by William Klock

 

Imagine you’re an Israelite at the time of the Exodus.  Moses shows up and announces that the God of your ancestors—a God no one’s heard from in four hundred years—is going to deliver you from Pharoah’s slavery.  Sounds pretty sketchy.  But then God begins to act.  He sends ten plagues on the Egyptians.  He turns the Nile to blood.  Wow!  But then Pharoah’s magicians do the same thing.  Okay…maybe not as impressive as it seemed at first.  But as the plagues go on, they get more and more impressive and Pharaoh’s magicians can’t keep up.  By the tenth plague you know without a doubt that this God of your fathers is something.  He’s even more powerful than Pharoah and his gods.  And then the Red Sea.  Pharaoh chased you down.  Your people are stuck between the sea and Pharaoh’s army.  All is lost.  And then the God of your fathers parts the sea itself in an amazing display of power and authority.  Imagine what it was like to walk through the sea on dry ground.  And then to watch as, just as miraculously, the God of your fathers causes the waters to come crashing back into place just at the right time to drown Pharaoh’s army.  And you join with your people as, for the first time, you sing praise to this God of your fathers—a God whom you’re now starting to think of as your God.  But God isn’t finished.  He appears as a magnificent pillar of cloud in the day and a pillar of fire at night and he leads your people into the wilderness.  When there’s nothing to drink, he causes water to pour forth from a rock.  When there’s nothing to eat, he miraculously provides an abundance of manna and quail.  At Mount Sinai he meets your people in cloud and lightning on the mountaintop.  He establishes a covenant with you.  He will be your God and you will be his people.  He sends Moses down the mountain with the torah and with instructions for the tabernacle.  And having been in God’s presence, Moses’ face shines so brightly with God’s glory that he has to wear a veil.  And when your people have finished assembling the tabernacle, you see God’s glory—like a cloud—descend to fill it.  It's stounding.  It’s the sort of thing the Egyptians could only dream about their gods doing and the God of Israel does it for real.  And, eventually, just as he promised, God leads your people into Canaan—the promised land—and he conquers the people for you and gives you their cities.  And you know it’s him, not you.  There’s no doubting it.  He had you march on Jericho, not with swords, but carrying his ark and blowing trumpets as you marched in circles around the city.  Not to attack it.  Not to put siege to it.  But simply to announce that the Lord, the God of Israel had come.  And when that announcement was clear and when everyone could see that you and your people had done nothing but announce the Lord’s presence, he caused the walls to come crashing down.  He defeated the city.  And neither you nor anyone else could possibly think of taking credit for it.  Neither you nor anyone else took the Lord for granted.  Neither you nor anyone else could dream of giving your faith, your loyalty, your allegiance to any other god.  Because you had seen with your own eyes the glory of the Lord.

 

Even as the generations passed, the people remembered the Lord.  They lived in those cities, they drew from those well, they harvested crops from those fields that the Lord had taken from the Canaanites and given to their fathers and grandfathers.  They bore in their flesh the sign of God’s covenant—that statement, “I will be your God and you will be my people”—they bore that sign in their circumcision.  And every year they celebrated the Passover and not only recalled the events of the Exodus in which the Lord had saved their fathers; they participated, themselves, in those events—they owned them as if they’d happened to them.  And the covenant was renewed.

 

And if you read the Old Testament no further you might think it would be like that forever.  How could a people who had so experienced the glory of God ever take him for granted, let alone turn their backs on him?  How could a people who had so experienced the glory of God ever look for confidence and hope in anyone or anything else?  But it happened.  They took their status as his people for granted.  They began to take those cities and wells and vineyards and fields he’d given them for granted.  They stopped celebrating the Passover and remembering what he’d done for them.  They started worshiping other gods.  They lost faith in the Lord and started putting their trust in kings and in armies and in politics.  And when the prophets came to rebuke the people and to call them back to faithfulness, they refused to listen and abused those prophets.  Eventually, because they took it all for granted, because they were unfaithful, the Lord took away the land and the cities and fields and vineyards—and finally even his presence—and sent the people into exile in a foreign land.  But not before he promised them renewal.  One day he would restore them and make them new and fill them with his own Spirit, he would turn their hearts of stone into hearts of flesh, so that they would be forever faithful.

 

And, in Jesus, the Lord fulfilled that promise to his people.  In Jesus he was born as one of them, but rejected and crucified as a false Messiah.  God raised Jesus from death and overturned the verdict against him, declaring that he really was the Messiah and creation’s true Lord.  In rising from the grave Jesus conquered death.  And then, to those who were baptised and received the sign of God’s new covenant, he gave God’s Spirit.  The old Israel had a temple.  This new Israel is the temple.  And as we read in last week’s Epistle, Paul stressed that the risen Jesus appeared to the twelve, and to the other disciples, and even at one point to five hundred, and lastly to him.  And Jesus changed everything for them.  In his death and resurrection he led his people in a new exodus, not this time from physical bondage under Pharaoh, but from bondage to sin and death themselves.  And in baptism, Jesus leads his people like Moses through the waters of redemption to meet the Lord on the far side.  And the Spirit leads us, not as a pillar of cloud or fire, but as God’s very presence within us, as we embark on a world- and humanity-saving trek through the wilderness of the old evil age into the age to come, towards the New Jerusalem, to that day when gospel and Spirit have done their work and Jesus does away with sin and death and evil once and for all and forever, and creation is set to rights and we enjoy the presence of our God eternally.  Those first eyewitnesses took this astounding gospel story to Jerusalem and Judea and Samaria and to the world and amazing things happened.  It was more than just a story of the glory of God.  The story of the old exodus was that, but this was more.  The story of the Messiah and this new exodus has power unlike any story that has been told before or since.  This is a story backed by the life-giving and life-changing power of Jesus and the Spirit and the people who heard it and believed it and came to trust in the death and, most importantly, the resurrection of Jesus, they were changed.  Forgiven by the redeeming death of Jesus and then given a foretaste of the life of God’s new world by the Spirit whom he poured into them.  It was a change that no one could ignore.  Some were captivated by it and came to hear and to believe the gospel story for themselves and they shared in this new life too.  And others got angry as the gospel story and God’s new world challenged the gods and the kings and the systems in which they were already invested.  But to those who believed, the gospel, the good news about Jesus was life itself.  And they gathered together as often as they could and when they did, they not only shared the community the gospel had given them, they shared in the meal Jesus had given them.  In the Lord’s Supper they ate bread and drank wine—and just as in the Passover—they didn’t just remember what Jesus had done to deliver them from sin and death, they appropriated that death and resurrection, they participated in that saving event themselves.  They owned this new exodus just as the Israelites owned the events of the first exodus.  And each time it was as if the Lord was renewing his covenant with them: through Jesus and the Spirit, I will be your God and you will be my people.

 

And you might think that their faithfulness to the Lord would be unending.  You would think that their trust and loyalty—their confidence—would always and only be in Jesus the Messiah.  But it wasn’t.  If we’re honest about our struggles, we know that it’s easy to become distracted by other things.  There’s a reason we gather every Sunday to hear the good news again and to come to the Lord’s Table to be reminded and to renew the covenant.  There’s a reason why wendaily immerse ourselves in the scriptures and in the story there of God and his people.  Because when we don’t, even as glorious as that story is, even as it once captivated us so thoroughly, somehow—and to our shame—we forget.  And Jesus is still there, but we start focusing on other things and we start looking for other things and we start putting our confidence and our hope in other things.

 

It even happened in the early church with that first generation of believers.  Paul had arrived in Corinth in about a.d. 50 or 51.  He proclaimed the good news about Jesus and both Jews and gentiles there were captivated by the story.  They believed.  They were baptised.  And Paul stayed with them for about a year and half, helping them to set up a church.  And everyone knew that it wasn’t Paul who had done.  He was just an unassuming little man.  Funny looking, maybe with a speech impediment.  (Remember in last week’s Epistle he owned that insult about being a monster, prematurely born.)  What happened in Corinth wasn’t about Paul.  Brothers and Sisters, it was about the power of the gospel and the Spirit.  And yet just a few years later, it all started to fall apart.  The amazing story about the death and resurrection of Jesus that had once so spoken to them about the glory of God started to fade, and with it their motivation to holiness.  Sin—gross, truly wicked sin—started to creep into the church and they found ways to justify it.  Their worship became chaotic as people began using the gifts the Spirit had given to bring attention to themselves instead of to build up the body.  They abused the Lord’s Supper and twisted and undermined its covenant meaning.  And when Paul, their brother, the one who had not only brought the gospel to them, but who could speak with authority about it because he, himself, had met the risen Jesus, when he wrote to them they brushed him off.  They told him they didn’t want to hear from him anymore.  He’d been displaced by other preachers who were flashier, who were more handsome, who were better spoken then he was.

 

And so, at the end of 2 Corinthians 2 he appeals to them.  He talks about himself as “we” instead of “I” and I think he does that to emphasise that he stand with the other apostles whose authority came from being eyewitness of the risen Messiah.  The same could not be said of others who have come to them and led them astray.  He writes to them, saying, “We aren’t mere peddlers of God’s word, as so many preachers are.  We speak with sincerity.  We speak from God.  We speak in God’s presence.  We speak in the Messiah.”  The Messiah: that’s who this is really about.  Paul has no authority of his own.  He simply speaks what he heard from Jesus himself.  And his point here is that they had once been captivated by that gospel of the Messiah that Paul had proclaimed to them, but now they’ve been captivated by the words of mere men.  “Do you want a letter of recommendation before you’ll listen to me?” Paul asks.  “Do I need to give you a sheaf of reference letters so you’ll know I’m legit?”

 

“No,” says Paul, going on in 3:2: “You are our official reference!  It’s written on our hearts.  Everyone can know and read it.  It’s plain that you are a letter from the Messiah, with us the messengers.  A letter not written with ink, but with the Spirit of the living God.  Not on tablets of stone, but on the tablets of fleshly hearts.”

 

In other words, despite all their problems, despite their backsliding into worldly ways, they are not the people they once were.  Paul had proclaimed the good new—the story about Jesus and his death and resurrection and ascension—and through that preaching the Spirit had captivated them and filled their hearts with faith.  They believed.  They gave their trust, their loyalty, their allegiance, their obedience to Jesus and they were transformed.  And Paul could see it even through all their problems.  No, Paul doesn’t need to give them references.  “You are my reference,” he says to them.  I know you’ve kicked me to the curb, but it was the message I received from Jesus that I preached to you that transformed you—not the merely human words of the other preachers who came along.  It was the word of God that did it.

 

And they really, really need to hear this.  Because in the years since Paul left, as they’ve listened to teachers who led them astray, as the glory of the pure gospel has faded from their vision, they’ve begun to put their confidence in other things.  They no longer associate Paul with the gospel.  They’re thinking of him as that funny-looking little man with the speech impediment.  And following someone like that in Greek culture, well, that wasn’t going to get you anywhere.  And so they associated with the handsome preachers with eloquent rhetoric who could impress the Greeks.  They’ve forgotten that the gifts the Spirit gave them were gifts of grace to build up the body, and now they’re abusing them and putting their confidence in them.  They’ve forgotten that the gospel puts them all on an equal footing before the throne of grace, and they’re letting their old class and cultural divisions divide them up.  They were growing their church—as we’d say it today—but they weren’t growing it on the gospel.

 

We do the same thing today.  We may do it even more than the Corinthians, because commercialism is the cultural water we swim in and we don’t even realise how much it impacts how we think about church and we don’t realise how it so easily displaces the gospel and gospel growth and gospel ministry.  We build our churches around personalities.  We build our churches around programmes.  We build our churches around demographics.  We build our churches by advertising that we’re better than or that we’re not like our neighbouring churches.  We treat the church as if it’s a business or a social club instead of a family—the covenant people of God, transformed and shaped by the gospel and the Spirit.  The Spirit has transformed our hearts of stone into hearts of flesh through the power of the gospel, but we forget the centrality of the gospel and allow our hearts to calcify back into stone.  It might not seem like that’s what’s happening at first.  Our churches may even have the appearance of success, but it’s because we’re appealing to stony hearts of worldly people with what they value, not with the power of the transforming gospel they need.

It's that simple gospel that needs to be at the centre of everything.  The risen Jesus always before us.  The risen Jesus at the centre of every decision we make.  The risen Jesus at the heart of everything we do.  Just Jesus, crucified and risen.  The simple gospel.  So Paul goes on in verse 4: “That is the kind of confidence we have toward God, through the Messiah.”  Stop putting your confidence in other things.  Just put it in Jesus.  He and only he can bring us before God.  So Paul says, “It isn’t as though we are qualified in ourselves to reckon that we have anything to offer on our own account.  Our qualification comes from God: God has qualified us to be stewards of a new covenant, not of the letter, but of the Spirit.  The letter kills, you see, but the Spirit gives life.”  The gospel was his only qualification and the only one that mattered.  The same goes for us.

 

Now, think again of the glory that God put on display in the Exodus and in the story of Israel that followed.  That’s what Paul gets at in verse 7 when he writes: “But just think about it: when death was being ministered, carved in letter of stone,”—he’s talking about Mt. Sinai and the giving of the law”—“it was a glorious thing, so glorious in fact that the children of Israel couldn’t look at Moses’ face because of the glory of his face, a glory that was to be abolished.”  The glory God displayed in those days was astounding.  It moved the people to faith and trust and worship. But now Paul’s talking about the new covenant and what God has done in Jesus and the Spirit.  “Will the ministry of the Spirit not be more glorious?” he asks them.  “If ministering condemnation is glorious, you see, how much more glorious is the ministry of vindication—of righteousness, of justice?  In fact, what used to be glorious has come, by comparison, to have no glory at all, because of the new glory which goes so far beyond it!

 

O, Brothers and Sisters, would that we would also be so captivated by the glory of the simple gospel of Jesus the Messiah.  There is no other glory that can compare and if we will keep it always before us—this good new of Jesus, crucified, risen, and Lord—if we would keep our eyes always focused on it, if we let it shape our lives, if we let it shape our decision, if we let it be the basis for everything we do as the church.  If the glory of the gospel were our sole source of confidence and hope, it would transform our churches and make us the people God intends for us to be.  God’s promise is that one day the knowledge of his glory will cover the earth as the waters cover the sea, but, Brothers and Sisters, remember that he has made us the stewards of that glory.  He has entrusted his gospel of life to us and he’s filled us with his Spirit.  It is our calling to make his glory known by taking the good news of Jesus to Courtenay and Comox, to Vancouver Island, to Canada, and even to the ends of the earth.  You may have placed a veil over God’s glory.  This morning let the scriptures lift that veil.  Let the bread and the wine here at his Table lift that veil.  Look on the glory of the Lord revealed in Jesus the Messiah and be refreshed and renewed for the gospel ministry to which you have been called.

 

Let’s pray: Almighty and everlasting God, you are always more ready to hear than we to pray, and to give more than we either desire or deserve:  Pour upon us the abundance of your mercy, forgiving us those things of which our conscience is afraid, and giving us those good things for which we are not worthy to ask, except through the merits and mediation of Jesus Christ our Saviour; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.  Amen.

by William Klock

 

“Two men went up to the temple to pray,” Jesus said.  The temple was the place where heaven and earth met.  The place where men and women could go to be in the presence of God.  Twice a day the priests would lead the people in prayers, at nine in the morning and at three in the afternoon, but people could go any time to pray. On this day, two men climbed the steps to the temple courts to pray.  “One,” Jesus said, “was a Pharisee.”  A Jew could pray anywhere—at home, wherever.  But if anyone was going to go out of their way to pray at the temple, it was going to be a Pharisee.  The temple was everything to them.  They weren’t priests, but they lived their lives as if they were.  So it was natural for a Pharisee to go to the temple to pray.

 

But there were two men this day, Jesus said, who went up to the temple.  “The other was a tax collector.”  If there was a polar opposite of the Pharisee, it was the tax collector.  The Pharisees were devoted to God’s covenant and to his law.  They kept every last jot and tittle of it.  But the tax collectors.  When Jesus mentioned a tax collector, his whole audience recoiled.  They were the worst of the worst.  There were “sinners”—that means Jews who made lifestyle that rejected God’s covenant with them—but then there were tax collectors.  They were a special kind of sinner.  The scum of the earth.  They got rich sucking up to the gentile dogs while swindling their own people.

 

I expect that as Jesus described these two men, everyone had a similar mental picture.  The Pharisee, dignified, wearing his fine clothes, making his way confidently up the steps to the temple complex, and striding just as confidently through the outer courts.  Everyone knew him, everyone he passed greeted him respectfully as he made his way through the various gates and colonnades, further and further into the temple complex.  But then the tax collector.  Maybe it took him three times to make it up those steps, because twice he turned around, overwhelmed by guilt and shame.  And on the far side of the court of the Gentiles, the soreg, the low wall that marked the boundary between the pure and impure, made him pause.  He didn’t belong on the other side.  But he’d already spent weeks tracking down the people he’d fleeced and making restitution to them.  There was no going back.  So he steeled himself and passed through, head down, trying to look unobtrusive, because he knew—he just knew—that everyone recognised him.  And he went to one of the men selling lambs.  And he picked one out, paid for it, took it in his arms—he wasn’t used to handling animals—and he got in line in the courtyard outside the sanctuary, waiting for a priest as the lamb struggled.  And finally, a priest motioned him toward the altar.  He presented the lamb, his sin offering, and as the priest held it, the tax collector laid his hands on it and slit its throat.  And the priest collected the blood and poured it out at the base of the altar, then butchered the little lamb and burned its fat.  Now he was pure.  But there was still more to do.  The tax collector went back out to the outer court and this time he bought a ram for a guilt offering.  And a servant helped him with the ram as he, again, went back to stand in line for a priest.  And, again, he placed his hands on the ram as the priest held it.  And he killed it, and as with the lamb, the blood was poured out and the fat was burned.  And his guilt was expiated.  And now he could go and pray.  And there he saw the Pharisee.  The Pharisee had seen him, too.  The Pharisee had seen him all along.  As he’d chatted with a friend, the Pharisee had seen the tax collector buy his lamb.  And he’d seem him again as he bought his ram.  As he stood there praying, he’d seen the sacrifice.  God may have forgiven the tax collector, but the Pharisee sure didn’t see him that way.  He took a smug look back at the tax collector and, Jesus says, “he prayed in this way to himself, ‘God, I thank you that I am not like other people: greedy, unjust, immoral, or even like this tax collector.  I fast twice a week.  I give tithes of all that I get.’”

