Living Words

A Sermon for the Sixth Sunday after Trinity

Romans 6:3-11 & St. Matthew 5:20-26

by William Klock

Our Gospel today is just a short clip from Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount.  The whole sermon runs for three chapters, from Matthew 5 to Matthew 7.  Luke records a similar sermon preached another time.  You could say that this was Jesus’ kingdom manifesto and he probably preached this sermon or something very much like it wherever he went.  And wherever he preached it people responded just as people today respond to it: Jesus starts out his sermon with what we call the Beatitudes: Blessed are the poor in spirit, the mourners, the meek, the peacemakers, those who hunger and thirst for righteousness.  Jesus tells them that they’ve got to be the salt of the earth and the light of the world.  Hearing that we think, “Oh!  That’s really nice.  Wouldn’t the world be a better place if we all lived that way.”  But as Jesus keeps preaching and as what he says sinks in we think, “But Jesus, that’s impossible!”  In verse 20, as today’s Gospel begins, Jesus announces:

Unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.

 

The Pharisees were the most righteous people around.  They lived their lives, right down to the last detail, as if they were living in the temple itself—the place where earth and heaven intersected.  They weren’t priests, but they lived as though they were.  They lived each day as if they were in the presence of God and they encouraged everyone else to repent and do the same.  That, they believed, was how the kingdom would come: when Israel stopped compromising the law and living like the Gentiles.  The problem was that it was next to impossible for an ordinary person to do.  The Pharisees were mostly rich people who didn’t have to worry about getting dirty with life.  And yet here’s Jesus talking to ordinary people and telling them: If you want to see the kingdom, you’ve got to do better than the Pharisees.

Jesus spoke with authority.  He did amazing things.  People were eager to listen.  People had to have been taken aback when he said this, but they were willing to keep listening.  Maybe he didn’t mean what it sounded like he meant.  But then Jesus goes on and it’s exactly what he said—the righteousness of the Pharisees doesn’t go far enough.  Look at verses 21 and 22:

You have heard that it was said to those of old, ‘You shall not murder; and whoever murders will be liable to judgment.’  But I say to you that everyone who is angry with his brother will be liable to judgment; whoever insults his brother will be liable to the council; and whoever says, ‘You fool!’ will be liable to the hell of fire.

 

Sin culminates in violence.  That’s the lesson we see in Genesis, back at the beginning of the story.  Cain resented his brother Abel, he hated him, and eventually his hate boiled over and he killed him.  Before long violence broke out everywhere.  The first king in Genesis was praised by the people for his violence.  Genesis says that on the eve of the great flood the earth was filled with violence.  The Lord chose and called Israel to be a light on a hill—to show the nations a better way—and so in the law the Lord told Israel, “Thou shalt not murder.”  But people were still angry and they still hated.  Israel—the people who were supposed to be the light of the world—was boiling over with anger and hatred, the Pharisees against the Sadducees, the Zealots against the Herodians, and everyone against the Romans.  We still struggle with anger and hatred.  Watch or read the news and your blood boils against this person or that group who aren’t doing things right.  Your boss is a jerk.  Your husband or your wife knows exactly how to push your buttons.  Your kids don’t do what they’re told.  Your neighbour is loud and his dogs won’t stop barking.  The Prime Minister, your MP, or your MLA, they’re destroying the country.  The anger smoulders.  Granted, most of us probably don’t seriously think of murdering anyone, but Jesus says that stopping short of murder isn’t enough.  It’s not the point.  Your anger may not go any further than anger and your hate may not go any further than hate, but it’s still not pleasing to God and the person who thinks he’s righteous because he satisfied his anger or his hate with brooding, bitterness, name-calling, or cursing instead of pulling a knife or a gun is no more righteous for it.

Instead, Jesus offers an alternative: reconciliation.

So if you are offering your gift at the altar and there remember that your brother has something against you, leave your gift there before the altar and go.  First be reconciled to your brother, and then come and offer your gift.  Come to terms quickly with your accuser while you are going with him to court, lest your accuser hand you over to the judge, and the judge to the guard, and you be put in prison.  Truly, I say to you, you will never get out until you have paid the last penny.  (Matthew 5:23-26)

No matter how you read it, this is a challenge.  But it’s more challenging than it might seem at first glance.  We tend to read it as if Jesus is talking directly to us.  We picture ourselves coming to worship on a Sunday and as we put our offering in the plate or as we come to the Lord’s Table we realise that we need to go and reconcile with a brother or sister.  But Jesus isn’t talking directly to us.  He was talking to people who lived in Galilee two thousand years ago.  What he’s actually describing is one of these people making the three- or four-day trip down to Jerusalem to go to the temple.  They make the long trip, wrangling an animal for sacrifice all the way there.  Jesus describes that person going to the Temple, but as he leads the animal to where the priests offer the sacrifices, as he’s reminded of God’s love and God’s holiness, he’s also reminded of his own sin—how because of his own hate or his own anger he’s at odds with, separated from some person he should be close to.  He’s gone to all this trouble to make things right with God, but done nothing to make things right with his brother.  Back at home.  In Galilee.

Jesus didn’t really expect that this person would run back home to Galilee to make things right and leave the animal there in the temple for a week.  But Jesus’ point stands.  The kingdom way is not patting yourself on the back for hating your neighbour but not actually killing him.  The kingdom way is reconciliation.  And it contrasts not just with the righteousness of the Pharisees, but the general attitude of Jews and everyone else.  The Pharisees tried to live their lives as if they were perpetually, every day and in every thing, in the temple, in the presence of God.  And yet it wouldn’t have occurred to many of them, even if they were in the actual temple itself, that to come before the presence of our holy and loving God, to come before his presence seeking reconciliation—that was the point of the sacrifice Jesus describes—while being angry and at odds with a neighbour or a brother or a sister made a mockery out of the whole thing.

Jesus says: Yes, live each day as if you were living in the temple, living in God’s presence.  The Pharisees are right about that.  But that means understanding and appreciating that God has forgiven you and reconciled you to himself and that you need to make love and reconciliation part of your own life.  You can’t live deliberately at odds with someone, you can’t wilfully hold onto your anger and bitterness towards someone if you’re going to live before the holy and loving God who has forgiven you.

This is what it looks like to be God’s people.  This is what it means to be salt and light.  This is what it means to be Israel.  But that’s not what Israel was doing.  Jesus warns the people to reconcile before they wind up in court.  Again, to understand what Jesus is saying we have to remember to whom he was speaking.  The Jews were waiting eagerly for their day in court.  They were going to drag their enemies before the Lord and they prayed that day would come soon so that the Lord could rain down judgement on those enemies.  But that’s not what it looks like to be the salt of the earth or the light of the world.  And so Jesus warns: Your day in court will come, but it may be your enemies who win.  Judgement may fall on you instead—because you haven’t been salt and light.  As Jesus continues preaching this theme gets stronger and stronger.  To be light means to seek reconciliation because to be light means shining the reconciling love of God into the anger and hate of the world.  And if that sounds hard to us, it sounded even harder to Israel.  The Jews had suffered centuries of defeat and exile and oppression and persecution.  If any people had a right to be angry, to hate, to lash out with violence, to pray for judgement they did.  But Jesus warns: That’s not the way.  Not the way for Israel and not the way for us.  The reconciliation Jesus talks about, this loving your neighbour even though you have every right to hate him, all of this sounds impossible.  We all have people in our lives that are impossible to love.  It can’t be done.  Until we look at Jesus.

Brothers and Sisters, think of Jesus.  He was scorned and rejected.  He was mocked and beaten.  He was killed in the most brutal and humiliating way imaginable.  He didn’t deserve any of it.  He was God himself.  In Jesus God humbled himself and took on our flesh.  He became one of us.  Specifically, he became Israel’s representative, he took up the mission God had given her, the mission she had failed at so miserably, he took her punishment on himself, and being lifted on the cross on that hill outside Jerusalem he was lifted up as the true light of the world.  He embraced sin and returned love and in that God’s light was blindingly beautiful.

And now we need to leave Matthew and turn to Paul and our Epistle from Romans.  We’re jumping into the middle of Romans, but to this point Paul has been talking about grace and Jesus dying for the sins of his people.  It is by grace that sin is forgiven, he says, and wherever sin abounds, grace abounds even more.  And so he anticipates someone then saying, “Oh well, then, if grace is so good, we should keep living in sin in order to receive more grace.”  And Paul writes, “No!  Absolutely not.  We’ve died to sin.  How can we then live for sin?  We can’t!”  It’s not very different from hearing Jesus tell us to do the impossible—to reconcile with and to love our enemies.  How can we do that?  And Paul reminds us: It was impossible, but something’s changed.  We’ve died to sin and that changes everything.  He goes on in Romans 6:3-4.

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

Baptism changes everything.  Again, just as we need to imagine ourselves as First Century Galileans when we hear Jesus preaching we need to remember that Paul, too, was writing to mostly Jewish Christians only a few decades later.  When we do that what we realise is that in Romans Paul is retelling Israel’s story and in Romans 6, as he writes about Baptism and what it means and does, he’s simultaneously telling the story of Israel’s exodus from Egypt.

Israel cried out to the Lord from the misery of her slavery and oppression.  The Lord heard and he sent Moses.  Moses led the people out of their bondage and into the Promised Land and that journey began at the Red Sea.  They entered the sea as slaves and they came out the other side a free people, their captors crushed and drowned under the waves.  And yet they had to pass through the wilderness.  It took longer than the people expected.  They grumbled a lot and even got angry with the Lord and with Moses and talked about going back to Egypt.  But the Lord led his people—a cloud by day and fire by night—and eventually they entered the Promised Land.

Again, the Israelites entered the Sea slaves and they came out the other side a free people.  And Paul uses this to illustrate what happens in baptism.  We go into the water dead and we come out alive.  We go into the water slaves to sin and death and we come out free people.  And that’s what makes Jesus’ impossible calling possible.  It’s what makes possible a righteousness greater even than the righteousness of the Pharisees.  Paul says that in our baptism we are united with Jesus in his death and resurrection.  God called Israel to be salt and light.  No matter how hard she tried she couldn’t do it.  But Jesus came as the true Israelite.  His life and ministry embodied Israel’s calling.  He even followed Israel’s pattern symbolically in his own baptism and his own forty days in the wilderness.  And then he took on himself the crucifixion that Israel deserved.  His enemies killed him, but instead of returning judgement and violence on them, instead of cursing them, he responded by praying to his Father: “Forgive them, for they know not what they do.”  Sin and death, anger and hate did their worst to Jesus at the cross and Jesus overcame them with love and with sacrifice.  Impossible?  For human beings who have only their own sinful wills to rely on, yes.  But not for Jesus and not for those who have been baptised into the death and resurrection of Jesus.  We are not who we once were.  Earlier in Romans Paul describes what we used to be as being “in Adam”.  By birth we are part of the old humanity, fallen and enslaved to sin.  By virtue of our baptism we are born again.  We are now “in Christ”—in the new Adam, in Jesus the Messiah.

