Teaching the Hungry

I.N.I.

a sermon to be preached on the 8th Sunday after Pentecost, 22 July 2012, at our Savior Lutheran Church, Arlington, Virginia; the Gospel for the day being St. Mark 6:30-44

Grace, mercy, and peace be yours in Christ Jesus, our Lord,

[read text]

Dear Friends in Christ,

It's been styled as a grand outdoor picnic. It's been called a spiritual retreat that got derailed. It's been used as an example of snowballing generosity, and proclaimed as a miracle of astounding proportions.

The miracle of the feeding in today's Gospel is, or should be, familiar to all of us. There are 2 crowd feeding miracles in the Gospels: one with 7 loaves feeding 4,000 people that appears in Matthew and Mark; and this one with 5 loaves and 2 fish that feed 5,000 people in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. For you Bible trivia fans, you will take note that this feeding of the 5,000 is the only miracle of Christ that appears in all four of the Gospels. It doesn't take much reflection to come up with the idea that these feedings, and this one in particular, are important. Why else would God cause them to be preserved for us so many times?

Trusting that the miracle story is familiar to you, I want to look with you this morning at an aspect of it that might not have been emphasized in other sermons and Sunday School lessons based on these verses that you have heard. Some of you who know me well might think now that I will dwell on verse 32, "So they went away by themselves in a boat to a solitary place." Since God has given me the gift of being an introvert, there is some appeal in that. But that's not where I want to turn your attention. Rather, I'd like us to start with verse 34, "When Jesus landed and saw a large crowd, he had compassion on them, because they were like sheep without a shepherd. So he began teaching them many things."

In a place and time of great need - such as the Holy Land was when Jesus walked the earth - He met that need with His teaching. There were people there with debilitating and disfiguring diseases. There were people there out of work. There were orphans and widows. There were the divorced and and about to be divorced. There were depressed people and alcoholics; thieves and abusers. There were all sorts of people with all sorts of needs (including some who were hungry!), and when Jesus saw them, His heart went out to them. He had compassion on them.

This crowd of hungry people were hungry for more than food at this point. Whether they realized it or not, they hungered and thirsted for righteousness (Matt. 5:6). And, boy, would they ever be filled! Jesus met their varied needs by teaching them "many things." We don't know the exact content of His teaching on this occasion. We do know that it met their needs, particularly their core, central need.

Jesus had identified the whole crowd's need for direction, for a leader. They were clearly "sheep without a shepherd". Now chances are that few if any of us have enough direct personal experience with flocks of sheep to catch the real drift of this phrase. I know I don't. But I know enough about sheep to know that they're pretty much given to wandering. This past spring the little lambs at Mount Vernon learned how to escape from their enclosure and repeatedly took to wandering aimlessly, once (I'm told) even into the Mansion itself. Sheep just don't have focus and direction when left to themselves. When people are acting like sheep they, too, get quite lost.

So Jesus began as He always does, right where the need was the greatest. Everyone in that large crowd was at a different place in their spiritual lives, just like all of us in this smaller crowd are this morning. For one person in the crowd Jesus offered his pure words of forgiveness and comfort. Another got challenged with God's Law, before he got the grace he didn't know he needed. Surely, the Lord's teaching many things reached different people differently. Some already knew the condemnation of the Law. But some still needed to hear it. As it was then, so it is now.

And when it comes down to it, we the Church too often still have the initial reaction of the Lord's disciples. What was their response to this crowd? What did they suggest be done with them? Did the disciples share in the way that Jesus "had compassion on them because they were like sheep without a shepherd"? (Mark 6:34) Did the disciples teach the whole crowd the whole counsel of God, rightly dividing Law and Gospel so that the many people heard the "many things" each needed?

Well, not really. "The disciples came to Him, 'This is a remote place,' they said, 'and it's already very late. Send the people away....'." (Mark 6:35) Send the people away, they said! Jesus, we came away by ourselves in the boat to get away from the world. And here You are teaching them. Send them away, Lord! Please!

Do we ever stop to think that in the 21st century Church we are often those disciples? We want to be off by ourselves with Jesus where we can report to him everything we've done recently (Mark 6:30). Yes, that's good. We should spend time alone with the Lord, probably more that any of us regularly do. Whether it's by going off into a closet to pray (Matt. 6:6), or by going away on a group spiritual retreat as the disciples thought they were doing at the beginning of today's Gospel (Mark 6:30), or even by going off by ourselves into the hills to pray as Jesus Himself did after finally dismissing this crowd (Mark 6:46) ... whatever our method or setting (and it should really be some combination of them) we all need to spend more time with God.

But, again, I fear that today's Church -- just like the nascent Church there on the shores of Galilee -- all too vociferously pleads with Jesus to "send the [crowd] away." It seems that a lot of times we don't want to deal with them. We don't want to deal with their needs. We don't want to deal with their sins. We're okay with different kinds of people from different backgrounds and classes and nationalities in the Church (most Christians today seem to welcome other brothers and sisters in Christ who arrive freshly washed by Baptism, all clean and shiny, ready to be active in the local congregation). What we aren't okay with are the people in the crowd who have needs.

We're afraid of what they'll do to us. We're afraid they will contaminate us. We're afraid that because they are spiritually in a real different place from us, that they will somehow "be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord." (Romans 8:39) But you know from the end of Romans chapter 8, that no such thing could happen. All these fears we have about the crowds are paper tigers, with no power to harm us. These fears need to be thrown out and left behind. "Perfect love casts out all fear" (I John 4:18).

What Jesus is calling His Church to do is to welcome in the crowds of misfits and sinners and arrogant people, the weak and the broken, the lost and those who think they know their way but are depending on a broken spiritual GPS unit. Jesus said to His disciples and He says to us, "You give them something to eat."

Maybe some need food for their bodies. Maybe they need some intellectually satisfying food in the way of sound teaching. Some may need more in the way of emotional sustenance. Jesus would have us sit the world's crowds down in our midst and feed them from what we have. And surely the thing we have that everyone can benefit from is a spiritually sustaining fellowship.

This is how the prophecy in today's Old Testament lesson is fulfilled, where the Lord says that "they shall fear no more, nor be dismayed, neither shall any be missing" (Jeremiah 23:4). Jesus is the long-promised righteous Branch who sets up shepherds to take care of His scattered sheep.

All "who once were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ" (Ephesians 2:13) as we heard in today's Epistle. Everyone is brought to God through the cross of Christ. Jesus brought this about "by abolishing the law of commandments and ordinances" (v. 15), reconciling "us [all] to God in one body through the cross" (v.16). Now "you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God, built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the cornerstone" (vv. 19-20) This is the message of peace that Jesus extended to those crowds on the shore of the Sea of Galilee. While the disciples (who should have known better) wanted to send the crowds away, Jesus wanted them brought near. He wanted them brought close so badly that He was willing to die for them.

Our Church today needs to reflect this wide, welcoming gesture to the world. God's love is for everyone, for all people. It isn't just for people who look and think like us. It's not just for people who act and react like us. We dare not beg Jesus to "Send them away to go into the surrounding countryside and villages" (Mark 6: 36). We dare not remain under the accusation spoken in Jeremiah that "you have scattered my flock and have driven them away, and you have not attended to them." (Jeremiah 23:2). Rather, we want to respond positively to Jesus when He tells us "you give them something to eat" (Mark 6:37). By the power of the Holy Spirit that washes over us in our Baptism, and by the forgiveness that consumes us when we receive Holy Communion, we are able to welcome and care for the world's crowds that today still appear like sheep without a shepherd.

S.D.G.

345 years ago today -- on 16 July 1667 -- one of my great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandmothers died. Her name was Anna Grote Robrahn. We don't know just when or where she was born, but it was likely somewhere in northern Germany and in the early 1620s. (Anna's husband, Clawes Robrahn, was born in Pogez, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Germany in 1622.)

Anna and Clawes married in neighboring Carlow, Germany on 17 October 1648. They had 7 children between 1649 and 1659: Ties, Trine, Hans, Claus, Johann, Anna, and Engel. I'm descended through Anna's daughter Trine, who was born 11 December 1650.

Clawes was the village mayor ("der Schulze," or "der Schultheiss") in Pogez. He re-married on 17 September 1667, just two months and a day after Anna died. (Was the official mourning period 2 months?) Clawes and his new young bride ("young" as in 22 years younger than he was!) had another 8 children over the next 20 years. Clawes died in 1693 in the village of Pogez, the same place Anna died.

The other interesting thing about my ancestor Anna Grote Robrahn was that the German church record book all this information comes from says that the cause of her death was "als Hexe verbrannt."

For those of you without any German, that means she was burned as a witch.

< see http://www.pfhl.de/Kirchspiele/frz/2760.htm >

After much back and forth I think I have discovered that for me and my intended goals, it makes more sense to do bibliographic work and take notes using Zotero than Evernote. Big deal, huh? Well it might be.

I hope to be researching and writing in the broad and as-yet not-too-clearly defined area in the history of the Appalachian Trail. I am not too sure what I mean by that. The Trail is pretty well-defined. My research and writing goals are not.

So on I go. This blog may become active again. It may be a place I take public note of whatever I find that I think might be of interest to others. It might be a lot of things. But, if it really becomes active, it should be more than merely a place to record notes from hikes I take.

Zotero was created, as I understand it, as a free software for academics in the humanities to use for corralling their bibliographies and reading lists. But what I just discovered is that one can also attach an infinite (?) number of notes to each source. THAT was my real sticking point. (Or one of them.) I couldn't quite see how taking notes on the sources could easily be accomplished. Maybe it was a recent update of the software. Or maybe I just hadn't dug deeply enough. Anyway, voila!

