A Sermon on Matthew 4:1-11.

I said on Ash Wednesday that the problem that ensnares the world today is the same problem that has plagued humanity since the beginning, namely, our rebellion against God. Part of going through Ash Wednesday and going through the season of Lent is to remind ourselves that even though we are the people of God, we are not excluded from this human predicament of sin. We have to come to God and repent, holding up our brokenness and weakness to him as an offering, so that we can be the people he created us to be and so that we can go out into the world to do the work of his kingdom as his broken-but-healed, weak-but-strong people. And I also said that our repentance takes place as part of a story that starts in the Garden, makes its way through Abram and his offspring, climaxes in the death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus of Nazareth, and then continues in the Church. It is that same story that is on display in our readings this morning. 

God created Adam and Eve and placed them in the Garden to be his image-bearers, the vice-regents of his creation. Their task was to rule over creation, to govern it wisely, and to expand the Garden over the face of the earth. But Adam and Eve failed to listen to the Word of God. God commanded them not to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and the serpent twisted what God had commanded, deceived Eve, she and Adam ate, and ever since the world has been subjected to futility–ever since all created things have been under the curse. 

And then God called Abram and promised him that he would bless the entire world through Abram and his offspring, that he would take all that had gone wrong and make it right. The story weaves its way from Abram through the Patriarchs and Joseph until it comes to Moses, who stands before Pharoah and says that the God of heaven and earth has commanded, “Let my people go.” God’s solution to the problem of sin is Israel-shaped. Redemption is to come through Israel, and so he frees his people from slavery in Egypt, baptizes them in the Red Sea, and brings them to Sinai, like Adam and Eve in the Garden, to give them his commandments and to tell them how to live as his people. 

God’s solution to the problem that plagues creation is Israel-shaped, but even as God is on Sinai giving his Law to his people, Israel is following in the footsteps of Adam and Eve. They are rebelling against their creator and worshipping a golden calf at the foot of the mountain, and herein lies the fundamental problem that permeates the Old Testament. God’s solution to the problem that plagues creation is Israel-shaped, but Israel itself is part of the problem. They are just like Adam and Eve. They don’t listen to or obey the Word of God, and this rebellion, which manifests itself at Sinai, flows through the Old Testament from Exodus to Malachi. And so the question remains at the close of the Hebrew Bible: How can God use an Israel-shaped solution to the problem of sin when Israel itself has become part of the problem?

In answer to this question, God steps into the story of human history, unites himself to humanity in general but to Abraham’s offspring in particular, and will be faithful where Israel was faithless. So, when Jesus is led by the Spirit back out into the wilderness, this is not merely an exciting tale where Jesus is tempted by Satan. When Jesus encounters Satan, the whole Gospel is at stake, and the entire narrative of our redemption is at risk. Will Jesus be faithful where Israel was faithless? Will Jesus be faithful where Adam was faithless? And the answer to both questions is a resounding yes. Of course, those questions won’t be answered fulled until the cross where Jesus was obedient to the point of death. But here in the wilderness, as Satan comes and twists Scripture, Jesus succeeds where Israel and Adam failed.

Adam’s sin brought sin and death into the world. Israel’s sin put God’s plan of redemption in jeopardy.

However one wants to interpret the story of humanity’s fall in the opening chapters of Genesis, the major premise of that narrative is clear. The fundamental problem in the story of humanity is our rebellion again God, and our word for that rebellion is ‘sin.’ God created us to dwell with him forever. He created us to share life together forever. He created us with bodies that would never die because we had access to the tree of life. Ever since that moment, when the serpent deceived Adam and Eve in the Garden-Temple, humanity has been cut off from God, separated from its creator, and separated from the source of eternal life. We began to die that day, and all of this is because of sin, because we rebelled against God, because we thought we knew better than his instructions for our lives.