This is what Paul means when he writes in verses 6 and 7:

We know that our old self was crucified with him in order that the body of sin might be brought to nothing, so that we would no longer be enslaved to sin.  For one who has died has been set free from sin.

Sometimes sin comes knocking at the door and it seems impossible to say no.  Sometimes that certain person who irritates us comes around and we know we should forgive and love them but it seems impossible.  It feels like we’re still slaves to sin.  All sin has to do is show up, give us a little wave, and we cave in to it.  But Paul says, No!  That old self is dead.  It was crucified with Jesus.  We are no longer slaves.  We have been set free from bondage to sin.  Like Israel wanting to go back to Egypt, it’s easy to be tempted to go back to that bondage.  The wilderness isn’t an easy place to be, but the Lord is with us anyway.  And Paul stresses that we need to remember that sin no longer has any hold on us.  We’re new and free people in Christ.

Paul goes on:

Now if we have died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with him.  We know that Christ, being raised from the dead, will never die again; death no longer has dominion over him.  For the death he died he died to sin, once for all, but the life he lives he lives to God.  So you also must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus.  (Romans 6:8-11)

Jesus burst alive from the tomb that first Easter.  Other people, like Lazarus, had come back from the dead too, but Jesus’ resurrection is different.  Lazarus had to die again, but Jesus has gone through death and come out the other side into a kind of life that death can never touch and, Paul says, if we are in Christ then we have a share in this new life.

We’re not there yet.  We too still have to face death, but we live in hope knowing that like Jesus we will come out the other side of death alive in a way we never have been before—alive in the way that God truly intended us to be when he created us.  But what about today?  Sin and death can’t touch our future, but what about our present?  Jesus’ calling still seems impossible so much of the time.  And this is why Paul makes this point.  Our baptism pulls our future hope into the present.  It takes the life of Jesus and his victory over sin and death and applies it to us today.  There’s a change whether we feel it or not.  The Israelites didn’t necessarily feel any different on one side of the Red Sea than they had on the other, but everything was still different for them.  They had been slaves; now they were free.  And just so for us.  We are no longer in Adam; we are in Christ.  Jesus has poured God’s Spirit into us and the Spirit is at work to renew our minds and regenerate our hearts as we live in this in-between time.

In verse 11 Paul says that we must consider ourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Jesus Christ.  That word “consider” is an accounting term that Paul uses.  And here’s his point.  When you send your books to your accountant he adds everything up and gives you the bottom line.  His reckoning doesn’t change your financial situation.  Nothing about your situation has actually changed by the fact that your accountant has added up your profit and loss columns.  But that bottom line he reckons for you shows you in fact where you stand.  It might mean you’ve got money you need to invest or creditors you need to pay or it might mean you need to cut back and tighten your belt.  Adding up your profits and losses doesn’t itself have an impact on the health of your business, but it does make you aware of it and it tells you what you need to do.

And so Paul looks at the cross and he looks at the empty tomb and he looks at the gift of the Spirit at Pentecost and everything else and he says: I’ve done the math and it says that you are in Christ.  You are dead to sin and alive to God.  Now start living that way!

Is it a challenge?  Of course.  Jesus was baptised, the heavens opened up, the Spirit descended on him and the Father spoke, “This is my Son.  With him I am pleased”.  And then the Spirit sent Jesus straight into the wilderness to battle the devil.  The Lord led Israel out of Egypt through the miraculous parting of the sea, he was present with her, giving the law and leading as cloud and as fire and yet he led her straight into the wilderness.  And we too.  We’re baptised and the Lord sends us straight from the Font into the world.  There’s a reason why, in our baptism, we’re called on to renounce the world, the flesh, and the devil.  All three will come after us.  They’ll tell us that nothing has changed.  They’ll tell us that following after Jesus is impossible.  They’ll tempt us to give up or at least to compromise.  When others sin against us, when they hurt us, when they wrong us the temptation comes saying: “It’s okay, be angry or be bitter.  Get that person out of your life—you don’t need them.  Hey, look how well you’re doing!  You didn’t kill them!”  Brothers and Sisters, that’s sin calling.  Jesus calls us to seek to reconcile.  Jesus calls us to embrace the wrongs that others do to us and to return those wrongs with grace.  Jesus calls us to break the cycle of anger and hate and violence.  And when it seems impossible, remember your baptism, remember that you have died and risen again with Jesus, remember that he has poured his Spirit into you and then in faith live the impossible life that he has made possible.  Not only will you and I see the kingdom of God, the people all around us will see it too.

Let us pray: Gracious Father, you have poured your gracious love into us poor sinners by giving your own Son as a sacrifice.  Teach us to pour that love back out to the world.  When it seems impossible to break the cycle of sin and anger and hate, remind us of our baptism and that we have in faith trusted in your promise of forgiveness and life in Jesus.  Remind us that we have died with him and risen with him and that sin and death no longer hold us captive.  Teach us to live for righteousness that the world might see Jesus and his kingdom through us.  We ask this through Jesus Christ our Lord.  Amen.

A Sermon for the Fifth Sunday after Trinity

St. Luke 5:1-11

by William Klock

This morning Luke introduces us to Simon Peter.  In the previous Chapter Luke shows us Jesus as he begins his ministry, travelling around Galilee preaching and healing.  He was bringing good news to the poor, release to the captives, and sight to the blind.  Everyone “wondered” and “was amazed” by what he did and what he said.  But Jesus didn’t pick up any followers.  Just the opposite, in fact.  In his home town the people insisted he stay.  They wanted him to be their own personal miracle-worker.  And when he refused they tried to stone him.  But now in Peter we see the response that Jesus was looking for.  And yet Peter had no idea what he was getting himself into at the time.  As the gospel story plays out we see that he didn’t always follow Jesus consistently or whole-heartedly, but he did follow and he’s become a model for all of us who now follow Jesus.  One of the things that comes through Luke’s portrayal of Peter is just how much he’s like us.  He’s a sinner, sometimes a doubter, and even once a betrayer.  When I read the Bible and I don’t understand I take comfort in Peter; he followed Jesus himself for three years and most of that time he didn’t understand either.  Jesus called him to follow, but Peter had no idea what that was going to involve, what Jesus was asking him to do, how he was going to do it, or even how he was going to support himself financially.  But Peter followed anyway and Jesus did amazing things through him.

The story begins with Jesus preaching by the sea.  In 5:1-3 Luke writes:

On one occasion, while the crowd was pressing in on him to hear the word of God, he was standing by the lake of Gennesaret, and he saw two boats by the lake, but the fishermen had gone out of them and were washing their nets.  Getting into one of the boats, which was Simon’s, he asked him to put out a little from the land.  And he sat down and taught the people from the boat.

 

Gennesaret was the local name for the Sea of Galilee.  That part of the lake has a shoreline full of little coves where the fishermen would keep their boats and do their work.  On this occasion Jesus was preaching to a group of people on the beach of one of these coves.  Word got out and the crowd got bigger and bigger, so Jesus had an idea.  These little coves are like natural amphitheatres.  Sound also travels well over water, so Jesus decided to take one of the fishing boats out into the middle of the cove so that he could preach to the crowd and be heard better.

Luke says that the boat Jesus chose belonged to Simon Peter.  Peter and Jesus may have known each other already.  Luke doesn’t always tell us everything in chronological order, but in Chapter 4 we read about Jesus healing Peter’s mother-in-law.  If they already knew each other and if Jesus had already healed Peter’s mother-in-law it might explain why Peter, tired from fishing all night, would be willing to row him out into the cove.  It might simply be that Peter had just been listening to Jesus preach for the first time and was impressed with what he was hearing.  No doubt, though, Peter had heard people talk about what Jesus was preaching and doing throughout the region.  At the very least, Peter was probably flattered that this popular preacher was asking for his help.

And so Jesus sits in Peter’s boat and preaches for a while.  Peter was tired.  He probably just wanted to go home.  But as the crowd leaves, instead of asking Peter to take him back to shore, Jesus tells Peter that it’s time to get back to work.  Luke writes:

And when he had finished speaking, he said to Simon, “Put out into the deep and let down your nets for a catch.”

 

If this command had come from anyone else it would have been crazy talk.  We hear exasperation in Peter’s response.

And Simon answered, “Master, we toiled all night and took nothing!” (Luke 5:5a)

I’ve read that it’s difficult to catch fish during the day on the Sea of Galilee.  Our sources tell us that in Peter’s day, most of the fishing was done at night and the fishermen would then take their catches into the towns to sell them during the morning hours.  The nets described here were trammel nets made of linen.  They were useless in the day because the fish could see them and would swim away.  They were designed to be used at night when they would be invisible to the fish.  So Jesus’ command to Peter isn’t just crazy from the standpoint that they hadn’t caught anything all night, these fishermen didn’t even have the right equipment to catch fish in the daylight.

And, of course, if there’s anyone who’s particular about his way of doing things, it’s a fisherman.  This pole for this kind of fish and that bait for that kind of fishing.  Tell them they’re wrong and you might get thrown overboard.  I can’t think of any reason why Peter would have been any different.  His livelihood depended on his expertise.  Jesus would have known this too.  And yet even though Peter’s tired after a night of catching nothing, Jesus tells him and his colleagues to row back out into the deep water at the wrong time of the day and to cast their nets again even though they’re not the right nets for daytime fishing.  But Peter doesn’t throw Jesus overboard.  He doesn’t even argue with him.  He gets his fellow fishermen together and he says to Jesus:

“At your word I will let down the nets.”

 

Yes, Peter let’s Jesus know just how absurd his command is.  And Luke makes sure we know that Peter—the expert on fishing the Sea of Galilee—knew this was absurd and impossible.  And yet Peter addresses him as “Master”, accepts his authority, and obeys.  What Jesus is asking would be absurd coming from anyone else, but the fact that this is Jesus’ “word”—a word backed by Jesus’ obvious authority—makes all the difference.  This is faith.  Even if it’s faith that doesn’t know where it’s all going to lead, it’s faith.  Its’s the kind of faith that led Abraham across the desert to a land he’d never known when God called.  It’s the kind of faith that moved Mary to say “yes” when the angel came to her.  Mary knew that virgins don’t conceive and have children and Peter knew that you don’t catch fish in the day when you haven’t caught them at night and you certainly don’t catch them with the wrong kind of nets.  And yet as Mary submitted to the announcement that she would, as a virgin, bear a son, Peter now submits to Jesus.  He recognised Jesus’ authority just as everyone else did, but for Peter it went beyond amazement and wonder; he was ready to obey and to follow.  And so Peter and his friends rowed out and cast their nets.

