Living Words

A Sermon for the Ninth Sunday after Trinity

A Sermon for the Eighth Sunday after Trinity Romans 8:12-17 by William Klock Our Epistle this morning continues the walk we’ve been taking through St. Paul’s letter to the Romans.  We’re looking at Romans 8:12-17 today.  For several weeks the lectionary has had us skipping through this section of the epistle, hitting the high points of Paul’s argument as he talks about what it means to be rescued by Jesus from our bondage to sin and death and made alive to God.  Through these chapters of Romans Paul describes how we’ve been rescued by Jesus and he does this by putting our own rescue in the terms of Israel’s rescue form slavery in Egypt.  We picture the Israelites dancing and singing in praise of their God on the far shore of the Red Sea.  The Lord had rescued Israel and he hadn’t just rescued her, he’d rescued her in an amazing show of his power and authority as he parted the sea and then as he drowned the Egyptian army.  The people weren’t just dancing and singing because they were happy; they were praising the Lord and they were ready to serve him and to follow him out of gratitude for what he’d done for them.  And now Paul’s headed in the same direction with us.  That same God has rescued us from our slavery to sin and death and he’s done it by becoming, himself, one of us in Jesus.  He humbled himself, he suffered, he died, and he rose from the grave for our sake.  He’s freed us from our bondage and he’s given us new life—his own life.  But it’s even greater than that.  If God has rescued us from bondage as he did the Israelites, that means that just as he made and called Israel his children, so through Jesus he has adopted us as his own and made us his children. But then Paul realises that he needs to stress another point before he goes on.  And so Paul stops and he switches gears for just a moment and he says in verse 12: So then, brothers, we are debtors, not to the flesh, to live according to the flesh.   We are debtors, he says.  We’re all, you and I, in debt.  For most people that sounds like bad news.  Unless you’re a politician and can raise taxes or get your central bank to monetize your debt, debt is something that weighs heavily on people.  And, of course, once you’re in debt that debt often ends up dominating everything in your life.  And now Paul says that we are debtors.  That sounds bad, but he lifts at least some of the weight off right away.  We’re debtors, but not to the flesh—not if we are in Jesus. Last week I talked a little about how our baptism into Jesus changes everything.  In our baptism we are regenerated.  That means that our ownership is transferred from death to life, from sin to God.  Our citizenship is transferred from the world to the kingdom of heaven.  Think of Israel in the Exodus.  They were slaves to Pharaoh.  The Lord led them to the sea.  They thought they were trapped between the sea and the army of Egypt, but then the Lord separated the waters and called them to pass through.  The parted sea embodied his promise of a new life.  They passed through in faith and they came out the other side a new people, no longer in bondage to Pharaoh, but belonging to the Lord.  And so with us.  In our baptism we step out in faith as we pass through the waters embodying God’s promise of life.  We renounce the old way of life.  We renounce the world, the flesh, and the devil.  That’s repentance.  We turned aside from and renounce everything that is not Jesus and in faith we pass through the water and put on Jesus.  We let go of every sin and every false source of security and we take hold of Jesus with both hands.  He is now our life.  We owe nothing to the flesh (or to the world or the devil, for that matter).  That’s not where our debt lies.  That old life never did anything for us.  Like Pharaoh holding the Israelites captive, it once held us, it ruled and controlled us, and all it did was give us death in return.  Again, we owe nothing to the old life of our unredeemed flesh.  That’s not where our debt lies. And so Paul goes on saying: For if you live according to the flesh you will die, but if by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body, you will live.   So here’s the reality.  Here’s why Paul assures us we are not in debt to the flesh.  We may be Christians, we may be in Jesus, we may be washed clean, but temptation is still here.  We’ve renounced the world, the flesh, and the devil, but they still call to us.  And that makes people doubt.  It makes people think that just maybe we are in debt to the flesh.  There’s a myth that many Christians easily believe that says that the moment you become a Christian all temptation and all your problems are supposed to instantly vanish.  But anyone who’s honest knows that doesn’t happen.  Sanctification—that’s the theological name for the process of being made holy—sanctification is a process—a life-long process—that happens as the Spirit transforms our hearts and minds, as we immerse ourselves in the Scriptures he’s caused to be written and learn and grow and are confronted by that word about our sins and called again and again to repent.  It’s a process that unfolds as the word and the Spirit send us out into the darkness of the world and give us opportunities to shine the light of Jesus.  It’s a process.  And this is why Paul tells us so many times and in so many places to put the old way of life to death.  He tells us that it’s been crucified with Jesus.  He tells us that it’s been buried with him in baptism.  Yes, the temptation is still there.  The world, the flesh, and the devil scream at us, they grab hold of us, they try to shackles us to themselves and drag us back into sin and that’s why Paul calls us to actively and to daily put that old life to death.  A few weeks ago we read how he tells us to consider or to reckon that in light of the death and resurrection of Jesus and in light of his gift of the Holy Spirit we are dead to sin and alive to God in Jesus.  It’s a fact.  It may not always feel that way, but it really does add up.  All we have to do is live it out in faith and rely on God’s grace and in doing that is the way of life. In verses 14-15 Paul writes: For all who are led by the Spirit of God are sons of God.  For you did not receive the spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received the Spirit of adoption as sons, by whom we cry, “Abba! Father!”   Paul’s now leading us into the wilderness with Israel—he does this especially over the course of Romans 8—as he uses Old Testament imagery to describe the Christian life.  He reminds us that Israel was led by the Lord himself when she left Egypt.  Remember the cloud by day and the fire by night.  So the Spirit of God leads us.  And then Paul reminds us of Israel’s struggle in the wilderness.  Right from the start, at Mt. Sinai, as Moses was on the mountain receiving the law, the people forged and danced around a golden calf.  The people grumbled against Moses and grumbled against the Lord.  At first they grumbled because they had nothing to eat, so the Lord gave them manna.  Then they grumbled because they got tired of eating boring old manna.  They whined about how they missed the fleshpots of Egypt.  Even as they prepared to enter the promised land, they heard the report of the spies who were sent to scope thing out and they whined that there was no way they’d be able to take the land—they were all going to die.  The very people who had been delivered at the Red Sea, the very people for whom the Lord provided miraculous care for forty years in the wilderness repeatedly fell back into idolatry and rebellion and even grumbled about how much better they’d had it in Egypt.  But the Lord wouldn’t let go of Israel.  Why?  When the Lord spoke to Pharaoh through Moses he had said, “Israel is my firstborn son, and I say to you, “Let my son go that he may serve me.”  Israel was the Lord’s son by adoption and nothing would stop the Lord from redeeming his son so that his son could worship him in the inheritance of the land he had promised. St. Paul echoes all of this in Romans.  Israel was in the wilderness and constantly tempted to return to Egypt—to return to the very bondage from which the Lord had rescued her.  And here we are in our own wilderness.  Jesus doesn’t recue us and zap us straight to the New Jerusalem any more than the Lord zapped Israel straight to a depopulated promised land.  We continue to struggle against the temptations of the world, the flesh, and the devil.  God led Israel, manifesting himself in the cloud and the fire.  He leads us too, having poured his Spirit into us in our baptism.  Think about that for a minute.  Imagine the awe the Israelites had for the cloud and the fire.  Where it moved they followed.  Where it stopped they stopped and set up the tabernacle—and then the cloud or the fire would descend to rest in the holy of holies.  Again, imagine the awe of that and then consider that we have something far more awesome—we have God the Holy Spirit in us!  And yet just like Israel, we somehow allow the miraculous presence of God with us and in us to become mundane and we give in to the temptation to grumble and to return to our bondage to sin. Paul knows all this.  He wasn’t immune to temptation either.  And this is why he so adamantly tells us not to lose hope and not to stop fighting.  We weren’t given the spirit of slavery, he says.  That’s what we’ve been rescued from.  No, we’ve been given the Spirit of adoption.  As he made Israel his sons and daughters, the Lord through Jesus has made us his sons and daughters, he has taken our dead wood and grafted it into the living vine.  We’ve been made a part of that “family tree” called “Israel”.  We are his children and we can cry out to him just as Jesus did, “Abba! Father!”  He is as much our Father as he is Jesus’ Father and Paul stresses that he’s not a distant Father; he’s near, he loves us, he cares for us.  That’s the point of “Abba”.  It’s not that we should think of “Daddy God” as is sometimes said.  It’s that the God to whom we rightly fall on our knees in humble submission as we cry out, “Holy, holy, holy!” is not just the Father, but our Father just as he is Jesus’ Father.  We are his beloved sons and daughters.  And this is the first reality the Spirit drive home to us when he’s poured into us.  In Chapter 5 Paul writes about a love for God that the Holy Spirit pours into our hearts.  That’s what he’s talking about here.  In verse 16 Paul writes, The Spirit himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God…   Somehow and in some way our adoption by God in Jesus is confirmed by this witness that comes as the Holy Spirit being poured in and our now regenerated and renewed spirit connect.  When I read this I can’t help but think of the old days of using a modem to dial up to another computer or to the internet.  You’d hear the modem dial, the other modem would pick up and then you’d hear what sounded like static and pings and pongs back and forth as they negotiated a connection that they could both maintain.  The technical term for that was “hand-shaking”.  And when it was finished you were connected.  God’s Spirit and our spirit do something like that on a spiritual level and the end result of that “connection” is the assurance that we are children of God.  And, Paul goes on in verse 17: …and if children, then heirs—heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ, provided we suffer with him in order that we may also be glorified with him.   Children receive an inheritance.  Israel was promised that her inheritance would be the land of Canaan, but there was a broader aspect to it too.  She was also called to be a blessing to the nations as part of that promised inheritance and we see this in Jesus.  As far back as Psalm 2 it was promised to the Messiah: “I will make the nations your heritage, and the ends of the earth your possession.”  But now Paul shows us what it means in Christian terms—what it means for those of us who are in Jesus.  It means that the whole earth, all of creation is the inheritance of Jesus and his people.  It means that when the end of the age finally comes, God will vindicate Jesus and his people, he will resurrect us all as he already has Jesus, and somehow our resurrection will be worked out in Creation itself as literally everything is made new and set free from the sickness, corruption, and death to which our sin has bound it. This is what Paul means when he says that we will be glorified with Jesus.  We’ve talked about this before.  We often think of “glory” as a place: heaven when you die.  But glory isn’t so much a place as it is a state.  Jesus will come into his glory as he is given dominion over God’s renewed creation and we, his people, will be glorified with him as we human beings are restored to our rightful state—to the state for which God created us.  Remember Adam and Eve, created to be God’s stewards as they exercised dominion over his creation—caring for it, subduing it, and growing and expanding the garden until it filled the whole earth—maybe even somehow the whole cosmos.  That’s what it means to be God’s image-bearers.  And that is the task that Jesus has come—like a second Adam, Paul has said—to set Creation to rights and to get everything back on track.  This is our inheritance as God’s sons and daughters. And this, finally, brings us back to Paul’s statement about our being debtors.  We’re not debtors to the flesh to fall back into that old way of bondage to the world, the flesh, and the devil.  No, we are debtors to the God who created us, who loves us, who loved us even when we rejected him, rebelled against him, and sinned against him.  We are debtors to the God who still, despite our ugliness, desired to reconcile us to himself by providing a means of forgiveness.  We are debtors to the God who humbled himself to take on our flesh and to die for us so that we can be reconciled to him and restored to our place as his children and the stewards of his creation.  This is love so deep and grace so wide that even in a lifetime we can never fully grasp its depth and its width, but it is our inheritance in Jesus and, Paul says, it puts us forever in God’s debt.  And as debt tends to dominate the life of the debtor, this debt ought to dominate our lives.  The good news is that this isn’t the crushing sort of debt we’re sadly so often accustomed to living with.  Instead, this is a debt of love and mercy and grace and freedom.  It’s a debt that moves us out of love in return for the love we’ve been shown to make that love manifest to all.  And, Brothers and Sisters, it’s an inheritance so great that we ought to be living in hope and anticipation, so excited that we can’t wait for that last great day when we see it in full, but that we spend each day as Jesus did making it manifest in whatever way we can today: preaching good news to the poor, release to the captives, sight to the blind and looking forward to the day when the glory of the Lord fills the earth as the waters cover the sea. Let us pray: Gracious Father, in Jesus you have redeemed us from sin and death and forgiven us our rebellion.  Teach us, we pray, the depth of your love and grace that we would be moved, loving you in return, to put to death sin and to live for righteousness so that the whole world will give you glory as they see your grace at work in us.  We ask this through Jesus Christ our Saviour and Lord.  Amen.