What I'm not yet completely convinced of is the long-term preservation of notes and bibliographies. I'm old enough, or old-fashioned enough to fear cloud storage, to fear hard-drive failure, to fear out-dated hardware and software (anyone want a master's thesis written in Bank Street Writer on an Apple IIe and stored on several 5.25 inch floppy discs?). Luckily I have it printed out on actual paper; there's a paper copy at my seminary library; and there are microfiche copies in a couple libraries around the country.

Will whatever I'm putting into Zotero live as digital data for as long as I would like it to? One can say that everything on the Internet lasts forever, but it doesn't. Someone somewhere is maintaining it as transient bits and bytes on a server. Yes, lots of copies keep stuff safe, but that isn't intended for my personal data. So I'm still working on that part of my puzzle.

Evernote still seems to me to be an excellent tool for 'on the road' collection of stuff. At the moment I picture using it for grabbing information from random sources, particularly ones that are not online digital sources (a road sign, photograph I take at a conference, a menu in a restaurant, whatever). Then if it needs to be incorporated into my research database and notes, transferring it -- by hand if necessary, or by finding a way to connect the two, even if jury-rigged.

The web at the moment seems full of scholars and researchers, academic and otherwise, looking for the one best tool to meet their needs along these lines. I'm adding my voice. Maybe I'll be one of the people who ends up happy with his choice over the long run, and keeps adding notes about how it's going.

Here's What Christians Look Like

I.N.I.

A sermon to be preached at Our Savior Lutheran Church, Arlington, Virginia on 6 November 2011, whereon is celebrated All Saints' Day, and based on the Gospel for the day: St. Matthew 5: 1-12.

Grace, mercy, and peace be yours in Christ Jesus, our Lord!

[text]

Dear Friends in Christ,

Today's Gospel text is one that's surely familiar to most if not all of us as the opening words of the Sermon on the Mount. Lots of sermons have been preached on these words. A pastor sometimes wonders whether he can say anything new about such a familiar text. There are things about this text, though, that bear repeating, even if you've heard them before.

One place to start is to recall that these words are called “the Beatitudes” ... although that doesn't necessarily help deal with the text, does it? The name “beatitude” is simply a reminder, built on the Latin translation, that the first word in each verse is the word “blessed.” In Latin it is “beata.” Hence “beatitude.” We could just as well call this passage “the blessednesses.”

But what does this passage have to do with All Saints Day? We're observing All Saints this Sunday, even though we're several days past the actual day on the church calendar. The first lesson today, from the book of Revelation, seems to fit real well with the All Saints theme; that lesson has Saint John's vision of “a great multitude that no one could number, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne” of God in Heaven (Rev. 7:9). And from John's first epistle, our second lesson tells his Christian hearers “we are God's children now, and what we will be has not yet appeared; but we know that when [Jesus] appears we shall be like him, because we shall see him as he is” (I John 3:2); giving us the understanding that there is some kind of change, some kind of new thing that our lives will change into in the future, that is, when we are standing before the throne of God

This lesson from Matthew's Gospel actually also has a forward-looking, a future-grasping sense to it. When you stop and look at these Beatitudes, you see that the second half of most of them is a future tense “they shall.” They all indicate some reward yet to come, something that hasn't happened yet, something that might not be fulfilled until – again – we are standing before the throne of God where we will see Jesus as he is. But the first half of each verse is in the present tense.

These verses tell us over an over again that certain groups of people are blessed, blessed now, and blessed because they have something that is related to their identifying trait. First of all, what does “blessed” mean? We find the word used a lot in Scripture, so we can scope out the way God uses the word when communicating with people through the Bible. What it boils down to is that 'the special feature is that it refers overwhelmingly to the distinctive religious joy which accrues to [a person] from his share in the salvation of the Kingdom of God.' [Kittel, IV,307].

Religious joy. Not wealth. That's not what the blessings are. Not success in your job. Not a big house. Not safety and security as you travel. Not general health and well-being. The word “blessed” as it is used in the Bible refers to a particular religious joy that someone gets as a share of salvation.

The point is that this joy rises up only as a result of who we are as Christian people who have been called, gathered, enlightened and sanctified by the Holy Spirit. The joy of blessedness does not rise up when we have been working hard to be better people. It doesn't come to us by luck. It doesn't just happen randomly to some people for no reason. It comes to us because of who we are are God's daughters and sons, His redeemed children, the ones bought by the blood of Jesus.

In a few words, I'd like you to take home with you today the thought that these Beatitudes describe the Christian life. They don't tell us what we have to do. They don't lay out a plan for developing our lives. The Beatitudes neither prescribe ways we've got to live, nor do they proscribe outlooks we should avoid. In these verses Jesus simply tells us “here's what Christians look like.” So this passage at the beginning of his Sermon on the Mount is fitting at an All Saints Day observance because it characterizes all of the saints, all of the Christians, all those who follow Jesus.

While one could easily spend weeks working through these beatitudes one at a time, let's look instead this morning at just some of them to see ways in which this works out. For example, in verse 3 Jesus begins “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of God.” What is this telling us? Is it saying that to be blessed, Christians need to be poor? That no rich people can enter the Kingdom of Heaven? Not really. It might well be harder for a rich person to enter the Kingdom of Heaven than for a camel to go through the eye of a needle (as Jesus also said; Matthew 19:24), but it isn't impossible. This description of Christians focuses on the trait Christians display of being unattached to worldly goods and riches. We might own worldly riches, but we aren't defined by them, they don't own us.

We should be rich or poor, whichever we are, part of the 99% or the 1%, knowing that neither condition makes us closer to God in itself, and neither condition means we aren't close to Him. The poor widow whom Jesus saw at the Temple exemplifies this. She wasn't held up as an example of someone especially close to God because she was poor. No, we remember her because of her attitude toward what money she did have. She placed her “widow's mite,” her couple pennies, into the offering plate and thereby gave much more than the rich Pharisees. She was poor, yes, but she was also “poor in spirit” in the sense of this Beatitude.

She knew that the riches of this world really belong here in this world. And that believers are citizens of Heaven, only here on earth for a while. Writing about this beatitude, Martin Luther wrote that “While we live here, we should use all temporal goods and physical necessities the way a guest does in a strange place, where he stays overnight and leaves in the morning.” [Luther's Works, XXI, 13]. What a great image that is! We are only on earth for a short while, and during our stay God gives us various things for our use, but that doesn't make these things ours. Start to think of all your money and resources as a guest towel and bedsheets; they're nice to have while we visit, but we leave them behind when we go home. No regrets. No sadness. These amenities weren't ours to begin with, and they didn't become ours just because we used them a while. Everything we “own” on earth falls into this category.

So, in our spirits, we Christians are poor whether we have a lot of stuff or not. We realize we don't “own” things. How does that define us as blessed? Because we know that we have a treasure stored up for us in Heaven. We have the Kingdom of God awaiting us! What amazing riches that gives us.

What about the verse that says “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God”? (Matt. 5:8) Maybe that one gives you trouble. After all, being “poor in spirit” - well, we can see ourselves being poor. And with “Blessed are those who mourn,” well everyone will mourn at some point, we know that, too. But this talk of being “pure in heart”? Who are we to think that this phrase describes us even for a moment?

Maybe we should go off somewhere away from all the distractions of the world, away from people, away from business and advertising. Maybe then we could work on being pure in heart. Except that God doesn't want that, because if he did, then why would he honor our earthly callings? Scripture speaks of this pure heart and mind in a manner that is completely consistent with being a husband, a wife, a child, an employer, an employee, a teacher, a student ... consistent with being, in other words, a person fully engaged in our world. If we all abandoned our society and culture to go try to be pure in heart away from it all, we would not be doing any of God's creation any good (not to mention the people whose lives still need to be touched by God through our presence among them).

So “what is meant by a 'pure heart' is this: one that is watching and pondering what God says and is replacing its own ideas with the Word of God. This alone is pure before God, yes, purity itself, which purifies everything that it includes and touches.” So writes Luther. He continues, “therefore though a common laborer, a shoemaker, or a blacksmith may be dirty and sooty or may smell because he is covered with dirt and pitch, still he may sit at home and think: 'My God has made me a man. He has given me my house, wife, and child and has commanded me to love them and to support them with my work.' Note that he is pondering the Word of God in his heart; and though he stinks outwardly, inwardly he is pure incense before God. But if he attains the highest purity so that he takes hold of the Gospel and believes in Christ ... then he is pure completely, inwardly in heart toward God and outwardly toward everything under him on earth. Then everything he is and does, his walking, standing, eating, and drinking, is pure for him; and nothing can make him impure.” (Luther's Works XXI, 34)

That's all it takes to be rendered pure before God. Sticking with the Word of God that purifies us in our faith, and sticking with the word that teaches us our duty to our fellow human beings. And that's how we “see God” (in the words of the Beatitude). When we have faith that Christ is our Savior, then we see immediately that we have a gracious God. Faith leads us to the throne, and opens our eyes so we see the overwhelming, superabundant grace and love of God for us. That's what it means to “see God,” not with our physical eyes, but with the eyes of faith.

One more Beatitude that has special appeal is in verse 9: “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God.” Jesus describes Christians as peacemakers. Not just as avoiders of conflict, but as people actively involved in creating peace. Martin Luther again says that “the Lord here honors those who do their best to try to make peace, not only in their own lives, but also among other people, who try to settle ugly and involved issues, who endure squabbling and try to avoid and prevent war and bloodshed.” (Luther's Works, XXI, 39)

Here we see that peacemaking is an active role. And there are so very many places to exercise that capacity we each have within us. We start especially where we are. We calm our own reactions when someone else slights us, when someone offends us, when someone attacks us. You and I as Christians are here described as peacemakers, so our role would be to endure the harsh, cruel words of people who might gripe and bicker and annoy, and our role is to present the best to people. We begin with our own outlooks. And we do the same to help other people with their outlooks on each other. The old joke punch line “hey, let's you and him fight” never really was all that funny and is less so now that we know Christians simply don't rile up others in arguments.