The season of Lent, which begins today, is all about sin. Or to be more specific: Lent is all about the appropriate human response to sin, which is repentance. And here, we see one of the most beautiful facets of the Christian Gospel. Repentance isn’t arbitrary. Repentance takes place or means what it means as part of a story, and it’s a crucial part of our role in that story. A long time after Adam and Eve sinned, God called a man named Abram and made a promise to him that God would fix the world through him and his offspring. And God’s faithfulness to this promise is what Paul calls “the righteousness of God.” The Scriptures aren’t concerned about the attributes of God as if they were concepts or ideas that could be understood and defined independently of how God had revealed himself in salvation history. The Scriptures are concerned with what God does, with his role in this story that we call human history, and with his faithfulness to the promise that he made to Abram. His faithfulness to that promise is his righteousness. 

And so, if God is going to be righteous, if God is going to fix the world through Abram’s offspring as he promised, then the sin which had always plagued humanity from the beginning must be dealt with. And not in a “coming to the Temple once a day, once a week, and on appointed festivals” kind of way, but in a once for all, final, never again to be repeated kind of way. And this God did, by taking a faithful descendant of Abraham and nailing him to the cross. Paul puts it this way. He says in short that God “made him who knew no sin to be sin.” 

Today isn’t Good Friday, but repentance and the cross go hand in hand because, on the cross, God dealt with sin once and for all. How he did that is part of the mystery. I can’t tell you with absolute certainty and clarity what it means that God made Jesus sin. I can only tell you that Paul is adamant that God nailed to the cross the problem that has plagued humanity since the beginning and that sin died as Jesus died. And so when we repent, we aren’t repenting in the hope that God will find some way to forgive our sins, nor are we trying to find some action or emotion or sacrifice that will bring the forgiveness for which we long. The forgiveness for which we hope is already secured in the past. Sin, my sin, your sin, the world’s sin, past, present, and future, has already been dealt with once and for all on the cross of Jesus Christ. And our part in this story is to repent. To come to God, to recognize our sinfulness, to recognize our brokenness, to recognize our failures, our faults, and the futile desires of the flesh, and to say, “God, I’m sorry. There is no good in me apart from you. There is no way for me to make myself right. But you’ve already dealt with my sin. You’ve already nailed it to the cross. But still, Father, this world is broken. I’m broken. Make it right. Make me right.”

And that moment right there, when we recognize our own brokenness as part of the world’s brokenness, is where the words that Paul says next in our reading come to their full force. Paul says that God made him who knew no sin to be sin “so that in him [in Christ, in the sinless o

In a few days, we will gather back here to start the season of Lent with a celebration of the Ash Wednesday liturgy. The season of Lent is a season of repentance and self-denial, and frequently in Lent people give something up like chocolate or television or the internet as an act of self-denial. Others use this season as an opportunity to deal with and hopefully move beyond some sin that they still struggle within their lives, and that’s completely appropriate for Lent too. The basic conception of Lent is that we’re “giving up,” whether that’s giving up something good as an act of spiritual discipline rather or giving up something sinful. Through either means Lent is trying to teach us what it means to empty ourselves, to deny ourselves, and to take up our cross and follow Jesus. 

We can see this if we take a closer look at our reading from St. Paul’s letter to the Philippians. The reading starts mid-thought for Paul, which is a bit unfortunate. Back at the beginning of chapter three, Paul is explaining that if someone wanted to put confidence in the flesh, by which he means, have confidence that his Judaism would save him, then Paul would have more reason for confidence than anyone. He was “circumcised on the eighth day, of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of Hebrews (which means he had no Gentile lineage); as to the law, a Pharisee; as to zeal, a persecutor of the church; as to righteousness under the law, blameless.” What’s important to note here is that none of these are bad things. There’s nothing wrong with what Paul lists here. Even being a persecutor of the church is reasonably defensible given what he believed about the consequences this new Jewish sect centered around Jesus might have for the people of God as a whole. 

