181205 Sermon on Genesis 11-13 (Advent 1 Midweek), December 5, 2018 Our reading today from Genesis chapters 11-13 is important for understanding the Bible.  The Bible is quite large and so it is easy for people to get lost in it.  It is always good to know the beginning of the story.  Our reading tonight, in a way, is the beginning of the story.  To be sure there is a history that precedes Abram and Sarai—Adam and Eve, Cain, Abel, and Seth, Noah and his three sons.  These also are important people for understanding the Bible—particularly Adam and Eve and the story of their fall into sin.  But all of these things are covered in the first 11 chapters of Genesis and their stories are done.  Beginning with chapter 12 of Genesis pretty much the remainder of the Scriptures is about Abram and his descendants.  As we heard in our reading Abram was called out of Ur in the land of the Chaldeans—the southern area of Mesopotamia close to where Babylon was.  The whole family goes north along the fertile rivers in Iraq.  But then just Abram, Sarai, and Abram’s nephew Lot, go further, turning south and coming into the land of Canaan.  This was the beginning of a story that would play out over centuries and is still being played out to this very day.  Abraham’s descendants would settle this land.  Jesus would be born of this nation and would be a blessing to all the people of the world.  Christians to this day are imitators of Abraham in their faith towards God and their living according to God’s promise, come what may.  And so in all the books of the Bible after this first book of Genesis, it is important to understand that all these characters, with a few notable and important exceptions, are about Abraham’s descendants and the relationship with they had with the one true God.  He was their God and they were his people, according to the covenant that God made with Abram as we heard in our reading.God’s covenant, his promise, is the main thing in Abram’s life.  He says to Abram, “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you.  And I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing.  I will bless those who bless you, and him who dishonors you I will curse, and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.”There are a few things about this promise that are worth talking about a little bit more.  First of all, Abram is called away from what is familiar—literally.  The word “familiar” comes from the word “family.”  Abram is told to leave those whom he knows and loves and where he would have some natural advantages and security, and live by God’s promise that he will take care of him and bless him.  St. Paul points to Abram as the great example of faith, and that is what is extraordinary about him.  He left what he could see and he pushed forward for that which he could not see, but that had been promised him by God.Secondly, God says to Abram that he will make him into a great nation.  There’s a problem, though. Abram and Sarai do not have any children.  Natural human reason would think that it was silly to go to a new land when there aren’t any heirs to inherit it.  It took over twenty five more years of living according to God’s promises before Abram and Sarai would be granted their long awaited son, Isaac.  God would continue this pattern of making Abram’s descendants into a great nation, but doing so in an unexpected way that natural human reason is not all that impressed by.  Abram’s descendants were never an empire—not even close.  They were never as great as Egypt or Babylon or Persia or Greece were in their glory days.  They didn’t have a lot of land.  They didn’t have armies capable of conquering the world.  So what made them great?  It was that they w

181202 Sermon for Advent 1, December 2, 2018 A couple weeks ago we had a reading from 2 Peter where he said that in the last times scoffers will come scoffing, wondering where Jesus is.  He is supposed to come, but things are continuing on like they always have been since the beginning of Creation.  This point of view is the major alternative to thinking like a Christian.  “Things have always gone on the way that they have, and they are going to continue to go on that way.”  Over the centuries this message gets tweaked here and there, but it is mainly the same.  Among us, therefore, we hear about what sounds like the opposite of things going on like they always have—the story of innovation and progressivism.  The times, they are a changin’, but let’s not forget that that song is over fifty years old.  The message of modern times is even older—at least a couple hundred years old.  They all say that with our own natural human smarts and ambitions we have discovered what is really useful, equitable and good.  The old ways are over and done with.”  President Obama, a few years ago, spoke according to this old narrative when so-called “marriage” was invented for people of the same sex.  He spoke about being on the “right side” of history.  What he meant by that is that things are going to stay the same.  We aren’t ever going to go back to those Neanderthal days when only men and women were married.  The times, they are a changin’, but then they are going to stay the same.  Supposedly we’ve figured out yet another thing to make life more pleasant for ourselves, and now life will carry on like it always has.Modern Man has forgotten about God because it doesn’t seem to increase his quality of life.  And so he has become an expert at finding the little comforts and improvements—tweaking this and that.  He isn’t able to life his mind above the bushes and berries that are right in front of his nose.  