We actually go out of our way to soften words and turn aside blows. Even “if you are the victim of injustice and violence, you have no right to take the advice of your own foolish head and immediately start getting even and hitting back; but you are to think it over, try to bear it and have peace.” (Luther's Works, XXI, 40). It takes two to quarrel, of course, and by stepping aside and refusing to argue, we not only avoid fighting but we move toward creating peace. If only nations would do that, too. But you know what? Nations are made up of individual people, and if enough individual people cultivated this Christian attitude, our world would be a more peaceful place.

The reward for this peacemaking is multifaceted. Yes, we will be less stressed when we are personally at peace. Yes, our families and communities and churches and workplaces will all be calmer more pleasant places to live when we are at peace. And yes, the international scene will be more livable when nations of peacemakers are cooperating rather than in conflict with each other. But more than any of that, people will look at us and they will call us – God will call us – “sons and daughters of God.” That's an eternal benefit that outlasts the good of peace on earth. Children of God! When we join with the saints who have gone before us to complete the family circle of God in Heaven, we will know that peacemaking on earth was only a prelude to the full peace there that passes all human understanding. There in Heaven we will join with “a great multitude that no one could number, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb.” (Rev. 7:9) Think of it as the melting pot to end all melting pots if you want, but it will be the culmination of all our earthly peacemaking efforts, when we stand united with all these people so different from us, but engaged in praising God at his throne.

These, then, are examples of how the Beatitudes from the beginning of Jesus's Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 5 describe the Christian life as it is lived on earth. There is a real sense of the “now, but not yet” in all of the promises wherein we have the Kingdom of God now, but not yet as fully as we will in Heaven; where we are comforted now, but not as completely as we will be when we see Christ face to face; where we are satisfied now, but will only feel it completely and forever when we join the rest of the saints above. But remember also the “now” part. Don't forget that these eternal blessings are for us now as the saints of God in the Church on earth. St. John wrote in today's epistle that “we are God's children now” and meant that the blessings of faith are present among us as we go about our daily lives.

Christians are peacemakers, we are pure in heart, we are merciful, we are persecuted for righteousness' sake, and all the rest. But not in the manner of some list of “9 Habits of Successful Christians” self-help book. These aren't traits that only special people can display after years of disciplined hard work and effort, years of prayer and fasting, decades of dedicated training and practice. These traits are things that Christians simply are. By the power of the Holy Spirit dwelling in us, we exhibit them more clearly today than yesterday. When we slip back into the world's way of looking at things – as we surely will for as long as we live in this world – then we stop and pray for forgiveness, we refresh ourselves in God's Word, we accept the renewal given us in the Sacrament. Why? Because that's what the saints of God do, and we are among those saints, both now and in the life to come.

May our eyes ever be open to the truths of the Beatitude blessings in our lives. Amen.
And may the peace of God that passes all human understanding keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus our Lord. Amen.

S.D.G.

Seek First the Kingdom of God

I.N.I.

A sermon to be preached at Our Savior Lutheran Church, Arlington, VA on the 11th Sunday after Pentecost, also called 8 August 2010, and based on the Holy Gospel for the Day, St. Luke 12:22-34, especially verses 31 and 32

Grace, mercy, and peace be yours in Christ Jesus our Lord,

Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ,

In my experience preaching in various congregations from the assigned lessons for each Sunday, I find some Sundays that either the lessons don't seem to fit together so well or that it's hard to find a really sweet nugget in them to bring into the pulpit with me. This isn't one of those Sundays. All three of our lessons fit together well and are chock full of wonderful words of God for us to chew on and enjoy. The struggle this week was more a case of having to decide what to leave out for another time. This explains why I am not focusing on Abram, and God's really big promises to him; or Abram's belief in God that the Lord credited to him as righteousness. It explains why I am not picking up the echo of our Genesis lesson that we have in Hebrews 11, where we hear the beginning of that great exposition on faith as the assurance of things hoped for and the conviction of things not seen, ending in the middle of the chapter but with again the story of Abram's faith.

And it explains why I settled on the two verses from Luke 12 that I am calling our attention to this morning. 'Seek first the Kingdom of God – strive for – his kingdom, and all these things (I'll touch on what things later on) will be added unto you as well. Do not be afraid, little flock, for it is your Father's good pleasure to give you the kingdom – He wants to, and He will.'

This all sounds fine. Maybe you've sung some of these words in songs or hymns. They're probably familiar words. But at second thought, it might appear that they don't sound too Lutheran. Lutheran Christians have a kind of automatic response against if-then, work-reward passages. And that's what this passage could sound like. It's as if Jesus is telling us that once we get out our compass and maps, fire up the GPS unit, pack our bags and set off to hunt up the Kingdom of God – once we work hard to find it and get into it – then the Father will let us in or something (that little detail seems lacking in our text) and will also give us earthly blessings, especially food and clothing. And that sort of talk about rewarding our hard work of going out and hunting for God doesn't sound properly orthodox to us, it doesn't sound like good Lutheran teaching. Well, it isn't, really. But that's not what the text is saying.

What the text is saying is significantly different. Let's unwrap the meaning so that we can get to the point where we will see that all Christian people will eagerly seek first the Kingdom of God. A very good place to start is with the a-b-c of God's abundant blessed caring for each of His creatures, for you and for me. God's abundant blessed caring for us should be where we start and end our every prayer about earthly things. God's care for us overflows more than we could ever think to ask for. God's care for us blesses us in more ways than we can imagine or count. Yet we sometimes, perhaps often, don't really believe in it. Sometimes we use some other standard and think we've been left out of God's blessings. Or perhaps we let greed and covetousness run our day-to-day lives. Maybe we get jealous of what other people have. In those cases we show a lack of faith in God. And that always gets us in trouble.

We should, instead, seek first the Kingdom of God. What is this word “seek”? One translation has “strive for”. Others say “continue to be eager for” or “set your mind upon,” “set your hearts on,” “be concerned about.” It's as if the translators are struggling to capture the sense of Jesus's original word. For good reason. The dictionaries point out that the word He used has two senses: one is “seeking” in the sense of a shepherd searching for a lost sheep (Matthew 18:12) or a woman seeking a lost coin (Luke 15:8); the other sense is in a holy 'demand' by God who expects fruit from a tree (Luke 13:6) or faithfulness from a servant (1 Corinthians 4:2). So there are 2 sides to “seeking.” There is looking for what belongs to you; and there is a patient, hopeful expectation of what is due.

And neither of these senses of the word “seek” indicate working hard to get something that isn't already given to you. In other words, that picture of getting out a map and hunting for God's Kingdom, and then pounding on the door to be let in, is all wrong. The Kingdom of God is already ours. It has already been given to us. It's just that, in our sin and self-centeredness, we've lost sight of it. So we should patiently search for what we already have by the grace of God. We should look as the good shepherd searches for the one lost sheep. We should sweep the house looking for where we dropped the valuable coin like the woman. We should wait patiently and expectantly, looking down the road like the father of the Prodigal Son. We should keep returning to the fig tree year after year looking for fruit. What we are seeking is already ours. God has already given it to us.

Jesus gave us another way to remember this process. In the Lord's Prayer, He told us to pray “Thy Kingdom come.” Now, we believe that God's Kingdom comes whether we pray for it or not, but in this petition of the Prayer we pray that it comes also to us. We pray that God's Kingdom may prevail among us, so that we may be a part of those among whom God's name is hallowed. We are praying for the flowering of what is already planted in our hearts. We are seeking the Kingdom of God in all the various ways and places it already is.

So, what IS the Kingdom of God? Simply, it's what we confess regularly in the creeds: that God sent his Son, Jesus Christ our Lord, into the world to redeem us from sin, death and the Devil, and to bring us to Himself and rule us as our king of righteousness, life and salvation. To carry this out, God gave us His Holy Spirit to teach us through the Word, to call us through the Gospel, to enlighten us with His gifts, to strengthen and keep us in the one, true faith. THAT is “the Kingdom of God.”

When we “seek first the Kingdom of God” what we are doing is praying that all this may be realized in us, and that God's name may be praised through His holy Word and in our lives. So we are seeking to remain faithful to what was begun in us at Baptism, and to grow in faith through leading holy lives. And we pray that , led by the same Holy Spirit, many others may come into the Kingdom and become our brothers and sisters in the faith.

God's Kingdom comes to us in two ways as we seek it. First, it comes here and now through the Word and faith; and second, it comes in eternity through the Second Coming of Jesus. Seeking it, we pray that it may come to those who are not yet in it, and that it may come by daily growth in us all both now and in eternity when we go home to Heaven. As we are strengthened in the faith, God's Kingdom comes to us. As we live Christian lives, God's Kingdom comes. As we extend the outreach of His Church, we seek God's Kingdom. That's how we seek the Kingdom of God. That's how we set our hearts and minds on it. That's how we concern ourselves with it. That's how we focus our attention on the Kingdom.

And did you notice that we're NOT focusing our attention and prayers upon? It's often hard to see what isn't there until someone points it out. Let me point it out. We are not focusing our attention and prayers on a crust of bread or a shred of cloth. We aren't looking for food and clothing. We aren't looking for earthly, temporal, temporary blessings. Leap back to St. Luke 12:22-23 where Jesus says “I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you are to eat or about your body, what you are to wear. For life is ore than food, and the body more than clothing.”

