Ash Wednesday – Neither Flight nor Fight but Submit

Biblical Text: 2 Corinthians 5:20-6:10

Paul’s extended argument in 2 Corinthians is an argument with what we might naturally want to do in s stressful situation. We might want to fight it, which means defeat and domination of the enemy. Or we might want to avoid it, flee from it, which means by varying degrees denial and disappearance. Paul could flee by just never seeing the Corinthians again. Paul could fight by “defending” his apostleship and proving it all over again. But neither of those things are what an Ambassador of Christ does. The one who has not received the grace of God in vain, is the one who can control themselves and not fight or flee, but submit to what God calls them to be. That may look like all kinds of paradox, and the world doesn’t know how to respond to it. But that is the way of the grace. That is the way of Jesus

Living Toward the Promise

Text: Ephesians 5:21-6:9 NLT
Full Sermon Draft

This sermon completes Paul’s re-upping of the moral law/10 Commandments in the Christian life. It treats the 4th commandment and how we live into the promises of God by honoring the various close authorities in our lives. Those authorities are both temporal and eternal/spiritual, and they are not always perfect. Paul discusses it all under the the banner of being in submission to each other. The world attempts to divide us and councils that we are first individuals. The wisdom of God says we live in a web of proper authority in which we look out for the other. He does this by penning what is often called a household code.

This sermon looks at the elements of that household code and what they ask of the Christian life. That includes the honor between husband and wife, and how that is a sacramental picture of something much greater. But in each case we are called to live toward the promise and not give in to the easy temptations of the way of the world.

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Lord, Son of David

Biblical Text: Matthew 15:21-28
Full Sermon Draft

The text is the Canaanite woman’s request. In a week of Nazis and violence it would have been harder to pick a better text. The sermon explores the relationship between Christ and Tribe or between Christ and all the various things that we base our identity on. The text, with its blunt sayings, allows us to work in two direction. The woman’s repeated title of choice is “Lord”. Jesus’ responses to the disciples and then the woman allow us to understand just who this Lord is. He is not OUR lord, the Lord of created to back up our preferred identities, but He is THE Lord. The Lord is also the Son of David. Salvation comes from the Jews. It is that joint truth that is a God large enough to save, but particular enough to be human. I believe that in such a week this sermon offers both truth and hope.

I don’t address it in the sermon, because it is a speculative or allegorical reading, but it is a reading that captures this religious imagination. This anonymous woman has been called the mother of the gentile church. The woman’s request is for the healing or exorcism of the her daughter. The woman herself as a Canaanite from Tyre and Sidon stands in for the entirety of the Gentiles. In the OT time period the nations were given over to the idols. The woman’s request is to drive the demons or those idols from her daughter – the church growing. At that allegorical level where characters are not just themselves but stand for larger entities or truths, the request is to make the gentile church clean. Even more so, admitting being “dogs”, being outside the old covenant, to still share in the new. Does the Christian have to become a Jew first, the question of Acts 15, is addressed allegorically here. The Canaanite woman’s faith in the abundance of the Lord Son of David, that the lost sheep of Israel includes Canaanites, spurs Jesus to grant the request. Hence the mother of the gentile church. Not provable in a modern way, but it rings a lot of poetic images.

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The Elder’s Turn

Biblical Text: Ephesians 5:22-33
Full Sermon Text

I was on vacation this Sunday, so our Elders filled in. One elder in particular, Dr. Warriner, you will hear on the podcast delivering the sermon.

I didn’t want to appear like the biggest chicken selectively picking the week of one of the toughest texts to modern ears to be on vacation, so I ghost wrote it. I would make a lousy speech-writer. I’m too much of a narcissist to get into someone else’s voice. Anyway, the text is St. Paul on marriage. The attempt is to find the grace in tough words.

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Chains of Being

Full Text

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.