And when they had done this, they enclosed a large number of fish, and their nets were breaking.  They signaled to their partners in the other boat to come and help them.  And they came and filled both the boats, so that they began to sink. (Luke 5:6-7)

Was Peter just humouring Jesus because he was “famous” and commanded respect?  Did he really expect that something miraculous might happen?  It’s hard to say, but it seems like he was expecting something.  They might not have caught any fish during the night, but the nets would have been no less full of weeds and debris from the effort.  He and his friends had been cleaning them as Jesus was preaching.  Cleaning the nets was a job in itself and it doesn’t seem very likely that Peter would have been willing to foul his nets again if he was just humouring this silly rabbi who obviously knew nothing about fishing.  No, I think Peter was expecting something to happen.  Things happened wherever Jesus went.  And yet even expecting something to happen, Peter still wasn’t prepared.  Luke says they caught a “large number of fish”.  That’s an understatement.  They caught more fish than they’d ever caught before—more than their nets were designed to catch.  It took the men in two boats to haul in the tearing nets and then the weight of all the fish began to swamp the boats.  And all at the wrong time of day and with the wrong kind of nets.

And there in the middle of a mountain of wriggling fish and in a sinking boat, Peter throws himself at Jesus’ feet.

But when Simon Peter saw it, he fell down at Jesus’ knees, saying, “Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, O Lord.”  For he and all who were with him were astonished at the catch of fish that they had taken, and so also were James and John, sons of Zebedee, who were partners with Simon. (Luke 5:8-10a)

Peter saw something in Jesus.  Knowing Peter and how he struggled to understand what Jesus said and did, we probably shouldn’t read too much into his calling Jesus “Lord” at this point.  I doubt Peter was intentionally making a theological statement about the divinity of Jesus.  But we shouldn’t read too little into it either.  In that moment Peter recognised a connection between Jesus and the God of Israel.  The Lord was at work in Jesus.  Her was the Messiah.  And recognising this, Peter responds the way people of true faith have always responded when overwhelmed by the holy.  He prostrates himself, he confesses his sinfulness, and he begs Jesus to go away.  If Peter were like the people of Nazareth or Capernaum he would have been offering Jesus a job.  “Jesus, don’t go anywhere.  We need you to join our little fishing company so that we can catch fish like this every day.  Stay with us, Jesus, and we’ll be rich in no time!”  But Peter does exactly the opposite.  He recognises that God is at work in Jesus, and faced with that kind of holiness he confesses his sinfulness and begs Jesus to leave.

It’s not that Peter was suggesting he was a particularly evil or impious man.  He’s simply responding to an encounter with the holy the way so many others had done in Israel’s long history.  Think of Moses.  Remember God calling to Moses out of the burning bush: “I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.  Take off your sandals for you are standing on holy ground.”  And how did Moses respond?  Exodus says that he hid his face because he was afraid to look on God (Exodus 3:5-6).  Or think of Isaiah.  He was confronted with a vision of the Lord sitting on his throne, surrounded by angels and he cried out, “Woe is me!  For I am lost; for I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips; for my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts” (Isaiah 6:5).  Even prophets like Moses and Isaiah were overwhelmed by their sinfulness when confronted by the holy.  And yet Peter’s confession of himself as a sinner highlights Jesus’ mission.  Jesus came to do battle with sin and death, but that was only good news to those who knew they were subject to sin and death—to those who knew who the true enemy is.  The problem with the people in Nazareth and Capernaum was that they thought the Romans and other Gentiles were the enemy.  They didn’t understand the gravity of their own captivity to sin.  And as a result, they only saw Jesus as a cheap miracle worker.  But in Peter we see a man who suddenly understood who the real enemy is and in acknowledging his own sinfulness—his own captivity to that enemy—Peter takes the first step needed to follow Jesus.  He acknowledges that he’s exactly the sort of person Jesus has come to redeem.  To admit that you are a sinner is to admit your need; it’s to admit that you need God’s gracious intervention—the very intervention Jesus came to make.  Peter repents.  He takes the first step of faith.  It won’t be the last time he repents.  As Jesus reveals more of Peter’s life that needs to be turned around—other sins, his violent political views, his betrayal—Peter will step out in faith and repent again and again.  But it starts here.

Again, Peter probably wasn’t thinking things through this logically or theologically.  He simply recognised that he was in the presence of someone who was truly holy and in light of that holiness his own sinfulness was revealed for what it was.  Peter suddenly got a taste of what it will be like to stand before God’s judgement.  That’s a horrible place for a sinner to be and Peter wanted it to stop.  He wanted Jesus to go away.  He didn’t want his sinfulness revealed in such a dramatic way.  It didn’t occur to him at that point that Jesus might just be the answer to his sinfulness.  But that changes when Jesus responds to Peter’s fear.  Look at what follows in verses 10 and 11:

And Jesus said to Simon, “Do not be afraid; from now on you will be catching men.”  And when they had brought their boats to land, they left everything and followed him.

 

The answer to Peter’s sinfulness is not for Jesus to go away, but for Peter to follow Jesus.  And, of course, to follow Jesus is to trust him.  Again, the theology can come later.  At this point it’s enough to trust and to follow.  Peter doesn’t know where that will lead, but Jesus gives him a hint.  In fact, Jesus suddenly turns the amazing catch of fish into something prophetic and ties it to Peter’s own confession of his sin.  He’s spent his life catching dead fish and selling them in the market.  Jesus just showed him how lucrative fishing could potentially be with a personal messiah helping him out, but then Jesus calls Peter to follow him and instead to spend the rest of his life catching people who are dead in their sins and releasing them into Jesus’ kingdom.  And if Jesus can bring such an amazing catch when it comes to fish, just imagine what can happen if you fish for people instead.

Imagine what the people on the shore were thinking as they watched the fishermen struggling to get the fish into their boats.  And imagine what they were thinking as the saw big, tough Peter out there in the boat kneeling in front of Jesus.  Maybe they could even hear the conversation across the water.  It was a morning full of surprises, but imagine what people thought when Peter and his friends came to shore with Jesus—and with that enormous haul of fish—and simply walked away from it.  Peter and his friends, James and John, had made an investment in their boats and nets.  Fishing was a good livelihood.  They weren’t rich, but they were better off than many.  That miraculous haul of fish was worth a lot of money too.  But Luke tells us that when they got to shore, “they left everything and followed him”.  Everything: the boats, the nets, the fish, even their livelihood—their source of income and support.  Brothers and Sisters, that’s trust, that’s faith.  From that point on, Peter, James, and John would find their fundamental sense of belonging and being as they walked with Jesus and as they did the work of his kingdom.

I mentioned earlier Isaiah’s response to the holy.  Luke presents this entire scene, I think, in parallel with Isaiah’s calling.  In Isaiah 6 we read of the prophet’s vision of the Lord: “sitting upon a throne, high and lifted up,” the train of his robe filling the temple and the seraphim singing, “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts; the whole earth is full of his glory!”

Isaiah’s response, as we’ve seen, was to cry out “Woe is me!  For I am lost; for I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips.”  The holiness of the Lord brought Isaiah to a recognition of his own sins and the sins of his people, but the Lord didn’t leave him in the horrible place of condemnation.  Isaiah goes on to tell us that “one of the seraphim flew to me, having in his hand a burning coal…from the altar.  And he touched my mouth and said, ‘Behold, this has touched your lips; your guilt is taken away, your sin atoned for.’  It was then that Isaiah heard the voice of the Lord asking, “Whom shall I send, and who shall go for us?”  And now knowing the depth of the sin problem of his people and having been relieved of its weight himself, Isaiah scrambles to respond: “Here am I!  Send me” (Isaiah 6:1-10).

This was Peter’s experience.  Neither Isaiah nor Peter had any idea what it meant to be sent; they just knew it meant leaving everything and trusting in the Lord.  They had had an encounter with the holy and instead of being condemned, they had been forgiven—their sins were taken away—and they responded to the Lord’s call with faith.  Why?  Certainly out of a sense of gratitude, but in both cases there was also a realisation that the rest of the nation—and eventually they’d realise, the rest of humanity—needed to experience the same forgiveness that they had experienced.  They were the poor who had heard the good news; they were the captives suddenly set free; they were the blind who suddenly received their sight and, more than anything else, they wanted to take that good news, that release, that healing to all the people still subject to sin and death.  And they were ready to give up everything else in order to do it.  As time went on, as they followed Jesus in the days and weeks and years after the cross, they were willing to suffer and even to die for the sake of the good news that Jesus is Lord, that he is Creation’s true King, and that he has brought forgiveness, restoration, and renewal.

In contrast we have a tendency to be far more blasé about our encounter with Jesus.  We need to ask why that is.  Why aren’t we as excited as Peter was?  Why aren’t we willing to give up everything—or at least to be ready and prepared to give it all up?  Why aren’t we bringing in a miraculous catch of people into the kingdom?  Could it be because our response to Jesus hasn’t really gone beyond the “amazement” and “wonder” of the people in Nazareth and Capernaum that we read about in the chapter before all of this?  Could it be because we haven’t really been confronted with God’s holiness and our own sinfulness as Peter was?

A lot of people are blasé about the Gospel because they’ve never been truly confronted by the weight of their sin in light of the truly holy.  For too many people, Jesus comes to give us hugs and to affirm us as we are or maybe to encourage us to be just a little bit better than we are.  But Brothers and Sisters, there’s a reason why our liturgy of daily prayer begins with confession—twice a day and even first thing in the morning.  There’s a reason why the liturgy of the Lord’s Supper focuses our attention so much on our sin.  There’s a reason why we recite the Ten Commandments and then ask the Lord for his mercy and then again confess our sins and hear the Lord’s absolution.  There’s a reason why, after both of those “confessions” we still come to the Table acknowledging that we are not worthy of the Lord’s crumbs apart from his gracious mercy.  The liturgy declares the love of God manifest in the Lord Jesus, but at each step it also reminds us that we are sinners unworthy of that love apart from grace.  It reminds us that we deserve death, but that God loves us so much that he became one of us and died in our place.  The liturgy doesn’t let us come merely to be affirmed as we are; it reminds us that Jesus died that we might be forgiven and restored and transformed, because, dear Friends, it’s only in light of these things that we can begin to plumb the great depths of God’s love for us and the enormous costliness of his grace.  And it’s as we understand just how amazing his love and grace are and how much they cost our Lord, that the Gospel becomes not some blasé doctrine of comfort and do-gooderism, but a profound and overwhelmingly compelling call to leave everything and to follow Jesus in faith.  It’s as we experience our own release from the captivity of sin and death that our blind eyes are opened and we seek to share the good news of Jesus Christ with all those around us that they might be drawn to the kingdom and experience the same wonderful release from captivity that we have.

Let us pray: Heavenly Father, thank you for the witness of Peter.  As uncomfortable and even as terrifying as such an experience is, confront our sin with the light of your holiness that we might better grasp the depths of your love and grace.  Stir up in us a fresh love for you and a fresh desire to share your Good News with the world that it might be set free from the sin and death that once enslaved us.  Give us the faith to leave everything and to follow you, trusting you to lead and to equip and to empower.  We ask this through Jesus Christ our Lord.  Amen.