Everything is mundane, but he wants to believe that the final frontiers are being conquered, and that the greatest changes are afoot.  But this is just blindness caused by pride.The season of Advent affords us the opportunity to speak about real change.  The word “advent” means “coming” or “arrival.”  And there is a two-fold coming that we consider during this four week season—Christ’s first coming and his second coming.  Christ’s first coming is at Christmas, when he came down from heaven and was incarnate in the womb of the Virgin Mary by the power of the Holy Spirit.  His second coming has not happened yet.  He sits at the right hand of God and will come again to judge the living and the dead. Jesus, the Son of God incarnate, is the great change.  By the redemption he has worked, we are prepared for a land, not just of milk and honey, but where righteousness dwells.  As King David puts it in Psalm 23, “Surely, goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life, and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.”  Through Jesus we are acceptable in God’s sight and may live together with him.  By Jesus’s actions 2,000 years ago as well as his actions today through his Word and Sacraments, he is bringing this about.  The final step of his total deliverance has not yet happened, but fast approaches.  This is the radical alternative to the way that the world thinks.The thinking of the world has been the same from the beginning.  You see it already in Adam and Eve.  After they fell into sin they thought, “Well, that stinks.  We really screwed up there.  But I suppose we should try to make the most of it.”  And so they engage in busyness.  They try to deal with the effects of their sin.  They try to put out of mind that thing that the Lord had said: “In the day that you eat of it you will surely die.”  Busyness and forgetfulness became the new normal

181125 Sermon on Matthew 25:1-13 (Last Sunday of Church Year), November 25, 2018 In a way we know a lot about sleep and yet in another way it is something that is mysterious.  We know a lot about sleep because we do it so often.  About a quarter to a third of our whole life is spent in sleeping.  It’s not like we don’t know what it is. And yet we don’t totally understand it.  I’m sure you’ve noticed how you end up slipping off to sleep unawares.  Sleep is not something that you can set out to do and accomplish by your own will power.  If you want to sleep, then you put yourself in a position where sleep is likely to come, but it’s not really up to us to make us sleep.  On the other hand we can keep ourselves awake by our own willpower somewhat, but our will can be thwarted—especially if we are tired.  We might fall asleep even though we’d like to stay awake.This happened to the disciples Peter, James, and John once.  It was the night that Jesus was betrayed.  After instituting the Lord’s Supper Jesus and the disciples went outside the city of Jerusalem to the Mount of Olives.  Then Jesus and Peter, James, and John went on a ways from the rest of them.  Jesus told these three to watch and pray, while he went on further to pray by himself.  That was when Jesus wrestled with his Father in prayer, asking that the cup should pass from him if that should be possible.  After praying for a while Jesus came back to the three and found them sleeping.  He woke them up and told them to watch and pray.  The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak.  Three times this happened where Jesus went to pray by himself and when he came back he found the three sleeping.  Why couldn’t they stay awake?  This gives us something to wonder about when it comes to the New Testament’s instructions about the end times.  In several different places we are told to stay awake and watch for the second coming of Jesus.  Both our epistle reading and our Gospel reading speak to this.St. Paul says in our epistle reading that we must beware because Jesus will come like a thief in the night.  Thieves are pretty clever, and they will pick the time that they believe is the most likely when they will not be detected.  Those who are not prepared are going to be caught unaware.  Therefore we must stay awake and be sober. Sleep plays a very important role in Jesus’s parable of the five wise and five foolish virgins.  The plot turns on the fact that they all fell asleep with their lamps burning.  If they had stayed awake, they would have known how much time had passed and that the oil would necessarily be getting low or already be gone.  Then, furthermore, the foolish virgins would have been able to get more oil, but now there is no time.  The bridegroom was already there.  The shops were either closed or a long way off.  By the time they get back, the doors are shut and the bridegroom would not let them in.Since sleep is so important for what Jesus and the apostles teach about the end times, it is beneficial to consider it carefully.  What does this sleep signify?  I think the most important point of comparison is the lack of consciousness.  The lack of consciousness is something that is also found with those who are not sober.  Being sober means that you know and understand what is going on.  Staying awake and being sober is often linked together in Jesus’s and the apostles’ talks about the end times.  What they are saying is that we must be conscious.But, be conscious of what?  The short and correct answer is that we should be conscious of the Lord Jesus Christ, but we must not just shut off our brains at this point, satisfied that we already know the answer.  Remaining conscious of the Lord Jesus Christ is harder than it might sound at first, but then again it is also quite easy and a

