Living Words

A Sermon for Ash Wednesday

Joel 2:12-17 & St. Matthew 6:16-21

by William Klock

Our Epistle today from Joel gives us a unique opportunity to view not only the day’s Gospel, but the entire season of Lent from the perspective of Israel’s story.  Joel’s ministry as a prophet likely took place at some point after the exile and the contents of the book summon Judah to repentance as the nation faced the devastation wrought by a horrible plague of locusts.  We get a sense of the severity of the plague in the first chapter, where it is revealed that the locusts have consumed even the vines and stripped the fig trees of their bark.  These are not the normal food of locusts.  They are what locusts would turn to once everything else had been consumed.  The vine and the fig tree being symbols of peace and prosperity, their consumption by locusts speaks to the desperate situation of the nation.  As 1:13 notes, the priests lamented before the altar for there was neither grain nor drink left in the land to offer to the Lord.

Repeatedly the prophet speaks of Day of the Lord, a day to which Israel looked with eager anticipation.  One day the Lord would arise from his throne, he who had tamed chaos to create an ordered cosmos, and he would do the same again.  The Lord would arise to bring justice to his people and to set all to rights.  Israel’s perennial problem was that she always saw herself as the innocent victim.  On the Day of the Lord her enemies would be vanquished and she would be vindicated.  It occurred to few that the Day of the Lord might turn out to be a judgement on Israel’s own sins.  This gets at the heart of Joel’s prophecy.  The Day of Lord has come and his own people have found themselves the focus of his judgement.

The book is a call to repentance.  Judah stands condemned for having offered the outward sacrifices of grain, wine, and oil, while the people had not truly dedicated their hearts to the Lord.  But Joel reminds the people that this is not the end.  The purpose of the Lord’s discipline is to bring repentance and with repentance will come restoration.  “Even now,” declares the Lord, return to me with all your heart…Return to the Lord your God, for he is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love; and he relents over disaster” (vv. 12-13).

This does not mean that the outward trapping of religion and of repentance are unnecessary.  Through the prophet the Lord summons his people to fast, to weep, to mourn—but to do so from the heart and as evidence of true repentance.  Lest they are tempted to make a show of rending their garments, the Lord declares it is more important that they first rend their hearts.

The need for corporate repentance is highlighted as well.  The priests are to take their place “between the vestibule and the altar” to weep and cry out for mercy while the entire nation joins them: the elders and the children—even the bride and bridegroom are to suspend their honeymoon that the whole nation take part in this corporate act of repentance.

In response to the honest repentance of the nation, the Lord promises restoration—even that one day he will solve Israel’s heart problem by pouring out his Spirit.  In that day he will establish his people forever and put an end to their enemies.  Here our Epistle, even as we enter our Lenten fast, sets our eyes on Easter and on the age to come that burst forth from the empty tomb.  Even as we are reminded by the old Israel of the importance of penitence, both as individuals and corporately as the Church, we are also reminded that we are not the old Israel; we are the new Israel, the people who live on the other side of the Lord’s promise to pour out his Spirit.

As we read today’s Gospel we see Jesus addressing the same old problem.  Many in Israel continued to put on a show of outward piety, while their hearts were far from the Lord.  Jesus warns that those who put on a show for others have received all they will ever receive for their efforts.  They may receive respect and honour from those around them, but it has not moved God.  Think again of the Day of the Lord, that day when the people of Israel anticipated the Lord coming to defeat their enemies, to set all to rights, and to reign forever.  Many people fasted and made public acts of repentance in anticipation of that day.  Jesus’ warning in light of that should have been frightening.  As the Messiah, he was setting in motion the events that would culminate in the Day of the Lord and here he warns that those who have made an insincere show of repentance will have no share in that day.  Rather, those who, to use the language of Joel, have rent their hearts rather than their garments, are the ones whom the Father will see and reward—they are the ones who will know the age to come.

Let your investment be in the age to come, Jesus exhorts the people.  Investment in the things of this age will not last.  Moth and rust corrupt and thieves break in and steal.  More importantly, our investments in the values and systems of the present evil age are foolish in light of the inauguration of the age to come by Jesus.  We’re reminded of the Quinquagesima Epistle from 1 Corinthians 13.  If even the good, God-given gifts of tongues and prophecy will one day cease to have a purpose when the age to come as been consummated, how much more ought we to hold lightly to the praises of others and to investment in the values, systems, and institutions of the age that is passing away.  Instead, Jesus encourages his people to lay up treasures in heaven.  It’s important to note that Jews did not understand “heaven” the way many Christians unfortunately do, as referring to “up there” or “the next life”.  In Jewish thought—as it should be in Christian thought—heaven is God’s realm as earth is ours and Jesus has accomplished the work to heal the breach between them caused by human sin and rebellion.  One day heaven and earth will be rejoined.  One day, as the Jews had always hoped, all will be set to rights and evil wiped from the face of the earth.  It is that dawning age into which we ought to be investing, knowing that what we do out of love for God and love for each other in this age is what will last into the age to come.

Israel struggled with repentance and so did the people surrounding Jesus.  They lived in anticipation of the fulfilment of the Lord’s promise to pour out his Spirit and to set right the hearts of his people.  There is, necessarily then, a difference between our season of penitence and theirs.  We live on the fulfilment side of the Lord’s promise.  We are the people in whom the Spirit of God dwells and that has changed everything.  Nevertheless, we too live in anticipation of the day when all will finally be set to rights and so it is just as important for us to set our eyes on Jesus and to commit ourselves to investing in the thing of his kingdom.

Brothers and Sisters, this is the purpose of our Lenten fast.  Each year the Church calls us to slow down, to take a break, and to fast so that we can, for at least these few weeks, invest some time that we wouldn’t normally invest in considering God’s word, in considering the gospel, in considering what Jesus has done for us by his death and resurrection, to make a point of being deliberate about our love for each other and, especially for the poor and needy, so that as we approach Easter, we will have our eyes more firmly set on Jesus and the new life and the new creation that lie before us.

A Sermon for Quinquagesima

1 Corinthians 13:1-13

by William Klock

This last Thursday I was making dinner and Veronica was teaching a piano lesson.  I overheard her telling what, I think, must be one of her favourite stories.  Mozart, so it goes, apparently had trouble getting up some mornings, so one of his servants would go to the piano and play a scale right up to the last note and then stop.  The unfinished scale would so irritate Mozart that he had to get out of bed, go to the piano, and play that one last note.  I think it’s a musician thing, because Veronica has told me this story many, many times—usually just after I’ve turned off the car or TV in the middle of a piece of music.

I say this because I think it illustrates something about the nature of the kingdom of God.  When Jesus came he introduced a new piece of music to his people.  We might even point back to the original tune that he taught to Adam and to Eve.  When their children lost the tune the Lord came and taught it again to Abraham and then to Moses and to the Israelites.  It wasn’t an easy tune—mostly because sinful human beings lacked the full ability to play it.  And so the tune God taught Abraham and Moses was a bit like a simple melody line played on the piano with one hand.  Even then Israel struggled to play it.  But when Jesus came he amazed everyone by sitting down at the piano and playing the full harmony with both hands.  The music took on new life.  It was fuller and richer and more beautiful than anything anyone had heard since Adam’s day.  Some people didn’t like it.  Some people flat-out refused to learn it or even listen to it.  But Jesus taught it to a few and each of them taught it to a few and each of those to a few and pretty soon thousands were playing and the music was spreading all over the world.  At some point someone taught it to each of us and now we’re playing it.

And yet, even still, we know—or at least we should know—that there’s more yet to come.  What Jesus has taught us to play isn’t the full piece of music.  It’s like the piano solo leading into the great orchestral piece.  It gives a taste of what’s to come, but to hear the full symphony we have to wait for Jesus to return—for Jesus to come back from heaven, bringing the kingdom with him in all its majesty and eternal glory.  In the meantime, we play the piece he’s taught us, the piece he’s specially equipped us to play.  And as we see in our Epistle this morning from First Corinthians, at the heart of this music Jesus has taught us—the melody of it that holds it all together and that will lead into something so much greater one day—the heart, the theme of that music is love.

We’ll be looking this morning at 1 Corinthians 13.  It’s a passage of Scripture that we’re very prone to understanding out of context—often because we read it out of context.  We hear it read it at weddings as if what it’s talking about is romantic love between husband and wife.  Or parts of it is painted on pieces of home décor or stitched on throw-pillows.  The result is that miss the point of the passage.  What Paul says here about love comes in the middle of a discussion about the Church, about living together as the body of Christ, about spiritual gifts, and about worship.  So, yes, what he describes here is about the love of husband and wife, but only because it is first and foremost about love in general, love as it should be lived out in every aspect of life and in every relationship in light of Jesus and what he’s accomplished.

A few weeks ago we were reading in Romans where Paul described the Church as being like a body, everyone gifted and equipped for a certain task, not for their own benefit, but for the benefit of the whole body.  During Epiphany, not long before that, we were reading about the Church as a temple, each of us a stone, shaped and carved and cut very carefully by the Lord and all purposefully fitted together as the dwelling place of the Holy Spirit.  Last Sunday we read Paul’s second letter to the Corinthians.  They were boasting to each other about their gifts and achievements and they’d started following teachers who boasted in their achievements—boasting as Greeks and Romans typically boasted.  It was how people climbed to the top of the heap and demanded respect and honour.  But in contrast Paul describes his own accomplishments: he’d been arrested, beaten, whipped, scourged, shipwrecked, cold, hungry, naked, shamed and run out of town in dishonour—all for the sake of his brothers and sisters, the very ones, in fact, who rejected him.  And we think: How is this all possible?  How do we live for the sake of others?  How do we die to self for the sake of others?  How do we sacrifice for the sake of others?  The last several Sundays pointed us toward discipline and humility.  Today the lessons point us to love.  And so after describing the way the Church acts as a body with each using his or her gifts for the sake of others and, ultimately, for the sake of Jesus and his kingdom Paul writes:

I will show you a still more excellent way.

If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.  And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing.  If I give away all I have, and if I deliver up my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing. (1 Corinthians 12:31b-13:4)

It’s not just about having and using gifts or about doing things in the Church.  The Corinthian Church had no lack of gifts.  It had no lack of activity.  It had no lack of people wanting to contribute money to this cause or that cause.  (One of the reasons Paul wrote to them was to raise money to support the struggling Christians in Jerusalem.)  The problem in Corinth was a lack of love.  Without love all the amazing things they were doing might as well have been nothing.

Back in Chapter 3 Paul used the illustration of building a temple.  Like the temple in Jerusalem, it was built of carefully hewn wood, cut stones, gold, and precious jewels.  Jesus is the foundation and others, like Paul and the Corinthians, were building on that foundation, but not everyone was building with stone or with gems and precious metals.  Some were building with hay and straw.  At the end, he says, it’ll all be tested with fire.  The hay and straw will go up in smoke.  This is an image here that gives us a sense of what lies in store.  Other passages talk of the old heaven and earth passing away and a new world being ushered in.  I’m sure much of the language is figurative—the reality is at this point beyond our understanding.  However it happens, though, that which is unworthy, that which is the product of sinfulness and selfishness, that which does not honour God will be consumed and will pass away, leaving a new world in which the holy, the God-honouring remains.  Only the work in which people truly invested—the stone, the gold, the silver, the precious jewels—will remain.  Some will make a good show of building, but if love is not their motive, it’s not going to last—it will be exposed and consumed by God’s judgement.  If love isn’t the motive, when Jesus comes and draws our music into his own great symphony, those who have been playing their own tune will have nothing to contribute.

Paul goes on in verses 5-7:

Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth.  Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

 

This is what will be left.  This is the melody that Jesus will take up into his great symphony.  And it stands in stark contrast with the ways and values of the present age, but it stands in contrast too with the ways and values of many people in the Church.  What Paul does is to hold up Jesus as our model for love.

Jesus is patient and kind.  Remember, he came to condemned sinners, not to condemn, but to redeem.  God has every right to leave us dead in our sins, but because he loves us he is patient and has given himself—the life of his Son—to restore us to life.  Love is not envious or boastful.  Think again of Jesus.  He who is God humbled himself in the incarnation—again, for our sake—becoming one of us.  And he came not as a great king or warrior, but as the son of a humble girl and her carpenter husband, raised in a poor backwater, and finally dying—for our sake—the humiliating and painful death of a criminal—a death we deserve, but that he did not.  He had more right to boast than anyone who has ever lived, but as they pressed the crown of thorns on his head and beat him, mocking his sovereignty, he chose not to revile them in return.  Instead, as he was dying he prayed for the very men who were standing there gloating and jeering at him.  Love is not irritable or resentful.  Again, God is patient and long-suffering.  Rather than resenting us for our sins, the Lord has given himself to redeem us from them.  Love does not rejoice at wrongs.  Just the opposite.  The angels in heaven rejoice with the Lord whenever a sinner repents.  Again, think of Jesus: Love bears all things…believes all things…hopes all things…endures all things.  Has anyone borne more or endured more than Jesus?

And with that image in our heads we need to think of ourselves.  Are we patient and kind?  And we need to be honest.  It’s easy to be patient and kind some of the time and to the people we like, but what about the people we don’t like?  What about those difficult situations we find ourselves in?  Are we really patient and kind?  Are we envious and boastful or, like Jesus, are we humble and willing to give up our honour for the sake of others—even for the sake of people who hurt us and wrong us.  Are we irritable and resentful?  These are sins that Christians can be very tolerant of.  Sometimes we even turn irritability and resentment into virtues when the right people and situations come our way.  What’s my reaction when Mormon missionaries knock on my door or when a telemarketer calls?  I can be pretty irritable and most people would say that that’s just fine when it comes to telemarketers and cult members.  Christians can often be downright curmudgeonly when it comes to sinners and to non-Christians—and many times we even see it as a virtue.  People of Jesus’ day would have said something similar about tax collectors and prostitutes and gentiles, but Jesus instead forgave these people and welcomed them into the kingdom.

Again, where and how do we fall short of Jesus’ model of love?  In our families?  In our workplaces?  In our schools?  In our church?  And imagine the difference it would make around us if love were the driving force, the motive behind everything we do.  Imagine what it would be like if we gave of ourselves, our rights, our honour, our glory the way that Jesus did.

And it sounds good, but I know it also sounds impossible.  How can we ever give of ourselves the way Jesus did?  Sometimes it’s hard enough giving this way to people we love.  What about people who aren’t close to us, people who have hurt us, people who are our enemies?  This is why we need to have the example of Jesus always before us.  We need to remember that we were his enemies.  We need to remember that he owed us nothing but judgement, and yet he became incarnate and died for us.  We need to think and meditate on the depth of love that God manifested towards us in Jesus.  Brothers and Sisters, the love of God in Jesus should motivate and transform us.

But that’s not all.  Love is impossible, but Jesus has done more than give us an example.  He’s washed us of our sin and he’s given us the Holy Spirit.  Think back to John the Baptist.  He told the people, “I’ve plunged you into the water, but one is coming who will plunge you into the Holy Spirit.”  Jesus doesn’t forgive our sins and leave us in some kind of neutral state.  He forgives our sins and then pours his own life into us.  Remember: The Lord didn’t rescue the Israelites from slavery in Egypt just to leave them wandering in the wilderness.  No.  He freed them from Egypt, he made them his people, and he took up his dwelling in their midst as he led them into a new home and new way of life.  And just so with Jesus, but on an even grander scale.  Jesus rescues us and frees us from sin and death, he makes us his people—more specifically, Paul talks about Jesus making us his own body—and he comes and dwells, not just in our midst, but actually inside us.  He makes us his temple as he pours his Spirit into us.  But his ultimate plan isn’t just to save us, but to redeem his entire creation—to set us back on the track that Adam and Eve abandoned when they sinned.  And so as Israel’s destination was the promised land, our destination is the New Jerusalem, the kingdom that Jesus has promised to bring in all its fullness.  That’s the future, but in Jesus that future has burst into our present.  In the Holy Spirit Jesus gives us a foretaste of what is to come.  He invites us play the music of the kingdom and the music of the kingdom is love.

Again: If it’s not driven by love, it won’t last.  And Paul drives this point home in the rest of the passage.  It’s not just that the things we do without love will go up in smoke when the kingdom finally comes in all its fullness, but even many of the good things Jesus calls us to do will be overwhelmed by the great theme of love.  Look at verses 8-13:

Love never ends.  As for prophecies, they will pass away; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will pass away.  For we know in part and we prophesy in part, but when the perfect comes, the partial will pass away.  When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child.  When I became a man, I gave up childish ways.  For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face.  Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known.