A Sermon for the Eighth Sunday after Trinity

A Sermon for the Seventh Sunday after Trinity Romans 6:19-23 & St. Mark 8:1-9 by William Klock The Old Testament prophet Hosea called Israel back to the Lord.  The people had turned their backs on him, they were worshipping idols, and even offering their children as sacrifices on the altars of pagan gods.  Instead of trusting the Lord to take care of them as he had promised, they had thrown themselves into the game of geopolitics and had put their trust in horses and chariots and made alliances with their pagan neighbours—all things that the Lord had forbidden.  Through Hosea, God call his covenant people back to himself.  He did it by turning Hosea’s life into a series of living object lessons, the best known of which took place when God told Hosea to take a prostitute named Gomer for his wife.  Repeatedly Gomer left him, going back to her life of prostitution, and repeatedly and lovingly, Hosea sought her out, bought her out of her slavery, and brought her back to his home to be his wife. People thought Hosea was crazy.  What kind of idiot would take a prostitute for his wife and keep buying her back out of that life as she was continually unfaithful to him?  But through the prophet the Lord eventually says to them, “I’m that ‘idiot’ and you’re the prostitute!  I brought you out of Egypt, I loved you and fed you in the wilderness, I conquered the Canaanites for you and gave you homes that you didn’t build and an abundant harvest that you didn’t plant, and yet you continually turn your back on me and play the harlot with false Gods and with the nations of the world.”  And having given them that dramatic object lessons, Hosea calls the people back to their God: Return, O Israel, to the Lord your God, for you have stumbled because of your iniquity. Take with you words and return to the Lord; say to him, “Take away all iniquity; accept that which is good and we will pay with bulls the fruit of our lips. Assyria shall not save us, we will not ride on horses; and we will say no more, ‘Our God,’ to the work of our hands.  (Hosea 14:1-3) Israel continued to struggle to be faithful to the Lord.  That’s why Jesus came.  Israel’s God, himself, taking on human flesh and being born of Mary.  He humbled himself, becoming one of his own people.  And as if that wasn’t enough, he was despised, rejected, and killed.  But in that, as the perfect Israelite, Jesus took on himself the death that Israel deserved.  He brought a means of forgiveness, a means of restoration, and in his resurrection he brought a means and a promise of life to people who were dead.  And each of us, though Gentiles, have been called into the redeemed life of Israel through Jesus.  Our God is a god who gives his life out of love for his people—the very people who reject and despise and rebel against him. And yet even as Jesus’ people, given his life and his Spirit, how often are we like Hosea’s wife Gomer?  How often do we turn our backs on the Lord?  Consider our priorities in life.  All too often we put everything else first, and feel good about ourselves if we’re willing to give him an hour or two on Sunday morning and maybe a few minutes of prayer during the week.  Instead of devoting our time, our talents, and our treasures to the one who gave them to us, we squander them on the things of the world.  We profess with our mouths that Jesus is our Saviour and Lord, but we fail to put our trust in him and instead trust in the ways and systems of the world for our security.  Through the prophets the Lord condemned his people for their false view of worship.  They thought that they could live their lives however they wanted as long as they came to the temple to offer the Lord the sacrifices he required—even thinking they could worship other gods on the side.  Jesus paraphrased God’s response to that when he told the people, “I desire mercy, and not sacrifice.”  True worship involves our whole selves given over to God for his use all of the time. Think about the vow we took or that our parents took for us when we were baptized.  The priest asked: “Do you renounce the devil and all his works, the empty display and false values of the world, and the sinful desires of the flesh, so that you will not follow them and be led by them?”  In our Baptism we renounce the powers of the present evil age and we take hold of Jesus and the new age he has ushered in.  In our Baptism we are consecrated to the Lord.   But what does it mean to be consecrated to something or someone?  Notice that in our baptismal vows we don’t promise to renounce the world the flesh and the devil when it’s convenient or when it doesn’t cut into our own plans or our own enjoyment or sense of security.  In our vows we give ourselves over to the Lord entirely.  We put ourselves firmly in his kingdom and renounce everything that stands opposed to it.  Like the Israelites, we’ve been called by the Lord to a new life.  They were slaves to the Egyptians and he brought them to a new life of freedom.  We were slaves to sin and he does the same for us spiritually.  Look at Romans 6:19-22.  St. Paul says: I am speaking in human terms, because of your natural limitations. For just as you once presented your members as slaves to impurity and to lawlessness leading to more lawlessness, so now present your members as slaves to righteousness leading to sanctification.    For when you were slaves of sin, you were free in regard to righteousness.   But what fruit were you getting at that time from the things of which you are now ashamed?  For the end of those things is death.  But now that you have been set free from sin and have become slaves of God, the fruit you get leads to sanctification and its end, eternal life.   When it came to conveying the depth of our total devotion, first to sin and then as redeemed men and women to Jesus, Paul chose to compare it to slavery. A slave is literally owned by his master and is expected to be totally devoted to him in body and soul.  For Paul, to serve Jesus was everything—it was his life.  Remember that a slave’s life belonged to his master, and so while the analogy isn’t perfect—the negative side of slavery isn’t what Paul has in view here—it illustrates the level of devotion that the Christian has to God.  He has bought us out of slavery with the blood of his Son, and we serve him; not out of fear or slavish obligation, but out of gratitude for what he has done for us.  There’s no way we can pay him back for his sacrifice, but we do the best we can and he gives us the Holy Spirit to enable us to do more than we can ever do on our own. At one time each of us was a slave to sin.  That’s a point where all the negative connotations of slavery are appropriate.  Oddly enough, though, when we were slaves to sin most of us didn’t really see the negative side of it.  Read some 19th Century American history and you’ll read about slaves that ran away from their masters.  They didn’t want to live that miserable life.  But before Jesus found us, how many of us tried to run away from the master of sin?  We were slaves to sin and we enjoyed it.  Like the drug addict who is a slave to his drugs that get him high, all the time ignoring the harm the drugs do to his body and mind and the life of crime those drugs often lead him to, the sinner is slave to the momentary pleasures of sin, oblivious to or ignoring the deathly consequences of that sin.  In our natural and fallen state each of us is a slave to sin.  We have absolutely no desire to get away from it and no way to master its temptations if we did want to get away, and so we serve it body and soul. By contrast, as redeemed men and women we are called to serve the Lord with the same level of commitment we used to have to sin.  We used to seek sin out.  We left no stone unturned in a search for pleasure and gratification.  Brothers and Sisters, we need to put at least the same amount of effort into serving Jesus that we used to put into serving sin.  Where our wills were once submitted to unrighteousness, we are now to submit them totally to righteousness.  That’s the total consecration that has its beginning in our baptismal vows. And note that there’s no middle state and there’s no compromising. You can’t say you’re no longer a slave to sin and at the same time not be a slave to righteousness.  Just like a real slave, God bought us from our old master, sin, with the blood of Jesus, who has become our new master.  In a very real sense we’ve gone from one form of slavery to another.  It’s not uncommon to hear people refer to someone as a “carnal Christian”—someone who professes to have made Jesus his Saviour and Lord, but doesn’t really live out that faith.  St. Paul doesn’t leave any room for someone like that.  Either you’re a slave to sin and serve the world, the flesh, and the devil, or you’re a slave to Jesus, serving him with body and soul.  St. James reminds us that faith without works is a dead faith.  You can’t be a Christian, you can’t have experienced the amazing grace of God in your life, and at the same time not be wholly driven to serve Jesus with everything you’ve got! Do you ever notice how non-Christians usually don’t want to have anything to do with Jesus?  I know a lot of people who take a big interest in God, but they don’t want to talk about Jesus unless it’s their own distorted version of him.  A distant and non-interfering God is okay, but a Saviour who comes into our lives and calls us to account makes people uncomfortable.  This is why churches that teach pop-psychology and self-help, that affirm people in their sin or in their spiritual immaturity, and that don’t hold their members accountable are often so popular.  Nobody likes to be convicted of sin.  We’d rather have a religion that makes us feel warm and fuzzy and comfortable.  St. Paul makes the point that the problem isn’t that man doesn’t want God—what we don’t want, he says, is Jesus.  We want God and the good things he has to offer, but on our own terms.  Jesus, however, reminds us that we are sinners and can only come to God on his terms—that we have to give up our sin and acknowledge his lordship.  Paul tells us that when we were ruled by sin, we didn’t want to have anything to do with Jesus—he only convicted us of our sin.  Our redemption flips things: now that Jesus rules us, he must be our master and we should have no desire for sin. St. Paul’s slavery analogy drives home the absoluteness of our duty under Jesus.  Some translations render the word as “servant.”  That misses the point of the absoluteness of what St. Paul is saying.  We are to have a total devotion.  Our love for our master changes our desire.  How much of a chore is it to sin?  In our natural state we love to sin.  Our desire to serve Jesus should be like that.  Serving him isn’t a chore, it’s a pleasure because we love him. If we go on and look at verses 22 to 23, Paul shows us the contrast made between the wages of sin and the wages of Christ: But now that you have been set free from sin and have become slaves of God, the fruit you get leads to sanctification and its end, eternal life.  For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord. (Romans 6:22-23) Sin may give us pleasure today, but it only has one end.  The only place it ultimately takes anyone is death.  Genesis tells us about Adam and Eve living in the presence of the Lord, their Creator, and under the branches of the tree of life.  They were made of dust, the point being that they were mortal creatures.  But he brought those two mortal creatures into his presence and in the presence of the Lord is life.  In choosing to sin, in choosing to rebel against their creator, Adam and Eve chose to be outside his presence.  They chose mortality, they chose death over life.  Brother and Sisters, God is the source of life and each and every sin we commit widens the gulf that stands between him and us.  Each sin takes us further away from the life found only in God’s presence. In contrast, in return for serving Jesus we are daily brought closer and closer to God’s life.  I think a lot of Christians sit around and passively wait for the life of eternity.  A lot of Christians look at the problems of the world around us and take an escapist attitude.  We want out.  “Come, Lord Jesus!”  And yet too often in just looking for escape, we miss out on the life that God gives us right now.  When we’re grafted into his vine we start bearing fruit—that’s his life manifested in us right now.  Sin has its own fruit, but it’s like a cancer that gradually kills the vine.  God, on the other hand, nourishes us and makes us grow.  That’s the sanctification that St. Paul writes about—it’s the journey we take as we travel the road to eternal life, each day getting closer and closer to God. Paul also notes that God’s gift of eternal life is free.  It’s free because the life of the Christian isn’t the result of his own goodness—it’s in spite of his sinfulness.  Every one of us has earned the deathly wages of sin—it only takes one time, one sin.  Each of us deserves death, but life in God can never be deserved or earned.  It’s God’s gift.  And as we follow our new master we will find his sustaining grace will grow; our yoke will become easier, our burden will become lighter, our peace will become deeper, and our hope will become more and more assured. Our Gospel lesson gives us the assurance we need as we put on Jesus’ yoke and carry the burden he’s given us.  In our lesson today we read St. Mark’s account of Jesus’ multiplication of the loaves and fishes for the crowd that had gathered to hear him preach. Jesus expects us to follow him just like those people followed him into the country where there was nothing to eat.  He didn’t cut his sermon short thinking, “Hmm, some of these people came a long way and I’d better let them go early so they can go home to dinner.”  He preached for three days.  But all the time he understood what they’d given up to be there.  He said, I have compassion on the crowd, because they have been with me now three days and have nothing to eat. And if I send them away hungry to their homes, they will faint on the way. And some of them have come from far away. (Mark 8:2-3) Jesus demands our all, but in return he gives us all the grace we need to follow him.  When he calls us to seek him first, he knows what we’ve left behind to follow him.  He knows how far we’ve travelled to be with him and to sit at his feet.  As he cared for the Israelites in the wilderness, he will take care of us too.  The Gospels tell this story more than once, and each time they tell us how everyone ate until he was satisfied and that there were still plenty of leftovers.  God isn’t stingy with his blessings.  These accounts of his generosity ought to confirm our faith in him. Brothers and sisters, God has promised this all along.  Go back to our Old Testament lesson from Hosea.  This is what he promises in verses 4-8: I will heal their apostasy; I will love them freely, for my anger has turned from them. I will be like the dew to Israel; he shall blossom like the lily; he shall take root like the trees of Lebanon; his shoots shall spread out; his beauty shall be like the olive, and his fragrance like Lebanon.  They shall return and dwell beneath my shadow; they shall flourish like the grain; they shall blossom like the vine; their fame shall be like the wine of Lebanon. O Ephraim, what have I to do with idols? It is I who answer and look after you. I am like an evergreen cypress; from me comes your fruit. (Hosea 14:4-8) It’s easy to be wholly devoted to Jesus and to stay away from sin when we’re surrounded by our brothers and sisters as we worship the Lord on Sunday morning.  But when we step out of the church door and into the world it’s not always easy to take that little pocket of the Kingdom of God with us.  God’s promise to us is that he will give us the grace necessary to follow him—and we know from what he’s done in the past that he’s never stingy with his grace.  Too often we foolishly go off into the world and try to “be good” on our own.  It doesn’t work that way, because without the Lord’s life sustaining us we have no life of our own.  We make the mistake of focusing on eternal life as a reward we’ll get after we die.  Our hope lies in the life of the age to come, but Brothers and Sisters, life is also God’s reward to the faithful every day, right here and right now in the power of the Holy Spirit.  Jesus has pulled the life of the age to come into the present and he pours it into us in our Baptism.  All we have to do is take our collect for today and make it our daily prayer and our daily commitment: “Lord of all power and might, the author and giver of all good things, graft in our hearts the love of your Name, increase in us true religion, nourish us with all goodness, and so by your mercy keep us; through Jesus Christ our Lord.  Amen.”