181121 Sermon on Deuteronomy 26:1-11 (Thanksgiving), November 21, 2018 The Thanksgiving Holiday is an important American tradition.  As it is with other national festivals, all people are gathered together no matter what their creed or race.  Along with the Holiday season and the Fourth of July, everybody celebrates this festival.  That’s why all the airports and highways are packed with people.But as you know, we are not gathered here tonight because we are Americans or because we worship America.  We are Christians.  We worship Christ.  And so our Thanksgiving is different.  It’s directed someplace, namely, to our God—it is not just a general sense of gratitude.  Even atheists can understand the value of having a sense of gratitude.  It is expressed in proverbial sayings like, “Be grateful for what you have,” or “count your blessings.”  But it is something different to lift up your hearts unto the Lord, giving thanks for exactly what it is that you have at this moment, where you are in your life, no matter where you are or what is going on.This is the kind of thankfulness that I’d like to learn a little more about tonight.  Consider our Old Testament reading.  This is from Deuteronomy at the time of Moses.  The Israelites are still in the wilderness, but God is speaking to them about what they should do when they enter into the land that God has promised for them.  They are to take some of the first fruits of their newly acquired land and sacrifice it to the Lord.  The words are especially important.  They are to say, “I declare today to the Lord your God that I have come into the land that the Lord swore to our fathers to give us.”  And a little later it says, “And [God] brought us into this place and gave us this land, a land flowing with milk and honey.”  The focus, the attention, is on the Lord God.  In their new home they lift up their eyes to God and say, “You are the one who did this for us and to us.  We are here because of you.”This “in your face” kind of interaction with God, this “we lift up our hearts unto the Lord” kind of thanksgiving is what makes it different from what comes naturally to us.  What would be perfectly natural for the Israelites to do when they entered the promised land is to look around them and say, “My goodness, what milk!  What honey!  Look at all this stuff that is mine!  Let’s count it!”  What comes perfectly naturally for all people is to look at the gifts and pay no mind to the One who gives the gifts.  Of course, everybody knows in some sense that God is back there somewhere as the supreme being or the grand architect, but what drives the gratitude—the real force behind it—is the goodness of the stuff.  So long as life is good and exactly how you might want it to be, then the gratitude might be there, but not God.  The goal is not to have God, but the stuff—the quality of life.What makes the Israelite’s thanksgiving or the Christian’s thanksgiving different from what otherwise comes naturally to us is faith.  God’s people believe his promises.  God’s promise plays a large part in the thanksgiving that the Israelites are to offer in our reading.  At the very beginning of their thanksgiving they recall that God promised their fathers this land for them.  God kept his promise and brought them there.  More important than land or milk and honey is God’s promise that he would be their God and that they would be his people.  He promised them the Savior so that they could be together forever.  God’s promises is what gave them the confidence to raise their hearts to him.God has also made his promises to you.  He has baptized you, and do you know what God’s Word says about that?  Jesus says in the last chapter of Mark: “Whoever believes and is baptized shall be saved, whoever does not believe shall be condemned.”&

181118 Sermon on Matthew 25:31-46 (Second to Last Sunday of the Church Year), November 18, 2018 In our Gospel reading Jesus is speaking about the last day and the judgement of the living and the dead.  All people will come before him on that day, and each will be judged by him.  What was previously hidden will be brought to light.  One of the names for this momentous event is the “apocalypse,” which means uncovering.  Everything will be exposed.  All people will be perfectly divided so that each goes where he or she belongs.  The blessed shall inherit the kingdom that the Father has prepared from the foundation of the world.  The cursed shall enter hell, which was created for the devil and his angels.  Eternity shall be spent in either of these two places, and each individual will be in one or the other.  There is plenty in these words to awaken all of us.Because these words and ideas are so exalted, magnificent, and generally overlooked by people—including Christians—there are a lot of different things that we could talk about.  But I’d like to focus today on the basis of Jesus’s judgement in the picture he gives us in the Gospel.The difference between the sheep and the goats is that the sheep fed, gave drink, welcomed, clothed, and visited Jesus.  The goats did not do any of these things.  Which commandment is being talked about here?  All these things have to do with the fifth commandment: You shall not murder.  As Jesus teaches in the Sermon on the Mount, you shall not murder does not just mean that I shouldn’t kill my neighbor.  It means that I should be kindly disposed towards my neighbor and help him with whatever his needs might be.  Our Catechism says that the meaning of this commandment is that we should fear and love God so that we do not hurt or harm our neighbor in his body, but help and support him in every physical need.  