A Sermon for the Fourth Sunday after Trinity

Romans 8:17-23

by William Klock

Our Epistle from Romans 8 this morning is one those wonderful, short passages that remind us of the bigger picture, that gives us a bird’s-eye view of the Good News, of God’s redemption and renewal of humanity and of his entire Creation.  It’s the hilltop from which we can see the lay of the land, where we’ve come from, where we’re going, and how it all fits together.

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

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

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

 

Paul says, “For I consider…”  That doesn’t mean this is his opinion.  Paul uses the same Greek word several times as he builds his argument in Romans.  Other translations say “I reckon”.  The sense of it is, “This is how I work it out”.  Knowing the Scriptures, knowing Jesus, working under the Spirit’s inspiration, this is the only conclusion he can reach.  He’s been building this argument for eight chapters in Romans and here he reaches the inevitable conclusion: those who will be glorified will first face suffering, but that this suffering can’t begin to compare with the glory to be revealed.

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

But what is the glory Paul’s writing about?  Our translation says that this glory is to be revealed “to us”, but that makes it sound like we’re going to be spectators to this glory.  What Paul writes in Greek has the sense of this glory revealed towards us or into us.  It’s a sense of this glory being bestowed on us as a gift—and this makes perfect sense when we remember what Paul said before: that if we are in Christ, then we will share in his inheritance—we will participate in his inheritance.

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

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

 

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Sermon for the Third Sunday after Trinity

St. Luke 15:1-10

by William Klock

There’s something about sharing a meal that communicates fellowship.  And so Jesus liked to eat with people.  The Jews looked forward to a great banquet at the Lord’s table at the end of the age, a banquet that celebrated God’s having set the world to rights, and so it makes sense that Jesus would eat with people.  In him, God was once again with his people.  In Jesus, God was inaugurating that new world that everyone had hoped for.  Jesus was acting out the great banquet that Israel had always hoped for when the Lord would return to his people.  The problem for a lot of people was that Jesus was inviting and eating with the wrong people.  Look again at Luke 15:1-2.

Now the tax collectors and sinners were all drawing near to hear him.  And the Pharisees and the scribes grumbled, saying, “This man receives sinners and eats with them.”

It was bad enough that Jesus accepted invitations from tax collectors and sinners, but now Luke tells us that Jesus was becoming known for hosting his own banquets and actually, deliberately choosing to invite these sorts of people.  As far as the Pharisees were concerned, if Jesus was the Messiah, he was doing it all very wrong.

Tax collectors have always been unpopular people, but to the Jews they represented everything that was wrong with the world.  They represented the Romans and the corrupt Herodians.  They were a constant reminder that, despite being in their own land, the Jews were essentially still in exile.  And “sinners”.  For the Pharisees that was pretty much anyone who wasn’t a Pharisee, from the really bad sinners, like prostitutes, down to the ordinary people who were simply too poor or illiterate to practise the sort of holiness the Pharisees did.

When we talk about the Pharisees it’s important to remember what they were about.  Jews understood heaven and earth to be two halves of God’s Creation.  They were meant to be together, to overlap with God and his people living together.  That’s how Creation began.  Think of the Garden of Eden where God and the people he created lived together.  But human rebellion and sin separated heaven and earth.  Sinful human beings were cast out of the presence of God because unholiness cannot survive the presence of the holy.  But there was one place left where heaven and earth still overlapped.  That was the temple.  It took preparation and sacrifices and priests acting as mediators, but in the temple sin could be overcome for just a little while and humans could enter the presence of God—in the temple you could get a glimpse of the holy.  The Pharisees and Jesus would have both agreed that if you want to understand how things should be on earth, you had to start by figuring out how things were in heaven.  This is the point of Jesus’ prayer for God’s kingdom to come on earth as in heaven.  So the Pharisees looked to the temple—that was the closest you could get to heaven—and being in the temple required absolute purity on the part of the priests.  The Pharisees weren’t priests—at least not most of them—but they chose to get as close to heaven as they thought they could by doing their best to live like the priests in the temple and being as pure as they could possibly be.  Rich people could afford to live that way.  Most ordinary people could not and so the Pharisees looked down on them as “sinners”.

And yet here’s Jesus claiming to be the Messiah and claiming to be inaugurating God’s kingdom—and that means acting out here on earth the things that are going on in heaven—but instead of living like the Pharisees and steering clear of sinners and unclean people, Jesus is actually seeking them out and sharing with them this heavenly symbol of the banquet.  Jesus is bringing heaven and earth back together.  Everything about what he’s doing shouts “Messiah!”, but the Pharisees are furious because the great heavenly banquet is supposed to be for the righteous, not the unrighteous.  It’s supposed to be centred around the temple, but Jesus is centring it around himself.  Anyone who will come to Jesus is welcome.  All of this is like a stick in the eye of the Pharisees.

Jesus responds with three parables and our Gospel includes the first two.  Look at verses 3-6:

So he told them this parable: “What man of you, having a hundred sheep, if he has lost one of them, does not leave the ninety-nine in the open country, and go after the one that is lost, until he finds it?  And when he has found it, he lays it on his shoulders, rejoicing.  And when he comes home, he calls together his friends and his neighbors, saying to them, ‘Rejoice with me, for I have found my sheep that was lost.’”

 

Notice that this whole passage is one long question that Jesus puts to the Pharisees: “Which of you having lost a sheep wouldn’t do all these things and then celebrate when you’ve found the animal?”

Shepherds weren’t their kind of people, but they could identify with the story.  A flock of a hundred sheep was about average.  This wasn’t a rich man, but he wasn’t poor either.  In the morning he would lead his sheep to pasture and at the end of the day he’d lead them back to the sheepfold and count them as they went through the gate.  This night he notices that one is missing.  He’s still got ninety-nine, but that one missing sheep was still valuable.  He couldn’t afford to write it off.  And so he leaves the ninety-nine with the other shepherds and goes off into the night to find the lost one.  Everyone could imagine this shepherd hunting high and low in the dark for the sheep, worrying not just about the possibility of wild animals eating the sheep, but eating him too.  The chances of finding it, let alone finding it alive were probably fairly slim.  But the man finally finds it.  Sheep are natural herd animals, so when they wander off and get separated from the flock they get frightened and shut down.  Jesus describes the man doing what any shepherd would do: picking up the frightened sheep and carrying it across his shoulders, back to the sheepfold.  He and his sheep return safe and sound.  And so he invites his fellow shepherds to celebrate with him.  The sheep that was lost has been found!  Jesus is asking the Pharisees: If this happened to you, wouldn’t you celebrate?  And the obvious answer is that, yes, they would.  We all would.

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

“Or what woman, having ten silver coins, if she loses one coin, does not light a lamp and sweep the house and seek diligently until she finds it?  And when she has found it, she calls together her friends and neighbors, saying, ‘Rejoice with me, for I have found the coin that I had lost.’”

 

The man with the flock of one hundred sheep was reasonably well off.  In contrast, the woman Jesus describes now is destitute.  The coins would probably have been part of her dowry—maybe all there was to her dowry—and made into a headdress.  Headdresses with hundreds of coins were and are common, so we get a sense how poor this woman is in that her dowry consisted of a mere ten silver coins.  We can imagine her on this day taking out her precious headdress and putting it on, maybe remembering her wedding day long ago.  And as she puts it away she notices that one of the ten little coins is missing.  She panics, looks around, but she can’t find it.  The sort of little mud-brick house someone like her would have lived in had a small door and maybe a tiny window.  The house would have been dark.  She lights her little oil lamp, but even that doesn’t do very much for her, so she starts sweeping the floor with palm fronds, hoping to hear the coin scrape on the floor or, if all else fails, to sweep it up.[1]  Anyone can identify with this scene.  I’ve done this myself.  You know I collect old lanterns.  They’ve got all sorts of screws in odd sizes and with weird thread pitches.  As I’ve discovered, you can’t just go to the hardware store and buy a new one if you lose it.  I’ve dropped screws plenty of times, swept the floor, and found myself sifting through the dustpan with a magnet.  So this image of the old woman hunting for her lost coin is one the Pharisees could easily identify with and Jesus is asking them: “If this happened to you and after all the panic and after all the searching and sweeping you finally found the coin, would you not call your friends to tell them the good news and to celebrate?”  Of course they would.

The answer to both of Jesus’ questions is “yes”.  In fact, even two thousand years distant from the shepherd or the poor woman, we can sense their loss and we can celebrate with them as Jesus describes their joy.  The Pharisees were no different.  Jesus may even have got them thinking of some time they lost something of their own and then found it and were joyful.  And what Jesus is saying is that these tax collectors and sinners are precious to him—and not only to him, but to all of heaven and to the Lord himself.  In verse 7, at the end of the first parable, as the shepherd celebrates with his friends, Jesus says to the Pharisees:

“Just so, I tell you, there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who need no repentance.

 

And in verse 10 as the woman celebrates her found coin he says:

“Just so, I tell you, there is joy before the angels of God over one sinner who repents.”

 

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

“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.”

 

You see, the Pharisees were anticipating the end of the age and they were ready for God to send his Son into the world to condemn sinners.  The Pharisees were partly right.  They were right to look forward to a day of coming judgement when God’s Son would come to condemn sinners and to vindicate the righteous.  What they got wrong was that it never occurred to them that God would send his Son, not just at the end of history, but would first send him into the middle of history, to call sinners to repentance and to offer himself as a sacrifice for their sins.  Jesus stepped into the middle of history to redeem sinners so that when he returns at the end of history we won’t be condemned.  In this we see the love of God.  He didn’t cast humanity from his presence with a “A good riddance!”  We sundered heaven and earth and when we did, God set in motion a plan to bring us back together.

This was the plan from the beginning.  Through Abraham God had called Israel to be a light to the nations, to be his means of rescuing them from the darkness, but instead Israel had done the opposite—just like the Pharisees.  And over and over the Lord had rebuked his people for failing in their mission.  Jesus’ parable of the lost sheep has strong echoes of Ezekiel 34.  There the Lord says:

Ah, shepherds of Israel who have been feeding yourselves! Should not shepherds feed the sheep?  You eat the fat, you clothe yourselves with the wool, you slaughter the fat ones, but you do not feed the sheep.  The weak you have not strengthened, the sick you have not healed, the injured you have not bound up, the strayed you have not brought back, the lost you have not sought, and with force and harshness you have ruled them.  So they were scattered, because there was no shepherd, and they became food for all the wild beasts.  My sheep were scattered; they wandered over all the mountains and on every high hill. My sheep were scattered over all the face of the earth, with none to search or seek for them.”

