Behold Your King

Biblical Texts: Palms – John 12:12-19 Passion – Mark 15:1-47

This sermon has two “movements” (man that is a pretentious term). The first is a bit of history about Passion Sunday and Palm Sunday and how we got to them being together. The second is a meditation upon the two crowds: the one that sang Jesus into Jerusalem with Palms, and the one that cried crucify. The second movement is really the preaching for the day and takes up most of the sermon. And the really interesting thing from these two texts is the interplay of who calls Jesus “The King of Israel” and who calls him “the King of the Jews”. Israel and “The Jews” are always distinct things. And Palm Sunday/Passion Sunday confirms the difference. Israel is the people of God by faith. They accept this King who comes on colt and cross. “The Jews” are the people from every nation that reject this king, who have no king but Caesar. And that is the crisis of the Kingdom. The King has come, but is this Jesus your King?

Love & Money

In Wednesday morning Bible Study this week we studied Matthew 19 which I like to call the love and money chapter. Jesus’ teaching on both motives for murder compressed into one chapter.  Even Jesus on these topics gives a little wiggle room saying things like “not everyone can receive this saying” and “let the one who is able to receive this receive it” and “with God all things are possible.” Jesus doesn’t lie.  He is asked legal questions.  “Is it lawful to divorce?” and “What good works must I do?”  And He does give the legal answers. It is just that these legal answers are typically beyond us.  The law is good and wise, and our lives would be better if we followed them. But as Jesus says to one of the questions “because of the hardness of your hearts…”.  The ultimate answer is not to be found in the law.  The ultimate answer is sandwiched in the middle of those two great motives.  The Kingdom belongs to the little children.  Which is not so much a literal statement as a picture written on the heart. The Kingdom belongs to those humble enough to accept the touch of Jesus.  We break the world.  We find ourselves in the ditch.  And we need the touch of God to save us and give us hope.

To me that is the law and gospel of love and money.  But thinking about it further there is something more that needs to be said in our day.  Author Tom Holland, an excellent popular historian of the ancient world, wrote a book recently called Dominion.  And his thesis of this book is true, but dramatically unpopular in academic haunts. He captured it perfectly in the subtitle: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World. The Historian of the ancient would, against what he wanted to believe as he was enamored with glory that was Rome and the grandeur that was Greece, detailed how a crucified Jew in a backwater of the empire changed the entire world. And because of that change, even today the world is much more “Christian” than we might think. Let me explain.

In the ancient world, you got what you deserved. If you were crucified you were obviously guilty. The idea that an innocent man could be on the tree was just not possible.  But that thinking is really derived from a deeper pagan idea. Fortune, the Gods, had their favorites. And those the gods favored were rewarded with money, power, fame, glory.  And the reward of the gods was righteousness. The acts of the powerful, because they were powerful, were righteous and ordained by God. The desires of money were always just. If you had enough money to bribe enough people that wasn’t corruption.  That was simply the outworking of the right.  For Jesus to say, “Only with difficulty will a rich person enter the Kingdom of heaven.  It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle” was earth changing even to his Jewish disciples.  When the gospel says “when they heard this, they were greatly astonished, saying ‘who then can be saved?’” It is because this is a direct refutation of everything they thought about God.  Even the Jews.  Yes, the prophets warned about taking care of the widowed and the fatherless, but even that could find gentile parallels in Stoic thought about fortune.  The wheel turns.  If you are generous when you are up, karma will help you when you are down.  God still rewarded the righteous with power, money, fame, glory.

Our civilization, apparently at the end of this Dominion, is at an interesting point. It is still “Christian” is the sense that we know the innocent can suffer and that we think it is incumbent on a just society to rectify. It is still “Christian” to the extent that it doesn’t equate power with righteousness.  But to the extent that it has rejected both the gospel – let’s put it here as the meek shall inherit the earth – and the law – that the 10 commandments represent how we should live, how long does that Dominion’s conclusions which were built on the proclamation of the law and gospel hold? We already see the secular replacements (“human rights”, “rule of law”, “philanthropy”) breaking and the demands of power and money returning stronger. How long until those demands are again simply asserted at the righteous judgements of god? There are already such assertions in the cults of many current figures in the papers everyday.