You and I have a direct connection with almighty God, the creator of the Universe through Jesus Christ, His Son, our Lord. He has given us an eternal, priceless treasure by forgiving us our sins and giving us eternal life in Heaven. That's something way, way more than any of us would have ever thought to ask for on our own. Yet that's what God has given us. And because He is God, he claims the honor of giving us far more abundantly and liberally than anyone can comprehend. Like a deep, eternal, inexhaustible fountain that flows with more and more and more cold water on even the hottest day of the driest month, God keeps on giving to His children. He wants us to ask many and great things of Him. And He wants us to ask confidently.

Imagine, if you will, a rich and powerful person who calls to and invites a homeless beggar to ask for anything he wants. Imagine that the rich person is willing and ready to give lavishly. And imagine that the beggar only asks for some loose change to help make up the price of a cup of coffee. Would the rich person be indignant, upset, even angry? If you are the beggar, and don't ask the rich person for some substantial gift, then shame on you! Because God is the rich person in this little story and we are the beggars.

God's joy and purpose is to see to our blessing and comfort. Asking him merely for a little food and some clothing is a kind of insult to God's generosity. He has promised and is intent on giving us so much, so many blessings, we would be despising His gifts to barely croak out a petition for a morsel of bread.

The fault in this case lies wholly in our unbelief which does not look to God even for enough to satisfy our bodies, let along expect, without doubting, eternal blessings from God. Therefore we must strengthen ourselves against unbelief and seek first the Kingdom of God. Then, surely, we will have all the other things in abundance, as Christ teaches here in Luke's Gospel.

How do we strengthen our faith? By relying on God's grace which brought us that faith in the first place. His powerful grace comes to us in His Word, and in the Sacraments. We hear the Law and the Gospel in the words of the Holy Bible as we see how our sin is condemned, but how we are forgiven because of the death of Jesus. What a relief! What a source of inspiration and power! We are baptized people and therefore rely on the promises wrapped up in that cleansing whenever sin gets the upper hand again. We use the promises of God to fight off the attacks of Satan. We've been baptized! The evil one has no power over us any longer! And we are nourished in this life, both as we fight off the evil foe and as we carry out our God-given mission in life, by coming regularly to the Sacrament of the Altar, Holy Communion, the Lord's Supper. The “altar” reminds us that it is because of Christ's sacrificial death that we are here. The communion reminds us that we gather with other believers who are going through similar struggles, and finding the same godly assurances and love that we seek. The supper reminds us that what we have here was instituted by Jesus Himself as a way to feed us His true body and blood, strengthening and preserving us in the one true faith unto life everlasting.

We're in a great position. We have a loving and powerful God Who forgives us our sins and wants to sustain us in our earthly lives as well. He gives us the directions and means to approach Him, seeking His blessings. He has already promised to clothe us more gloriously than Solomon or the lilies of the field, and to feed us more regularly and fully than He feeds to birds who don't know how to farm and grow their own food. “Don't be afraid, little flock, for it is God's good pleasure – His delight! – to give you the Kingdom.”

So let's eagerly seek first the Kingdom of God. It turns out, as we've seen, that it's a very Lutheran thing to do – as, of course, it should be because it's a very Christian thing to do, because it comes from the lips of Jesus and is recorded in the Bible. Let's seek out the Kingdom like a shepherd searching for a lost sheep that he wants to rescue. Let's longingly search for it like the Prodigal Son's father looked down the road for his returning child. Let's keep checking like the farmer stopping in regularly, expectantly, hopefully, faithfully to see whether there's ripe fruit on the tree. We know the Kingdom of God is there for us with all its attendant blessings. Let's seek it out. Let's find it.

Amen.

And may the peace of God that passes all human understanding keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus our Lord. Amen.

S.D.G.

The Crazy Man and the Pigs

I.N.I.

A sermon to be preached at Our Savior Lutheran Church, Arlington, Virginia on 20 June 2010, that is, the 4th Sunday after Pentecost, and based on the Holy Gospel for the Day, St. Luke 8:26-39, the healing of the Gadarene demoniac

Grace, mercy, and peace be yours in Christ Jesus, our Lord!

Dear Friends in Christ,

One of the ways to study stories from the Bible, and to develop a deeper sense of how these stories are meaningful to each of us today, is to work your way through the story thinking of yourself as one character, then another. What would the miracle at Cana have meant if I were the groom or the bride's father, for example. Or if I were one of Noah's sons, how would the whole story about the ark and 40 days of rain have affected me? Maybe we could try something like that with this story from Luke's Gospel.

We could, of course, think of ourselves as one of the disciples safely on shore at last after the wild, windy trip across the Sea of Galilee during which we woke up Jesus and He calmed the storm with just His words. Or maybe we could imagine ourselves as the villagers who came out to see what happened, after it all happened, and then asked Jesus to please leave town. (Have we ever politely asked Jesus to leave?) Or what would it have been like to be one of the local pig farmers who saw their entire flock suddenly rush down the steep bank like lemmings and drown? (Jesus can turn our world upside down, but is this the kind of thing that means?) Or what would it have been like to be the pigs in the story?

Or what would it have been like to be the naked crazy man who lived in the cemetery? Has your life ever gotten that far out of control? Have you ever felt like you've been losing touch with reality enough that you might as well be this guy? Have things ever gotten wild enough, overwhelming enough, stressful enough that you have thought “You know, maybe it wouldn't be so bad just to let everything go, cut all my ties with society, check out of normalcy.”?

We can learn some good lessons from this poor man's experiences. Even if we've been in control enough that we've never felt pushed to or over that edge, we can learn some things for our good from his story. Let's see what there is in this story for us.

First of all, the core of this passage from Luke's Gospel is also found in Matthew and Mark. It seems that God wanted to be sure we listened to this story, so he had three of His evangelists record it, not just one. And, as often happens, each of the writers includes details that the others leave out, maybe simply because they got the story from a different witness. Matthew, an eyewitness himself, tells us that there were actually two demon-possessed men there who “were so fierce that no one could pass that way” (Matt. 8:28). Mark tells us that the man “was always howling and bruising himself with stones” (Mark 5:5) and that there were about 2,000 pigs in the flock. Luke tells us that after the healing the man was seen “sitting at the feet of Jesus” (Luke 8:35).

Next, we know, I suppose, that the central point of this story is the same as of every story in the Bible: the story tells us about our need to be close to God, and how that comes about through Jesus our Savior. So why do we need to hear that lesson again? Why is it again the central point of a Scripture lesson and sermon that we are in need to salvation and that Jesus is our one and only Savior? Simply because we keep coming up with new ways of fomenting rebellion against Him and inventive ways to slip away from God. Here's how it is illustrated here in Luke chapter 8:

The naked man is one side of this coin, and the villagers are the other. And I think that they actually can be said to alternate the ways in which they show us separation from God. What they are teaching us in the end is that we – you and I – can live closer to Jesus, both healed of our craziness and un-distracted by non-essentials. We don't know just why this man was tormented with these demons who proudly named themselves “Legion.” We don't know whether maybe he invited them in, believing that he could control them and use their strength to gain money or power. There are certainly lots of examples in history and literature and the daily newspapers for us of people who make bargains with the Devil and end up polluting themselves and those around them with destructive drugs or dissipating habits, with wasteful living, with – in short – sinful intent. Oh, yeah, they may start out saying, I'm going to be different from everyone else; I'm going to control this habit; I'll do good with this stolen money; I'll help people with this excess power. But it's always a bargain that breaks the people who try to keep it. And this man in the tombs was certainly being broken by the demons in his life.

It could be that the demons weren't invited into his life, but invaded one day when his defenses were down. It didn't matter to the Legion, because they were enjoying themselves terrorizing the man and the villagers and people who tried to pass by. Satan's long-term goal is chaos and destruction, and he had the demons taking this man and those around him further down that road day by day. They delight in rebellion against the Creator. They enjoy, in their own twisted ways, taking people away from God.

The villagers were, I said, the other half of the picture. How were they siding against God? Well think about it: here's someone they knew, someone related to a lot of them surely, someone it great need, a man who who could most use a helping hand, and what had they done? They made sure he stayed away. When he came near, they tried to keep him in chains. This is no way to care for the helpless. This is no way to treat the poor and needy. This is not how the least of these is to be treated. It isn't how we say we would treat Jesus.

And then, later in the story, these villagers come rushing out to the cemetery to see for themselves what the pig farmers had told them. I mean, who could believe that there were actually 2,000 pigs floating upside down in the lake? Disasters always attract nosy people who aren't going to lend a hand. That's what was going on here. These are the people who tie up traffic on the interstate trying to get a look at the accident on the other side of the median. And what happened here? They got out to the spot, saw Jesus teaching the man (this is the significance of Luke's mention that the man was “sitting at the feet of Jesus” ... disciples sat at the feet of their Masters; this man had already become a disciple of Jesus!). So did they naturally join in? Did they sit down, too, to enjoy a “Sermon in the Cemetery”? No. These villagers were so distracted by the non-essentials that they just up and asked Jesus to leave them. They wanted to see dead pigs. They wanted to see the crazy naked man. They wanted some kind of excitement. But all they had was Jesus teaching “the man from whom the demons had gone sitting at the feet of Jesus, clothed and in his right mind.” (Luke 8:35) The villagers were afraid, Luke tells us. Some of the eyewitnesses tried to tell them how the healing took place, but with one voice “all the people of the surrounding country ... asked Jesus to leave.” So they missed out on their one great chance to be with the Savior. They thought it was better to slip away from Jesus, to get a great distance between Him and themselves. It was really a quiet rebellion against God.