 

And the tax collector.  Jesus says he “stood a long way off, not even wanting to lift his eyes to heaven.  He beat his breast and said, ‘God, be merciful to me, sinner that I am.’”  He’d gone through the formal actions of forgiveness, but he knew that mere formalism would never see him reconciled to God.  And so, after offering his sacrifices, he knelt humbly and prayed the words of Psalm 51: “Have mercy on me, O God—the psalm goes on—according to your steadfast love, according to your abundant mercy, blot out my transgressions.”  He knew.  God isn’t a vending machine.  Offering a lamb isn’t like pushing B4 and absolution drops into the slot for you to take.  He knew the words of the psalm.  David went on to sing, “The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise.”  And so the tax collector knelt—and without any presumption—threw himself on the grace of God.  And, as Jesus has said elsewhere, all of heaven rejoiced over this repentant sinner—even as the Pharisee scowled at him.

 

And Jesus said to the people, “Let me tell you, he—the tax collector—was the one who went back to his home vindicated by God, not the other.”  That had to make some people angry.  It was one thing to grant—even if a little grudgingly—that there was something good about a repentant tax collector.  Okay, he offered his lamb and his ram and his contrition was obviously real.  But dissing the Pharisee?  That was too much.  But you see, this is exactly why Jesus told this story.  Luke introduces this episode saying, “Jesus told this next parable against those who trusted in their own righteous standing and despised others.”  And so Jesus explains: “Don’t you see?  People who exalt themselves will be humbled, and people who humble themselves will be exalted.”

 

Going to the temple, standing before the Lord, and singing out a litany of your own pious greatness—that’s not pleasing to the Lord.  That’s a good way to find yourself humbled on the last day.  And having this in mind that makes this bigger than the Pharisees.  Maybe they were the worst offenders, but Jesus gets to the heart of Israel’s problem and exposes it.  They knew they were “in”.  They knew that when the Day of the Lord came, judgement would fall on everyone else and that they would be vindicated and go on to live in his presence in the age to come, they knew this because they faithfully bore all the markers of God’s covenant.  They were circumcised, they kept the sabbath, and they ate the right foods—they kept God’s law.  That meant they were righteous…or so they thought.  But Jesus sort of asks here: “Where is your heart?”

 

This is what the prophets had been asking Israel—and warning her about—for centuries.  Reminding the people that formalism doesn’t cut it.  Yes, God required sacrifices.  He’d given them a law.  But obedience was supposed flow from a humble heart overflowing with gratitude for God’s grace.  It was supposed to be rooted in faith—faith in a God who had called a childless pagan named Abram and blessed him beyond anything he deserved; faith in a God who called a sorry and miserable group of slaves out of Egypt and blessed them beyond anything they deserved.  But Israel got complacent, and comfortable, and forgot the source of her blessings.  Instead of trusting God, she trusted in horses and chariots and kings—and even foreign gods.  She thought mere formalism would satisfy God’s requirement for holiness.  And her heart became hard, idolatrous, and self-righteous.  So for all their love of torah, the hearts of the Pharisees were far from God—and in that, they represented most of the people in Israel.  They exalted themselves and presumed upon God, when they should have been humble before him, thanking him for his grace.  When judgement day came, they were ready to sing that litany of their righteousness: We’re not like other people.  We fast and we tithe.  We’re circumcised and we keep the sabbath.  And God would high-five them and the invite them along to go smite the sinners and tax collectors and gentiles.  Their hearts will filled with pride, not faith.

 

Habakkuk was one of those prophets that had warned Israel in the days before the exile.  “Look at the proud!” he said, “His spirit is presumptuous and is not right, but the righteous shall live by faith.”  Pride and faith, Brothers and Sisters, are polar opposites.

 

Habakkuk looked around him lamented to the Lord:

 

O Lord, how long shall I cry for help,

and you will not hear?

Or cry to you “Violence!”

and you will not save?

Why do you make me see iniquity,

and why do you idly look at wrong?

Destruction and violence are before me;

strife and contention arise.

So the law is paralyzed,

and justice never goes forth.

For the wicked surround the righteous;

so justice goes forth perverted. (Habakkuk 1:1-4)

 

Wickedness, idolatry, injustice—pride.  Judah no longer trusted in the Lord and it showed.  The heart of the people was far from God and those who were humble, who did lean on his grace were trampled under foot.  And Habakkuk knew it couldn’t go on like this forever.  He knew the Lord’s judgement on a wicked and faithless and proud people had to come soon.  And so he cried out to the Lord and the Lord assured him: “The righteous shall live by faith.”  In other words, the righteous will live the way they always do, regardless of circumstances: by faith in the grace and mercy and goodness of God—not in pride, but by faith.

Pride is insidious.  It can take any form in order to push out faith.  The Pharisees were, in most ways, so close—but in them pride twisted faith itself.  I wonder what Habakkuk would think of our world.  We now have a whole season devoted to pride.  At first it was a month, but now it just seems to go on and on: Pridetide, the unholy parody of Trinitytide.  At least the Pharisees were prideful for their good works.  Today, the wicked and perverted announce their sins with pride and their “ally” lackies signal their virtue as loudly as possible.  And the wealthy and the powerful, governments and corporation and businesses big and small join in the litany of pride and woe to anyone who dares to dissent and on whom the scorn and wrath of the Pride Pharisees falls.  The more things change, the more they stay the same.  The proud are always convinced of their own righteousness and standing before God.

 

And yet Jesus told so many stories in which the proud—so sure of their righteous standing—ended up finding themselves in the outer darkness, weeping and gnashing their teeth, while the tax collectors and sinners—having discovered the mercy and grace of God, having repented in faith—found themselves welcomed into the feast.  Again, pride and faith are polar opposites, mutually exclusive.

 

And I think this is why the church, for the Eleventh Sunday after Trinity, has coupled this Gospel about the Pharisee and the tax collector with St. Paul’s affirmation of faith at the beginning of 1 Corinthians 15.  He begins with the gospel, with the good news about Jesus.  He writes: “Let me remind you, Brother [and Sisters], about the good news which I announced to you.”  I love the way it works in Greek.  Paul talks about the gospel that he gospelled to them.  The gospel is the best news ever.  It’s the news that changes everything.  It’s the news that dispels—or, at any rate, it should dispel—any ideas we have about being proud of ourselves.  Because Paul goes on and says, “You received this good news, and you’re standing firm on it, and you are saved through it, if you hold fast the message I announced—I gospelled—to you.  Unless it was for nothing that you believed.”

 

These were men and women who had stood on all sorts of things.  Some of them were Jews and once they had stood on that: on their circumcision, on their sabbath keeping, on their general keeping of torah.  Some of them were Gentiles.  They’d stood on their pagan gods, or on the emperor, or on their philosophies.  But then Paul came and he gospelled the gospel.  He announced the good news and it changed everything.  Or, at least it did for a time.  And then pride started creeping back in.  It’s insidious.  And as pride crept in, it pushed faith in the good news out.  And Paul says of that good news: “What I handed on to you at the beginning, you see, was what I received, namely this: The Messiah died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures, he was buried, he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures, he was seen by Cephas, then by the twelve, then he was seen by over five hundred brothers and sisters all at once, most of whom are still with us, though some fell asleep, then he was seen by James, then by all the apostles.”

 

The good news is that Jesus died and Jesus was raised and that it happened just as God had promised in the scriptures.  Jesus led his people in a new exodus and in that exodus he revealed God’s mercy and grace and God’s power and might and glory.  He revealed God’s faithfulness to his promises.  In Jesus’ death sins are forgiven and in his resurrection the life of God, his new creation began.  If the exodus from Egypt and all it revealed about God and its annual remembrance every year in the Passover could dispel Israel’s pride and fill the people with faith in their God, how much more should this new exodus from sin and death dispel our pride and bring us humbly in faith to God through Jesus?  If we will only believe and trust.

 

That was Paul’s problem.  He was filled with pride.  He refused and refused and refused.  He persecuted the church.  But as a testimony to the patient grace of God, Paul goes on.  He writes, “And last of all, as to one untimely born, he appeared even to me.”  It’s hard to say exactly what he means here when he says “untimely born”.  The word in question is only used this one time in the New Testament, but it refers to a premature birth.  It could be a miscarriage or premature birth where the baby lives, but it could also refer to a child monstrously deformed by having been born premature.  It may be that some people in Corinth who didn’t like Paul called him a monster because of his appearance and Paul is humble owning the accusation.  But the key thing, what Paul’s getting at is the risen Jesus—not just a vision of Jesus but the real, live living Jesus—appeared to him last of all and Paul wants to stress that he didn’t deserve it.  “I’m the least of the apostles,” he writes.  “In fact, I don’t really deserve to be called ‘apostle’ at all, because I persecuted God’s church.  But I am what I am because of God’s grace, and his grace to me wasn’t wasted.”

 

Paul has been the epitome of the proud Pharisee.  And then he met Jesus on the road to Damascus and every last bit of his pride came crashing down around him.  Seeing Jesus alive was the proof that the gospel was true and if the gospel was true, none of the things in which Paul had prided himself mattered any more.  The only thing that mattered was faith—faith in Jesus the Messiah who died and rose again.  Paul knew he didn’t deserve that vision of Jesus.  He didn’t deserve the grace of God.  But there it was.  God had given his son to die, so that Paul, the proud Pharisee could live.  And ditto for everyone in the church in Corinth.  God gave his son to die so that those other Jews there could live.  He gave his son to die so that soldier proud of his devotion to Caesar or the prostitute proud of her devotion Aphrodite or the witch proud of her magic or the philosopher proud of his philosophy could live.  Each one of them, confronted with the gospel had their pride dispelled and that same gospel filled them with faith in the living God and his son who died and rose again.  And forever after they came to him in humility to fall on his grace and to praise him for his merciful lovingkindness.  Even Paul, after all he accomplished as a missionary apostle, writes to them: “I am what I am because of the grace of God, and his grace to me wasn’t wasted.  On the contrary, I worked harder than all of them—though it wasn’t me, but God’s grace which was within me.  So whether it was me or them, that was the way we announced it, and that was the way you believed.”  Paul won’t even take credit for what had happened in Corinth as a result of the gospel being preached.  It wasn’t Paul’s skill or his reasoning or his apologetics.  It was the grace of God.

 

Brothers and Sisters, be captivated by the grace of God on display at the cross.  There God displayed his glory and that glory ought to dispel every last bit of pride we have—whatever it is we take pride in.  The gospel shines so brightly, it exposes the things in which we take pride as filthy rags in comparison.  And when pride is gone, then the gospel—this good news of God’s saving grace, this good news about the God who humbled himself to take our form and to die for us so that we, his enemies can be his friends again, good news of the god who gave his own life to forgive our sins, that good news ought to fill us with faith overflowing.  So Brothers and Sisters, hear the good news about Jesus this morning.  How he died and rose again for you.  Not because you are so great, but because he loves you—his precious creation so much—hear that good news in the scriptures and in the liturgy and when you come to his Table.  Let it dispel all pride; be humbled by the gospel, and be filled instead with faith.  In the midst of a broken word, faith in the living God will begin to set things to rights, not pride in ourselves.  Faith in the living God, not pride in ourselves, is our real and lasting source of hope.

 

Let’s pray: Lord God, you declare your almighty power most chiefly in showing mercy and pity: mercifully grant to us such a measure of your grace, that we, running the way of your commandments, may receive your gracious promises, and be made partakers of your heavenly treasure; through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord, who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.  Amen.

by William Klock

 

St. Bartholomew the Apostle.  He’s pretty much a mystery.  As far as the New Testament goes, Matthew, Mark, and Luke list him as one of the twelve.  Beyond that, we have nothing.  His name, Bar tholomais probably means “son of Tolomai”, but it may actually be his given name since when Matthew, Mark, and Luke want to refer to someone as “son of So-and-so” they use the Greek way of doing it not the Aramaic “bar So-and-so”.  Since John never mentions Bartholomew, but does mention Nathanael, some think that the two are the same.  I don’t find the argument very convincing.  Various stories and legends describe him going off to evangelise India or Pontus or Armenia, amongst other places.  When I consider sources and dates, I think the story of him taking the gospel to India is probably the most likely.  Almost without a doubt he was martyred for proclaiming Jesus the Messiah—probably flayed and maybe then beheaded.  He was an apostle—one of Jesus’ hand-picked messengers sent to herald the good news—so what we can confidently say is that that’s exactly what he did and that he probably died, very painfully, for the sake of his Lord.

 

But since there are no scripture passages that tell us about him, our Epistle and Gospel today are simply passages that tell us about the apostles in general.  So with that, I’d like to look at our Epistle

—Acts 5:12-16.  Here's, again, what Luke writes:

 

One Saturday morning back in my computer tech days I found a woman sitting in her car outside the door when I showed up to open the store.  She was from out of town and afraid that if she waited to call until we were open, there wouldn’t be time to fix her computer the same day.  So she just showed up.  And she had a box of doughnuts by way of apology—or bribe—really a little of both.  So I got to work on the computer and the doughnuts while she watched and talked to me.  They were really good doughnuts and I told her and she told me she’d made them herself.  In fact, she owned a little doughnut shop in a tourist town an hour away.  And she told me how she got started.  There was only one place in town that sold doughnuts, but they didn’t make them.  Their doughnuts were delivered from the city and were a day old—at least—by the time they were served.  She opened up a little place in a converted camping trailer selling doughnuts and coffee to the tourists, but the coffee shop that had been there forever had a corner on the coffee and doughnut market, plus a primo location to catch the tourists.  She was about to call it quits, when the owner of the garden shop across the street from the coffee shop came to see her.  The garden shop and the coffee shop were in some kind of spat and the owner of the garden shop decided to invite this woman to park her trailer in their parking lot.  See, the tourist industry there was all about tulips.  People would come to see the tulips and the reason that old coffee shop was in such a good location was because the place across the street—the garden shop—sold tulip bulbs from the local growers.  People came to see the tulips, then they went to the garden shop to buy bulbs, and finally ended up across the street for coffee and doughnuts.  But coffee and doughnuts in the parking lot of the garden shop was more convenient than coffee and doughnuts across the street.  It helped that her doughnuts were better and that they were fresh.  So pretty soon all the people were crowding around her trailer for doughnuts instead of going to the old mainstay across the street.  And, of course, the coffee shop owner wasn’t happy.  He went to the town council and tried to have “mobile restaurants” banned from town—an early version of today’s restauranteurs trying to ban competition from food trucks.  It didn’t work and this woman who’d brought her computer in eventually won the doughnut war.

 

That’s a bit like what’s going on in Acts 5.  Pay attention to the fact that this is Acts 5.  This is right at the beginning of the story.  These are the days and weeks just after Pentecost.  And if Peter and James and John had gone back home to Galilee and done these signs and wonders, they would have drawn crowds just like Jesus had done there, but being so far away from Jerusalem, they probably wouldn’t have drawn the ire of the Jewish religious authorities.  The Pharisees, of course, were always there scowling and scolding, but the Pharisees weren’t the gatekeepers.  They were just a popular interest group.  But Peter and the other apostles didn’t go back to Galilee.  They stayed right in Jerusalem.  Not only that, but Luke writes that they were meeting together in Solomon’s Porch.  Solomon’s Porch was a great colonnade on the eastern side of the outer court of the temple.  So the apostles would go to the temple to worship, but they would also spend their days gathered together, preaching, and doing signs and wonders in the outer court.  This was where all the people were coming and going and it was probably near the house where the serving priests lived.  It was a busy place.  The temple wasn’t a church, but what the apostles were doing would be a bit like coming to church and then hanging out afterward on the front porch or in the rectory garden.  And the crowds would gather.  Some of them stopped to listen or to be healed on their way to or from the temple proper, but many people were coming just to hear the teaching of the apostles.  Many people were coming, just like they’d come to Jesus, because they’d heard that Peter and the others were casting out demons, giving sight to the blind, and healing the lame.  And I fully expect that Peter was repeating several times a day the same thing he preached on Pentecost—about Jesus fulfilling the promises of the old covenant and making a new and better one.

 

They’d set up a doughnut stand right in front of the established coffee shop that had been there forever.  And they were selling delicious, fresh doughnuts while the coffee shop was still trying to sell day-olds delivered yesterday.  So you can understand that this raised the ire of the Jewish authorities.  The apostles weren’t just tweaking the noses of some Pharisees in backwater villages.  They were—you might say—stealing customers from the religious authorities and doing so right on their front porch.

 

And let’s talk about the healings that were happening, because I’ve noticed that we’re very, very, very, very prone to taking passages like this out of context.  It’s not just that the apostles were working a multitude of healing miracles.  It gets pretty weird.  Luke says that people would even lay out their sick loved ones just so Peter’s shadow would fall on them and they’d be healed.  Every last one of them, Luke seems to be saying, was healed.  The part about Peter’s shadow seems kind of over-the-top.  I can’t help but think of various medieval stories of people being healed by the relics of saints or people stealing Baby Jesus’ diapers off Mary’s washline and being healed by them.  And yet Peter’s shadow isn’t the only weird thing like this in Acts that we might be tempted to doubt.  Luke also tells us later in Acts that people would take Paul’s handkerchiefs and use them to heal the sick.