So now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love.

 

First Corinthians give us the distinct sense that the church in that city was fixated on certain miraculous gifts, especially prophecy and tongues, not only elevating those who had these gifts above others, but emphasizing to everyone that these gifts were sort of the end-all-be-all of Christianity.  Forget everything else—put it all aside—and pursue prophecy and tongues!  But Paul is warning them and saying, “No.  These gifts are great and they’re useful, but there’s something far more important: cultivate love.  If you want to build the kingdom, don’t pursue gifts.  If you’ve got them, use them—lovingly—but pursue love above all else.  When the kingdom is here and we’re all living in God’s presence, there will no longer be any need of prophecy, but there will be a need for love.  The same goes for tongues.  Who needs tongues when the curse of Babel is done away with?  But we’ll still need love.

Paul describes it in terms of growing from a child into an adult.  Think of all the toys we give to babies to help them develop hand-eye coordination, to learn language skills, to socialize them.  But then they grow up and they no longer need those things—in part because those things helped them to develop into healthy adults.  In the present age our view of God is dim.  Paul describes it in terms of an ancient mirror made of polished metal.  The reflection was imperfect and dark.  And so is our view of God.  Even as redeemed men and women, our vision of God is clouded by sin.  And yet one day we will stand before him face to face.  We’ll know him not only through the mediating words of Scripture or through the mediating work of the Holy Spirit, but we’ll stand before him and know him face-to-face.

And it’s on that day that our music will be taken up into God’s great symphony and all that will remain is love.  Faith, hope, and love remain, he says—they’re critical to our life as the Church, as the people of God today—but above all we need to learn to love.  It’s not that faith and hope aren’t important.  They’re vital, but without love—they’ll be out of tune with God’s symphony.  We live by faith.  We take hold of Jesus, the forgiveness of sin and the promise of life, and we take hold of him by faith as we trust in him.  We submit to his lordship by faith.  And we live in hope—living for a kingdom and a world for which we have only a down payment.  But on the great day when Jesus returns and the kingdom is consummated, faith will vanish into sight, hope will be fulfilled, but love will only intensify, growing greater and more profound as we see our Lord face to face and the weight of sin and death is finally and fully lifted from us—as the blurry image of the mirror is replaced by the real thing—as our simple chopsticks-like tune of love on the piano is taken up as part of the Lord’s grand symphony of love.

Brothers and Sisters, think of the words of the Lord’s Prayer: “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.”  We pray these words so often and know them so well that we easily forget what they really mean.  This is a prayer that looks forward in faith and hope to the day when we will see him face to face; this is a prayer that looks forward to the day when we have grown from little children into adults; this is a prayer that looks forward to that day when love becomes Creation’s all-consuming theme.  The Lord’s Prayer looks forward to that day in hope and faith, but what it asks for is that this theme of love be manifested here today.  It asks in faith for love to be made known today in the midst of sin and of fear and of hate and of death.  And, Brothers and Sisters, that means that it’s a prayer for our own hearts and minds to be transformed by the Holy Spirit, because if anyone is to manifest love in this present age, it is us, the only people in this world who know first-hand the love of Jesus.  So pray, “thy will be done, on earth as in heaven” and pray those words in hope of the coming kingdom and pray those words in faith, trusting and seeking for the Lord to give you his loving heart so that you can show his love in your church, in your family, in your workplace, in your school, in your community, and in your world.

Let us pray: O Lord, you have taught us that whatever we do without love is worth nothing: send your Holy Spirit and pour into our hearts that most excellent gift of love, the true bond of peace and of all virtues; without which whoever lives is counted dead before you.  Grant this for the sake of your only Son, Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.  Amen.

A Sermon for the Third Sunday after Epiphany

Romans 12:16-21

by William Klock

 

We live in the overlap of two ages and see it in the hostility of the world to Jesus and his people.  In his death and resurrection, Jesus has inaugurated a new age, a new world, and he’s given his people and the world hope.  He will make all things new.  But making all things new and setting God’s Creation to rights also means judgement and wiping away everything and everyone who stands against God and his world.  We see his graciousness and his patience on display in the fact that he sent his Son, not to bring an end to the story by crushing and wiping away ungodliness, but by sending him into the middle of the story, to die for the sake of his enemies, in order to make a means of redemption.  Jesus offers a way out of the coming judgement.  Jesus offers an opportunity to be part of his new creation.  We need only kneel in faith before him in acknowledgement that he is Creation’s true Lord.  In return, he makes his people and, in that, he forgives us and he makes us knew.  In our baptism his plunges us into his own Spirit and his Spirit then converts ungodly hearts set on rebellion, and places in them a love for God and a love for each other.  Jesus and the Spirit make us part of God’s new creation.  Jesus could have come to bring history to its end, but that would have been the end of us, too.  Instead, he’s inaugurated God’s new age, he’s inaugurated God’s new creation, and in this overlap—the new age inaugurated while the old age continues to trundle along—he sends his people out to proclaim his royal summons to the world, calling men and women to repentance, to faith, to take part in his new world.

But the people and the powers and the institutions invested in the old age don’t like that.  Jesus warned his friends: “A disciple is not greater than his master.  If they have persecuted me, they will also persecute you.”  Persecution is bound to happen whenever and wherever the old age and the new age meet.  Paul knew this from personal experience.  In fact, Paul had found himself on both sides of the clash.  He knew what it was to be the persecutor and he knew what it was to be the persecuted.  He knew that it was in this meeting of the ages, this place where the world and the kingdom come up against each other straight on, that Jesus’ people find one of our greatest opportunities to be the people the Spirit has made us.  This clash is the place where Christians have profound opportunity to live the gospel and to be and to manifest God’s new creation here and now.

You and I, as Western Christians, really know nothing of persecution.  Not first-hand.  We’ve read stories of brothers and sisters martyred for their faith in China or the Soviet Union or the Middle East, but we haven’t experienced real persecution ourselves.  We sometimes face opposition and hostility.  The older I get the more I think that an awful lot of the “opposition” we face here in North America isn’t so much for being Christians; it’s for being jerks about being Christians.  But that highlights what Paul is getting at in our Epistle today, in Romans 12:16-21.  We’re continuing in this passage that began with Paul telling us to present ourselves as living sacrifices to God.  To do that, he writes, is to worship the one who has saved us.  He went on to explain what that looks like in practical terms.  It begins with love and last Sunday we looked at his description of love at work in the Church.  How we live with and treat each other is a profound witness to the world.  In the Third Century, Tertullian wrote about the influence the Church had on the pagans around it.  They didn’t comment on what the Church taught or said, but on how the Church lived.  In the midst of a dog-eat-dog world, the pagans saw Christians and were astounded, saying, “Look how they love each other!”  Here in the Church we are a microcosm of God’s new creation.  But Jesus doesn’t intend for us to keep it to ourselves.  Just as God’s love spills out of us to each other, it then spills out of the Church to the world—and it often has its most profound impact when it comes up against opposition, hostility, and persecution.  In these verses, Paul now carries this theme of love as he leads us out of the doors of the church and back to our neighbourhoods, workplaces, governments, and communities.

Paul knew this first-hand the impact of the love of Jesus can have when it comes up against the world.  What he writes here is not what he grew up with.  What he writes here is the opposite of what characterised the Jewish world he knew—not to mention the pagan world.  The Seventh Chapter of 2 Maccabees gives us an idea of the mindset that Paul was raised with.  We don’t have time to read the whole thing this morning, but the story takes place about 160 years before Jesus was born.  A group of Jews under the leadership of Mattathias Maccabeus and his son, Judas, rose up against their Greek rulers.  The Greeks tried to supress the faith of the Jews.  In 2 Maccabees 7 we read about a woman and her seven sons who were threatened with torture in an effort to force them to eat pork.  They refused and, one by one, the sons were brutally tortured and killed for their refusal to compromise.  Each, in turn, as he was tortured called down curses on those Greek soldiers and on Antiochus Epiphanes, the Greek king.  They became national heroes, not just for refusing to compromise and eat pork, but for having the courage to curse the soldiers as they were dying.  The men who rose up to violently overthrow the Greeks in the revolt that came were national heroes too.  (They still are.)  The Maccabees were the spiritual fathers of the Pharisees.  They were heroes to Paul and Paul saw his opposition to the Church as being faithful to that heritage.

But something changed.  It might have begun as Paul stood by while Stephen, the first martyr, was stoned.  Stephen preached Jesus and the Jews killed him for it.  Paul held coats so that those throwing stones wouldn’t be encumbered.  And he heard Stephen with his dying breath cry out, “Lord, do not hold this sin against them” (Acts 7:60).  Just like Jesus, who was crucified, but did not curse or revile in return, but prayed, “Forgive them, for they know not what they are doing,” Stephen prayed for his enemies.  This was unheard of.  But, years later, here’s what Paul wrote in Romans 12—the end of our Epistle last week:

Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse them.

 

Someone reviles you for your faith in Jesus.  Bless them.  Someone has your church’s tax-exempt status revoked because of your witness for Jesus.  Bless them.  You’re fined for refusing to compromise your faith as it relates to your business practices.  Bless them.  You’re arrested and put in jail for proclaiming the good news about Jesus.  Bless them.  Bless them.  Bless them.  Bless them.  Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse them.  Is that a hard thing to do?  Of course it is.  But do it anyway.  If Stephen used his last breath to pray for the people who were stoning him, so can you.  And Stephen’s story reminds us of the key here.  Stephen had his sight fixed on Jesus and the Cross.  Brothers and Sisters, you can’t revile, curse, and fight back when you have your eyes fixed on the one who gave himself up as a sacrifice for the sins of his enemies and who preached, “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you” (Matthew 5:44).  Epiphany reminds us of the manifestation of Jesus as Messiah, as Lord, as Saviour.  You and I have experienced that manifestation and it changes everything.

And it’s not just blessing the people who would persecute us for our faith.  We’re going to face hostility everywhere we turn in the world.  The old age is filled with sin and corruption.  Our interactions are tainted with it every day.  But instead of seeing this as an opportunity to get back or get even, as people of God’s new creation, we should look at our life in the midst of the world as a means of lifting the veil on the new creation that is our hope—and that Jesus and the Spirit have made us a part of already.  Look at verses 15-16:

Rejoice with those who rejoice, weep with those who weep.  Live in harmony with one another. Do not be haughty, but associate with the lowly.   Never be wise in your own sight.

 

That means: Don’t be a sourpuss.  When something good happens to your pagan neighbour, be happy for him.  When he throws a party to celebrate something, go and celebrate with him.  Some people might get drunk in the process.  You can still celebrate with him, just don’t get drunk yourself and don’t be a nag.  When Veronica’s brother got married it was by a druid priestess with a druid-Wiccan ceremony.  We could have been sourpusses about it, but the fact is that marriage was instituted by God.  Marriage is a good thing—even when the pagans do it.  It’s what men and women are supposed to do.  It’s a joyful time.  We went.  We politely declined the smudging and stood outside the “sacred circle” drawn by the priestess and didn’t take part in the pagan rituals, but we could still rejoice with them in their marriage.

The flip side of this is that we ought to weep with our neighbours or with the world when it weeps.  Some Christians are really, really good at Schadenfreude.  They sit and smirk every time something bad happens to unbelievers.  Brothers and Sisters, don’t be like that.  First, it’s self-righteous to be like that.  Bad things happen because we—all of us, every human being who has ever lived—have sinned and contributed to the corruption of our world.  Sometimes we suffer as the consequence of our own personal sins.  Most of the time we suffer the cumulative consequences of thousands and thousands of years of sins committed corporately by the entire human race.  The problems of this world can be laid at our feet too.  We’ve all contributed and none of us has any business gloating at the misfortune of a fellow human being.  But, second, you and I are privileged to be stewards of the answer to human suffering.  In Jesus and the Spirit, we’ve caught a glimpse of the world set to rights.  God, in his grace and mercy, saw fit to reach each of us with the good news about Jesus.  We ought to show that same grace and mercy to others who suffer.  Instead of gloating, we ought to take the good news about Jesus to them.

In fact, even though the world around us is hostile to the good news, Paul says “live in harmony with one another.”  The Greek literally says, “thinking the same thing towards one another”.  The sense is that Paul is calling us to live alongside our neighbours, sharing life with them.  We Christians are prone to withdrawing from our neighbours.  We may not go off and form literal ghettos where we all live in the same place apart from everyone else, although there have been some groups who have done that.  No, our problem is that we tend to minimize our association with non-Christians.  That’s particularly true of those of us who have been raised in the Church.  We tend to form all of our close relationship with fellow Christians.  And then we wonder where all the opportunities for evangelism have gone!  It’s good to ask yourself—particularly if you’ve been a Christian for a long time—if you’ve isolated yourself from non-Christians.

Paul says not to be snobs, but to associate with the lowly.  We see this lived out very dramatically in the Church of Paul’s day as slaves and free people lived alongside each other as brothers and sisters in Christ.  Paul, no doubt, had in mind the tensions between Jewish and Gentile Christians in the Roman churches.  Those may not be the sorts of division we’re prone to being snobbish about, but they make the point that the love of Jesus that has been poured into our hearts by the Spirit crosses boundaries of every kind.

Now look at verses 17 and 18:

Repay no one evil for evil, but give thought to do what is honorable in the sight of all.  If possible, so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all.

 

Responding in kind is the way of the fallen human heart.  It’s our most natural response.  But the Christian is different.  Again, the Spirit has removed our hearts of stone and in their places filled us with love for God and love for our neighbours.  This is the most basic and fundamental characteristics of the Christian, which is why Paul beats this drum so often—he says almost exactly the same thing in 1Thessalonians 5.  Love does not seek revenge.  Love seeks the best, even for our enemies.  If you struggle with this—and we all do—remember, again, the cross.  We rejected God.  We sinned.  We sundered heaven and earth.  We corrupted God’s creation.  But instead of repaying our evil with more evil, God sent his Son to forgive, to reconcile, and to restore. Why?  Because he loves us.  Think on the cross.  Meditate on the cross.  Keep the cross always at the centre of your vision and love will become easier and more natural.

And because of love and our desire to live out the good news and to manifest God’s new age in the midst of the world, we’ll always be thinking about how to do good.  Paul knew that sometimes doing good and manifesting the kingdom will bring the scorn of the world.  It took Jesus to the cross.  But he also knew that it’s possible to live at peace with our neighbours.  There are times when our integrity and refusal to compromise may lose us friends or get us fired from our jobs, but we can still rejoice with our joyful neighbours and weep with our weeping neighbours.

What comes to my mind as I read these words is that Paul understands that we will face the opposition of the world, but we should respond to that by being squeaky-clean.  We should be living in such a way that when we do face opposition or persecution, it should truly be for the sake of Jesus and only for the sake of Jesus.  I think this is something we modern Christians need desperately to hear.  We can be real jerks sometimes, all in the name of Jesus.  We can be horrible snobs in the name of Jesus.  We can be terrible sourpusses in the name of Jesus.  We often gloat at the sufferings of unbelievers—particularly those who actively oppose us—and we gloat in the name of Jesus.  We can be horrible, self-righteous hypocrites in the name of Jesus.  And we too often seek our own welfare—often doing so in the name of Jesus—through associations with ungodliness and ungodly people.  Politics, in particular, has corrupted our gospel perspective and compromised our witness.  And politics, too, has caused us to forget Jesus’ warnings about violence and retaliation.  We may never dream of taking up swords against our enemies, but we invest ourselves in winning control of the government so that we can turn its sword against our enemies.  We must make every effort to live for the sake of others, following the example of Jesus, and seeking to show the love of God to all.

It’s become pretty common for some people to compare Christians to Nazis because of our stance on sexuality, sexual identity, and marriage—hot topics at the centre of today’s cultural revolution.  We’re seen by many as bigots and haters.  Brothers and Sisters, our refusal to compromise will bring this sort of opposition, but we need to be sure that the opposition is truly for the sake of our commitment to Jesus and to the real love that Paul describes here.  If the world is going to call us Nazis, we need to be squeaky-clean.  We need to be the most loving people on the planet—as we should be—even if the world doesn’t fully understand true love.  The people who are going to call us Nazis on this issue, need to see us rejoice with those who rejoice, weeping with those who weep.  They should never see us thinking more highly of ourselves than we ought.  To the contrary, they should see us seeking out the lowly.  They should know, even if they’ve suppressed it in the backs of their minds and seared their own consciences, that their accusations are utterly false.