And yet after making this list of reasons why he could have confidence in the flesh, Paul says, and here is where our reading starts: “But whatever gain I had, I counted as loss for the sake of the Messiah. Indeed, I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Jesus, the Messiah, my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish (or dung), in order that I may gain the Messiah and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which comes through the faithfulness of the Messiah, the righteousness from God that depends on faith—that I may know him and the power of his resurrection, and may share his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, that by any means possible I may attain the resurrection from the dead” (Phil 3:7–11).

Paul’s argument here is instructive for us. He says that there were good things in his life that he is willing to let go of for the surpassing worth of knowing Jesus, the Messiah, his Lord. Actually, he says even more than this. He says that he counts all things as loss for the surpassing worth of knowing Jesus. So what does Paul mean? Is he saying that nothing for him has any value any more except knowing Jesus Christ? I don’t think so. One of the mistakes people often make when reading Scripture is not being able to recognize that someone is speaking hyperbolically. What Paul is saying is that part of being a follower of Jesus Christ is being willing to give up the good things we have in our life for the sake of following Jesus. 

Here Paul has in mind specifically soteriology, the doctrine of salvation. But this is only a specific instance of what Paul had already told the Philippians earlier. He told them back in chapter 2 to imitate Jesus the Messiah, who “though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross” (Phil 2:6–8). The word for “emptied” here is the word κενόω, and theologians speak of Christ’s k

Acts 1:1-8

Saint Luke is the only one of the Evangelists, which is a word we use for the authors of the Gospels, who wrote a sequel. Matthew, Mark, and John (it almost sounds odd to say it without Luke in there) don’t tell us what happened after the ministry of Jesus. Only Luke does. We can piece together some events in the life of the early church by looking at the epistles and the situations that Paul and others were addressing, but for the most part, it is the book of Acts which is our only witness to the life of the church immediately after the ascension of Jesus Christ. This book is our only window into those earliest years of the church, which has now existed for nearly 2,000 years. 

And one of the things that Luke does in his introduction to this book, and it is subtle, but it is incredibly significant, is frame the story of the early church as a continuation of the story of Jesus. Now, I don’t mean that Luke says, “This is what happened before, and now this is the sequel.” It’s not simply that time has passed and now Luke is telling a new story that in some sense continues the themes of his last book. Luke actually says more than this. He says, “In the first book, O Theophilus, I have dealt with all that Jesus began to do and teach.” Note, he doesn’t say, “In the first book, O Theophilus, I have dealt with all that Jesus did and taught.” No, he says, “I have dealt with all that Jesus began to do and teach.”

If we stop and ask ourselves why Luke frames the story this way, the answer is obvious, and most you probably already know this. Luke tells the story of the early church this way because Luke believes that Jesus continues to do and to teach through his Apostles and through his church. The Gospel of Luke is the story of what Jesus began to do and to teach and the Acts of the Apostle is the story of what Jesus continued to do and teach through his Apostles. 

And for St. Luke, this isn’t simply a metaphor or an interesting way to frame the two stories. For St. Luke this belief is grounded in his pneumatology, which is a fancy way of saying that for St. Luke this belief about the early church is grounded in what he believes about the Holy Spirit. You see, the Holy Spirit isn’t just a doctrine, or an idea, or a source of magic power. The Holy Spirit is the Spirit of God but also the Spirit of Jesus Christ. I won’t get into the debates that led to the split between the Eastern and Western churches, but there is a reason that we say in our creed the Holy Spirit is the Lord, the given of life, who proceeds from the Father and the Son. The Holy Spirit then is our entry point into the divine fellowship. It is our means of access to this grace in which we stand. But perhaps most importantly, it is the Holy Spirit, who proceeds from the Father and the Son, and who was poured out on the church at Pentecost, that makes us members of the body of Christ. 