 

The very ones who were supposed to care for the sheep have taken advantage of them and abandoned them.  But, says the Lord:

I, I myself will search for my sheep and will seek them out…and I will rescue them from all places where they have been scattered on a day of clouds and thick darkness…I will feed them with good pasture, and on the mountain heights of Israel shall be their grazing land. There they shall lie down in good grazing land, and on rich pasture they shall feed on the mountains of Israel.  I myself will be the shepherd of my sheep, and I myself will make them lie down, declares the Lord god.  I will seek the lost, and I will bring back the strayed, and I will bind up the injured, and I will strengthen the weak, and the fat and the strong I will destroy. I will feed them in justice.” (Ezekiel 34:2b-6, 11, 12b, 14-16)

The Sadducees, the religious leaders of Jesus’ day, were corrupt sell-outs who enriched themselves, getting fat at the expense of the sheep, like the leaders in Ezekiel’s day.  The Pharisees opposed them and called for reform, but they didn’t have it right either.  Their solution was to condemn the lost sheep.  Sure, they’d show them by example—at a distance—how they ought to live.  But they didn’t seek them out.  They didn’t really call them back to the Lord—not in any meaningful way.  And so the condemnation that the Lord gave through Ezekiel now falls on the Pharisees.

Thus says the Lord god to them: Behold, I, I myself will judge between the fat sheep and the lean sheep.  Because you push with side and shoulder, and thrust at all the weak with your horns, till you have scattered them abroad, I will rescue my flock; they shall no longer be a prey.  And I will judge between sheep and sheep.  And I will set up over them one shepherd, my servant David, and he shall feed them: he shall feed them and be their shepherd.

In Jesus, Ezekiel’s prophecy has been fulfilled.  He is the Son of David come to seek and to save the lost, to shepherd the sheep, and to feed them in the rich pasture of his kingdom.  He’s given himself as a sacrifice for our sins and this morning he invites us to his Table to his heavenly banquet.  But how do we come?  Again, this is the meal Jesus gave us to make sense of the cross.  He is the Passover lamb sacrificed for our sins.  By his death he frees us from our bondage to sin and death and leads us into new life and new creation.  In Jesus we see grace.  We don’t deserve any of this.  We’re the rebels; we’re the sinners; we’re the God-haters.  We deserve nothing but death, but in his grace Jesus offers us forgiveness and restoration and life.  And when we take hold of his grace in faith he tells us that the whole heavenly court rejoices.  What was lost has been found.  What ran away has been restored.

But we’re always at risk of forgetting that we come to the banquet only by grace.  It’s interesting that in the gnostic pseudo-gospel of Thomas, the parable was changed.  In that telling of the story, the shepherd explains to the lost sheep that he sought it out because he loved it and he valued it more than the others.[2]  We’re prone to twisting the story the same way in our own minds—thinking that we’ve been invited here to the Table because we deserved to be here.  But that’s not the story Jesus tells.  The one sheep that was lost was no more valuable than the other ninety-nine.  The one coin lost was no different than all the others.  In fact, in the parable of the Prodigal Son, which follows them, the son who was lost was an utter twit and many people justly wonder why his father didn’t simply disown him.  The only difference between the one and the ninety-nine and the one and the ten is that the one was lost.  Brothers and sisters, we are not here because we’ve earned God’s love.  We’re here by his grace.  We are here because he rejoices in redeeming sinners.  We’re here because it pleases him to forgive his enemies and restore them to his fellowship.

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

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

[1] For background details for both parables see Joachim Jeremias, The Parables of Jesus (London: SCM Press, 1972), pp. 132-135 and Leland Ryken, James C. Wilhoit, and Tremper Longman III, eds., Dictionary of Biblical Imagery (Downers Grove, Ill.: Baker Academic, 1998), pp. 782-785.

[2] Gospel of Thomas 107.

A Sermon for the Second Sunday after Trinity

St. Luke 14:16-24

by William Klock

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

So what’s going on here?  Remember that for the Jews of Jesus’ day and especially for the Pharisees, there were three main things that set them apart from everyone else in the world: circumcision, the Sabbath, and their diet.  Two of those things come into play here.  The Pharisees were zealous to keep the Sabbath holy and that meant absolutely no kind of work.  They were also zealous about purity—not just what they ate, but also who they ate with.  It was pointless to have clean food if someone who was unclean sat down at your table and rendered everything unclean.  Now, these markers weren’t bad.  Circumcision, Sabbath, and diet—the whole law—were given by God as boundary markers for his people—visible signs to set them apart from the world—so that they would know to whom they belonged, so that they would know their calling to be light to the nations, and so that they would maintain the holiness needed to fulfil that calling.  Israel was given a light, but instead of holding it high for the nations to see, she hid it under a basket.  Israel was like a lighthouse keeper who’s lit his light, but drawn the curtain…and then condemns the ship captains as they crash into the rocks.

Back to Luke 14.  I suspect this man showing up during dinner was a setup meant to trap Jesus.  The man was most likely a beggar who showed up at the door for scraps.  Beggars did that all the time when rich people were having banquets.  But to see what Jesus will do, his host allows this man to actually slip into the banquet.  And instead of throwing him some scraps and sending him on his way, Jesus welcomes the man into the banquet and heals him.  And they’re shocked and appalled.  Jesus has ruined the banquet—everything’s unclean now.  But he’s also—Gasp!—he’s done work on the Sabbath.  And from their skewed perspective, this reveals Jesus to be an enemy of the kingdom—a false messiah.  The Pharisees were trying to clean Israel up, to get people to be more holy, to push the unholy and the unclean to the outside, and here’s Jesus doing just the opposite.

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Luke doesn’t tell us how the Pharisees responded or if they even understood, but it’s hard to think that it didn’t sink in on some level.  Everyone in the Jewish word, and especially the Pharisees, were waiting for the Lord’s return.  The prophets had talked about that great day in terms of a great banquet and this banquet idea then became a common image of the coming Day of the Lord.  And now Jesus explains that he’s come to open the door to that great banquet.  This is what Israel has been waiting for all these years.  And yet Jesus rebukes them.  This isn’t the first time the Lord has extended his invitation.  For centuries he had called to his people through the prophets, but they had refused to hear the prophets and had even killed some of them.  And now Jesus has come and he’s travelled through Galilee and Judea, inviting everyone to the banquet, but like the people in the parable, they all have excuses.

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

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

But this now takes us back to Jesus’ call in verses 12-14: “When you give a dinner…do not invite your friends…lest they also invite you in return and you be repaid.  But when you give a feast, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind, and you will be blessed, because they cannot repay you.  For you will be repaid at the resurrection of the just.”  Dear friends, as you come to the Lord’s Table this morning, think on the fact that he has invited us here from the highways and hedges.  We didn’t belong here, but Jesus has washed us clean and grafted us into his family as adopted sons and daughters.  Because of him we do belong.  But having been invited, he now calls us to be hosts ourselves.  Lest we forget.  Lest we think that we’ve earned our place here at the Table.  Lest we ever think that others don’t belong, Jesus now calls us to go out to the highways and the hedges—to go to the places we may have forgotten where he once found us.  He calls us to look for the poor, the unclean, and sinners, not to condemn them, but to invite them to the Lord’s banquet—to invite them to receive the grace of God just as we have.  To tell them of the God who has humbled himself in becoming one of us and to die for our sake.  To invite them to come and be forgiven, healed, set free, and washed clean by Jesus.  That they might have a share with us in Jesus in the life of God and of his kingdom.

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

A Sermon for the First Sunday after Trinity

1 John 4:7-21

by William Klock

One of our great challenges today is to understand what love is.  Over the last few weeks I’ve seen an old high school friend posting her artwork for sale on social media.  It’s all promoting “love”.  The slogan is “love is love”.  But what it’s really all about is promoting homosexuality.  A few days ago I was reading an article by a girl who was pressured by her boyfriend into having sex.  “I love you and if you love me, you’ll do it,” he told her.  And when she got pregnant her family told her, “If you love yourself and you love this child, you’ll have an abortion rather than give yourselve and the baby so much disadvantage.”  Sin makes a mess of everything, even to the point of corrupting what it means to love.  But our Epistle today confronts us with real love, godly love, love defined by the cross of Jesus.  “Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God, and everyone who loves is born of God and knows God.  Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love” (1 John 4:7-8).  Alongside the Epistle the Church gives us the parable of the rich man and Lazarus in our Gospel.  It was a parable spoken to Pharisees who had convinced themselves that certain types of people, people who stood under God’s condemnation, were unworthy of being shown love.

Brothers and Sisters, Jesus reveals—especially, but not least, in his Incarnation and in his sacrificial death—that God is love.  We may struggle with that.  Some people get it backwards, turning love itself into a god.  No.  Love is not our god, but our God is love.  And sometimes we struggle to wrap out minds around love itself.  As I said, sin makes a mess of things and because of that we often struggle to grasp what real love is.  Many have known a father or mother, a husband or wife, a boyfriend or girlfriend who spoke of love, but was abusive.  Many have been in relationships where love had to be earned and was loaded with conditions.  We live in a culture where lust is often confused with love.  Sin has made a mess of it.

This is why we have to come back to Jesus.  If we want to know what love is we look to him and we think back on what he’s done for us.  John says in verses 9 and 10: “This is how God’s love was revealed to us: God sent his only Son into the world, so that we should live through him.  Love consists in this: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the sacrifice that would atone for our sins.”  In this we see God’s perfect goodness.  We’re the “bad guys”, we’re the rebels, we’re the sinners whose love is tainted by our selfishness.  We’re the ones who rejected the goodness of God.  We’re the ones who rejected his love.  (Remember, he didn’t have to create us.  He chose to create us in order to shower his love on us.)  He could have thrown in the towel and given up on us.  He could have destroyed his creation and started over just as easily as he started in the beginning.  But instead he shows his perfect and abundant love in giving himself as a sacrifice for our sins that we might be restored to his presence.  That’s what real love looks like.

This is the heart of the Christian faith.  God reveals himself in Jesus the Messiah.  Not only that, but in the death and resurrection of Jesus God reconciles sinners to himself.  This is the love on which our faith is based and it’s the love that should be revealed in our lives as people of this faith.  We can’t be people of Jesus without the love of Jesus being revealed through us.

But, again and as we all can attest, it’s not easy.  I hope we all leave today wanting to go out to love and serve the Lord.  He feeds us at his Table today.  We’ve heard his Word read and once again been reminded of his love for us and how that love was made manifest in Jesus and at the cross.  But sin gets in the way.  How long does it last when we get back to work on Monday and something goes wrong?  How long does it last when your spouse or your kids push the button that sets you off?  Maybe all it takes is the drive home from church and someone drives too slowly in front of you or cuts you off.  Love isn’t easy.  And this is the reason why we need the reminder that love isn’t a warm and fuzzy feeling.  It’s an action, a way of life that is defined for us by God in Jesus.