That means that we should give food, drink, clothing, and otherwise support our neighbor so that he or she may live comfortably and pleasantly rather than in wretchedness and suffering.A person may then wonder about the other commandments.  What about fornicating, adultery and other perversions?  What about stealing and lying?  What about despising preaching, not calling upon God’s name, or not loving God with all our heart, soul, strength, and mind?  These things also will be taken into account in the final judgment because all these things are part of the Ten Commandments.  They make up the will of God as it is given to us in his Law.  But Jesus must have a definite purpose in mind for speaking only about the fifth commandment.  Jesus obviously knows about the other commandments, but he chooses only this one.  Furthermore, the fifth commandment is not spoken about in a general way, he is speaking only of the actions towards the least of these my brothers.  In so far as a person either ministers or does not minister to the least of Jesus’s brothers, he is either ministering or not ministering to Jesus.So who are Jesus’s brothers?  For answering this question it is important that we pay close attention to God’s Word.  The answer is a bit surprising and, to be honest, is rather off-putting to our reason.  Jesus’s brothers are not his relatives.  They also are not humanity in general.  They are those who hear the Word of God and keep it.  There are several examples that support this.One time Jesus was teaching a crowd of people, and the word went through the room that Jesus’s mother and his brothers were looking for him.  They must have had something important that they needed from him.  But Jesus looks around him and says, “These are my mother and my brothers.  Whoever does the will of God is my brother, and sister, and mother.”  This strikes the unbeliever as being especially cold that Jesus would choose strangers ov

181111 Sermon on Matthew 24:15-28 (3rd Last Sunday of the Church Year), November 11, 2018 Beginning today we have entered into that season of the Church Year where the readings direct our thoughts to the end of our lives, the end of the world, Christ’s second coming, the judgement of the living and the dead.  These are the last things and they have not yet come to pass.  One day the sun and the moon will darken, the stars will fall, the trumpet will sound, and Christ will come on the clouds in great glory.  Then all people will be resurrected from the dead, appear before Christ, and those who are righteous will be received into heaven, while those who remained in their sins will be cast into hell.  This is either going to happen while we are still living or this is what our bodily existence will awaken to after we have closed our eyes in death and been laid into the grave.The end, the goal, the culmination of everybody’s life is in these last things, but we need some help or we won’t welcome these thoughts in the least bit.  God’s righteous judgment is the Old Adam’s greatest fear.  Past sins come to mind.  And have you gotten any better?  Have you quit sinning?  To understand God’s righteous judgement is to understand the impossibility of salvation in any other way than by the salvation Jesus has worked on the cross—his sacred head wounded, with grief and shame weighed down.  The cross is everything.  It is the sinner’s only hope.  But it is not an empty hope or a hope that might or might not produce results.  We can know this by Jesus’s resurrection from the dead.  Jesus was crushed for our iniquities and bore all the wrath of God for all your sins and for the sins of the whole world.  He became a worm and no man.  But God’s wrath was extinguished with the blood of his Son, and he raised him from the dead because He is his beloved Son in whom he is well pleased.  And so the Father also loves you because Jesus has joined himself to you.  It wasn’t his own sins that he suffered and died for, it was your sins—all of them.  You and he go together.  If he has been raised by the glory of the Father, then you also are raised to live a new life before God in righteousness and purity forever.  And so when the sun and the moon wobble in their orbits, and nations rise up in war, and the sea roars, and the trumpet blasts, by faith in Christ you may lift up your heads and look up, because your redemption is drawing near.  By faith in Christ, we can scan the horizon, awaiting his coming with eager anticipation instead of cowering in the bushes in horror.  By faith in Christ you can say together with St. John, “Come quickly, Lord Jesus.”  But there is a lot of trouble that must be dealt with now and going forward until the end.  Jesus’s prophecies that are recorded in our Gospel reading today especially deal with these things.  But before we get into that, I’d first like to speak about the nature of prophesies in general, so that we can keep this in mind as we consider Jesus’s words.The usual nature of prophecy is that things are not cut and dried as though we were dealing with a news report from the future transferred back in time before the event.  The Old Testament prophecies concerning Christ have this character, where it seems as though it would not have been so perfectly clear at the time that the prophecy was given.  After the prophecy is fulfilled, then it is easier to look back at what was spoken or done and see more clearly.  St. John speaks of this in his Gospel.  Not all the things that Jesus said or did were altogether immediately clear.  Some of these things were understood more fully only later.  For example, when Jesus said that he would destroy the temple and rebuild it in three days, St. John says that the disciples did not understand him when he said that. 