Brothers and Sisters, Paul gives us a sombre warning in verse 19:

Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave it to the wrath of God, for it is written, “Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord.”

 

This isn’t always an easy thing to do, but, again, look to the cross.  God’s people are loved by God.  That God would give his Son for our sake is the proof.  We’re Christians because we trust in God—in his goodness and his wisdom seen first and foremost in his provision for forgiveness and renewal through Jesus.  Brothers and Sisters, we know that God is good.  We know that God takes care of us.  We know that God will set all things to rights in the end and that his justice will prevail.  We don’t need to take justice into our own hands by seeking vengeance.  To do that is to perpetuate the very cycle of evil that Jesus died to end.  Have you ever considered that your faith is witnessed to others when you choose to trust in God to deal with your enemies?  Think on that the next time you’re tempted to repay evil with evil.

Then in verses 20-21 Paul writes,

 

To the contrary, “if your enemy is hungry, feed him; if he is thirsty, give him something to drink; for by so doing you will heap burning coals on his head.”  Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.

 

Instead of cursing our enemies, we need to devote ourselves, as Jesus said, to praying for our enemies and seeking out ways to do good to those who persecute us.  Paul quotes Proverbs 25:21-22.  Don’t just leave it at not taking vengeance on your enemies.  Look for ways to actively do good to him or to her.  This goes along with being squeaky-clean.  Manifest the love of God to your enemy.  There’s some disagreement about exactly what Paul means by heaping coals on his head, but Paul’s point seems to be this:  First, doing good to your enemies is the right thing to do, because it models the love that God has shown us in Jesus.  Never forget that we were once God’s enemies.  Second, vengeance is God’s prerogative and we need to trust in him in these situations.  And, finally third, Paul’s thinking that—even if it’s a long-shot—loving our enemies may bring them to repentance.  That may seem a stretch, but Paul knew this first-hand.  Remember Stephen.  Paul stood there holding coats for the stone-throwers.  He heard Stephen’s prayers for his enemies.  Paul didn’t change his mind about Jesus that day, but Stephen’s witness stayed with him and was part of a long sequence of events that would eventually bring Paul to Jesus.

Paul really knew how evil is overcome, not with more evil, but with good.  He’d seen it in his own experience.  But he understood it, first and foremost, because of the cross of Jesus.  Paul understood the way in which violence compounds violence and evil compounds evil just as we do.  Someone hits you so you hit back harder and the violence spirals.  It’s in our fallen nature and has been from the beginning.  In Genesis 4 we’re told of Lamech who boasted that a man hit him so he retaliated by murdering the man and the world has been spiralling into greater violence ever since.  Evil only begets more evil.

Brothers and Sisters, Jesus stepped into history to break that cycle.  Evil concentrated itself in one place, rose up to its full height, and did its worst at the cross.  Peter drew his sword, but Jesus knew that evil begets evil, that those who live by the sword die by the sword.  Jesus told Peter to put his sword away and then allowed himself to be led to the cross.  Jesus let evil do its worst and in doing so, he broke the cycle.  He returned death with life and evil with love.  And now he’s filled us with that same love and calls us to break the cycle wherever we find ourselves in it.  It’s not a question of if, but when.  The spiral of evil and violence finds us every day, even if only in small ways.  How do we respond?  Brothers and Sisters, think on that.  Focus your eyes on Jesus and his cross and meditate on his love.

Let us pray: Almighty and everlasting God, mercifully look upon our infirmities; and in all our dangers and necessities stretch out your right hand to help and defend us, through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.  Amen.

A Sermon for the Second Sunday after Epiphany

Romans 12:6-16 & St. Mark 1:1-11

by William Klock

The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.

 

That’s how Mark’s launches into the story of Jesus.  He uses that word “gospel” that we use so often that we sometimes forget what it really means.  “Gospel” means “good news”.  In the Jewish mind it was the word that described the news that the runners brought back from the battlefield when the king’s army had defeated the enemy: “Good News!  We’ve been victorious!”  In the Roman mind it described the “good news” that was sent out across the empire by official heralds that a new Caesar, a new emperor, had ascended to the throne, also usually having vanquished his foes.

And Mark says that this good news is about Jesus, the Son of God.  Again, sometimes we miss the intended significance of this.  When we hear “Son of God” we tend to think of the virgin birth and Jesus as the incarnate Word of God, born of Mary in human flesh.  And we’re not wrong in that, but long before Jesus was ever born Jewish people were talking about the “Son of God” and when they did they were talking about the Messiah—the one whom God would send to set everything to rights.

And so here at the beginning of the story, Mark sets out that what he’s going to tell us in this book he’s written is the good news that in Jesus the long-promised and long-awaited Messiah of Israel has come, that he has won a great victory over his enemies, and that he has inaugurated a new kingdom—and that Jesus is Lord.  What Mark’s going to tell us about Jesus and what we’ll hear Jesus telling us himself isn’t just good advice—as if we might want to try on Jesus for size and see if he fits or that he’s introduced a new way of doing things and we might give it a try and see if we like it or if it works for us.  No.  This is a proclamation that Jesus is King.  It’s not good advice; it’s good news—and that means we have no choice but to do something about it.

Mark then launches into the story by telling us about Jesus’ cousin, John the Baptist.  Isaiah had prophesied as we read in verses 2 and 3 that the Lord would send a messenger to prepare the way for the Messiah—to prepare Israel to receive him.  He described his work in terms of paving a highway in the wilderness, which brings up images of the Exodus and God leading his people to the promised land.  And then Mark tells us about John calling the people out into the wilderness and baptizing them with a baptism of repentance.

In Luke’s Gospel we’re told that John’s message was “Repent for the kingdom of God is at hand”.  In the Messiah the Lord was coming to visit and to rescue his people, but if the Lord was coming—the Holy one of Israel—that meant that people needed to prepare themselves.  Think of all the ways the Law—the torah—had taught the people to keep themselves ritually pure and how to purify themselves should they become unclean, all so that they could live as part of the community of God’s people.  They were to be a holy people.  And now the Lord himself was coming in the Messiah—they really needed to prepare themselves; they really needed to purify themselves.  And this is what John invited them to do in his baptism.  He called them to turn aside, not just from sin in a general sense, although that was certainly part of it, but also to call them to set aside every form of hypocrisy and corruption, to get back to the business of holiness and of righteousness and of justice in every area of life.

And when John did this, when he called people out into the wilderness to baptise them in the Jordan River, what they understood him to be saying was that another Exodus was going to take place.  Just as the Lord had rescued Israel from Egypt, he was going to rescue her again.  But John makes it clear that this time is going to be different.  In the old Exodus, God had certainly heard and visited his people.  He came and lived in their midst in a pillar of cloud in the tabernacle.  But John says that his baptism isn’t all there is.  Israel had gone through water before and, while it saved her from Egypt, it didn’t save her from sin and death.  No, John says that he’s only preparing the way for another—for the one Mark calls the Son of God—who will baptise them with the Holy Spirit.

I like the way Bp. Wright paraphrases verse 8 in his New Testament for Everyone: “I’ve plunged you in the water,” John says, “he’s going to plunge you in the Holy Spirit.”  That, Brothers and Sisters, changes everything.  Instead of God living in our midst, but living over there in the tabernacle—and, more particularly, in the holy of holies where none of us can actually go because, no matter how many sacrifices we make and how often we purify ourselves, we’re still unholy sinners—instead of that, God is now coming to live not just in our midst, but inside us.  As we read on The Epiphany, he’s building a new temple for himself and we ourselves are the blocks of stone he’s carefully cut and carefully fitted together.  In the first Exodus, the Lord took his people through the water, he gave them a law written on stone tablets, and he gave them priests to tell them to do it.  And most of the time they weren’t particularly good at living out that law.  But in this new exodus, Jesus leads us not only through the water, but in doing so he plunges us into his own Holy Spirit.  Instead of giving us the law on tablets of stone the Spirit writes Jesus’ law on our hearts so that it’s not only internal, but that we’ll actually be in love with it and motivated by it and seek to do it—that’s the significance of it being written on our hearts.  And so we don’t anymore need priests urging us to do it, because we’ll have the Lord’s Spirit himself in us, making his desires our desires as we feed ourselves on his Word.

Mark then goes on to tell us about Jesus’ baptism by John.  In verse 9 Jesus steps into the story.  Mark doesn’t tell us about his birth; he starts with his baptism.  As much as Jesus was the one for whom the people were being prepared by John, he doesn’t hesitate to identify himself with them in baptism.  But Jesus’ experience is unique—of course, because he is the Messiah.  As he comes out of the river, Mark says in verse 10-11:

Immediately he saw the heavens being torn open and the Spirit descending on him like a dove.  And a voice came from heaven, “You are my beloved Son; with you I am well pleased.”

 

For Jesus this was divine confirmation of his identity.  He grew up being told about the amazing circumstances of his birth, the things the angels had said to Zechariah and to Mary and to Joseph, about the way he was greeted as a baby by Simeon and Anna.  His family had those precious and kingly gifts from the wise men.  Last week’s Gospel told of that time he’d stayed behind in the temple when he was twelve, because he knew that he had to be about his Father’s—his real Father’s—business.  And yet we’re still given a pretty clear sense that Jesus had to sort out his calling and his ministry himself as he studied the Scriptures and saw himself in them.  His baptism by John, and specifically the Spirit appearing and the Father speaking, were confirmation that he’d got it right.  He really was the Messiah.

Mark says that the heavens were torn open.  Jesus had a glimpse into heaven.  And that doesn’t mean that he was looking up and seeing angels on clouds playing harps.  The sense is that he was given a glimpse into the realm of God much as St. John was in Revelation.  He was given a glimpse of the kingdom that is to come—the kingdom he was sent to inaugurate.  It was either confirmation of what he’d already come to understand of God’s kingdom and its ways or it gave him, in that glimpse, an understanding of what he was to proclaim.  Jesus grew up surrounded by the darkness of the world, but as the heavens were opened for that short time, he had a glimpse into the new reality that God has been preparing—like a child getting a glimpse of all the presents being hidden away in the closet in anticipation of Christmas.

This ties in with our Epistle from Romans in the sense that each of us, in our baptism, have been given a similar glimpse of the kingdom.  We’ve trusted in Jesus because someone else at some point, whether our parents or a friend or our minister—someone has given a glimpse into the kingdom that Jesus has inaugurated, has given us a glimpse of a life of forgiveness and grace, and a glimpse of resurrection and recreation and we’ve taken hold of it in faith.  And now we—you and I—are called to continue giving the world glimpses of the kingdom.  We’re called to proclaim the good news.  And, along with that proclamation, we’re also called to live by the ways and values of the kingdom, so that the world can see Jesus and can see what the future has in store as it looks at us, as it looks at the Church.  Our calling is to show the world what it looks like to have been plunged into the Holy Spirit.

In last Sunday’s Epistle, St. Paul exhorted us to present our bodies as living sacrifices.  To do this is the only reasonable response to Jesus having sacrificed himself for us.  It’s the only response that makes sense when we think on the Incarnation, on the cross, and on the empty tomb.  Jesus gave everything for us; in gratitude we should give our everything back to him.  And Paul contrasts this mindset with the mindset that’s all around us in the world.  He warns in Romans 12:2, “Do not be conformed to this present age, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind.”  Yes, the world, the flesh, and the devil tempt us.  It’s hard to follow Jesus and sometimes we fail, but Paul reminds us that in our baptism we’ve been transformed.  John plunged people into the water.  Jesus does more.  He plunges us into the water and as he does so he plunges us into the Holy Spirit.  In doing that he’s transformed our hearts and he’s renewed our minds.  Because of the Holy Spirit the desires of our hearts are different now.  Because of the Holy Spirit the fog that once clouded our thinking has been lifted.  What used to seem foolish when we heard about Jesus and about sacrifice and about dying in order to live now makes perfect sense.  The Spirit has taken the things and the thinking and the values and the priorities of the age to come and brought them into our hearts and minds.  The world—this present evil age—competes for our loyalty, so we must never forget what the Spirit has done in us.

Paul stresses that we need to live this life of sacrifice by showing humility to each other.  This in itself runs contrary to the grain of the world’s thinking of every man for himself.  In last week’s lesson, in Romans 12:4-5, Paul gives us the image of a body.

For as in one body we have many members, and the members do not all have the same function, so we, though many, are one body in Christ, and individually members one of another.

 

And with this he switches gears a bit.  In last week’s Epistle Paul was focused on the idea of sacrifice and of humility.  In this week’s Epistle, which begins at the next verse, Romans 12:6, Paul shows us how this works out in practise.  Keep Paul’s image of a body in mind—a body made up of all sorts of different organs and limbs—as we go on:

Having gifts that differ according to the grace given to us, let us use them: if prophecy, in proportion to our faith; if service, in our serving; the one who teaches, in his teaching; the one who exhorts, in his exhortation; the one who contributes, in generosity; the one who leads, with zeal; the one who does acts of mercy, with cheerfulness. (Romans 12:6-8)

The Holy Spirit doesn’t just change our hearts and minds, he also equips us to serve the kingdom.  In some cases he gives us gifts that we don’t have by nature, some more mundane and some spectacular.  In some cases the Spirit simply transforms the personality traits and the natural gifts we already have so that we can use them for the kingdom.  The New Testament is full of lists of gifts and each list is a little different, which ought to tell us that there’s no exhaustive list.  People sometimes get hung up thinking that they have to have one of the gifts specifically mentioned in these lists and when they can’t find it they become discouraged.  Brothers and Sisters, the Spirit works with and gifts each person differently and according to the place in the body he has for us.  Think again of Paul’s analogy of the temple being built by Jesus, each of us is a stone carefully and specifically cut to fit a certain place.  Don’t ever think that the Spirit hasn’t equipped you in some way just because nothing in these lists seems to fit.  Jesus has work for all and he’s plunged us all into his transforming Spirit.  What Paul does here is give some examples so that we can see how we’re called to work together and to serve the kingdom so that the world will see Jesus in his Church.

He begins with prophecy.  Prophecy is the gift whereby the Spirit equips us to apply the Word of God to life and to specific situations.  Pauls says that if that’s how you’ve graciously been equipped, then get on with prophesying.  If you’ve been equipped especially to serve, then get on with serving.  If you’ve been equipped to teach, get on with teaching.  And so it goes for those equipped to exhort and to give and to lead and to show acts of mercy.  If you’ve been gifted in these ways, get on with using those gifts.  Don’t short-change the Church by squandering them.  And Paul starts out, in mentioning prophecy, saying that, as the ESV puts it, we do this “in proportion to our faith”.

What does that mean?  Well, it helps to go back to verse 3, where Paul warns us to think with sober judgement, each according to the measure of faith God has assigned.  He is not saying that we are given different measures of faith.  That would mean, in verse 3, that some would think less soberly than others and that some are called to be more humble than others.  No, what Paul is saying is that we do all these things in accordance with the faith, referring to the content of what we believe: that Jesus is Lord, that he has died, and that he has risen from the dead.  We treat each other humbly because that is what we see in Jesus, who humbly gave his life for us.  So with our gifts: we use them not for ourselves and we use them not willy-nilly for whatever reason might seem good at the time.  No, we use them in accordance with the faith, with the Good News we’ve been given.

The one who prophesies has not been equipped so that he can spout off anything that pops into his head.  No, he must speak in accordance with the faith we have been given—what he says must be in harmony with the message of the cross and the empty tomb, it must be in harmony with the rest of Scripture, and it must work to build up the body, not the speaker.  And this principle applies across the board with all the gifts and all the ways we serve.  Does the one who teaches teach in accordance with the faith and with the Scriptures?  Does he teach to build up the body, or is he tearing it apart or building up himself?  Does the one who exhorts or the one who shows mercy do so in a way that reinforces the Good News, or is there no thought for that?

Some time ago I was reading an article was written by a woman who gave up Christianity for paganism and considers herself a witch.  She and some of her fellow witches visited a healing ministry run by Bethel, a wildly popular church that currently has a massive influence on large swathes of Charismatic Christianity.  One of the things she wrote about were the prophecies and exhortations spoken over them while they were there.  Everything that was said affirmed them in their pursuit of paganism and told them that God was pleased with them and that they were on the right spiritual path.  They were given words of peace, despite being on a path away from and at odds with the Prince of Peace.  The people working in that church were obviously well-meaning and I’m skeptical about the legitimacy of the gifts they claim to have, but the reason I bring them up is that they’re misusing the gifts of prophecy and exhortation and mercy.  They’re proclaiming “Peace!  Peace!” where there is no peace.  God’s gifts must be used in accordance with the faith he has given us.  They’ve been given to us to give the world a glimpse of the kingdom and to declare, “Repent, for the kingdom God has come!”  If, instead, we’re using our gifts to affirm people in their unrepentance and in their rejection of the kingdom, then we’re abusing those gifts.  We need to use the Spirit’s gifts with discernment and with discipline.