 

And there are people today who think that stuff like this should be the norm always and everywhere.  There are scammers sending out vials of holy water or oil as a cure-all and televangelists who will wave their jackets at a line-up of people and claim they’ve been healed.  And if you don’t experience miracles like this in your own life or in your own church, well, they’ll shame you and tell you that you lack faith.  A few weeks ago someone sent me some commentary about a new “worship” song that came out of one of those sorts of places.  The song calls for revival and courage and strength and faith, which are all good things and all things the church today often lacks, but then the heart of the song is a prayer for a new Pentecost.  They don’t see the sort of miraculous happenings today that we see in Acts 5 and they think that what we need is another Pentecost.  What they’re saying is that the modern church—or at least mainstream churches that don’t do the things they claim to do—lack the Holy Spirit.  And I cringed.  That’s no different than saying that because some Christians still walk in sin, we need Jesus to die again.  No.  A thousand times, no!  Just like Jesus death and resurrection, Pentecost has already happened.  It was a one-time event.  We don’t need another one.  What we need is to live as the people, as the community, as the church born that day when God poured out his Spirit.  And, in some cases, we need to read scripture better so that we don’t set unrealistic expectations.  Remember, Brothers and Sisters, miracles are acts of God, not acts of men and women.  If God wants us to see miracles, nothing is going to stop him.  If he could act through a pagan prophet like Balaam, he can act through even the most lukewarm Christian.  Maybe the problem is that we’ve misunderstood what God was doing through the apostles in the book of Acts.

 

Remember that context is everything, so let’s look at this story about the apostles in context.  When Jesus had risen from the grave a few week earlier, he inaugurated God’s new creation.  He was the firstborn of the resurrection.  God’s new life went out like a shockwave from the empty tomb on Easter.  And that new life, that new creation met the disciples of Jesus on Pentecost.  And God wanted it be clear, he wanted the world to see that in Jesus and in this new covenant people who identified with Jesus, his kingdom, his new creation was being born.  And so, first with Jesus and then with the apostles and those first believers, God did amazing things so that no one would or could mistake what was happening.  Remember the people in the gospels, people like Nicodemus who said to Jesus, “No one can do the things you do unless he’s from God.”  Jesus’ signs and wonders validated his messiahship.  And now, as we get into Acts, we see that God wanted to make sure that when those first Christians started telling people the good news that Jesus had risen from the dead and that new creation had begun, they had his witness, they had these signs and wonders to go along with their preaching and their actions.

 

But it’s wouldn’t be like that forever.  Miracles would stop being noteworthy if they happened all the time.  We really need to pay attention to the big biblical story here.  Miracles aren’t a common thing in that story.  They cluster around the times when God does something new.  Think of the exodus from Egypt.  The biggest cluster of miracles in the Old Testament is found in the Exodus: from the burning bush, to the plagues sent on Egypt, to the parting of the Red Sea and the drowning of Pharaoh’s army, to the water from the rock and the manna in the wilderness.  But it doesn’t stop there.  That generation knew miracles like no other.  They saw the Lord in the pillar of cloud and the pillar of fire, leading them to the promised land.  They knew the bronze serpent Moses raised up.  They knew the miraculous battles won for them by the Lord.  And when they marched into Canaan, the Lord dried up the Jordan.  He won their battles and toppled cities like Jericho.  And it happened so that Israel would powerfully know his goodness and his glory and then pass that knowledge to future generations.  And, too, the Lord did these thing so that the nations would take note.  The God of Israel is powerful and glorious and cares for his people.  He’s unlike any other god.  But then take note: those future generations were expected to know the goodness and the faithfulness and glory of God, not through ongoing daily miracles, but through the witness of their fathers and through the scriptures.  And, too, each new generation bore in its flesh the sign of circumcision, the sign of God’s covenant with them and of his faithfulness.  And every year the families of Israel gathered together and ate the Passover and participated themselves in the glorious events of the Exodus.  The Lord took his people from the witness of miracles to the witness of what we might call the common means of grace.  Miracles convinced a people who didn’t know the Lord to trust and obey him.  But the covenant people who then knew him, who lived with him in their midst, who had his word, who bore his covenant sign and ate his covenant meal—they didn’t need miracles to know the Lord was worthy of their trust and obedience.

 

And, Brothers and Sisters, the Lord followed exactly this pattern in the new exodus.  Jesus’ ministry and then the ministry of the apostles were full of the miraculous.  Jesus himself and then the Spirit are the evidence of God’s goodness and faithfulness and glory, but as Jesus led his people—not this time into Canaan, but into his new creation—he made that new creation manifestly real as he made all the sad things of this world become untrue, as he undid the real-world consequences of sin and death and as he showed how he had defeated the devils at the cross.

 

In the book of Acts God shows the world very dramatically what the church is—that it is the beachhead of his kingdom, his new creation in the world.  His church is the new covenant community, the temple in which he now dwells, the steward of both his Spirit and his gospel who will spread his new creation wherever it—wherever they—wherever we—go.  Acts is about God’s formation of his new people.

 

Consider that the passage just before our Epistle today is the story of Ananias and Sapphira.  It’s telling that people will think miraculous healings should be everyday occurrences, but I’ve never heard anyone suggest that God striking down people who lie to the church should be just as ordinary.  If it were, we’d have a lot of dead faith-healers.  But we shouldn’t expect that to happen.  The Lord only needed to strike down a couple like Ananias and Sapphira once.  The point isn’t that this is what happens to people who lie to the church.  The point is that this one frightening miracle should—and I think it has—reverberated down through the generations with the message that God expects holiness of his people.  Acts 5 begins with that call to holiness and it makes it very plain that a church that lacks holiness, even if it isn’t literally struck dead, will die.  Jesus will take away its lampstand.  We’ve seen that through history and we see it today.  So, after establishing that holiness is an essential characteristic of the people of God (and not, that’s what much of Exodus is about as well), Chapter 5 then continues with these signs and wonders done by the apostles to back up their proclamation that in Jesus new creation has begun.  Again, the church doesn’t ordinarily need miracles to show God’s new creation.  We show the world God’s new creation as we live the fruit of the Spirit, as we bring the reconciling power of the gospel to broken people and broken relationships, and as we work to bring things like mercy and justice and life to a sin-broken world.  But in those early days, the Jewish authorities could say that’s just what they were already doing.  So God gave better doughnuts to the apostles.

 

And that’s then followed by the arrest of the apostles by the temple authorities.  They were angry because they’d set up a doughnut shop on their front porch and were stealing their customers.  Just as they’d crucified Jesus to say, “He’s not really the Messiah,” they have Peter and the others arrested to send the message, “Despite their miracles, these men are frauds.  Don’t believe them when they claim to be a new temple.  That’s blasphemy!”  But do you remember what happened?  That night as the apostles sat in their jail cells an angel appeared, set them free, and sent them back to the temple court to keep preaching the gospel.  The next day the priests met to decide what to do with the apostles.  They sent for them to be brought from the jail and that’s when the guards reported they were gone.  And that’s when someone came running into the council chamber saying, “Look!  The guys you arrested and put in prison are right now in the temple preaching.”

 

It's God, again, backing up his newly established church with miracles.  When he raised Jesus from the dead, he overturned the false verdict of Pilate and the Jews and this time he overturned the false verdict of the priests and validates the good news Peter was preaching.  And the apostles took it to heart.  They kept preaching and preaching and preaching—in Jerusalem, in Judea, in Samaria, and eventually to the world—and all but John were martyred.  They were killed for their faithful proclamation of Jesus.  But they knew the same God who had raised Jesus from the dead would one day raise them.  Death had no more power over them than the demons or sickness or prison doors.  And their story was told through the generations of Christians to come: to Christians in Rome, to Christians in pagan nations, to Christians living under Communism, to Christian missionaries who gave their lives to proclaim to the good news to hostile people.  They didn’t need to experience miracles first hand.  Just as Isreal knew the stories of the first exodus from Egypt, these Christian brothers and sisters knew the stories of the second exodus from sin and death.  And as Israel bore God’s covenant sign of circumcision and celebrated the Passover and remembered God’s goodness and faithfulness and glory, so those Christians bore themselves the sign of baptism and celebrated the Lord’s Supper and not only knew the goodness and faithfulness and glory of God, but they also knew—as we should too—that we are the embodiment of God’s new creation, we are the stewards of his Spirit and his gospel, we are the beachhead of God’s new creation.  Miracles or not, what we need to remember is that the power to defeat the enemies of God is the power of his gospel and the power of his Spirit.  It always has been and it always will be.

 

Let’s pray: O almighty and eternal God, who gave your apostle Saint Bartholomew grace truly to believe and to preach your Word: Grant that your Church may love that Word, and both preach and receive it; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

by William Klock

 

All the tax collectors and sinners were drawing near to listen to Jesus, writes St. Luke at the beginning of Chapter 15.  But the Pharisees and the scribes—the legal experts—were grumbling.  “This fellow welcomes sinners!” they said.  “He even eats with them!”  (Luke 15:1-2)

 

You can just picture these angry Pharisees, their faces red, veins popping in their foreheads, grumbling with each other.  They’d heard troubling things about Jesus, but then he’d come to town and they listened while he preached in the synagogue and they were pleasantly surprised.  They nodded along with him.  And they watched as he healed sick people and cast out demons.  People were saying Jesus was the Messiah.  Maybe he really was.  Maybe the bad things people were saying about him weren’t true after all.  But then the party last night.  Matthew, the guy who collected taxes for the Romans, the traitor to his people, they’d heard rumours that he’d taken up with Jesus and last night he threw a big party and invited all his scummy, sinner friends.  A bunch of JINOs—you know, Jews-in-name-only.  Not a single one of them kept the law: tax collectors, prostitutes, greedy businessmen who supplied the Roman army.  Rumour had it they were eating bacon-wrapped prawns!  And Jesus was there.  They raged.  How could a guy seem so holy, preach such great things, know the scriptures so well, and even work miracles that only God could do, and then go and party with sinners?  I mean, yeah, there were also rumours that Jesus was telling his kingdom stories at the party and someone even said that some of those sinners had decided to repent and sin no more.  But that just made these Pharisees angrier.  If Jesus were really the Messiah, if he'd really come to usher in God’s kingdom, he should be calling down fire and brimstone on those tax collectors and their sinner friends.  No, they grumbled to each other, this won’t do.  This won’t do at all.

 

So Jesus answered their angry grumbles with three stories.  The first story is about a shepherd who loses one of his hundred sheep.  He secures the ninety-nine in the fold and sets off into the night to find the lost one.  When he finds that lost sheep, he carries it home on his shoulders, and rejoices with the other shepherds.  What was precious had been lost, but was now found.  In the second story Jesus tells of a poor old woman who loses one of ten silver coins.  They were probably her dowry.  She can’t find the coin anywhere.  She turns her whole house upside-down in her frantic search for the precious coin.  Eventually she sweeps the house and finds it.  In her great joy she runs to tell her friends so that they can rejoice with her.

 

And Jesus likens the joy of the shepherd who found the lost sheep and the joy of the woman who found the lost coin to the joy in heaven when a lost sinner repents.  Jesus’ knew exactly how to poke the Pharisees.  It’s that last bit about the rejoicing in heaven that really drove the point home.  The Pharisees—like everyone else in Israel—knew that the world is not as it should be.  They knew the story of how the Lord had created the world and then created Adam and Eve to live in his presence and to steward his temple.  Heaven and earth were supposed to overlap.  God and humans were supposed to live together.  But sin had ruined everything.  Sin drove a wedge between heaven and earth and God and man and now everything is broken.  But then God had called and created this special people—Israel—to be his people and to live in his presence.  When they were lost in Egypt, like the shepherd in the story, he sought them out and rescued them.  And in the middle of their community stood the temple.  And in the most holy place in the temple was the ark.  It represented God’s covenant with them.  And it was his footstool.  And on it rested his presence in a cloud of glory.  Or that’s how it was before the exile.  But the temple was the one place on earth where heaven and earth still overlapped, the one place where sinful people—purified from their sins—could enter God’s presence.  That’s why the Pharisees lived like they did.  They weren’t priests, but they lived as if they were—aways ritually pure, always ready to be in God’s presence.  They were the original on-earth-as-in-heaven people.  They loved what God loved.  They rejoiced when heaven rejoiced.  Or so they thought.  Because that’s what Jesus is getting at here when he talks about heaven rejoicing over a single sinner who repents.  In Jesus, the God of Israel was searching out and finding his lost sheep, his lost coins and all of heaven was rejoicing.  So this is a very pointed rebuke.  They’re angry because they think Jesus is doing it wrong and Jesus flips it all around: No, actually, they’re the ones who have got it all wrong.  They think they have the heart of God, but they don’t.

 

And now Jesus has their attention.  Their faces are angry and red.  They’re about to blow their tops.  So Jesus seizes the moment to really drive his point home with a third story.

 

Jesus describes this younger son as a truly despicable character.  A father could give his sons their inheritance early, but only a truly despicable son would demand it.  And when a father did give his sons their inheritance early, it was expected that they would continue to give their father the proceeds of the land.  Dutiful fathers take care of their sons and then dutiful sons take care of their fathers.  But there’s nothing dutiful about this kid.  He not only demands his inheritance early, but then he sells the land, takes the cash, and goes to a far-off country.  He cares nothing for his family, for his brother, or for his father.  And then, on top of that, he abandons his people.  He’s leaving Israel—the place where God’s people live in his presence—to go to a pagan gentile land where they’ve never heard of the torah or the sabbath.  He’ll never set foot in the temple again.  And here’s Jesus’ point.  This kid is the epitome of a “sinner”.  Everyone trips up from time to time, everyone sins, but when the Pharisees talked about “sinners” they were talking about people who chose sin over faithfulness—people who made a choice abandon God’s law, God’s covenant, and God’s people.  They lived lives that were incompatible with being a faithful Jew.  But it gets worse.  Jesus goes on:

 

When he had spent it all—everyone saw that coming!—a severe famine came on that country and he found himself destitute.  So he went and attached himself to one of the citizens of that country, who sent him into the fields to feed his pigs.  He longed to satisfy his hunger with the pods the pigs were eating, and no one would give him anything.

The boy abandoned God and now, to all appearances, God has abandoned him.  He squandered his inheritance on prostitutes and loose living and now he finds himself feeding pigs.  For a Jew to have anything to do with pigs—the epitome of uncleanness—that was bad enough, but to actually be hungry enough to eat their food—well—Jesus has conjured up an image of complete moral and physical degradation.  This is rock bottom.  Some of the Pharisees were thinking, “Serves him right!  That’s justice.”  I wonder, though, if others weren’t starting to clue into where Jesus was going with this.  Remember that these were people who had concluded they were still living in exile.  Their ancestors had worshipped idols and forsaken God’s law.  Israel was God’s son, but they were a son who had taken advantage of his father’s patience and mercy and goodness.  And so they had found themselves in exile, in Babylon, in a pagan land, with nothing and far from God.  I suspect that at least some of the scribes and Pharisees were beginning to hear their own story being told by Jesus.

 

So finally, Jesus says, the son smartened up: He came to his senses.  “Just think,” he said to himself, “There are all my father’s hands with plenty to eat and here I am, starving to death.  I’ll get up and go to my father and I’ll say to him, ‘Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you.  I don’t deserve to be called your son and longer.  Make me like one of your hired hands.’”  And he got up and went to his father.

 

I trust that, again, at least some of the scribes and Pharisees saw themselves in this, because this is what their ancestors had done.  Sitting by the waters of Babylon, first they wept for all they’d lost, and then they wept in repentance for all their unfaithfulness.  And this is what the Pharisees were still doing: trying to be faithful to the law, urging everyone else to be faithful to the law, in the hopes that the Father would take them back.  This is why they were so angry at the tax collectors and sinners.  They were calling everyone to national repentance in the hopes that the Lord would return to them and set the world to rights, but the tax collectors and sinners refused to get with the programme—they were holding everything back.

 

But, too, Jesus’ last two stories about the lost sheep and the lost coin were still echoing in their ears.  The tax collectors and sinners were the lost sheep of Israel and Jesus had been sent by the Lord to find them.  I see one of the Pharisees putting his hands to his heas in frustration and thinking, “It’s like Jesus is saying we’re all lost sheep, we’re all lost coins, we’re all lost sons of the Father!”  They weren’t ready to accept that.

 

And then the father in the story.  Jesus says: While still a long way off, his father saw him and his heart was stirred with love and pity.  He ran to him, hugged him tight, and kissed him.

 

Everything in the image goes against the image of the ancient near eastern patriarch.  The father should be dignified, stern, disciplined, ready to carry out justice, but instead Jesus gives us a picture of this father—so incredibly undignified—running to meet his son, his robes blowing behind him, his sandals slap-slap-slapping as he ran.  And instead of running to his son to give him a kick in the pants and beating for being such a lout, he loves him.  The son tries to begin the spiel he’s been rehearsing the whole of his long journey: “Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you.  I don’t deserve to be called your son any longer.”  But his father cuts him off and calls for his servants: “Hurry!  Bring the best clothes and put them on him!  Put a ring on his hand and shoes on his feet!  And bring the calf that we’ve fattened and kill it.  Let’s eat and have a party!  This son of mine was dead and is alive again!  He was lost and now he’s found!”  And they began to celebrate.