Our own lives sometimes follow these patterns. We, too, rebel. We, too, invite in demons or demon-like things that take us away from God. We, too, get distracted from God by things that simply are not essential. We, too, try to slip away or to send Jesus quietly packing. Do we abuse our bodies with things or practices that hurt them? Do we abuse our relationships with force or control or demands or legalism? Do we abuse our world that God has given us? Then do we go looking for things that appear bright and shiny, but simply serve to distract us from important spiritual matters? Do we seek out people, places and things that just don't make us stronger disciples? Do we collect the earthly things that are temporary and unimportant instead of storing up treasure in Heaven?

These are the ways of the naked crazy man and of the villagers. But, as we've heard, there is a better way.

If our goal is indeed to live closer to Jesus, both healed of our craziness and un-distracted by non-essentials, then the way to get there is to listen to the voice of Jesus, to His words of healing and His teaching. In this Bible text, the demon-possessed man is the only one who did so. So he turns out to be the character in the story that we should be seeing ourselves in. This nameless man is the one who was completely turned around and entranced by the words of Jesus. The 12 disciples just disappear out of the narrative for some reason, probably so that we focus on the one convert. The swineherds witnessed the healing and immediately left the scene. The villagers heard the story from the swineherds, but instead of letting their story be a saving Gospel story, they had it become a sensationalist news story. It is only the healed man who heard the Savior's call and became a disciple.

And like all true disciples this man fervently wanted to be with Jesus. He begged Jesus to let him come back to the western side of the Sea of Galilee. 'Jesus, I need you so much. Stay with me. Let me come with you. Just don't send me away. I've been so lonely without you, Jesus. Life has been so hard. People have been so cruel.' But Jesus had a special plan for this man. His story of healing, a vibrant and exciting story of redemption and grace, a story of Law and Gospel, a story of God's love breaking into a man's sin-darkened world, a story of renewal and of forgiveness and of a new unexpected beginning ... this man's story simply had to be heard. There were people in the village there who needed to hear it again and again. There were people in the other Ten Towns (the Decapolis) who had to hear.

So this brand new disciple is sent out to share the Gospel with the distracted people on the wrong side of the Sea of Galilee. “He went away,” Luke records, “proclaiming throughout the city how much Jesus had done for him.” (Luke 8:39) And then he fades from history. Sort of.

The Bible never tells us his name (it's not important). And it doesn't really tell us anything much about his lay ministry activities. Except this: back in Mark's Gospel this story is recorded in chapter 5 where it ends with the words that the man “went away and began to proclaim in the Decapolis how much Jesus had done for him; and everyone was amazed.”. (Mark 5:20) Then in Mark chapter 7 there's this: after Jesus healed the daughter of the nameless Syro-Phonecian woman, “He returned from the region of Type, and went by way of Sidon towards the Sea of Galilee, in the region of the Decapolis” (Mark 7:31). There the crowds – crowds, mind you! – brought Him a deaf man to be healed. The parallel in Matthew's Gospel says that “Great crowds came to Him, bringing with them the lame, the maimed, the mute and many others. They put them at His feet and He cured them.” (Matt. 15:30).

Now, how do you suppose the people in these Gentile mountain towns on the eastern side of the Sea of Galilee, away from the places Jesus spent so much of His ministry, how do you suppose these crowds knew about Jesus and the fact that God's healing power flowed through Him? Do you suppose that just maybe the words of one man, formerly known as the naked crazy man who lived in the cemetery, had made a difference in this territory? I have to admit that the Bible doesn't tell us, but it's an awfully attractive explanation for the instant recognition and popularity of Jesus in this foreign land.

Whether or not this man's words were the earthly explanation for the later spread of Jesus's ministry there, for changing the hearts of villagers and swineherds and others into hearts ready to listen to Jesus, we do know this: Jesus changes hearts. The evidence is here in this healing story recorded in three of the four Gospels. And the evidence is here in our world today. People's lives are changed for the better when they listen to the calling voice of Jesus. People escape the clutches of their demons. People are forgiven by God. Our sins are washed away because Jesus took the punishment we deserved when He died in our places on the cross outside Jerusalem. We are clothed in the righteousness of God and we are set right, just as the man in the tombs was clothed and returned to his right mind. This happens today. It has happened to you as followers of Jesus, even if the demons you have been released from were not as dramatic as this man's Legion of demons. Maybe, instead, you were called away from the distractions of this world where you were looking for floating pigs and other disasters rather than a gentle Savior to learn from.

Either way, God has changed lives right here. And He calls us first to discipleship, and then to telling others about this change in our lives. As God's dearest children we are all chosen to live ever closer to Jesus even if, yes, for a time we have to leave His side to carry out His business preparing His way. We have all been healed of our craziness. We have all been pulled away from the meaningless distractions. Recognizing this fact helps us focus on how we are to live as Christians. The Holy Spirit comes to us in the means of grace (God's Word and Sacraments) giving us the power and focus to be God's children in a hostile world. And we are empowered to be His witnesses wherever we are. Let us so live. Amen.

May the peace of God that passes all human understanding keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus our Lord. Amen.

S.D.G.

Jonah, but Not the Whale

I.N.I.

A sermon to be preached at St. Paul Lutheran Church, Columbia, PA on Ash Wednesday 2010, a.k.a. 17 February 2010, and based on the theme text for the evening, Jonah 1:1-3, as well as taken extensively from the sermon provided with the worship materials, one written by the Rev. Prof. Reed Lessing.

Grace, mercy, and peace be yours in Christ Jesus our Lord.

[text is Jonah 1:1-3]

Dear Friends in Christ,

Jonah had a problem. At root, it was the same basic problem that each of us has: a problem with our relationship with the Lord. Our Lenten Wednesday evening services this year will draw much from the Old Testament book of Jonah, leading us from our problem to the Solution, that is, to our Savior. At least one part of the story of Jonah is probably familiar to us all: the business with him being swallowed by the whale, or 'big fish.' But there is good biblical material for us to work through both before and after the whale events. Tonight we're going to begin at the beginning.

The narrative of Jonah actually begins in 2 Kings 14:23-27. That passage gives us part of the historical setting for the more familiar events from the book with Jonah's name on it. In 2nd Kings we read: “In the fifteenth year of King Amaziah son of Joash of Judah, King Jereboam son of Joash of Israel began to reign in Samaria; he reigned forty-one years. He did what was evil in the sight of the Lord; he did not depart from all the sins of Jereboam son of Nebat, which he caused Israel to sin. He restored the border of Israel from Lebo-hamath as far as the Sea of the Arabah, according to the word of the Lord, the God of Israel, which he spoke by his servant Jonah son of Amittai, the prophet, who was from Gath-hepher. For the Lord saw that the distress of Israel was very bitter; there was no one left, bond or free, and no one to help Israel. But the Lord had not said that he would blot out the name of Israel from under heaven, so he saved them by the hand of Jereboam son of Joash.”

From this passage, we find that even in Israel, a sinful nation in the sight of God – a nation under the reign of an unfaithful king, Jereboam, who (we just read) “did what was evil in the sight of the Lord” -- the prophet Jonah was successful. God did not destroy unfaithful Israel while his prophet Jonah was speaking the word of God among them.

In the book bearing his name, Jonah was also a successful prophet. The people of Nineveh (once Jonah finally got there) heard and heeded the word of God. They repented.

Yet Jonah, son of Amittai (and his father's name means 'faithful' or 'true,' so Jonah was 'the son of faithfulness' or 'the child of truth') ...yet Jonah, while successful, proves to be anything but faithful. He turns tail and runs the other direction when God calls him to this particular mission. And then, as we'll hear in the weeks to come, even when Jonah does tell the truth, preaching the word of God in Nineveh, he does so begrudgingly, like a sulking teenager. Deep down Jonah doesn't seem to want those nasty outsiders to know God's truth. And even despite that kind of delivery, God's powerful word, His faithful and true word, succeeds there.

Jonah must have been successful as a prophet in his native Israel. That is, successful in more than the theological terms we heard from 2nd Kings. He had to have been earning a living at his work, because when the book of Jonah opens he was able to hire sailors and pay for the use of a ship to take him away from Nineveh. The opening sentences of Jonah have him not only paying his own fare, but in fact hiring the entire ship and crew, which meant he was spending a lot of money trying to get away from God.

Other Israelites had been called to go beyond their homeland. Abram was sent away from home. Jacob and his sons left their home to go to Egypt. Moses led God's people away from their home in Egypt to wander in the desert. Others were also called by God to go to and speak his Word to people outside the ranks of the chosen Israelites. But while Jonah surely knew his people's history, he didn't want to follow in their footsteps. Nineveh was known as a sinful place. Other prophets wrote about it. Pick the worst parts of the cities with the worst reputation you can think of, mix them together, and that would have been Nineveh.

And this was the place God was calling Jonah to go to. This was one call Jonah would rather have not gotten. Someone has likened it to asking a Jew in 1942 to move from New York to Berlin. Not the place he or she would want to go! It would be understandable for that person to head the other direction. And that's just what Jonah tried to do. He hung up on God, grabbed his hat, and darted out the back door, hoping he wasn't being watched.

So what kind of prophet would hang up on God? One like Jonah. While his father's name meant 'faithful' or 'true,' Jonah's own name meant 'dove.' To the ancient Hebrews, a 'dove' didn't mean 'peace' or 'Holy Spirit' like it does to us; to them it meant 'flighty, brainless, unreliable.' And that's just what our Jonah was when God called.

He chartered this ship and headed for Tarshish, a city that would years later be known as Tarsus and be the birthplace of St. Paul, but at that time was known for being a rich, pleasant place to be. Situated on important trade routes, Tarshish would have been able to hide Jonah in comfort had he gotten there. God had other plans.

