciation of the scribes and Pharisees.  It’s the beginning of the end.  They’ve been shut down by Jesus at every turn and now go off to plot to have Jesus killed.  But in both disputes Jesus draws on Israel’s story to explain who he is and what it means that he’s the Messiah.  So let’s continue with this final dispute with the Pharisees.  Look at verses 35 and 36:

And one of them, a lawyer, asked him a question to test him.  “Teacher, which is the great commandment in the Law?”

 

The Sadducees took issue with Jesus over his teaching about resurrection.  The Pharisees took issue with Jesus over his approach to the law.  They’d counted up all of the Lord’s commandments to Israel and the total came to 613.  From what I read, there was apparently debate, at least in some circles, about which commandment was the most important.  I think, though, that the Pharisees had this one figured out pretty well.  Israel’s “creed”—and her daily prayer, and still her daily prayer as part of her liturgies for morning and evening prayer—was the Shema, Deuteronomy 6:4: “Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one.”  And it goes on, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might.”  These Pharisees, however, seem to have expected Jesus to say something else.  I’m not sure what they expected.  They just expected that whatever he said about the law would be wrong.  But look at what he says in verses 37-40:

And he said to him, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.  This is the great and first commandment.  And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself.  On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets.”

 

And there’s nothing here the Pharisees can argue about.  Jesus gives the right answer.  And yet even though it’s the right answer, even though the Pharisees couldn’t disagree with it leaves them condemned—and, once again, fuming.  They’d watched Jesus for three years and what made them so angry about him and about his ministry is that he didn’t do the law right.  He healed on the Sabbath.  He declared people clean and bypassed the priests.  He forgave sins and bypassed the temple and sacrificial system.  And yet when they ask him what’s most important about the law, he gives the same answer they would have.  And that really strikes back at them.  What if they’re the ones who are doing the law all wrong?  What if the new thing that will transform Israel, the thing the Lord had promised, what if it really is happening in Jesus?  Through the Prophets the Lord had promised that one day he would set his people to rights so that they would be able to really and truly live the law—something they’d failed to do over and over and over.  The Pharisees expected the Messiah would be the one to set Israel to rights, but they also saw themselves as the ones preparing the way for him with their teaching on the law.  Jesus’ statement here subtly—or maybe not so subtly—is a statement of his Messiahship and yet another call to the Pharisees to repent, because they’ve got it wrong.  It’s call to get in line with the new thing that Israel’s God is doing in their midst.  So they can’t argue with Jesus’ answer, but they’re still convinced he’s wrong.  They’re left frustrated and fuming.

So in the first part of our Gospel, Jesus gives them the answer they dare not question, but then he in turn asks them a question that they dare not answer—as Bp. Wright puts it.  With his answer about the law it seems like Jesus has shut up the Pharisees as soundly as he had shut up the Sadducees, but Jesus knew there was one more point that needed to be made.  What they understood of the person and ministry of the Messiah was just as important to the Pharisees as how they understood the law.  And so Jesus goes on to tie the two together.  Look at verses 41 and 42:

Now while the Pharisees were gathered together, Jesus asked them a question, saying, “What do you think about the [Messiah]? Whose son is he?”

 

If the answer to their question points to the ministry of the Messiah, then it makes sense next to ask just who they think this Messiah is or will be.  To be more specific, Jesus gets points in the right direction with that odd question about whose son they think the Messiah is.  He knew very well what their answer would be if he put the question to them that way.  Everyone knew that the Messiah was—or would be—the son of David.  In fact, that was one of the Messianic titles.  And the Pharisees answer just as we’d expect.

They said to him, “The son of David.”

 

And now Jesus responds with what may be one of his most enigmatic sayings.  I remember reading this passage many times when I was growing up and knowing that it had to do with Jesus being God or something like that, but never really understanding how he really made his point—until in my late teens I discovered there are these great books called “commentaries” that our pastor had in his office and they’re great at explaining things like background and context—or in this case explaining that Jesus was quoting from Psalm 110.  They knew the psalms by heart.  Most of us don’t and so we often need someone to make these connections for us.  (If you want another good reason to pray the Daily Office—Morning and Evening Prayer—it’s that it will help you internalise the Psalter so you’ll be more likely to recognise it in passages like this.)  And the more I studied and, especially, the more I’ve come to look at Jesus in light of the Old Testament, the more profound I’ve realised his question to the Pharisees really is.