We have no participation in Jesus or in the Church apart from the Holy Spirit. It is the Holy Spirit who makes us all one in Christ Jesus, it is the Holy Spirit who leads us on our journey through this life, and it is the Holy Spirit who fills us with wisdom and insight and brings us more and more into conformity with Jesus Christ each and every day. At least we hope so. And because of this, with the Father and the Son, He is worshipped and glorified. So on the vertical dimension, we have our access to the heavenly realm and to the Trinity through the Holy Spirit who makes us one in Jesus Christ, and as important and stunning as that is, that is not Luke’s point in our passage this morning. 

Luke’s point is that those who have been filled with the Holy Spirit are called to go out into the world and do the work of Jesus Christ. The narrative works like this. Jesus Christ ascends to heaven, takes his seat at the right hand of God, and pours out his Spirit upon his Church to make them one with him and to send them out to do that work that he began to do in his earth

1 Corinthians 2:1-16; Matthew 5:13-20

Today we are three Sundays away from the start of Lent. This Sunday is known Septuagesima Sunday, which means that we are 70 days away from Easter. Next Sunday is Sexagesima Sunday, and the Sunday after that is the last Sunday before Lent, also known as Quinquagesima Sunday. I hope you are taking notes because there will be a quiz later, and I will need the proper spelling of those words. 

The point of these names is mostly to signify that Lent and Easter are coming. We are still in Epiphany, and we have not transitioned to Lent yet, but Lent is coming, and thanks be to God, so is Easter. In Lent, it is traditional for a community of believers like us to all read the same book as an act of Lenten devotion, and I would like to suggest that we all read a small book by Francis Chan entitled Letters to the Church. I’ll have more to say about the book as Lent approaches over the next few weeks, but for now, I wanted to put it on your radar as Ash Wednesday draws near. 

To the task at hand then, there are three things I would like us to focus on this morning. The first two come from the Gospel lesson, and the second comes from the Epistle, and we’re going to take them in reverse order: Epistle first, then Gospels. But what I want you to do is, as you hear me speaking and saying what I’m about to say, I want you to be thinking about who St. Dunstan’s is called to be as a church. 

Paul says at the beginning of our reading, “And I, when I came to you, brothers, did not come proclaiming to you the testimony of God with lofty speech or wisdom. For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus the Messiah and him crucified” (1 Cor 2:1–2). There is a lot that we could say here, but to keep it simple and to keep me from going off on rabbit trails, this is the essential message of the Christian message that will never not be a part of our life together at St. Dunstan’s. There is only one message for the world, and there is only one message for the church, and they are the same message. “Jesus the Messiah and him crucified” is Paul’s shorthand way of saying more fully what he says elsewhere, like 1 Corinthians 15: “For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve.” (1 Corinthians 15:3–5). 

That’s it. That’s our message to the world. That’s my message to you. That’s what I’m going to preach to you for as many Sundays as you’ll let me because every genuinely Christian sermon is simply a riffing on that sentence. To put it bluntly, if you’re not preaching the cross of Jesus Christ, you’re not preaching. The cross is and will always be the center of our life together and our teaching here at St. Dunstan’s because Jesus command to those who are on the way is simple: take up your cross and follow me. 

But also notice that for Paul, the cross is not just a historical and theological event. For Paul, the cross is the place where God’s secret and hidden wisdom is made manifest, the wisdom which is now made manifest in his preaching. He says, “But we impart a secret and hidden wisdom of God, which God decreed before the ages for our glory. None of the rulers of this age understood this, for if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory” (1 Cor 2:7–8). To put it simply, the cross reveals the wisdom of God, which this world does not understand, and therefore our decisions as a church, assuming we want them to demonstrate and reflect the wisdom of God, must be cruciform. They must be shaped by and defined by the cross of Jesus Christ. 