If we will not hear the law.  I’m not saying live it perfectly, but merely hear it. Neither do we get the world it orders. That harsher pagan false law returns. And we should not be as surprised as the disciples this time. We know the difference the gospel made. When presented with the King like on Palm Sunday, if we ultimately reject his rule, we should not be surprised when other lords return.

Lenten Midweek 5- Lord’s Prayer

This is the final sermon in the Lenten Midweek series. We reviewed the first portion of the Catechism with emphasis on the creed (MW 2,3 & 4). The Law was MW1 and this MW5 is the Lord’s Prayer. We used the third petition as the text. The arrangement of Luther’s catechism in the Word section drops leaves you at prayer, which is part of Luther’s teaching. The Christian life is a life of prayer. This sermon reflects on what prayer accomplishes and how which are the two questions Luther asks in the catechism: What does this mean? and How is this done?

Cross Hearts

Biblical Text: Jeremiah 31: 31-34

The law is a covenant that con work on the head. It can work on the gut. The law doesn’t really work on the heart. Our natural hearts are turned elsewhere. What this passage of Jeremiah promises is a covenant with God that works on the heart. That is a covenant that places us at the foot of the cross. This sermon reflects on attempts to read God’s word with the head, and then reading it with the heart. It is much less “heady” than most of mine.

AI Musings and Silent Oracles

I apologize upfront, I’m not even attempting to bring any wisdom this week.  But the Large Language Models (LLMs/ChatGPT) and the machine learning (ML/the robots) have been on my mind.  The next generation of these things is apparently around the corner and each generation gets better.  And with each generation that gets better, anxiety and fear can also rise.  I expect any day the “Butlerian Jihad” (Dune fans will know) will emerge.  We have two paths of thought by our Sci-Fi imagineers on this.  One is the Terminator and the other is C3PO.   The new technology is always Frankenstein, here to kill us or make us obsolete.  The opposite picture – usually pushed by the Dr. Frankensteins – is that the new technology is a harmless loveable nothing who is only here to make our lives better. Eventually we come to some type of synthesis. We recognize that the monster is not really a monster.  That yes, the new technology has some good uses.  But, that we remain the real monsters, and if there is some way to abuse the new technology, we will find it.  

But if I was musing that “this time is different” it would go something like this.  For most of history, especially Christian history, our anthropology – what we think about ourselves – has had a three-fold division: mind, body and soul.  The seat of the mind in is the head.  The seat of the body is the gut.  And the seat of the soul in the heart. The mind thinks, the body feels, the soul wills. Plato would picture this as a chariot – the technology of the day.  The mind and the body are the horses and the spirit is the charioteer.  Within Christian thought we say that “we have the mind of Christ (1 Cor 2:16).”  The Holy Spirit or the renewed sprit dwells within us (Psalm 51). And we await the renewed body, the resurrection body.  Until the resurrection we dwell in this tent which also contains sin.  The Christian struggle is that the renewed mind and spirit struggle against that flesh. Both from fear of death (Hebrew 2:15) and from carnal desire.  

Technology as we are thinking here really has its beginning with Descartes. When he said “I think, therefore I am” he reduced that Spirit to the mind.  Philosophers have been arguing the mind-body problem ever since. But the practical effect is that Western man pursuing the head alone developed great mastery over the material. This was the movie Oppenheimer’s theme. Should we have made the atomic bomb?  The fact that the mind said it was possible made it necessary to bring it into reality.  That was the smile on Oppy’s face seeing the explosion. He had made it, extending the realm of the mind over the material. He never really submitted the question to the will, the Spirit – Is this a good thing?  The AI we see being developed is almost the perfect reduction of this Western man.  It is all mind.  It has no spirit, neither does it have any permanent flesh.  

My guess is that we will find that our spirit and flesh will provide plenty for our new technology tools. If we find Terminators, it is because we have willed Terminators. But we will also have plenty of Star Wars droids.  Plenty of personality, much smarter than we are in some ways, but really extension of our own will.  If I give voice to the fear, it is that something else provides the spirit to the AI mind.  “And [the 2nd beast] was allowed to give breath to the image of the [first] beast, so that the image of the beast might even speak and might cause those who would not worship the image of the beast to be slain. (Revelation 13:15).”  Toward the end of the apostolic era Plutarch – a Roman historian – pens a letter on the strange “Obsolescence of the Oracles”.  The Oracles fell silent one by one.  They no longer spoke.  Now of course Paul would say that they were all demons. And Christ has bound the strong man (Mark 3:27).  But that picture of the beasts imagines a time when the oracles are no longer silent.  Do we have a very different oracle coming into the world slouching toward Bethlehem as the poet wrote?  Time to put such visions away. Lord have mercy. Amen. 