 

I think it’s also worth noting that Paul stresses at the end that the one who “does acts of mercy” do so with cheerfulness.  As the discernment and discipline he connects with prophecy apply all the way down the list, this cheerfulness applies all the way back up.  We may not always feel like doing these things, but we need to remember that in God’s economy, in biblical thinking, love is not so much about feeling as it is about doing.  The world tells us that you should do what feels right, but God tells us to do what we know is right and that right feelings will follow.  Again, we too often allow ourselves to be conformed to the present age rather than surrendering to the transforming work of the Spirit in us.

After giving these specifics in terms of gifts, Paul then goes on to write in more general terms about the gospel principles at work here.  Look at verses 9-16.  There’s a long list here.  I noticed that my Bible happens to give this section the heading, “Marks of the True Christian”.  Think about that and notice that it starts with love at the top.

Let love be genuine. Abhor what is evil; hold fast to what is good.  Love one another with brotherly affection.  Outdo one another in showing honor.  Do not be slothful in zeal, be fervent in spirit, serve the Lord.  Rejoice in hope, be patient in tribulation, be constant in prayer.  Contribute to the needs of the saints and seek to show hospitality.

Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse them.  Rejoice with those who rejoice, weep with those who weep.  Live in harmony with one another. Do not be haughty, but associate with the lowly. Never be wise in your own sight.

 

We don’t have time to cover each of these in detail, but think of them in terms of giving the world a glimpse of Jesus and the kingdom.  We’ve seen real love in Jesus.  In him we’ve seen what it looks like to abhor evil and hold fast to good.  In him we get a sense of what it looks like to show honour to others rather than grabbing it all for ourselves.  We see in him what humility and lowliness toward others looks like.  We—especially Gentile believers—have seen what Jesus’ hospitality looks like as he welcomes us in to Abraham’s family.  In Jesus we’ve seen the greatest example ever of what it looks like to bless those who persecute us.  And Paul ends this list in verse 21, writing, “Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.”

Brothers and Sisters, this is what it looks like to be faithful stewards of the grace of God.  This is what it looks like to live the life Jesus has given us.  This is what it looks like to be people who have been plunged into the Holy Spirit.  This is what it looks like to be the new Israel, rescued from our bondage to sin and death and given hope for a new life.  We love each other as Jesus has loved us and as he specially equipped us to love, and as we do so we show our love for him, because in loving each other we are loving the people whom Jesus loves.  But it’s not just the Church we love.  Jesus was sent to redeem because “God so loved the world”.  We witness what love looks like as we love each other, but we also witness the love of God as we give ourselves for the sake of the world, as we give ourselves to be light in the darkness—even when the darkness is hostile and seeks to snuff us out.  In Jesus, God overcame evil with good and we are called to be his witnesses by doing the same.  And so let us proclaim the message of John and Jesus: Repent, for the kingdom of God has come.  But let us also live in such a way that in our lives and the life of the Church, the heavens are opened to give all those around us a glimpse of the life and the kingdom that await all those who will trust in Jesus.

Let us pray: Heavenly Father, in the baptism of Jesus you revealed him to be your Son and you anointed him with the Holy Spirit.  May we who are born again of that same water and Spirit, we ask, be faithful to our calling as your children by grace, living and manifesting in our lives the love and mercy you have shown to us as we proclaim your kingdom.  We ask this through Jesus Christ our Lord.  Amen.

Church and State:

The Importance of Corporate Worship and Submission to the Governing Authorities

by William Klock

I spent this week preparing a sermon for the Sunday after Epiphany, a sermon about the young Jesus in Jerusalem after the Passover and Mary and Joseph searching for him frantically, perhaps with the naïve hope that the health order shutting our churches would be lifted this week.  With the order extended for another month, it seems appropriate to address that subject instead.

Like every church, you all have a variety of opinions on how we should be dealing with the pandemic and with the current health orders.  I’ll say at the outset that I’m thankful you’ve been pretty gracious in dealing with differences.  This has been a difficult time for pastors, caught between demands that we obey government orders (or even go beyond them) and others demanding we defy orders.  I’ve lost count of the pastors I know who have been fired for making the “wrong” choice or who have simply broken down and quit.  I am not looking forward to the aftermath to come, because there will likely be a lot of split churches in future.  In our own church, we’ve lost one person who, apparently, felt we should be continuing with our normal activities, despite health orders, and we’ve lost a couple of people who were upset that we continued meeting in the Spring and didn’t impose our own mask order in the absence of one from the province.  I’m not a doctor and neither is anyone else in our congregation.  Health experts, like our Provincial Health Officer, are there—even given emergency dictatorial powers—for a reason.  They’re qualified to address these issues.  No one here is qualified to make these decision and so we abide by the orders and guidelines given by those who are.  If the experts issuing health orders, for example, leave the wearing of masks up to private judgement, a pastor or vestry with no medical expertise has no business ordering they be worn, binding the conscience of believers, and effectively excommunicating anyone whose private judgement dictates otherwise.  If the health officials tell us we must wear masks indoors, we will—not because I or the vestry thinks it’s a good idea and issues an order for the church, but because those in authority in the government who are qualified to issue such orders have told us to and as good Christians we submit to the civil magistrate.

Now, that said—and I’ll come back to this issue of obedience to the civil magistrate later—I think it’s important to address these issues.  And here’s how I’m going to address it today.  First, I want to look at ecclesiology.  Ecclesiology is the branch of theology that deals with the church—ekklesia is the Greek word for “church”—and so this branch of theology addresses who and what we are, what we do, and how we do it.  Our ecclesiology answers important questions like “What does it mean for the Church to gather?”, “Do we have to do it in person?”, “Can our gatherings be ‘virtual’?”.  Things like that.  Second, we need to look at our political theology.  How does the Church relate to the State and the State to the Church?  Where does the authority of one begin and the other end?  What do we do when they overlap or seem to be in conflict?  And, finally, we’ll bring this back to our current situation, which has been complicated by a broad failure of the Church to adequately address these issues.

So, first, ecclesiology.  The greatest failure, I think, has been here.  It’s not surprising.  For generations a large swath of Evangelicals has downplayed theology.  Get a group of pastors together and try to recite the Creed and most can’t do it.  I’ve been sitting there more than once when it happened.  So it’s no surprise when the people sitting in the pews are theologically illiterate.  Ecclesiology was one of the great subjects of the Protestant Reformation, but we’ve reached a point where we’ve got pastors who don’t even know what the word means.  A big part of the problem is that for the many years—especially since the 1970s—Evangelicals have been doing church, not based on well-thought-out ecclesiology, but on pragmatic principles—based on whatever will get the biggest number of butts in the pews or reach the biggest number of people, but a great deal of what we’ve done has undermined the integrity of the Church.  We’ve downplayed commitment and sacrifice and submission to the Lordship of Jesus, while turning the faith into a therapeutic and private spiritual hobby that we do by ourselves.  And the problem is that when something like the coronavirus hits us, we have nothing solid on which to base our response—or, as we’ve seen, we fall back on the faulty, unbiblical foundations we’ve been building for the last fifty years.

It’s sad, but not surprising that a church that for decades has promoted the idea—whether overtly or not—that you can “go to church” in front of the TV in your pajamas and with your coffee, has so quickly adopted this “virtual church” model.  Consider that in the Spring, almost every church in British Columbia stopped in-person services.  The fifty-person cap imposed on us certainly made things difficult for larger churches, but we’ve since seen that it’s not an insurmountable problem.  Our Roman brothers and sisters, for example, understanding how important it is for the Church to gather in person, eventually worked out a system of two services a day, six days a week.  For many churches like ours, the limit posed no problem at all.  But most churches didn’t even try.  Most simply went to some kind of “virtual” model.  Now most understood that this was a stop-gap measure, that this isn’t how things are supposed to be.  That said, however, there have been quite a few pastors failing to make this distinction and even some touting it as a “new normal” that’s better than what we had before.  I fear what the fallout will be.  I can no longer count of the number of people who have said something like, “I don’t know that I’ll ever go back.  It’s so much easier and comfortable to watch at home and I can do it at the time I want” or “This has been such a blessing.  We don’t have to get the kids ready for church.  Hubby and I can just watch in peace while they play.  This is so much better.”  And all of this is reinforcing that old half-truth as I hear people say repeatedly, “The Church is not a building,” by which they mean that gathered, public worship is not of the essence of the Church.  The polls being done in recent months say that when this is over, church attendance will be down something like 30%, either because people will be watching from home or will simply have dropped out after months (or a year) of non-attendance.  That’s a staggering and tragic number and those who shut down when they didn’t have to are big contributors.

Brothers and Sisters, in-person worship is part of the essence of the Church.  It is not an optional add-on to something we otherwise do privately.  Let me go back to that statement that the Church is not a building.  I said it’s half true.  It’s true that the Church is the people, not the building.  But the statement is misleading.  To be the Church, the people have to meet together and that requires a place, whether it’s a cathedral, a storefront, a house, or the shade of a great tree on an African plain.  You see, there’s no such thing as an ecclesiological vacuum.  If we don’t take the time to develop a biblical ecclesiology or at least to listen to our forefathers in the faith who worked out a biblical ecclesiology at great length, some kind of half-biblical and poorly-thought-out ecclesiology will fill the vacuum—and as this pandemic has put pressure on the Church, this is exactly what’s been revealed.

So what does the Bible say about the Church?  A year’s worth of sermons could easily develop to answer that question, but I’ll try to answer it briefly here.  Let me go back to that statement that the Church is not a building.  There’s a reason why church buildings are so closely associated with the people who are the Church, that we’ve come to refer to both as “church”.  To gather together in some place established for that gathering is of the essence of the Church.  Consider the very word “Church”.  The Greek word used in the New Testament is one you’ve heard before: ekklesia.  The word literally means “assembly” and the New Testament writers use it to describe both the people who assemble and the assembly of those people—pretty much exactly parallel to the way we use “church” to refer to God’s people assembling together and the assembly of God’s people.  But the key here is the assembly.  The ekklesia does not exists apart from the assembly.  The members can go off to their own homes, to their work and other affairs and be apart from each other, but they remain the ekklesia, because they are the part of the assembly when it gathers together.  The church is defined by its physical gathering for corporate worship.  It’s defined by other things as well, most importantly our union with Jesus, but it’s also defined by its nature as a gathered people.  There’s no such thing as a loner Christian.  A person who, due to extraordinary circumstances can no longer be part of our corporate gathering—say they’ve had to move into a nursing home—remains a part of the Church, because they’ve been part of the assembly.  But you can’t be part of the Church if you’ve never been a regular part of the assembly.  This is part of the problem with so-called “virtual church”.  It may serve as an emergency stop-gap in times like our own, it may even be a good thing in that respect, but it’s not “church”.  It’s the church doing its best to maintain connection and some kind of venue for teaching and worship in extreme circumstances.  But if virtual church—whether today’s livestreams or the TV broadcasts we’ve had for decades—are all you’ve ever been part of, you’re not part of the church.  This has always been the danger of the broadcast church and it’s why responsible evangelism, while it may use these methods to reach unbelievers, always stresses the need for those it connects with by TV, radio, or Internet to join the physical gathering of the local church and to take part in the very physical sacraments, baptism and the Lord’s Supper, that mark God’s people out as his own, as the Church.

We see this gathering, this physical coming together, throughout the New Testament.  We don’t have time to look at all or even most of those passages, but let’s look at a couple of them.  First, let’s look at St. Luke’s description of the Church just after Pentecost.  Acts 2:42-46:

And they devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers.  And awe came upon every soul, and many wonders and signs were being done through the apostles.  And all who believed were together and had all things in common.  And they were selling their possessions and belongings and distributing the proceeds to all, as any had need.  And day by day, attending the temple together and breaking bread in their homes, they received their food with glad and generous hearts.

Fellowship, together, attending.  These are the sorts of words that characterize the Church through the New Testament.  It’s in our name, because it’s what we do.  Those early brothers and sisters were known for gathering together to hear the apostles, to fellowship, and to worship together.  They shared common meals as part of their gatherings and, in those early days, the Lord’s Supper was part of those meals, not merely a ritual meal as it is for most today.  All of this requires presence.  And, Luke says, they were devoted to it.  That word “devoted” in verse 42 is something we might pass over, but it’s vitally important, particularly today.  Even before the pandemic, many Christians showed a lack of devotion to the gathering of the Church.  There will always be occasional necessities, travels, illnesses that prevent our attendance, but Luke’s description here should prompt us to ask if we’re really devoted.  Do we prioritise gathering with the Church to worship on Sundays?  Or is it something we do when we don’t have something else to do?  Does our devotion inform our other commitments?  There are lots of competing options these days.  Do sports or clubs take us away from the Church?  Sometimes it’s a more subtle sort of competition.  Do we neglect things that need to be done in preparation for Monday, leaving them to the last minute so that we end up missing church to get them done?  Do we do things on Saturday (or Saturday night) that we know will leave us exhausted and unwilling or unprepared to get up for church on Sunday?  Maybe we know getting the kids ready will be a hassle on Sunday morning, but we neglect to do everything we can to prepare them Saturday night.  These are all things that reflect our priorities.  In the pandemic we might look at things like our non-church activities that expose us to infection and raise our risk of passing the virus to others when we gather together.  If I have to limit the number of people I’m around during the week, I want to do everything I can to prioritise my activities so that I can safely include the Church in that limited circle of people.

The other passage I’d like us to look at is Hebrew 10:24-25:

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

First, notice how the gathering of the saints together has a familial aspect to it.  We gather to exhort and to encourage one another in the faith.  It’s a means by which we love each other and put that love on display for the sake of the world.  In a day when Christianity has largely morphed into an individualistic and private affair—me, my Bible, and Jesus—the writer of Hebrews reminds us that that is not the nature of Christianity.  As St. Paul tells us multiple times, we are part of a body.  That body requires all of its parts to function and each of the parts requires the body to survive.

And, it’s important to note, that this comes here in Hebrews as an apostolic command.  Do not neglect to meet together.  Like the command to keep the Sabbath, this doesn’t mean that we’ve sinned by missing church due to some necessity.  There are good reasons sometimes.  You may be ill.  There may be some emergency.  For some few who might be at truly great risk in our current situation, there may be good reason to stay at home.  There may be a health order issued by the government.  There are sometimes good reasons to miss the assembly or even to cancel the assembly for a Sunday or for a short season, but we may not neglect it without such a good reason.

And, I think it’s important to add in light of what has happened across our province, it is wrong for church leaders to deprive the saints of the opportunity to gather, short of such a reason.  It is one thing for members of the Church, in their private judgement and assessing their own risk, to absent themselves by choice.  It is another thing entirely for the pastor or the vestry or even the bishop to suspend the church’s services, depriving the people of the sacraments and the opportunity to gather for worship.  This is, I think, a grievous wrong.  It is one thing if necessity or emergency dictates it.  Perhaps a wildfire surrounds us or an earthquake has made it impossible to gather or the governmental health authority issues an order closing churches, but absent such a situation, the leaders of a church must at least offer the opportunity to gather to the people of the church.

Finally, the New Testament puts the Lord’s Supper at the centre of our worship, alongside the preaching of the word.  You can, as you are now, watch a recording or a livestream of a sermon, but the Lord’s Supper requires physical presence as much as it requires physical bread and physical wine.  Sadly, we’ve even muddled this up today.  I’ve watched pastors on livestreams send people to the kitchen to get “something to drink and some kind of bread”, even if it’s orange juice and Doritos.  I watched one pastor pantomime the Lord’s Supper, pretending to drink from a pretend chalice and to eat pretend bread, and then pretending to pass it through the computer screen.  Some in our own tradition have taken to distributing pre-consecrated bread and wine for people to eat during the livestream of a service and others who think they can consecrate bread and wine in someone’s home via the Internet.  None of these things is the Lord’s Supper.  The key to the Lord’s Supper is not the consecration of the elements.  When Jesus blessed the bread and wine, he was giving a simple blessing as we do over our own meals, giving thanks to God.  The bread and wine don’t change into something else to make the Lord’s Supper the Lord’s Supper.  The key to the Lord’s Supper, just as it was the key its precursor, the Passover, is the presence of the family, the people of God, gathered to share in a meal by which we participate in the death and resurrection of Jesus, in the events by which he has delivered generation after generation of believers from the bondage of sin and death and made us a new people.  You cannot celebrate the Lord’s Supper alone.  Like the Passover, it requires the gathering of the family around the Table, physical presence, to eat real bread and to drink real wine.