Second, Jesus uses two metaphors to describe the people of Israel in Matthew 5. If we don’t recognize that first and foremost Jesus is talking to Israel, we are missing a step in the hermeneutical process by which we come to u

Luke 2:22-40

Typically, this Sunday is the fourth Sunday of or after Epiphany, but instead, because today is February 2nd, we are celebrating Candlemas, also known as the Feast of the Presentation of Jesus Christ, also known as the Feast of the Purification of Mary, also known as Groundhog’s Day. Candlemas is one of the oldest known feasts in the Christian church dating back to at least the 4th century, where we know it was celebrated in Jerusalem. We have Candlemas sermons from Fathers of the church like Cyril of Jerusalem, Gregory the Theologian, Amphilochius of Iconium, Gregory of Nyssa, and John Chrysostom. An incomplete book known as The Pilgrimage of Egeria, the account of a woman who went on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land towards the end of the 3rd century, says this, “But certainly the Feast of the Purification is celebrated here with the greatest honor. On this day, there is a procession to the Anastasis [now known as the Church of the Holy Sepulchre]; all go in procession, and all things are done in order with great joy, just as at Easter. All the priests preach, and also the bishop, always treating of that passage of the Gospel where, on the fortieth day, Joseph and Mary brought the Lord into the Temple, and Simeon and Anna the prophetess, the daughter of Famuhel, saw Him, and of the words which they said when they saw the Lord, and of the offerings which the parents presented. And when all things have been celebrated in order as is customary, the sacrament is administered, and so the people are dismissed.”

It should be no surprise to us that this day was a feast day the celebration of which was comparable to Easter, for in many ways this is one of the more remarkable incidents in the life of Jesus where, as we saw with Jesus in the Temple as a young boy, many of the major themes of the Gospel narrative blend together in this one account. Here we find a reference to Mary, Joseph, Jesus, the Law of Moses, the Temple, Jerusalem, the Holy Spirit, the Messiah, the consolation or comfort of Israel, servant, peace, salvation, light, revelation, Gentiles, glory, and Israel. The Holy Trinity is present. The Holy family is present. The Law of Moses is present. The Jerusalem Temple is present. And we haven’t even started to tell the story yet of a young mother bringing her only child to the Temple to present him to the Lord in a simple act of obedience. And on the surface, that’s what drives this whole account. It’s the small act of obedience by Mary and Joseph that set everything else in motion. 

There are two texts at play here from the outset of the narrative. First, Leviticus 12 says that a woman who bore a son was unclean for seven days, and one the eighth day the boy was to be circumcised. Then, after 33 days (counting inclusively), the woman was to bring the child to the Tent of Meeting (the Temple filled this role in Mary’s day) with a sacrifice. For those who could afford it, the sacrifice was to be a one-year-old lamb for a burnt offering and a pigeon or turtledove for a sin offering. For those who could not afford a lamb, the mother was to bring two pigeons or two turtle doves, which is what Mary does. Secondly, the other text at play here is Exodus 13, which says, “Consecrate to me all the firstborn. Whatever is the first to open the womb among the people of Israel, both of man and of beast, is mine” (Exod 13:2). And so, because it is the fortieth day, and because Jesus is Mary’s firstborn, she and Joseph, as tired as they were, come to the Temple in obedience to their God. 

But there’s more that should be said there. If you’re sitting there thinking, “Exodus 13… Exodus 13… doesn’t something interesting happen in Exodus 13?” the answer is YES! Exodus 12 is the account of the first Passover, in which every household of the children of Abraham, so long as they could afford it, were to sacrifice a Lamb and were to put the blood of the lamb on the doorposts and lintel of the house so that when the Lord pass

So, here’s my logic. I’m assuming that no one is coming to the annual meeting who won’t be in church today, but there may be some people who aren’t staying for the annual meeting who are here right now. On that assumption, I’m going to both preach and give the “State of St. Dunstan’s address now,” and then if you don’t stick around for the annual meeting, you’ll mostly be missing out on the business part of the meeting. I’m not advising that you leave, but I am warning you that this might be a bit longer sermon than usual. Maybe not as last week, though. 