Jesus has this brilliant way of telling stories.  First, it’s so obviously about the tax collectors and sinners but then somehow he manages to carry on with the story so that it becomes about both the tax collectors and sinners and the whole people of Israel longing for the return of their heavenly Father.  And then he reminds everyone that their Father is full of love and mercy and grace, ready to pour out his blessings and to throw a party for anyone who repents.  It’s hard to imagine that at least some of the scribes and Pharisees didn’t get it.  “Oh man.  He’s talking about all of us,” they were thinking.  But still, some were obstinate.  They didn’t get it.  “What a stupid father,” they were thinking.  “He should beat his lout of a son, disown him, and tell him he never wants to see him again.”

 

And that’s why there’s a place for everyone in Jesus’ story.  He says, The older son was out in the fields.  When he came home and got near to the house, he heard music and dancing.  He called one of the servants and asked what was going on.  “Your brother’s come home!” he said.  “And your father has thrown a great party.  He’s killed the fattened calf.  Because he’s got him back safe and well!”  Well, the older son flew into a range and refused to go in.

Sound familiar?  I expect that as he said this, Jesus was looking straight at those Pharisees who were still boiling with rage.

 

Jesus has a way with words and here he puts the words of the Pharisees into the mouth of this angry older brother who won’t let go of his grudge.  They’ve been slaving away for the Lord all these years.  They’ve never disobeyed a single one of his commandments.  And when the Messiah comes—assuming Jesus really is the Messiah—he goes and throws a party with the tax collectors and sinners instead of with them!  And so Jesus says to them in the words of the father to the older son: “My son, you’re always with me.  Everything I have belongs to you.  But we had to celebrate and be happy.  This brother of yours was dead and is alive again.  He was lost and now he’s found.”

 

Jesus gets at their hypocrisy.  Notice how the older brother refuses to own his brother.  He yells at his father about “this son of yours”, but the father reminds him here at the end, “this brother of yours was dead and is alive again…this brother of yours.  This is the funny thing with the Pharisees—and they weren’t the only ones in Israel who thought this way: on the one hand they were angry with the tax collectors and sinners.  They knew that these people belonged to God.  They knew they were lost.  Their sins were, they thought holding back the rest of Israel from experiencing the Lord’s return and an end to their long exile.  But on the other hand, they disowned the tax collectors and sinners.  They longed and prayed for God’s judgement to fall on them, right along with the gentiles.  They refused to acknowledge them as lost brothers.  And now they’re mad because Jesus has come to bring them back to the sheepfold.  They should be rejoicing.  Your brother who was dead is alive again!  You’re brother!

 

I’m sure that resonated with the Pharisees.  Think of Ezekiel and his vision of the valley of dry bones.  Those dry bones represented Israel.  She had forsaken the covenant and the Lord had disciplined her by sending her into exile.  But the Lord promised that one day his word would come and restore his wayward and faithless people to life.  What was dead would be made alive again.  And not just in some figurative sense.  One of the central doctrines of the Pharisees was the dearly held belief that one day the Lord would literally raise the dead of Israel to life in his presence.  One day he would set everything to rights, beginning with his people.  One day he would take what was dead and make it live again.

 

And by way of the parable, Jesus is now saying to the Pharisees that he’s the one who’s come to do it.  But he hasn’t just come to reward them with the life of the age to come, he’s come to offer that life even to the prodigals of Israel.  Prostitute and Pharisees, both are part of the people of God, both are the Lord’s children, both belong equally to him.  The Lord had rescued the ancestors of the prostitute from Egypt just as he’d rescued the ancestors of the Pharisees.  He desires life for the prostitute just as much as he does for the Pharisee.  That’s what they need to wrap their heads around, because no amount of law keeping will get them into the kingdom if they don’t share God’s heart.

 

You see, judgement was coming for Israel, but not quite like the Pharisees thought.  They thought that in the end, the Lord would recognise his people by their faithfulness to the law—to circumcision and sabbath and diet.  That meant the tax collectors and sinners were out.  But the fact was—and this is the point of Jesus’ parables—that when judgement came on Jerusalem and on Judah, what would mark out the people of God was not faithfulness to the law, but faithfulness to Jesus the Messiah.  Jesus had taken on Israel’s identity, he had picked up her failed mission, he died the death that she deserved, and when he rose from the grave and sent God’s Spirit, he formed a new family, a new covenant people not centred this time on law, but on himself.  As St. John wrote, “To all who did receive him, who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God, who were born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God” (John 1:12-13).  And, Brothers and Sisters, at the heart of Jesus’ ministry was mercy—and God the Father rejoiced in heaven to see that mercy at work amongst his people, as his lost sons and daughters were found, as what had been dead became alive again.

 

Brothers and Sisters, do want to share God’s heart?  Then hear Jesus’ story. It’s about the loving and merciful faithfulness of God revealed in Jesus as he fulfils his promises to his people.  It was that faithfulness, revealed in Jesus and proclaimed by those first Jewish believers, that brought the first gentiles into the Church.  And that, itself, was a fulfilment of the Lord’s promises.  This new people of God, this new Israel centred on faith in Jesus, brought the nations to the Lord, to the God of Israel, in awe, in reverence, and in faith.  Because membership in this new family was based not on law but on faith in Jesus made it possible for the nations—for you and I—to become children of God and fellow heirs with the natural brothers and sisters of Jesus.  And this opens that category of “the lost” to encompass an entire world.  In the parable Jesus was talking about the lost of Israel, but through Jesus the sort of restoration that the Lord sought with the lost of Israel has been opened to all of humanity.  You and I ought to see the lost of our own world, people created to bear the image of God, but lost to him because of their sin, you and I ought to see those people and desire for them the same mercy and restoration that God has shown to us through Jesus.  We ought not only to rejoice when we see that mercy at work, the joy of our own experience of God’s mercy ought to be sending us out to the lost.  But all too often we become blasé about what God has done for us.  We lose the joy we once found in our salvation.  Or, for those of us who have never known life apart from God’s covenantal mercy—like so many in Israel—we take his mercy for granted.  Brothers and Sisters, take time to think on what the Lord has done for us in Jesus and rejoice.  Make a point of it.  As you read scripture.  When you come to the Lord’s Table.  Make a point of it.  Rejoice and stand in awe at the mercy of God.

 

And, I think, if we do that, we will avoid the stance of the Pharisees who had forgotten the nature of God’s mercy, who chafed at Jesus offering the mercy of God to sinners while they worked so hard to be faithful.  We’re prone to the same sort of thing.  We forget the mercy of God.  We forget his forgiveness.  We forget that as much as God is pleased with us when we are faithful and pleased with our good works, we too are only part of this family because of his mercy and his forgiveness.  And then we start looking at the lost, not as people to be found, but as people who deserve their comeuppance, who need God’s judgement rather than his mercy.  And, in that, we forget what the kingdom of God is all about.

 

Brothers and Sisters, think on the mercy of God and rejoice.  Come to his Table this morning and be reminded that he sent his Son at great cost to seek out the lost and to restore us to the fold.  Here we see the faithfulness of God, a witness that has now brought you and I who were not even of that flock.  A witness that has brought us in awe and wonder and in faith to Jesus the Messiah—a faith by which the Father has welcomed us, too, into the sheepfold.  Rejoice in the mercies of God and carry that rejoicing to the lost that they, like us, might see and know themselves the mercies of God at work in Jesus.

 

Let us pray: Grant us, Lord, we pray, to know your mercy and never to take your salvation for granted.  Make us faithful stewards of your mercies that we might rejoice as you do at the restoration of the lost; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.  Amen.

 

by William Klock

 

In 597 b.c. the Babylonians conquered Judah.  The Babylonian king, Nebuchadnezzar, ordered the deportation of the ruling elite of Jerusalem.  That meant King Jehoiachin, most of the royal family, and thousands of others including many of the priests.  That included Ezekiel.  He had been born into one of the important priestly families.  He was twenty-five years old.  Had everything gone as expected, had everything gone to plan, he would have been ordained a priest at the age of thirty and gone on to serve before the presence of the Lord in the temple.  Instead, with the rest of those Jewish exiles, he sat down by the rivers of Babylon and wept as he remembered Zion—as one of the psalmists put it.  And he wondered how he and his people could ever sing the Lord’s song in a strange land.

 

And then, on Ezekiel’s thirtieth birthday, he had a vision.  He saw the Lord enthroned in glory and the Lord commissioned him.  Instead of being a priest, the Lord ordained Ezekiel a prophet—a prophet to the exiles and to the people of Judah.  Ezekiel was to announce to his people why they had been defeated and carried off into exile.  He was to accuse his people of their idolatry and of their unfaithfulness to the Lord’s covenant.  And he was also to announce that the Lord’s judgement on Judah had only just begun.  And so Ezekiel’s ministry began with a series of acted out prophecies.  He acted out the coming destruction of Jerusalem with miniatures.  He lay on his side for a year, acting the part of the scapegoat, while eating food cooked over human waste.  He cut off his hair with a sword.  Again, to announce the coming judgement on Jerusalem.  And all for nought.  The Lord told him that no one would listen and they didn’t—because Israel’s heart was hardened against the Lord.

 

But just because the people wouldn’t listen didn’t mean Ezekiel’s job as a prophet was done.  The Lord gave him another vision, this time of the temple in Jerusalem.  He saw his people worshipping idols in the temple court and then he saw the Lord’s glory—the cloud that rested on the ark of the covenant in the holy of holies—he saw that cloud of glory depart from the temple.  And the Lord announced to him that the temple would be destroyed.  Again, because of Israel’s idolatry and lack of covenant faithfulness.  Ezekiel accused his people of being like a rebellious wife and like a rampaging lion.  He described Israel and Judah as two shameless and reprobate prostitute sisters.  And he dragged his people into the divine courtroom and put them on trial before the Lord.  They could beg for mercy all they wanted, but the time for mercy had passed.  God’s goodness and faithfulness demanded that he judge his people.  For centuries he had shown them his patient mercy, but now is was time for justice.  And that’s when word reached Ezekiel that Jerusalem had fallen, the temple had been destroyed, and that the Lord’s judgement had come on Judah.

 

But that wasn’t the end of Ezekiel’s ministry.  The Lord would not leave his people in judgement forever.  If being faithful to his word meant judgement on their unfaithfulness, it also meant restoring them and making them faithful.  And so Ezekiel’s prophetic messaged shifted from judgement to hope.  Through him the Lord promised the restoration of his people under a new king, under a David-like messiah.  And the Lord promised to breathe his Spirit into his people to take away their heart of stone and to give them a heart of flesh.  He gave Ezekiel a vision of a valley of dry bones and commanded the prophet to speak his word over those bones.  And the word of the Lord brought them back to life.  It was a promise of new creation.  But the wicked pagan nations still stood in the way of that new creation.  And so the Lord also gave Ezekiel a series of visions in which he defeated the nations.  And then, finally, Ezekiel had a vision of creation set to rights.  That vision begins with a temple.  Not the old temple, but a new one.  A new one infinitely grander and more beautiful than even Solomon’s temple.  And after being given a tour of this temple, Ezekiel has a vision of the Lord’s glory descending to fill it.  It’s the Lord’s way of saying that he will not abandon his people forever.  He will be with them again.  And out of this temple’s gate flows a stream and as it flows down the mountain from the temple the stream turns into a great river.  Wherever it flows trees and lush vegetation spring up.  And eventually the river flow down into the desert and there it causes a lush garden to grow—Eden restored—a garden named “the Lord is there”.

 

Now, everyone likes that last part.  Everyone wants to hear and to claim for themselves the messages of hope.  No one wants to hear the call to repentance and the warning of coming judgement.  No one would listen to Ezekiel’s warnings.  It’s not that they didn’t hear them—or see them.  It was hard to miss the weird guy playing with action figures or hacking his hair off with a sword or laying on his side and cooking food over poop.  They saw it all.  But they refused to take it to heart.  They were convinced their exile to Babylon was an accident of history, not the Lord’s judgement on their idolatry.  But once Ezekiel’s prophecies of doom came true, I expect the people were hanging on his every last word of hope.  That’s the test of a prophet, after all: does his word come to pass.  Ezekiel’s did.

 

And for that reason the people were still hanging onto his words when Jesus came, still looking for and longing for those divine promises to finally be fulfilled.  Because judgement had happened as the prophet foretold, that restoration of the people, that new creation, that new life with God would happen just as surely too.  It was just a matter of time.  So it shouldn’t be a surprise that as Jesus preached he drew on the words of the old prophets like Ezekiel.  But it was the same old thing all over again.  The people gathered to hear Jesus preach good news.  They flocked to him for healing and deliverance and miracles that showed the kingdom of God was breaking in.  But they didn’t want to hear the warnings.  They gasped when he told them that to see that coming kingdom, to know that garden called “the Lord is there”, they needed righteousness, they needed covenant faithfulness far beyond that of the scribes and Pharisees.  Judgement was coming on Judah again and Jesus was there to create a new people, a new community that would have that righteousness, that would be salt and light, that would be a city on a hill, that would come out the other side of God’s judgement to see his kingdom.  The people in Ezekiel’s day didn’t want to hear that part of the message and neither did the people in Jesus’ day.  Ed Stetzer likes to say, “If you want everyone to like you don’t be a pastor, go sell ice cream.”  I think Ezekiel (and Jesus) would say the same thing about being a prophet.

 

Our Gospel today is taken from the closing words of Jesus’ sermon on the mount.  Jesus has spoken hard words—just as Ezekiel had.  But there was reason to hope.  In him the Lord was finally doing that new thing everyone had been waiting for since the prophets, but Jesus was also condemning their covenant faithlessness and announcing coming judgement.  And so he warns the people—this is Matthew 7:13—“Go in by the narrow gate.  The gate that leads to destruction, you see, is nice and wide and the road going there has plenty of room.  Lots of people go that way.  But the gate leading to life is narrow, and the road going there is a tight squeeze.  Not many people find their way through.”

In other words, “Yes, I know what I’ve been saying is hard.  Yes, I know it means repentance and turning away from sin and pursuing covenant faithfulness with everything you’ve got and even then you’re going to need God’s help, but that’s the way to life.  Listen to me, because judgement is coming again and it’s coming soon.  (He later told the disciples: before this generation passes away!)  And if you refuse to listen and if you keep going down the wide and easy path you’re on, you’re as sure to meet that judgement as the people of Ezekiel’s day did.

 

“Watch out for false prophets!” Jesus says.  There are people invested in the ways and the ideas and the systems of the present evil age.  They don’t want to see you repent and turn back to the Lord.  They know everyone loves ice cream and they’re going to show up with a cart full of it and everyone’s going to listen to them—because ice cream is a lot more fun than calls to repentance.  “They will come to you dressed like sheep, but inside they are hungry wolves.”  Jesus draws on Ezekiel’s condemnation of the leaders of Israel and Judah.  They were like wolves in the midst of the flock, tearing apart the sheep, shedding blood, all for their own gain.  It’s always the way of false prophets.  They proclaim what people want to hear.  When the Lord desires repentance, the false prophets proclaim the status quo.  When the Lord desires sacrifice, the false prophets proclaim health and wealth.  When the Lord warns of judgement, the prophets proclaim “Peace!  Peace!”  And so Jesus warns in verse 16, “You’ll be able to tell them by the fruit they bear: you don’t find grapes growing on thorn-bushes, do you, or figs on thistles?  Well, in the same way, good trees produce good fruit and bad trees produce bad fruit.  Actually, good trees can’t produce bad fruit, nor can bad ones produce good fruit.  Every tree that doesn’t produce good fruit is cut down and thrown on the fire.  So you must recognise them by their fruits.”

There’s never been any shortage of false prophets in the world.  In the Old Testament the test of a prophet was whether or not what he said came to pass.  The punishment for false prophecy was death.  Brothers and Sisters, claiming to speak the very word of the Lord is serious business.  His words are life.  When people claim to speak for the Lord, but speak falsely, it gives people reason to doubt his actual word.  But people took it lightly in Ezekiel’s day, people took it lightly in Jesus’ day, and far too many people take it lightly today.  The Old Testament test of a prophet still stands: Do his words come to pass?  But when Jesus warned the people, there wasn’t time for that.  Judgement was coming soon.  So Jesus gives another way: look at the fruit.  It was a good test then and it’s a good test now.  When someone says, “Thus says the Lord,” look at that person’s life.  Does their life show the fruit of the Spirit?  Do you see things like love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, and self-control?  Or are they just selling ice cream and getting rich?  It’s always amazing to me how many people flock to men and women who claim to work miracles and who claim to speak for God, but the miracles are false, the words are heresy, and the things they say never come to pass.  But it is a testimony to just how much we like ice cream, how much we’d rather hear “Peace, peace!” than a message about repentance.  Look at the fruit.  If the fruit is bad, the tree is bad and there’s only one destination for bad trees: the fire—judgement.  Don’t end up in the same place.

 

Look for the fruit.  I know the language of the fruit and the gifts of the Spirit is something that developed later with Paul, but I think it’s worth noting that Jesus talks here about fruit.  Too many people look for signs—what Paul would call “gifts” of the Spirit.  But even Paul warns these things can be faked.  Signs and wonders aren’t necessarily evidence of a true prophet.  Fruit is the evidence.

 

And Jesus goes on, “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven; only people who do the will of my Father in heaven.  On that day lots of people will say to me, ‘Lord, Lord, we prophesied in your name, didn’t we?  We cast out demons in your name.  We performed lots of powerful deeds in your name.’  Then I will have to say to them, ‘I never knew you.  You’re a bunch of evildoers.  Go away from me.’”