People have said to me, “It’s unfair.  We don’t get Communion, but you can have it whenever you want!”  Brothers and Sister, that’s not true.  I know there are ministers who do that, but for me to celebrate the Lord’s Supper with my own family in private would be an abuse of the sacrament.  It would be like the father depriving his family of food while he eats himself.  No, your fast is my fast and I will eat the Lord’s Supper for the first time again with all of you, when we’re allowed to meet again together.

So now that we’ve established that gathering together is essential to being the Church, what authority does the State have to restrict our gatherings?  Does it have any authority at all to do this?  Most churches have exposed a dearth of thinking about ecclesiology, but in the last few months a few pastors have been preaching things more or less along the lines of “Jesus is the Lord of the Church and the State has no right to tell us what we can or can’t do!”  Some of you have forwarded links to those sermons to me.  This is a problem, too.  I admire their willingness to take a stand—and at some point in future that kind of stand may be necessary—but at this point in time, these guys are ignoring half a millennium of well-developed Protestant political theology.

These arguments claiming that the State has no authority over the Church are all rooted in a misunderstand or misapplication of principles of political theology that go all the way back to Martin Luther and the Reformers.  Before the Reformation, the Church claimed authority over everything: the Church, the Family, the State…everything.  The Reformers changed that.  Luther wrote of “three estates”: “But of holy orders and true religious institutions established by God are these three: the office of priest, the estate of marriage, the civil government.”[1]  In other words, what Luther is saying is that God has established three orders or spheres of governance in the world: the Family, the Church, and the State.  More recently, the Dutch statesman and theologian, Abraham Kuyper, developed a similar and related idea known as “sphere sovereignty”.  The idea being—and it’s a biblically grounded one, as was Luther’s—that these God ordained “spheres” such as Family, Church, and State each have their own authority.  Kuyper’s “sphere sovereignty” has held a major place in Protestant Reformed Theology in the last century, so it’s not surprising that a lot of these sorts of sermons are coming from that quarter.

So I think most everyone can agree that there are God-ordained spheres or estates, each with its own authority, but apart from the Old Testament law, which was unique to Israel, the Bible doesn’t draw crisp, clean circles around these spheres the way some folks today would like to think.  That would make things easier on paper, but it would lead to chaos in the real world.  The problem is that in the real world the spheres overlap.  So it’s easy to look at our current situation and declare that the State has no authority to suspend church services, but in reality none of us actually believes that.  There are all sorts of situations in which civil authorities can legitimately interfere with our services.  The Charter of Rights and Freedoms recognizes the freedom to peaceably assemble, but the Charter also includes what is known as the “reasonable limits” clause, which recognizes that these rights are not absolute.

So when it comes to something like our doctrine, there is a very clear boundary between the authority of the Church and the authority of the State.  The Minister of Health, for example, has no authority to dictate to us what our doctrine is or should be.  He would be seriously overstepping his authority to try tell us we should believe this or that as justification for closing our churches, for example, saying that “virtual church” is just as good as regular church.  That’s a matter of doctrine.

But in other matters, the State may intrude on the Church’s sphere.  The State has no say in how a church chooses or ordains pastors, but there are circumstances—say I was caught embezzling funds—in which the State can rightly bar a guilty clergyman from his job.  We readily accept that the civil authorities can put occupancy limits on our building for reasons of public safety and noise restrictions on our musical activities so that we don’t become a public noise nuisance.  We accept that the fire marshal or building inspector can close our building due to safety concerns.  That happened right here in 1974, when the cenotaph was dedicated.  They wanted to hold a dedicatory service in the building, but the building was in such disrepair that the Fire Chief barred them from using it.  That Fire Chief was Lawrence Burns, a man most of you know as a devoted Christian and leader in the local church.  In times of war, the State may restrict how and when a church may meet.  During the Blitz, Londoners were barred from churches after dark, lest the light become a target.

Plague and pestilence have—until now—been such a thing of the past that most of us have forgotten that the Church has addressed these issues for us already.  Richard Baxter, one of the finest of the Puritans, wrote this in his catechism:

Question 109: May we omit church-assemblies on the Lord’s day, if the magistrate forbid them?

 

Answer: 1. It is one thing to forbid them for a time, upon some special cause, (as infection by pestilence, fire, war, etc.) and another to forbid them statedly or profanely. 

It is one thing to omit them for a time, and another to do it ordinarily. 

It is one thing to omit them in formal obedience to the law; and another thing to omit them in prudence, or for necessity, because we cannot keep them. 

The assembly and the circumstances of the assembly must be distinguished.

(1) If the magistrate for a greater good, (as the common safety,) forbid church-assemblies in a time of pestilence, assault of enemies, or fire, or the like necessity, it is a duty to obey him. 1. Because positive duties give place to those great natural duties which are their end: so Christ justified himself and his disciples’ violation of the external rest of the sabbath. ‘For the sabbath was made for man, and not man for the sabbath.’ 2. Because affirmatives bind not ‘ad semper,’ and out-of-season duties become sins. 3. Because one Lord’s day or assembly is not to be preferred before many, which by the omission of that one are like to be obtained….”[2]

Notice, first, that Baxter acknowledges the authority of the State overlaps that of the Church here.  The civil magistrate has every right to impose limits or rules or even to suspend our gathering if it is justified in doing so for public health and safety.  As Baxter quotes Jesus, the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.  Baxter also reminds us that while a sin is always a sin—in other words, when God commands, “Thou shalt not murder,” there is never any circumstance in which it is okay to murder—the same is not always true of God’s positive commands.  We are obligated to gather together, and doing so should be normative, but there will be times when it’s okay not to.  Think again of the Sabbath.  Israel was commanded to keep the Sabbath, but that didn’t mean leaving your donkey in a ditch or your son down a well to do so.  The command to keep the Sabbath is not absolute in the way the commands not to murder or not to commit adultery are.  And, finally, he points out that it may be prudent to suspend Sunday worship for a short time if not doing so would mean having to suspend it for a longer time.  I think that’s particularly applicable in our current situation—or at least it is potentially so.

Now, Baxter’s catechism never had any official authority in any ecclesiastical jurisdiction, so let me quote a short bit of the Augsburg Confession, which is one of the formularies of the Lutheran Churches:

Article XXVIII: Of Ecclesiastical Power

… Therefore the power of the Church and the civil power must not be confounded. The power of the Church has its own commission to teach the Gospel and to administer the Sacraments. Let it not break into the office of another; let it not transfer the kingdoms of this world; let it not abrogate the laws of civil rulers; let it not abolish lawful obedience; let it not interfere with judgments concerning civil ordinances or contracts; let it not prescribe laws to civil rulers concerning the form of the Commonwealth….

 

There are aspects of the civil magistrate’s authority that rightly and justly overlap the authority of the Church and—with some exceptions amongst the Anabaptists—Protestants have always recognized this.  This is part of the practical outworking of St. Paul’s exhortation in Romans 13 to be subject to the governing authorities:

Let every person be subject to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and those that exist have been instituted by God.  Therefore whoever resists the authorities resists what God has appointed, and those who resist will incur judgment.  (Romans 13:1-2)

Are there circumstance in which Christians may or are even required to disobey the civil magistrate?  Of course there are.  But this isn’t one of them.  If the magistrate were requiring we do something sinful—say offering a pinch of incense to Caesar—we would be bound to disobey.  But suspending church services for a limited period of time because of a pandemic is not one of those situations.  It is not a sin to cancel our corporate worship out of necessity.

Now, finally, what if we disagree with the health orders?  Let me approach this from two angles.

First, there’s been a lot of talk about these health orders and the persecution of the Church—as if our government is hostile to Christians.  Something like that may be going on in other jurisdictions, but it’s just plain foolish to think that in British Columbia.  First, our Health Minister and our Premier are both church-goers.  They belong to very liberal churches that we would likely consider heretical in belief, but they are “religious people” and they’ve made it clear that they value religion and even “church”.  Second, the health orders in BC target everyone, not just Christians.  We haven’t been singled out.  I think it’s important to stop the persecution talk right now.  That may really come someday, but it’s not now.

But, let’s say these orders were unfairly aimed at churches.  I think the best test to determine whether or not that’s the case is to look at what’s happening with theatres and concerts.  Is the government allowing theatres to operate?  Can people gather for a concert?  In terms of a pandemic, those venues are comparable to a church service.  If churches were ordered closed, but theatres were still open, we’d probably have just cause to claim persecution or, at least, that we’re being unjustly targeted.  But that’s not the case in British Columbia.  I know it seems stupid that you can’t go to church, but you can still buy liquor and dope, but the fact is that shopping—whatever your shopping for—is a less risky situation than sitting in a room full of people for an hour or two.

But if we perceived the health orders to be imposing an unjust bias on us, would we be justified in engaging in civil disobedience as some are doing?  No.  Here’s why.  Scripture obligates us to be subject to the governing authorities.  That means that we must first avail ourselves of the means of redress that our system of government has provided—and it has provided them.  We can contact our MLA.  We can write to our Premier, our Health Minister, and—while they haven’t made it easy—even our Provincial Health Officer.  If that doesn’t get us anywhere, we have recourse to the Courts.  These are all avenues that we need to exhaust before we can justifiably engage in civil disobedience when the issue at stake is not one that involves sin.  If we did otherwise, we would be disregarding Scripture’s command to be subject to the governing authorities, and that would be a problem.

Why is this important?  Consider how our relation with the civil authorities impacts our witness as Christians.  This is what lies behind most of what the New Testament has to say on the subject.  Paul urged Timothy to pray for those in authority.  The idea, he writes, is that we “lead a peaceful and quiet life, godly and dignified in every way.”  Christians should not be known for creating chaos and constantly raging against the civil authorities.  Paul similarly wrote to Titus

Remind them to be submissive to rulers and authorities, to be obedient, to be ready for every good work, to speak evil of no one, to avoid quarreling, to be gentle, and to show perfect courtesy toward all people. (Titus 3:1-2)

Paul hits some of us close to home.  It’s easy to quarrel about these things and it’s easy to cross the line from legitimate and godly criticism and into speaking evil.  I know the struggle, but struggle we must.  This is part of our witness.  Peter, in particular, addresses that aspect of it:

Be subject for the Lord’s sake to every human institution, whether it be to the emperor as supreme, or to governors as sent by him to punish those who do evil and to praise those who do good.  For this is the will of God, that by doing good you should put to silence the ignorance of foolish people.  (1 Peter 3:13-15)

Christians are the last people who should be known as trouble-makers.  That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t stand up for our rights, but it does mean we need to make sure that when we do, we do it in the least disruptive and most gracious way possible.

And that gets to the final point I want to make.  Part of what’s going on in BC is our own fault and we need to own that.  The day before this “social lockdown” was put in place, Adrian Dix and Bonnie Henry held one of their conference calls with “faith leaders”.  In that call they thanked religious communities for having done such a good job.  There had been no issues with public religious gatherings when the protocols they’d given were followed.  This is why so many were shocked when, the next day, the health order issued shut us down.  Archbishop Miller, the senior Roman prelate in BC, wrote a letter of protest.  A law professor at UBC wrote a letter stating that this kind of action was likely unconstitutional.  You can’t suspend a charter right without good reason and none had been given.  When Dix and Henry responded, it was to say that with the goal of keeping businesses and schools open, they were curtailing what they deemed to be “social” activities.  This makes sense to an extent.  We’ve seen that most business and educational activities haven’t posed great threats.  Community spread was happening largely in social gatherings and that’s what they targeted.  The problem is that churches had proved ourselves safe and low-risk and the authorities admitted that freely literally the day before.  When confronted about this the next week in a press conference, Henry brushed it off, rightly pointing out that social gatherings have been a problem, but then unjustifiably lumping public religious gatherings into the same general category.  Legally, the authorities need to provide some kind of reasonable evidence that our services are a credible threat to public health before curtailing them, but that has never been done.

This is a point that could be challenged in court, but it’s unlikely to go anywhere.  Why? Because the vast majority of Christians in British Columbia sent a clear message back in the Spring. The health authorities permitted us to meet with caps on attendance nd with safety measure in place, but the vast majority of churches shut down anyway.  When other jurisdictions were ordering churches closed, the authorities here, knowing how important our public gatherings are—or, at least, should be—allowed us to continue to meet.  I was overjoyed at the time.  We were one of the few Reformed Episcopal Churches on the continent still meeting during March and April and May, because our health authorities knew it was important we be able to meet.  And yet what happened?  Every other church in the Comox Valley closed its doors and the same happened across the province.  We were handed a great privilege and were in a unique situation in North America—and most Christians in BC threw it away.  The church at large in BC sent a message to our authorities, who had bent over backwards so that we could continue to meet, that the corporate gathering of the saints isn’t really that important after all.

And that, I think, is a good reason for us to be circumspect in our protest.  The majority of our church leaders, our brothers, and our sisters have sent a message to the government that it’s okay for the government to shut us down without demonstrating that we pose a threat to public health.  And so the response from the government and the response from the public to protest and to the churches that are defying the orders is something like, “Stop being trouble-makers.  Physical gatherings aren’t that big of a deal—see all the churches that shut down even though we didn’t ask them to.  The Church isn’t a building.”  And our witness goes down in flames.  I don’t have all the answers as to how we rebuild from here.  It will take a lot of wisdom and a lot of wise Christians working together.  It will take the education of the Church at large.  Consider, I’ve said nothing here that is new or that’s my own novel interpretation.  Everything I’ve said this morning is what the Church has been saying for hundreds of years.  The problem is that much of the Church has stopped listening to our forefathers, to our history, to our own doctrinal formularies.  Brothers and Sisters, we need to pray for our leaders, for our community, and for the larger church.  And we need to be faithful in our witness to the best of our ability.  This means being good citizens under the current circumstances.  I think it’s also a time in which the Lord is reminding us that there’s more to being the Church than gathering on Sunday mornings.  We aren’t able to do that, but there are so many other things we can be doing to witness Jesus to the world—things that we haven’t done very well in the past when we were meeting regularly together.  Some words of that great Anglican divine, Richard Hooker, are fitting.  He wrote at a time when there was a great deal of contention and quarreling going on in the Church of England and this is what he wrote:

In the meantime, shall there be no doings?  Hardly!  There are the weightier matters of the law: justice, mercy, and faithfulness.  These things we ought to do; and these things, while we contend about less, we leave undone.  Happy those whom the Lord comes and finds doing them instead of quarreling…[3]

Friends, we cannot meet together, but we can be faithful in witnessing the justice and mercy of the kingdom and I can’t think of a time when the world needs that witness more than it does now.

 

Let’s pray: Heavenly Father, we come to you this morning, a people dispersed by order of our government and pray for your mercy.  Deliver us from this time of sickness, give wisdom to our leaders that they might deal with us justly, and restore us to our fellowship.  Fill us with wisdom and grace, we ask, that we might respond to our governing authorities with humility and work for the reformation of your church with all godliness.  We ask this through Jesus our Lord.  Amen.

[1] Luther’s Works, 37:365

[2] A Christian Directory, pp. 870-872.

[3] The Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity in Modern English, Preface.vi.5.

A Sermon for the Second Sunday after Christmas

Isaiah 61:1-3 & St. Matthew 2:19-23

by William Klock

If Joseph’s hometown was Bethlehem, how did Jesus end up in Nazareth?  Well, St. Luke tells us that at the time he was betrothed to Mary, Joseph was already living in Nazareth.  He doesn’t tell us why.  Maybe it was due to the availability of work, but in the end we’re never told.  Due to the Emperor’s census, he and Mary travelled back to Bethlehem and the Gospels indicate that they stayed there for quite some time, probably about two years, before fleeing to Egypt to escape Herod’s wrath.  But how did the family end up back in Nazareth?  Enter St. Matthew with today’s Gospel:

But when Herod died, behold, an angel of the Lord appeared in a dream to Joseph in Egypt, saying, “Rise, take the child and his mother and go to the land of Israel, for those who sought the child’s life are dead.”  And he rose and took the child and his mother and went to the land of Israel.  But when he heard that Archelaus was reigning over Judea in place of his father Herod, he was afraid to go there, and being warned in a dream he withdrew to the district of Galilee.  And he went and lived in a city called Nazareth, so that what was spoken by the prophets might be fulfilled, that he would be called a Nazarene.  (Matthew 2:19-23)

This is a continuation of Matthew’s telling of the nativity as read in the Gospel for the Sunday after Christmas and then, following after that, the Gospel for the Feast of the Holy Innocents.  Of course, we didn’t read either of those Gospels this year, but today’s continues the story nevertheless and I’ll give a little recap to give some context.