One of the things that surprise me when I hear some people talk about the early church is often how idyllic their descriptions are. They speak about the first several decades, even centuries, as if Jesus ascended, the Spirit was poured out, the Apostles learned everything that we would come to know as confessional Christian theology, and everything was perfect. But the careful reader of the New Testament will know that things in the first century of the early church were far from ideal. Even in Corinth, a city that Paul had visited personally and a church that he had founded, there were lots of problems, including divisions and descensions among the people. 

Now, I’m well aware that when a person in any position of authority stands up in front of a group of people and says, “I want you all to agree” or “I don’t want there to be any divisions among us,” what it often sounds like is, “I want you all to agree with me” and “I don’t want there to be any divisions among us, so you all need to start doing what I say.” As we’ll see, however, what Paul has in mind is something entirely different, but more on that in a moment. 

For now, I want to talk about us as a church. It was at the very end of December in 2017 that Bishop Morales made me priest-in-charge of St. Dunstan’s. That means that I’ve been “in charge” here (a term I’m not comfortable with, as some of you well know) for about two years, and in those two years, we’ve made some significant changes, especially more recently. Change is always difficult for people. Some people, especially at the very beginning, although not many, chose to leave this community and attend another church, and that’s ok. All that truly matters is that they are still attending somewhere and still actively participate in the worship of Jesus Christ. Others passed away, or their spouse did, and that meant a move or change for them that took them away from St. Dunstan’s. We’ve lost some very precious people over the past two years, either because they’ve decided to move on or because the Lord has called them into his presence, but that’s not the whole story of the past two years. 

I remember a few months back, a senior member of this church came to me and said, “Father, can we start asking people to wear name tags again because there are so many new people and I can’t remember all their names.” Now that’s the kind of thing a priest wants to hear. Look around. Not necessarily right now, especially later today at the picnic, and look at all the new faces that Lord has brought to this church over the past two years. Every service has new people who have joined over the past few years, and several of those new people are plugged in, teaching Sunday school, serving in different capacities, and even being or becoming members of the vestry. 

Not only have we been blessed with great people, both like time members and new saints to our community, but we’ve also been moving in the right direction. We’ve been, slowly but surely for two years, fixing problems that needed to be fixed, in some cases, urgently needed to be fixed. And now, as the Bishop likes to say, in my humble and correct opinion, we are ready to move forward into the future that God wills for us, and that’s primarily what ReVive! was all about. It was about asking what the marks of a healthy church are, what we are doing well, and what we could be doing better. For those of you who w

Later this evening I will be headed to the airport to board a plane to Wisconsin where I’ll spend the next week studying at Nashotah House. Because of the reading that I’ve had to do for the class that I’m taking, I’ve been thinking a lot about epistemology over the past few weeks. Epistemology is the study of the theory of knowledge or the study of how we know what we think we know. In the sciences, to know something to be true means to be able to demonstrate it through critical methodology, or at least that was the great claim of the Enlightenment and modernism. Postmodernism, however, reminded us that the subject (the person doing the thinking and studying) is always involved in any truth claim, so there is always a subjective element built into even the most seemingly objective studies. Nevertheless, in the sciences, claims to truth rest primarily on repeatable use of critical methodology to produce the same result. So, if you and I do the same experiment the exact same way and we get the same result, we have discovered the truth. 

In the humanities, however, what we mean by truth is not so simple and straightforward. What does it mean that a poem is true? Or a painting? What about Lord of the Rings or the Chronicles of Narnia? Certainly, the Chronicles of Narnia are not true in the same way that a history book should be true, but what Christian could deny the truth of what the risen Aslan says to Lucy? “’It means,’ said Aslan, ‘that though the Witch knew the Deep Magic, there is a magic deeper still which she did not know: Her knowledge goes back only to the dawn of time. But if she could have looked a little further back, into the stillness and the darkness before Time dawned, she would have read there a different incantation. She would have known that when a willing victim who had committed no treachery was killed in a traitor’s stead, the Table would crack and Death itself would start working backward.” Is that true? There is no Aslan, there is no Lucy, there is no table, and there is no Narnia, but who in this room would say that that tale isn’t true?