Brothers and Sisters, as often as we fail to show the love of Jesus in our lives we need to keep coming back to Jesus.  We need to keep coming back to the one who, though he was in the form of God thought it not a thing to be exploited, but poured himself out, humbling himself and becoming one of us.  We need to come back to Jesus, despised, rejected, abused, and crucified for our sake.  As often as we fail to live the love of God in our lives we need to come back to the story of redemption and remind ourselves of, think on, and meditate on the lengths to which God has gone to reconcile sinners to himself.  The love of God in Jesus changed the world and God intends for it to keep changing the world as it wells up in our lives and manifests itself to the world—as we live it out.

John goes on in verse 11: “Beloved, since God loved us so much, we also ought to love one another.”  It’s easy to hear that as nothing more than “Jesus set an example, now go follow it.”  Its’ true that he did and that we should.  But that’s not what John is getting at.  He goes deeper in verse 12: “No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God lives in us, and his love is perfected in us.”

John says something very similar at the beginning of his Gospel.  In John 1:18 he writes, “No one has ever seen God.  It is only God the Son who is close to the Father’s heart, who has made him known.”  What John’s saying there in his Gospel is that no one can truly know God apart from Jesus.  In Jesus—in the humble act of his incarnation and in his offering of himself as a sacrifice for our sins—God goes from being abstract divinity or from being the “Big Guy upstairs” to being the Creator who seeks to be intimately known by his people and who loves us infinitely.  Jesus reveals that.  And what John says here in our Epistle is very similar.  God’s love—the love he’s put into action in Jesus—is made complete in his people as they are forgiven and restored and as his Spirit makes them—makes us new.  And so it’s through us that people come to know who God is.  Jesus came and proclaimed that God’s kingdom was breaking into the world and he called men and women to repent and enter his kingdom by faith.  Now, in us, the world sees that kingdom.  Jesus calls us to proclaim his kingdom with our mouths and to call people to repentance and faith, but it’s in our lives—and our love for each other—that the world sees what Jesus has done.  Just as God’s love is manifest in Jesus, who took our flesh upon himself, so, John says in 3:18, we are called to love, not so much in word or speech (although we should do that too!), but to love in truth and action, made manifest in our flesh and blood.

At the end of our lesson, in verse 21, John warns: “This is the commandment we have from him: Those who love God must also love their brothers and sisters.”  John is talking specifically about loving our fellow Christians, but our love shouldn’t be restricted by the walls of the church.  That was Israel’s problem and it’s what Jesus condemns in our Gospel today.  But John’s point is that you can’t claim to love God while not loving others.  If you say you love God but you hate your brother or your sister, you’re a liar.  It’s that simple.  Granted, I don’t know anyone who’s learned to love with the perfection of Jesus, but we ought to be trying.  We ought to feel remorse when we fail to love.  We ought to recoil when we see hate in a brother or sister—and we ought to desire to bring correction.  John writes, “By this we know that we abide in him and he in us, because he has given us of his Spirit.”  And the Holy Spirit changes hearts and minds.  The Holy Spirit gives life to our dead wood and makes us bear fruit, the greatest of which is love.

Again, this is a challenge.  Just think over the last week—or maybe just the last twenty-four hours—and I think we can all find some way in which we failed to be loving—probably more than one.  I remember thinking about this when I was younger and it was new to me and I looked at my own life and I was afraid.  I knew I wasn’t living up to the standard John describes and I worried that one day I’d be saying, “Lord, Lord” and Jesus would tell me to depart because he didn’t know me.  But that’s not where John takes us.  Instead, John tells us in verses 17 and 18 about the confidence we can have before God.  “Love has been perfected in us in this: that we may have boldness on the day of judgement, because as he is, so are we in this world.  There is no fear in love, but perfect love drives out fear.  Fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not been perfected in love.”

The love of God manifested in the flesh and blood of Jesus is made complete in us as we in turn devote our flesh and blood to God’s love.  And despite our struggles and our failures, we have no need to be afraid that we’re outside the redeeming grace of God.  If the love of God has been completed or perfected in love this way in us it has only happened because we are in Christ.  God loves us.  He manifests his love by giving Jesus so that we can be forgiven and restored.  We grab hold of Jesus in faith.  He pours his Spirit into us and transforms us.  We start bearing fruit and the love of God pours out of us to others and back to God.  And the more we think and meditate on it all the more we’ll be driven to love.  Brothers and Sisters, if you’re struggling to love, steep yourself in the Word and meditate on Jesus and the cross.  If you’re struggling to love, come to the Table this morning and think on Jesus, the Son of God, giving his flesh and blood for your sake.  If you’re struggling with a half-hearted commitment to love, if we’re struggling to take love seriously, consider and meditate on just how seriously God has taken his love for us.  In love he gave his Son for us.  In love he sent his Spirit to make us new.  And if we will immerse ourselves in the love of God poured out on us in Jesus and the Spirit, the Father will surely perfect his love in us.

Let us pray: Heavenly Father, in the Collect we acknowledged that in our mortal weakness we can do no good thing.  It is by your grace that we are transformed.  Remind us each day, we pray of the loving grace you have shown to us in giving Jesus, your Son, as a sacrifice for our sins.  Remind us each day of the gift of the Spirit, whom you have poured into us and the gift of your Word that the Spirit has caused to be written—the witness to your mighty and saving deeds witnessed through the prophets and apostles and finally in Jesus.  Immerse us in the means of grace you have given: in your Word, in your Sacraments, in the loving fellowship of your church where we find exhortation and discipline.  Complete your love in us, we pray, through Jesus Christ our Lord.  Amen.

A Sermon for Trinity Sunday

St. John 3:1-17

by William Klock

The Feast of the Holy Trinity was introduced in the early Tenth Century by Stephen, the Bishop of Liége in Belgium.  It caught on quickly and became popular in the churches of the Low Countries, Germany, and England.  For hundreds of years there had been a tradition of a private mass, said by the priest each Sunday that honoured the Trinity, but this feast day sort of went public with it—made a much bigger deal of it.  But our lessons today go back long before the Sunday after Pentecost was observed as Trinity Sunday.  Typically, when we have a major feast on the calendar—like Christmas or Easter or Pentecost—there’s a Sunday before or after that fleshes it out, that explains what was going on when that event happened.  And that’s what our lessons—particularly our Gospel—today were meant to do for Pentecost.  But when Trinity Sunday came along no one changed the lessons, because here we see the Trinity revealed in the exchange between Jesus and Nicodemus, we see the Trinity revealed as Israel’s story reaches its climax in Jesus and as the Spirit is poured out on God’s people.

In Jesus the new Israel was born and our Gospel today sort of bridges the gap between the old Israel at Mt. Sinai and the new Israel at Pentecost. Nicodemus comes to visit Jesus.  He came at night, which suggests he was afraid of being seen.  He was one of the Pharisees—not all of them were bad or hostile to Jesus, but they were the ones who had it all figured out and Jesus didn’t fit well into their thinking.  He’d been watching and listening to Jesus.  He saw the God of Israel at work.  He says to him, “Rabbi, we know that you’re a teacher who’s come from God.  No one could do these signs you’re doing unless God is with him.”

Nicodemus knew the story.  He knew the God of Israel.  But he knew there was more to it.  As he’d watched and listened to Jesus he’d figured that out.  Jesus was talking about the Lord doing another great work, of the Lord leading his people in another exodus, this time more significant than the last one from Egypt.  It didn’t fit into his Pharisaical paradigm, but there had to be something to it, because the Lord was so clearly with Jesus.

And Jesus picks up on the question implied in Nicodemus’ statement.  He says, “The central truth you’re missing, Nicodemus, is that you’ve got to be born again to see the kingdom of God.”  Nicodemus understood so much.  If anyone wanted to see God’s will done and his kingdom come on earth as in heaven it was the Pharisees.  That’s what they lived for.  And Nicodemus saw it in Jesus, but Jesus wasn’t preaching what the Pharisees were preaching.  Jesus is saying to him that what he’s missing is this new birth, this being born again.

And Nicodemus doesn’t get it.  “How can I be born again, Jesus?  I know you’re not talking about returning to my mother’s womb, but what do you mean.  A person is only born once.”  You see, what Jesus is getting at is this idea that Israel needs to be put back on track so that she can fulfil her mission—the one given to Abraham almost two thousand years before.  And this idea of birth would have resonated particularly with someone like Nicodemus.  To be a Jew was all about being born as part of Abraham’s family.  Other things like circumcision and what you ate (or didn’t eat) were important too and especially so for the Pharisees, but those things were important because they identified you as part of Abraham’s family.  They also drew a clear boundary between those who were in the family and all the uncircumcised, unclean gentiles were most definitely not.

What Jesus is saying now is that being born into Abraham’s family in the way the Jews had been thinking about it all this time wasn’t enough.  In fact, it never had been enough.  And Nicodemus should have known this.  For almost two millennia people were being born into Abraham’s family and God’s kingdom still hadn’t come.  For almost two millennia people were born into Abraham’s family and still the Gentiles hadn’t experienced the Lord’s blessing through them, at least not on the large scale envisioned in the Scriptures.  Just the opposite.  Zechariah had spoken of a day when the Gentiles would be grabbing hold of Jews by their clothing saying, “Take us with you, because we hear that God is with you!”  Instead, because of the way most of Abraham’s children were living, the nations mocked them and taunted them saying, “Where’s your God now?”  It takes more than being born of the flesh of Abraham.

Jesus says to Nicodemus, “Truly, truly, unless you’re born of water and the Spirit you cannot enter God’s kingdom.  Flesh gives birth to flesh, but the Spirit gives birth to spirit.”  Israel needs something more than a biological inheritance.  What does Jesus mean, though, when he talks about being born of water and the Spirit?  This was what John the Baptist was preaching about.  God was about to lead his people in a new exodus.  As Israel had been led through the waters of the Red Sea to become a covenant family, so John was calling people to pass through the waters of the Jordan—a step of repentance and faith—and into a new covenant.  Nicodemus needed that baptism of repentance.  He needed to turn aside from his own misguided expectations of the kingdom and of the Messiah.  But remember what John promised.  When people asked if he was the Messiah he said that he was only the forerunner.  John said, “I baptise you with water, but he will plunge you into the Holy Spirit.”  And that’s just what Jesus does.  As we recalled last week on Pentecost, Jesus takes those who have repented, who have turned aside from every false lord, from every false god, from every false source of security in order to take hold of him in faith by passing through the waters of baptism and he plunges us into the Holy Spirit.  And it’s the Spirit who does the work of transforming us.  It’s the Spirit who regenerates us.  It’s the Spirit who causes us to be born again as he takes our old dead wood and unites it to the life of Jesus, causing us to bear fruit.