A Sermon for the Seventh Sunday after Trinity

A Sermon for the Sixth Sunday after Trinity

A Sermon for the Fifth Sunday after Trinity

A Sermon for the Fourth Sunday after Trinity Romans 8:17-23 by William Klock Our Epistle from Romans 8 this morning is one those wonderful, short passages that remind us of the bigger picture, that gives us a bird’s-eye view of the Good News, of God’s redemption and renewal of humanity and of his entire Creation.  It’s the hilltop from which we can see the lay of the land, where we’ve come from, where we’re going, and how it all fits together. This is the midpoint of Paul’s letter to the Roman church.  In the first half of the letter, Paul works his way through the story of Israel and all her ups and downs—and for Israel things were mostly “down”.  And now in Chapter 8 he begins talking about life in the flesh versus life in the Spirit and the law of sin and death versus the law of the Spirit.  This is where, in verse 11, he famously writes that if the Spirit who raised Jesus from the dead lives in us, the One who raised Jesus from the dead will also give life to our mortal bodies—if we are in Christ Jesus we live in hope of the same resurrection he has experienced.  But even more than that, Paul goes on to write, through our union with Jesus we are children and heirs of God, fellow heirs with Christ—that means sharing in Jesus’ inheritance.  But what is that?  Paul writes in verse 17 that it means to suffer with him so that we can be glorified with him.  The Christian life—life with Jesus—for Paul means two things: suffering and glory.  Suffering is a given as we long for glory. What does that mean?  What does Paul mean by “glory”?  And what about suffering?  Most Christians living through the last two thousand years have understood that suffering is part of our calling as we follow Jesus.  Jesus promised it.  The New Testament writers talk about it often—and most of them faced it themselves and were martyred for proclaiming the lordship of Jesus.  Many of our brothers and sisters today are persecuted for their faith in various parts of the world.  And yet in the West—probably in part because we haven’t faced persecution for such a long time—many Christians have no place for suffering in their theology.  Many even go so far as to say that if you’re experiencing suffering—sickness, poverty, rejection or anything else negative—it’s due to a lack of faith.  But that’s just the opposite of what Jesus taught and it’s just the opposite of what Paul teaches here.  The inheritance we share with Jesus is one of suffering that leads to glory.  What this means is at the centre of our Epistle and Paul goes on in verse 18: For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us.   Paul says, “For I consider…”  That doesn’t mean this is his opinion.  Paul uses the same Greek word several times as he builds his argument in Romans.  Other translations say “I reckon”.  The sense of it is, “This is how I work it out”.  Knowing the Scriptures, knowing Jesus, working under the Spirit’s inspiration, this is the only conclusion he can reach.  He’s been building this argument for eight chapters in Romans and here he reaches the inevitable conclusion: those who will be glorified will first face suffering, but that this suffering can’t begin to compare with the glory to be revealed. Think about what a powerful statement that was when Paul wrote this.  When he writes that word “suffering” most of us probably read into that whatever our own trials and tribulations are.  That’s fine.  But what did Paul have in mind?  Later in the chapter, in verses 35-36 he writes that nothing will separate us from the love of Christ—nothing—and then he goes on to detail the sorts of suffering that he and other Christians were facing—things people might think mean that God doesn’t love them, things they might think show a lack of faith, things that might separate them from Jesus.  Here’s his list: hardship or distress, persecution or famine, nakedness or peril or sword.  And he quotes from Psalm 44: “For your sake we are being killed all day long; we are accounted sheep to be slaughtered.”  These things are far worse than the sorts of suffering any of us are likely to face.  And as horrible as this suffering was, none of it could compare with the glory to be revealed—no amount of suffering could make the glory not worth it. But what is the glory Paul’s writing about?  Our translation says that this glory is to be revealed “to us”, but that makes it sound like we’re going to be spectators to this glory.  What Paul writes in Greek has the sense of this glory revealed towards us or into us.  It’s a sense of this glory being bestowed on us as a gift—and this makes perfect sense when we remember what Paul said before: that if we are in Christ, then we will share in his inheritance—we will participate in his inheritance. And what’s the inheritance?  Well, who is Jesus?  He is Lord.  His glory is revealed or it’s unveiled in his glorious and sovereign rule of Creation and Paul is saying here that the glory we wait for with eager longing, the glory that is the basis for our hope as Christians is not glory in the sense many people often think.  We often think of “glory” as a place or a state of being.  When a Christian dies we often hear people say that he or she has gone on or been promoted to “glory”.  Brothers and Sisters, “glory” isn’t going to heaven when you die.  As Jesus’ glory is his sovereign rule over Creation, so the glory to be revealed in us is our participation, our sharing in the sovereign and saving rule of Jesus in the age to come.  And this is why he says what he does in verse 19: For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God.   If our hope, if our glory—as it is so often wrongly portrayed—was for the destruction of this world and an eternity of disembodied existence in heaven with God, then the Creation would have no reason to eagerly long for that glory to be revealed.  What Paul describes here is the opposite: God’s Creation is waiting for the great day when its true rulers are revealed, the sons of God, and when it will be delivered from corruption.  Look at verses 20-22: For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of him who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to corruption and obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God.  For we know that the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now.   This is where we need to stand back and look at the big picture.  Everything Paul’s saying here is dependent on that.  It’s the big picture the Bible gives of us of God’s Creation, from beginning to end.  We read in Genesis that God created and that everything was good.  We even read there that when he created human beings he looked at his handiwork and declared us not just “good”, but “very good”.  But we look around us now and have to wonder what happened.  War is always raging somewhere, there’s violence everywhere, there’s greed and corruption everywhere.  Justice is in short supply and so are the basic things that people need to survive—maybe not in our part of the world, but for billions of others.  And yet even if we don’t pay attention to the big evils that play out on the international scene—or even on the local scene, for that matter—we only have to look at the struggles that we have ourselves and that we share with our family and friends to keep away from sin and to do good.  Hate is easy; love is hard.  Paul knew it.  The Roman Christians knew it.  We know it. Paul tells the story of Creation in the book of Romans, but he tells it as Israel’s story.  We don’t have time to run through the whole book this morning obviously, but Paul’s point is that the whole Creation is enslaved in the same sort of way that Israel was in Egypt.  And right there we get a glimmer of hope.  Remember, when Israel went down to Egypt—we read about that in the story of Jacob and Joseph—it was all according to the Lord’s plan.  The Lord arranged for Joseph to become a slave in Egypt so that through him he could rescue his people.  Egypt started out good for Israel.  When things turned around under a new king who enslaved Israel, it was not because the Lord had ceased to be good and it was not because the Lord was no longer in control.  No.  We learn later that the Lord allowed the Israelites to become slaves in Egypt so that he could then manifest his glorious sovereignty to everyone—to Israel in rescuing her and to the Egyptians by showing his power over her false gods and over her mighty horses and chariots.  In the Exodus, the Lord marked Israel forever as the people he had freed from slavery, people to whom he had given a new life.  That became their national identity, celebrated every year in the Passover. In all of that Paul is working up to his point here.  As the Lord allowed Israel to fall into bondage to Egypt, so he has allowed his good Creation to be subjected to death and decay.  We may look around and wonder if things are hopeless.  Every time one war ends and we see peace break out another war begins somewhere else.  We work hard to lift this group out of poverty, but then that group over there falls into it.  We cure one disease only to have two new ones crop up.  Isaiah wrote about a day when the lion would lie down with the lamb and we look around us and wonder if that’s ever going to happen. And Paul assures us: Yes, it’s for real.  This is God’s promise.  No matter how bad things are, this is still his good Creation and he has promised to put everything to rights.  Even as he cast Adam and Eve from the garden he was promising them that he would one day overcome sin and restore everything to the way it should be.  Genesis shows things going from bad to worse.  It shows us humanity losing even the very knowledge of God and sinking into paganism and idolatry.  But then it tells us how God came to Abraham and established a covenant with him.  The Lord promised that through Abraham and his family he would restore not only humanity, but all of Creation and here Paul reminds us what that means, what it looks like and why the Creation itself would long for it to happen. Again, we need the big picture—we need to remember where things started.  In Genesis we read that the Lord created human beings to be his image bearers.  Theologians have argued for two thousand years over what exactly that means, but in the last century, as we’ve been able to read the Old Testament in light of other Jewish and Ancient Near Eastern literature that’s been unearthed we’ve realised that the language of Genesis is temple language.  Israel’s pagan neighbours built great stone temples and then places images of their gods in them.  Those images represented the gods’ rule or sovereignty over the land and people.  And Genesis uses the same languages and imagery, except that in Genesis it’s the Lord himself who builds his own temple—the cosmos—and instead of placing an image of himself carved in stone or gold in it, he creates human beings, to live in his presence in the temple, but also to rule his creation justly and wisely—to have dominion and to subdue Creation in the Lord’s name.  That’s what it meant for humanity to bear God’s image: to be his stewards, the priests of his temple.  But then we chose to rebel.  As Paul writes in Romans 1, we chose to worship the Creation instead of the Creator.  We subjected the Lord’s good creation to corruption. Now, in light of that, it should make sense that Creation goans with eager longing for the day when our inheritance is revealed.  That’s the day when Creation will be set free from the corruption we brought on it.  That’s the day when we, Creation’s stewards will be restored and renewed and put back in charge, reigning with Jesus.  Again, think back to Israel.  He chose and called her, he rescued her, he made her his people, he sent her to the nations to bring healing and restoration.  But she rebelled and she rejected her mission.  And yet the Lord didn’t give up and he didn’t change his plan to redeem his Creation through Israel.  He simply sent a faithful Israelite—he sent Jesus.  And Jesus not only redeemed Israel by dying in her place, he established a new Israel in his own person, a new people to be a light to the nations—this time equipped by the Holy Spirit. This is what Paul is getting at in verse 23.  It’s not just the Creation that groans in eager longing: And not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies. The Lord hasn’t given up on his Creation any more than he gave up on Israel.  Creation is eagerly waiting for its rightful stewards to be set right.  On that great day the Lord will make all things new and restore his redeemed people to their rightful place as good, wise, and just rulers of Creation—as the faithful priests of his temple.  This is what it means for our glory to be revealed.  The big picture, the story of redemption, reminds us that this was how it was supposed to be from the beginning.  And so we groan and we wait eagerly too.  We live in the mess we’ve made here in the world.  We live with sin and with sickness and with death, and yet we live in hope, knowing that what God has begun in Jesus he will one day complete. And we can hope, because in Jesus and the Spirit, God has given us the firstfruits of his new creation.  He’s given a down payment on what he has promised.  The present age and its rulers have been decisively defeated by Jesus at the cross and the empty tomb and God’s new age has been inaugurated.  Jesus is Lord.  He truly is God’s King.  He’s given us his Spirit—Paul describes the Spirit here as the firstfruits—and that’s because we live in the overlap between these two ages, these two kingdoms.  The Jews brought the firstfruits of the harvest—usually sheaves of grain harvested at the very beginning of the season—as offerings to God.  They offered them in good years and even in bad years in faith that God would provide the rest of the harvest.  And so the Spirit is the sign of hope for us.  The life he gives to us here and now is a reminder that encourages our faith and hope in the resurrection and the new creation to come.  We groan and we sigh, we wait longingly in eager expectation, but our hope is certain because God is faithful and keeps his promises.  The prophet Habakkuk wrote that one day the glory of the Lord will fill the earth as the waters cover the sea.  Brothers and Sisters, life is full of suffering, of trials, of tribulations, when the glory of the Lord filling the earth seems impossible, we only need remember the cross of Jesus, his empty tomb, and his gift of the Holy Spirit. But with this in mind we need to be careful.  A lot of Christians, knowing this hope, have ended up becoming complacent.  Brothers and Sisters, we haven’t been redeemed by Jesus and given the gift of the Spirit so that we can retreat into a sort of personal holiness or private piety—or even into the walls and fellowship of the Church—while we wait for Jesus to return.  Not at all.  Jesus has inaugurated this new age in his resurrection and somehow someday the making new that began in his resurrection will encompass all of Creation and you and I are called, in the power of the Spirit, to embody that renewing work here and now.  How is Habakkuk’s prophecy going to be fulfilled?  How does the knowledge of the glory of the Lord spread to cover the earth?  Brothers and Sisters, that’s our mission.  Full of the Spirit, we’re called to proclaim to the world the Good News that Jesus is Lord and that his kingdom is here and now.  Our mission is to call the world to repentance and faith.  But don’t forget: We are also called to live out repentance and faith in our lives in such a way that we lift the veil on the kingdom and that we give a glimpse to the world of what heaven on earth looks like.  So far as we are able to do so today, we are called to exercise the good dominion that was given to Adam—we are called to be stewards of God’s temple, of his Creation.  Jesus has led the way for us here, the second Adam.  In his earthly ministry he made his Father’s new creation known in practical ways to the people around him and so should we.  In a word full of sin we should be visible in seeking after holiness.  In a world full of war and injustice, we should be visible and at the forefront working for biblical peace and biblical justice.  In a world full of hurting and sickness, we should be seeking to make the healing ministry of Jesus known.  In a world full of anger and hate, we should be working for forgiveness and reconciliation. If you’re like me you might get discouraged thinking about the mission Jesus has given us.  When I think of these things I think of things that we as Christians can do to bring Jesus and his glory to the world in “big” ways.  I think of Christians—and there are so often so few of us—working on the big international scene or I think of missionaries going to far off countries.  And then I get discouraged.  That’s far away.  It’s bigger than me.  But Friends, never forget that for every St. Paul or St. Peter, there were thousands of ordinary saints manifesting Jesus in their ordinary lives, proclaiming the Good News, and building the kingdom right where they were and transforming an empire.  We fulfil Jesus’ calling to us as we raise covenant children to walk with him in faith and to live the values of his kingdom.  We fulfil Jesus’ calling when work for peace and reconciliation with our neighbours, in our workplaces, and in our schools.  We fulfil Jesus’ calling when we forgive as we have been forgiven.  We fulfil Jesus’ calling when we love the hard-to-love people around us, knowing that we ourselves are hard-to-love too, but that Jesus loved us enough to die for us.  We fulfil Jesus’ calling when we sacrifice ourselves, our rights, our prerogatives, our time, and our treasure in order to make Jesus and his love and life known.  In everything we do, we should be seeking to give the world signs and foretastes of God’s new creation. Let us pray: Heavenly Father, as we asked earlier in the collect we ask again for grace to pass through the trials of this life without losing the things of eternal importance.  Remind us that the suffering we experience cannot begin to compare with the glory to be revealed to us.  Remind us always of the suffering that Jesus endured for our sake that in love and gratitude we might suffer too for the sake of making him known.  And as we think of Jesus’ death and resurrection and as we live the life given by your Spirit, fill us with hope and faith, knowing that the glory inaugurated in us today will one day be fully accomplished in our own resurrection and the restoration of all your Creation.  Amen.