181104 Sermon on Matthew 5:1-12 (All Saints' Day [observed]) November 4, 2018 The word “blessed” is a church word.  It is not used much outside of Church. The idea behind it is that God is the one who causes the good that a person is experiencing.  This way of looking at life, however, is unknown in society.  Instead of God being the decisive factor, a person’s every day life and its relative happiness or unhappiness is believed to be determined by other factors like hard work, strategy, research, technology, and so on.  At the bookstore you will find many resources that promise blessing if you will only manipulate these factors, but you won’t find very many on God blessing or cursing people.  People just don’t believe that kind of thing.  Most still believe in God, or an idea in their heads that they call “god,” but he doesn’t have much to do with the nuts and bolts of a person’s life.  He doesn’t bless and he doesn’t curse.  A person’s happiness is dependent upon other factors.  And so when we come to the beatitudes, Jesus’s list of blessedness that we heard in our Gospel reading this morning, it is almost incomprehensible to most people.  A little help might be given by substituting the word “blessed” with “happy” or “successful,” since these words are more common.  Then it would read: “Successful are the poor in spirit…  Happy are those who mourn...” And we can learn something with these substitutions.  They bring out more clearly how Jesus is speaking contrary to our expectations.  How can someone who is poor be successful?  Aren’t those who are successful rich, by definition?  How can anyone who mourns be happy?  Aren’t mourning and happiness opposites?  Being blessed means that things are good and just how they should be.  Jesus lists many instances where a person experiences lack and emptiness, and he says that this is good. How should we make sense of this?  Is this some alternate universe where empty is full and bad is good?  Just flip everything on its head?  No it’s not as simple or as silly as that.  But these words of wisdom do present a way of living that is different than how we naturally think.  Jesus assesses things differently than our reason would assess things.  Our reason is godless and unbelieving.  It believes that we are blessed quite apart from God, by manipulating the kinds of things that I mentioned earlier like hard work, strategy, technology, and so on.  All of the blessings that Jesus pronounces can only make sense if you understand that God is with the one who is being blessed, in spite of the hardship or lack that he or she is experiencing at the time.  Being blessed means, more than anything, that God is with you.  With this understanding—that blessing is a matter of God being with you—let’s look more closely at what Jesus says.  “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”  We could spend quite some time investigating what exactly Jesus means by saying “poor in spirit” rather than just “poor,” as he does in Luke’s Gospel.  That would be time well spent.  But for our purposes today we will focus on the main contrast that is involved: being “poor” here, but “rich” in the kingdom of heaven.  Being poor in this life is not the worst thing so long as you have faith in God, the great Giver.  If someone is poor and looks to God to open his hand and satisfy his or her desires, then he or she has more wealth with that faith than those who have billions and billions of dollars.  For when this short life is ended the billions must be left behind.  Then the burning question will not be about earthly possessions, but rather one’s standing before God.  Those with faith will inherit the kingdom of heaven.  Those without faith will receive the just punishment for their sins.  Theoretic

181028 Sermon for Reformation (Romans 3:19-28), October 28, 2018 Five hundred and one years ago this Wednesday, October 31st, Martin Luther posted 95 theses, or statements, in which he challenged the Roman Catholic Church’s selling of indulgences.  Indulgences were and still are offers of merit to those who purchase them, which reduce the amount of time a person spends in purgatory.  This was something that only the pope could do because as the vicar of Christ he claimed ownership of the treasury of merit that has been accumulated by all the saints.  He believed that he was able to transfer the merit that one saint had achieved with his or her good works to another who would receive them when they paid for these indulgences authorized by him.No part of what I’ve described to you is based in the Bible.  There is no such thing as indulgences in the Bible.  There is no such thing as purgatory in the Bible.  The pope is not the vicar of Christ and he doesn’t own and distribute the merit of the saints.  It is not possible to transfer credit from one sinner to another, nor is it even possible to earn this surplus of merit, or extra credit with God that then can be given to others.  None of this is Biblical.And so we come to one of the great principles of the Reformation: sola Scriptura or “Scripture alone.”  