At the beginning of Chapter 2 the wise men arrive in Jerusalem, following an unusual star—some think it may have been a conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn as we saw last week.  In those days the planet Jupiter was associated with kings and many associated Saturn with the Jews.  Seeing their conjunction the wise men—astrologers from the East—concluded that a great king had been born in Israel.  Of course, this is just one explanation.  For all we know the star could have been some other natural phenomenon provided in God’s providence or it may have been an entirely supernatural event.  At the end of the day we don’t know.  But whatever it was, the it signalled the birth of the King of the Jews to these magi.  They naturally went Jerusalem and to the place of King Herod, but he knew nothing about it.  He sent them on their way, but he was troubled.  It’s highly doubtful that Herod would have considered this a serious threat, but he decided to “take care” of any potential problem, just in case.  He asked the wise men to stop on their way home to tell him what they had found.  When they returned by a different route, Herod decided the safest course of action was to murder all the baby boys in Bethlehem, two years old and younger.

And so Herod’s soldiers marched to nearby Bethlehem.  There were probably ten to twenty little boys two years and younger in the small town.  They weren’t hard to find.  There having been a census not long before might have made it even easier.  It’s an awful story that the Church commemorates every December 28th.  It’s difficult to imagine soldiers murdering little children, and yet we see it today on the news and on the internet.  Families, fathers, mothers, and little children massacred in war and in genocide.  Sunni children killed by Shia militiamen in Iraq, Christian children cut in two by Islamic State militants, Arab families with their infants burned alive by Jewish settlers while they sleep in their homes.  And lest we think these awful things only happen in far away countries, we have our own atrocities here.  It makes it easier that so many deny their humanity and that we do it in clean medical facilities, but we murderer our own unborn by the tens of thousands every year in this country and millions more do so around the world.  God created us to be his friends and to rule his Creation in his name, but in our rejection of him we have become a cruel and barbaric race, subjecting each other to unspeakable things—the strong running rough-shod over the weak.

We wonder how Herod could do such a thing, but just remember that this was a man who murdered his own family just to make sure he had no rivals.  He even murdered his own wife.  As he was on his death bed he issued an order that the leading citizens of Jericho be murdered—so that there would be people crying at his funeral.  He was an evil and brutal man and the people under his rule suffered for it.  When we think of the oppression that the Jewish people lived under in the time of Jesus we usually think of the Romans, but Herod was there too and while the cruelty of the Romans was usually predictable, Herod’s was not—it was often chaotic and arbitrary.

When St. John opens his Gospel by talking about light coming into the darkness, this is the sort of darkness he had in mind.  And Jesus was born right in the middle of it.  This is what so many people simply couldn’t grasp.  They expected the Messiah to come as a great warrior—like King David, but much more glorious and powerful—to drive away the darkness.  They expected him to turn the tables.  But that’s just it.  Turning the tables too often results in the oppressed becoming the new oppressor.  Just look at where the current Post-modern philosophy of victimhood is leading our society today.  No, Brothers and Sisters, God had something much better in mind—something to stop the whole cycle of evil and sin.  And so, instead of being born in a palace to people with power, Jesus was born to an ordinary couple in the midst of the chaos and upheaval created by the Emperor’s census and then became a refugee, fleeing the darkness—to Egypt, of all places.

Why?

Consider the names that the angel revealed to Joseph before Jesus was born.  Joseph was understandably upset when he found out Mary was pregnant.  He was prepared to quietly divorce her.  But then the Lord spoke.

“Joseph, son of David, do not fear to take Mary as your wife, for that which is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit.  She will bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.”  (Matthew 1:20-21)

And Matthew comments on this, saying:

 

All this took place to fulfill what the Lord had spoken by the prophet:

“Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son,

  and they shall call his name Immanuel”

(which means, God with us). (Matthew 1:22-23)

You shall call his name Jesus.  There was nothing particularly unusual about the name “Jesus”.  It was pretty common, in fact.  In Hebrew it was “Yeshua”, one of several very common variants of “Joshua”.  It means “Yahweh saves”, “The Lord saves”.  And it was such a common name precisely because of the darkness in which the people lived.  They were desperate for the Lord to save them and we know that especially in the time in which Jesus was born the people were particularly expectant—the worse things got, the stronger their hopes became—and things were horrible.  And so as Joshua led God’s people into the promised land, Jesus was sent to lead his people in a new and bigger and better exodus into a new and bigger and better promised land.  In the first exodus the Israelites became a nation and were delivered from the bondage of Egypt; in this new exodus all humanity is to join in Jesus as the new Israel and in him the Lord will save them—save us—from our bondage to sin and death.

And yet it’s in Matthew’s commentary that we see the “how” of it all.  This he says is to fulfil what Isaiah spoke: “The virgin shall conceive and bear a son and he shall be called Immanuel, which means ‘God with us’.”  Matthew quotes from Isaiah 7:14.  It’s interesting that no one before Matthew ever seems to have understood this passage as pointing to the future Messiah.  Isaiah had spoken these words over seven centuries earlier and he spoke them to King Ahaz of Judah.  It was another very dark time for the Lord’s people.  The king of the northern tribes of Israel had made an alliance with the king of Syria and they laid siege to Jerusalem.  King Ahaz and his people were scared, but through the prophet the Lord exhorted them to stand firm in faith.  They were to trust him and he would vanquish their enemies and this promised child was a sign.  A young woman—the Hebrew doesn’t demand we translate it necessarily as “virgin”—perhaps Ahaz’s wife or daughter or Isaiah’s own wife, would bear a son and before he’s old enough to know the difference between good and evil the Lord would make good on his promise to deliver his people.  The child was to be prophetically called “Immanuel—God with us”, giving assurance to the people that the Lord had heard their cries from the darkness, that he would visit them, and that he would deliver them.

Just as the exodus in the days of Moses became an image of the ministry of Jesus leading his people out of sin’s bondage, that baby—Immanuel—born in the reign of Ahaz became another image of Jesus’ ministry.  In him God once again had heard the cries of his people from the darkness—the darkness of Herod, the darkness of Caesar—in Jesus he visited his people, and in Jesus he delivered them.  Even more so, Jesus is literally “God with us”.  In him God took on our human flesh, becoming one with us.  He was born not in some privileged palace to wealthy or nobles parents, but to a humble couple just as they were being submitted to the indignity of Roman rule.  Almost immediately he was made a refugee by the wicked and murderous King Herod.  In Jesus God is truly with us in every way imaginable, sharing our nature, sharing our life, sharing our pain, sharing our griefs, sharing our humanity—sharing our everything.  Jesus has come into the darkness and into the pain and into the grief.  This is how the Lord saves.

Joseph and Mary’s flight to Egypt underscores just how Jesus came into the midst of the darkness and not just that he’s come and joined us in it, but that he’s found us in the darkness and so that he can lead us out.  After telling us about the angel warning Joseph to flee to Egypt, Matthew tells us that this took place to fulfil what the prophet Hosea wrote: “Out of Egypt I called my son.”  But Hosea wasn’t looking forward to the Messiah—to Jesus—when he wrote those words.  He was talking about Israel.  Israel was the Lord’s son and the Lord called that son and rescued that son out of Egypt.  And now Jesus is constituting a new Israel where the old Israel had failed.  He is the Lord’s Son and the Lord will call him from Egypt as he once did Israel.  Matthew points to Jesus as the fulfilment and the culmination of Israel’s story.

And then as Matthew writes about the slaughter of the children of Bethlehem, he quotes from Jeremiah’s prophecy:

“A voice was heard in Ramah,

  weeping and loud lamentation,

Rachel weeping for her children;

  she refused to be comforted, because they are no more.” (Matthew 2:18)

It seems like an odd passage to quote.  When Jeremiah wrote those words he was writing to the people of Judah during their exile in Babylon.  It’s a passage, first, of mourning.  The children of Rachel had lost everything.  Think of the darkness of the world.  Israel had lost it all: their land, their prosperity, their temple.  Everything that the Lord had promised and everything that reminded them of their status as the Lord’s people had been taken away—even his presence, that cloud of glory that had rested in the holy of holies was gone.  Had the Lord forgotten them?  That was what they asked as they wept by the river of Babylon.  But Jeremiah then wrote about the Lord renewing his covenant with Israel.  When she had repented he would restore her to the land he had promised and he would make her prosperous again.  Eventually the Lord did restore Israel.  She returned from exile.  She rebuilt Jerusalem and rebuilt the temple.  But the darkness remained.  Matthew was writing to a Jewish audience and they would have seen here again Jesus, the Messiah, coming into the darkness to rescue the people from exile and to restore the Lord’s covenant with them.

And, finally, at the end of today’s Gospel we’re told that when the family returned from Egypt and heard that Archelaus was in power, Joseph decided to settle the family in Nazareth—about as far from Archelaus as he could get.  In his providence, the Lord had provided a connection for Joseph with this little, relatively remote village.  And Matthew says in verse, 23, that this was “so that what was spoken by the prophets might be fulfilled, that he would be called a Nazarene.”

Again, Matthew doesn’t use or quote the prophets the way we might expect him to, as if there’s a one-to-one equation between Isaiah or Jeremiah and the events surrounding Jesus’ birth.  Verse 23 continues to raise questions after two thousand years, because there is no mention of Nazareth anywhere in the Old Testament.  None of the prophets says anything about Jesus being a Nazarene.  The most likely explanation is that Matthew was making a word play.  In Isaiah 11:1 the prophet wrote about the Messiah:

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

  and a branch from his roots shall bear fruit.

 

They key word is the word “branch”.  In Hebrew the word is nazir, which sounds like Nazareth or Nazarene.  It’s not the sort of thing we would do with an Old Testament text, but it’s just the sort of sounds-like word game that was common then.  The point is that Jesus has a royal lineage.  The Lord had established a covenant with David that his house would be established forever.  In the course of history, David’s house eventually fell.  No descendant of David ever returned to the throne after the exile, but the covenant was still there.  A shoot from the cut-off and seemingly dead stump of Jesse—David’s father— would one day come forth and that branch—that nazir—would bear fruit.

Do you see what Matthew is doing here?  Think of the big picture—the sweep of Israel’s story as it’s told in the Bible.  That’s what Matthew is getting at with these quotes from and references to the prophets.  The three key points of Israel’s story that Luke pointed to were God’s covenant with Abraham, the Exodus from Egypt and his covenant at Sinai, and finally his covenant with David.  Israel’s identity was forged in these covenants and in them she found her hope for the future—and in Jesus all three covenants are brought together and fulfilled.  Matthew now does something very similar.  Quoting Hosea he reminds us of the Exodus.  Quoting Isaiah 11—the passage about the branch or nazir from Jesse—he reminds us of the covenant the Lord established with David.  And quoting Jeremiah 31 he gives a vivid picture of Israel’s need for rescue and of the darkness in which the world was lost.  Again, Jesus didn’t parachute into history at random.  Luke and Matthew both stress that Jesus came when the time was exactly right and that he came as the culmination of Israel’s story.  In him all the covenants and promises the Lord had made to Israel are brought together and fulfilled.  Jesus is Israel, which is why St. Paul can talk about Gentiles like us being grafted into Israel.  John the Baptist warned, as he preached the need for repentance in preparation for Jesus’ coming, that the Lord would lay his axe to the dead wood of Israel while raising children for Abraham from the stones.

Brothers and Sisters, this means that you and I are now part of this story—the story that goes back to God’s covenant with Abraham, to the Exodus from Egypt, and to the covenant with David.  All those who are in Jesus the Messiah—all those who have turned aside from everything that is not Jesus and instead have laid hold of him in hoping faith with both hands—share in the great story of Israel and of Israel’s God.  As Jesus came to bring light into the darkness—into the darkness of Caesar’s empire and of Herod’s brutal and murderous cruelty, Jesus has come to bring light into our darkness.

Listen to the words of our lesson from Isaiah 61:1-3.  These were the words Jesus preached from in the synagogue in Nazareth at the beginning of his ministry and they were words he claimed for himself.  This is what he came to do.  This is how he came to be light in the darkness.

The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me,

  because the Lord has anointed me

 to bring good news to the poor;

  he has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted,

to proclaim liberty to the captives,

  and the opening of the prison to those who are bound;

to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor,

  and the day of vengeance of our God;

  to comfort all who mourn;

to grant to those who mourn in Zion—

  to give them a beautiful headdress instead of ashes,

 the oil of gladness instead of mourning,

  the garment of praise instead of a faint spirit;

 that they may be called oaks of righteousness,

  the planting of the Lord, that he may be glorified.

 

This is Jesus—the Lord’s salvation.  This is what it looks like for God to be with us.  He has delivered us from bondage to sin and from the fear of death, its wages.  There’s darkness all around.  Again, all we have to do is turn on the evening news, read the paper, or look on the Internet.  The world is lost in darkness.  We may not have to deal with war and genocide here, but we all deal with the fallout of sin in the world around us and our problems are no less real to us.  We deal with sickness and with poverty.  We deal with difficult jobs, difficult people, with broken relationships and with the loss of loved ones.  We’ve spent the better part of a year living with a viral pandemic, confronted by our mortality and reminded that, because of our rebellion against him, we have been cut off from the life he created us to share in.  We have spent a month with our churches closed and I can’t help but think of Israel in exile, cut off from the temple.  Brothers and Sisters, Jesus has come into the darkness.  He has shared it with us.  He knows and he understands.  And so Jesus speaks good news to us, he binds up our broken hearts.  He takes away the ashes that have been poured on our heads and the sackcloth we’ve been wearing in mourning and gives us beautiful headdresses and garments of praise.  He is light in our darkness.  He is God with us.  Isaiah says that this is so that we will be called “oaks of righteousness” planted by the Lord so that he will be glorified.

Having God with us brings amazing transformation.  Imagine the chaos of the world all around, lost in sin, everyone struggling to get on top.  Think of our own suffering and pain and grief.  And then picture what we become when God is with us.  Isaiah says we are oaks of righteousness.  Ordinarily I could tell you to look out the window to the great oaks surrounding our church.  They’re there—on the other side of this wall, hanging over the roof above me.  As our building deteriorated from neglect in the 1940s, 50s, 60s, and 70s those trees only got stronger and bigger.  The storms come and go.  Every once in a while one of those big storms damages the church building, but the trees are there as strong as ever.  They’re an illustration of what Jesus has called us to be: light in the darkness, oaks in the storm, standing firm, making him known, providing a place of shelter to any who will come, giving a foretaste of his glorious kingdom and moving everyone around us to give glory to God.  He has not abandoned us.  In Jesus he saves.  In Jesus he has come to be with us—to find us in the dark and to make us light.

Let us pray: Almighty God, you have poured upon us the new light of your incarnate Word:  Grant that this light, enkindled in our hearts, may shine forth in our lives; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.  Amen.

Sermon for the Feast of St. John, Apostle and Evangelist

1 St. John 1:1-4

by William Klock

Sermon for the Feast of St. John, Apostle and Evangelist

1 St. John 1:1-4

When I was growing up I often heard the story of how my grandfather discovered the truth about Christmas.  He grew up in one of those houses where the Christmas decorations didn’t go up and the presents weren’t put out until after he’d gone to bed on Christmas Eve.  He would awake to the surprise on Christmas morning and everyone would tell him that Santa Claus had come while he was sleeping.  They wanted Christmases to be memorable and fun for him.  His father, my great-grandfather, died in an accident when my grandfather was only two years old.  After that he and my great-grandmother went to live with relatives.  I expect that at Christmas the older family members enjoyed having a little boy around again—someone who got excited about the season of Christmas.  I suspect they probably over-did things at least a little for his sake.

It didn’t last, however.  A few days before one Christmas my grandfather was playing in the yard and notice a trail of pine needles leading to the basement.  Down the steps he went and there he discovered “Christmas”, prepared and packed away, ready to be sprung on him Christmas morning, obviously not by Santa, but by his aunt and uncle and mother.  He was crushed.  Not only was the magic gone, but he realised that people he loved and trusted had been lying to him.

