Sermons

Further, as Paul makes clear, my own judgment matters little in the grand scheme of life and death. People like to say, ‘You can’t judge me, you haven’t walked in my shoes’ or some such colloquial variant, but we must understand that we are terribly unreliable witnesses when it comes to testifying against ourselves. Given enough time, I’m sure I could justify basically every stupid thing I have ever done, but to whom would I be seeking justification? How very convenient of me to establish a courtroom in which I am not only on trial, but I also get to serve as prosecutor, judge, and jury. It is amazing how many cases I can win in that courtroom of one. Is this justice? No, of course not, but fallen men do not want justice, not true justice. People tend to want their enemies punished or those who’ve done them wrong to be destroyed, but when it comes to our own trespasses and sins, we want nothing but second chances and do overs. It takes an act of God to move men’s hearts away from the tragic consequences of imagining ourselves to be little judgmental gods: false gods who lack the courage to live with the reality our personal reigns of terror create.

Again, St. Paul writes, ‘For the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and of spirit, of joints and of marrow, and discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart. And no creature is hidden from his sight, but all are naked and exposed to the eyes of him to whom we must give account’ (Hebrews 4:12-13). What do we learn from these two passages on our Holy Spirit inspired Scriptures? Well, we learn the Bible is not a source for carefully selected motivational material or an echo chamber for any earthly tribe or political party’s ideology; no, it is a weapon designed by God to cut through the lies and deceptions we pile on ourselves. Reading or hearing the Word of God should be a painful experience because we will again and again come into contact with the Holy God who is calling us to amputate from our hearts those idols our neighbors and families and enemies tell us we must love. Every time we come to God’s Word, we meet the same Lord who looks at prostitutes and tax collectors and fishermen and apostles and doctors and priests and says, ‘Leave everything and follow me.’ It should be terrifying when our Creator looks at us, naked and exposed, and says those words, and so, I don’t blame anyone who attacks or hides from the Word of God; I pity them, and I pray for them, but I understand how ignorance of God’s Will might bring a certain kind of cheap and comfortable bliss. Human history is the story of fallen men trying to find and keep this false heaven until it is inevitably smashed by confusion and fear, but the preservation of ignorant bliss can be a powerful motivation for closing our eyes to the Lord who says we must feel pain to understand hope.

Living in this divine, saving love explains why the early Christians spent so much time going into the forests of the Roman Empire to find and save babies left to die by their pagan parents, or why Christians refused to participate in the bloodsport of the Roman arena, or why they risked their lives to tell the Gauls and Norsemen and Aztecs to stop sacrificing humans to their demon gods, or why they insisted that the weakest in our society (babies in the womb, the elderly, the disabled, slaves) were owed a debt of love to God humanity must repay precisely because it is hard. As the children of these brave men and women we should be saying, ‘Thank God it is hard; please God make it harder so that the sweet-smelling sacrifice of my life can rise above the putrid stink of our selfish and suicidal world.’ This sacrificial life is the law of love because it is the law of Christ, and for the Christian, it has to be Christ or nothing.

If we understand then that all of the institutions of the Israelite people find their perfection in the ultimate Israelite, we start to have a good understanding of what is going on in the second Passover of Jesus’ ministry. The feeding of the five thousand is another prophetic acting out of who Jesus is; it is a sign of just who stands before the thousands gathered around the mysterious Galilean. God is reaching out once again to do what He has done from the beginning: feed His allies in the fight against evil. The same God who fed Adam and Eve in the garden, the same God who dropped mana from heaven takes the cheap bread of a poor, young boy and makes it a feast for His people. But again, what do the people do? By the end of chapter 6, the thousands have abandoned Jesus—God is again betrayed by the people He feeds. It is only the 12 and a few others who continue to follow God through the wilderness: feeding on the Word, following the heart of the universe as He proclaimed the kingdom of God.

If that wasn’t enough, the blind man’s surrender to God and rebirth in divine grace fills him with the courage to stand boldly before men who have the power to exile or execute him. The impotent inquisitors who question him and his parents are nothing when compared to the God/Man who twice put life inside of him, and so he can be a fearless witness to the good work God has birthed in him. What earthly power can compare to the Lord who brings light in the darkness, courage where there was once only shame, life where there has only ever been death? The healed man, the seeing man, looks out to us from the pages of John’s Gospel as the answer to that question. We need fear none of it. Whether evil men or corrupt leaders, whether lost children or broken hearts, whether pain or disappointment or sorrow or death, none of these things has power over the reborn sons and daughters of God. We have been washed; we have been healed; we have been given new eyes to see and new hearts to love and obey. We need nothing else.