A Sermon for the Fourth Sunday after Trinity

A Sermon for the Third Sunday after Trinity St. Luke 15:1-10 by William Klock There’s something about sharing a meal that communicates fellowship.  And so Jesus liked to eat with people.  The Jews looked forward to a great banquet at the Lord’s table at the end of the age, a banquet that celebrated God’s having set the world to rights, and so it makes sense that Jesus would eat with people.  In him, God was once again with his people.  In Jesus, God was inaugurating that new world that everyone had hoped for.  Jesus was acting out the great banquet that Israel had always hoped for when the Lord would return to his people.  The problem for a lot of people was that Jesus was inviting and eating with the wrong people.  Look again at Luke 15:1-2. Now the tax collectors and sinners were all drawing near to hear him.  And the Pharisees and the scribes grumbled, saying, “This man receives sinners and eats with them.” It was bad enough that Jesus accepted invitations from tax collectors and sinners, but now Luke tells us that Jesus was becoming known for hosting his own banquets and actually, deliberately choosing to invite these sorts of people.  As far as the Pharisees were concerned, if Jesus was the Messiah, he was doing it all very wrong. Tax collectors have always been unpopular people, but to the Jews they represented everything that was wrong with the world.  They represented the Romans and the corrupt Herodians.  They were a constant reminder that, despite being in their own land, the Jews were essentially still in exile.  And “sinners”.  For the Pharisees that was pretty much anyone who wasn’t a Pharisee, from the really bad sinners, like prostitutes, down to the ordinary people who were simply too poor or illiterate to practise the sort of holiness the Pharisees did. When we talk about the Pharisees it’s important to remember what they were about.  Jews understood heaven and earth to be two halves of God’s Creation.  They were meant to be together, to overlap with God and his people living together.  That’s how Creation began.  Think of the Garden of Eden where God and the people he created lived together.  But human rebellion and sin separated heaven and earth.  Sinful human beings were cast out of the presence of God because unholiness cannot survive the presence of the holy.  But there was one place left where heaven and earth still overlapped.  That was the temple.  It took preparation and sacrifices and priests acting as mediators, but in the temple sin could be overcome for just a little while and humans could enter the presence of God—in the temple you could get a glimpse of the holy.  The Pharisees and Jesus would have both agreed that if you want to understand how things should be on earth, you had to start by figuring out how things were in heaven.  This is the point of Jesus’ prayer for God’s kingdom to come on earth as in heaven.  So the Pharisees looked to the temple—that was the closest you could get to heaven—and being in the temple required absolute purity on the part of the priests.  The Pharisees weren’t priests—at least not most of them—but they chose to get as close to heaven as they thought they could by doing their best to live like the priests in the temple and being as pure as they could possibly be.  Rich people could afford to live that way.  Most ordinary people could not and so the Pharisees looked down on them as “sinners”. And yet here’s Jesus claiming to be the Messiah and claiming to be inaugurating God’s kingdom—and that means acting out here on earth the things that are going on in heaven—but instead of living like the Pharisees and steering clear of sinners and unclean people, Jesus is actually seeking them out and sharing with them this heavenly symbol of the banquet.  Jesus is bringing heaven and earth back together.  Everything about what he’s doing shouts “Messiah!”, but the Pharisees are furious because the great heavenly banquet is supposed to be for the righteous, not the unrighteous.  It’s supposed to be centred around the temple, but Jesus is centring it around himself.  Anyone who will come to Jesus is welcome.  All of this is like a stick in the eye of the Pharisees. Jesus responds with three parables and our Gospel includes the first two.  Look at verses 3-6: So he told them this parable: “What man of you, having a hundred sheep, if he has lost one of them, does not leave the ninety-nine in the open country, and go after the one that is lost, until he finds it?  And when he has found it, he lays it on his shoulders, rejoicing.  And when he comes home, he calls together his friends and his neighbors, saying to them, ‘Rejoice with me, for I have found my sheep that was lost.’”   Notice that this whole passage is one long question that Jesus puts to the Pharisees: “Which of you having lost a sheep wouldn’t do all these things and then celebrate when you’ve found the animal?” Shepherds weren’t their kind of people, but they could identify with the story.  A flock of a hundred sheep was about average.  This wasn’t a rich man, but he wasn’t poor either.  In the morning he would lead his sheep to pasture and at the end of the day he’d lead them back to the sheepfold and count them as they went through the gate.  This night he notices that one is missing.  He’s still got ninety-nine, but that one missing sheep was still valuable.  He couldn’t afford to write it off.  And so he leaves the ninety-nine with the other shepherds and goes off into the night to find the lost one.  Everyone could imagine this shepherd hunting high and low in the dark for the sheep, worrying not just about the possibility of wild animals eating the sheep, but eating him too.  The chances of finding it, let alone finding it alive were probably fairly slim.  But the man finally finds it.  Sheep are natural herd animals, so when they wander off and get separated from the flock they get frightened and shut down.  Jesus describes the man doing what any shepherd would do: picking up the frightened sheep and carrying it across his shoulders, back to the sheepfold.  He and his sheep return safe and sound.  And so he invites his fellow shepherds to celebrate with him.  The sheep that was lost has been found!  Jesus is asking the Pharisees: If this happened to you, wouldn’t you celebrate?  And the obvious answer is that, yes, they would.  We all would. Skipping now to verses 8-9 Jesus tells them a second parable.  This time it’s not one of ninety-nine that’s lost; it’s one of ten.  (In the third parable it’s one of two.) “Or what woman, having ten silver coins, if she loses one coin, does not light a lamp and sweep the house and seek diligently until she finds it?  And when she has found it, she calls together her friends and neighbors, saying, ‘Rejoice with me, for I have found the coin that I had lost.’”   The man with the flock of one hundred sheep was reasonably well off.  In contrast, the woman Jesus describes now is destitute.  The coins would probably have been part of her dowry—maybe all there was to her dowry—and made into a headdress.  Headdresses with hundreds of coins were and are common, so we get a sense how poor this woman is in that her dowry consisted of a mere ten silver coins.  We can imagine her on this day taking out her precious headdress and putting it on, maybe remembering her wedding day long ago.  And as she puts it away she notices that one of the ten little coins is missing.  She panics, looks around, but she can’t find it.  The sort of little mud-brick house someone like her would have lived in had a small door and maybe a tiny window.  The house would have been dark.  She lights her little oil lamp, but even that doesn’t do very much for her, so she starts sweeping the floor with palm fronds, hoping to hear the coin scrape on the floor or, if all else fails, to sweep it up.[1]  Anyone can identify with this scene.  I’ve done this myself.  You know I collect old lanterns.  They’ve got all sorts of screws in odd sizes and with weird thread pitches.  As I’ve discovered, you can’t just go to the hardware store and buy a new one if you lose it.  I’ve dropped screws plenty of times, swept the floor, and found myself sifting through the dustpan with a magnet.  So this image of the old woman hunting for her lost coin is one the Pharisees could easily identify with and Jesus is asking them: “If this happened to you and after all the panic and after all the searching and sweeping you finally found the coin, would you not call your friends to tell them the good news and to celebrate?”  Of course they would. The answer to both of Jesus’ questions is “yes”.  In fact, even two thousand years distant from the shepherd or the poor woman, we can sense their loss and we can celebrate with them as Jesus describes their joy.  The Pharisees were no different.  Jesus may even have got them thinking of some time they lost something of their own and then found it and were joyful.  And what Jesus is saying is that these tax collectors and sinners are precious to him—and not only to him, but to all of heaven and to the Lord himself.  In verse 7, at the end of the first parable, as the shepherd celebrates with his friends, Jesus says to the Pharisees: “Just so, I tell you, there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who need no repentance.   And in verse 10 as the woman celebrates her found coin he says: “Just so, I tell you, there is joy before the angels of God over one sinner who repents.”   Jesus profoundly shames the self-righteousness of the Pharisees.  He has a remarkable way of telling stories that cut right to the heart of things.  Their idea of “on earth as it is in heaven” meant condemning sinners and the unclean and consigning them to God’s judgement.  But Jesus is saying, if you want to see what’s going on in heaven stop looking to the temple.  That worked in the past, but in Jesus God is doing something new.  This is part of the reason why Jesus was forgiving sins and declaring people clean.  He was acting out and showing people how he is the new temple.  In him heaven and earth have come together.  In Jesus we have the firstfruits and a foretaste of God’s redemption and his new creation.  And in these parables Jesus is telling the Pharisees, if you want to manifest on earth what is happening in heaven, look at what I am doing, not at the old temple.  And in Jesus and in his banquets with tax collectors and sinners we see that God truly loves sinners and that he’s sent Jesus not to condemn us in our sin, but to rescue us and to lead us back to him in repentance and faith.  We’re reminded here of Jesus’ words in John 3:16-17: “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.  For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.”   You see, the Pharisees were anticipating the end of the age and they were ready for God to send his Son into the world to condemn sinners.  The Pharisees were partly right.  They were right to look forward to a day of coming judgement when God’s Son would come to condemn sinners and to vindicate the righteous.  What they got wrong was that it never occurred to them that God would send his Son, not just at the end of history, but would first send him into the middle of history, to call sinners to repentance and to offer himself as a sacrifice for their sins.  Jesus stepped into the middle of history to redeem sinners so that when he returns at the end of history we won’t be condemned.  In this we see the love of God.  He didn’t cast humanity from his presence with a “A good riddance!”  We sundered heaven and earth and when we did, God set in motion a plan to bring us back together. This was the plan from the beginning.  Through Abraham God had called Israel to be a light to the nations, to be his means of rescuing them from the darkness, but instead Israel had done the opposite—just like the Pharisees.  And over and over the Lord had rebuked his people for failing in their mission.  Jesus’ parable of the lost sheep has strong echoes of Ezekiel 34.  There the Lord says: Ah, shepherds of Israel who have been feeding yourselves! Should not shepherds feed the sheep?  You eat the fat, you clothe yourselves with the wool, you slaughter the fat ones, but you do not feed the sheep.  The weak you have not strengthened, the sick you have not healed, the injured you have not bound up, the strayed you have not brought back, the lost you have not sought, and with force and harshness you have ruled them.  So they were scattered, because there was no shepherd, and they became food for all the wild beasts.  My sheep were scattered; they wandered over all the mountains and on every high hill. My sheep were scattered over all the face of the earth, with none to search or seek for them.”   The very ones who were supposed to care for the sheep have taken advantage of them and abandoned them.  But, says the Lord: I, I myself will search for my sheep and will seek them out…and I will rescue them from all places where they have been scattered on a day of clouds and thick darkness…I will feed them with good pasture, and on the mountain heights of Israel shall be their grazing land. There they shall lie down in good grazing land, and on rich pasture they shall feed on the mountains of Israel.  I myself will be the shepherd of my sheep, and I myself will make them lie down, declares the Lord god.  I will seek the lost, and I will bring back the strayed, and I will bind up the injured, and I will strengthen the weak, and the fat and the strong I will destroy. I will feed them in justice.” (Ezekiel 34:2b-6, 11, 12b, 14-16) The Sadducees, the religious leaders of Jesus’ day, were corrupt sell-outs who enriched themselves, getting fat at the expense of the sheep, like the leaders in Ezekiel’s day.  The Pharisees opposed them and called for reform, but they didn’t have it right either.  Their solution was to condemn the lost sheep.  Sure, they’d show them by example—at a distance—how they ought to live.  But they didn’t seek them out.  They didn’t really call them back to the Lord—not in any meaningful way.  And so the condemnation that the Lord gave through Ezekiel now falls on the Pharisees. Thus says the Lord god to them: Behold, I, I myself will judge between the fat sheep and the lean sheep.  Because you push with side and shoulder, and thrust at all the weak with your horns, till you have scattered them abroad, I will rescue my flock; they shall no longer be a prey.  And I will judge between sheep and sheep.  And I will set up over them one shepherd, my servant David, and he shall feed them: he shall feed them and be their shepherd. In Jesus, Ezekiel’s prophecy has been fulfilled.  He is the Son of David come to seek and to save the lost, to shepherd the sheep, and to feed them in the rich pasture of his kingdom.  He’s given himself as a sacrifice for our sins and this morning he invites us to his Table to his heavenly banquet.  But how do we come?  Again, this is the meal Jesus gave us to make sense of the cross.  He is the Passover lamb sacrificed for our sins.  By his death he frees us from our bondage to sin and death and leads us into new life and new creation.  In Jesus we see grace.  We don’t deserve any of this.  We’re the rebels; we’re the sinners; we’re the God-haters.  We deserve nothing but death, but in his grace Jesus offers us forgiveness and restoration and life.  And when we take hold of his grace in faith he tells us that the whole heavenly court rejoices.  What was lost has been found.  What ran away has been restored. But we’re always at risk of forgetting that we come to the banquet only by grace.  It’s interesting that in the gnostic pseudo-gospel of Thomas, the parable was changed.  In that telling of the story, the shepherd explains to the lost sheep that he sought it out because he loved it and he valued it more than the others.[2]  We’re prone to twisting the story the same way in our own minds—thinking that we’ve been invited here to the Table because we deserved to be here.  But that’s not the story Jesus tells.  The one sheep that was lost was no more valuable than the other ninety-nine.  The one coin lost was no different than all the others.  In fact, in the parable of the Prodigal Son, which follows them, the son who was lost was an utter twit and many people justly wonder why his father didn’t simply disown him.  The only difference between the one and the ninety-nine and the one and the ten is that the one was lost.  Brothers and sisters, we are not here because we’ve earned God’s love.  We’re here by his grace.  We are here because he rejoices in redeeming sinners.  We’re here because it pleases him to forgive his enemies and restore them to his fellowship. Jesus upset the Pharisees because he made manifest on earth the reality of heaven that they had forgotten.  He revealed that the Lord is a God who loves his enemies and desires to save them.  We pray the words from Jesus’ prayer: “on earth as in heaven”.  But do we live out the reality of heaven in our lives by reaching out to sinners with the love and grace and joy of heaven?  It’s easy to fall into self-righteousness and it’s easy to live with an attitude of condemnation.  Brothers and Sisters, remember this morning that we come to the Lord’s Table because of his love and grace.  We come as sinners forgiven.  When you go, don’t leave all of this at the door of the church, but take it with you so that you can encounter the world with grace and with the same love that God has shown you in Jesus. Let us pray: Loving and gracious Father, help us to grasp your deep, deep love for sinners and the profound graciousness of grace.  Remind us of the joy in your courts over sinners who were lost and now found.  And, Father, help us to love our fellow sinners as you have loved us and show us ways in which we can make the reality of heavenly known here on earth.  We ask this through Jesus Christ our Lord.  Amen. [1] For background details for both parables see Joachim Jeremias, The Parables of Jesus (London: SCM Press, 1972), pp. 132-135 and Leland Ryken, James C. Wilhoit, and Tremper Longman III, eds., Dictionary of Biblical Imagery (Downers Grove, Ill.: Baker Academic, 1998), pp. 782-785. [2] Gospel of Thomas 107.

A Sermon for the Third Sunday after Trinity

A Sermon for the Second Sunday after Trinity St. Luke 14:16-24 by William Klock At the beginning of Chapter 14, St. Luke tells us that one Sabbath Jesus was invited to have dinner at the house of a prominent Pharisee and that there was a man there who had dropsy.  The whole thing looks a bit like a setup.  Looking at the man and then turning to these authorities on the law, Jesus asks them if it’s legal to heal on the Sabbath.  Luke says that they were silent.  Jesus then healed the man and sent him on his way and we can gather that the lawyers and Pharisees all looked very offended and scandalised—even though they had to have known that this is what Jesus would do.  Jesus then asked them, “Which of you who, if your son or your ox fell into a well on the Sabbath wouldn’t immediately pull him out?”  And despite the answer being obvious—of course they’d pull out him out!—they don’t know what to say.  They know whatever they might say will condemn them. So what’s going on here?  Remember that for the Jews of Jesus’ day and especially for the Pharisees, there were three main things that set them apart from everyone else in the world: circumcision, the Sabbath, and their diet.  Two of those things come into play here.  The Pharisees were zealous to keep the Sabbath holy and that meant absolutely no kind of work.  They were also zealous about purity—not just what they ate, but also who they ate with.  It was pointless to have clean food if someone who was unclean sat down at your table and rendered everything unclean.  Now, these markers weren’t bad.  Circumcision, Sabbath, and diet—the whole law—were given by God as boundary markers for his people—visible signs to set them apart from the world—so that they would know to whom they belonged, so that they would know their calling to be light to the nations, and so that they would maintain the holiness needed to fulfil that calling.  Israel was given a light, but instead of holding it high for the nations to see, she hid it under a basket.  Israel was like a lighthouse keeper who’s lit his light, but drawn the curtain…and then condemns the ship captains as they crash into the rocks. Back to Luke 14.  I suspect this man showing up during dinner was a setup meant to trap Jesus.  The man was most likely a beggar who showed up at the door for scraps.  Beggars did that all the time when rich people were having banquets.  But to see what Jesus will do, his host allows this man to actually slip into the banquet.  And instead of throwing him some scraps and sending him on his way, Jesus welcomes the man into the banquet and heals him.  And they’re shocked and appalled.  Jesus has ruined the banquet—everything’s unclean now.  But he’s also—Gasp!—he’s done work on the Sabbath.  And from their skewed perspective, this reveals Jesus to be an enemy of the kingdom—a false messiah.  The Pharisees were trying to clean Israel up, to get people to be more holy, to push the unholy and the unclean to the outside, and here’s Jesus doing just the opposite. The Pharisees didn’t know what to say, but Jesus launches in to two parables.  The first addresses all the social posturing that went on at these banquets.  Everyone was invited for a reason and ultimately in order for the host to show off the status he had in the world and, hopefully, to elevate himself even higher.  The second parable is today’s Gospel reading and it begins at verses 12-14: He said also to the man who had invited him, “When you give a dinner or a banquet, do not invite your friends or your brothers or your relatives or rich neighbors, lest they also invite you in return and you be repaid.  But when you give a feast, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind, and you will be blessed, because they cannot repay you.  For you will be repaid at the resurrection of the just.”   Jesus strikes at the Pharisees’ source of security.  The resurrection of the dead was one of the key doctrines of the Pharisees.  They knew that when the Messiah came, he would judge the wicked and resurrect the righteous.  And, of course, they were the righteous who would be resurrected.  And here Jesus tells them: “The resurrection you’re sure of—you’re going to miss it if you don’t change—if you don’t repent.  You’re convinced the Lord will reward you for your righteousness, but until you start showing mercy and grace to the poor, to the unclean, and to the outsider—until you start being the light in the darkness the Lord has called you to be—you will never understand true righteousness.  If you want to take part in the coming resurrection of the dead, you need to start bearing fruit that reflects grace.  You need to get your head around the fact that for all your righteousness and law-keeping, you too are sinners.  You won’t be saved because of your family or your intellect, your law-keeping or your spirituality.  Only those who can humbly acknowledge their sinfulness and who are ready to trust in God’s grace—and are humble and gracious enough to share it with sinners even worse than themselves—only they will be resurrected when the Lord comes. But Jesus’ fellow dinner guests still don’t get it.  One poor, clueless soul chimes in, cheerfully declaring: “Blessed is everyone who will eat bread in the kingdom of God!”  He doesn’t understand that Jesus is telling him that if he doesn’t repent of his self-righteousness, if he doesn’t humble himself before God, he won’t eat bread in the kingdom of God.  And so Jesus tells a second parable that’s even more vivid and that strikes even harder at the Jews’ source of security.  Look at verses 15-20: But he said to him, “A man once gave a great banquet and invited many.  And at the time for the banquet he sent his servant to say to those who had been invited, ‘Come, for everything is now ready.’  But they all alike began to make excuses.  The first said to him, ‘I have bought a field, and I must go out and see it.  Please have me excused.’  And another said, ‘I have bought five yoke of oxen, and I go to examine them. Please have me excused.’  And another said, ‘I have married a wife, and therefore I cannot come.’ Consider how important an event like this was in that culture.  This wasn’t just a matter of putting a roast in the oven and inviting friends to eat and play cards after dinner.  If they call at the last minute to say they can’t make it, you might be disappointed, but you can do it again next week.  A banquet like the one Jesus describes was a major social event.  The guest list was carefully made to everyone’s mutual social advantage.  To top it off, a big banquet was an expensive affair—you couldn’t just postpone it because your guests backed out at the last minute.  And for that matter, as a guest to a banquet like this, backing out was a huge social snub.  For all their excuses, what these guests are really doing is orchestrating a rejection of their host—they’re trying to knock him from his perch at the top of the social hierarchy. What’s interesting is that the man hosting the banquet simply decides to throw all social propriety and the whole hierarchical system of their world out the window.  If the people of his own social class will have nothing to do with him, he’ll have nothing to do with them.  Look at how he responds: So the servant came and reported these things to his master. Then the master of the house became angry and said to his servant, ‘Go out quickly to the streets and lanes of the city, and bring in the poor and crippled and blind and lame.’  And the servant said, ‘Sir, what you commanded has been done, and still there is room.’  And the master said to the servant, ‘Go out to the highways and hedges and compel people to come in, that my house may be filled.  For I tell you, none of those men who were invited shall taste my banquet.’” (Luke 14:21-24) When the rich won’t come, he rounds up the poor.  Notice that his servant literally has to bring them or even compel them to come to the banquet.  The poor and crippled and blind and lame knew that they didn’t belong.  When they heard the invitation from the servant, they would have thought it was a joke.  Banquets were all about quid pro quo and tit for tat.  They had nothing to offer this rich man who invited them.  And so the rich man sends his servants out to round up these outsiders and to bring them to the banquet to enjoy his gracious hospitality.  In fact, the rich man rejects the whole system of patronage and debts and reciprocal favours—none of those who rejected his invitation will ever sit at his table.  Instead, he’s going to share his hospitality with the people who haven’t earned it and can never repay it. Luke doesn’t tell us how the Pharisees responded or if they even understood, but it’s hard to think that it didn’t sink in on some level.  Everyone in the Jewish word, and especially the Pharisees, were waiting for the Lord’s return.  The prophets had talked about that great day in terms of a great banquet and this banquet idea then became a common image of the coming Day of the Lord.  And now Jesus explains that he’s come to open the door to that great banquet.  This is what Israel has been waiting for all these years.  And yet Jesus rebukes them.  This isn’t the first time the Lord has extended his invitation.  For centuries he had called to his people through the prophets, but they had refused to hear the prophets and had even killed some of them.  And now Jesus has come and he’s travelled through Galilee and Judea, inviting everyone to the banquet, but like the people in the parable, they all have excuses. It’s worth noting the excuses given in the parable.  One man says that he’s bought five yoke of oxen sight-unseen and has to check them over.  Another has bought a field sight-unseen and needs to go have a look at it.  The third just got married and has obligations to his new bride.  The first two excuses peg these men as very wealthy.  Five yoke of oxen would only be needed to plough a very large tract of land.  A wealthy absentee landlord was the sort of person who would buy a field without first seeing it.  But all three of these excuses go back to the law given in Deuteronomy.  A man who had built a new house, but hadn’t dedicated it yet, a man who had bought a field, but hadn’t enjoyed its produce, and a newly married man were all excused from going off to war.  And now these guests twist those laws as excuses to reject their host’s banquet.  But this is what Israel had done with the law: twisting it into something it was never meant to be.  And it’s that twisting of the law that was particularly exemplified in the Pharisees.  Jesus didn’t meet their expectations of the Messiah.  His banquet included too many sinners, unclean people, and outsiders.  And so they rejected the invitation.  This parable is a warning to Israel.  Jesus is saying that if they continue to reject his invitation he will turn from them and take that invitation to the unclean and to the sick and to the poor—and even to the gentiles—and having rejected him, they will never taste of his goodness or of the salvation he’s brought to the world.  As in the parable of the vineyard, Israel has repeatedly rejected the representatives of the vineyard owner.  Finally, he’s sent his own son to them.  This is their final chance.  If they reject him, too, the owner of the vineyard will return in wrath to take the vineyard away and to give it to those who will appreciate it and do his will. But the parable has another level of meaning.  Imagine Luke writing a generation later.  Even if greater Israel had rejected Jesus’ invitation, thousands of Jews had accepted it.  The first Christians were all Jews, and then an amazing thing happened: the Good News went out to the hated Samaritans—and many of them accepted the invitation.  And then it went out to the Gentiles—and thousands of them accepted it too.  And suddenly those first Jewish Christians were in a situation very much like the Pharisees had been.  They were Jews.  They were the chosen.  They were the clean people.  They were the righteous and holy people.  Even an apostle like Peter struggled to go and pray with a gentile convert.  It’s a reminder that even we who have received the grace of God, are still prone to forgetting that we come to his Table not because of our own merit, but only because of Jesus and only because of grace.  We need to remember that grace when we’re tempted to think that there are people who don’t belong here.  Brothers and sisters, none of us belongs here.  We’re only here because God is gracious and sent his Son to die and rise from the dead for our sake. But this now takes us back to Jesus’ call in verses 12-14: “When you give a dinner…do not invite your friends…lest they also invite you in return and you be repaid.  But when you give a feast, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind, and you will be blessed, because they cannot repay you.  For you will be repaid at the resurrection of the just.”  Dear friends, as you come to the Lord’s Table this morning, think on the fact that he has invited us here from the highways and hedges.  We didn’t belong here, but Jesus has washed us clean and grafted us into his family as adopted sons and daughters.  Because of him we do belong.  But having been invited, he now calls us to be hosts ourselves.  Lest we forget.  Lest we think that we’ve earned our place here at the Table.  Lest we ever think that others don’t belong, Jesus now calls us to go out to the highways and the hedges—to go to the places we may have forgotten where he once found us.  He calls us to look for the poor, the unclean, and sinners, not to condemn them, but to invite them to the Lord’s banquet—to invite them to receive the grace of God just as we have.  To tell them of the God who has humbled himself in becoming one of us and to die for our sake.  To invite them to come and be forgiven, healed, set free, and washed clean by Jesus.  That they might have a share with us in Jesus in the life of God and of his kingdom. Let us pray: Father, you delight to show mercy to sinners and you graciously sent your Son to suffer the punishment we deserve.  We have received your grace and have been given new life.  Remind us to set aside all thoughts of self-righteousness.  Give us opportunities now to share your mercy and grace with others, give us eyes to see those opportunities, and a love for sinners that we might never let those opportunities pass us by.  We ask this through Jesus Christ our Lord.  Amen.

