The Logic of Sacrifice

Biblical Text: John 1:29-42a

John the Baptist points at Jesus and says “Behold, the Lamb of God.” This sermon meditates on the meaning of that phrase. First thinking about the logic and meaning of sacrifice, which oddly has both left our world and in coming back in all kinds of ways. It thinks about how that logic of sacrifice doesn’t really work, at least not with how God has provided the lamb. The last point it contemplates is what happens when we find what we are seeking and it is the lamb of God.

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Solar Array (An Object Lesson)

The house that we bought had installed a rather large solar array. Unfortunately, we learned about a month after moving in that something was wrong and it wasn’t working. We learned this when the new electric bill came and there was a zero on produced electricity. The frustration was doubled when the supposed fix was delayed for another month when the scheduled repairman bailed out on the initial date. Other than the occasion to sin as several words got taken in vain over that time, it was also an occasion to learn a few things. I did manage to learn that the installation was still on warranty, who the company was and how to contact them. I learned that they provide both a website and a phone app that monitors and reports on solar production, to which I am now addicted checking the status. I also learned a bit about the actual physical installation which I think is a possible if flawed object lesson in two types of righteousness or the righteousness of the law and that of the gospel.

I’ll say the solar array has three parts: the panels up on the roof, the wires and gauges, and something called an inverter. The panels produce direct current (DC). The electricity that comes from APS is alternating current (AC). The DC produced has to be converted to AC to be used. That is the purpose of the inverter. What was out on my array was the inverter. So, when I got access to the reporting app, I could see Watts being produced by the panels, but it all went nowhere. They were being sent into a non-working inverter.

Luther would talk about moral and civil righteousness. Moral righteousness is that vertical standing with God. Civil righteousness is our standing with each other. The only way we receive moral righteousness is by faith in what Christ has done. The reason we can stand is because Christ has given us his righteousness that covers all our sin. Civil righteousness works much differently, and it has some interesting quirks. Civil righteousness is active. We do it. The real question is if what we are doing is truly righteous or just what we or our society think is righteous.

The law of God, like those solar panels, makes use of the light given. The law is good and wise and tells us what is truly righteous. But like those panels, the law by itself has no ability to produce usable power. And what it does produce can be wasted. We know what is right, but we don’t feel like doing it, or worse we twist it to support what I want to do. By ourselves we are like those DC solar panels. The light of the law wasted. A direct current to nowhere good.

It is only by the indwelling of the Spirit creating faith in the work of Christ that creates something usable. That inverter is able to make two useful things out of the law. First is it able to make us aware of our sin. When we look at the cross we become aware that however we have been counting righteousness, it doesn’t work. Our righteousness with God is something that only comes through Christ. The second thing it can do is start to move what we receive from God into the right directions with our neighbors. Without faith in Christ we might be producing a lot of DC current, but it does nothing. It is only by that great inverter that the light of the law can be turned into righteousness. We receive passively the moral righteousness of Christ, and we are then empowered, producing the right current, to love our neighbor.

Like all object lessons, it isn’t perfect. I could pick it apart and probably declare myself heretical. But it does strike something core: “One thing is needful”. And without that faith everything is lost.

Let It Be So For Now

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Biblical Text: Matthew 3:13-17, (Romans 6:1-11)

The occasion on the church calendar is the baptism of Jesus. If we stop and think about it, the baptism of Jesus doesn’t make sense. It is one of those moments that just feels wrong. Even John the Baptist gets this in his reply to Jesus. Jesus replies in two ways: a) let it be so for now and b) to fulfill all righteousness. This sermon explores how and why Jesus undergoes a baptism of repentance through his answers to John.

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A Gifted Star (Epiphany)

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This is an Epiphany sermon. It riffs on the idea of “wise men”. The fact is that in the story there are a lot of men who would be considered wise, but are fools for various reasons. It is only when we are gifted stars to guide – the wisdom of God – that we wind up at the manger.

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A Faintly Burning Wick He will Not Quench

There are these series of “songs” in the book of Isaiah often called the servant songs. The most famous is the one most associated with the passion in Isaiah 52 and 53. “Behold, my servant…shall be high and lifted up…he was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows…” Our Old Testament Lesson for this week (Isaiah 42) is another one of the servant songs. And it contains one of the most fascinating descriptions in the Bible of the way that God will operate with men.