There were Christians in the middle of the First Century who were feeling similarly disenchanted.  People who had walked with Jesus, who had heard him teach, who had seen him perform miracles, who had seen him crucified and then seen him again, raised from the dead, told others who hadn’t seen and eventually they were telling the next generation that hadn’t even been alive when the events of the Gospels took place.  And it was in those years and decades that followed that persecution began to take place.  The Jews refused to accept this new way of following Israel’s God.  If the Christians were lucky they were simply cut off from the synagogues.  If they were unlucky, they were stoned like St. Stephen or dragged before the authorities by men like Saul of Tarsus.  Some years later persecution by the Romans began, and while it wasn’t widespread, it was horrible.  Men and women were crucified, they were thrown to the lions in the arena—Nero even covered them in pitch, nailed them to stakes, and set them on fire to light his garden parties.  It was hard enough for some who had seen Jesus to persevere.  Many of those who hadn’t seen him questioned.  Were the apostles for real?  Was their story real?  And if it was, where was this new age that Jesus was said to have ushered in?  Why were things getting worse instead of better for them.  And they doubted.  As I said when we began our study of Luke’s Gospel, I think it’s a strong possibility that the “Theophilus” to whom Luke addressed both his Gospel and the book of Acts, was just one of these second generation converts in whom doubts were beginning to arise.  Luke wasn’t an eye-witness either—at least not to Jesus.  He gathered first-hand accounts and recorded the story for the sake of those who would come after.  In fact, all four Gospels were written as the eye-witnesses themselves were aging and realising that word of mouth wasn’t enough.  The testimony of the eye-witnesses had to be written down.

St. John was part of that effort.  John, along with his brother, James, and with Peter were part of Jesus’ inner circle.  They knew him better than anyone.  Tradition says that John also wrote the three epistles we have near the end of the New Testament and that during his exile on the island of Patmos, he wrote the book of Revelation.  In all three cases—in his Gospel, in his epistles, and in Revelation—John writes to Christians who are being beaten down by the present age.  He reminds them of Jesus, of his ministry and of his sacrifice and of his promises, and he urges them to persevere—to persevere in faith, in love, and in hope.  In Revelation he repeatedly calls the churches to “conquer”—to stand firm in Jesus and to overcome, interestingly enough, not by responding to hate with hate or violence with violence, but to stand firm in their suffering and in their persecution.  As Jesus triumphed over sin and death with the shedding of his blood, so the Church will triumph and will conquer through rejection, through suffering, through persecution, and even through martyrdom.  It seems counterintuitive.  Many wanted to give up and throw in the towel.  But John reminds them—and he reminds us—that this is how God’s kingdom works.  It’s how Jesus overcame and it is how the Church will overcome too.

And so John begins his epistle—an epistle exhorting fellow Christians to stand firm in Christ-like love—by going back to his being an eye-witness of what that love looked like when he saw Jesus displaying it.  Again, this is 1 John and our lesson begins at the first verse:

That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we looked upon and have touched with our hands, concerning the word of life—the life was made manifest, and we have seen it, and testify to it and proclaim to you the eternal life, which was with the Father and was made manifest to us—that which we have seen and heard we proclaim also to you, so that you too may have fellowship with us; and indeed our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son Jesus Christ.  And we are writing these things so that our joy may be complete. (1 John 1:1-4)

John begins his epistle by taking us back to Jesus—to his life, to his ministry, to his teaching and preaching, to his death and resurrection.  This is what started it all—or, better since Jesus came into the middle of a story that had been unfolding for a long time, this is what changed everything.  This is what John’s epistle is about.  And yet the message of radical love in the epistle is a challenge.  It’s especially a challenge for those who weren’t there when Jesus was walking on earth and who now have questions or doubts.  Love is sacrificial.  That’s a very difficult kind of love to live—especially when it comes to your enemies.  As John talks about in Revelation, sacrificial love means persecution and martyrdom.  And people thought: “How do I know it’s worth it?”  So John goes back to Jesus.  John was an eyewitness.  Not just that, he was one of Jesus’ closest and best friends.  He’s saying, “Trust me.  The story is true.  I and so many others heard him, we saw him—especially the empty tomb!—and we touched the risen Lord.  Thomas put his fingers into the holes in his hands.  We ate fish with him on the beach.  Jesus is life itself and this is what we eyewitnesses testify.  Testify—put us on the witnesses stand and we’ll swear to it.

And he describes what he and the eyewitnesses proclaim: eternal life.  Our English translations don’t capture very well what John is getting at here.  The Greek word, aionios, means “eternal” but it’s also the word for “age”.  We get our word “aeon” from it.  “Eternal life” tends to come across as otherworldly in English.  We start thinking about a strictly spiritual existence, about heaven somewhere “up there”, and many people think about the pop-culture idea of angels floating around on clouds and playing harps.  But John, like Jesus and Paul, when he talks about “eternal life” isn’t talking about the life Jesus brings in otherworldly or non-corporeal terms.  That’s how it often comes across, because none of our English words captures the full sense of the Greek word they use.  Again, the Greek word is freighted with meaning.  It’s not just that this life is “eternal”, but that it’s the life of “the age to come”.  Jews looked at history as divided into two ages—two aeons.  There was the present age, which is full of pain and suffering, injustice and unrighteousness, and then there was the age to come.  God would send his Messiah, he would rescue his people, not by taking them out of the world, but by coming in judgement to deal with all the suffering and injustice.  God would rescue his people and his creation and set everything to rights and reign as King eternally.  It’s this Jewish understanding of history that we need to keep in mind any time we see the New Testament writers telling us about “eternal life”.  It’s the life of the “age to come”—it’s life in God’s presence, it’s life in Creation set to rights, it’s life in which God has wiped away every tear from our eyes.

This is what the Jews expected.  And it came in Jesus.  But as see throughout the Gospels, Jesus didn’t bring it about the way people were expecting.  This is what got him into trouble with so many people and with the Jewish authorities.  But what John’s saying here is that in Jesus it happened—maybe not the way we expected—but it most certainly did happen!  Somehow, through Jesus’ becoming one of his people, through Jesus dying, and through Jesus rising from death, that future age to come is breaking into the present age.  It’s not the clean break that people expected, but it is happening.  The present evil age is passing away.  Jesus dealt it a death blow.  Its days are numbered.  And the age to come is breaking in.  It will come in all its fullness just as everyone longed for it to come—just as so many of us still long for it come.  But the world isn’t ready yet.  God has a plan.  There’s a reason he’s working this way.

It might help to understand this if we go back my grandfather’s childhood basement where his family was preparing for Christmas.  Over weeks or months, presents were carefully wrapped and stashed away in the basement.  Boxes full of decorations were already there.  A day or two before Christmas the tree was brought home and hidden away.  Think of your own homes: presents for the kids stashed on the high shelf in the closet where they’ll never find them, decorations carefully stored away in the garage or the crawlspace, a turkey thawing in the refrigerator.  Everything is being prepared, but it’s not out yet.  We’re waiting for the big day.  And yet I think of when I was a kid.  We couldn’t wait.  In our house the tree went up early and the presents slowly appeared one by one under tree.  For a week or two we shook them and tried to peek through the seams in the paper, trying to figure out what was inside.  We didn’t sit down to start opening things until after Christmas dinner.  It was a long wait, so we kids were allowed to open one present on Christmas Eve—something to tide us over.  That one present was a foretaste of what was to come on the afternoon of Christmas Day.

That’s something of what has happened in the ministry of Jesus.  The kingdom of heaven—all the wonderful things of the age to come—are being prepared and carefully made ready in heaven in anticipation of the great day when all will be revealed.  But Jesus came like a present opened on Christmas Eve.  He gave the world a foretaste of the age to come as he preached good news to the poor, release to the captives, sight to the blind, as he brought healing and forgiveness and reconciliation—and most importantly, as he poured out the Holy Spirit on his people, uniting us to himself, transforming our hearts and minds, and giving as much of the life of the age to come to us as our broken and unresurrected selves can handle right now.

One day the present age will fully pass away and the age to come will be here in its fullness.  One day all things will finally be made new and Jesus will return, bring the life of the age to come with him—and everything that goes with it—restoring Creation, finally conquering evil once and for all time, and setting everything to rights.  We often miss all of this.  We think the Good News is escape from the evils of the world.  But that’s not the Good News.  That’s not the way of seeing history that the Old Testament had established.  Back to my grandfather’s basement.  His family didn’t go down to the basement to enjoy Christmas any more than you just celebrated your Christmas by squeezing everyone into your refrigerator to enjoy your Christmas turkey.  No.  Everything we’ve been prepared is brought out and our homes are transformed with all the good things that have been hidden away.  Just so with the age to come.  The Good News is, at its most basic, that Jesus is Lord.  Not just Lord of heaven, but Lord of all—Lord of this earth, Lord of Creation—and that he will deal with pain and suffering and injustice and unrighteousness and sin and death not by whisking us away, but by coming and defeating evil and its minions once and for all.  The vision St. John gives us in Revelation is of the dragon—the serpent, the Satan—being allowed to do his worst.  After his beast—Rome—is finally cast down, the Satan whips the nations into a frenzy, encouraging every last vestige of evil to rise up against the Lamb.  And with every evil exposed, Jesus conquers it all—and then the dragon, the Satan, is cast into the fire.  It’s as if Jesus uses the Satan to sweep the dust from every dark corner and from under every piece of furniture into plain view, in one pile for Jesus to deal with—and then, having swept up every last vestige of evil, Jesus throws the broom itself into the fire.  There is no more evil in his restored Creation, which means heaven can come down.  And John gives us that image of the New Jerusalem descending to earth—God’s realm and our realm, now joined back together as God originally intended.  And it can finally happen because the sin that split them apart has been dealt with.

That’s the life of the age to come.  As John says in verse 2, this is the life that was “with the Father”.  In verse 3 he describes this life as “fellowship” and specifically as fellowship with the Father.  This is what we’ve been missing ever since humanity’s first sin in the garden.  The holy and unholy can never be together.  Adam and Eve were cast out of the garden, out of God’s presence.  They were cut off from the tree of life and began to die—because they had sinned, because they had become unholy.

This is what was so remarkable about Jesus.  He is one of us, but he has fellowship with the Father.  They are in communion with each other—it was never broken.  And people could see this wherever he went.  He had power over sin and death, he had power over the minions of the devil, he had power to forgive sins—because he was full of the life that sinners lack, that we reject in our sinfulness.  And yet the whole point of Jesus ministry was to bring this life to the rest of us.  He lived, he died, and he rose to life to break our bondage to sin, to wash us clean from the stain of our sins, so that we can share his fellowship with the Father—so that we can have the life of the age to come.

And John says, this is what he and his friends had heard and it’s what they have proclaimed.  This is the Good News.  And it’s Good News—not just good advice.  As I said a couple of weeks ago, we too often proclaim the Good News as if it’s something our friends might like to try for themselves—like something from the smorgasbord.  Take it or leave it.  If you like it, great!  If not, oh well.  But, Brothers and Sisters, that’s not what the New Testament means by Good News.  The Greek word is euangelion.  It’s the word from which we get “evangel” and “evangelical”.  In the Old Testament the word is used to describe the good news of victory brought by messengers from the battlefield.  Think of Isaiah 52:7 and those familiar words, “How beautiful on the mountains are the feet of him who brings good news.”  That’s the word there.  It’s the image of a messenger running as fast as he can to tell the people in the city the good news that their forces have been victorious.  That’s one half of what it means to proclaim Good News.  A victory has been won by Jesus against sin and death.  Now, think about that.  Is that the sort of “news” you present as a “take it or leave it” sort of thing?  Not really.

But the other aspect of Good News and one we see especially in Paul’s epistles, comes from the way the word was used in the Roman world.  When a new Caesar ascended to the throne—often by having defeated his rivals—imperial heralds were sent throughout the empire to declare the Good News: Caesar is Lord or Augustus is Lord or Vespasian is Lord.  He has put his enemies under his feet and taken his throne to rule.  It was a call for loyalty.  If there was anyone still fighting for the losing side off in the fringes of the empire, now was the time to lay down their arms and swear allegiance to the victor.

This is the other side of the Good News we proclaim.  Jesus is Lord.  He has conquered his rivals.  He has crushed the serpent’s head.  Yes, Caesar pretends at being Lord, but his days are numbered and so are the days of his empire.  He’s part of the present evil age that is passing away.  So to proclaim the Good News is to announce that Jesus has been victorious and it’s to call the world to allegiance to Jesus.  Again, this isn’t a take it or leave it option.  Imagine Caesar’s heralds running through the empire to announce that Caesar had defeated his enemies and now ruled Rome—but you can take it or leave it.  We often talk about “sharing” the Good News.  This is a pretty recent phenomenon that started in the mid-Twentieth Century.  But consider how silly it is to think that Caesar’s heralds went through the empire to “share” the Good News that Caesar was emperor.  No.  This was news they announced and proclaimed.  Judgement would come on any who rejected it.  And consider how this is even more the case with Jesus.  Horrible judgement came on Jerusalem for its rejection of Jesus and his lordship and that judgement was a small foretaste of the judgement John points to in Revelation that will come on the last great day when Jesus deals once and for all with all those who insist on continuing their rebellion.

So, Brothers and Sisters, proclaim the good news of Jesus’ lordship with power and with confidence knowing what it means.  Live in the story and live in the life of the age to come and live in it with joy.  That’s why, John says in verse 4, he has written this: so that instead of living in doubt or fear when we face persecution for our witness and proclamation of the love of God in Jesus, for our witness and proclamation of his kingdom, we may live in joy, knowing that Jesus is Lord and that in the Holy Spirit he has given us a taste of the life and of the kingdom that is coming.  It’s like the gift we give to our children to open on Christmas Eve, a gift that gives them a taste of the wonderful things still waiting for them on Christmas morning.  A gift that says, “Christmas is here,” even if we have to wait for the rest of it.  But, Brothers and Sisters, remember that Jesus came not for the sake of a few, but for the sake of the whole world—to offer forgiveness to all humanity and to call all humanity back into fellowship with his Father.  What Jesus has done for us is not meant to be merely a foretaste of the kingdom to encourage us as we face the ongoing evil of the present age.  We ourselves—our transformed lives, the love we live, the hope we have, the Good News we proclaim—is meant to be a foretaste of the kingdom for the people around us.  Through the lives of his people—through our lives—Jesus lifts the veil and gives the world a glimpse of the age to come.  Think on and ponder our usual words of dismissal when we meet together: “Go out in peace to love and serve the Lord.”

Let us pray: Shed upon your Church, O Lord, the brightness of your light, that we, being illumined by the teaching of your apostle and evangelist, Saint John, may so walk in the light of your truth, that at length we may attain to the fullness of eternal life; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.  Amen.

A Sermon for Christmas Day

1 John 1:1-14

by William Klock

“In the beginning was the Word.”  Just like the words, “Once up on a time” or “A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away,” that introduction “In the beginning” tells us that we’re reading the opening lines of a great story.  But unlike those other introductions, St. John’s opening words in his Gospel signal that this story is very much rooted in history.  “Once upon a time” and “A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away” offer us no point of historical connection—just the opposite.  But John grounds the story of Jesus in history.  Yes, it’s a long time ago.  No, we can’t put a date on it.  But we can follow the biblical story, generation by generation right back to that beginning.  And that’s where John anchors the story of Jesus.  John anchors the Gospel in those events by which the God of Israel spoke, and by his word brought light out of the darkness, order out of the chaos, and created life—human beings to live in his presence—to glorify God and to enjoy him forever.  And as we know, not long after and by our rebellion, we broke that joyful fellowship and subjected ourselves instead to sin and death.  We drew a cloak of darkness over the world.

Here is what the gospel is about: The creator God himself entering the darkness of this fallen world to restore the light and to set it to rights.  But what’s this “word” got to do with it?  For that we need, as always to return to the Old Testament and to Israel’s story.  When John writes of the word—the Greek word he uses is one you’ve heard before, logos—he’s not using it the way the pagan philosophers like Heraclitus, Plato, or the Stoics used it.  If that’s where we start, we’ll be on the wrong foot from the get-go.  They spoke of a sort of deified universal reason, a pantheistic mind behind the universe.  No, John’s logos is grounded in Israel’s story and he tips us off with those words, “In the beginning”.