A Sermon for the Second Sunday after Trinity

A Sermon for the First Sunday after Trinity 1 John 4:7-21 by William Klock One of our great challenges today is to understand what love is.  Over the last few weeks I’ve seen an old high school friend posting her artwork for sale on social media.  It’s all promoting “love”.  The slogan is “love is love”.  But what it’s really all about is promoting homosexuality.  A few days ago I was reading an article by a girl who was pressured by her boyfriend into having sex.  “I love you and if you love me, you’ll do it,” he told her.  And when she got pregnant her family told her, “If you love yourself and you love this child, you’ll have an abortion rather than give yourselve and the baby so much disadvantage.”  Sin makes a mess of everything, even to the point of corrupting what it means to love.  But our Epistle today confronts us with real love, godly love, love defined by the cross of Jesus.  “Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God, and everyone who loves is born of God and knows God.  Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love” (1 John 4:7-8).  Alongside the Epistle the Church gives us the parable of the rich man and Lazarus in our Gospel.  It was a parable spoken to Pharisees who had convinced themselves that certain types of people, people who stood under God’s condemnation, were unworthy of being shown love. Brothers and Sisters, Jesus reveals—especially, but not least, in his Incarnation and in his sacrificial death—that God is love.  We may struggle with that.  Some people get it backwards, turning love itself into a god.  No.  Love is not our god, but our God is love.  And sometimes we struggle to wrap out minds around love itself.  As I said, sin makes a mess of things and because of that we often struggle to grasp what real love is.  Many have known a father or mother, a husband or wife, a boyfriend or girlfriend who spoke of love, but was abusive.  Many have been in relationships where love had to be earned and was loaded with conditions.  We live in a culture where lust is often confused with love.  Sin has made a mess of it. This is why we have to come back to Jesus.  If we want to know what love is we look to him and we think back on what he’s done for us.  John says in verses 9 and 10: “This is how God’s love was revealed to us: God sent his only Son into the world, so that we should live through him.  Love consists in this: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the sacrifice that would atone for our sins.”  In this we see God’s perfect goodness.  We’re the “bad guys”, we’re the rebels, we’re the sinners whose love is tainted by our selfishness.  We’re the ones who rejected the goodness of God.  We’re the ones who rejected his love.  (Remember, he didn’t have to create us.  He chose to create us in order to shower his love on us.)  He could have thrown in the towel and given up on us.  He could have destroyed his creation and started over just as easily as he started in the beginning.  But instead he shows his perfect and abundant love in giving himself as a sacrifice for our sins that we might be restored to his presence.  That’s what real love looks like. This is the heart of the Christian faith.  God reveals himself in Jesus the Messiah.  Not only that, but in the death and resurrection of Jesus God reconciles sinners to himself.  This is the love on which our faith is based and it’s the love that should be revealed in our lives as people of this faith.  We can’t be people of Jesus without the love of Jesus being revealed through us. But, again and as we all can attest, it’s not easy.  I hope we all leave today wanting to go out to love and serve the Lord.  He feeds us at his Table today.  We’ve heard his Word read and once again been reminded of his love for us and how that love was made manifest in Jesus and at the cross.  But sin gets in the way.  How long does it last when we get back to work on Monday and something goes wrong?  How long does it last when your spouse or your kids push the button that sets you off?  Maybe all it takes is the drive home from church and someone drives too slowly in front of you or cuts you off.  Love isn’t easy.  And this is the reason why we need the reminder that love isn’t a warm and fuzzy feeling.  It’s an action, a way of life that is defined for us by God in Jesus. Brothers and Sisters, as often as we fail to show the love of Jesus in our lives we need to keep coming back to Jesus.  We need to keep coming back to the one who, though he was in the form of God thought it not a thing to be exploited, but poured himself out, humbling himself and becoming one of us.  We need to come back to Jesus, despised, rejected, abused, and crucified for our sake.  As often as we fail to live the love of God in our lives we need to come back to the story of redemption and remind ourselves of, think on, and meditate on the lengths to which God has gone to reconcile sinners to himself.  The love of God in Jesus changed the world and God intends for it to keep changing the world as it wells up in our lives and manifests itself to the world—as we live it out. John goes on in verse 11: “Beloved, since God loved us so much, we also ought to love one another.”  It’s easy to hear that as nothing more than “Jesus set an example, now go follow it.”  Its’ true that he did and that we should.  But that’s not what John is getting at.  He goes deeper in verse 12: “No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God lives in us, and his love is perfected in us.” John says something very similar at the beginning of his Gospel.  In John 1:18 he writes, “No one has ever seen God.  It is only God the Son who is close to the Father’s heart, who has made him known.”  What John’s saying there in his Gospel is that no one can truly know God apart from Jesus.  In Jesus—in the humble act of his incarnation and in his offering of himself as a sacrifice for our sins—God goes from being abstract divinity or from being the “Big Guy upstairs” to being the Creator who seeks to be intimately known by his people and who loves us infinitely.  Jesus reveals that.  And what John says here in our Epistle is very similar.  God’s love—the love he’s put into action in Jesus—is made complete in his people as they are forgiven and restored and as his Spirit makes them—makes us new.  And so it’s through us that people come to know who God is.  Jesus came and proclaimed that God’s kingdom was breaking into the world and he called men and women to repent and enter his kingdom by faith.  Now, in us, the world sees that kingdom.  Jesus calls us to proclaim his kingdom with our mouths and to call people to repentance and faith, but it’s in our lives—and our love for each other—that the world sees what Jesus has done.  Just as God’s love is manifest in Jesus, who took our flesh upon himself, so, John says in 3:18, we are called to love, not so much in word or speech (although we should do that too!), but to love in truth and action, made manifest in our flesh and blood. At the end of our lesson, in verse 21, John warns: “This is the commandment we have from him: Those who love God must also love their brothers and sisters.”  John is talking specifically about loving our fellow Christians, but our love shouldn’t be restricted by the walls of the church.  That was Israel’s problem and it’s what Jesus condemns in our Gospel today.  But John’s point is that you can’t claim to love God while not loving others.  If you say you love God but you hate your brother or your sister, you’re a liar.  It’s that simple.  Granted, I don’t know anyone who’s learned to love with the perfection of Jesus, but we ought to be trying.  We ought to feel remorse when we fail to love.  We ought to recoil when we see hate in a brother or sister—and we ought to desire to bring correction.  John writes, “By this we know that we abide in him and he in us, because he has given us of his Spirit.”  And the Holy Spirit changes hearts and minds.  The Holy Spirit gives life to our dead wood and makes us bear fruit, the greatest of which is love. Again, this is a challenge.  Just think over the last week—or maybe just the last twenty-four hours—and I think we can all find some way in which we failed to be loving—probably more than one.  I remember thinking about this when I was younger and it was new to me and I looked at my own life and I was afraid.  I knew I wasn’t living up to the standard John describes and I worried that one day I’d be saying, “Lord, Lord” and Jesus would tell me to depart because he didn’t know me.  But that’s not where John takes us.  Instead, John tells us in verses 17 and 18 about the confidence we can have before God.  “Love has been perfected in us in this: that we may have boldness on the day of judgement, because as he is, so are we in this world.  There is no fear in love, but perfect love drives out fear.  Fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not been perfected in love.” The love of God manifested in the flesh and blood of Jesus is made complete in us as we in turn devote our flesh and blood to God’s love.  And despite our struggles and our failures, we have no need to be afraid that we’re outside the redeeming grace of God.  If the love of God has been completed or perfected in love this way in us it has only happened because we are in Christ.  God loves us.  He manifests his love by giving Jesus so that we can be forgiven and restored.  We grab hold of Jesus in faith.  He pours his Spirit into us and transforms us.  We start bearing fruit and the love of God pours out of us to others and back to God.  And the more we think and meditate on it all the more we’ll be driven to love.  Brothers and Sisters, if you’re struggling to love, steep yourself in the Word and meditate on Jesus and the cross.  If you’re struggling to love, come to the Table this morning and think on Jesus, the Son of God, giving his flesh and blood for your sake.  If you’re struggling with a half-hearted commitment to love, if we’re struggling to take love seriously, consider and meditate on just how seriously God has taken his love for us.  In love he gave his Son for us.  In love he sent his Spirit to make us new.  And if we will immerse ourselves in the love of God poured out on us in Jesus and the Spirit, the Father will surely perfect his love in us. Let us pray: Heavenly Father, in the Collect we acknowledged that in our mortal weakness we can do no good thing.  It is by your grace that we are transformed.  Remind us each day, we pray of the loving grace you have shown to us in giving Jesus, your Son, as a sacrifice for our sins.  Remind us each day of the gift of the Spirit, whom you have poured into us and the gift of your Word that the Spirit has caused to be written—the witness to your mighty and saving deeds witnessed through the prophets and apostles and finally in Jesus.  Immerse us in the means of grace you have given: in your Word, in your Sacraments, in the loving fellowship of your church where we find exhortation and discipline.  Complete your love in us, we pray, through Jesus Christ our Lord.  Amen.

