This is our Good Friday service. It is the first time I’ve used the Gospel of John for this, and John has his own very different emphasis. Same events, but focus on the Divine Jesus, as opposed to the Synoptics human passion.
It felt right. I was much more Christ the victor than the normal Good Friday. This is the Jesus who know and does so willingly, because it is his will. The world doesn’t get it, and so loses. Just when it thinks it has won, it is finished.
I’m uploading the 2nd service today. Call it 5 years in and I’m starting to get a handle on this Palm & Passion Sunday. The gospel according to John is also starting to grow on me. Or maybe I should say that the last six weeks reading John in the midst of events has opened it up in ways I did not completely see before.
The question of John 12, of Palm Sunday and Jesus’ talk immediately after, is what is glory? There is the temporal glory of the parade, and the eternal glory of the Father. This sermon asks us to consider our lives in light of “things temporal and things eternal”. As a great prayer says “may we so pass through things temporal that we do not lose the things eternal.”
When I first saw these texts for this plague week I felt “wow, lets change them.” But I’ve only changed the assigned texts of a Sunday less than 5 times. And I am glad I didn’t. In the midst of death, or at least the fear of death, these lessons tell us our hope. That is what the sermon does. Hopefully gives the saints God’s word to live in these times.
Service note: We are splitting our services to say under 10 people locally (everyone has their own pew), 9 AM and 11 AM with roughly the same number online. So, we don’t have music. We are using responsive prayer 2 in LSB. It is also wired up to produce the best sound for those online. I’ve put the entire service out. The back half after the sermon is collective prayer.
The work of God is always being displayed in our midst. It is up to us how we respond to it. God’s desired response is faith in his son. The life of Jesus is the demonstration, the work of God displayed, of the Goodness of the Father. Even in bad things, God is good. This sermon, through examining the story of Jesus’ healing of the man born blind, is a mediation on both the purposes of God and faith’s response.
The meeting of the Samaritan Woman at the well is one of those stories that I think our “High View” of the bible often gets in the way of deeply understanding. I think it is pretty clear that verses 1-15 have a lot of playful irony in them. And that irony is the set up for an encounter with The Truth. The role of a prophet is to tell the truth. And this woman at the well didn’t just meet any old prophet. She met The Truth. In the midst of plague, one that is asking we step out of tick-tock time, we are having ourselves an ironic meeting with the truth. This sermon holds up the woman’s answers and asks what ours our. It also holds out not just the The Truth, but The Way.
This is something of a statement about the purpose of preaching. We attempt to put so much on the sermon. We look for all kinds of things there. And I honestly think we look for the wrong things. What the sermon is about is proclaiming the gospel. What the sermon is about is evangelism, our evangelism. And that is what this sermon attempts to do. It isn’t 7 words of wisdom for your best life. It isn’t 5 ways to life hack your way to Jesus. It is “God so loved the world that he gave his son.” He gave him for you. He gave him that we might hear and believe and live. There is a lot else that the Bible teaches that we should do, but preaching – that is about love, what God has done for us.
I’ve become convinced that the real “crisis” if you want to call it that in American Christianity is the dismissal of the calls of the spiritual life. Even the church seems to have a very utilitarian view of the faith. It “sells” faith as something that will be good for you. It will make you healthier, wealthier and maybe wise. The trouble is that The Faith makes none of those claims. It doesn’t necessarily rule them out, but the norm would be the life of Christ, which is a life of trial. What the Faith does claim is truth. Christ is Lord. He bids us follow him. Hence the real test, do we follow?
This particular sermon was composed to take part in a specific liturgical situation. We had a baptism at the start of service. It was also helped by one of the great hymns of the Faith – I Walk in Danger All the Way (LSB 716).
Ash Wednesday, the start of Lent, has a very specific ritual. And rituals, for some deep reason, fulfill a need in humans. Out problem is perverting the ritual. It is the same thing the sin does to lots of good things. It takes the action and twists the direction the wrong way. Instead of love flowing outward to our neighbor, or love coming to us from God, sin wants love to flow from our neighbor and then believes it can give something to God. The Ashes tell us otherwise. They set us in proper relation with God and with out neighbor. Or they should. If we are listening to them instead of trying to get them to speak for us.
We had a glitch in recording today, so I had to rerecord after the fact, but I can’t rerecord the music. And the Hymn of the Day I think was important. Maybe more important that the sermon. This particular hymn is one I look forward to all year. It is a favorite, and I believe it stands up to the best of all time. In our hymnal – Lutheran Service Book 416 – Swiftly Pass the Clouds of Glory. The text is by Thomas Troeger. The music is Love’s Light by Amanda Husberg. It is a gorgeous pairing.
Swiftly pass the clouds of glory. Heaven’s voice the dazzling light/Moses and Elijah vanish; Christ alone commands the height/Peter, James and John fall silent, Turning from the summit’s rise/Downward toward the shadowed valley where their Lord has fixed His eyes.
Glimpsed and gone the revelation, they shall gain and keep its truth/Not by building on the mountain any shrine or sacred booth/but by following the savior through the valley to the cross/And by testing faith’s resilience through betrayal, pain and loss
Lord, transfigure our perception with the purest light that shines/And recast our life’s intentions to the shape of Your designs/Till we seek no other glory than what lies past Calvary’s hill/And our living and our dying and our rising by Your will.
This sermon is slightly longer than I normally go, which yes, I realized that means nobody will listen. Way to lead with the glass jaw parson. But more seriously, I think I use the extra 10 mins or so for good effect. I promise you that this is not the typical sermon you will hear on Sunday. In short it is a defense of the law. It is an encouragement to holiness. But Christian holiness should not be something based in fear, because the law has lost its sting. Give it a listen.