So in saying that the Messiah is the son of David they give the right answer—but it’s not the whole answer.  And so Jesus replies in verses 43-45:

“How is it then that David, in the Spirit, calls him Lord, saying,

         “‘The Lord said to my Lord,

         “Sit at my right hand,

                  until I put your enemies under your feet”’?

If then David calls him Lord, how is he his son?”

 

It’s that “The Lord said to my Lord” bit that’s confusing here.  Again, it helps if we know that Jesus is quoting from Psalm 110.  It’s the most oft-quoted Psalm in the New Testament.  And if we go back to it you’ll see that in our English Bibles the first “Lord” is in small caps.  That means that this is the “Lord” that refers to God.  It’s the title the Jews used instead of saying the divine name that was given to Moses: Yahweh, “I am”.  This important distinction between Lord and Lord is lost in the Greek version, which is what Matthew quotes from.  But if we understand this, then the passage starts to make more sense.  Instead of “The Lord said to my Lord,” it’s “Yahweh said to my Lord”.  It’s not just any two “lords” here; it’s Yahweh, the God of Israel addressing someone.  That makes more sense, doesn’t it?  But we still might not know who “my Lord”, the second “Lord” refers to.

At this point, let’s just look at the whole psalm.  Again, this is Psalm 110.  Go ahead and turn there.  It’s titled “A Psalm of or to or for David”.

Yahweh says to my Lord:

         “Sit at my right hand,

until I make your enemies your footstool.”

Yahweh sends forth from Zion

         your mighty scepter.

         Rule in the midst of your enemies!

Your people will offer themselves freely

         on the day of your power,

         in holy garments;

from the womb of the morning,

         the dew of your youth will be yours.

Yahweh has sworn

         and will not change his mind,

“You are a priest forever

         after the order of Melchizedek.”

Yahweh is at your right hand;

         he will shatter kings on the day of his wrath.

He will execute judgment among the nations,

         filling them with corpses;

he will shatter chiefs

         over the wide earth.

He will drink from the brook by the way;

         therefore he will lift up his head.

 

So, first, “my Lord” is David.  The psalm is addressed to David, maybe written by a court musician or possibly a prophet like Nathan.  David is his Lord, his King, and he sings of what the Lord, Yahweh, the God of Israel, has promised to King David.  There’s no reason to think that this was intended to be a messianic psalm when it was written.  It speaks of God’s promises to David.  Yahweh, the Lord, seats him in a place of honour and gives him his sceptre—think of Samuel going out to anoint the lowly shepherd son of Jesse.  The Lord will give him victory over his enemies.  David was not of the priestly tribe of Levi, but the Lord, in making him King in Jerusalem (Zion), gives him the priesthood of Melchizedek, the priest-king of Jerusalem in the days of Abraham—and that kingly authority will be forever.  But then things are reversed.  As Yahweh has seated David at his right hand, now Yahweh places himself at David’s right hand to give him victory, to make him the instrument of his judgement and wrath on the nations.

It’s not hard to see how, many years later, this psalm came to embody the messianic hopes of Israel.  In a time when no son of David was on the throne and Israel was governed by fake Jews like Herod and foreign pagans like the Romans, the people looked to the promises of this psalm for hope.  The people longed for the son of David to return.  David’s throne—his kingly line—as the psalm implies, was to stand forever.  The people longed for the day when their God would judge the nations and so they sang this psalm in hopeful longing, sure of God’s faithfulness and looking for the day when the son of David would come with might to take up his throne.  Like so many others in Israel, this was the hope of the Pharisees.  When they spoke of the Messiah as the son of David, they were looking forward to the great king who would come to bring God’s judgement and to defeat the nations.

But this gets back to Jesus’ answer to their question in the first part of the passage—the answer that pointed to the ministry of the Messiah that would finally set right the hearts of the people, that would finally enable them to truly love God and neighbour.  If the son of David is just a king who comes to crush the nations, what does that do to solve the heart problem of God’s people?  How does it solve the problem of sin and Irael’s inability to keep the law?