On the one hand, we have the sciences with their claim to truth through repeated, critical experimentation, and on the other, we have the humanities in which what counts as truth or knowledge is far more difficult to define. So, where on this spectrum do we place theology? When we say that something is true in theology or in the Church, is that claim more like a truth claim in the sciences or in the humanities? Or, to be more specific, when we hear John the Baptist say this morning, “Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world,” what do we mean when we say that it’s true?

This saying by John is one of the most iconic sayings in the history of Christianity. Jesus as the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world is a prominent symbol in the history of Christian art, and it affected Christian imagination from the first century onward, even within the Bible itself, for example, in Revelation 5 where Jesus is the lamb standing as though he had been slain. The Agnus Dei, Latin for “Lamb of God,” plays a central role in the liturgy, and at the fraction, we repeat the words of St. Paul that Christ our Passover, really, our Passover lamb, is sacrificed for us. Some of us this Christmas, as a gift from Jimmy and Ally Thomas, went to the “Behold the Lamb of God” concert. This imagery is used in many ways throughout the history of Christianity, so it’s important that we ask ourselves, when John the Baptist sees Jesus coming towards him, when he sees a man, with probably long hair and a beard and dusty garments and dirty sandals, and he points to that man and says, “Behold the Lamb of God,” how do we know that to be true?

Are there scientific, repeatable tests that we can do to prove that claim like Qui-Gon testing Anakin’s blood to check his midichlorian count? Is there a test that we could run to check Jesus’ blood to see how much Agnus Dei was in t

In 2008, Time magazine published an article entitled “10 Ideas that are Changing the World.” On this list were such ideas as “The End of Customer Service,” “The Post-Movie-Star Era,” and “Geoengineering.” For some, one of the more surprising ideas to make this list was number ten: “Re-Judaizing Jesus.” The article cites New Testament scholar Amy-Jill Levine of Vanderbilt University as saying, “if you get the [Jewish] context wrong, you will certainly get Jesus wrong.” For some, the article was surprising because, it was claimed, the church and biblical scholars have always known that Jesus was Jewish, and this wasn’t really a new idea. But, of course, that’s missing the point. The idea that was changing the world wasn’t merely reminding ourselves that Jesus was Jewish but rather that to understand Jesus, we must understand him in his first-century Jewish context, and this, unfortunately, is something the church failed to do for nearly two millennia. The history of the church’s reading of Scripture makes New Testament theology sound more like Greek philosophy than Jewish theology, and the project that is currently underway in New Testament studies, and for which we should all give thanks to God, is an attempt to reread and rediscover the New Testament in this distinctly Jewish light. 

 And I begin the sermon this way this evening because part of the process of coming to this understanding as readers of Scripture is coming to the realization that for most of us, in some important ways, this is not our story. Certainly, the prophets said that when God finally acted on behalf of the offspring of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, that action would be a blessing to the whole world. Indeed, in the promise made to Abram, he is told, “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” (Gen 12:1–3).

But there is a tension here. On the one hand, God has chosen to bless this one family, one people, amongst all the other families and peoples of the world, and yet when God acts to bless this one family, this one people, that action will be a blessing for all the other families and peoples of the world. This means that the story of the Bible, from cover to cover, is a distinctly Jewish story that, at its climax, resounds with blessings for the entire world. And that’s what we’re here to celebrate tonight. We’re gathered here to celebrate that God in his grace decided not to bless only one family on the earth but every family. 