3rd Article: Where is the Holy Spirit?

This is the 4th Lenten Midweek. The theme we have been following is the first part of the catechism with a focus on the creed. This week was the third article on the Holy Spirit. This meditation’s theme is the contrast between the airy nature of what we typically attribute to “The Spirit” and the very concrete nature of the Spirit in both scripture and creed. If we meditate on the catechism’s explanation the Spirit’s work is the most observable in our daily lives. Taking place in and through the church and the forgiveness of sins.

The Light of the Cross

Biblical Text: John 3:14-21

There are Sunday were you look at the text have trouble finding any hymns to go with them or any themes that are preachable…and then there is Lent 4 series B. You could preach a year on these three texts. And there are at least 3 services of great hymns usable, and another 3 that nobody would complain about.

Jesus explicitly connect the cross to the episode of Israel and snakes in the wilderness. The pastor’s corner this week (scroll down) wrote that up more fully. But this sermon brings some of that in. What is Jesus connecting to directly? There are a couple of things that the lifting up of the snake does. It is a picture of the toxic nature of our sin. It also makes completely clear the sin and the environment we live in rife with “fiery serpents.” This sermon makes the connections between that OT lesson (Numbers 21:4-9) and the cross. It then examines how the cross goes further. How this is one of the rare places God answers some “why?” questions. It finishes with the encouragement to live the Christian life and our hope stated so clearly by John – eternal life. The cross is the light by which we can see all this.

Seraphic Vipers

The Old Testament Reading this week is one of those too strange not to be true stories.  Israel is wandering in the desert and it is probably quite late in their 40 years of wandering.  The high priest Aaron has died, although exactly when it is in that time frame isn’t possible to pin down. But not much has changed.  They are impatient.  They speak against God and Moses.  They make comparisons to how good it was in Egypt. They want food and water while despising the manna and quail. (Numbers 21:4-5).  It’s a replay of the greatest hits. Nothing has changed. Sinful human nature remains a constant.  40 years in the wilderness has taught them nothing.

The LORD’s response this time is not the slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love character.  Neither does he give Moses a chance to negotiate.  The LORD sends fiery serpents among the people. That descriptor itself is interesting. The word translated as fiery is simply Seraphim, as in the Cherubim and Seraphim.  The LORD sent seraphic vipers. The leap to fiery is that the Seraphim are those angels closest to God.  They are the ones who take burning coals to Isaiah (Isaiah 6:6).  The serpents bite, so maybe the fiery is meant to capture the sting of the bite.  But, it is still evocative.  When we are grumpy and giving in to anger and complaining to God, how easy are our tongues and actions given over to Screwtape and his sort – Seraphic Vipers. Even if they aren’t demons, it’s evocative.  And maybe a reminder of the world we live in – visible and invisible.

And when we are suffering the slings and arrows of fortune or Wormtongue what is our prayer?  Take it away.  “We have sinned, we have spoken against the LORD and against you.  Pray to the LORD, that he take the serpents from us. (Numbers 21:7).”  Put us back on the top of the wheel of fortune. Remove the thorn in my flesh. Make things perfect again. Restore it like it was.  Yes, we will admit our sin.  We might even mean it.  But what we desperately want is the peace we forfeited.

And God’s answer to their prayers is instructive.  Does he take the serpents away?  No. He instructs Moses to make an image of one of them, put it on a pole, and tell everyone bitten to look at the image. “When he sees it, he shall live. (Numbers 21:8).”  Israel is not restored, but enabled to live in the midst of the Seraphic Vipers. Another reason I’m not so confident of just calling them snakes.  Because they never come up again in the story, but they are not driven away either.  They just go to the background.  While the pole with their image is in the foreground.