So Jesus plays off the way in which this psalm had come to embody messianic hopes and that it was commonly attributed to David.  They understood the psalm to be about the son of David—the Messiah—and Jesus says, “Well, okay, that’s all well and good, but there’s more, because if in composing the psalm David refers to the central figure—the one you identify as his son—but calls him “my Lord”, how can that be?  How can the Messiah be David’s son and David’s lord (his master) at the same time?”

Jesus is, in fact, the son of David, but here he draws in another identification that we see throughout Matthew’s gospel.  Do you remember when Jesus asked the disciples who they thought he was?  That’s in Matthew 16.  And Peter responded, “You are the [Messiah], the son of the living God”.  That was another option the Pharisees could have given in answer to Jesus’ question.  There was more than one facet to the Messiah, but hardly anyone was putting them all together.

The son of David is the great king, the one who will come in judgement to set all to rights by crushing the enemies of the people.  But there’s also the son of the living God.  In Matthew’s gospel the son of the living God is the representative of Israel.  This title, too, is drawn from the Old Testament Prophets.  This son will fulfil the Lord’s purposes for Israel where Israel has consistently failed.  This is the son who was called out of Egypt—remember how Joseph and Mary fled Herod?  This is the beloved son, the anointed servant of God—remember Jesus’ baptism and the descent of the Spirit on him?  This is the Israel who is obedient in the wilderness, who is consistently faithful to the Lord and to his commands—remember Jesus tempted by the devil?  This is the son of God who acts to make peace—remember the sermon on the mount and Jesus’ statement, “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be sons of God”?  This is the son of God who is tempted to abandon his servanthood, first in the wilderness, then at the cross, but is faithful both times.

Eventually, Matthew brings the son of the living God and the son of David together as Jesus stands before the high priest, Caiaphas.  “I adjure you by the living God, tell us if you are the Christ, the Son of God,” he demands.  And Jesus responds, “You have said so. But I tell you, from now on you will see the Son of Man seated at the right hand of Power and coming on the clouds of heaven.”  Jesus brings together both of these “sons” in his answer.  He brings together the son of the living God story about the one who will stand as Israel’s representative, as the servant who will suffer for the sake of his people, and the story we see in Psalm 110 of the son of David, the great king who will rule over the nations with the authority of the God of Israel.  When we put these stories together we see Jesus as the Lord’s anointed servant, the son who humbles himself to represent the people, and who, because he has suffered and died, will be raised to God’s right hand where he will reign as both king and judge.  That’s what upset the high priest—Jesus’ claim that he would sit as judge over the leaders of Israel with the authority of the God of Israel.

But our Gospel lesson today, this final dispute with the Pharisees, is part of the story that gets us from Peter’s confession that Jesus is the son of the living God to Jesus’ claim before the high priest.  Who is Jesus?  Jesus himself draws on the narrative of the people of God.  He is the son of God who will represent the people in his suffering and death and he is the son of David, not just by birth, but because it will be on account of his suffering and death that he will be raised to rule at the right hand of God.

And, of course, this also redirects the people to the real source of their problems.  When they limited the identity of the Messiah to the son of David, they saw the gentiles, the nations, people like the Romans as their enemies—people the king could put to death with his sword and his army.  But when we bring in the son of God, the suffering servant, who dies and rises again, we see that what he’s really come to defeat is are enemies common to Jew and gentile alike: sin and death.  The Romans, the Babylonians, the Assyrians, the Edomites, the Egyptians—the nations—were never really the real problem and destroying them was never really the solution.  Sin and death are the enemies—and they’re the common enemy of all humanity.  And so it’s then through this dual identity—both son of God and son of David—that Jesus opens the way for the salvation not only of Israel, but of the nations.

Matthew ends the passage in verse 46:

And no one was able to answer him a word, nor from that day did anyone dare to ask him any more questions.