“On that day.”  That’s language right out of the Old Testament prophets about the coming day of the Lord, about the day of judgement when the Lord will punish evil and vindicate the righteous.  A lot of people thought that just being an Israelite and having the Lord as their God gave them a place in the coming kingdom, but Jesus says that, no, that’s not enough.  In fact, he narrows it down even further: a lot of people will think that because they’ve thought of Jesus as their Lord and done amazing things in his name, that they’ll have a place in the kingdom—and not even that will cut it.

 

It's important, I think, to remember here that Jesus isn’t talking directly to us.  He was talking to First Century Jews and the judgement he was warning about was the judgement that would come forty years later when the Romans destroyed Jerusalem and the temple.  Those who would survive, those who would see the birth of the kingdom, would be those who truly identified themselves with Jesus in faith.  The people who followed him in the new exodus through baptism and into whom God would pour his Spirit.  They’re the ones—not the ones who merely had an appreciation for what Jesus was teaching or thought of him as a great prophet—but the ones who truly recognised the God of Israel at work in Jesus the Messiah and who became part of his family, this new Israel redeemed by his death and given a new heart of flesh by the Holy Spirit.  They would be the dry bones that lived again.  They would be the ones whom God would deliver from the coming judgement.  They’re the ones who would live to testify to the nations of the glory of the God of Israel revealed in the cross.  They’re the ones who would live to proclaim the good news to the nations.

 

And so Jesus concludes his sermon with a final allusion to Ezekiel.  In verse 24 he says, “So, then, everyone who hears these words of mine and does them will be like a wise man who built his house on the rock.  Heavy rain fell; floods rose up; the winds blew and beat on that house.  It didn’t fall, because it was founded on the rock.  And everyone who hears these words of mine and doesn’t do them—they will be like a foolish man who built his house on the sand.  Heavy rain fell; floods rose up; the winds blew and battered the house—and down it fell.  It fell with a great crash.”

Ezekiel warned the false prophets about the wall they’d built.  It’s a pretty clear reference to the temple just as Jesus’ “house” here is, too.  The false prophets had built a wall and they’d whitewashed it and it looked great.  It looked like a wall for the ages.  But when the Lord’s judgement came, when he sent the rains and the floods and the winds, that wall came crashing down and exposed its builders as the unfaithful and idolatrous false prophets they really were.  The same thing would happen again.  The people of Jerusalem and Judea looked up to the temple as their hope, but Jesus condemns them.  Not this time as whitewashed walls, but as whitewashed tombs.  They went through the motions of faithfulness, they maintained their ritual purity, they proclaimed their love for and their loyalty to God, but their hearts were far from him.  Because God’s heart was in Jesus.

 

Jesus had to come to fulfil the prophecies of hope and life.  He’d come to build God’s new temple.  Not one whitewashed with false piety, but one washed with his own blood.  Listen to Peter’s call in his first epistle: “Come to him, to that living stone.  Men rejected him, but God chose him and values him very highly!  Like living stones yourselves, you are being built up into a spiritual house—a new temple!—to be a holy priesthood, to offer spiritual sacrifices that will be pleasing to God through Jesus the Messiah.  That’s why it stands in scripture: ‘Look!  I am setting up in Zion a chosen, precious cornerstone.  Believe in him!  You will not be ashamed.’”

The false prophets, the wolves in sheep’s clothing, the grifters selling spiritual ice cream, they whitewash false piety, they whitewash selfishness, they whitewash heresies—they whitewash the ugly things of the world.  They proclaim “Peace, peace” in the face of coming judgement.  Brothers and Sisters, don’t be duped.  Listen to Jesus.  Stay focused on Jesus.  Think of Peter’s confession later in Matthew’s Gospel: “You are the Messiah, the son of the living God!”  This is the rock on which Jesus has built his church—his people, his new temple—and not even the gates of hell will overpower it.  Never forget that this is the temple in which his Spirit dwells. Never forget that this the temple from which God’s new life flows to the world.  Never forget that this temple is the source of God’s new creation.  And it’s built on the rock and nothing but the rock that is Jesus.

 

Come to the Lord’s Table this morning and be reminded that in Jesus, God has given his own life for you—for us.  Come to the Lord’s Table and be reminded that in Jesus, God has breathed his life into our dry bones and made us live again.  Come to the Lord’s Table and be reminded that he’s made us the precious stones of his temple.  Then be that Spirit-filled and life-giving water that Ezekiel saw flowing out from the temple into the world carrying God’s life, carrying his new creation.

 

Let’s pray: Gracious Father, in Jesus you have washed us clean from sin and by your Spirit you have renewed our hearts and made the priests of your new temple.  Guard our hearts from the temptations of false prophets and false gods that our desires might always be for you and your kingdom, through Jesus our Lord.  Amen.

by William Klock

 

I’ve been reading a great book by an Oxford classicist named Teresa Morgan.  It’s a study of the Greek and Latin words for faith and what they meant in the culture of the Greeks and Romans, the Jews, and in the early Church.  It’s a fascinating read and as we were getting ready to go camping last Sunday afternoon I tossed it in my bag.  But then I stopped for a second, I panned across a wall of bookshelves, and my eyes settled on a copy of Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One, which is—as far as I’m concerned—the ultimate novel written for Gen-X nerds who were born in the early Seventies and came of age in the Eighties.  It’s a sci-fi novel built around references to things like the Atari 2600, Dungeons & Dragons, Zork, and Pac-Man.  I read it about ten years ago, but I decided to read it again this week with apologies to Dr. Morgan and her study of pistis and fides.  And I enjoyed it the second time as much as the first.  In the back of my mind, however, I was mulling over our Epistle from Romans 6 and how St. Paul writes about being slaves.  That meant that one particular part of the book kind of jumped out at me.  In the story there’s an evil mega-corporation out to conquer and corrupt the virtual reality paradise where everyone in the future spends all their time.  And this evil corporation has its fingers in everything, which means it’s easy to end up owing it money.  And when that happens, you’re arrested and transported to headquarters where you become an indentured servant, slaving away at some menial and demeaning job until you die—because there’s no way out. Between late fees, interest payments, charges for room and board and healthcare, your debt only grows, it never gets any smaller.  And Cline does a pretty good job of making it sound utterly miserable—at least to me—because it reminded me of my days as a Mac tech when I had to do phone support, which is an utterly miserable job.  But this book makes it ever more miserable: these indentured servants—slaves—did the phone support.  The description hits close to home in a lot of ways and it makes you—or at least me—want to shout out, “Let my people go!”

 

But like I said, I also had Romans 6 percolating away in the back of my brain too and I was asking myself: Would I rather be a slave like the Israelites in Egypt, breaking my back to make bricks without straw under the hot Mediterranean sun or having my brain turn to mush doing non-stop tech support for Innovative Online Industries?  I don’t know.  What I do know is that being delivered from either one of those slaveries would completely change my outlook on life, the universe, and everything.

 

And that’s just how it was for Israel.  The beginning of the Book of Exodus paints a bleak and desperate picture of Israel’s turn of fortune—or, I should say, “providence” because, we learn as the story unfolds, the Lord was in control of the narrative all along.  Jacob and his family went down to Egypt as honoured guests of Pharaoh, but four hundred years later a new Pharaoh turned them into slaves, making bricks for his grand building projects.  Mixing mud and straw, filling moulds, baking them in the sun, then carrying those heavy loads of bricks to wherever they were needed.  All the time baking themselves in that hot sun, day in and day out.  Day in and day out with no rest.  Eating out of fleshpots—which sounds pretty awful all by itself.

 

Put yourself in that place.  (Or doing phone support as a slave if that seems worse to you.)  And then imagine how you would feel after the Lord came and delivered you from that slavery.  And not just a simple jailbreak.  Consider how the Lord came first to Moses and his people and reminded them that he was their God, the one who had made promises to their fathers and who had been sovereign over all of this all along.  And the Lord then goes, through Moses, to Pharaoh.  Again, this isn’t a secret jailbreak in the dead of night.  The Lord announced to the king, before his whole court, that Israel belonged to him, that Israel was his beloved son, and demanded Israel’s release.  And then the showdown began.  The Lord sent ten plagues that exposed Pharaoh and his gods for the powerless frauds they really were.  Defeated, Pharaoh finally let them go, but that wasn’t the end of it.  In one last ditch effort to recover his slaves and his dignity, Pharaoh went after the Israelites with his army and cornered them at the Red Sea.  Israel had escaped the frying pan only to land in the fire.  And then the Lord acted again.  He bared his mighty arm and parted the waters of the sea so that his people could pass through on dry land.  And when the Egyptian army tried to follow, the Lord drowned them all and left “mighty” Pharaoh, the greatest king on earth, powerless and pounding sand on the opposite shore.

 

Again, it wasn’t just a simple jailbreak under cover of darkness: You know, the Lord rescuing his people but with as little effort as possible.  To the contrary, he showed his faithfulness and his love towards his people, but he also showed his glory.  He brought the prison walls tumbling down in broad daylight for everyone to see.  He humbled the greatest king and the most powerful gods in the known world.  And he wasn’t done.  That was just the first act.  From the Red Sea he led Isreal into the wilderness and fed her miraculously on manna and quail and water he caused to flow from a rock.  He met her at Mount Sinai and there he made a formal covenant with her.  “I will be your God and you will be my people.”  And he gave them his law, a new way of life that would separate them from all the other peoples of the earth.  They wouldn’t just be the Lord’s people.  The law would allow them to be the people who lived with the Lord in their midst.  A holy people, set apart.  And so they built a tabernacle as a place of meeting with him and the Lord’s glory descended like a cloud to fill it.  And for a third act, the Lord led them into the land of Canaan and conquered it for them.  The Lord gave them cities they hadn’t built; wells they hadn’t dug; and fields and vineyards they hadn’t planted.  All to show them his faithfulness, his love, his grace, and most of all his glory.

 

The Lord made them the rescued-from-slavery people and every year they celebrated that identity and the great show of glory and faithfulness the Lord had made to make them that people.  Each year they gathered as families and ate the Passover and as they did that they remembered who they were and what the Lord had done for them.  And they were grateful.  They loved the Lord with all their heart and soul and mind and strength.  They loved their neighbours the way the Lord had loved them.  They were righteous—meaning that they love and obeyed his law.  His heart was their heart.  They worshipped him and him alone.  And, forget horses and chariots!  They trusted in the Lord who had shown the power of his mighty arm when he delivered them from slavery.

 

Or so you might expect.

 

But then you read the history of Israel and it’s mostly the opposite.  They neglected the Passover and, not surprisingly, they forgot what the Lord had done for them.  They forgot his faithfulness.  They forgot his love.  They forgot his grace.  They forgot his glory.  They neglected his covenant and his law.  They worshipped other gods—the very gods defeated when the Lord conquered Canaan for them.  And instead of trusting in the Lord and his mighty arm, they trusted in horses and chariots and politics and intrigue and money.

 

And that’s where our Old Testament lessons comes into this.  The Lord sent the Prophet Hosea to the king and to the people of Israel with a message.  At this point the kingdom had split: Judah in the south and Israel in the north.  Judah was bad, but Israel was so bad they made Judah look like a goody-two-shoes.  And Hosea’s ministry began with an acted-out prophecy.  The Lord told him to take a prostitute as his wife.  Hosea obeyed.  He married Gomer, a prostitute, probably from one of the pagan temples.  And he loved her and cared for her and he had children with her.  But repeatedly she left Hosea and returned to her life of prostitution.  And each time, his heart broken, Hosea would go out and find her and bring her back to his home and love her.

 

Through the prophet the Lord was saying to his people: I am Hosea.  You’re the prostitute.  I loved you.  I delivered you from Egypt.  I gave you a land that was not your own and I caused you to prosper in it.  I repeatedly defeated your enemies so that you could live at peace.  But over and over you’ve prostituted yourselves to foreign gods and foreign kings who have done nothing for you other than to lead you away from me, your true love.  Through the prophet the Lord stressed his faithfulness over against Israel’s unfaithfulness.

 

And so the Lord called to his people:

 

And the Lord promised: If they would do this.  If they would repent and return to him:

But Israel had to leave off her idolatry.  It was not Baal or Asherah who delivered them from Egypt and caused them to prosper in the land.  It was the Lord.

One way or another the Lord would heal their apostasy.  One way or another the people he had chosen as his own would reveal his glory before the watching nations.  Either they would be faithful to him and he would prosper them beyond measure or he would punish their unfaithfulness and let the nations destroy them.

 

And if you’ve read the books of Kings and Chronicles and the Prophets you know that the latter is what happened.  Israel continued in her idolatry and was destroyed by the Assyrians, the tribes scattered and lost forever.  About a hundred years later the same thing happened to Judah, but it was Babylon that defeated the people and destroyed Jerusalem and the temple.  But in Judah’s case, even though the people were exiled from the land, they kept their identity and were eventually allowed to return.  They rebuilt Jerusalem and the temple.  And, so far as the worship of pagan gods went, they’d learned their lesson.  Never again was that kind of raw idolatry a problem for the people of Judah.  And yet we’ve seen in some of our recent Gospel lessons that the people still failed to be faithful to the Lord.  Last Sunday we heard Jesus condemn the Pharisees—the most righteous, the most covenantally faithful people around.  Even they weren’t as faithful and as righteous as they thought.

 

Enter Jesus.  God himself, incarnate, became the faithful Israelite.  He perfectly submitted himself to the God of Israel, to his will, to his heart, to his law.  His righteousness—which, if you remember from last Sunday, means his faithfulness to God’s covenant, was perfect.  And his fellow Jews killed him for it.  They got the Romans to crucify him on their behalf.  And that means that in Jesus, the son of God wasn’t just incarnate as an Israelite, wasn’t just the perfect Israelite in his covenant faithfulness, he even died the very death that the Israelites would face when the judgement he announced came to them a generation later.  He very literally died the death that their unfaithfulness deserved.  And just like Israel in Egypt, the fate of the son of God in Israel was all guided by providence.  The Lord knew what he was doing.  And in that, Jesus became a sacrifice for the sins of his people.  If they trusted in him as the Messiah he claimed to be, they found forgiveness of their sins.

 

But that’s not all.  The Lord also knew what he was doing in allowing sin and evil to concentrate themselves all in one place so that they could rise up and do their worst to Jesus.  It was Pharaoh and the gods of Egypt all over again.  If you know the story, you recognise that this how the Lord works.  In the same way he allowed Israel to become enslaved to the most powerful king in the world who had the most powerful gods in the world, so the Lord allowed Jesus to go to the cross where the most powerful forces in creation would kill him.  And he did it so that he could, once again, bare his mighty arm and raise Jesus back to life.  In doing that he not only overturned the false verdict against him in his sham trial, but more importantly, he defeated sin and death the same way he defeated Pharaoh and his gods.

 

Jesus was leading his people in an exodus—the exodus—the exodus that the old one, the one that shaped them as a people, the one they remembered every year at Passover, was but a foretaste.  The old exodus happened so that the Lord could set a pattern and teach his people his loving and faithful character—so that he could prepare them for a future rescue, not just from a pagan king and his fake gods, but so that he could rescue them from sin and death.  Not to lead them into a land of milk and honey, but to lead them into his new creation—into a world finally set to rights, a world where they could live forever in his presence.  And as he did in that first exodus, so in the second, the Lord displayed his glory not just to his own people, but to the watching world.  And so Jesus didn’t just make a new way of covenant faithfulness for his own people, he made it for everyone who would see the glory of the God of Israel at the cross and at the empty tomb.  For anyone who will trust that Jesus is Lord, who will trust that in his death and resurrection he has defeated sin and death, and who will pass through the waters of baptism to life with God—a life infused by God’s own Spirit—on the other side.  A life of righteousness, of covenant faithfulness that exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees.

 

Brothers and Sisters, that glory displayed at the cross and the empty tomb is what has drawn each of us.  It’s faith in that glory and in the promise offered in our baptism that has taken us through those waters.  And yet, like Israel of old, that vision of God’s glory and of his loving faithfulness somehow fades from our vision.  That vision of glory that once caused us, like the Israelites singing the Lord’s praise on the shore of the Red Sea, to sing his praises ourselves, to joyfully proclaim the good news to the world, that motivated us covenant faithfulness—to a life of holiness—somehow it fades or maybe we just take our eyes off of it in the midst of our various trials and tribulations.  And we lose our passion for the Lord, for holiness, for proclaiming his gospel.  St. Paul saw it happening in the Roman church.  The old divisions between Jew and Gentile were creeping back in.  They were no longer pursuing holiness and gospel life the way they once had.  And so he reminds them in Romans 6: “But now you have been set free from sin and enslaved to God, you have fruit for holiness.  Its destination is the life of the age to come.  The wages of sin, you see, are death; but God’s free gift is the life of the age to come, in the Messiah, Jesus our Lord.”

Brothers and Sisters, we need to be reminded of the glorious thing that God has done for us in Jesus.  We were slaves to sin and death.  We had no hope.  But then we heard the story—the good news—about the mighty and glorious God of Israel, how he gave his son to die to redeem his people from their sins, how he raised him from death, and how his new creation has begun in this new people.  How he’s poured out his Spirit on them and made them a temple and a foretaste of the life and the world to come.  A free gift.  God’s amazing gracious grace.  And we believed and with joy we jumped into the waters of baptism.  We left Pharaoh—we left sin and death—pounding sand over another escapee—and we met Jesus on the other side.  And he filled us with his Spirit.  And we set out with him to the promised land, to the New Jerusalem, to the life of the age to come.  But somewhere along the way the joy and enthusiasm faded.  We began to trade holiness for sin.  We began to lag behind Jesus along the way, and began to look longingly at our old gods.  We became apathetic about the gospel, about the good news that had once so captivated us.