Almost as soon as the ship set sail, it ran into problems. The weather turned against them. Winds and waves conspired to halt their progress and to bring the ship to the brink of sinking. Our text says that Jonah “went down to Joppa” to get his ship ... and down he continued to go. He continued to go down, down, down toward his death. Away from God, away from God's blessings.

That's a great picture of what happens when we run from God's call in our own lives. Our gracious God calls each of us to do particular things and be particular kinds of people. Using biblical language, the person who “runs away from the Lord” or “flees from the presence of the Lord” is the one who is refusing to serve God, even though he or she knows what God's Word says. As a prophet, Jonah should have longed to stand in the Lord's presence, but Jonah tried to hide from God's presence, going down into the bottom of the ship during the storm. Where we go and how we act both reveal something about our reaction to God's call on our lives.

God's Word eventually won the day in Jonah's life. Jonah was finally convinced to carry through with his missionary work in Nineveh. God's Word works toward that same end in our lives, no matter how long we try to head the other direction, heading down and away from God in our own ways.

God's Word is alive for us in Jesus, our Savior. He crossed ever so many boundaries to come down to us. Before His death He constantly went beyond the traditional and expected boundaries in meaningful ways. He met with a Samaritan woman at a well. He healed the son of a Roman soldier. He touched lepers. It shouldn't be any surprise that He did those things, considering that Jesus traveled past His boundaries in Heaven to be born, to live and die among us, a sinful and rebellious people. Jesus is not a Jonah, flighty and unreliable. Jesus is squarely focused on spreading His message of love, forgiveness, and salvation. He answered God's call because he IS the living Word of God.

And God is still calling. He is calling us to confess our sin. He is calling us to confess the name of Jesus. He is “calling young and old to rest, calling the souls of those distressed, longing for life everlasting.” (Built on the Rock, LW 291)

God is calling us to do the work He has appointed for us to do while it is day, before the night comes when no one can work. And God is calling us home to His side. We can take a lesson from the story of Jonah and invest in the journey there, rather than in a doomed voyage away from God. Jesus is our hope for survival during and at the end of that voyage.

S.D.G.

Having an Epiphany

I.N.I.

A sermon to be preached on the 2nd Sunday after the Epiphany, or 17 January 2010, and based on the Gospel for the day, St. John 2:1-11, the story of the Wedding at Cana, at Our Savior Lutheran Church, Arlington, Virginia

Grace, mercy, and peace be yours in Christ Jesus our Lord,

[text]

Dear Friends in Christ,

Well, here we are in the season of Epiphany, on the second Sunday after the Epiphany. The Wise Men have come and gone. And we've got a whole lot of Epiphany left before it's over. What should we do with it? And what do our lessons have to say about it?

One of the traditional emphases of the Church during this time of year is the revelation of the Gospel of Christ to the whole world. That is, we often talk about missions during this season. Well, that's all find and good, but today's Gospel is about a wedding reception in the Jewish city of Cana. Not much mission work there. Not much “to the whole world,” either. Or is there? While the words 'sin' and 'forgiveness' don't appear in this Gospel Lesson, if we look again at the text we can find some helpful things for our faith and life in it. We can discover a number of epiphanies in this text, that is, spots where God became apparent to different people when – if this were drawn as a cartoon – there would be a lightbulb turning on over their heads.

I. an epiphany for Mary
II. an epiphany for the servants and steward
III. an epiphany for the disciples
IV. an epiphany for you and me

First of all, we can look at the mother of Jesus and think about how this event may have been an epiphany for her. Over the years people have wished that Mary had sat down to write a Gospel account of her own. What a wonderful set of stories she would have been able to tell about Jesus during his childhood and youth. And then, too, what an interesting light she would have shed on the stories of Jesus as an adult that are so familiar to us from the New Testament. In the story of this miracle at the wedding in Cana, wouldn't you like to know just what Mary had in mind when she said to Jesus “They have no wine”? And wouldn't you like to know what her reaction was when Jesus answered her?

Since we don't have a canonical Gospel by Mary, perhaps the best we can do is to imagine ourselves in her place, and meditate on what our own motivations and reactions might have been. We're probably quite safe in assuming that Mary knew her Son was different from other women's sons. There was the whole background of the miraculous conception while she was a virgin. There were the angelic messages, the shepherds, the wise men. And as the sinless Son of God, Jesus must have been different from other boys. So now, as an adult, Mary must have known that Jesus was different from other men.

Yet He was still her Son. She likely still had expectations about how they would relate to and interact with each other. Their whole Middle Eastern Jewish first century culture filled the air with these expectations. So when the wine at this wedding reception gave out Mary went and told Jesus. She didn't ask anything of Him. She didn't tell Him what to do. She just made a simple statement, understanding that He would know what she meant. Maybe some of you have done this? Anyone here ever just simply announced “The trash can's full” or “The clothes dryer is done” or “The grass is getting pretty long” and expected that the person hearing that would understand that you wanted him or her to take out the trash, empty the dryer and fold the clothes, or start the lawn mower and cut the grass? Mary could have been making the same kind of announcement to Jesus, thinking it was obvious what He should do in dealing with it.

But lest you think Mary was ordering around Jesus, you ought to know that this wedding reception wasn't one of the quickie 4 or 5 hour-long receptions we have after weddings. The party to celebrate a marriage back then would have been quick at 4 or 5 days. They were huge affairs that probably involved the whole village, or certainly a large segment of it. Weddings were big social events with days of eating and drinking, and to cut it short by running out of wine would have been a blunder of tragic proportions. I even read on place that doing that could possibly have been grounds for a legal suit by the guests because it would have appeared as if the offending host was trying to get off easy rather than holding a wedding feast equivalent to the ones his neighbors had held and at which he had feasted and drank in the past. So running out of wine before the multi-day feast was over would have been an embarrassment, an insult, a bad omen, poor manners, an economic disaster, and even possible legal trouble all at once. Mary was hinting strongly that Jesus might be able to do something about preventing all this from happening for a family that were certainly friends, and very possibly even relatives.

One epiphany Mary had was that Jesus didn't say “Sure, Mom” and jump in to lend a hand. He spoke to her as an adult to an adult, addressing her with the respectful “Woman” and saying “what concern is that to you and to me? My hour is not yet come.” Now, if you think about the different times in the Gospels when Mary appears in the story, it won't take you very long to recall the next time we hear Jesus speaking to His mother in the same way: it was when His hour had come, when He was hanging on the cross and said (in John 19:26) “Woman, here is your son” to give over the care of His mother to the disciple John.

For now, however, Mary simply told the servants there to do whatever Jesus might tell them to do. She expressed a simple faith is Jesus's ability to discern the dire needs of the wedding host family, and to act in a way that would meet their needs, maintain their dignity, protect their name, and in every way be the right thing to do. If, earlier on, Mary had ever just expected her Son to lend a hand, now she knew that He was an adult member of the community, able and expected to act independently. Perhaps this was another epiphany for her.

The servants and steward were the next in line for an epiphany. Maybe it is easy to picture these folks as the caterer and his tired college student part-time help; or perhaps the steward was more like today's best man at a wedding, keeping an eye on things so that the groom could enjoy the party. Well that would really be making the story a little too much something of our time, but maybe some of the relationships were the same. The servants were directed first to fill up these large stone jars with gallons and gallons of water. Perhaps so that they wouldn't have to lug more water any time soon, they filled the jars up to the brim. When that was done Jesus directed that they should take some to the steward, which they did.

And that's when amazement struck them all. More wine! Good wine!! Better wine than they had been serving earlier on!!! The epiphany for them all was that Jesus was somehow or other a miracle worker. He was not just a friend or relative of the wedding party. He was definitely something special.

Then there are the disciples. They don't play much of a part in this story, do they? They're only mentioned at the beginning and the end. At the beginning, John writes “Jesus and His disciples had also been invited to the wedding.” (John 2:2). And then they apparently disappear into the crowd. Until the last phrase of the last verse: “and His disciples believed in Him” (John 2:11). The implication clearly is that they had some sort of epiphany about Jesus as they witnessed “the first of His signs ... and revealed His glory” (John 2:11).

It is curious that these disciples apparently were disciples before they believed. A disciple is a learner, a follower, one being instructed. So perhaps their early discipleship consisted mostly of building up their intellectual foundation for faith. (And, admittedly, this “early discipleship” – if we can call it that – had stretched only 3 days for some of them, and only a couple days longer for others.) Still, it was after the working of this “sign” that the Scripture tells us they “believed in Him.” So there was now a deeper or maybe a different attachment to Jesus as their Master. They had seen the sign.

It is significant that John never uses the word “miracle” but rather calls these things “signs” or “works.”. In John's Gospel all these miraculous happenings point to something. They point to God. So when the disciples believed in Jesus after witnessing Him working in this way, they were just beginning their walk of faith. Those people who only believe because of miracles have much room to grow. And these first disciples were certainly in that situation at Cana. They had lots of room to grow, much need for growth. But at least they were pointed in the proper direction. The miracle of the wine at the wedding in Cana pointed the disciples to God.

Their epiphany that day was that Jesus was way more that a really intriguing Teacher. The first chapter of John's Gospel is full, very full, of titles for Jesus, including “Lamb of God,” “Son of God,” “Rabbi (which means Teacher),” “the Messiah (which is translated Anointed),” and “the King of Israel.” And those are just the things that His disciples called Him! Before Cana. Before the first of His signs. Before we are told that the disciples believed in Him. Somehow for them, the miracle wrapped up all the loose ends that they maybe had left sitting around when they first started to follow Jesus.

Now what has all this to do with us? I believe this passage of Scripture can also lead us to and through epiphanies, events where the light starts to dawn on us in the same way that it started to dawn for the actors in the story.