 

Jesus shut down the Pharisees once and for all.  The next we see of them, they’re plotting to have him killed.  And, of course, if they’d really understood what Jesus was getting at here, maybe they’d have thought twice.  Instead they help Jesus to fulfil his role as suffering servant.  They didn’t really understand.  Neither did the disciples.  Not at that point, anyway.  But that would change once Jesus has been raised from death and had ascended to the right hand of his Father.  Ten days later the Spirit descended on his disciples, just as he’d promised—not just as Jesus had promised, but just as the Lord had promised through the Prophets centuries before—and then they understood.  David died and was buried, but Jesus rose from death and is seated at the right hand of God.  Let me close with what Peter preached that day:

“Brothers, I may say to you with confidence about the patriarch David that he both died and was buried, and his tomb is with us to this day.  Being therefore a prophet, and knowing that God had sworn with an oath to him that he would set one of his descendants on his throne, he foresaw and spoke about the resurrection of the [Messiah], that he was not abandoned to Hades, nor did his flesh see corruption.  This Jesus God raised up, and of that we all are witnesses.  Being therefore exalted at the right hand of God, and having received from the Father the promise of the Holy Spirit, he has poured out this that you yourselves are seeing and hearing.  For David did not ascend into the heavens, but he himself says,

         “‘The Lord said to my Lord,

         “Sit at my right hand,

         until I make your enemies your footstool.”’

  Let all the house of Israel therefore know for certain that God has made him both Lord and [Messiah], this Jesus whom you crucified.”  (Acts 2:29-36)

Let’s pray: Almighty God, gracious Father, we give you thank for your promises and for your faithfulness to them.  We think today especially of your promises to David and the Prophets that gave them a hope for your Messiah.  He is both David’s son and your own son, the true Israel, and in him we have forgiveness of sins and the life of your kingdom.  We pray that as we live the life he gives, we would also live in hope, knowing your faithfulness and trusting in your promises, and joyfully expecting—and participating in—the work your Church, empowered by Jesus and the Spirit as we look forward to your renewal of all things.  Amen.

A Sermon for the Seventeenth Sunday after Trinity

Ephesians 4:1-10

by William Klock

Have you ever been part of a group that forgot what it was about?  About twenty years ago I joined the Sons of the American Revolution.  It’s a civil fraternity for descendants of those who fought in the American Revolution.  Because you have to prove your lineage, it’s a group that’s big on genealogy, but its main purpose is to promote the ideals of American democracy.  I enjoyed the SAR for several years, but then we had a new guy transfer in from out-of-state.  He was a registered parliamentarian.  Yes, there is such a thing.  And before too long he was picking apart our bylaws—and the bylaws of the state organisation—and pretty soon all of our meetings were consumed with fights over rules governing the organisation.  There were no more presentations and lectures on history and civics and one by one people started dropping out.  By the time the parliamentarian got his way, there was almost no one left and when the monthly presentations and lectures came back they were consistently highjacked to defend the agenda that had been pushed for those last several years.  And membership dwindled even more.  It’s easy to lose focus.  It’s easy to forget what we’re about.

I think, Brothers and Sisters, we’re all probably well aware, the same sort of thing can happen easily in the Church.  We’re brought together by Jesus to live out and to proclaim the Good News, but we lose focus.  The Church can easily become a social club for people to sit around and bicker about which Bible translation to read or what colour the new carpet should be or how to organise next year’s budget.  Or maybe it’s not trivialities that side-track us.  Sometimes even important things can cause us to forget who we are.  Years ago I was in an online discussion forum where, one night, a number of us had a horrible, ugly, no-holds-barred Internet brawl over the nature of—get this—the love of God.  There we were arguing over the love of God while being so unloving that some people were throwing down their keyboards in anger, never to return.  Talk about forgetting our identity!

Our Epistle this morning is taken from Ephesians 4.  This is where St. Paul launches into the second half of his letter.  And if we read between the lines we can get a sense of the problems he was addressing in the Ephesian churches.  They were struggling to maintain their unity.  And as we saw in our lessons from Galatians this past month, in the early Church one of the chief causes for disunity was the divide between Jews and Gentiles.  The first Christians were all Jews and part of being Jewish meant keeping apart from the Gentiles—the non-Jews.  The Jews found their identity in their having been set apart by the Lord.  Circumcision, diet, Sabbath, these were the things that set Jews apart and drew a boundary: Jews on the inside and Gentiles on the outside.  They were clean, they were pure; Gentiles were unclean.  And then the Good News went out to the Gentiles and they started coming to the Church.  And then Paul was called to actually go out as a missionary to the Gentiles and to bring them in.  And the Jewish Christians didn’t know what to do.  Did Gentiles need to become Jewish converts before they could truly follow Jesus?   Did they need to be circumcised and observe the Sabbath and Jewish dietary laws?  This all became a huge source of division and disunity in the churches.