A Sermon for the First Sunday after Trinity

A Sermon for Trinity Sunday St. John 3:1-17 by William Klock The Feast of the Holy Trinity was introduced in the early Tenth Century by Stephen, the Bishop of Liége in Belgium.  It caught on quickly and became popular in the churches of the Low Countries, Germany, and England.  For hundreds of years there had been a tradition of a private mass, said by the priest each Sunday that honoured the Trinity, but this feast day sort of went public with it—made a much bigger deal of it.  But our lessons today go back long before the Sunday after Pentecost was observed as Trinity Sunday.  Typically, when we have a major feast on the calendar—like Christmas or Easter or Pentecost—there’s a Sunday before or after that fleshes it out, that explains what was going on when that event happened.  And that’s what our lessons—particularly our Gospel—today were meant to do for Pentecost.  But when Trinity Sunday came along no one changed the lessons, because here we see the Trinity revealed in the exchange between Jesus and Nicodemus, we see the Trinity revealed as Israel’s story reaches its climax in Jesus and as the Spirit is poured out on God’s people. In Jesus the new Israel was born and our Gospel today sort of bridges the gap between the old Israel at Mt. Sinai and the new Israel at Pentecost. Nicodemus comes to visit Jesus.  He came at night, which suggests he was afraid of being seen.  He was one of the Pharisees—not all of them were bad or hostile to Jesus, but they were the ones who had it all figured out and Jesus didn’t fit well into their thinking.  He’d been watching and listening to Jesus.  He saw the God of Israel at work.  He says to him, “Rabbi, we know that you’re a teacher who’s come from God.  No one could do these signs you’re doing unless God is with him.” Nicodemus knew the story.  He knew the God of Israel.  But he knew there was more to it.  As he’d watched and listened to Jesus he’d figured that out.  Jesus was talking about the Lord doing another great work, of the Lord leading his people in another exodus, this time more significant than the last one from Egypt.  It didn’t fit into his Pharisaical paradigm, but there had to be something to it, because the Lord was so clearly with Jesus. And Jesus picks up on the question implied in Nicodemus’ statement.  He says, “The central truth you’re missing, Nicodemus, is that you’ve got to be born again to see the kingdom of God.”  Nicodemus understood so much.  If anyone wanted to see God’s will done and his kingdom come on earth as in heaven it was the Pharisees.  That’s what they lived for.  And Nicodemus saw it in Jesus, but Jesus wasn’t preaching what the Pharisees were preaching.  Jesus is saying to him that what he’s missing is this new birth, this being born again. And Nicodemus doesn’t get it.  “How can I be born again, Jesus?  I know you’re not talking about returning to my mother’s womb, but what do you mean.  A person is only born once.”  You see, what Jesus is getting at is this idea that Israel needs to be put back on track so that she can fulfil her mission—the one given to Abraham almost two thousand years before.  And this idea of birth would have resonated particularly with someone like Nicodemus.  To be a Jew was all about being born as part of Abraham’s family.  Other things like circumcision and what you ate (or didn’t eat) were important too and especially so for the Pharisees, but those things were important because they identified you as part of Abraham’s family.  They also drew a clear boundary between those who were in the family and all the uncircumcised, unclean gentiles were most definitely not. What Jesus is saying now is that being born into Abraham’s family in the way the Jews had been thinking about it all this time wasn’t enough.  In fact, it never had been enough.  And Nicodemus should have known this.  For almost two millennia people were being born into Abraham’s family and God’s kingdom still hadn’t come.  For almost two millennia people were born into Abraham’s family and still the Gentiles hadn’t experienced the Lord’s blessing through them, at least not on the large scale envisioned in the Scriptures.  Just the opposite.  Zechariah had spoken of a day when the Gentiles would be grabbing hold of Jews by their clothing saying, “Take us with you, because we hear that God is with you!”  Instead, because of the way most of Abraham’s children were living, the nations mocked them and taunted them saying, “Where’s your God now?”  It takes more than being born of the flesh of Abraham. Jesus says to Nicodemus, “Truly, truly, unless you’re born of water and the Spirit you cannot enter God’s kingdom.  Flesh gives birth to flesh, but the Spirit gives birth to spirit.”  Israel needs something more than a biological inheritance.  What does Jesus mean, though, when he talks about being born of water and the Spirit?  This was what John the Baptist was preaching about.  God was about to lead his people in a new exodus.  As Israel had been led through the waters of the Red Sea to become a covenant family, so John was calling people to pass through the waters of the Jordan—a step of repentance and faith—and into a new covenant.  Nicodemus needed that baptism of repentance.  He needed to turn aside from his own misguided expectations of the kingdom and of the Messiah.  But remember what John promised.  When people asked if he was the Messiah he said that he was only the forerunner.  John said, “I baptise you with water, but he will plunge you into the Holy Spirit.”  And that’s just what Jesus does.  As we recalled last week on Pentecost, Jesus takes those who have repented, who have turned aside from every false lord, from every false god, from every false source of security in order to take hold of him in faith by passing through the waters of baptism and he plunges us into the Holy Spirit.  And it’s the Spirit who does the work of transforming us.  It’s the Spirit who regenerates us.  It’s the Spirit who causes us to be born again as he takes our old dead wood and unites it to the life of Jesus, causing us to bear fruit. In our baptism we’re back at the Red Sea.  There was the parted sea and God calling Israel to pass through to freedom and new life on the other side.  There was no receiving of the law in Egypt; they had to cross to the other side of the sea to find covenant with the Lord.  And so we stand at the waters of baptism today.  In them Jesus gives his promise: Repent, turn aside from every false way, trust me, follow me in faith and you will find forgiveness of sins and new life through the Spirit.  To pass through the waters of baptism is to take hold of Jesus’ promise and to be born again of water and the Spirit. But, again, this didn’t fit what Nicodemus knew.  “How can this be so?” he asks.  And Jesus asks a bit incredulously, “How can you not know this?  You’re one of the teachers of Israel!”  Nicodemus knew the story.  He understood how Israel had so miserably failed in her mission.  In fact, that’s what the Pharisees were all about: Calling Israel to be more faithful to the law so that the Lord would return to her.  Jesus tells Nicodemus: God has heard cries and is visiting his people and he’s doing it in me.  I’m the son of man, the one spoken of by Daniel all those years ago.  I can tell you reliably the things of heaven because I’m the one who has come down from heaven. I suspect that things must have started to sink in for Nicodemus at this point.  He started to understand, because now Jesus really starts to correct what was wrong with Israel’s thinking about herself, about what it meant to God’s people, and about what it would mean for the Lord to come to deliver them.  Jesus reminds Nicodemus of an event from Israel’s time in the wilderness.  The Israelites grumbled against Moses—which was ultimately grumbling against the Lord—and so he sent poisonous snakes into the camp.  They bit people and many of those who were bitten died.  But the Lord also gave Moses the remedy.  He told Moses to cast a snake out of bronze and to mount it on a pole.  Anyone who would look up to the bronze snake would be healed. And now Jesus says, “Just as Moses lifted up that snake in the wilderness, so the son of man must be lifted up so that all who believe in him may have eternal life.”  Jesus is pointing to his own crucifixion.  As the snake was the affliction of the people lifted up for them to look at, so Jesus will take our affliction on himself—our sin and the punishment for it—and be lifted up on the cross.  He will be lifted up for all to look upon—to see the horror and the gravity of our sin, to see that the wages of sin is death.  But we will also see Jesus taking it all on himself and in that the horror and ugliness of his being raised up becomes an act by which he is glorified.  In the cross we see the love of God made manifest in Jesus.  And Jesus says in the familiar words we all know, “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.  For God sent not his Son into the world to condemn the world; but that the world through him might be saved.” Jesus corrects the central error in the thinking of Israel in his day.  They were hoping and praying for the day when the Lord would come, not just to vindicate his people, but to judge their enemies—to rain down fire and brimstone on the Romans and all other gentiles.  But instead Jesus tells Nicodemus that he’s come not to condemn, but to save all who will look to him.  All.  The Jews looked forward to the condemnation he would bring, but Jesus says he’s come not to condemn, but to save.  And this is where the part about being born again of water and the Spirit comes into play.  Being born of water and the Spirit supersedes biology and genealogy.  In Jesus God opens his arms to welcome Jew and Gentile alike.  Abraham’s family is still central and important, but Jesus reminds us that genes and DNA were never really what made anyone part of Abraham’s family; it was about faith.  It was faith for Abraham himself and it was faith in God’s promises for all who followed after: for Isaac and Jacob, for Joseph and Moses and Joshua, for gentiles like Rahab and Ruth, and even for the great kings like David and Solomon.  And God’s promise was that through his covenant people, through these people who knew him in faith and were reconciled to him by faith, he would bless the nations.  It happened here and there in the Old Testament.  Rahab and Ruth are two of many small-scale testimonies to that, but here we finally see the Lord’s promise coming to full fruit.  It’s what we celebrated last week on Pentecost as Jesus sent the Holy Spirit on these men of Israel gathered from around the world.  They had heard Peter preach about Jesus and what he’d come to do.  They rallied to Jesus in faith and in response Jesus poured his Spirit into them.  Finally, through Jesus Israel became the source of blessing she was intended to be—not by flesh, but by the Spirit—as these men and women took the good news to the nations: Jesus is Lord.  He has conquered sin and death.  In him is the forgiveness of sin, in him is life, in him God has returned to his Creation as King.  And in him—the Incarnate Word—God makes himself known.  In Jesus, God Incarnate, we have the restoration and fellowship with our Creator that he has been working towards ever since the day we rebelled and were cast out of his presence.  In Jesus God’s kingdom—his new creation—has been inaugurated, in us and through us in the world.  In Jesus and in us, his people, the promises made to Abraham are being fulfilled and we see that the blessing of God to the nations is for them to know him and to be reconciled to him in Jesus and the power of the Spirit. Let us pray: Almighty God we praise you this morning for the grace you have shown us.  Even as we rebelled against you, our good Creator, you were setting in motion our redemption: Father sending, calling, electing; Son speaking, coming, dying, rising; and Spirit uniting, renewing, regenerating, empowering.  In the redemption of the world we see the glory of the Trinity and the majesty of the Unity and in gratitude we fall before you with the angels to sing, “Holy, holy, holy Lord God almighty.”  By your grace, keep us strong in faith, O Lord, but keep us also faithful in our witness and our ministry to make your redeeming love known to the world.  We ask this through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord, who lives and reigns together with you and the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever.  Amen.  

A Sermon for Trinity Sunday

A Sermon for Ascension Sunday Daniel 7:9-14 & Acts 1:1-11 by William Klock   As you came today you walked through the lychgate and under those words carved on it: “Jesus is Lord”.  That’s the central truth we celebrate and remember in the Ascension and it’s an exhortation we need to hear right now more than ever.  People are living in fear of sickness.  Our government is trying to control the spread of that sickness—and for so much of the last year it feels like we’re wasting out time, like those people out cutting scotch broom along the public right of ways, while acres upon acres are growing on private land just the other side of a wire fence, like bailing water out of a sinking boat.  And, meanwhile, the scientists have been working frantically for a solution—and now we’ve got it, if only we can get it to people fast enough.  Brothers and Sisters, the people living in crippling fear need to be reminded that Jesus is Lord.  The politicians and the technocrats need to be reminded that Jesus is Lord.  And everyone who thinks that Science is our saviour needs to be reminded that Jesus is Lord.  Healthy fear, good government, and the miracles of science are all good things—but we need to remember that they are gifts of God under the lordship of Jesus. In our lesson from Acts, St. Luke tells us about Jesus as he led the disciples out of Jerusalem to the Mount of Olives.  He promised them that John’s prophecy would soon be fulfilled.  He was going to send his Spirit to baptise them with fire.  They didn’t know what that meant.  In fact, it didn’t even seem very important to them at the time.  They wanted to know about the kingdom!  That’s what the Messiah was about—he was supposed to come and restore the kingdom of Israel.  When he rode into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday they were thinking that maybe now he would finally throw off the poor itinerant rabbi disguise and restore the kingdom, throwing out the Romans and taking up David’s throne.  But instead Jesus allowed himself to be arrested, beaten, and killed.  They were despondent.  But then on Sunday he rose from the dead.  Maybe this was finally it.  But through the next forty days Jesus simply taught them the Scriptures.  The disciples were excited to have Jesus back with them.  They were excited about his resurrection, although they didn’t yet truly understand what it meant.  And so there on the Mount of Olives they asked again: Jesus, it’s great you’re alive again.  We appreciate all the Bible teaching.  But when are you going to bring the kingdom?  And in response Jesus once again promised them the gift of the Holy Spirit to empower their witness and then told them that it wasn’t their place to know the times and seasons fixed by the Father.  But then Jesus did something amazing: he ascended into the clouds.  There were the disciples staring into the sky, probably with their mouths agape, as Jesus disappeared from their sight.  And they just stood there, staring and staring until the two men, the two angels, broke into their wonder and amazement saying, “Hey, you men of Galilee!  Are you going to stand there forever staring into space?  Jesus went up to heaven and he’s coming back.  Didn’t he give you something important to do in the meantime?” What just happened there?  Why were they agape, staring into the sky?  It wasn’t just that Jesus had done something that no one else had ever done before.  No, it was because he did something that anyone who knew the Hebrew scriptures recognised.  In our Old Testament lesson from Daniel 7 we read about the one called the son of man.  Daniel saw in a vision a sequence of empires…Babylonians, Persians, Greeks.  They were ferocious, destructive, oppressing God’s people.  And then they were destroyed and, Daniel says, he saw this one like a son of man—a figure representing the people of God— “with the clouds of heaven…he came to the Ancient of Days and was presented before him.  And to him was given dominion and glory and a kingdom, that all peoples, nations, and languages should serve him; his dominion is an everlasting dominion, which shall not pass away, and his kingdom one that shall not be destroyed.” God’s people had suffered, been defeated, exiled, oppressed and through it all the faithful continued and they cried out to the Lord and Daniel saw their prayers answered in the son of man as he was revealed in glory, as he came on the clouds to take his throne with the ancient of day.  Friends, the disciple stood there agape because right there on the Mount of the Ascension, Daniel’s vision had just become a reality.  The son of man had ascended to take his throne and that meant—it still means—that despite any appearances to the contrary, despite despotic kings, despite rejection and persecution, despite the ongoing presence of sin and death in the word, Jesus is seated on his throne, Jesus rules, Jesus is Lord. It is providential that Augustus chose to use the imagery of Caesar ascending into heaven to become a god and that “Caesar is Lord” became the quasi-religious pledge of allegiance to the Roman Empire.  I say it’s providential, because what the pagan Romans had been depicting in their imperial iconography for a generation before Jesus, was also struck down that day when Jesus did for real, what the Romans believed Caesar had done symbolically.  However much Caesar insisted that he was lord of the world, no matter how hard he pressed those early believers to acknowledge it, to offer him a pinch of incense on the imperial altars, no matter how many he crucified or fed to the lions, they knew that Jesus had done it for real and they persevered in faith knowing that Jesus is Lord. Jesus’ kingdom is here and now.  It’s not coming in the future.  It’s not coming after a rapture of believers.  It’s not coming before or after or in the middle of a Great Tribulation.  And it’s not something we have to go to heaven to experience.  The disciples asked Jesus when the kingdom was coming and Jesus responded by telling them that it was not for them to know.  I think he was smiling as he said that, because the next thing we see is Jesus ascending.  Just as the Ascension sends the message loudly and clearly that Jesus is Lord, it also sends the message loudly and clearly that his kingdom is here and now, even if the King’s throne is in heaven.  They asked him when the kingdom was coming and in response he gave them a dramatic visual that they’d never forget: They saw the King ascend to his throne.  Brothers and Sisters, the Ascension of Jesus tells us very dramatically and unmistakably that the kingdom is here and now.  Why is the Ascension important?  Again, it tells us dramatically and unmistakably that the kingdom is here and now. All of this is important, but what does it mean that Jesus is reigning and that the kingdom is here and now?  For that we need to look at the big picture.  In the beginning God created the Cosmos to give him glory.  At the centre of it was a garden and in that garden the Lord placed human beings to tend and to keep it.  Everything about the garden points to its being the Lord’s temple.  When the Israelites built the tabernacle, the design was meant to mimic the garden.  It was in the garden that human beings lived in the presence of the Lord.  And later it was in the temple that the Lord manifested his presence in the holy of holies.  The temple was the place where heaven and earth met and where the people went to meet with, to worship, and to fellowship with the Lord.  The temple pointed back to the garden.  When humanity sinned, the garden was lost.  Adam and Eve were cast out and an angel placed at the entrance to guard it.  And from there the story of humanity goes from bad to worse.  And yet the Lord never abandoned his Creation.  The creation was meant to give God glory and when it turned on him, instead of destroying it, God chose to manifest his glory by renewing it—by making a new creation.  And as humanity lost all knowledge of the Lord, he called Abraham to himself and through Abraham created a new humanity in the family of Abraham.  Through Abraham, the Lord began the work of restoring the garden. And yet think about a garden.  You can’t plant a garden in the wilderness and expect it to flourish on its own.  Enemies and wild animals will raid the garden and steal the fruit.  Without cultivation and protection the wild will quickly overcome the garden.  And so the Lord provided for the protection of his new garden.  He sent Jacob and his family to Egypt, where the king looked on them with favour, provided for them, cared for them, and protected them.  When the king of Egypt became hostile, the Lord himself rescued his new creation—Israel—and led her into the wilderness and to the promised land.  He fed her in the wilderness and he drove out her enemies from the land.  Eventually the Lord gave her a human king to protect his new creation from the wilderness—from the hostile enemies—that surrounded her.  But through it all, it was ultimately the Lord who was King and who protected his people.  Isaiah declared that “the Lord reigns” when Israel was faced with conquest by the Babylonian empire.  The Babylonian king and the Babylonian gods had no power over Israel no matter how bad things got.  In Daniel’s vision ferocious beasts represent the kingdoms of the earth that had conquered and dominated Israel, but in that vision the Lord takes the kingdom away from those monsters and delivers it to the saints and ultimately to the son of man—to Jesus.  Even when the Lord uses earthly kings to discipline his people, he continues to care for them.  That’s the purpose of his kingship and his kingdom: the care and cultivation of his new creation. And all this comes to full fruit in Jesus.  He has come as the Son of Man.  He has come as the Messiah—the true and eternal king in the line of David.  He has come to bring the Lord’s new creation to full fruit—to suffer for his people and to give them his Holy Spirit that they might truly be the new creation that Israel was supposed to be—that they might be the true sons and daughters of Abraham.  But not only that, he has also come to establish a kingdom over which he will rule himself—a kingdom to protect and to safeguard the new creation—the Lord’s garden as it grows and flourishes and spreads throughout the world.  This is the story of the book of Acts.  We read the beginning today: Jesus ascended into the clouds to take his heavenly throne.  Jesus is Lord, Caesar is not.  The rest of Acts is the story of the church, of the new creation, of the kingdom spreading throughout the world.  And Acts ends dramatically with Paul in Rome, in chains, proclaiming the lordship of Jesus right under Caesar’s nose.  Through the suffering, persecution, and martyrdom of the saints, the kingdom of Jesus has triumphed and will continue to triumph. Brothers and sisters, we are that new creation.  The wilderness has surrounded the Lord’s garden.  Earthly empires and kings have tried to steal its fruit, they’ve tried to stamp it out and burn it down, but King Jesus has preserved it.  Because of his preservation, past generations have carried the good news that Jesus is Lord from Jerusalem to Samaria and to all the world.  Because King Jesus has preserved it we know and believe that good news here in Canada, half a world away from that mount from which Jesus ascended to his throne two thousand years ago.  Because King Jesus continues to preserve his new creation, we can have confidence to go out in faith, to charge into the darkness with the light of Christ, knowing that no matter what happens the kingdom of God is here and now and that nothing will stop it.  As St. Paul writes in 1 Corinthians, this new creation of which we are a part is protected by the one who has been given all authority and who will reign until every last enemy is put under his feet, even death itself. Our hope as Christians is in that day.  Death is the last enemy to separate earth and heaven and on that day when Jesus finally defeats it, he’ll return from his throne on the clouds as the angels told the disciples.  As the joyful people of Rome went out to join their triumphant Caesar as he marched into the city as the conquering hero, St. Paul says that the people of Jesus will meet him in the air to accompany him as returns to earth the conquering hero—as he comes accompanied by heaven itself and restores earth and heaven. Brothers and Sisters, in the Old Testament the temple was the one place on earth where heaven and earth met and where the Lord could be known.  When Jesus came he became the temple for us.  The amazing thing is that Jesus didn’t leave it at that.  He sent his Holy Spirit to fill and indwell us.  We, his Church, are now the temple.  We are now the place where heaven and earth connect and where the Lord is made known.  And that’s our mission.  Carved on our lychgate are those familiar words: “Jesus is Lord”.  We pass beneath them as we come to the church to meet and to worship, but have you ever thought about what they really mean?  The next time you walk under those words remember the Ascension.  Remember that Jesus is seated on his throne, that his kingdom is here and now, and that he has made us his people.  We are his army, but not an army like those of Rome sent out to conquer barbarians with the sword.  Jesus calls us to charge into the darkness bearing his light, to suffer and even to die for the sake of the lost as we seek to make known his love, his peace, his justice, his mercy, and especially his grace. Let us pray: Gracious Father, in his Ascension you have raised Jesus to the place of kingship and authority.  Let us never forget the significance of his rule.  As we face the darkness, give us courage to shine his light brightly and to proclaim that he is Lord.  Increase our understanding of your love and grace that we might manifest it to hostile world around us.  And remind us, Father, to live in the hope of his sure return when all of his enemies have been subjected to his rule.  In the meantime, as we wait for the restoration of heaven and earth, let us be faithful representative of your kingdom, making heaven visible and known to all around us.  We ask this through Jesus Christ, our Saviour and our Lord.  Amen.