Suppose you ever thought of Jesus as simply another man, maybe one Who would do your bidding, going here or there when you asked simply because you asked, or because of your relative positions in society. Maybe you're a highly educated person, someone well off, someone with position, and power and possessions. Jesus of Nazareth had none of those things. If you were to meet Him on the street today you might not even notice Him, much less recognize Him. Should that be the case, then this miracle story can serve to call you to correction. Like Mary, you can begin to see that Jesus is so much more than the baby Jesus in the manger. You can begin to see Him as mire than Someone to do your bidding for you. He is a strong man, full of character and acting independently for our good whether we ask for His intervention or not. That's just the way God is. And we'd better get used to it.

If, like the servants and steward of the banquet, you are tempted to think that Jesus isn't all that special, then stand back! There is a miracle-worker in our midst. He takes the most ordinary things and uses them for the most extraordinary purposes. Jesus also takes the most ordinary people and uses them for the most extraordinary tasks. A few days ago there was a terrible earthquake in Haiti, one of the poorest countries in the world, and certainly the poorest in the Western Hemisphere. You and I, just ordinary people, can do very extraordinary things for the victims of that earthquake because of our love for Jesus. When you respond to the appeals by Lutheran World Relief or other aid agencies, you extra money will literally save lives in Haiti once the aid workers can get into the country. These won't be miracles in the same sense that Jesus performed, but your gifts will still be signs pointing people to God.

And if, like the first disciples, it takes a miracle for you to believe in Jesus, then so be it. Just know that He is God and that as He reveals His glory to you more and more every day, you will more and more reflect that glory to the world. You yourselves will be turning from sin and pointing others to God. Yes, Jesus is a fascinating Teacher. Yes, He is the Lamb of God. Yes, He is the King of Israel. And, especially, yes, here's your miracle: He is our Savior.

It was on the cross that the glory of Jesus was fully revealed. It was to the cross that all his signs pointed. It was to that high point in history that our eyes turn when we believe in Jesus. With all of His disciples of all time, you and I join hands as sinners who have been bought back from death by the dieing and rising of Jesus. We walk together as forever new believers, washed clean each day, fed at the altar, strengthened in faith for life, drinking the new wine that is so much more beneficial than the legalistic ceremonies symbolized by water in stone pots.

The light has come on for each believer. We have had our epiphanies. And now we spread that light to others.

S.D.G.

Departing in Peace

I.N.I.

A sermon to be preached at Our Savior Lutheran Church, Arlington, Virginia on the Sunday after Christmas, 27 December 2009, and based on the Gospel for the day, St. Luke 2:22-40, but especially verses 29-32, the Nunc Dimittis of Simeon

Grace, mercy, and peace be yours in Christ Jesus our Lord,

[text]

Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ,

What a special day this is! And what a special day it was when Mary and Joseph brought their infant son to the Temple in Jerusalem!

Luke wraps together the two events of the purification of Mary and the Presentation of Jesus. The first was required in the Old Testament 40 days after a boy was born (and 80 days after a girl was born), wherein a sacrifice was to be brought in order to make the new mother ritually clean again. The latter also came from the Old Testament command that a first-born son was to be considered holy to the Lord; although, they could be redeemed – bought back, if you will – from God in order to be of service in some other life's work besides the priesthood.

The sacrifice that Joseph and Mary bring is the two turtledoves sacrifice of a poor couple that could not afford the purchase of a lamb, which would have been the other acceptable alternative. (Although, if you think about it, they were also bringing a spotless, unblemished Lamb with them, One Who would be the most acceptable sacrifice ever.) And, interestingly (although maybe one shouldn't make too much of it) Luke doesn't mention the offering required to 'buy back' a first-born son, which could mean that Luke intends his readers to understand that Jesus remained dedicated to God's service – which, of course, He did.

This Temple in Jerusalem was quite different from today's Christian churches. There was something going on every day of the week at the Temple. There was a lot of noise. There was confusion. There would have been enough smells to overpower a lot of us here. There were a lot of people. Without being profane, I think we might imagine it something like a crowded shopping mall.

While the Holy Family was there at the Temple, a couple people came to them out of the hustle and bustle. These two were 'regulars,' people who were probably considered to be just part of the scenery by many of the other Temple-goers because they were always there at the Temple. They met Jesus and His parents, and they said some remarkable things. I want to focus our attention on one of those people and one of the things he said.

Simeon was a man who “was just and devout, waiting for the Consolation of Israel, and the Holy Spirit was upon him.” He's usually pictured as a senior citizen, but the text doesn't really speak directly to his age, as it does to Anna's.

It's interesting that despite how just and devout he was, despite how religious, spiritual, and pious he was, Simeon still had to wait for the Consolation of Israel. Neither his devotion, nor his spirituality could bring this about. Both Simeon as an individual man, and Israel as the people of God, had to wait for consolation, for the Consolation (capital C), for the One who could and would console the nation and its individuals. The Christmas story underlines for us just how wrong it is for people to hope that their own actions will bring about lasting peace in their hearts and lives. There are several individuals in the story who are specifically described as people focused on following the Law, yet who all needed a Savior. Here again, Simeon is one of them. He was concerned about following all the rules and regulations, but he knew that none of it was enough to gain him everlasting peace. Simeon knew, as we all know deep in our hearts, that forgiveness and peace only come from God. There is only One who can and does soothe our stress, alleviate our grief, and truly comfort us. That one is our loving God.

Simeon recognizes Jesus as the One he has been waiting for. How did he do that? The only way it could have been was that, as Luke tells us, “the Holy Spirit was with him.”

And there again, we have a clear Scripture telling us that the only way people come to have Jesus in their hearts is through the gift of the Holy Spirit who brings us to faith. Others there in the Temple were just. Others were devout. Others were religious. But the Holy Spirit was with Simeon, and Simeon was the one who recognized Jesus for Who He really is. Simeon was the one who took Jesus into his arms. Today our world is filled with people who think that they can somehow grab the benefits of knowing Jesus all on their own, that they can gain the peace that passes all understanding, or the deep joy, or the hope for the future all on their own. But Simeon teaches us that recognizing and embracing Jesus comes only when the Holy Spirit is upon us, as He is when we hear the Word of God and come to faith, when we experience the means of grace.

Upon holding Jesus, Simeon broke into a blessing that we think of as a song (maybe he sang it, too, we don't know). Those of us in liturgical Christian churches sing this “Nunc Dimittis” after we receive Holy Communion: “Lord, now let your servant go in peace....” Let's look at the words of that song for a few minutes this morning.

That opening line is one of the more beautiful lines in the Bible. “Lord, now you are letting your servant depart in peace, According to your word.” Well how else and when else would one of God's servants be able to die in peace? When God's word is fulfilled, His promises are all made good. Simeon is recognizing that all of the Lord's promises to the world up to that time especially through the prophets of Israel pointed to Jesus. On a personal level, Simeon may have had a special assurance from God that he would not die until he saw the fulfillment of those Old Testament promises. He'd hung on. He'd spent time in the Temple. He'd outlived many of his family and friends, some of whom had also been waiting expectantly for the coming of the Messiah. And yet the Lord delayed His coming. So Simeon did not give up, but waited patiently and expectantly for Jesus' first coming, in the same way that you and I wait for His second coming.

This side of the first Christmas, all the Lord's promises still point to Jesus, you see. Now they point us toward that second coming when we will all be able to depart in peace at the fulfillment of God's word. As faithful followers, as Holy Spirit filled Christians, as baptized children of our heavenly Father, we truly do have the chance to sing Simeon's song as our own song. We truly are ready to depart this world in peace because we know what awaits us on the other side of death. We can depart in peace because God fulfills His word of forgiveness for our sins.

Simeon explains next how it is that he is ready to die. He says “For my eyes have seen Your salvation, Which you have prepared before the face of all peoples.” This phrase fleshes out what the first line pointed toward. In case you didn't get what word it is that has been fulfilled, Simeon tells us that it was the word about the sending of the One who would bring salvation, the One Who would be salvation for the world.

It is significant that the most meaningful word for Simeon is the word of salvation. There is no other more meaningful word for any of us. Every person's struggle for meaning and rest is rooted in a yearning for salvation. We know we've messed up. We want to have that fixed.

The salvation which Simeon saw wasn't something reserved for a small segment of society, either. It wasn't something set aside for the especially pious, or the especially righteous; it wasn't a salvation reserved for those who were especially generous or giving; and it really wasn't a salvation reserved only for the descendants of Abraham who made up the people of Israel. This salvation had been prepared before the face of all peoples, male and female, slave and free, Jew and Gentile. Everyone on earth needs God reaching into history to save us. Everyone gets that salvation offered to them.

The last phrase of Simeon's song specifies what he meant by “before the face of all peoples”. Simeon sings, “A light to bring revelation to the Gentiles, and the glory of your people Israel.” Both Jew and Gentile, in other words. Everyone. God so loves the whole world that he sent his only-begotten Son.

So one of the miracles of this season is the clear teaching that Jesus is not only the long-awaited Messiah of the Jews, promised by God through the prophets for generations, but that Jesus is also the long-awaited Messiah of the Gentiles, the Savior of the whole world.

The next verse in the Gospel tells us that Joseph and Mary “marveled at those things which were spoken of Him.” Most parents have people say nice things about their children, but these words were really over the top in a way. These parents had heard angelic messages about the special role this child would have, but perhaps even they had not understood until now just how widespread, how earth-shaking, how history-making Jesus would be. “A light to bring revelation to the Gentiles.” Well, clearly the Gentiles have been sitting in darkness, the darkness of sin without hearing a promise of salvation. Not that many years in the future, though, Peter and Paul would be preaching God's word of forgiveness to Gentile people. It was happening. The light of the world was spreading throughout the world.