John lays Genesis here like a foundation stone and from it we take our cue to look to the Jewish scriptures.  Repeatedly in Genesis 1, God speaks and life-sustaining order and, eventually, life itself springs forth from the dark chaos.  Psalm 33:6 echoes Genesis 1: “By the word of the Lord the heavens were made, and by the breath of his mouth all their host.”  In Isaiah 55:10-11 the word of the Lord brought hope to a fallen Israel:

“For as the rain and the snow come down from heaven

         and do not return there but water the earth,

making it bring forth and sprout,

         giving seed to the sower and bread to the eater,

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

         it shall not return to me empty,

but it shall accomplish that which I purpose,

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

Like the rain from heaven bringing life to the earth, the word of the Lord will proceed from his mouth and accomplish his purposes with absolute certainty—in this case, to restore and to renew his people.  Isaiah 40:6-8 speaks of the everlasting nature of the word of the Lord:

All flesh is grass,

         and all its beauty is like the flower of the field.

The grass withers, the flower fades

         when the breath of the LORD blows on it;

         surely the people are grass.

The grass withers, the flower fades,

         but the word of our God will stand forever.

Flowers fade, grass withers, people die, but the Lord’s word stands forever.  But what actually is this “word”?  With his statement that the word was, in the beginning, God and with God, John points us back to passages like Proverbs 8, which speaks of wisdom as that which was not only there with God in the beginning, acting with creative force, but that which continues to sustain creation and guide aright those who will listen.

“The LORD possessed me at the beginning of his work,

         the first of his acts of old.

Ages ago I was set up,

         at the first, before the beginning of the earth.

When there were no depths I was brought forth,

         when there were no springs abounding with water…

 

…then I was beside him, like a master workman,

          and I was daily his delight,

         rejoicing before him always,

rejoicing in his inhabited world

         and delighting in the children of man.

Similarly, Sirach 24 places wisdom at the creation of the world, but also associates wisdom with the law given to Israel and established in Jerusalem and in the temple:

“Then the Creator of all things gave me a commandment, and the one who created me assigned a place for my tent. And he said, ‘Make your dwelling in Jacob, and in Israel receive your inheritance.’  From eternity, in the beginning, he created me, and for eternity I shall not cease to exist.  In the holy tabernacle I ministered before him, and so I was established in Zion.  In the beloved city likewise he gave me a resting place, and in Jerusalem was my dominion.  So I took root in an honored people, in the portion of the Lord, who is their inheritance.

What John says here is that by which God creates and sustains the life of the cosmos has taken on human flesh and been born into the world.  And yet this is no inanimate force emanating from God or merely with him.  It is, somehow, God himself.  Humanity’s sin has brought the darkness of death upon creation, but God himself, in all his creative and life-giving power, has come to lighten the darkness by restoring life.

Of course, in keeping with our fallenness, people failed to recognise the light.  John the Baptist was sent to herald the light and even many who believed him failed to recognise the light when he arrived.  And yet, John tells us, to those who did receive him, he gave the right to become children of God.  John gives us another hint or two here of the story.  Who were the “sons of God”?  That was Israel’s title, given at the Exodus—God’s beloved and firstborn son.  In Jesus a new family has been born.  It began with the old.  The first believers, the first sons and daughters of this new family were drawn from the old.  And yet John hints at the blossoming fulfilment of the old Israel’s mission in this new family.  There’s a universality in those words, “to all who did receive him” and we know that he doesn’t just mean all those of the old family who believed, because he goes on to say that the sons and daughters of this new Israel are born not of blood or the will of the flesh or of the will of man, but of God himself.  Descent, desire, and human power are not the basis of this new family, but rather God himself by the power of his life-creating and life-sustaining word.  The Lord created life by the power of his word in the beginning and humanity rejected that gift of life.  Now a new beginning has been made as the word has returned, this time wedded to our flesh, bring life from death and to restore the rejected gift.

And then those final words: we have seen the glory, the glory of the Father revealed in the Son, full of grace and truth.  John draws on the words of Psalm 85:10, “Mercy and truth are met together; righteousness and peace have kissed each other” (KJV).  Psalm 85 is a prayer—a prayer of the exile, seeking the Lord for forgiveness and for restoration.  It is very much an Advent sort of hymn.  Here at the end of our Christmas Gospel those words stand, “full of grace and truth”.  In Jesus the prayer has finally been answered.

Brothers and Sisters, take heart.  We walk through difficult days.  They’re hardly the most difficult days humans have ever faced, but they are, for many of us, the most difficult days that our generation has known.  To make matters worse, the world is practically shouting at us right now that our faith is irrelevant, that it doesn’t matter.  Things seem very dark.  Thanks be to God that the light has come into the darkness and that the darkness has not overcome it.  The worst the darkness could ever do, it did on that Friday almost two thousand years ago when it crucified Jesus on a cross.  Three days later the light burst forth from the tomb, brighter than it ever had been before.  Take heart.  We have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son of the Father, full of grace and truth.

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

Sermon for the Fourth Sunday in Advent

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

by William Klock

“Rejoice!” says St. Paul in our Epistle, “Rejoice in the Lord.”  That’s probably the most challenging thing anyone could have said to me this week.  I’m struggling to rejoice right now.  Three weeks of church closures was already weighing on me and, I’m sure on you too.  When I heard the announcement that we’d be shut down at least until the second week in January, my heart sank even lower.  It’s not just the closure itself.  It’s knowing that the need for pastoral support is going to be greater now than it was in the Spring and that I gave everything I had back then and have been running on empty ever since.  I’m just putting one foot in front of the other, pastorally speaking.  I expect most of you can relate in some way to that.  But Paul is right.  Rejoicing in the Lord is important.  But maybe not right now.  And yet Paul goes on: “Rejoice in the Lord always” and as if that wasn’t strong enough, he repeats it: “again I will say, rejoice.”  Always.  Just do it.

Rejoice.  That means to be joyful.  It might help us to know that Paul isn’t just talking about being generally cheerful and upbeat.  He’s not saying that we need to be slap-happy or that we need to put on a fake smile for others to see.  He’s talking very specifically about finding joy in the Lord and in his promises and in the life he’s given us as his people.  And he’s talking about showing it—witnessing it so that other people see it.  We talked these last few Advent weeks about the Gentiles being drawn to the God of Israel to give him glory, because they’ve seen his faithfulness to his own people.  That kind of captures the idea here.  Be joyful in the Lord and in a way that attracts the attention of the world, that they might be drawn to the Lord too.

But boy does that seem hard to do right now.  Even when we make a conscious choice, it’s a struggle.  But, Brothers and Sisters, this is where Advent leads us.  Even as the days get shorter and shorter and lead us into the depths of winter, there in the darkness we’re met by the word become flesh, by the light in the darkness, by the light that the darkness cannot overcome.  It doesn’t mean the darkness isn’t real.  It does mean that in the midst of the darkness, we have the light of Jesus.  As the Psalmist wrote, “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil; for thou art with me.”  If the Psalmist could say that, living in a day that still looked forward to the Messiah and that still looked forward to the gift of God’s Spirit, if a man who knew only the promises and the Lord’s faithfulness could write such words, how much more ought we be able to live them as people of Jesus and the Spirit?

Is it hard?  Yes, sometimes it is.  Now is one of those times for many of us.  And I think it’s even harder when we feel as though we’ve somehow got to gin up these feelings of joy for ourselves.  But that’s not what Paul tells us to do.  Our joy is rooted in the story of God and his people and that’s an integral part of our Advent readings from Scripture.  We should know joy, because we know the story that has brought us to the point we’re at.  To that end, let’s look at our Gospel today.  Again, it’s found in John 1 and begins at verse 19:

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

John the Evangelist introduces us to John the Baptist.  As we see in the next paragraph, these Levitical and priestly inquirers were sent by the Pharisees.  If someone showed up with a message from God, the Pharisees were sure to show up and to ask questions to see if it was legit.  The Jews really were expecting someone.  John anticipates this in his answers.  They ask who he thinks he is and the first thing he says is, “I am not the Christ.”  “Christ” is just the Greek word for Messiah.  “I am not the Messiah.”  That’s the one everyone was really anxious to see.  The Messiah would deliver his people and reign as David once had.  There had been others in recent memory who had claimed to be the Messiah, and in light of that, the Pharisees probably expected John would do the same.  And John says that, no, that’s not him.

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

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

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

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

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

The question they pose about baptism gives him a chance to expand on this.  This was one of the perplexing things to the Pharisees.  Baptism wasn’t part of what they were expecting.  Look at 25-27:

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

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

These are the two sides of the gospel coin: Jesus advent brought mercy to the repentant, but it also brought judgement on the unrepentant within Israel.  What’s significant for us here, Brothers and Sisters, is that this exchange between John and the Pharisees reminds us of the Messiah’s place in Israel’s story and of the faithfulness of God to his promises.  It is this manifestation of the Lord’s faithfulness (and of his goodness, mercy, grace, and wisdom) to Israel—something we see brought to its climax in the coming, the death, the resurrection, and the ascension of Jesus, that has drawn us to the God of Israel and that, by faith, has incorporated us into the people of God.  Through our incorporation into this people, through our being made adopted sons and daughters of Abraham, we’ve come to know God’s mercy and the life of the Spirit, too.  And this is where our Epistle today takes off.  There are practical implications of our being incorporated into the story of the people of God.

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

 

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

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

I was thinking about this the last couple of weeks.  The government has ordered churches closed and it’s got a lot of people talking about persecution.  Brothers and Sisters, I really think we’re dealing with something worse than persecution.  Here’s what I mean.  Persecution happens when people fear the Church and fear our witness.  Last week I mentioned Rod Dreher’s new book, Live Not by Lies.  In that book he talks about his conversations with people who lived under Communism in Eastern Europe.  The Soviets clamped down on Christians because they understood that the gospel, that the message that Jesus is Lord was a threat to their atheistic philosophy.  And it wasn’t theoretical.  It was often Christians who took a stand against the Communists and they did so in light of the gospel.  And they were persecuted horribly for their stand for Jesus.

Brothers and Sisters, that’s not what we’re seeing, at least not here in Canada or in British Columbia today.  Again, I think what we’re seeing is something far worse than persecution.  What we’re seeing today is indifference to the Church.  We haven’t been barred from public worship because our worship poses a threat to the government.  No, we’ve been shuttered because the authorities see no value in what we do.  They aren’t hostile.  They’re indifferent.  Listen to the Health Minister or the Provincial Health Officer and they talk about us as if we’re little more than a hobby or a support group—and if that’s all we are, then we can put what we do on pause or we can do it over Zoom.  Leaders in previous generations, in the midst of national crises, called the Church to prayer.  They understood the value of God’s people gathered together to pray for the community, the nation, and the world.  But not anymore.  Even as the authorities restrict us to praying in our homes, I have yet to hear any of them appeal to us to pray for them and to pray for our community and country.  I don’t think it occurs to them that prayer is important or makes a difference.  And we really have ourselves to blame.  Why?  Because we have not been the witnesses God calls us to be.  We have been mealy-mouthed and, quite often, just plain silent in our proclamation and because we have been half-hearted and unfaithful in our gospel living.  Like old Israel, we pray to God, but we’ve failed to tear down the old altars to Mammon and Aphrodite and Caesar.  We name Jesus, but we deal dishonestly in business, we sell our souls to the commercialism that surrounds us, we look to politics (or in the immediate situation to science) as our saviour, and we dabble in the sexual immorality of the age.  We’ve failed to proclaim the gospel and we justify saying that we’ll preach it with our lives, but if we stop to ask what the world sees in our lives, is it really very different?  Does the world see us rejoicing in the Lord?  Does the world see us manifesting the merciful gentleness of Jesus?  Does the world see us living in faithful prayer and trusting in God, or does it see people just as anxious as everyone else?  Does the world see the peace of God ruling our hearts and minds?  Sadly, I think that for the Church at large, the answer more often than not is “no”.

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

Brothers and Sisters, we’ve so failed at being stewards of the gospel that we’re provoking neither response: either hostility and persecution on the one hand, or a harvest of new believers attracted to our faithful preaching and living.  I pray that the shuttering of our churches would prompt us consider why we’re no longer seen as relevant, when in past generations our gatherings for prayer would not only be welcomed, but encouraged.  I pray that our situation today would take us to our knees in repentant prayer.  That it would remind us of our need for faithful boldness as stewards of the gospel.  Rejoice!  Rejoice in the Lord always.  Again, I say rejoice.

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

Sermon for the Third Sunday in Advent

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

by William Klock

I am not a baker and I was never particularly good at chemistry.  I know that somehow when you add water to wheat, the gluten does something and that when you feed sugar to yeast under the right circumstances it makes bubbles and the gluten traps the bubbles so you end up with fluffy bread instead of bricks, but I don’t really understand the specifics: why one kind of flour works differently than another, why some recipes use water and others use milk.  Why do some use eggs and others don’t?  I’m not a baker.  But I don’t need to be, because we have a bread machine in our house.  The recipe book that came with the bread machine could be titled “Bread for Dummies”.  It’s foolproof.  But like they say, never underestimate dummies and fools.  The first time I used the bread machine I was in a rush.  I was under the impression that you just dump in the ingredients and the machine does the work.  Well, it does.  But you have to do exactly what it says.  The recipes are very specific.  They even tell you what order to put in the ingredients.  And so I was miffed when the recipe was very specific in saying to add room temperature milk and a room temperature egg.  I didn’t think I’d have to plan thirty minutes ahead with a bread machine.  What difference could it make?  So I poured in cold milk and plopped in a cold egg.  And the bread barely rose, because the dough was cold and the yeast didn’t activate until the very end of the kneading and rising cycle.  Instead of bread, the machine made a brick.

It’s funny, too, how obstinate we can sometimes be when we make mistakes like this.  I asked Veronica what went wrong.  “I did just what the book said,” I said.  I was very insistent.  But as she pressed me for details, I admitted that the milk and egg were cold.  “That’s it,” she told me.  But I doubled-down.  I mean, shouldn’t the flour—the biggest ingredient—have brought the temperature up?  I was in denial.  My pride was hurt.  It makes you feel pretty dumb when you can’t even make bread with a bread machine.  But it also highlights why following the instructions is important.

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

Last week I read Rod Dreher’s new book, Live not by Lies, and it had me thinking about this.  The last few years, Dreher has been writing about what the Church, particularly in North America, needs to be doing as we enter a new dark age.  I think that to anyone with eyes to see, he’s right that the North American Church is woefully unprepared to live as a minority community, let alone to live in an environment that is becoming increasingly hostile to us.  For the last couple of generations we’ve been failing to instil lasting faith in our children and have lost them to the culture.  In the last decade, our people, our leaders, and our churches have been falling like dominos to Postmodern apostasy.  And there’s a reason for this.  We’ve left the recipe aside and we’re trying to bake bread with too many shortcuts and with the wrong ingredients.  We’ve sidelined what Jesus told us to do and have put other things at the centre of what we are.  We’ve changed and watered down the message.  We’ve muddled the truth to the point that many Christians can no longer distinguish between God’s truth and the world’s lies.  And, all too often, we’ve stopped trusting in the Holy Spirit to do the work of converting hearts and minds and have been trying to do it ourselves.

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

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

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

 

I’ve always wondered how hard it was for Paul to write this, especially the bit about “This is how you need to regard me: I’m a servant of Christ and a steward of God’s mysteries.”  Good clergymen tend to err on the side of humility, even to a fault.  The only guys I’ve ever known to say things like this have been egotists who never should have been in ministry in the first place.  Paul had one advantage that only the apostles had and that was that they had known Jesus in the flesh and had been commissioned by him personally.  I can’t say that and neither can anyone else alive today.  That said, there is a place for God’s stewards to assert their calling in the face of unjust judgement.  Most of us, when faced with unjust criticism nod humbly, say nothing, and take it to God, but Paul reminds us that there is a time to speak up against these kinds of judgements.  I think that goes for every Christian, too.  We’re all minister of the gospel.  Increasingly the world hurls unjust criticisms at us.  I was reading an article on The Record’s Facebook page last week.  It was about some churches on the Mainland defying the shutdown order.  The comments were painful.  It was interesting that none of the dozens of nasty comments was really aimed at the defiance of the orders these churches were making.  The nasty comments were all more generally about how Christians are haters or bigots or racists or knuckle-dragging mouth-breathers and that the clergy are just in it for the money.  I’m sure plenty of Christians saw these comments, but there were no responses.  Yes, to respond is probably pointless.  People who have bought into Postmodern thinking don’t care about reasoning or facts; it’s all about their feelings and you can’t argue with feelings.  And yet, here we are, ministers of the gospel and stewards of the mysteries of God and increasingly we’re just letting the false judgements and accusations of pagans back us out of the public square.  We go silently and sit facing the corner like disciplined children—and I think a lot of the time we actually feel guilty when we hear these accusations, even though we know better.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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