 

Brothers and Sisters, come to the Lord’s Table this morning and be renewed.  This is our Passover meal in which we recall the mighty saving deeds of our faithful, loving, gracious and glorious God.  This is the meal that reminds us we were once hopelessly enslaved to sin and death, but that the God of all creation loves us so much that he gave his own and only son to die on our behalf.  Remember that in him our sins have been forgiven.  And remember that this meal is also God’s future, pulled into the present.  It’s a reminder that death no longer has a hold on us, because in rising from the grave, Jesus defeated death as thoroughly as he defeated sin.  The bread and wine here at the Table are a reminder of what God has done for us in Jesus and they are a reminder of the hope—the new world and the new life—that lies before us because we have trusted him.

 

Let’s pray: Lord of all power and might, the author and giver of all good things:  Graft in our hearts the love of your Name; increase in us true religion; nourish us with all goodness; and bring forth in us the fruit of good works; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.  Amen.

by William Klock

 

In last Sunday’s Gospel we were with Jesus and Peter in that fishing boat as Jesus preached to the crowd on the shore.  I said that I had a pretty good ides the sorts of things Jesus was preaching, because both Matthew and Luke preserve versions of his favourite sermon about the kingdom.  Today’s Gospel gives us a snippet of Matthew’s version of that sermon.  In Matthew 5:20 Jesus says to the gathered crowd, “I tell you, unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.”  In the words leading up to this, Jesus was preparing the people to hear this.  He talks about being the salt of the earth and the light of the world and a city set on hill and a light held high on a lampstand for everyone to see.  “That’s how you must shine your light in front of people!” he says, “Then they’ll see what wonderful things you do, and they’ll give glory to your father in heaven.”  Do your works, does you the way you live make people take notice and give glory to God?  That’s a tough one, isn’t it?  And then, just in case people might be thinking that Jesus came to do away with the law and the prophets: “Don’t suppose that I came to destroy the law or the prophets,” Jesus said, “I didn’t come to destroy them.  I came to fulfil them!  I’m telling you the truth: until heaven and earth disappear—and since that won’t happen this just means never—not one stroke, not one dot, is going to disappear from the law until it’s all come true.  So anyone who relaxes a single one of these commandments, even the little ones, and teaches that to people, will be called least in the kingdom of heaven.  And anyone who does them and teaches them will be called great in the kingdom of heaven.”  And this is where Jesus says those words, “Yes, let me tell you: unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never get into the kingdom of heaven.”

Because Jesus was doing and saying so many things that a lot of people thought weren’t right, I suspect some people thought that Jesus was teaching an easier way to the kingdom.  The Pharisees were mad because he didn’t seem to keep the law with the same zeal that they thought everyone should, but I suspect there were others who thought Jesus was offering them a way to God without all the spiritual rigor and rules.  Just this week I found myself talking to someone who had left an orthodox, biblical church a few years ago and is now worshipping at a United Church.  The reason: “They aren’t so strict.  They let people be themselves.  They aren’t so bound to the Bible.”  In other words: The United Church offers a way to God that you can follow on your own terms.  I suspect some people thought Jesus was doing a sort of First Century Jewish version of that.  And so Jesus makes it clear that this is not the case.  No, just the opposite in fact.  Not even the Pharisees with all their zeal for torah, not even they meet the standard.  Later in the sermon he’ll go on to talk about the wide and narrow way that will lead Israel to destruction and the narrow gate that few can find and the narrow and difficult way beyond that leads to the kingdom.  No, Jesus hasn’t come to relax the standard.  Not at all.

 

But before we can go on we need to ask a couple of questions.  When Jesus talks about “righteousness”, what does he mean?  Well, for the Jews “righteousness” was bound up with torah, with the law and with God’s covenant.  A righteous person was someone who was faithful to God and to the covenant and that meant, fundamentally, that he was faithful in living the law that God had given his people.

 

The name “Pharisee” means “separated one”.  That’s what Israel was supposed to be.  The Lord had delivered Israel from slavery in Egypt to be his people and he gave them a law, he gave them torah, as a way of life that would separate them and that would make them distinct from every other people on earth.  When the nations looked at Israel they were supposed to be moved to give glory to God.  But for most of their history, the Israelites didn’t do a very good job of being that separate and distinct people.  They were selective in their obedience.  They worshipped idols.  And so just as he cast Adam and Eve out of the garden and out of his holy presence, the Lord cast out Israel and sent her in exile to Babylon.  Righteousness means “covenant faithfulness” and if Israel wasn’t going to be faithful to the covenant, then in order to be faithful himself to the covenant, the Lord would have enact the covenant curses that he promised would befall his people if they didn’t keep their end of the covenant—if they were unrighteous.

 

As I’ve said before fairly recently, the Pharisees knew all of this.  More than that, they believed that the exile was, after a fashion, still ongoing.  Because Israel was still ruled by pagans and because the Lord’s presence had never returned to the temple.  They desperately wanted an end to Roman rule and even more than that, they prayed for the Lord’s return.  But that wasn’t going to happen as long as Israel was still unfaithful—still lacking in righteousness.  So the Pharisees decided to set an example.  They weren’t just going to obey the law as best they could; they were going to live their whole lives as if they were priests in the temple.  They wouldn’t just keep themselves from sin.  They’d keep themselves ritually pure at all times.  They were ready for the Lord to return.  If only they could get everyone in Israel just as ready!  But not everyone in Israel was as interested in righteousness as they were.  There were a lot of people who just weren’t as serious about God’s law as they were.  But worse were the compromisers—the Jews who gradually assimilated to the pagan ways of the Greeks and Romans and the people who willingly and knowingly became traitors to the covenant: tax collectors and sinners.

 

Think of it this way: The Pharisees saw themselves in the midst of a culture war.  And they knew it wasn’t the first time Israel had faced a culture war.  And so their heroes were the righteous men of Israel’s past culture wars.  One of those heroes was Phinehas, one of Aaron’s grandsons.  In the book of Numbers we read how Balak, the King of Moab, had hired a prophet to curse the Israelites.  But the prophet, Balaam couldn’t do it.  Every time he opened his mouth to curse the Israelites, the Lord caused blessings to spill out.  So Balak, instead, sent a bunch of beautiful Moabite women to infiltrate the Israelite camp and to entice the men of Israel to worship the Canaanite god Baal with them.  Isreal’s first culture war.  The men were enticed into sexual immorality and then into idolatry—those two always go hand-in-hand.  But Phinehas, came upon one of the Israelite men in flagrante delicto with one of these women.  Filled with holy zeal, Phinehas grabbed a spear and ran them both through together.  That was the end of Israel’s first culture war and Phinehas became a hero for his righteous zeal.

 

But much more recently, the Pharisees looked back on the heroes of the Maccabean Revolt—about 160 years before.  In those days Judah was ruled by Greeks.  And the Greeks just sort of thought that because their culture was so superior to everyone else’s, everyone would just assimilate given the chance.  Think of Gus in My Big Fat Greek Wedding.  “There are two kinds of people: Greeks and everyone who wish they was Greek.”  But no matter how many temples or gymnasiums the Greeks built, the Jews wouldn’t assimilate.  Antiochus IV Epiphanes had enough of it and finally outlawed the law.  If you circumcised your son, you and he would be executed.  He defiled the Lord’s altar by sacrificing a pig on it.  In Second Maccabees we read a horrific story of seven brothers and their mother who were tortured and gruesomely martyred when they refused to eat pork.  Jews were forced to offer sacrifices to Zeus.  Mattathias Maccabeus was watching as one Jewish man caved into that pressure.  The writer of First Maccabees tells us how Mattathias burned with zeal for the law, just like Phinehas had.  He ran forward and killed the man at the altar, then turned and killed the King’s soldier.  That would kick off a revolt against the pagan Greeks.  But the Maccabean revolutionaries didn’t just go after their foreign rulers; like Mattathias they went after compromising Jews as well.

 

They were the inspiration for the Pharisees.  The Pharisees didn’t have that kind of power.  They couldn’t force anyone to keep the law or to keep it better.  But they had the same kind of zeal.  They desperately wanted, they prayed for the Lord to return to Zion to destroy the Romans and all the other unrighteous pagans—and all the compromisers like the tax collectors and sinners in Israel, too.

 

And—getting back to Jesus peaching on the hillside—and Jesus now says that even that kind of zeal, that kind of righteousness isn’t enough to get folks into the kingdom.  In other words, to the people who were coming to Jesus thinking he was making it easier—kind of like some modern liberal spirituality that you can shape to your own liking—Jesus says, “No.  I didn’t come to make it easier.”  But then he condemns even the Pharisees.  They were the most righteous people around and even they weren’t going to make the cut.  So what now?  Imagine all the people holding their breath to hear what Jesus is going to say next.  They really, really want to know.  Before he ever started preaching, they’d seen him doing all the Messiah things: casting out demons, healing the sick and the blind and the deaf.  They knew without a doubt that the God of Israel was somehow acting in and through Jesus, so they had to think that when he preached, he preached with authority and he spoke for God.  He’s got their attention now.  Now they want to know what it means to be more righteous than even the Pharisees.

 

So Jesus goes on and says, “You have heard it said to the people of old, ‘You shall not murder’; and anyone who commits murder shall be liable to judgement.  But I say to you that everyone who is angry with his brother shall be liable to judgement; anyone who insults his brother with foul and abusive language will be liable to the lawcourt; and anyone who says, ‘You fool,’ will be liable to the fires of Gehenna.”

And Jesus keeps going on like this.  If we skip down to 5:27—picking up just were today’s Gospel ends—Jesus says something similar about adultery.  “You have heard it said, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’  But I say to you: everyone who gazes at a woman in order to lust after her has already committed adultery with her in his heart.”  On and on.  Divorce falls in Jesus sites too: Divorce is wrong.  Marriage is a life-long covenant.  Tell the truth, he says, and you won’t need to make oaths for people to believe you.  The law commanded justice and put limits on retaliation, but Jesus says, “Don’t resist evil with violence”, “turn the other cheek”.  “When someone wants to sue you and take your shirt, let him have your coat, too.  When someone forces you to go one mile, go a second one with him.”  And in verse 43 Jesus puts a cherry on top of all this.  They knew that the law was about loving your neighbour, but then they got the idea that the only people who were their neighbours were their fellow Jews.  Love your neighbours, yes, but hate your enemies—people like the Romans, the tax collectors, and the sinners who openly rejected God’s law and covenant.  Love your neighbours.  Pray for God to smite your enemies.  And Jesus says, “No!  I tell you: love your enemies!  Pray for people who persecute you!”  Why?  “So that you may be sons [and daughters] of your Father in heaven.”

Do you want to have a share in the kingdom?  Do you want to be a child of the Father?  Do you want to know how to have a righteousness—a covenant faithfulness—greater than even the Pharisees?  Do want people to glorify God when they see how you live?  Then love the way that God loves.  That’s what righteousness has always been about: it’s been about a people that conforms to the heart of God.  Righteousness is about sinlessness, but it goes deeper than that and that’s what the Pharisees and so many others in Israel had forgotten even though it was there all along: “Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is one Lord.  And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength, and your neighbour as yourself.”

 

Brothers and Sisters, this is what kingdom people look like in a culture war.  They love the way God loves.  This is the narrow gate, this is the difficult path that leads to the kingdom and life with God.  It’s hard.  All we have to do is look around us.  Things haven’t changed much since Jesus preached this two thousand years ago.  We’re in the middle of a war ourselves and it seems like Christians are prone to the same two failures.  There’s a ditch on either side of the road.  You fall into the ditch on this side when you give in and compromise.  Whether it's the Judeans who went along with the Greeks, leaving their sons uncircumcised, eating pork, and making offerings to Zeus or the Christians today who give up and buy into the pagan world’s notion that love is whatever you make it, anything goes, and we can all live and fellowship with God on our own terms.  Brothers and Sisters, compromise with a godless and anti-gospel culture isn’t the way.  Jesus didn’t come to make it easier to get into the kingdom, but there are a lot of people and churches today who think that the answer to the culture and to dwindling interest in the gospel is to lower the bar and to make it easier to think of yourself as a Christian.  Appealing to the cultural moment might get you a few followers in the short term, but it will land you in the outer darkness, weeping and gnashing your teeth just as surely as the opposite error will.

 

The opposite error—the ditch on the other side of the road—is Phariseeism.  And that happens when we forget that the gospel wins not through violence and force but when Christians love the way that God loves.  Brothers and Sisters, no amount of compelling, force, violence, or political power will ever move the heart of an unbeliever to give glory to God because of what they see in us.  But in the midst of a culture war it’s very easy for God’s people to think that seizing the reigns of power is the answer.  We’ll do anything, compromise just about anything, team up with just about anyone no matter how ungodly they are, to get our hands on that power.  And we can do it all with a zealousness like that of Phinehas or Mattathias that feels so right.  We try to meld Caesar and Jesus together, forgetting that Caesars bloody and violent way is the opposite of the gospel, which conquers through love.  You can’t trust in Jesus and at the same trust in horses and chariots.  You can’t trust in Jesus and at the same time trust in political power.  Jesus demands our allegiance and our trust—all of it and without compromise.  And it’s when we give him that full allegiance that we have the loving heart of God.  It’s when we’re willing to follow Jesus as we turn the other cheek, as we give both our shirt and our coat, as we go the extra mile, even as we go to our own deaths, it’s then that world takes notice and give glory to God.  That’s how the gospel captivates hearts and transforms the world.

 

Brothers and Sisters, that’s the narrow gate and the difficult path.  Don’t give up on righteousness when the going gets tough.  And never forget that law is ultimately about loving God and loving our neighbours—everyone—the way God loves them—enough to give his own son.  Love them as God does—even your worst enemy—even to point of sacrifice.  That’s how God once captivated your heart and it’s how he will captivate theirs.

 

Jesus stresses just how important this is.  Going back to the end of our Gospel in Matthew 5:23 he says, “So, if you are coming to the altar with your gift and there you remember that your brother has a grievance against you, leave your gift right there in front of the altar, and go first and be reconciled to your brother.  Then come back and offer your gift.”

We probably miss the significance of this.  To go to the temple in Jerusalem to make an offering to God was the peak of righteousness, of covenant faithfulness.  This took precedence over everything else.  No one.  No. one.  Would go to Jerusalem.  And remember, Jesus is preaching in Galilee, a three day’s journey from Jerusalem.  No one would trek all that way, carrying their animal for sacrifice or buying one at an exorbitant price at the temple, wait their turn, and then standing there with the priest ready to make the sacrifice, suddenly realise they needed to go all the way back home to make something right with a brother or a sister.  Yes, I think Jesus is using a bit of hyperbole here, but he wants to drive his point home, because this is how people—especially the Pharisees thought.  If you were doing it for God, nothing else mattered.  Think of the priest and the Levite in Jesus’ parable, leaving a man for dead on the side of the road lest they become ritually impure.  For all their talk of loving God, they’d forgotten just how much God loves us and they’d failed to live it out.  That’s why they grumbled when Jesus ate with tax collectors and sinners.  They’d forgotten that all of heaven rejoices over a sinner who repents.

 

No, says Jesus.  Never think that you’re honouring God if, at the same time, you’re failing to love your neighbour the way God loves him.  Never think you’re doing God’s work if, at the same time, you’ve compromised his call to faith and to faithfulness.  Never think you’re building the kingdom if, at the same time, you’re compromising its principles.  Instead, stop what you’re doing and make things right.  Go back and love your neighbour.  Reconcile and make things right with him.  Remember that you serve the God who gave his son out of love in order to reconcile sinful you to himself.  Have that kind of love in your heart and let it shape every thing you do.

 

Brothers and Sisters, every Sunday we recite those words of Jesus: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it, You shall love your neighbour as yourself. On these two commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets.”  Don’t just mindlessly say those words.  Be shaped by them.  Love God and love your neighbour with everything you’ve got and then you will have that righteousness greater even than that of the scribes and the Pharisees.

 

Let’s pray: O God, you have prepared for those who love you such good things as surpass our understanding: Pour into our hearts such love towards you, that we, loving you above all things, may obtain your promises, which exceed all that we can desire; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

by William Klock

 

Our Gospels during these first few Sundays of Trinitytide—so far—have all had us following Jesus as he made his way to Jerusalem to observe the Passover for the last time.  But today’s Gospel—from the Fifth Chapter of Luke—takes us back to the beginning of Jesus’ ministry—those early days when he was travelling around the region of Galilee a long way from Jerusalem.  Luke gives a series of vignettes in Chapter 4.  Every sabbath, he writes, Jesus was teaching in the synagogues.  He read from Isaiah one sabbath in his hometown synagogue in Nazareth and then he told the people, “Today this scripture is fulfilled in your own hearing!”  The people were so angry that they tried to stone him and he fled from the town.  So he went to Capernaum and taught in the synagogue there.  That’s where a demon-possessed man stood up and shouted at Jesus: “I know who you are.  You’re God’s holy one!”  And just to prove it, Jesus then cast out the demon and word went out throughout the whole region.  On another sabbath, after preaching in the synagogue, he was invited to the house of Simon Peter.  Peter’s mother-in-law was sick with a high fever.  Jesus rebuked the fever and straightaway she recovered and served them lunch.  Pretty soon everyone who was sick or who had a demon showed up and Jesus healed them all.  And because of that, no matter where Jesus went, Luke writes, the crowds hunted for him.  And that’s how today’s Gospel begins.  One day Jesus was standing by the lake of Gennesaret.  Finally a moment of peace.  An early morning walk on the beach.  He found a little cove.  The shores of Gennesaret (or Galilee as it’s otherwise known) are full of little coves.  He watched as the fishermen dragged their boats ashore after a night of hard work.  But then someone came down the trail to the beach.  And he saw Jesus.  And he went running back up the trail out of sight shouting, “He’s here!  He’s here!  I’ve found him!”  And others began to follow the man back down the trail to the beach.  And more and more until another crowd had gathered and was pressing in on Jesus.  They had seen for themselves or they had heard the stories of the amazing things the God of Israel was doing through Jesus and they wanted to see more.  They wanted to hear more of the good news that Jesus was proclaiming.