And he would also be “the glory of your people Israel.” This little child would somehow become the greatest person in a nation that had had many great people in it. As the One who embodied all the prophecies and promises of Israel going back to the Garden of Eden, this Child was destined for clear greatness. Maybe wrapped in his baby clothes there in the Temple that day He didn't look all that different from other babies begin brought in by their parents. How would anyone have known but by the inspiration of the Holy Spirit? Yet the Spirit inspired, and Simeon spoke, and Joseph and Mary had the chance to marvel at what was spoken. They could take those words with them through the years of raising Jesus. Here was a special child. Here was the ultimate Child of promise. He was the Child of the real, the most important promise.

His life, his death, his resurrection would make all the difference in the world to the world. He was the Savior. He was the glory of his people, he was the light to the Gentiles. He brought salvation to all people. Because of Jesus, all people now have the chance to depart from this world in peace.

You and I can be ready at a moment's notice to make this departure. Our Savior has come. He was born in Bethlehem so many years ago. He died in our places on the cross. He rose from the dead as proof of God's victory over sin, death, and the Devil. We celebrate Christmas now in remembrance of our Savior's first coming. And with Simeon we look forward to Jesus' second coming and to 'departing this life in peace according to His Word; for our eyes have seen His Salvation, which He has prepared before the face of all peoples, a light to bring revelation to the Gentiles, And a glory to His people Israel.' Amen.

S.D.G.

Great Expectations and Greater Ones

I.N.I.

A sermon to be preached at St. Paul's Lutheran Church, Columbia, Pennsylvania on Wednesday 9 December 2009 and based on the assigned Gospel text for the evening: St. Luke 1:12-15a, 18, 24-25, 57 to carry the theme of Elizabeth personifying Advent Expectation.

Grace, mercy, and peace be yours in Christ Jesus our Lord.


[text]

Dear Friends in Christ,

“Elizabeth is expecting.” That news flashed through a certain Judean town years ago, we can be sure. But Elizabeth was expecting long before she became pregnant. We can guess at some of Elizabeth's expectations, and be fairly certain of others.

I. Elizabeth's Expectations (Known and Conjectured)

For example, while her husband Zechariah had been off in Jerusalem, we can guess that she was expecting him to come home brimming with news and stories. She was also likely expecting that she would spend her remaining years as a doting aunt or as a babysitting substitute grandmother for children in her village. Maybe she was even expecting that God would actually answer her prayers over the years and somehow send her a child of her own despite her advanced years.

And like other faithful believers over the years, Elizabeth had been expecting the Lord to fulfill His ancient promises and to send a Messiah to Israel.

There's a good chance that Elizabeth expected something from the Lord in response to the way she had been “righteous before God, living blamelessly according to all the commandments and regulations of the Lord” (Lk. 1:6). That would really only be natural, wouldn't it? She was keeping up her side of the relationship. When was God going to step in and do something for her in return? It wasn't as if Elizabeth was a 'nobody' after all. She was a descendant of Aaron, the brother of Moses of old and the progenitor of Israel's priests. She had married a priest. Her family connections, in other words, were pretty solid.

And despite the fact that there were so very many laws to keep, she and her husband had really exercised a great deal of piety and even holiness by keeping a very kosher household, by strictly maintaining the Sabbath, by observing the festivals like Passover. They had sacrificed the required sacrifices. They had prayed the necessary prayers. They had worshiped. They had loved the Lord with all their heart, soul, and mind. They had loved their neighbors, too.

Yet while Elizabeth had rejoiced in the Lord, and again I say rejoiced, there was that one thing missing. So much of her people's culture focused on the promise of children, and she had none. At one level, children were the Social Security system of their world – much like they are in poor cultures of today's world: when people aged beyond being able to work for their living, then they expected that their children would care for them as they had for their own parents. But at another level, children were viewed as a blessing from the Lord, as kind of tangible evidence of His love, and certainly as a way that the faith of Israel could grow.

There were examples in the Scriptures that Elizabeth knew, examples of women whose aged or barren wombs had finally been blessed by children of promise. Just two are included in our lessons this evening. Out Old Testament lesson recalls Rachel giving birth to Joseph who would later save his whole family by gathering them into his household in Egypt during a terrible famine. Our New Testament lesson recalls Sarah, Rachel's grandmother-in-law, who gave birth to her son Isaac when she and Abraham were “as good as dead,” both being in the neighborhood of 100 years old. I wouldn't be surprised if Elizabeth knew their stories by heart and included them in her prayers. She and Zechariah had prayed for a child. She knew that being able to pass on her faith in God to her own children would be a way of making her own contribution to the growth of the Lord's family.

Well, all that about children was true. But Elizabeth was mistaken if she ever expected that her obedience to the Law of God was going to get her the child she wanted. As right as she was, Elizabeth was wrong if she ever thought that living blamelessly according to all the commandments and regulations of the Lord would somehow prove her worthiness to God, as if she could really be perfect and 100% blameless.

Elizabeth's expectations while Zechariah was serving at the Temple in Jerusalem – if they were realistic – were defined by the boundaries of her imperfection, her sin before the Lord, that meant she would never be able to keep God's Law completely.

II. Our Expectations Before We Know Christ

You and I can and do have our own expectations, don't we? Our expectations can be all over the map, too. We can expect that if we out in an honest day's work, we will get a a full day's pay. We can expect that when we do achieve retirement age, we will be somewhat taken care of. We can expect that when we are sick or injured that we can get help from doctors and the health care system.

We may be expecting all sorts of other things. We may be expecting things from our families. We may be expecting things from our friends, from our neighbors, even from strangers.

And maybe we expect things from God. There are a lot of people in today's world who have some sort of vague expectation that 'God helps those who help themselves.' This is not a phrase from the Bible, though, and does not express our Christian faith. But we hear a lot about people – and maybe you are or were one of them – who expect that if we treat other people well, and do our best, and generally try to be nice to others, well then God will pretty much have to let us into Heaven after we die. You've all seen the cartoon image of St. Peter guarding the gate of Heaven with a long list of who has been naughty and nice. The world before Jesus Christ sees things this way, as if God were a grandfatherly Santa Claus, always genial, always eager to overlook slips by his grandchildren, and always dropping eternal presents on everybody because – despite the talk – nobody ever really expects Santa to skip a house where children misbehave.

So we expect God to play fair. We do our best. We come as close as we can to “ living blamelessly according to all the commandments and regulations of the Lord” and surely the Lord will bless us. Won't He?

Well, if we're really honest with ourselves, we know He won't. God wants perfection. And perfection means not slipping even once. It means scoring a perfect “10” every time. It means getting straight A's every semester every year for the rest of our lives. And that's just not going to happen.

That means that what we really should expect from God is His disappointment with us, His correction, and His hand of punishment. THAT is only fair. Those have always been the rules of the game. Everybody, deep in their hearts, realizes that, too.

III. Our Expectations Once We Know Christ

Here's where Elizabeth of old – old Elizabeth of old – can continue to teach you and me about the Lord. What Elizabeth was expecting can be what we are expecting, too.

Because Elizabeth was expecting her Savior. Her expectation was met when Mary visited six months later. Part of what she said to Mary was to ask “why has this happened to me that the mother of my Lord comes to me?” She could tell because her unborn son, John the Baptiser, “leaped for joy” in her womb when Mary greeted her. John was beginning his own ministry of announcing the coming of the Savior. And Elizabeth rejoiced.

So, too, do we rejoice at the coming of our Savior. With eager expectation we look forward to celebrating Christmas once again. On December 25th we start our annual 12 day celebration of Jesus' birth. We always expect the best of this time of year. And it's all tied up in the coming of Jesus, born of the Virgin Mary in Bethlehem, born our King, and born our Redeemer.

And that is precisely why you and I look forward to the Second Coming with the same eager expectation. People who have no Savior have no hope for the future. They have no way to save themselves from the punishment for their sins. They have no assurance that things will be all right for them when they die. Maybe they hope so. But they don't know.

We who are followers of Jesus, however, have a sure and certain promise that we have a good future before us. We don't have to wonder whether we've done enough good deeds to get past the gatekeeper of Heaven. We don't need to tremble because maybe some of the things we've done were just bad enough to keep out of everlasting joy. You and I know we haven't done enough good, and that we've done way too much bad. But we also know this: we know that Jesus Christ, true God and true Man, did absolutely everything to satisfy God on our behalves. So we look forward to the Second Coming of Jesus, we look forward to judgment day, we look forward to our deaths because they are the door that takes us into our eternal rest, our eternal peace, our eternal joy.

We should expect nothing if we rely on our own merits or worthiness. But God's gracious gifts exceed our human expectations. Instead of anger, we find grace. Instead of rejection, we find love and acceptance. Instead of punishment, we receive Jesus, the Incarnate Son of God. This God-with-us, this Immanuel, becomes our Savior. He took our sin and suffering and death, aced them all in our place before we were even born, and gave us his life and holiness to cover us.

This Advent we all have expectations. We may be expecting presents. We may be expecting greeting cards. We may be expecting family get-togethers or visits from friends. We could be expecting special meals and cookies and fruit cake. I can't promise that any of those expectations will be fulfilled.

This Advent, we who have been made one with Jesus through our Baptism into his death and resurrection have other expectations as well. We are expecting God's forgiveness. We are expecting eternal joy. We are expecting to be welcomed into Heaven where the open arms of our loving God will wrap us up in the warmest hug ever. And those expectations we can be absolutely sure will be fulfilled.

May the peace of God that surpasses all human understanding and expectation keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus our Lord. Amen.

S.D.G.