Let Us Ever Walk With Jesus

Text: Matthew 25:14-30 (Really Matthew 25:1-30)
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The title of the post is a hymn we sang (tune, lyrics). I meant to get that up as the “Hymns We Sing” selection, but it just didn’t work that way. That is the central theme of the sermon and I believe the sermon text. The parable of that talents (and the preceding parable of the 10 virgins) has a bunch of beguiling allegories. I look at some of those in the sermon. But at their core, there are parables of what the successful Christian life – the life that leads to eternal life – look like. And what they look like are lives committed to walking with Jesus. They are lives full of prayer and praise and the word lived in front of those who would scoff.

That sanctification walk is hard to fake – if anyone would even desire to do so. The only reason that anyone would really try is because they were convinced that this guy Jesus was the real thing. That walking with Jesus, regardless of the circumstances, actually meant everything. It is easy to imagine Pascal’s Wager, but that isn’t enough. That bet gets you to the position of the man with one talent. You are a little afraid of that god, so you take his talent and bury in case he returns. But you don’t really change your life. You don’t live you life walking with Jesus. And as in the parable, that isn’t enough. The Christian life is one that must be lived. And you only do that if you think that man on the cross bidding you to pick up yours is actually the Lord of everything.

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The Communion of Saints

Sermon Text: Matt 5:6, Rev 6:10, Rev 7:9, Lord’s Prayer, Apostles Creed, All Saints Day
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A Lutherans we are trained to think in terms of paradoxes in tension. Here is what I mean by that. The big tension paradox is law and gospel. The law kills, yet is necessary to show us the gospel which makes alive. The gospel without the law just confirms people in self-righteousness. Think the self-esteem movement of today. That is the perfect example of gospel without law. It essentially says that God accepts you just the way you are. Used in the context before the law, that is deadly and leads to a bunch of the dysfunctions we see in our culture today. Likewise the law without the gospel doesn’t work. For a while you get better people as they struggle to keep the law, to be holy. But eventually they figure out it is a rigged game. Hey, I can’t do this!?! That is the proper place for the gospel message of God accepts you through Jesus Christ. Law and gospel go together and the Lutheran emphasis at least in America has been on the proper distinction between Law and Gospel. That is the name of Walther’s LCMS-famous book.

And that works and is true if your primary goal is salvation of the individual. And don’t get me wrong, that is important. But the gospel is about more than my personal Jesus. The gospel is the proclamation of Jesus as Lord. The gospel is the proclamation of the resurrection of all flesh. And when you are proclaiming that – that is law and gospel at the same time.

In this sermon I’ve got a section that I labeled gospel in the text. First it is all scripture. Second it is a listing of the question of the prophets and martyrs – “How long?” How long until the church or people of God is perfected? How long until the martyrs receive justice? How long until the Lordship of Christ is acknowledged by all? To the believer that is pure gospel. The Spirit has already called us by the gospel, enlightened us with His gifts, and placed us on the walk of sanctification. We struggle now and long for that day when we don’t. How long is a cry for justice. For God to act. But that same proclamation if you don’t have faith in the work of Christ is either just lunacy or stark terror. The same proclamation works as law. Either it is dismissed as not applicable. (If we say we have no sin we deceive ourselves – 1 John 1:8). Or it should strike us to the core. What if that is true? What if Christ is Lord, and I don’t acknowledge that? What does this Lord want?

The same words, the proclamation of Jesus is Lord is either the most consoling Gospel or the most damning law at the same time. The saints share a communion of hearing that proclamation as Gospel and longing for the day when the church at rest and the church militant are joined in the church Triumphant marching after the King of Glory.

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Whose expectations get met?

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The text is Matthew 21:33-46 which is the parable of the wicked tenants. I’ve pondered this parable for a long time – at least in American terms. It is filled with an urgency and a venom missing is the mustard seed and birds of the air. It has an easy allegory, but one that seems tailor made to produce pharisees. There are parts of it that to a Lutheran are shockingly troublesome. The production and handing over of “fruits” reads like works-righteousness. And the whole “leasing” of the vineyard reducing the Kingdom to a financial transaction. It doesn’t fit my nice and tidy systematic theology. And if we accept the easy allegory the church has placed on the parable almost from the start, does it mean anything to us today? Not much that I could see.

So for me here the key isn’t so much allegorical as centered in the Question of Jesus – “What will the landowner do when he returns?” Everybody has expectations. Some expectations get met and others go bust. The thought for the Christian life is to get your expectations in line with God’s. The landowners expectations get met. The only question is by whom. A cornerstone has been set. The vineyard will produce a crop. Do we fall over that cornerstone attempting to meet our expectations against the landowner, or do we produce the fruit in season viewing the vineyard and its cornerstone in the cross as marvelous?

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Truth in the midst of Ugly

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I would be real interested to know what people actually heard from this sermon. I think it had a high emotional register, but I’m not sure if I used that emotion to the proper end.