And so in Ephesians Paul takes these people back to the basics.  He takes them back to what it means to be a Christian.  In Chapter 1 he reminds them that Jesus is their hope.  He’s the Messiah and he tells them, “When you heard the Good News, when you believed in Jesus, he sealed you—all of you—with the Holy Spirit.  The Spirit is Jesus’ guarantee to you of the inheritance he has promised.”  And Paul also stresses what that inheritance is: It’s their redemption as God’s own people—again, all of them, not just the Jews, but the Gentile believers too.  When they read that they must have remembered the stories of Pentecost—maybe some of them had even been there—and remembered how the Spirit brought together people from every corner of the world and overcame their different languages to forge them into one church.  As the Lord had once sealed to himself the people of Israel by the gift of the law, he has now sealed these people, his new Israel, the Church, by the gift of the Spirit.

At the end of Chapter one, just a few verses later, Paul stresses the kingship of Jesus.  Jesus died and God raised him from the dead and gave him a throne—a throne and a dominion and a name above every earthly power.  Jesus is the world’s true King and the Church is his body, called to declare his death and resurrection and called to proclaim the Good News that he is Lord until every enemy has been put under his feet.  We brought death into the world when we sinned and rebelled against God, but in Jesus he has unleashed life.  Jesus has begun the work of recreation and setting Creation to rights and part of that setting to rights is manifested visibly in the unity of the Church—in the unity that was so dramatically seen at Pentecost and in the unity that should have been so dramatically seen in churches like the one at Ephesus, as Jews and Gentiles came together as one people, as the true Israel of God.  In 2:14 Paul reminds them that Jesus is their—and our—peace.  In his flesh he’s made those who were near—that’s the Jews—and those who were far—that’s the Gentiles—one in himself.  Through his cross he’s put to death the hostility that once kept the two apart.  Through Jesus we all have access to the Father in the one Spirit.  We’re one household, he writes—and the house is God’s.  We are his temple, each one of us brought from our particular background, each of us with our unique stories to tell, but brought together by the Spirit, made holy, and made a dwelling place for God.  Brothers and Sisters, that what the Church is to be.

And now in our Epistle today from Chapter 4 Paul sums things up for the Christians in Ephesus with three basic points.  First and foremost, they’ve been called to follow the King; second, that they’ve been given and equipped with God’s amazing grace so that each has a part to play, a role to fill in the serving the King as the Church; and finally, he stresses the unity they have in Jesus.  It’s a wonderful reminder that unity isn’t something we create; it’s something Christians naturally have in Jesus.  Our duty is to guard that God-given unity.  Numbers two and three, the grace and the unity, tend to take care of themselves when we remember number one—when we remember that we’ve been called to follow the King.

Look at Ephesians 4:1-3.

I therefore, a prisoner for the Lord [Paul is writing to them from prison], urge you to walk in a manner worthy of the calling to which you have been called, with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love, eager to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.

 

This is something that Paul stresses over and over in his epistles.  We’ve been called to follow Jesus and that means walking—living with each other and bearing with each other—humbly, gently, and patiently in love.  Friends, that’s how God has dealt with us.  He created all things good.  He provided everything human beings need to live.  And we made a mess of it.  We’re the ones who doubted his goodness.  We’re the ones who disobeyed his commands.  We’re the ones who corrupted his Creation.  And yet the almighty Creator of the universe who is perfectly good and perfectly holy has been patient with us.  We stand condemned to death before him, but he came as one of us, humbling himself, taking up our flesh and dying the death that we deserve so that we might be forgiven and restored to his fellowship.  As Jesus said, he came to those condemned, not to heap more condemnation on us, but to redeem us.