The first thing it does is make sure that we understand who and what we are dealing with. “Behold my servant, whom I uphold, my chosen, in whom my soul delights.” There are three unique things here that we should absorb. The first is that the mystery of our election is tied up in the mystery of the Trinity. The son is the only-begotten of the Father. This is the one in whom the soul of the Lord delights – soul here meaning being or essence. The delight of the Lord being with his people has always been tied up with his people being connected to the only-begotten son. And from where does this delight come? The choosing. This one is my chosen. And this chosen has chosen his own. As John says at the start of his gospel, “given the right to become Children of God, who were born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God. (Jn. 1:13 ESV),” And for what have they been chosen? They are servants of the most high. Now it is the paradoxical nature of this God that he raises up his servants. And the one who is the servant of all now sits at the right hand of God. The church is the servant of Christ, his chosen, and the delight of his eye in an analogous way to the son and the Father.

How is this made known? “I will put my Spirit upon him, he will bring forth justice to the nations.” The Spirit was placed upon Jesus in his baptism. There is a long-standing fight between the Western and the Eastern churches over the Nicene Creed. The Eastern one confess that the Spirit proceeds from the Father alone. The Wester adds: and the Son. The Spirit placed upon Jesus in His baptism then proceeds from the Son to us in our baptism. He took our baptism, so that we might receive his. Just as Jesus was anointed by the Spirit for his service, we have been anointed by the Spirit for our service. And what is this service? To make known to the nations what the justice of the Lord is.

And all of that brings us to the toughest verses. How is this done? Can we bring this justice to the nations by brute force? What about by the wisdom of the world? “He will not cry aloud or lift up his voice, or make it heard in the street; a bruised reed he will not break, and a faintly burning wick he will not quench.” All of the straightforward ways of power and authority of the world are to be shunned. The gospel proceeds by “left-handed” ways. It is not that the gospel denies truth and justice. No, “he will faithfully bring forth justice. He will not grow faint or be discouraged.” This is the same God who “created the heavens and stretched them out.” His law stands. But that rule is to be accepted and longed for. “The coastlands wait for his law.” Because Christ will not have the might of the law crush the weak. Christ has chosen us and his election is sure. That “left-handed” way is by faith. The Servant has chosen us and the will of God will not be confounded. Our faith is not in vain. The One who made all things, will make them all new in due time. “Behold, the former things have come to pass, and new things I now declare.”

God operates with us by telling us exactly what he has done. By giving us His servant “as a covenant for the people.” And all those who have faith in this covenant are the chosen, those in whom the soul of God delights.

Companions of Christ (The Holy Innocents)

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Biblical Text: Matthew 2:13-23

This is a Christmas Season sermon. The Christmas season is not something that stops on Dec 25th. It is also not something that came for universal hygge or general comfort. It came for peace on earth, and the world is not going to give that peace without a fight. This is a serious sermon about a serious topic which only finds its resolution is one place, the resurrection.

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A Christmas Season

“Love sought is good, but given unsought better.” – Olivia, Act 3, Scene 1, Twelfth Night

That line is from Shakespeare’s play Twelfth Night, otherwise known as Epiphany. You might have been forced to read it usually as a sophomore. The play has two themes that play on Epiphany. The first is wisdom and foolishness, or what is wise and what is foolish. The second – like most of Shakespeare’s comedies – is about the true nature of love. Olivia thinks she is being wise playing a “courtly love” game which ends with her foolishness of falling in love with a woman dressed as a man. And it is all played as a farce. Shakespeare’s comedies have all kinds of troubles today.

I guess I blame Reformed Protestantism. If you followed Calvin or Zwingli, they more or less ditched the church year. Every Sunday was the Lord’s Day. Elevating any day as a Holy Day was Judaizing (using Paul’s term from Galatians.) And while they have a point, every Sunday is a little Easter, life is not quite that flat. Romans 14: 5-6 should have solved that. But the United States was largely a Reformed Protestant project, so we get Christmas Day and grudgingly Easter (although that is disappearing into Spring Breaks not always around Holy Week), but we’ve lost the seasons.

The season of Christmas is twelve days, Dec 25^th – Jan 5^th. The carol The Twelve Days of Christmas is an echo of that. It might also be a Roman Catholic crypto-polemic against the Reformed erasing. And the entire 12 days were often something of boozy hazy time ending with a big party on Twelfth Night when gifts were exchanged. After all, it was the coming of the Magi that brought the gifts. Hispanic Cultures still maintain a bit of this as Tres Reyes. The Protestant Work ethic couldn’t imagine 12 boozy days, so we pack up the tree the day after.