A Sermon for Ascension Sunday

Sermon on John 16:23-33 Our gospel lesson this morning comes from John 16, part of Jesus’ farewell discourse with his disciples before his crucifixion. We are reading this passage from our time, on the other side of the resurrection, but it is importation for our understanding of it to relate what Jesus says here to the moment when he spoke it to his disciples: prior to our passage, Jesus has mentioned that what he is about to do is like childbirth: a process full of pain, but in which pain is forgotten in the joy that attends a new life coming into the world. asking the Father in Jesus’ name not Jesus asking for them, but them asking the Father in Jesus’ name. “hitherto you have asked nothing in my name” - the accomplishment of salvation has not yet happened; Christians’ appeal to the Father is not yet a matter of their inclusion in the finished redemption. At this moment, Jesus is speaking before His crucifixion, before His arrest, before His last Supper. “in figures of speech” - the Greek is paroimiai, that is the Hebrew mashal, mishlim. Yes, it is the title of the book of Proverbs, but in another sense it is a label for the riddling parables that Jesus has used in his preaching of the Kingdom so far — including Jesus comparison of his sacrificial death to childbirth in the immediately foregoing previous verses. The disciples have been so very uncomprehending of the plan. On the mount of Transfiguration, Peter had offered to build three tents – as though it were already time for the Sukkoth, the feast of booths that followed after the redemption from Egypt. But Jesus was on the mountain discussing his “exodus” with Moses and Elijah. Or again, when Jesus tried to tell his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and suffer many things from the elders and chief priests and scribe and be killed, and on the third day be raised, Peter responded by taking Him aside and rebuking Him. Or again, when on another occasion, Jesus explained that the path to His glory led through sufferings and death, He was immediately met with a request that James and John sit at His right hand and His left in His kingdom. Right up to the moment of His arrest, they don’t understand. They are sleeping just before Judas and his armed band arrive to arrest Jesus. The disciples have no sense of the urgency of Jesus’ impending suffering. But Jesus’ discourse is full of this pressing urgency. “The hour is coming” he says twice. “In that day,” he says twice. He knows well that things will look quite different to them from the other side. Then they will remember what He had told them; then they will recognize Him in the breaking of the bread; then they will look back at his promise to raise this temple in three days and they will realize that He was speaking about His body; then they will “believe the Scripture and the word that Jesus had spoken.” And when this happens, everything will be clear. Jesus says to his disciples that “I will tell you plainly about the Father.” Note the future tense. The hour is coming when I will tell you plainly about the Father. That is, Jesus is telling his disciples that when you see the Son of God dying on the cross and then rising again, and the penny drops, and Thomas has been invited to poke Jesus with his finger, and you have eaten fish with Him on the shore of the sea of Galilee — then you will have the fullest and plainest explanation of who Israel’s God is. Then you will understand that glory comes through suffering, and you will know how much the Father loves His people Israel. Then, after listening to Jesus tell one audience after another that “the kingdom of heaven is like” – which really means “the kingship of God is like” — is like a mustard seed, a treasure in a field, a pearl of great price, a fishnet full of fish, leaven in bread dough, a sower who went out to sow seed – and maybe you disciples puzzled over those parables, those mishlim — then at last, you will be confronted with the reality that all those parables were speaking of. In the light of the resurrection, confronted with a fait accompli, you will finally understand. This – this resurrection, this tomb, this cross, these hands that bear the marks of the nails for all eternity – this is how Israel’s God has become King at last. Now you know the Father, because the Son has shown Him to you. But His disciples, like Peter offering to build the tabernacles to celebrate Sukkoth before the Exodus, skip over the painful birth pangs and try to go straight to rejoicing over the baby. They think that he has already made the full disclosure: “Ah now you are speaking plainly and not using figurative speech! Now we know that you know all things and do not need anyone to question you; this is why we beleive that you came from God.” Their answer still shows no understanding of the need for Jesus to die; of the fact that only by being stretched out on the cross can He do what John says He has done: “No one has ever seen God; the only-begotten Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, he has explained Him.” (John 1:18. The word “explained” is ἐξηγήσατο.) Jesus then gives His disciples an astounding promise: “Whatever you ask of the Father in my name, he will give it to you.” (16:23) This is not word-faith, prosperity gospel, “name it and claim it” nonsense. Jesus doesn’t mean that if you believe in him, you can ask the Father for a waterfront mansion, and He will give it to you. Or “I want a Lamborghini inJesusnameamen!” The addition of “in Jesus’ name” doesn’t act as a magical “get what you want” spell. We need to squeeze this utterance. One of the first things we need to notice about it is that it echoes what Martha says to Jesus when he comes to Bethany to raise Lazarus, in John 11:22: “Martha said to Jesus, "Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died. But even now I know that whatever you ask from God, God will give you." -John 11:21-22 This is the sort of access to God that Jesus is promising His disciples. He explicitly disavows that he is going to be a permanent interface between the disciples and the Father, as though Jesus were going to relay our messages to the Father, or as though the Father didn’t really know and love us, but just Jesus, with us sort of smuggled in under his cloak. No, we ask the Father, and He hears us. Not through a series of secretaries and receptionists. Not through the saints or the Virgin Mary, as though we were children who ask Mom rather than Dad because she’s more likely to say yes. And this speaks to one of the big problems that affects many people’s view of God. They think of Jesus and the Father as existing in a sort of good cop/bad cop relationship, or that the Father is the harsh and judgmental God who smites sinners and sends them to Hell, while Jesus is kind and loving and wants to save us. No, says, Jesus, “the Father himself loves you.” It is because the Father loves you that He sent Jesus to save you. But it remains the case that Jesus tells us to ask “in my name” - rabbis in the Talmud are cited as saying something “in the name of rabbi so and so” come from God - theme in John preexistence disciples vs the cosmos Mother’s Day - we have to reach back and grab a little bit of text from before our Gospel lesson today: John 16:21 “When a woman is giving birth, she has sorrow because her hour has come, but when she has delivered the baby, she no longer remembers the anguish, for joy that a human being has been born into the world.”

A Sermon for the Fifth Sunday after Easter

A Sermon for the Fourth Sunday after Easter St. John 16:5-15 & St. James 1:17-21 by William Klock Our lessons today continue to carry us through the Easter season.  In our Gospel we see the story moving us gradually from the events of Holy Week and Easter to the Ascension and to Pentecost and in our Epistle St. James points us to the practical outworking, to the implications for the Christian life of what Jesus was explain to his disciples. Our Gospel today isn’t the easiest passage to understand, but it helps to have a sense of where the Jewish people were coming from in the First Century.  There were times when Israel prospered and flourished, but most of her history involved difficult times, whether that was her slavery in Egypt, internal conflicts, conflicts with her pagan neighbours, or her exile to Babylon.  Through these difficult times, God’s people cried out to him, whether it was the nation as a whole crying out for God to give them justice in the face of wicked enemies or the righteous within Israel crying out for God to judge the wicked kings or priests or false prophets in her midst.  God’s people pleaded for their day in God’s court.  They knew he was the just Judge, they knew his promises, and they knew that if and, more importantly when, they had the opportunity to stand before him, he would hear their case, that he would hear their evidence, and that he would judge rightly—that he would find his people (or the faithful remnant among them) to be in the right, that he would vindicate them, and that he would punish their enemies and set things to right.  Through the Psalms and here and there in the Prophets we get glimpses of the heavenly courtroom and hear Israel pleading with the Lord to let her stand there and to hear her case.  And things were no different in Jesus’ day.  The people pleaded with the Lord to hear their case against the Romans, or against the corrupt Herodians, the Romans’ puppet local rulers, or against the men who had corrupted the priesthood and the temple.  This desperate longing for God’s justice is what Jesus draws on in the Upper Room as he speaks to his disciples, preparing them for what’s to come. Let me read part of our Gospel to you again and see if you can hear it.   But now I am going to him who sent me, and none of you asks me, ‘Where are you going?’ But because I have said these things to you, sorrow has filled your heart. Nevertheless, I tell you the truth: it is to your advantage that I go away, for if I do not go away, the Helper will not come to you. But if I go, I will send him to you. And when he comes, he will convict the world concerning sin and righteousness and judgment: concerning sin, because they do not believe in me; concerning righteousness, because I go to the Father, and you will see me no longer; concerning judgment, because the ruler of this world is judged.   Jesus is telling his friends that he’s going to have to leave them and this leaves them with all sorts of questions.  The Messiah was supposed to set everything to rights, but how is that going to happen if he leaves?  And now Jesus is saying that the problems are going to continue.  His people will face rejection and persecution.  But he also promises that they will know the vindication that Israel had always longed for.  This is, in fact, just the reason why he’s got to leave. You see, they thought that the Messiah would be the one standing as their advocate when they had their day in God’s court.  That he would be their lawyer—to put it in our terms.  They expected Jesus to be their Perry Mason.  If he were to leave, who would make their case?  But Jesus is going to do something even better.  Jesus will send the Helper.  The Greek word is parakletos.  Jesus is referring to the Holy Spirit, but the word he uses here refers to one who will stand as a mediator or intercessor or an advocate.  The Spirit will stand before the Judge like Perry Mason to make the case.  But here’s the critical thing: Jesus the Messiah will by the one in the dock.  He will be the one on trial.  And this is why Jesus had to leave them.  He was arrested, falsely accused, and unjustly executed.  The world issued a verdict against Jesus: he was a false messiah, he was in the wrong.  But by raising him from the dead, his Father overturned that verdict and declared that he is, indeed, the Messiah.  And the disciples were overjoyed to have him back—but then he had to leave again.  Why?  They need their Messiah with them, so they think, to set things to rights.  But, no, he’s got to leave again.  Why?  Because his vindication is not complete.  Jesus’ vindication is completed in his ascension, as he returns to the Father to sit as his side as Lord of all. And so Jesus will be raised from the dead and he will ascend to his throne.  And this these things will be Exhibit A and Exhibit B when the Spirit makes his case in court.  The Spirit, Jesus says, will bring the evidence to convict the world of sin.  First, the Spirit will hold up the world’s rejection of Jesus himself and its continuing pursuit of its own values and agendas as evidence.  Second, the Spirit will bring evidence to convict the false justice of the world.  Most translations make this already difficult passage more difficult by translating dikaiosyne as “righteousness” when “justice” suits the passage far better.  The world believes itself to be just or in the right.  We see this supremely in the false conviction and execution of Jesus.  But the world’s verdict on Jesus was overturned that first Easter and God’s verdict in regards to Jesus is confirmed at his ascension.  Third, the Spirit will bring the evidence to show that the world’s judgment or condemnation of Jesus and his people is wrong.  Jesus’ death, resurrection, and ascension reveal the defeat of the “ruler of this world”—of the satan, of sin, and of death.  In short, what the Lord has promised and what Israel had longed for is about to be fulfilled in and by Jesus himself and will be known by those who have united themselves to him in faith.  Brothers and Sisters, here’s the wonderful thing here.  Jesus is the one who will stand in the dock to face the judge.  The Spirit will make his case.  The judge will find him—from our perspective today, had already found him—to be in the right.  And then we find out that Jesus invites us sinners to join him in the dock as the Father issues his verdict.  We have done nothing.  Jesus has done it all.  But when we by faith step into the dock and identify ourselves with Jesus, his vindication becomes our vindication.  He reality becomes our sure and certain hope.  Jesus exhorts his friends in verses 14-15: He will glorify me, for he will take what is mine and declare it to you. All that the Father has is mine; therefore I said that he will take what is mine and declare it to you.   “He will take what is mine and declare it to you.”  But, Brothers and Sisters, it’s more than the verdict in favour Jesus that the Spirit declares and passes on to us.  Let’s look at our Epistle again.  Again, this is James 1:17-21.   Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change. Of his own will he brought us forth by the word of truth, that we should be a kind of firstfruits of his creatures.   Know this, my beloved brothers: let every person be quick to hear, slow to speak, slow to anger; for the anger of man does not produce the righteousness of God. Therefore put away all filthiness and rampant wickedness and receive with meekness the implanted word, which is able to save your souls.   The work of the Spirit that Jesus describes in the Gospel is not limited to the heavenly courtroom or to esoteric knowledge about Jesus.  This should be obvious if we remember Israel’s story.  Her relationship with the Lord had always been meant to work out in her life and her life was meant to be a witness to the world of life in the presence of God.  If the Spirit will come alongside Jesus’ people to see them vindicated in the heavenly court, and if the Spirit is to give them understanding into just what it is that Jesus has done by his death and resurrection, St. James knew that the Spirit will also cause the life of God to well up in this new Israel that is rooted in Jesus.  James is well-known for his stress on the works that necessarily accompany faith.  God doesn’t merely save his people from sin and death, he saves them to be his stewards. It seems likely that when today’s Epistle was chosen to be paired with our passage from John 16, an association was meant to be made between Jesus’ promise of the Spirit and James’ statement that “every perfect gift is from above”.  While James does not speak directly of the Spirit, the gifts from above that he does address are those conferred by the Spirit and his exhortation here closely parallels Jesus’ exhortation in the Gospel.  James speaks first of the wisdom God bestows on those who ask (v. 5) and then, after urging his readers to stand firm in the face of persecution (v. 12), he reminds them that God is not the source of our temptation (vv. 13-14).  Just the opposite, in fact: God only sends us good gifts.  In our fallen state, our disordered desires lead us to sin and sin to death, but God has spoken his “word of truth”—his logos, surely a reference both to Jesus and to God’s word in a more general sense—to bring about a work of new creation in us.  If we in Jesus, the new creation that has begun in him is beginning in us as well.  Even as we face trials and struggle against sin, the firstfruits of God’s new world are manifest in our lives. But Friends, this leaves us with a choice.  Will we pursue sin or will be pursue the life of God?  In the heavenly court we have been declared by God to be in the right, because we have united ourselves to Jesus in faith.  His vindication is our vindication.  The Spirit has given witness on our behalf.  But woe to the one who names Jesus while manifesting anger, filthiness, and wickedness.  Try as we might to claim the vindication of Jesus for ourselves, a life characterised by wickedness rather than the Spirit reveals any such claim to be superficial.  As James will write in 2:20, faith without works is dead.  Brothers and Sisters, when we are united with Jesus the Spirit not only makes the Father’s verdict that Jesus is in the right our verdict, but he also does a work of transformation—of regeneration and renewal in us that gives evidence of that verdict.  The evidence that we have taken hold of Jesus in faith is God’s new creation welling up in us as we manifest the fruit of the indwelling Spirit and produce good works.  And so, even as we grasp Jesus in faith, we also pray in faith as we do in our Collect today, for grace—for grace that will rightly order our sinful and unruly hearts, for grace that we will love what he commands, and for grace that we will desire what he has promised. Let us pray: Almighty God, you alone can bring into order the unruly wills and affections of sinners: Grant your people grace to love what you command and desire what you promise; that, among the many and varied changes of the world, our hearts may surely there be fixed where true joys are to be found; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.  Amen.