If that is how the Lord has dealt with us, shouldn’t we deal humbly, patiently, and lovingly with each other?  It’s a struggle.  It’s not easy.  Christians can gossip just as well as non-Christians.  We rub each other the wrong way.  We do things that offend.  We make mistakes.  And, yes, we’re called to correct each other, but we don’t correct each other by gossiping to others.  We don’t correct each other by ignoring them or putting them out of our lives.  We correct in love and with the hope of restoration—just as God has corrected us.  Friends, when something happens between you and someone else in the Church, is your first thought to take offense, to get upset, to assert your rights—or is it to maintain the unity Jesus has given us?  Is it to keep the bonds of peace the Spirit has forged?  We struggle to be patient, humble, and loving because we haven’t kept Jesus before us, because we’ve forgotten that this is how he’s dealt with us, because we have a tendency to take grace for granted.

Brothers and Sisters, remember our calling.  Look at verses 4-6:

There is one body and one Spirit—just as you were called to the one hope that belongs to your call—one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all.

 

One, one, one, one, one.  One body, one Spirit, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and he’s Father of all—and this is our one call.  The call of the Church at one point reached each of us.  At some point each of us, through a parent, a friend, someone, heard the proclamation that Jesus died and rose again, that he is Lord and the world’s true King.  At some point each of us heard that.  It was a call to repentance, a call to turn away from everything that is not Jesus and to find our hope, our security, our calling, our life in him.  At some point each of us believed.  We affirmed that Jesus is Lord—not Caesar, not money, not sex, not power, not recognition.  Jesus is Lord and we gave him our eternal allegiance.  At some point the call reached us and because we have believed we’ve now been called to carry that gospel, that Good News to the world.

Remember what the word “gospel” meant in the Old Testament.  It was the proclamation of good news. It was the good news that the army had won a great victory against the enemy.  It was the good news that a people in exile could return to their homes.  And remember what the word “gospel” meant in the Greco-Roman world.  It was the news spread by imperial heralds that a new king had taken the throne to rule the empire.  And “gospel” for the first Christians rolled all of that together.  Good News, they proclaimed!  Jesus has won the victory over sin and death!  Good News!  Jesus is Lord!  Jesus is the world’s true King!  Brothers and Sisters, the Gospel is not good advice.  What we proclaim isn’t a take-it-or-leave-it proposition.  We’re not going out to tell people that Jesus is another viable option on a religious smorgasbord.  It’s Good News.  We are heralds of the news that Jesus has risen from the dead, that his kingdom is breaking in, that it is unleashing life into the world, and he is King and no other.  The Good News is a call to the world to repent, to turn aside from everything that is not Jesus and to take hold of him in faith lest we be handed forever over to death.

Paul says that there is one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all and to proclaim that message the one Spirit has created one body, one Church to act as the herald of the kingdom.  In Ephesus the division between Jew and Gentile was threatening that unity, but Paul reminds them that Jesus has created a new family.  This is what so much of Chapter 2 was about, but it’s a theme that runs through the Gospels and the rest of the New Testament.  God doesn’t have two families or two peoples.  Jesus came in fulfilment of the prophecies given by God as far back as Abraham.  Through Abraham’s family he would restore a knowledge of himself to a world that had forgotten him.  Through Abraham’s family he would bring blessing to the world and set his Creation to rights.  Israel failed, but Jesus came, Abraham’s son, and he did what Israel had failed to do.  He gathered a new Israel around himself, starting with his twelve disciples, and opened to Jew and Gentile alike.  At Pentecost he gave his law, not written on stone tablets this time, but written on the very hearts of his people by the Spirit.  We, the body of Christ, represent God’s future and so we must guard our unity from whatever might drive us apart.  Paul writes about guarding our Jesus-centred unity the way soldiers guard a city from an enemy.

It’s hard for us to grasp just how important unity is in Paul’s teaching and in his vision of the Church.  We’ve become so used to the idea of division.  We’ve got the Orthodox and the Romans and the Protestants and within our own Protestant tradition we’ve got hundreds of smaller divisions.  Even our own Anglican tradition is in the midst of a realignment.  Sometimes the divisions have allowed us to grow so far apart and our languages and practices are so different that it can even be hard to recognize fellow Christians.