The core concern that I think the text addressed is God’s truth. And God’s truth can be real ugly. It can be offensive. Because God’s truth tells us how ugly we are in our nature. The cross tells us and shows us what and who we are. Jesus became our ugliness. And God works in the middle of that ugly. He works through the messy and incomplete and ugly. That task of faith is to recognize that even how ugly this crucified God might appear, his love is revealed there. And it is a love that is wide and deep and more than enough. The scraps that fall, the pieces gathered after the dinner, are enough to fill his people and those like this Canaanite who were not his people but have been grafted in.

Futility and Hope

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…Because Jesus entered into this groaning and futile mess. It easily could all be meaningless. But He said no. I’m going to claim it. I’m going to redeem it. Jesus felt and experienced the full futility. Disciples who didn’t get it. Kinsmen who rejected him. Fellow Jews who put him on trial. Cowardly justice that executed him. A peasant, on a cross, outside the walls of Jerusalem. My God, why have you forsaken me…for hope.
In the darkest places…a light shines.
The Spirit raised him from the dead, and elevated him to the right had of the Father. When he was gone, at his weakest, the Spirit acted with power…

You can reason your way to futility and meaninglessness. In fact, along with Ecclesiastes, I’d say that is the end point of most reason. But it is never satisfying. It feels like a lie. Not a lie you are telling yourself as the militant atheists would say. It feels like a lie against the universe, a blaspheming of the Spirit. Because there are these things that reason can’t explain that stand out like beacons against the general futility of life. The whole, “but this is the causal chain that led to those things”, doesn’t really have explanatory power to explain the birth of a child. And so I reckon that the present sufferings are not worth comparing the the glory that will be revealed to and in us.

Hope and Holiness

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If I’m looking at this sermon critically – it is too much lecture and not enough preaching. Here is what I mean by that: a lecture conveys information while preaching reaches beyond that.

The core of the text (1 Pet 3:13-22) as I read it was a summary of Peter’s argument up to this point, and a reiteration of the purpose. The argument is be holy. The longer form of that is Be Holy because you are a child of God and that is what God’s children do. The purpose – to point the glory and all eyes toward Christ.

Peter’s words are “be prepared to give a defense for the hope that is in you.” For me the summary of the hope that is in me is creeds. The creeds themselves are intellectual things. The make statements of what I take to be facts. (Non-Christians would say that make claims that are probably not facts.) But it is not that intellectual content that is the basis of my or the church’s hope. The basis is the truth that the creeds speak about – the God, Father, Son and Spirit, reigns. Hope rests not in this suffering world, or hope rests not in this ill-at-ease contentment of safety and plenty and its continuation. Hope rests in the fact that God acts and has acted and continues to act. Hope rests in the fact that the God who has acted has revealed himself not to be a harsh judge, but one moved to compassion (I’m bringing back a greek work – splagnizomai), who has his guts torn out over his world.

Our proclamation of that Hope (the church’s proclamation of that hope) is displayed in our holiness. Being prepared is not just about knowing the creed, but also about living it. And living something is always messy.

Chains of Being

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Text: 1 Peter 2:18-3:7

That title is a reference to what you might have heard as a medieval way of thinking – The great chain of being. Really it goes back to the Greeks and Romans and the ancient world. You might also have heard it referred to as the order of creation which I take as the Christian attempt to baptize the chain of being. There is a truth buried within it. God is sovereign. But natural man can’t understand that correctly. We think chain of being or order of creation and immediate jump to hierarchical org charts. We think dominion. Roman philosopher Seneca held we couldn’t make progress until “we conceived the right idea of god.” The right idea of God put forward by Peter is Jesus – the suffering servant. The one who submitted himself to our bad justice.

I preach within a denomination that holds to what the larger Christian world calls complementarian sexual roles. They hold this view largely on the basis of an order of creation. Here is the page with the various studies that have been done by the LCMS. The most recent one being the Creator’s Tapestry in 2009. Bluntly, any order of creation argument is missing the point. To derive dominion for the husband out of 1 Peter requires completely misreading and selectively quoting. (The CTCR report doesn’t look at the entire passage, nor does it put it in historical frame, it just quotes the wife/husband part.) The entire passage is a household code. That form is not an OT form but a Greek form. In the sermon I’ve quoted what some of those greek codes said from names like Aristotle, Plato and Seneca. Peter uses the form, but completely subverts it. He starts with slaves. Slaves who didn’t have any moral ability in those greek codes. Slaves would never have been addressed by a greek writer. In Christ the slave comes first because he/she is the closest model to Christ. Only then does Peter move on wives and husbands. The teaching is live holy lives of mutual submission reflecting Christ. Find that the other has more value than yourself. Uphold the society you live in where possible, Christian freedom is not to tear down society, but know that your dignity comes from God having chosen you. You are not chained in being or orders of creation instead you willfully submit to Christ, who submitted himself to the cross. Any theology or politics of dominion must meet its end at the cross.