Listen again to how Isaiah describes the way the blessing of Israel will become a blessing to all the world: “Arise, shine, for your light has come, and the glory of the LORD has risen upon you. For behold, darkness shall cover the earth, and thick darkness the peoples; but the LORD will arise upon you, and his glory will be seen upon you. And nations shall come to your light, and kings to the brightness of your rising.” You see, the imagery here is light and darkness, like it is so often throughout the Bible. When God acts, the Gentiles will be in darkness, but over the descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, a great light will shine, and the Gentiles will be drawn to that light. 

We often read this type of imagery and language differently than it was intended. The imagery here isn’t that God will bless Jews and Gentiles alike, but that God will bless the Jewish people and that Gentiles are welcome to come and join themselves to that blessing. Therefore, in the first century of the church, some Jewish-Christian believers insisted that Gentiles be circumcised because that’s what the imagery of the prophets suggested, or at least that’s how it was most commonly read. The Gentiles were free to enjoy the blessings of the peo

Have you ever considered what we don’t know about Jesus? Or, to phrase the question differently, have you ever considered what isn’t in the Gospels? What we don’t know about Jesus is quite surprising when you think about it. We aren’t told what he looks like. We aren’t told how his “father” died. We aren’t told where he went to school, if he was well-liked as a boy, if he had friends, or what his favorite food was. We’re told almost nothing about the first 30 years of Jesus’ life except for two different stories about his birth and this one story about Jesus as a twelve-year-old boy in the Jerusalem Temple. 

It probably should not surprise us then that legends grew up about the child Jesus. One of the more famous collections of these legends is known at the Infancy Gospel of Thomas. To be clear from the outset, there is no historical basis for these non-canonical legends, but in the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, the infant Jesus breathe life into birds fashioned from clay, curses two boys and kills them, strikes the parents of one of the boys blind, reverses the deaths and the blindness, resurrects a friend who fell from a roof, heals a man who chopped off his own foot with an ax, carries water on a cloth, produces a feast from a single grain, stretches a wood beam to help his father finish making a bed, heals his brother James from snake poison, resurrects another child, and finally resurrects an older man who had died while working construction. Between all these miracles are failed attempts to teach the child Jesus, and the story culminates in our reading this morning with Jesus in the Jerusalem Temple teaching the elders and teachers of the people as he expounds the law and the prophets. 

It is works like this that tell us that from very early on people were interested in stories about the early life of Jesus, which makes it all surprising that for all four of the canonical Gospels the story of Jesus’ life really begins when Jesus is about thirty years old and is baptized by John the Baptist. John start’s with Jesus’ preexistence and then moves right to John the Baptist. Luke and Matthew tell stories about his birth, and Luke tells the story in this morning’s reading, and then both move directly to John the Baptist, and Mark skips over Jesus’ birth entirely and begins his Gospel with John. And all of this information leads me to ask the question, considering that no canonical Gospel tells a single story about Jesus between his birth and the events with John the Baptism other than this story, why does Luke include this incident with Jesus, his parents, and the Jerusalem Temple?

One answer could be that Luke got this story directly from Mary. Scholars have noted for a long time that Luke has a unique expression about Mary treasuring things in her heart, and it’s been argued that this is because Luke is getting some information directly from Mary or a source directly connected to Mary. But that still doesn’t explain why Luke only includes this story. What is it about this story, amongst all the others that Luke could have included, and surely there were many, that made it worthy of inclusion in his Gospel?

First, you may have noticed that I described this story as the “incident with Jesus, his parents, and the Jerusalem Temple” a moment ago. In Luke’s Gospel, the Temple is not just a place but is rather more like a character in the story. We’ve already been to the Temple in Luke’s Gospel, and the Temple will repeatedly appear throughout the narrative. Given Luke’s emphasis on the Temple, it’s not surprising that he might want to include a story of a young Jesus in the Temple, especially considering what Jesus says about the Temple. When Mary and Joseph find Jesus, he says, “Why were you looking for me? Did you not know that I must be in my Father’s house?” (Luke 2:49).

In this story, from a very early age, we see not only that Jesus understands his ministry is going to involve the Jerusalem Temple, as Luke repeated