Some divisions take place over serious issues.  Those of you who started our own church left the Anglican Church of Canada because the gospel was no longer being preached and because sin was being promoted as virtue.  In more recent years we’ve had other divisions in the Comox Valley because of teaching that denies the divinity of Jesus.  These are issues that create division and they undermine our unity in Jesus.  He is our centre and if you preach a different Jesus and if you preach a different message as the Good News you’ve separated yourself from the body Jesus created.  As important as unity is, Paul also stresses many times that we are to have nothing to do with those who preach a different gospel.

But what Paul is specifically addressing here are the unnecessary divisions in the body.  The Ephesians all believed in the same Jesus and the same Good News.  The reasons their division were sinful was because they were over things that should not divide the body of Christ.  The differences between Jew and Gentile should not divide.  The differences of socio-economic class or of race or language should never divide.  Our personalities, our priorities, even the wrongs we do each other should never divide.  Instead we need to be patient, humble, and gentle with each other as we guard the unity we have by virtue of our shared life in Jesus.

Finally, in verses 7-11 Paul writes about the different gifts Jesus has given through the Spirit.

But grace was given to each one of us according to the measure of Christ’s gift. 

Paul’s about to launch into a list of some of the many gifts the Spirit gives to equip the Church for our calling to proclaim Jesus and his kingdom, but before he does that he quotes from Psalm 68:

Therefore it says,

          “When he ascended on high he led a host of captives,

                  and he gave gifts to men.”

(In saying, “He ascended,” what does it mean but that he had also descended into the lower regions, the earth?  He who descended is the one who also ascended far above all the heavens, that he might fill all things.)

 

The psalm is about Moses.  In the Exodus the Lord defeated the Egyptians and led Israel out of her bondage to them.  When the people had camped at Mt. Sinai Moses ascended up the mountain and when he came down he had the law written on stone tablets.  And Paul sees Jesus doing something similar.  Moses points to Jesus.  The Old Covenant points to a new and better one.  In his death and resurrection Jesus has led us in a new exodus from our bondage to sin and death.  After he rose from the dead Jesus ascended to take his throne and to rule from heaven until every enemy has been put under his feet.  But instead of coming down as Moses did with the law, Jesus gave his people the gift of God’s own Spirit.  When Moses came down the mountain with the law God created a people for himself and just so, but on an even grander scale, Jesus has created a new people for himself in his ascension and his sending of the Spirit.  We are the people of whom the old Israel was a type and a shadow.  In our baptism Jesus plunges us into the Spirit, he frees us from our bondage to sin and death, he gives us life, he unites us in that one Spirit, and he gives us grace and equips us both for our life together as his people and for our mission as his people to proclaim his kingdom.

That’s what Paul is writing about here.  But it’s not just the Font.  It’s not just our baptism.  Each Sunday we come to the Lord’s Table.  In Baptism we reach out to Jesus in faith and are united with him by the Spirit for the first time, but each week we gather and in the Lord’s Supper we celebrate the Sacrament of our continuing life in Jesus by the Spirit.  Here we come and as Jesus feeds us we eat of the one bread and drink of the one cup, again reminding us that as individuals we are united: one faith, one Spirit, one Lord, one God and Father of all.

Think on that as you come to the Lord’s Table this morning.  We share in the one bread and the one cup because we share in one Baptism into Jesus by the Spirit.  Despite all of our differences, we are one and we’re one because we share a common life in the Lord Jesus.  Dear friends, let the Lord’s call to his Table this morning be a reminder to guard the unity Jesus has given, let it be a reminder to walk in a manner worthy of his call—to bear with each other patiently, humbly, lovingly, graciously as Jesus borne with us.

Let us pray:  Heavenly Father, as we asked in the Collect we ask again: may your grace always go before us and follow after us.  May we be so enveloped by the grace you have shown us in Jesus that we can’t help but share that grace with each other and with the world.  Give us grace to guard the unity we have in Jesus.  Give us grace to remember that we are one in him.  And strengthen us with your grace to proclaim to the world the truth that has brought us together: Jesus died and rose again.  He is Lord and life.  Amen.