The apostles we meet in chapter nineteen of Luke’s Gospel are not immune to this human curse; it is a tremendous blessing then that their friend and Lord has come to save them from it. Again and again, Christ tells them He will be violently ripped away from them by a horde of self-righteous monsters and false priests too blind to see in Him the only hope for Mankind, to deaf to hear from His lips that first voice which spoke the universe into existence. Jesus tells the apostles not to be afraid when all of the world’s black evil is poured upon Him because He can take it; He must take it.

But, a reasonable question to ask here is: What about the money? Does the king just magically forgive the ‘gazillion’ dollars the servant owes? No, that’s not how debt works. Someone must pay. Just as someone must pay our sin debt or else good and evil are nothing more than illusions, and it is here where we start to understand the gravity of what Jesus is saying to Peter, to the other apostles, and to us. When Christ commands His church to adopt a radical, death-to-self kind of forgiveness, He does so knowing full well what the cost of forgiveness truly is. He knows the price of our forgiveness will be His unjust murder at the hands of the very people He came to save. There is nothing fair about Calvary: there is only the God/Man paying our unpayable debt with His blood and pain and life. There is nothing fair about us forgiving our brother or sister or enemy: there is only our recognition of what God has done for us and what we must now do to honor the God who has made us free.

The Christian cannot accept this dehumanizing equation, even if so much of our world’s commerce and media depend upon it; no, we do not enter into relationships with other people to feel good; we do not have children to give our lives meaning or help us be less lonely. Blessedly, Christians enter into relationships to save lives from the darkness. We become spouses and parents and friends to build communities of real communion with the Living God who promises to save His children from eternal death, just as he saved this nobleman’s son from the temporary death of this world. Jesus has proved in His ministry and resurrection that my already dying son and daughter can be saved. What wouldn’t I do to follow that Man? What castle would I not storm; what pain would I not endure to serve the Man who has already saved my son and daughter from death? St. Paul is calling us Christians to a life of dependance on the Divine Man who has already fought the darkness and won. If we love anyone, how could we not reach for the armor we need to defeat the sin and death which surround them. What would cause us to abandon them and the tools Christ gives us for victory?

The Gospel appointed for the morning of the twentieth Sunday after Trinity features the last in a series of parables aimed at the chief priests and elders who challenged Jesus’ authority to teach within the temple. Before we move on, it is worth noting that here we have another example of Christ’s fidelity to the law and participation in the worship of the temple. A combination of the failure and disorder of many historical Christian bodies and the common human desire for a more relatable savior has led some to embrace an image of a political revolutionary Jesus: somewhere on a spectrum between Che Guevara and Greta Thunberg. As I speak, over one hundred million dollars is being spent to promulgate this ‘community organizer’ Jesus through the ‘He gets us’ TV and internet campaign. However, this anachronistic and false imagining of our Lord fails to honor the radically different position Jesus is claiming for Himself. Jesus is not a revolutionary; He is God. He is the authority from which all other authorities derive, and it is a testimony to the fallenness of the world that all authorities and their subjects do not recognize the fountainhead of human power and might. Any attempt to mentally strip Jesus of his divinity, and that is always the danger when fashioning a disempowered, revolutionary Jesus, leads to confusion and the dishonoring of our King. The King of Kings does not rebel; He reveals the rebellion within us.

And so, it is with Spirit renewed hearts and minds and bodies that God teaches us how to truly live. Freed from every lie our world tells us, freed from the false priests who seek to rob us of our destiny by making us bend the knee to their soulless death cults, we can live with an eternal purpose greater than ourselves or the small, dying men who ask us to join them in their slow-motion suicide. We can be honorable and just in an increasingly dishonorable and unjust world because we are no longer slaves to the illusion that we must build heaven with our own two hands or that we must forge it from the tears and broken bodies of our enemies. God has already created heaven, and He is bringing it to an earth near you. Saving the earth is not our job; it was already saved when the young King of the universe climbed on a cross and bled for it. We are not the heroes of the story; we are not Batman (at best we are the policeman who says, ‘Wow,’ when Batman saves the day, or perhaps the criminal saved from a life of crime by the intervention of a force he cannot resist).  The humility to see this truth is a gift we should be praying for every day because this gift prevents us from becoming the very monsters we wish to slay, and it frees us to focus on our actual mission: to love God and our neighbors.