 

But it was no good trying to preach from the middle of the crowd.  People kept interrupting them with their problems.  Even if he could get a few words out, the crowd just couldn’t hear him.  So Jesus had an idea.  Sound travels wonderfully over water and the little beach cove was a perfect amphitheatre.  So he made his way down to the water where he’d seen the two boats, and got into one of them, and standing there, he called to one of the fishermen.  Jesus recognised the man.  It was the same fellow who’d invited him to lunch after the synagogue service.  It was the same fellow whose mother-in-law he’d healed.  “Hey you!  Was it Simon or Peter or Simon Peter.  Yes, this is your boat isn’t it?  Row me out a little way from the land.”  Maybe Peter felt like he owed Jesus something or maybe he was flattered that Jesus had chosen his boat and remembered him from the other day.  Whatever the case, Peter set aside his net, got in the boat, and rowed Jesus out into the middle of the cove.  And Luke says that Jesus sat down in the boat and began to teach the crowd.

 

It was probably some version of Jesus’ favourite sermon.  Luke has preserved one version of that sermon that we sometimes hear called “The Sermon on the Plain”—because Jesus preached it in a flat, open place, but mostly because it contrasts with the version preserved by Matthew, where Jesus preached from a hillside.  We call that version “The Sermon on the Mount”.  That’s the sermon where Jesus preaches about the kingdom of God.  It’s the sermon in which he calls the people of Israel to trust in the Lord because he never fails to provide.  He clothes the flowers of the field that wither tomorrow.  He feeds the birds so that they have no need to worry.  How much more important are you—the Lord’s elect, chosen, called covenant people—than flowers and birds?  So stop worrying and trust him.  Pursue, seek his kingdom above everything else, and trust him to take care of you.  Israel had struggled for forever with idolatry—in one form or another—instead of trusting in and giving her full allegiance to the Lord.  That’s what got them exiled to Babylon.  The Pharisees were right.  That idolatry and fickle faith was what kept them in a sort of in-house exile in their own time.  So, in other words, Jesus is saying to the people of Israel: Give the Lord your allegiance.  Give your all to his agenda: to holiness, to being light in the darkness, stop being so fickle.  You do that and, just as he promised, the Lord will take care of you—he’ll even pour out his blessings on you.

 

And Peter sat there right in front of Jesus, holding the oars, keeping the boat in position and Jesus facing the shore, and he listened.  The Bible doesn’t tell us anything about Peter’s past, but just like anyone else, he had one.  I don’t think Peter was any great or notorious sinner or anything like that.  Reading between the lines, I think it’s safe to conclude that he was just your ordinary, average Judean who obeyed torah as best he could, who celebrated Passover with his family every year, who went to the temple in Jerusalem as required—at least most of the time.  But he knew he wasn’t perfect.  He could be impetuous at times.  He could fly off the handle.  But most of all, as Jesus preached, I think Peter was convicted of his own fickleness.  He tithed, but sometimes he did so grudgingly.  He kept the sabbath, but sometimes he worried where the money was going to come from when he took off that one day a week from fishing.  Some days, especially in the summer, sunset on Saturday just couldn’t come soon enough for Peter so he could get back to work.

 

Jesus got Peter thinking.  Did he really trust in the Lord?  Or did Peter trust in Peter?  Had he really given his full allegiance to the God of Israel or was Peter really serving Peter?  And Peter mulled on these things as Jesus finished speaking and said to him, “Put out into the deeper part, and let down your nets for a catch.”

Peter was still playing through in his head what Jesus had been saying about trusting the Lord and giving him his full allegiance.  This snapped him out of it.  No more introspection.  It’s like Jesus knew what he was thinking.  Peter didn’t really want to let down his nets.  He’d fished all night and they hadn’t caught anything.  They certainly weren’t going to catch anything in the daylight.  That’s because they fished with nets made of linen.  The fish could see them in the day, but they’d swim right into them in the dark at night.  And Peter had just finished cleaning and mending his nets.  Now he’d have to clean them—and if they hit a snag, maybe mend them too—all over again.  Peter was born and bred to fishing.  He knew everything there was to know about it.  He knew the habits of fish, he knew about nets, he knew about the seasons, the time of day, and the play of light in the water.  He knew about boats.  He knew about marketing and selling fish.  He was a fisherman!  And if First Century fishermen were anything like Twenty-first Century fishermen, the last thing you’d want to do with Peter is start an argument over fishing—especially if you’re not a fisherman.  And, of course, Jesus was not.  His father had taught him the carpentry and the building trade.

 

Peter really, really didn’t want to cast his net into the water again and he wouldn’t have for anyone else.  But this was Jesus.  Just like everyone else, Peter wasn’t quite sure exactly what to make of him, but he’d not only heard the stories; he’d seen it for himself.  His mother-in-law had been on the verge of death, but Jesus made her well—so well that virtually instantly she was up serving them lunch.  And so he says to Jesus, “Master”.  Let me pause there.  Master is okay, but it might not be the best translation.  In the Gospels people address Jesus as “teacher” or “rabbi” or even as “lord”, but unique in Luke’s Gospel, people occasionally address him as epistata.  An epistates is someone in charge, someone with authority.  The ten lepers address Jesus as epistata.  The disciples, when they were in the boat being tossed around by the storm, addressed him as epistata.  That’s how Peter addresses Jesus here.  “We were working hard all night and caught nothing.  But okay, Master.  You’re the boss, you’re calling the shots here.  So if you say so, I’ll let down the nets.”

Peter sounds like he’s letting down his nets grudgingly.  I wonder if that’s how it really was.  He’s been convicted in his own heart of how he’s been half-hearted in serving the Lord.  He’s just been hearing Jesus preach about God taking care of flowers and birds.  Or something along those lines, because we know Jesus liked to preach on that topic.  It was exactly what fickle, half-hearted Israel needed to hear.  So Peter probably didn’t want to go through the hassle of letting down his nets again, but I think he wanted to trust that through Jesus, the God of Israel really would look after him.  Jesus might not know anything about fishing, but Peter had seen that Jesus had authority and that he took charge of things—whether demons or blindness or sickness or even the fish in the sea.  He could see, plain as day, that the God of Israel was working through Jesus.  Peter was thinking on those words: “Seek first the kingdom of God and all these thing will be added to you.”

 

I think the main reason Luke records these words from Peter about having fished all night and caught nothing is that he wants to remind us that this is the way the Lord works.  Jesus is telling Peter to fish at the worst possible time to fish.  Jesus does this throughout the Gospels.  He hears that Lazarus is sick and near to death, but then he waits three days before going—time enough for Lazarus to be well and truly dead.  So instead of healing Lazarus from sickness, he raises him from the dead and calls him out of his tomb.  Or think of the woman who was bleeding for twelve years or the man who was blind from birth.  In that last instance Jesus had the opportunity to explain why these things happened.  The disciples with their conventional wisdom assumed that either the man or his parents were great sinners and that the Lord had punished him with blindness.  But Jesus said that, no, the man was born blind that God might reveal his glory.  Because that’s how the God of Israel works and Israel is the chief example.  The Lord allowed his people to become slaves in Egypt so that he might display his glory both to them and to the watching nations.  In the events of the Exodus the God of Israel exposed the king and the gods of Egypt as frauds, totally lacking the great power and authority they claimed to have.  The God of Israel single-handedly beat the gods of Egypt at their own games and humbled mighty Pharaoh—the greatest king on earth—and drowned his army in the sea.  And at the same time, in Israel, he created a people who would forever be singing his praises and announcing his glory to the nations.  All because they had watched him do the impossible.  Every newborn baby boy was circumcised and, in that, he was given the sign of God’s covenant promise.  And every year the fathers of Israel led their families as they ate the Passover meal and recalled the Lord’s promises and the glory he displayed on their behalf in the Exodus.

 

Jesus was doing the same thing.  He had come to lead the people in a new exodus and along the way, he was acting out that exodus, that divine deliverance as he did the impossible—and the more impossible the better, because the more power and authority it displayed.  Why had Peter (and James and John, his partners) why had they been skunked that night?  I don’t know.  Maybe Peter said something unkind to his wife before leaving that night.  Maybe he’d shorted the Lord in his tithing that week.  Maybe he’d dallied too long with that dancing girl the day before.  Maybe Peter thought his empty nets were punishment for some sin.  But if he’d asked Jesus, “Why did I toil all night and catch nothing?  Did I sin?”  Jesus would have said, “No, Peter.  It was so that the Lord, the God of Israel, would be glorified.”

 

And that’s exactly what happens.  Luke writes, beginning at verse 6 that when they let down their nets, they caught such a huge number of fish that their nets began to break.  Usually they’d fish all night for a catch that wouldn’t break their nets, but now Peter let down his net and before he could even pull it back into the boat to keep from becoming over-full of fish, the catch was so great that it strained the integrity of the net.  I assume it was just he and Jesus in the boat and he and Jesus were, themselves, straining to pull the net in.  They signalled to their partners in the other boat to come and help them, Luke writes.  So they came, and filled both the boats, and they began to sink.

And right there, in a sinking boat, with fish wriggling all around them, Luke writes that Peter took stock of everything that had just happened.  He fell down at Jesus’ knees.  “Depart from me, Lord!” he said, “Because I’m a sinful man!”  James and John, the sons of Zebedee, Simon Peter’s partners were just as amazed, Luke writes.  But being in the other boat, they couldn’t kneel at Jesus’ knees.  But Peter knelt there convicted of his sins by this amazing display of God’s glory.  I found myself asking this week why Peter didn’t have this same reaction when Jesus healed his mother-in-law.  Why was Peter’s mother-in-law sick?  For the same reason: so that Jesus could display the glory of the God of Israel.  Presumably Peter was impressed when he saw the healing.  But it didn’t impact him the way the multitude of fish did.  And maybe that’s because Peter was a fisherman, not a doctor.  It highlight the fact that God gets to each of us in different ways to convict us of sin and to move us to faith.  Every one of us has a different story of how God got hold of us.  That, too, is how he works.  But one way or another, each of us has been amazed and captivated by the glory of God.

 

Our reactions to that revelation are often different too.  Some people encountered God’s glory and were moved to faith as Jesus wiped away their tears.  Peter, however, is met by that glory and is moved to tears.  He knew how the prophets had preached about the coming judgement of Israel for her sins.  He’d heard Jesus preach—not just the warm-fuzzies, but also the announcement of soon-coming judgement.  And when he saw the glory of God, when he experienced the presence of the holy, Peter found himself overwhelmed by his own sinfulness.  He knew he didn’t belong in the presence of the holy.  He knew he belonged with those people who would find themselves in the outer darkness weeping and gnashing their teeth.  He responded just like Isaiah when he found himself in the presence of the holiness of God.  Remember Isaiah.  He cried out, “Woe is me!  For I am lost.  For I am a man of unclean lips and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips.  For my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts!” (Isaiah 6:5).  But it was just as Isaiah acknowledged his sinfulness that an angel flew down to touch his lips with a cleansing and holy fire.  The angel announced that his guilt had departed and that his sin had been blotted out.  And when the Lord called out, “Whom shall I send?  Who will go for us?  Who will proclaim my message to Israel?”  Isaiah cried out, “Here I am!  Send me!”

 

And it’s that scene all over again in that sinking fishing boat on the Sea of Galilee with fish wriggling all around.  Peter knelt there shaking at Jesus kneels and Jesus said, “Don’t be afraid.  From now on you’ll be catching men!”  Jesus is, himself, the holy fire who purifies us from our sins.

 

Now, it doesn’t come across in our English translations, but when Jesus says that Peter will be catching men, that “catching” isn’t usually a word associated with fishing.  It has the sense of catching someone or something alive—like a warrior catching an enemy, but sparing his life.  There’s a reason behind Jesus’ odd choice of words.  What he’s doing is echoing the words of Jeremiah 16.  There, through the Prophet, the Lord announced the judgement that was about to come on the people of Judea for their unfaithfulness and their idolatry.  The Babylonians would come and none would escape.  The Lord says, “I am sending for many fishers, declares the Lord, and they shall catch them…For my eyes are on their ways.  They are not hidden from me, nor is their iniquity concealed form my eyes.”  Jesus draws on the common Greek translation of the prophet.  He uses the same word: catch.  The people of Judea in those days wouldn’t be killed, but neither would they escape the judgement of exile.  But now Jesus flips the imagery around.  The people of Judah are still in their long exile, still experiencing the punishment brought by their sins, but now the Lord will send fishers again, this time to catch sinners and to rescue them alive from the coming judgement.  What was in Jeremiah’s day an image of the Lord’s judgement on sinners, Jesus now turns into an image of God’s mercy for them.  As Jesus says in John’s Gospel, “God did not send the son into the world to condemn the world, but so that the world could be saved by him.”  That’s what Jesus has come to do.  And even though only he can go to the cross to accomplish the redemption of sinners, he’s not going on this fishing trip alone.  He’s calling Peter (and James and John and eventually a whole host of men and women that we call the church) to go fishing with him, to catch men and women that they—that we—might be delivered from our sins and from the coming judgement.

 

How much of this did Peter understand that day?  Probably not much.  But what he did know is that in Jesus the God of Israel was at work.  He knew that judgement was inevitable and he knew that somehow and in some way the Lord was making deliverance possible through Jesus.  He had seen the glory of the Lord and there was no going back.  And so, Luke writes, They brought their boats to land, then they abandoned everything and followed him.

Peter walked away from all of it.  The boats, the net, the sea, the fish.  They had been his source of security.  That’s what he’d trusted.  But he heard that reminder from Jesus: Seek first God’s kingdom, and all these things will be added to you.  If the Lord could fill his nets to bursting just to make this point, Peter was ready to trust him with everything—to give his full allegiance to Jesus the Messiah.  If God could do this, he could do anything.  And so Peter gave his allegiance to the Lord Jesus.  And he knew hardship and he knew persecution and eventually he would even come to know martyrdom.  His faith and his love for Jesus would eventually lead him from Jerusalem all the way to Rome and all along the way he proclaimed the glory of God.  All the way he proclaimed the good news that Jesus died to forgive sins and rose to restore God’s life to us and to the world, and that this Jesus is the Lord of all who shows us the glory of his Father.  Peter went out into the world to challenge the fake gods and the fake kings in whom we trust, and proclaimed the crucified and risen Lord so that everyone would know the glory of the one, true God.  Peter eventually died for that message.  But Peter knew that his risen Lord was master over death itself, just as he'd been master over all those fish that one morning years before.  And so he trusted Jesus’ promise: Seek first God’s kingdom and his righteousness—even if it means martyrdom—and he will take care of you.

 

Let’s pray: Father, you have called us and made us your people.  You send us out, like Simon Peter, to fish for people that they might know the life of your kingdom.  When we’re tempted to protest, thinking that we are unworthy of the task, that we are too sinful, that we aren’t up to it, remind us that in Jesus you have forgiven us, that you have made us holy, that you have filled us with your Spirit, and that you have given us this remarkable and irresistible story to tell the world, this story of your goodness, your love, your grace, your mercy, and your faithfulness.  Your glory.  Give us the grace to do the work of your kingdom as we trust in your faithfulness to us and to all who hear it.  Amen.

Romans 8:17-23

by William Klock

Sometimes you have to stand back and look at the big picture when you want to find your way.  Think of going to a strange town and getting lost going from street to street and intersection to intersection.  When I first started working in Bellingham I kept getting lost when I was out making service calls.  I have a good sense of direction.  I don’t usually need a map—which is what had back then before Siri.  But what’s now Bellingham was originally five separate towns, each with its own street grid that didn’t match up.  Then, to make matters worse, when they ran Interstate 5 through the city, they cut it in half and left only a handful of thorougfares connecting everything.  Our service manager handed me a nifty spiral-bound “Guide of Whatcom County” and said: “New guy takes the map.”  A map lets you get above everything.  It gives you a bird’s eye view,  so that you can see the lay of the land.  The big picture helps you get your bearings.

 

We need something like that for the Bible.  As kids we read books full of disconnected “Bible stories”.  We know Adam and Abraham and Moses and Jesus, but we struggle to know how their stories are related and part of the bigger story.  As adults the most common approach to reading the Bible—when we read it!—is the cover-to-cover, Genesis-to-Revelation approach.  Don’t misunderstand; any type of Bible reading is good Bible reading, but the order the books of the Bible are arranged in isn’t chronological and doesn’t do much to help us see the “big picture”.  Even Bible scholars and theologians aren’t immune from missing the big picture.  They’re often so focused on the individual trees that it becomes easy to inadvertently forget the shape of the forest.

 

I say this because our Epistle from Romans 8 this morning is one those wonderful, short passages that bring us back to the big picture of the Good News, of God’s redemption and renewal of humanity and of his entire Creation.  But even here we might miss it.  Many Christians reading through Romans miss the big picture here because they are not expecting Paul’s language of God subjecting his Creation to futility and bondage and of that Creation waiting in with eager longing.  And yet our Epistle this morning is St. Paul leading us right to the climax of his letter to the Romans.  Paul walks us up a mountain so we can see the lay of the land, where we’ve come from, where we’re going, and how it all fits together.