What did they see when they saw it?  What do we see when we look at the cross? That man hangs there because of what we did. We put Jesus there. Risking a step out, it is the holy God that causes our pain.  Yes, we deserve it, but it is still suffering.  And when he came to us, we preferred to kill him.  “Here is the heir, let us kill him (Matthew 21:38)”  But when we look at the cross, if we see it rightly, we also live. God suffered with us.  He was raised up that we might see him rightly.  This one is not the Seraphic Vipers that divide us, but the innocent Son of God who loves us. Who loves us that even when we are living our greatest hits, died for us.  The sign lifted up for all the world to see.  Towering o’er the wrecks of time.  No, we are not delivered from the Seraphic Vipers.  But we can see them rightly in the light of the cross; see them rightly, and live.  

Temple Cleaners

Biblical Text: John 2:13-22

Jesus’ Cleansing of the Temple is both one of the most striking of his actions and maybe the most misunderstood. What we want from it is either permission to whip anyone we disagree with, or to cancel out all acts of zeal. But that just isn’t what this text is about. Looking at it from the Gospel of John helps in these regards as you have to deal with one of the great divergences between John and the Synoptics. Either you think Jesus did something like this twice (highly unlikely), the Synoptics got the timing wrong (all three?!), or John moved it to a special place for a theological reason. And how John tells the story is different is some important ways which is what I think he wants us to focus on. That and he says twice that “the disciples remembered.” And in each case what the disciples remembered were the words of Jesus and the Scriptures. The text is one that reveals Jesus. It has little to do with the act of cleansing the physical temple or telling us when we can fight or not. It has a lot to do with who Jesus is and what he is doing. It reveals God. The sermon follows those thoughts.

Quiet and Peaceable Life

We received in our mailboxes this week our mail-in primary ballot. That is still a bit strange.  In NY voting by mail was not really a thing.  Everyone trudged to the polls on a Tuesday if they wanted to vote.  But that brought to mind one of the petitions that is consistently in the Prayers of the Church.  The picture above is the generic form from the Bidding Prayer. The Apostle Paul in 1 Timothy 2 bids us to pray for a variety of people.  That is the scriptural format of the bidding prayer or the prayers of the church.  And one of his bids is “for kings and all who are in high positions, that we may lead a peaceful and quiet life, godly and dignified in every way (1 Tim. 2:2).” In our Sunday morning prayers this generic form takes on different specific forms at different times. There are many parts of that generic prayer that can get emphasized.  But there is a specific path of meditation I want to follow here.

The prayer is for a quiet and peaceable life.  Such a life depends upon those in authority. We might ask why that is.  Why doesn’t God just do it?  The primary answer in all things in the temporal kingdom is that God works through means. He has revealed his law.  And he has ordained those whose job it is to carry it out. As the prayer above puts it, “You have ordained for the punishment of evildoers and for the praise of those who do well all the powers that exist.”  The first use of the law, the civil use or the curb, is to punish evildoers and to praise the good (Romans 13:3-4). The establishment of good order is so that we are able to live quiet and peaceable lives. And our consistent prayer is that this would be granted to us.

But there are times it is not granted.  The worst of those times are when “I will make boys their princes, and infants shall rule over them. (Isaiah 3:4).” The longer passage – Isa 3:1-4 (5-8 ff) – is worth pondering.  How is this done?  The LORD takes away the support and supply of the following in order: mighty man and soldier, judge and prophet, diviner and elder, captain of 50 and man of rank, skillful magician and expert in charms.  That list I believe has an intentional order.

The mighty man and soldier are those who can both establish and keep order. They have both natural ability and official office. The judge and the prophet are those who can keep order already established and who can point in the way to keep it.  They also have a learned ability and an office. The next step down is the diviner and elder.  These are those with natural ability, but no office.  They are the judge and prophet in the wild. Following those are their opposites, those who have an office, but probably lack ability – the captain of 50  and man of rank.  In our world they have the credentials, but lack true aptitude. And last on the list are the Wizards of Oz.  Those who can fake it for a while.  They have neither office nor aptitude, but by some dark art can keep the machine working for a bit.  Or at least give the appearance of order.

How do you get Children?  The supply and support for these are removed. What does it mean to be ruled by children? It means those who lack the ability to create and maintain order. They praise the evildoer and punish the one who does good. They refuse to maintain proper curbs.  They tear down fences without wisdom as to why they were there. They point people away from God and toward themselves.

The prayer is that “those who make, administer and judge our laws, bear it according to the Word.”  That the curbs are put up in proper places.  That within them we might lead quiet and peaceable lives in godliness and honesty. God ultimately controls the supply, but we are the support. When you get that ballot I hope these are thoughts and prayers before checking your support.