Sermons

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. 

What then does Jesus say to the disciple’s question? Who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven? To answer this question, our Lord doesn’t pull out a coin with the emperor’s face on it, nor does He tell a story about some great Olympian or famous actor; no, He asks for an infant to be brought to Him, saying, ‘Verily I say unto you, Except ye be turned, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven. Whosoever therefore shall humble himself as this little child, the same is greatest in the kingdom of heaven’ (St. Matthew 18:2-4). We should note that Our Lord does not have some kind of sentimental idea of childhood innocence He wants us to emulate; Christ knows the hearts of men are wicked, whether they are 2 or 200; rather, it is the utter dependance of children upon their parents to which the Son of God would have us turn to see true greatness in an evil world. If Satan would have us try and be gods, Christ would have us know we are children.

That old story of humanity, given a new name each generation, is a lived through alienation from God and distance from our immortal brothers and sisters made in God’s image and likeness. We feel that distance even now. Can we look into the eyes of the person we love most in the world and truly know them in the way we know ourselves? No, even the most faithful couples or closest sets of siblings or best friends for life are still lacking the unity which would abolish the deep pit of loneliness which drives so much of the human experience. Adam and Eve, the first humans to bind themselves to this story of alienation and separation, responded to God’s fatherly call by hiding from Him in the garden He created to sustain their every need. They were ashamed and afraid, and so they hid from the only being who could save them from their new inward turned prisons. Our distance from each other is a symptom of our distance from God, and so God the Son came to destroy this distance. He became one of us to re-unite us with the God who lovingly created us, He died for us so that we would never again have to hide from God’s justice and love.

But Jesus, because He loves us, won’t let us live in that lie. Today He compares us to a flower or a blade of grass, and from God’s perspective this is exactly how impressive our work is in comparison to His. As we read in Isaiah 40, ‘All flesh is grass, and all its beauty is like the flower of the field. The grass withers, the flower fades when the breath of the Lord blows on it; surely the people are grass. The grass withers, the flower fades, but the word of our God will stand forever’ (Isaiah 40:6-8). It is comforting to remember that when Jesus—the Word of God made flesh, who will stand forever—looks out onto the creation, when He looks out at the flowers and the grass, He sees beauty, and He loves that beauty. And more amazingly, He includes us in that beauty. He includes us in the beauty and blessedness we have received as a gift from our Creator. But, ultimately, despite our real God given beauty, our inflated ideas of our own importance and accomplishments are merely a coping mechanism for the anxiety and worry Jesus tells us to banish today, and when that pride metastasizes in our souls, we begin to forget that we are fragile creatures and not the Creator. To live in the reality of our true station, we must free ourselves for hard, honest work without the fear and gloom and anxiety that possesses people and weakens them for the tasks Christ has set before us. Once we fully recognize and daily remember that we are the creatures and God is the Creator we don’t have to worry about saving the earth or finding ultimate fulfillment in our temporary occupations; no, we can recognize that all our earthly endeavors gain their value when we offer up our work to the God who created this world, saved this world, and will one day resurrect this world. We will be free from anxiety and fear when we remember that our moment in the Sun is truly as brief as the blooming wildflower on the side of the road, but we can strive in that briefness to showcase the beauty God has put inside of us; we can show that beauty to the world, and remind all men that their Creator loves the beauty, truth, and goodness which will soon bloom everywhere and forever in resurrection glory. That future is ours; how then could we ever worry?

Which bids the very practical question: ‘Why might I not be bearing fruit?’ Here is one reason Jesus gives in the Parable of the Sower: ‘As for what was sown among thorns, this is the one who hears the word, but the cares of the world and the deceitfulness of riches choke the word, and it proves unfruitful’ (St. Matthew 13:22). What is the part of us that responds to ‘the cares of the world and the deceitfulness of riches?’ What is the part of us that desires to ‘choke the word?’ Why it’s the flesh of course—the ‘old man’ as St. Paul also refers to it. This same apostle tells us that we must ‘crucify the flesh with its passions and desires’ (Galatians 5:24). He is telling us that we must pitilessly destroy that thing we falsely believe will save us or make us happy; we must brutally execute this thing we think we need and love, or it will kill us. As the Anglican priest and theologian John Stott puts it, ‘We must not only take up our cross and walk with it, but actually see that the execution takes place.’ We must nail our old man to the cross as he screams at us and begs us for life. Can we do that? Can we stomach seeing the thing we falsely love more than God die on a cross? We must if we want to be truly free; we must if we want to live in the blessed Christian liberty which makes us no man or demon or desire’s slave. May the Spirit be with us as we walk with our cross, and may He give strength to our hands as we crucify the flesh and begin to live in the perfect freedom of the new world to come.