The Roman Catholic Church does not believe that the Bible is the only source for the teachings from God that we are to believe.  They say that the pope can establish doctrine when he speaks in an official way, or else Church councils can establish doctrine so long as the pope agrees with it.This might sound strange to us, that so much authority should be invested in someone that doesn’t even have a position that is instituted in the Bible, but human nature is the same across the centuries.  Think of how some people look at synodical pronouncements about this and about that.  A lot of these documents that are produced by our synod are pretty good, but they are not infallible.  Officially our congregation and synod ultimately only recognize the Scriptures as authoritative, but practically speaking these other pronouncements can carry a lot of weight.  A lot of our people look to the synod like the Roman Catholics might look to the pope or the church councils.So what is the alternative?  One of the more radical things that Luther taught is that each person must judge for himself or herself what is being taught.  And this takes us to another of the great principles of the Reformation: sola fide or “Faith alone.”  Each person is responsible for his or her own faith.  In the end only you can either believe what God says or disbelieve it.  This cannot be handed over to anybody else.  If you are deceived and led astray by false doctrine it is you who will pay the penalty, not anybody else.  It doesn’t matter what any church says.  What matters is what is true.This can sound kind of lonely, and in a way it is.  Think of the great examples of faith that are given to us in the Scriptures.  Abraham is the greatest example.  God gave his word to him to sacrifice his son, his only son whom he loved.  Would he believe it or not believe it?  He believed, but he was all alone as he did so.  It doesn’t appear that he told his wife Sarah.  He didn’t tell Isaac, or the servants who accompanied them to the mountain.  It was just Abraham and God until the angel intervened before Abraham sacrificed his son.King David, also, is commended to us as an example.  The Scriptures say that David was a man after God’s own heart.  But when you listen to the Psalms he has written, he often complains about being all alone.  His friends have deserted him.  His own family has turned against him.  His enemies are looking to bring him down.  It is just him and God, but he puts his trust in

181027 Funeral Sermon for Arlene Thiele Not all deaths are the same.  The difference between someone who is old dying and someone young dying is so vast that they are almost two different things.  When young people die there is immense sadness.  It is easy for all of us to imagine the things that a young person might have done if only they lived longer.  When someone who is old dies, we know that those kinds of experiences are generally behind them.  They’ve had their children and their grandchildren.  They’ve had their careers and vacations and memories.   Unlike how it is with young people, nobody seems to be getting robbed of the potential life that they might have lived.And when we consider the situation of someone like Arlene, it is even more this way.  She certainly lived to be old.  At ninety-six she was the oldest member of our congregation.  In addition to having a long life, full of experiences, we also know that these last few years were not the way that most of us would choose to live out our days.  Dementia took away Arlene’s memories and many of her abilities.  She lost her independence and became more child-like.  In a way, she became like a different person.  We can be thankful that dementia did not take away her pleasant demeanor and positive outlook on life like it can with some.  I don’t think she was really unhappy these last years, but certainly thing were changed, and the daily tasks only became more and more difficult for her to do.  Life was only becoming harder, and so it is good that things should no longer be difficult for her.Death, therefore, can be evaluated very differently depending on the circumstances.  It can be a horrible tragedy, or something that is only to be expected, or even it can be somewhat of a relief.But what is almost always ignored, when death is looked at in this way, is God.  All the focus is on this life and the relative quality or quantity of it, but what about the One who giveth and who taketh away?  Behind every life there is a story with God, the Creator, on the one hand, and the person, the creature, on the other.  They are the main characters.  A good way to understand the Bible, and the history that is recorded in it, is that contained in this book are stories about the way that God dealt with different people.  Just as God dealt with the people of the Bible, so also he deals with each and every one of us up until today.And the stories can be quite different.  Some live in rebellion against God and will not listen to his Word.  