 

We don’t have time this morning to get into the details of Paul’s line of reasoning in the first half of Romans, but what he does in those chapters is to work his way through the story of Israel and all her ups and downs—and for Israel things were mostly “down”.  And now in Chapter 8 he begins talking about the life in the flesh versus life in the Spirit and the law of sin and death versus the law of the Spirit.  This is where, in verse 11, he famously writes that if the Spirit who raised Jesus from the dead lives in us, the One who raised Jesus from the dead will also give life to our mortal bodies—if we are in Jesus the Messiah we live in hope of the same resurrection he has experienced.  But even more than that, Paul goes on to write, through our union with Jesus we are children and heirs of God, fellow heirs with Christ—that means sharing in Jesus’ inheritance.  But what is that?  Paul writes in verse 17 that it means to suffer with him so that we can be glorified with him.  The Christian life—life with Jesus—for Paul means two things: suffering and glory.  Suffering is a given as we long for glory.

 

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

 

This is how I work it out.  Knowing the Scriptures, knowing Jesus, working under the Spirit’s inspiration, this is the only conclusion Paul can reach.  He’s been building this argument for eight chapters in Romans and here he reaches the inevitable conclusion: those who will be glorified will first face suffering, but he’s also worked out that this suffering can’t begin to compare with the glory to be unveiled in us.

 

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

 

But what is the glory Paul’s writing about?  Paul says this glory will be revealed in us.  It’s a sense of this glory being bestowed on us as a gift—and this makes perfect sense when we remember what Paul said before: that if we are in Christ, then we will share in and we will participate in his inheritance.

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

Again, we need the big picture—we need to remember where things started.  In Genesis we read that the Lord created human beings to be his image bearers.  The Lord built a temple for himself.  When the pagans built their temples, they placed images of their gods in them made of wood or stone, but in his own temple God placed human beings to represent his sovereignty and to rule his creation with wisdom and justice—to have dominion and to subdue Creation in the Lord’s name.  That’s what it meant for humanity to bear God’s image: to be his stewards, the priests of his temple.  But then we chose to rebel.  As Paul writes in Romans 1, we chose to worship the Creation instead of the Creator.  We subjected the Lord’s good creation to corruption.

 

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

 

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

 

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

by William Klock

 

In today’s Gospel St. Luke tells us that: All the tax collectors and sinners were drawing new to listen to Jesus.  You would think faithful Israelites would be happy about that.  After all, Jesus was calling them to repentance.  The Pharisees had been doing that for generations and without much success.  But when Jesus did it, crowds of sinners gathered to hear what he had to say.  But, says Luke, instead of rejoicing: The Pharisees and the scribes [they were the legal experts] were grumbling.  “This fellow welcomes sinners!” they said.  “He even eats with them!”

And we can gather that they didn’t just grumble this to themselves.  They grumbled it out loud to Jesus and So—this is Luke 15, in verse 3—and So Jesus told them this parable: “Who amongst you, having a hundred sheep and losing one of them, wouldn’t leave the ninety-nine in the countryside and go off looking for the lost one until you found it?  And when you found it, you’d carry it back home on your shoulders, rejoicing.  And you’d call your friends and neighbours in.  “Come and rejoice with me,” you’d say to them, “because I’ve found my lost sheep!”

Jesus smiled at the Pharisees like he was the one who had found his lost sheep and was inviting them to a party to celebrate.  But they just scowled at him all the more.  But why?  This is what they longed for.  There’s a saying of the rabbis that came later, but it still speaks accurately of the Pharisees who were their predecessors.  They said that if everyone in Israel obeyed the law, even if only for a single day, the Lord would return to them.  So why were they so angry when Jesus was moving sinners to repentance?

 

Well, a bit about the Pharisees.  They were a group or a party—if we were talking about Christians, you could almost-but-not-quite think of them as a “denomination”.  Like nearly everyone in Israel, they knew the Lord’s promises that one day he would return to his people and set this broken world to rights.  They longed for that day.  They knew that the Lord had left the temple and allowed it and Jerusalem and Judea to be destroyed by the Babylonians and for the people to be carried away to Babylon in exile as punishment for being unfaithful.  They hadn’t obeyed his law, but worse, they had bowed to foreign kings and worshipped other gods.  And even though the people had returned to Judea and they’d rebuilt the temple, the Lord’s presence had never returned and the land was still ruled by foreign pagan kings.  And that meant that the exile had never really ended.  Israel was still being punished for her unfaithfulness.  And so the main business of the Pharisees was calling the people of Israel to be faithful to God’s law.  They urged the people to be holy.  And if everyone would do that, maybe their long exile would finally end and the Lord would return.

 

And right at the centre of everything the Pharisees did was the temple.  The temple was the one place—or at least it was before the exile—it was the one place where heaven and earth and where God and human beings met.  It was a bubble of hope in a dark world.  It was what creation is supposed to be.  Heaven and earth, God and man had been separated by sin, but in the temple God had created a place where everything was as it should be—or at least a taste of it—until Israel’s unfaithfulness and idolatry messed that up just as Adam and Eve had messed up Eden.  So the Pharisees resolved to live their lives as if they were perpetually in the temple.  They weren’t priests, but they lived like priests anyway.  All the time.  And they urged everyone else to live this way too.  And that made them popular with some people, while other people resented them.

 

The problem with the Pharisees’ way of life was that only rich people could afford to live that way.  Because it wasn’t just that they avoided sin—God called everyone in Israel to do that—but they also did their best to stay ritually, ceremonially pure at all times—like the priests in the temple.  They were ready for the Lord’s presence to return at any moment and they’d be prepared to be in it.  The problem was that normal people were ritually impure a lot of the time.  It wasn’t a sin thing.  You only had to be ritually pure when it came time to go to the temple or eat the Passover, the rest of the time it didn’t much matter.  Women became impure when they menstruated.  Farmers became impure birthing livestock or dealing with dead animals.  If a family member died and you had to touch the body, you were then ritually impure.  For some people impurity was an almost daily thing.  Again, nothing to do with sin.  It was about what the Lord required of his people before entering his presence in the temple.  But what it meant was that regular people could never meet the demands of the Pharisees.

 

So the Pharisees were well-meaning.  They understood God’s grace.  Contrary to popular opinion, they weren’t trying to earn their way into God’s favour.  But there’s something that seems to happen whenever people start looking for ways to be holy above and beyond the ordinary or when we start making rules for ourselves that God didn’t give us in the first place.  It happened with monastics in the Middle Ages, when celibacy became a sign of holiness and ordinary Christian—who were faithfully fruitful and multiplying as God commanded in the beginning—were made to feel unholy and second-class.  It happened with the Methodist Holiness Movement in the Seventeenth Century, with what started out as Wesley’s desire to simply see Christians being more faithfully holy turning into a movement where Christian brothers and sisters were frowned on for putting sugar in their tea rather than drinking it black and giving the money to the poor.  It eventually led to people thinking that the gift of God’s Spirit was a separate event in the life of the Christian that you had to earn by reaching a certain level of holiness—turning the Christian life completely upside-down.

 

So wanting to be more holy is a good thing, but certain ways of doing it seem to have a powerful tendency to make us self-righteous.  Even when we know that being God’s people is all about grace, we can still act very self-righteously.  It happened to the Pharisees and it can happen to us.  And so they rightly saw that the world is not what it should be.  It’s full of sin and pain and tears and that’s all because of unholiness and sin.  They knew that only God can ultimately set it to rights, but they also knew that God’s people—whether Israel in the Old Testament or the Church in the New—we’re called to live God’s law—the torah in the Old Testament and the law of the Spirit in the New—we’re called to live God’s law and through that to became bubbles of God’s new creation, his future world set to rights, we’re called to be bubbles of that here in the present.  But some people out there are obstinate in their sin.  Some people are really awful sinners and we can literally watch as they make a mess of the world around them.  They do things that drag others into sin.  For the Pharisees that was the tax collectors, who collaborated with the Romans and who stole from their own people.  It was prostitutes, who not only sinned themselves, but who enticed others into sin.  Pharisees could see the fallout as men destroyed their lives and families because of prostitution.  These things were grievously wrong and sinful.  They were choices people made and they were conscious rejections of God’s covenant.  They weren’t just people who stumbled into sin; they were traitors to the covenant people, choosing sin and making the world worse.  And so the Pharisees—and I’m sure even ordinary people in Israel—they longed for the Lord to deal with these sinners.  And that’s good.  And I expect they prayed: Lord, bring Matthew the tax collector, bring Mary the prostitute, to repentance—or smite them.  Either way, put an end to the sin.  And, again, that’s what God does with sinners.  They were right to pray that way.

 

But, again, something happens when we start making rules for ourselves that mark us out as especially holy.  First, we forget that even if our sins aren’t as heinous, none of us is ever perfect or sinless.  We all contribute in some way to the mess this world is in and the pain and the tears of the people around us.  But, maybe worse, we can start to resent when those really bad sinners don’t get their just comeuppance.  Self-righteousness creeps in and grace and mercy get pushed out even though we know better, and we start longing to see God’s judgement fall on sinners and we become resentful when they do repent—like the men in another of Jesus’ parables who were angry when they, who had worked through the heat of the day, received the same wage as the men who had only worked an hour.  The Pharisees expected the Messiah to come in judgement on the unfaithful in Israel, to smite the tax collectors and the prostitutes and all the other sinners, but instead Jesus was eating with them.  The Pharisees knew that if Jesus was the Messiah, sharing a meal with him was like a promise of the great banquet that the Lord had promised the prophets, the great banquet that would take place when Israel was restored, when the world was set to rights, and when sinners were wiped from the earth for ever.  That banquet was for people like the Pharisees.  The tax collectors and sinners were supposed to be outside in the dark, weeping and gnashing their teeth—suffering the Lord’s wrath because they’d missed their chance for repentance.  Even though they knew that being the people of God was about grace, the Pharisees had managed to become self-righteous.

 

But there was a second thing about the Pharisees.  Remember that they were all about the temple.  They weren’t priests.  They couldn’t live in and around the temple the way the priests did, so they had their way of bringing the temple to themselves by following the purity codes for the priests in their everyday lives.  They wanted to see things on earth as they are in heaven.  But as they followed Jesus around and watched him, one thing that we might miss, but that stood out like a sore thumb to them, was that he bypassed the temple.  According to the law, for a sinner to be right again with the Lord, he had to repent of his sins, he had to make restitution for his sins, and he had to offer a sacrifice at the temple.  But time after time, they watched as Jesus simply forgave sinners and sent them on their way.  Repeatedly, Jesus bypassed the temple, the priests, and the sacrificial system altogether.  That absolutely infuriated the Pharisees.  The Messiah—so they thought—should have been reinforcing the importance of the temple, but instead Jesus was bypassing it.  In fact, when he did go to the temple, he upset everything and brought the sacrifices to a halt while people ran around to collect all the animals he’d scattered.  And then he was announcing that he would destroy and rebuild it in three days.  This, I think more than anything else, made the Pharisees angry.  In Jesus, the God of Israel was doing something new.  In Jesus, the God of Israel had begun the process of uniting earth and heaven, when he took on human flesh.  In Jesus, the God of Israel had begun the work of creating a new people for himself, a people who instead of having a temple, would themselves be the temple as he poured his own Spirit into them.  That’s why Jesus was bypassing the temple and offering people forgiveness apart from the priests and sacrificial system.  This is why Jesus was announcing and acting out prophecies of the temple’s destruction.  But the Pharisees just couldn’t let go of the temple.  They couldn’t accept that in Jesus, the Lord was creating a new one.  If the tax collectors and sinners had first gone to the temple to offer sacrifices for their sins and then been welcomed by Jesus, the Pharisees would have rejoiced.  But for Jesus to forgive them and then celebrate with them without the temple in between.  Well, that was blasphemy.  That’s why they grumbled.

 

And so Jesus told them the simply story of the man who lost a sheep.  Some of them owned sheep.  They paid shepherds to look after them, but they knew the value of a sheep.  If you and I who have never shepherded sheep a day in our lives can identify with the joyful shepherd who celebrated finding his sheep, so could the Pharisees.  “Which one of you wouldn’t rejoice in that situation,” Jesus asks them.  He knew the answer and so did they.

 

But just to drive his point home, Jesus tells a second story in verse 8.  We go from one of ninety-nine being lost to now one of ten.  There’s a third parable about the prodigal son.  It follows, but isn’t part of today’s Gospel, but in that story Jesus goes from one of ten to one of two).  But Jesus said to them: Or a woman having ten drachmas [those were little silver coins] loses one of them.  Will she not light a lamp and sweep the house, and hunt carefully until she finds it!  And when she finds it she’ll call her friends and neighbours in.  “Come!” she’ll say.  “Celebrate with me because I’ve found my lost coin!”

I get this one.  A while ago the freehub on my road bike seized up.  The freehub is the thing in the back that lets the wheel spin when you’re not pedalling and then engages when you do pedal.  It’s full of tiny ball bearings—lots of ball bearings.  I took it apart to clean out all the grit that had got into it and when I went to put it back together I was missing three of those tiny ball bearings.  I turned on all the lights in the garage and hunted.  Eventually I swept the whole floor and then went through the dustpan with a magnet.  And I found one and I rejoiced and I found a second and I rejoiced.  And I really, really would have rejoiced if I’d found that third one, but I didn’t.  I still haven’t.  And I had to buy a new freehub.  So I get the story.  You get the story.  The Pharisees would have got it too.

 

So we’ve gone from a shepherd well enough off to have a hundred sheep to a woman with only ten drachmas.  They were probably her bridal headdress, but that there were only ten coins says that she was poor.  Headdresses with hundreds of coins were common.  We can imagine this elderly widow taking out her precious bridal headdress and putting it on to remember that day so long ago.  And when she goes to put it away she notices one of the ten coins is missing.  She doesn’t see it anywhere and panics.  The sort of house a woman like that lived in was small and dark—hard to see anything small—so she sweeps the whole house.  And finally she finds it and she’s so excited she runs to tell her friends so that they can share her joy.  And, again, there’s that question.  “If this happened to you, wouldn’t you rejoice?”  Of course they would.

 

Two-thousand years distant we understand the stories, we sympathise with the shepherd and with the woman.  I bet that everyone who reads these stories immediately thinks of some time when something like this happened to them and the Pharisees were no different.  Jesus really drives the point home: If we can rejoice over a lost sheep or a lost coin that we’ve found, how much more ought we to rejoice over a lost sinner who repents.  Jesus strikes at their self-righteousness and lack of mercy.  God had once rescued them when they were lost in Egypt and slaves to Pharaoh.  He’d delivered Israel and claimed them as his own.  He even named Israel his son.  He naturally grieves over those who reject his gracious covenant and he just as naturally rejoices when they receive his grace and return.  I fully expect the Pharisees understood this was what Jesus was getting at, but just to make sure he says it out loud at the end of each story:

 

“Let me tell you: that’s how glad they will be in heaven over one sinner who repents—more than over ninety-nine righteous people who don’t need repentance…[and]…that’s how glad God’s angels feel when a single sinner repents.”

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

 

The restoration of sinners was so important to God, that he was doing something dramatically new—and instead of rejoicing over what Jesus was doing, the Pharisees were rejecting him.  The Pharisees were partly right.  They were right to look forward to a day of coming judgement when God’s Son would come to condemn sinners and to vindicate the righteous.  What they got wrong was that it never occurred to them that God would send his Son, not just at the end of history, but would first send him into the middle of history, to call sinners to repentance and to offer himself as a sacrifice for their sins.  To step into the middle of history to set a group of people to rights so that they would be his means of proclaiming his kingdom and his gracious forgiveness of sins—his gospel—to the world, so that when he does return at the end of history we won’t be condemned.  In this we see the love of God.  He didn’t cast humanity from his presence with a “Good riddance!”  That’s what the Pharisees would have done.  Instead, when we sundered heaven and earth, God graciously set in motion a plan to bring us back together.

 

Brothers and Sisters, Jesus has sought us out in our lostness, he’s forgiven us, and now invites us to his Table.  He’s given himself as a sacrifice for our sins and this morning he invites us to his heavenly banquet.  But how do we come?  Again, this is the meal Jesus gave us to make sense of the cross.  He is the Passover lamb sacrificed for our sins.  By his death he frees us from our bondage to sin and death and leads us into new life and new creation.  In Jesus we see grace.  We don’t deserve any of this.  We’re the rebels; we’re the sinners; we’re the God-haters.  One day he will wipe such people from creation so that it can be finally, once and for all set to rights.  We deserve nothing but death, but in his grace Jesus offers us forgiveness and restoration and life.  And when we take hold of his grace in faith he tells us that the whole heavenly court rejoices.  What was lost has been found.  What ran away has been restored.  Someone who had been an enemy of God, is now a friend—even a son or a daughter.

 

But we’re always at risk of forgetting that we come to the banquet only by grace.  It’s interesting that in the gnostic pseudo-gospel of Thomas, the parable was changed.  In that telling of the story, the shepherd explains to the lost sheep that he sought it out because he loved it and he valued it more than the others.[1]  We’re prone to twisting the story the same way in our own minds—thinking that we’ve been invited here to the Table because we deserved to be here.  But that’s not the story Jesus tells.  The one sheep that was lost was no more valuable than the other ninety-nine.  The one coin lost was no different than all the others.  In fact, in the parable of the Prodigal Son, which follows them, the son who was lost was a disgrace to his father and many people justly wonder why his father didn’t simply disown him.  The only difference between the one and the ninety-nine and the one and the ten is that the one was lost.  Brothers and sisters, we are not here because we’ve earned God’s love.  We’re here by his grace.  We are here because he rejoices in redeeming sinners.  We’re here because it pleases him to forgive his enemies and restore them to his fellowship.  In this we see his glory.

 

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

 

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

[1] Gospel of Thomas 107.