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

But, again, this didn’t fit what Nicodemus knew.  “How can this be so?” he asks.  And Jesus asks a bit incredulously, “How can you not know this?  You’re one of the teachers of Israel!”  Nicodemus knew the story.  He understood how Israel had so miserably failed in her mission.  In fact, that’s what the Pharisees were all about: Calling Israel to be more faithful to the law so that the Lord would return to her.  Jesus tells Nicodemus: God has heard cries and is visiting his people and he’s doing it in me.  I’m the son of man, the one spoken of by Daniel all those years ago.  I can tell you reliably the things of heaven because I’m the one who has come down from heaven.

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

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

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

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

A Sermon for Ascension Sunday

Daniel 7:9-14 & Acts 1:1-11

by William Klock

 

As you came today you walked through the lychgate and under those words carved on it: “Jesus is Lord”.  That’s the central truth we celebrate and remember in the Ascension and it’s an exhortation we need to hear right now more than ever.  People are living in fear of sickness.  Our government is trying to control the spread of that sickness—and for so much of the last year it feels like we’re wasting out time, like those people out cutting scotch broom along the public right of ways, while acres upon acres are growing on private land just the other side of a wire fence, like bailing water out of a sinking boat.  And, meanwhile, the scientists have been working frantically for a solution—and now we’ve got it, if only we can get it to people fast enough.  Brothers and Sisters, the people living in crippling fear need to be reminded that Jesus is Lord.  The politicians and the technocrats need to be reminded that Jesus is Lord.  And everyone who thinks that Science is our saviour needs to be reminded that Jesus is Lord.  Healthy fear, good government, and the miracles of science are all good things—but we need to remember that they are gifts of God under the lordship of Jesus.

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

What just happened there?  Why were they agape, staring into the sky?  It wasn’t just that Jesus had done something that no one else had ever done before.  No, it was because he did something that anyone who knew the Hebrew scriptures recognised.  In our Old Testament lesson from Daniel 7 we read about the one called the son of man.  Daniel saw in a vision a sequence of empires…Babylonians, Persians, Greeks.  They were ferocious, destructive, oppressing God’s people.  And then they were destroyed and, Daniel says, he saw this one like a son of man—a figure representing the people of God— “with the clouds of heaven…he came to the Ancient of Days and was presented before him.  And to him was given dominion and glory and a kingdom, that all peoples, nations, and languages should serve him; his dominion is an everlasting dominion, which shall not pass away, and his kingdom one that shall not be destroyed.”

God’s people had suffered, been defeated, exiled, oppressed and through it all the faithful continued and they cried out to the Lord and Daniel saw their prayers answered in the son of man as he was revealed in glory, as he came on the clouds to take his throne with the ancient of day.  Friends, the disciple stood there agape because right there on the Mount of the Ascension, Daniel’s vision had just become a reality.  The son of man had ascended to take his throne and that meant—it still means—that despite any appearances to the contrary, despite despotic kings, despite rejection and persecution, despite the ongoing presence of sin and death in the word, Jesus is seated on his throne, Jesus rules, Jesus is Lord.

It is providential that Augustus chose to use the imagery of Caesar ascending into heaven to become a god and that “Caesar is Lord” became the quasi-religious pledge of allegiance to the Roman Empire.  I say it’s providential, because what the pagan Romans had been depicting in their imperial iconography for a generation before Jesus, was also struck down that day when Jesus did for real, what the Romans believed Caesar had done symbolically.  However much Caesar insisted that he was lord of the world, no matter how hard he pressed those early believers to acknowledge it, to offer him a pinch of incense on the imperial altars, no matter how many he crucified or fed to the lions, they knew that Jesus had done it for real and they persevered in faith knowing that Jesus is Lord.

Jesus’ kingdom is here and now.  It’s not coming in the future.  It’s not coming after a rapture of believers.  It’s not coming before or after or in the middle of a Great Tribulation.  And it’s not something we have to go to heaven to experience.  The disciples asked Jesus when the kingdom was coming and Jesus responded by telling them that it was not for them to know.  I think he was smiling as he said that, because the next thing we see is Jesus ascending.  Just as the Ascension sends the message loudly and clearly that Jesus is Lord, it also sends the message loudly and clearly that his kingdom is here and now, even if the King’s throne is in heaven.  They asked him when the kingdom was coming and in response he gave them a dramatic visual that they’d never forget: They saw the King ascend to his throne.  Brothers and Sisters, the Ascension of Jesus tells us very dramatically and unmistakably that the kingdom is here and now.  Why is the Ascension important?  Again, it tells us dramatically and unmistakably that the kingdom is here and now.

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

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

And all this comes to full fruit in Jesus.  He has come as the Son of Man.  He has come as the Messiah—the true and eternal king in the line of David.  He has come to bring the Lord’s new creation to full fruit—to suffer for his people and to give them his Holy Spirit that they might truly be the new creation that Israel was supposed to be—that they might be the true sons and daughters of Abraham.  But not only that, he has also come to establish a kingdom over which he will rule himself—a kingdom to protect and to safeguard the new creation—the Lord’s garden as it grows and flourishes and spreads throughout the world.  This is the story of the book of Acts.  We read the beginning today: Jesus ascended into the clouds to take his heavenly throne.  Jesus is Lord, Caesar is not.  The rest of Acts is the story of the church, of the new creation, of the kingdom spreading throughout the world.  And Acts ends dramatically with Paul in Rome, in chains, proclaiming the lordship of Jesus right under Caesar’s nose.  Through the suffering, persecution, and martyrdom of the saints, the kingdom of Jesus has triumphed and will continue to triumph.

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

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

Brothers and Sisters, in the Old Testament the temple was the one place on earth where heaven and earth met and where the Lord could be known.  When Jesus came he became the temple for us.  The amazing thing is that Jesus didn’t leave it at that.  He sent his Holy Spirit to fill and indwell us.  We, his Church, are now the temple.  We are now the place where heaven and earth connect and where the Lord is made known.  And that’s our mission.  Carved on our lychgate are those familiar words: “Jesus is Lord”.  We pass beneath them as we come to the church to meet and to worship, but have you ever thought about what they really mean?  The next time you walk under those words remember the Ascension.  Remember that Jesus is seated on his throne, that his kingdom is here and now, and that he has made us his people.  We are his army, but not an army like those of Rome sent out to conquer barbarians with the sword.  Jesus calls us to charge into the darkness bearing his light, to suffer and even to die for the sake of the lost as we seek to make known his love, his peace, his justice, his mercy, and especially his grace.

Let us pray: Gracious Father, in his Ascension you have raised Jesus to the place of kingship and authority.  Let us never forget the significance of his rule.  As we face the darkness, give us courage to shine his light brightly and to proclaim that he is Lord.  Increase our understanding of your love and grace that we might manifest it to hostile world around us.  And remind us, Father, to live in the hope of his sure return when all of his enemies have been subjected to his rule.  In the meantime, as we wait for the restoration of heaven and earth, let us be faithful representative of your kingdom, making heaven visible and known to all around us.  We ask this through Jesus Christ, our Saviour and our Lord.  Amen.

Sermon on John 16:23-33

Our gospel lesson this morning comes from John 16, part of Jesus’ farewell discourse with his disciples before his crucifixion. We are reading this passage from our time, on the other side of the resurrection, but it is importation for our understanding of it to relate what Jesus says here to the moment when he spoke it to his disciples:

prior to our passage, Jesus has mentioned that what he is about to do is like childbirth: a process full of pain, but in which pain is forgotten in the joy that attends a new life coming into the world.

asking the Father in Jesus’ name

not Jesus asking for them, but them asking the Father in Jesus’ name.

“hitherto you have asked nothing in my name” - the accomplishment of salvation has not yet happened; Christians’ appeal to the Father is not yet a matter of their inclusion in the finished redemption. At this moment, Jesus is speaking before His crucifixion, before His arrest, before His last Supper.

“in figures of speech” - the Greek is paroimiai, that is the Hebrew mashal, mishlim. Yes, it is the title of the book of Proverbs, but in another sense it is a label for the riddling parables that Jesus has used in his preaching of the Kingdom so far — including Jesus comparison of his sacrificial death to childbirth in the immediately foregoing previous verses.

The disciples have been so very uncomprehending of the plan. On the mount of Transfiguration, Peter had offered to build three tents – as though it were already time for the Sukkoth, the feast of booths that followed after the redemption from Egypt. But Jesus was on the mountain discussing his “exodus” with Moses and Elijah. Or again, when Jesus tried to tell his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and suffer many things from the elders and chief priests and scribe and be killed, and on the third day be raised, Peter responded by taking Him aside and rebuking Him. Or again, when on another occasion, Jesus explained that the path to His glory led through sufferings and death, He was immediately met with a request that James and John sit at His right hand and His left in His kingdom.

Right up to the moment of His arrest, they don’t understand. They are sleeping just before Judas and his armed band arrive to arrest Jesus. The disciples have no sense of the urgency of Jesus’ impending suffering.

But Jesus’ discourse is full of this pressing urgency. “The hour is coming” he says twice. “In that day,” he says twice. He knows well that things will look quite different to them from the other side. Then they will remember what He had told them; then they will recognize Him in the breaking of the bread; then they will look back at his promise to raise this temple in three days and they will realize that He was speaking about His body; then they will “believe the Scripture and the word that Jesus had spoken.”

And when this happens, everything will be clear. Jesus says to his disciples that “I will tell you plainly about the Father.” Note the future tense. The hour is coming when I will tell you plainly about the Father. That is, Jesus is telling his disciples that when you see the Son of God dying on the cross and then rising again, and the penny drops, and Thomas has been invited to poke Jesus with his finger, and you have eaten fish with Him on the shore of the sea of Galilee — then you will have the fullest and plainest explanation of who Israel’s God is. Then you will understand that glory comes through suffering, and you will know how much the Father loves His people Israel. Then, after listening to Jesus tell one audience after another that “the kingdom of heaven is like” – which really means “the kingship of God is like” — is like a mustard seed, a treasure in a field, a pearl of great price, a fishnet full of fish, leaven in bread dough, a sower who went out to sow seed – and maybe you disciples puzzled over those parables, those mishlim — then at last, you will be confronted with the reality that all those parables were speaking of. In the light of the resurrection, confronted with a fait accompli, you will finally understand. This – this resurrection, this tomb, this cross, these hands that bear the marks of the nails for all eternity – this is how Israel’s God has become King at last. Now you know the Father, because the Son has shown Him to you.

But His disciples, like Peter offering to build the tabernacles to celebrate Sukkoth before the Exodus, skip over the painful birth pangs and try to go straight to rejoicing over the baby. They think that he has already made the full disclosure: “Ah now you are speaking plainly and not using figurative speech! Now we know that you know all things and do not need anyone to question you; this is why we beleive that you came from God.”

Their answer still shows no understanding of the need for Jesus to die; of the fact that only by being stretched out on the cross can He do what John says He has done: “No one has ever seen God; the only-begotten Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, he has explained Him.” (John 1:18. The word “explained” is ἐξηγήσατο.)