They thwart God’s efforts to save them through faith in his only beloved Son whom he sent to redeem the world.  Others repent of their sins and believe on the Lord Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of their sins.  Yet others believe for a while, but then fall away.  And yet some of these are called back to faith.  The Good Shepherd goes out looking for the sheep who was lost, and when he finds it he puts it on his shoulders and carries it back to the flock rejoicing.  The twists and turns and failures and restorations and joys and crosses are all a part of this story.  The length of a person’s life, also, then, is part of this story.  But it isn’t the main thing.A person might have a short life on this earth, but then he or she is “away from the body and at home with the Lord.”  Or a person might live a long life on this earth, but if he or she lives in rebellion against God and his Son, then their long life on earth will look incredibly short from the perspective of eternity.  Jesus says, “What good does it do for a person to gain the whole world, but to lose his or her own soul?”  This life and the quality of it is not the only or even the main concern.  The will of God towards you in Jesus Christ is everything.Jesus speaks of this will of God towards us in the readin

181021 Sermon on Ephesians 6:10-17, October 21, 2018 (Trinity 21) One of the great themes in the Bible is that God stands by and saves his own, even though the odds against them are overwhelming.  Generally speaking, God is not with the strong.  He is with the weak.  The Bible is full of examples of this, but I’ll just mention a couple.God was with Moses and the twelve tribes of Israel who were enslaved in Egypt.  Slaves don’t have weapons.  They are not allowed to organize themselves so that they can revolt against those who are enslaving them.  The Israelites were weak.  But God is strong.  He pounded the land of Egypt with ten plagues.  With the tenth plague he slaughtered the firstborn of every family, unless that family had been redeemed by the blood of the Passover lamb.  All the Egyptians finally tell the Israelites to get out of his land, because otherwise they would all die.You might think that in such a situation the Israelites would scurry out of town under the cover of darkness, escaping while they had the chance.  But that’s not how it was.  They left in the daylight, taking all their stuff with them.  God even made it so that these powerless people plundered the Egyptians.  Moses had told them to ask for gold and silver and clothing from their Egyptian neighbors, and God made it so that the Egyptians gave it to them.  The slaves became rich.  The weak became strong.  How so?  God made them rich and strong.Another example of God fighting for his own people who are weak is with Gideon.  At his time the Israelites were weak compared to their neighbors.  They couldn’t defend themselves, and so their more powerful neighbors would come and take their stuff whenever it suited them.  And so the Israelites weren’t able to thresh out their grain in the open or store anything so that it was easily accessible.  They had to hide everything carefully, because their enemies would take anything that they could find.  But God decided to raise up the man Gideon to free his people from their oppressors.  The call went out for men to fight and 32,000 answered the call.  But God told Gideon that the number was too large, because otherwise the people are going to say that they saved themselves instead of the Lord saving them.  And so Gideon said to the men that whoever didn’t want to fight should go home.  22,000 went home, leaving 10,000 to fight.  But that number was still too large, so God told Gideon to choose only those men who drank from the river with their hands as his warriors.  The final number was just 300.  These three hundred men were vastly outnumbered by their enemies, but God made it so that the thousands who were arrayed against them became terrified when the 300 approached them in the dark.  They ended up killing themselves in their flight from the three hundred and those who escaped were taken care of by the 10,000 who had stayed to fight.When I teach these kinds of things from the Bible I often ask those I’m teaching to put themselves into the shoes of the people they are learning about.  How would you feel if you were a slave in Egypt?  How would you feel if you saw the horrible plagues that maimed and killed?  And what if you were Gideon or one of those three hundred soldiers who were sneaking up on the enemy camp that would without doubt slaughter you if they knew how few you were?  I like how King David says it when he is an old man and he looks back on the way that God had dealt with him over the years in Psalm 18.  David says, “He made my feet like the feet of a deer and set me secure on the heights.”  Think of those mountain dwelling animals that run and skip along where there is just a tiny ledge of rock and on the other side there is a thousand foot drop.  That’s the picture that David is painting for us.  He is l