Sermons

Until verse 9 of chapter 12, ἀγάπη—the word Paul uses to describe genuine, sacrificial love—had always been used to describe the divine love, publicly revealed in the Son’s sacrifice of Himself for the sins of the world, but here (in the already in-breaking new world Christ’s resurrection made a sure reality) Paul reveals that a Christian’s love for others will be infused with a divine character. Our love, through the power of the Holy Spirit, will be painful as we shed layer after layer of the unnecessary trappings of this fallen world—as we focus our lives on uttering the unconditional, ‘YES,’ to all that Christ asks of us. Yes, I will be my brother’s keeper. Yes, I will zealously seek out good works for the kingdom of God. Yes, I will rejoice in the face of the violent and seductive tribulations of the fallen world. Yes, I will pray like I’m before the throne room of the Almighty God. Yes, I will open the home Christ gave me to bring the lost into His kingdom. Yes, I will do all of that and more because I am ready to be so fervent in thy Spirit that I burn on His altar as a sign and symbol to all men that God is on the march and wrath and love are coming with Him. We will be scarred in this world if we are Christ’s, but we can take it if the measure of our strength is God and not man.

But, God has defeated death. God embraces dead children just as He embraces repentant murderers remade into the children of God. How? The young child those first Gentile wisemen came to worship grew up to rebuild the broken unity between Man and God by writing a peace treaty in His own blood upon the Cross and sending God the Holy Spirit to transform the whitewashed tombs of our hearts into living temples fit for God to dwell. The first Gentiles to worship in the heart of God’s living temple were the wiseman representing the nations of the world bowing down in worship before God incarnate: these men were the first fruits of a new world in which Jew and Gentile are united in life through the holy worship now available to a new human race capable of once again walking with God as Adam and Eve walked with Him in the garden.

Abraham was called by God to be a father despite being an old man with no children. He was a man with no future; a grim casualty of a world made cruel and twisted by humanity’s failure to rise above our shared slavery to sin and death. It would be hard to imagine someone less likely to be called out of our world to be the father of many nations than Abraham. In fact, it might seem like a cruel, cosmic joke for God to command Abraham to take his barren wife Sarah away from the only family they had to become strangers in a strange land: a land filled with warlords and child sacrifice, pain and betrayal. But of course, we are meant to see in Abraham’s unsuitability and peril the shimmering outline of our own calling into the family of God. For without Christ, what future do you and I have? We can try to rage and fight against the darkness or become its pathetic servant, but no amount of anger or groveling will hold back the darkness: it is as futile as screaming at a sunset. No, we too must, ‘…get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father’s house, unto a land that I will shew thee. (Genesis 12:1). Abraham is our father because we are of the chosen, but he was also our father in sharing with us the desperate need to be delivered, and so he is our father when we leave the familiar lands of sin and death to journey to the promised land Jesus Christ has built with His true heart and loving obedience. God’s unmerited mercy on Abraham is our story; it is the beginning of how we and our children will make it home alive—how we will fill the mansions of the new heaven and earth with the holy family death can no longer rip away from us. We need not scream at the sunset if we know the Son will rise and never set.

But, as St. Paul tells us today, it doesn’t have to be this way. The apostle considers the faces of the Galatian church, the men and women who lived hard lives beset at all times by the urgent need to survive, and he knows that by all accounts he is making their day to day lives harder by introducing them to the truth; he knows the alienation and sacrifice that will come from being a follower of Christ—he’s living it, and it will eventually kill him—but he also knows that he must tell them the truth. What is the truth? For those truly in Christ, the God who created us has redeemed us and adopted us. It is simple, beautiful, and true, but what does it mean?

Jesus Christ has come to restore what was lost in Adam. That first man who failed to protect the world from evil will have his humanity vindicated by the second Adam born not into a luscious garden crafted to meet his every need; no, it is the sinful world Adam and his children of shame and fear covered with the excrement of sin that our Lord enters, not as a man, but as a defenseless child. The power and majesty, strength and courage displayed in this act are the stuff of legend. The Son of God has such utter trust in the goodness and love of His Father that He volunteers to descend into our murky world of lies and betrayal as a child just as He will trust that same Father’s faithfulness and justice when He dies on the Cross and descends into the darkness of death.

If we work on these positive virtues, we won’t have much time or energy left to get into trouble. Our lives will be gracious, moderate in every sense, and an invitation to others to share the happiness of a peace with God that passes understanding. But, grace and peace begin with God ruling our lives, and so it begins to make sense why so many of our fellow men have attacked the ancient and changeless virtues. Too much of our society loves disorder and strife; in our sick world it is increasingly how people build followers and platforms and all the rest. So, when they talk of ‘teaching values,’ they really mean the anti-values and anti-virtues of selfishness, self-rule, self-esteem, and the dark moral evil which bubbles up from those who make their desires their god. We should expect nothing less from anti-Christs.

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.