Jesus then gives His disciples an astounding promise:

“Whatever you ask of the Father in my name, he will give it to you.” (16:23)

This is not word-faith, prosperity gospel, “name it and claim it” nonsense. Jesus doesn’t mean that if you believe in him, you can ask the Father for a waterfront mansion, and He will give it to you. Or “I want a Lamborghini inJesusnameamen!” The addition of “in Jesus’ name” doesn’t act as a magical “get what you want” spell.

We need to squeeze this utterance. One of the first things we need to notice about it is that it echoes what Martha says to Jesus when he comes to Bethany to raise Lazarus, in John 11:22:

“Martha said to Jesus, "Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died. But even now I know that whatever you ask from God, God will give you." -John 11:21-22

This is the sort of access to God that Jesus is promising His disciples. He explicitly disavows that he is going to be a permanent interface between the disciples and the Father, as though Jesus were going to relay our messages to the Father, or as though the Father didn’t really know and love us, but just Jesus, with us sort of smuggled in under his cloak. No, we ask the Father, and He hears us. Not through a series of secretaries and receptionists. Not through the saints or the Virgin Mary, as though we were children who ask Mom rather than Dad because she’s more likely to say yes.

And this speaks to one of the big problems that affects many people’s view of God. They think of Jesus and the Father as existing in a sort of good cop/bad cop relationship, or that the Father is the harsh and judgmental God who smites sinners and sends them to Hell, while Jesus is kind and loving and wants to save us. No, says, Jesus, “the Father himself loves you.” It is because the Father loves you that He sent Jesus to save you.

But it remains the case that Jesus tells us to ask “in my name” -

rabbis in the Talmud are cited as saying something “in the name of rabbi so and so”

come from God - theme in John

preexistence

disciples vs the cosmos

Mother’s Day - we have to reach back and grab a little bit of text from before our Gospel lesson today: John 16:21 “When a woman is giving birth, she has sorrow because her hour has come, but when she has delivered the baby, she no longer remembers the anguish, for joy that a human being has been born into the world.”

A Sermon for the Fourth Sunday after Easter

St. John 16:5-15 & St. James 1:17-21

by William Klock

Our lessons today continue to carry us through the Easter season.  In our Gospel we see the story moving us gradually from the events of Holy Week and Easter to the Ascension and to Pentecost and in our Epistle St. James points us to the practical outworking, to the implications for the Christian life of what Jesus was explain to his disciples.

Our Gospel today isn’t the easiest passage to understand, but it helps to have a sense of where the Jewish people were coming from in the First Century.  There were times when Israel prospered and flourished, but most of her history involved difficult times, whether that was her slavery in Egypt, internal conflicts, conflicts with her pagan neighbours, or her exile to Babylon.  Through these difficult times, God’s people cried out to him, whether it was the nation as a whole crying out for God to give them justice in the face of wicked enemies or the righteous within Israel crying out for God to judge the wicked kings or priests or false prophets in her midst.  God’s people pleaded for their day in God’s court.  They knew he was the just Judge, they knew his promises, and they knew that if and, more importantly when, they had the opportunity to stand before him, he would hear their case, that he would hear their evidence, and that he would judge rightly—that he would find his people (or the faithful remnant among them) to be in the right, that he would vindicate them, and that he would punish their enemies and set things to right.  Through the Psalms and here and there in the Prophets we get glimpses of the heavenly courtroom and hear Israel pleading with the Lord to let her stand there and to hear her case.  And things were no different in Jesus’ day.  The people pleaded with the Lord to hear their case against the Romans, or against the corrupt Herodians, the Romans’ puppet local rulers, or against the men who had corrupted the priesthood and the temple.  This desperate longing for God’s justice is what Jesus draws on in the Upper Room as he speaks to his disciples, preparing them for what’s to come. Let me read part of our Gospel to you again and see if you can hear it.

 

But now I am going to him who sent me, and none of you asks me, ‘Where are you going?’ But because I have said these things to you, sorrow has filled your heart. Nevertheless, I tell you the truth: it is to your advantage that I go away, for if I do not go away, the Helper will not come to you. But if I go, I will send him to you. And when he comes, he will convict the world concerning sin and righteousness and judgment: concerning sin, because they do not believe in me; concerning righteousness, because I go to the Father, and you will see me no longer; concerning judgment, because the ruler of this world is judged.

 

Jesus is telling his friends that he’s going to have to leave them and this leaves them with all sorts of questions.  The Messiah was supposed to set everything to rights, but how is that going to happen if he leaves?  And now Jesus is saying that the problems are going to continue.  His people will face rejection and persecution.  But he also promises that they will know the vindication that Israel had always longed for.  This is, in fact, just the reason why he’s got to leave.

You see, they thought that the Messiah would be the one standing as their advocate when they had their day in God’s court.  That he would be their lawyer—to put it in our terms.  They expected Jesus to be their Perry Mason.  If he were to leave, who would make their case?  But Jesus is going to do something even better.  Jesus will send the Helper.  The Greek word is parakletos.  Jesus is referring to the Holy Spirit, but the word he uses here refers to one who will stand as a mediator or intercessor or an advocate.  The Spirit will stand before the Judge like Perry Mason to make the case.  But here’s the critical thing: Jesus the Messiah will by the one in the dock.  He will be the one on trial.  And this is why Jesus had to leave them.  He was arrested, falsely accused, and unjustly executed.  The world issued a verdict against Jesus: he was a false messiah, he was in the wrong.  But by raising him from the dead, his Father overturned that verdict and declared that he is, indeed, the Messiah.  And the disciples were overjoyed to have him back—but then he had to leave again.  Why?  They need their Messiah with them, so they think, to set things to rights.  But, no, he’s got to leave again.  Why?  Because his vindication is not complete.  Jesus’ vindication is completed in his ascension, as he returns to the Father to sit as his side as Lord of all.

And so Jesus will be raised from the dead and he will ascend to his throne.  And this these things will be Exhibit A and Exhibit B when the Spirit makes his case in court.  The Spirit, Jesus says, will bring the evidence to convict the world of sin.  First, the Spirit will hold up the world’s rejection of Jesus himself and its continuing pursuit of its own values and agendas as evidence.  Second, the Spirit will bring evidence to convict the false justice of the world.  Most translations make this already difficult passage more difficult by translating dikaiosyne as “righteousness” when “justice” suits the passage far better.  The world believes itself to be just or in the right.  We see this supremely in the false conviction and execution of Jesus.  But the world’s verdict on Jesus was overturned that first Easter and God’s verdict in regards to Jesus is confirmed at his ascension.  Third, the Spirit will bring the evidence to show that the world’s judgment or condemnation of Jesus and his people is wrong.  Jesus’ death, resurrection, and ascension reveal the defeat of the “ruler of this world”—of the satan, of sin, and of death.  In short, what the Lord has promised and what Israel had longed for is about to be fulfilled in and by Jesus himself and will be known by those who have united themselves to him in faith.  Brothers and Sisters, here’s the wonderful thing here.  Jesus is the one who will stand in the dock to face the judge.  The Spirit will make his case.  The judge will find him—from our perspective today, had already found him—to be in the right.  And then we find out that Jesus invites us sinners to join him in the dock as the Father issues his verdict.  We have done nothing.  Jesus has done it all.  But when we by faith step into the dock and identify ourselves with Jesus, his vindication becomes our vindication.  He reality becomes our sure and certain hope.  Jesus exhorts his friends in verses 14-15:

He will glorify me, for he will take what is mine and declare it to you. All that the Father has is mine; therefore I said that he will take what is mine and declare it to you.

 

“He will take what is mine and declare it to you.”  But, Brothers and Sisters, it’s more than the verdict in favour Jesus that the Spirit declares and passes on to us.  Let’s look at our Epistle again.  Again, this is James 1:17-21.

 

Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change. Of his own will he brought us forth by the word of truth, that we should be a kind of firstfruits of his creatures.

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

 

The work of the Spirit that Jesus describes in the Gospel is not limited to the heavenly courtroom or to esoteric knowledge about Jesus.  This should be obvious if we remember Israel’s story.  Her relationship with the Lord had always been meant to work out in her life and her life was meant to be a witness to the world of life in the presence of God.  If the Spirit will come alongside Jesus’ people to see them vindicated in the heavenly court, and if the Spirit is to give them understanding into just what it is that Jesus has done by his death and resurrection, St. James knew that the Spirit will also cause the life of God to well up in this new Israel that is rooted in Jesus.  James is well-known for his stress on the works that necessarily accompany faith.  God doesn’t merely save his people from sin and death, he saves them to be his stewards.

It seems likely that when today’s Epistle was chosen to be paired with our passage from John 16, an association was meant to be made between Jesus’ promise of the Spirit and James’ statement that “every perfect gift is from above”.  While James does not speak directly of the Spirit, the gifts from above that he does address are those conferred by the Spirit and his exhortation here closely parallels Jesus’ exhortation in the Gospel.  James speaks first of the wisdom God bestows on those who ask (v. 5) and then, after urging his readers to stand firm in the face of persecution (v. 12), he reminds them that God is not the source of our temptation (vv. 13-14).  Just the opposite, in fact: God only sends us good gifts.  In our fallen state, our disordered desires lead us to sin and sin to death, but God has spoken his “word of truth”—his logos, surely a reference both to Jesus and to God’s word in a more general sense—to bring about a work of new creation in us.  If we in Jesus, the new creation that has begun in him is beginning in us as well.  Even as we face trials and struggle against sin, the firstfruits of God’s new world are manifest in our lives.

But Friends, this leaves us with a choice.  Will we pursue sin or will be pursue the life of God?  In the heavenly court we have been declared by God to be in the right, because we have united ourselves to Jesus in faith.  His vindication is our vindication.  The Spirit has given witness on our behalf.  But woe to the one who names Jesus while manifesting anger, filthiness, and wickedness.  Try as we might to claim the vindication of Jesus for ourselves, a life characterised by wickedness rather than the Spirit reveals any such claim to be superficial.  As James will write in 2:20, faith without works is dead.  Brothers and Sisters, when we are united with Jesus the Spirit not only makes the Father’s verdict that Jesus is in the right our verdict, but he also does a work of transformation—of regeneration and renewal in us that gives evidence of that verdict.  The evidence that we have taken hold of Jesus in faith is God’s new creation welling up in us as we manifest the fruit of the indwelling Spirit and produce good works.  And so, even as we grasp Jesus in faith, we also pray in faith as we do in our Collect today, for grace—for grace that will rightly order our sinful and unruly hearts, for grace that we will love what he commands, and for grace that we will desire what he has promised.

Let us pray: Almighty God, you alone can bring into order the unruly wills and affections of sinners: Grant your people grace to love what you command and desire what you promise; that, among the many and varied changes of the world, our hearts may surely there be fixed where true joys are to be found; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.  Amen.