A Sermon for the Fourth Sunday after Easter

A Sermon for the Feast of St. Mark the Evangelist Ephesians 4:7-16 & St. John 15:1-11 by William Klock Today the Church remembers St. Mark, according to tradition, the author of the second Gospel—although fairly widely agreed to be the earliest of the four.  Mark travelled with Peter for two or three years as he made his way through Asia Minor and eventually to Rome.  The early Church historian Eusebius says that along the way Mark recorded Peter’s sermons and that these became the basis for his Gospel.  And yet, today, the Scripture passages we read say nothing of St. Mark.  Instead they continue the Easter theme of life in the risen Jesus.  It makes sense.  Mark wouldn’t have wanted us to focus on him today; he’d have wanted us to keep our attention on Jesus—which is why he wrote his Gospel.  And so, in our Epistle, St. Paul urges us to grow into maturity in Christ.  In our Gospel today, Jesus urges his disciples to abide in him.  The weather today isn’t great, so I’ll try to keep thing short and focus on just today’s Gospel. To make his point, Jesus draws on the imagery of God’s people as a vine.  He says: “I am the true vine, and my Father is the vinedresser. Every branch in me that does not bear fruit he takes away, and every branch that does bear fruit he prunes, that it may bear more fruit. Already you are clean because of the word that I have spoken to you. Abide in me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit by itself, unless it abides in the vine, neither can you, unless you abide in me. I am the vine; you are the branches. Whoever abides in me and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit, for apart from me you can do nothing. If anyone does not abide in me he is thrown away like a branch and withers; and the branches are gathered, thrown into the fire, and burned. If you abide in me, and my words abide in you, ask whatever you wish, and it will be done for you. By this my Father is glorified, that you bear much fruit and so prove to be my disciples. As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you. Abide in my love. If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commandments and abide in his love. These things I have spoken to you, that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be full. This imagery of the vine and the vinedresser was well-established in the Old Testament.  Israel is the vine.  The Lord is the vinedresser.  Psalm 80, for example, portrays Israel as a vine delivered from Egypt and planted in land cleared by the Lord.  While the vine flourished for a time, the wall that once protected it fell.  Passers-by plucked away the fruit, while boars and other animals ravaged it.  The psalmist pleads with the Lord to look on the vine and to restore Israel: “Give us life and we will call upon your name” (v. 18).  In other places, like Isaiah 5, Israel is condemned.  The Lord planted her and cultivated her, but despite his efforts, she grew only wild grapes. In our Gospel Jesus draws on this imagery to make the point that he is the new Israel and that membership in the people of God is based not on ethnicity or the marks of distinction created by the law, but by abiding in him.  Jesus uses this image to warn of coming judgement: as he has always done, the Father will prune away dead wood from the living vine.  Already this work has begun.  Jesus uses the unusual verb kathairo to describe the Father’s pruning and contrasts it with the “cleanness”—katharos—of the disciples.  They are part of those who have already submitted themselves to the vinedresser and been pruned.  They have heard the word of Jesus and believed with the result that they are bearing fruit, although this does not mean that more pruning will not be necessary.  It’s an ongoing process. The key here is abiding in Jesus.  He is the solution to Israel’s problem, the age-old failure to bear fruit.  In verses 8-11 Jesus moves from fruit, to love, to obedience, to joy.  If fruit is the evidence of abiding in Jesus, we must know what it looks like.  To abide in Jesus is an act of love in return for the love he has already shown.  As the Father loves him, Jesus also loves us.  We see this in the humility of his incarnation, but supremely in his death on the cross.  We love him because he first loved us.  Next we see the relationship between love and obedience.  To love Jesus is to keep his commandments and lest this seem harsh, Jesus compares it to the way in which he abides in his Father’s love by keeping his commandments.  The commandments of Jesus are good, the law of the Spirit gives life and we ought to submit to it in happy gratitude.  Finally, Jesus explains that it is through this abiding in love manifested in obedience that we will know joy. This is the life that Adam was meant to have, living in, abiding in the presence of God in the garden.  This is the life that Israel was meant to have as she lived with the Lord’s abode in her midst.  This is the life that witnesses God to the world, making known his love and manifesting new creation. I want to close with a modern-day—or close to modern-day—illustration about vines and branches.  In the early 1860s a certain species of aphids made its way from the New Word to Europe.  These little aphids fed on the roots of grape vines.  New Word stock had evolved resistance to these pests, but the vines of Europe had not and the aphids began to quickly kill them off.  The damage was enormous.  It cost the French economy something in the neighbourhood of 10 billion francs.  Grape-growers tried everything, from chemicals to letting their chickens run through the vineyards to eat the aphids, some even placing frogs at the base of each vine.  Nothing worked and the blight spread.  But they did find a solution.  Cuttings of a grape variety native to Texas, resistant to the aphids and accustomed to the same sort of soils found in France, were planted and the French vines grafted onto this New Word root stock.  The vines began to thrive again, receiving new life when grafted into those new roots.  It is, I think, a remarkable image of abiding in Jesus.  Sin has struck at our roots and because of that we die.  There’s nothing we can do to fix it.  Even in Israel, the law was powerless to address the root of the problem and to restore life.  And so the vineyard was pruned and from it the Lord raised up a new vine in Jesus.  Sin and death did their worst to him—kind of like those aphids had done their worst to that Texas stock—and he came out the other side alive.  Sin and death have no hold over him.  And as the Spirit grafts us into this new vine that is Jesus, Brothers and Sisters, his life restores us and makes us new.  It is the only solution.  It is the only source of life.  It is the only means to know triumph over sin.  Friends, abide in Jesus.  Hold closely to him.  Remember your baptism.  Come to his Table.  And steep yourself in his word that you might know and be transformed by the good news. Let’s pray: Almighty God, who through the heavenly teaching of Saint Mark the evangelist instructed your Church; Give us grace that we may not be carried away with every wind of false teaching, but may be established in the truth of your holy  Gospel, through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.

A Sermon for the Feast of St. Mark

A Sermon for the First Sunday after Easter St. John 20:10-23 by William Klock In the Easter acclamation we announce, “He is risen!”  That’s good news, but what does it mean for us?  What’s the application?  What does it have to do with who we are as Christians?  How does it change things for us?  What do we do with it?  Our Gospel today has something to say about all this in that odd scene where Jesus breathed on his friends.  Look again at John 20:22-23: [Jesus] breathed on them and said to them, “Receive the Holy Spirit.  If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you withhold forgiveness from any, it is withheld.” What does that mean?  Jesus breathes out the Holy Spirit on his friends—which is kind of an odd thing in itself—and he tells them that if they forgive sins those sins are forgiven and that if they withhold forgiveness, forgiveness is withheld.  Did he actually?  Or was it a symbolic act?  A sacramental act?  What do we do with this? Some Christians see Jesus imparting a gift of the Spirit specifically to the apostles—a gift that would empower them literally to forgive sins and to pass that gift on to the bishops and the priests who would succeed them.  This was one of the ideas that the Reformers objected to in the 16th Century and our liturgy reflects it.  The Church’s ministers do not give forgiveness.  They announce the forgiveness of sins that God offers through Jesus to those who are repentant and believe.  The Church’s ministers are ministers of grace—God’s grace.  And when I say that about the Church’s ministers, that means all of us, not just the clergy.  Brothers and Sisters, grace belongs to God.  We do not control it.  Forgiveness does not depend on the willingness of a priest to “give” it. But if this isn’t Jesus giving special powers to his apostles and their successors, what is this about?  To understand that, we need to take a step back in the story.  In verse 19 John says that the disciples were hiding.  They gathered together, locked the doors, and barred the windows.  I expect they were being very quiet lest anyone hear them.  They hoped that if anyone passed by it would look like no one was home.  They hoped that if the authorities came knocking, they’d quickly move on in their search.  Jesus’ friends had been hiding since Friday, since he was crucified.  And they were hiding because, when the Romans crucified a revolutionary or someone who claimed to be the Messiah, they didn’t typically leave it at the leader of the movement.  They usually crucified the other leaders and close followers of whomever they had convicted of treason.  In the great revolt that would take place a generation later, the Romans didn’t just crucify a handful of leaders.  They crucified everyone.  They couldn’t make crosses fast enough and ran out.  So Jesus had been nailed to a cross and his friends thought they were likely to be next.  It’s not hard to imagine how afraid they were. John also tells us that it was the first day of the week.  It was Sunday.  Mary had gone to the tomb just that morning and found it empty.  She had gone to tell the others.  As we read last Sunday, Peter and John went to see the empty tomb for themselves.  But that didn’t mean they weren’t still afraid.  The tomb was empty.  Mary and John insisted Jesus had been raised from the dead.  The others were sceptical.  This wasn’t how resurrection was supposed to happen.  It was supposed to be everyone all at once, not just one person, even if he was the Messiah.  Imagine them arguing in that shut-up dark house.  Voices started to rise.  And then a big “Shhhh!” from one of them.  “Whatever happened to Jesus happened to Jesus, but the Romans or Herod’s soldiers are probably out there right now combing the city and looking for us!  John thinks Jesus rose from the dead, but I’m not ready to test that theory myself!  Keep your voices down!” But then John says that Jesus suddenly appeared in the room.  The doors were locked, but somehow Jesus got inside and to these men who were already afraid and who were now probably really afraid of this man who suddenly appeared in their midst, Jesus says the one thing they most needed to hear: “Peace be with you!”  There’s something very practical in that.  But it’s full of kingdom reality too.  Jesus came to bring peace—to his friends and to the whole world—and so it’s natural that the very first thing he says to his friends as they sit there cowering in fear and thinking that all the hopes they had put in Jesus had come crashing down on Friday—it’s natural that the first thing he would say to them is “Peace be with you”.  Don’t be afraid.  That was the first Easter message.  But, also, don’t lose hope.  Jesus is saying in those few words, “I’m alive.  You’re hopes weren’t misplaced.  When they killed me they declared that I’m not the Messiah, not the King, but God has overturned their verdict and here I am.  Peace be with you.  I really am the Messiah and I really am making all things new.” Remember what Jesus was all about.  The Messiah was to set God’s world to rights.  Because it was wrong—because of our rebellion and idolatry—God and human beings had been separated.  In his graciousness, the Lord had established the temple as a place where heaven and earth overlapped and human beings could enter his presence—only, of course, after having purified themselves and offered sacrifices for their sins.  And remember that Jesus had hinted that God was about to do something new and much bigger.  Jesus declared that the temple’s days were over.  He would tear it down and in three days build a new one.  Think about that again.  The temple was the place of God’s presence.  It was the place where humans could meet God.  And it was the place where humans could find forgiveness of sins.  It was the greatest place on earth.  It was a beacon of light in a dark world.  And Jesus was going to tear it down and build something new and better. And now, on the third day after his crucifixion, the risen Jesus—vindicated by God and declared to truly be the Messiah, to truly be the King—appears to his disciples.  John says they spent some time marvelling as he showed them the wounds in his hands and in his side.  There was no doubting that it was him.  John says they were glad—which is, no doubt, an understatement.  And then Jesus says to them in verse 21: “Peace be with you.  As the Father has sent me, even so I am sending you.”   “Peace be with you,” again.  This time there’s more to it than just, “Don’t be afraid.”  This is a commissioning.  Jesus came to bring peace and now he’s giving his friends a mission to carry his peace to the world.  There’s to be no more hiding.  “As the Father sent me, even so I am sending you.”  Jesus had sent them out to the towns and villages of Galilee to prepare the way for him.  Now he’s sending them out again, but this is an even bigger mission.  But they need more than reassuring words from Jesus.  They need to be equipped. And when he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, “Receive the Holy Spirit.”   Brothers and Sisters, when Jesus rose from the grave he set the power of God’s new creation in motion and here, Jesus breathes on them—yet another one of his powerful visual object lessons he was so fond of—to say that because of his resurrection, new creation has now been imparted to them.  In both Hebrew and Greek the words for wind and breath and spirit are all the same.  As God breathed life into Adam, now Jesus, the second Adam, breathes new life into the disciples.  I suspect C. S. Lewis had this scene in mind when, in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, he wrote about the great lion, Aslan, breathing life back into the people the White Witch had turned to stone.  Aslan, the Christ-figure of Narnia, breathed on these dead stone statues and, like flame licking its way across paper, their colour returned and in moments they were moving again—and soon after they were running through the witch’s palace looking for others so that Aslan could breathe on them and restore them to life.  That’s something of the visual Jesus offers here.  He breathes on the disciples, recalling God’s breathing on Adam, as if to say, “Because of my resurrection, you have received God’s Holy Spirit.  Because of my resurrection, the life of God that Adam rejected has been given back to you.  Now go out to find others, proclaim the good news about me, so that they can share in this gift of life. People often think that the purpose of the Holy Spirit is to give us some kind of spiritual experience or to make us holy.  The Spirit certainly can and does do those things, but first and foremost, Jesus has given us the Spirit to equip and to empower us to go into the world in the same way that the Father sent Jesus into the world.  Jesus gives us the Spirit—he breathes the very life of God into us—and makes us the new temple, the new place where God meets human beings.  Think on that this week.  We Christians are the place where earth and heaven meet, because God’s spirit indwells us.  We, the Church, are his temple.  And as he gave Adam the task of expanding the garden of Eden, he gives his disciples the task of expanding the temple—of taking it to the world and of inviting the world to become a part of it. Let us pray: Lord Jesus, as you breathed your Spirit into your friends that first Easter Sunday you have fill us with your Spirit in our baptism.  You have made us whole and you have made us holy.  Now send us out into the world, equipped and empowered by your Spirit, that we might proclaim the good news to others, that they might be made whole and holy by your death for sins and your rising to give life.  Amen.

A Sermon for the First Sunday after Easter

Living Word Reformed Episcopal Church, Courtenay, British Columbia

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Living Words

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