But that’s enough dissembling, or maybe I’m just in a Christmas Season mood and can’t think straight. Olivia’s middle of the play statement captures something about the Christ child and the love of God. It is good that we love God. For God has sought our love. But the better is that he has loved us unsought. When we were lost in darkness, God sent His light. Whether that light is the fuller light of prophetic revelation, like “out of Egypt I have called my son” which ties the entire story of Israel to this Israel reduced to one, or a light given in a star to a bunch of foolish astrologers, God sought us out wise and foolish, while were all in the dark. He gave us His love unsought. When we were still sinners, Christ loved us.

The church built in a season, and then a fuller Epiphany season, to absorb the immensity of that truth. She can proclaim the reality in an hour. Your head can hear the message. But the heart doesn’t always work on the same timetable. And lots of wisdom and foolishness happens as love moves from head to heart.

A Great and Mighty Wonder

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Biblical Text: Hebrews 1:1-12

The assigned reading for Christmas Day from Hebrews is an interesting one. It is the start of an argument why Jesus is greater than the angels. The background of the argument is that angels took on an outsized role in the popular piety of the intertestamental period. You could almost say that the angels had been turned into idols. The writer of Hebrews was concerned to make an argument to compare the surpassing worth of the Son to the angels. It is an argument for the right ordering of our loves and right worship. The sermon attempts to get us to contemplate what we have placed where the 1st century Jews had placed angels. And how we worship aright.

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Christmas Eve 2022 (Light of Grace)

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The service itself was a very traditional lessons and carols. This sermon didn’t really focus on any one of those texts but upon the themes they present as what the light could mean. The sermon speaks for itself I think more than any summary I could give it here.

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Desire of Nations

“Sages leave your contemplations, brighter visions beam afar; seek the great desire of nations, ye have seen his natal star…(LSB 367, Angels from the Realms of Glory St. 3)”

“O Come, Desire of Nations bind in one the hearts of all mankind…(LSB 357 O Come, O Come, Immanuel St 7)”

This is not pulpit worthy, at least not yet. First because it is more an intuition than something well discerned. And second because there are so many ways it can go wrong. But desire is something fundamentally bound to Christmas.

When we are younger that desire is stoked by the wonders of the season. All the lights. The decorations coming out. A tree in the house! Cookies and just the pace of life. Before you even get to presents and Santa, a two-year old is attuned to the desire of the season. They are sad to see everything packed away. As we get older that desire moves on to: “What am I going to get?” It might be here that we start to understand something about desire. Whatever physical thing you get, the satisfaction doesn’t last that long. As soon as you get the Toy of the Year, it breaks. As soon as you open the X-box, desire moves to having the next game.

Desires of adults around the season might even be more complicated. Christmas might be the first time parents meet the new boyfriend/girlfriend. And the strange mix of desires all of that stirs up in both parents and children. Desires to give the children a “good Christmas” which gets harder each year, until it really is impossible. Desires for a gathering of the clan and a nostalgia for when everything was together. And it is not that any of these desires are necessarily bad. They might be appropriate in their seasons. And there are better and worse satisfactions of them. But if you pay close attention to the desires of season, they all tend to increase the restlessness. We place our hopes on things that can’t bear the weight, even if they are good things. Which if we are honest they often aren’t. Our desires are often that our wills would override the wills of others. That the world would stop and satisfy me.

What Christmas does is start to train our desires, in the words of a great prayer so that we “pass through things temporal that we lose not the things eternal.” It is not the fact of desire that is our problem; it is often the type of satisfaction we expect from what our hearts desire. We often place eternal desires on temporal things which can’t do anything but buckle under the weight.

The hymnwriters get this. Even if one is a sage and supposedly trained their desires for higher things, even those ideologies and deep desires are not the proper object. Brighter visions beam afar. All earthly desires should point us to our great desire. To know our creator and be known by Him. Christmas is that creator coming to us in order to be known. Christmas is that creator not just knowing us, but loving us.

Everything else we place our desires upon ultimately fails. It is only God who is an infinite source of satisfaction. As Augustine said, “we are restless, until we find our rest in thee.” So much of life is about training ourselves to have the right desires. To binding our hearts to those things which do bring peace. When the manger orders our desires, when we come and worship the Christ the newborn King, we allow Him to satisfy our deepest desires setting our hearts at peace so that we might rightly receive all the rest of the gifts of his providence. When we receive first the eternal, the temporal adorns it like so many perfect ornaments. Even the broken ones which speak of a day of mending.