The Beatitudes – Vision and Challenge

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One of the things that I am constantly amazed at is how the Church or Christianity is usually placed in the narrow, weak, small-minded, etc category. To me the simple facts are usually just the opposite. It is the church that requires disciples of Jesus to a) look up and see with eschatological or eternal eyes, b) recognize your real pitiful condition and c) look for salvation from outside yourself and d) start living that eternal reality here and now even though the kingdom has not been completely revealed. Each of those elements takes more courage and greater vision than anything those who attack the church have ever tried.

Everything the world tries to do can be condensed to getting you to narrow you focus to something you think you can control. As long as you don’t ask the big questions or get outside of a comfort range, then you can fool yourself in a high self-esteem. Christ says blessed are the poor in spirit which is point a and b. If you look up with eyes that see beyond your immediate plot you should recognize just how poor and pitiful we are. You can recognize that and run back immediately to your little plot. The Christian recognizes it and confesses it – I am a poor miserable sinner. Which takes more vision and courage – retreat into the seemingly safe self, or confession? Which is more limiting – finding yourself in within a much larger plot, or going back to your small one? The world wants you to stay so small that you don’t even think you need anyone else let alone a savior. Christianity says its hopeless absent God’s action in Christ. Which takes more courage: trying to keep everything in your own hands, or turning your very life over to someone else? And then Christ says go be merciful, be pure in heart (read as seek God first), be peacemakers. You know what happens to those kind of people in this world. But Christ says his disciples do these things. These are what my blessed people will look like.

It is one of those truisms that the world will throw at the church that only weak people need religion, or that the church is for those who are small minded. That truism is demonstrably false. It is those attempting to follow Christ, to live out their religion, that are given much larger vision and challenges. It is much easier to run back to the deceptive safety of one small plot. But running back to that small existence casts away the blessings. Blessed are the poor in Spirit, for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven.

The Disciple’s Life of Repentance

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Text: Luke 17:1-10

Luke 14:1 – 17:10 in my reading is one long extended teaching on being a disciple. The text for this sermon is the summary or conclusion of that section. I drew that boundary because in Luke 17:11 Jesus is no longer ping-ponging back and forth between disciples and Pharisees, but he is back on the road to Jerusalem. The entire Jerusalem road narrative is about discipleship, but this inner part has been more intense. It has been much more about how the disciple acts while Jesus is not present here and now.

The focus on being a disciple gives the section a heavy law feeling and it does end with millstones and the blunt saying about being an unworthy servant. But it is right there where the gospel enters. Of course that is how we would act. If we had a field slave and he came in we’d tell him to go clean up and make dinner. But that is not how God acts. In Christ – God serves the dinner and washes the feet. The unworthy slave is told to sit, eat, drink, rest…while the worthy son is crucified.

It is just that love for the unworthy slave that should inspire the life of repentance. We no longer have to look pious. We are not part of a religious club where membership depends upon our status or appearance. We have been seated at the table. We repent not because it atones for sin or gives us any merit. We repent because we desire to be closer to the heart and mission of the God who loved us first. We repent as a plea – Lord come quickly and finish what you started.

It Looks Half Built

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Luke 14:25-35

The travel narrative in Luke, what the lectionary has been taking us through this summer, is about discipleship. It is Luke’s collections of teachings and events that the disciples learned from Jesus on His was to the cross, as He prepared them for their cross. The lesson this week was one of those “cool it down” moments. We’ve all gotten caught up in something in the past, and that new thing takes over your entire life. The younger you are the more open you are to that type of infatuation. Everything comes up roses.

The life of the disciple in this world is not roses. The grace of forgiveness and new life is heady, but there are some thorns. The biggest is probably the half completed nature of salvation. That is not the half completed nature of salvation to eyes with faith, but if you look at the cross without faith, it looks like a king who didn’t have enough troops. And that cross is the pattern of discipleship. Here, we follow the crucified one. We feel like we have 10,000 troops going against 20,000.

Maybe it is just my phlematic german coming out, but I’ve never understood shiny-happy American Christianity. Sanctuaries that hid the cross, preachers that talked about wealth and prosperity, seven biblical secrets to a great life. I really throw any form of progressive-ism in the same boat. We’ve had 100 years of amazing progress in medicine and technology and what are the stats: higher rates of suicide, huge numbers on anti-depressants, shameful rates of incarceration and long-term unemployment. I’m not against “progress”. I liked being able to get my gall-bladder taken out and my youngest having surgery without great worry. These are blessings, but hold them in their place. The reality is life under the cross. Orthodoxy speaks reality better than anything I’ve heard. The cross does not preclude joy. For the joy that was set before him, he endured the cross (Heb 12:2). But the joy comes through the cross, not around it. Everything else seeks to avoid the cross, or deny it, or minimize it. The disciple embraces it. Not without understanding – count the costs – with understanding the disciple embraces the cross and the only solid foundation, even if it looks half built to those perishing.