Sermons

People often ask in the midst of their suffering or in response to the suffering of others, “Where was God?” Whenever this happens in a movie or a TV show everyone just clams up and looks sad, but in this room and in all rooms we take the Gospel, we do not ever need to apologize for our God. We can say without doubt or fear or shame, “Where was God? God was walking out of a tomb in A.D. 33; God was establishing a holy realm of faith and hope and love every day since; God was preparing an eternity more glorious than our imaginations can even begin to comprehend. That’s where God was.” For the question no one will ask on the day our King returns, the day Satan is ripped from his perch, the day pain and sickness exhaust themselves, the question no one will ask is “Where was God?” We will see and feel and taste and smell and hear his dominion and finally know that the question was never “Where was God?” The real questions was “Where were we?” Let our answer on that day be, “Humbly, by thy side my Lord. Humbly by thy side.”

What becomes clear from studying the Scriptures, rather than imaginative theories about the Church, is that any effort to break the foundation of the Church into competing fragments is an insanity. Our Lord says that it is His Church that He will build, not Peter’s, or yours, or mine. Our Lord promises the “keys of the kingdom of heaven” (Matt. 16:19), the authority of God’s stewards on earth to preach the Gospel, to administer the sacraments, and to maintain a godly discipline, but when He makes good on that promise and delivers those keys, on the evening of Easter Day, it is upon all of the Apostles that He breathes, and to all of the Apostles that He says: “Receive ye the Holy Ghost: Whosesoever sins ye remit, they are remitted unto them; and whosesoever sins ye retain, they are retained” (John 20:22-23). Likewise, the Holy Ghost descends upon Twelve Apostles on the day of Pentecost, and not upon just one.

It is good to remember that the parables are not our Lord’s version of Aesop’s fables, nor are they little devotional stories we can read or ignore with no great peril; no, these parables are a kind of picture language of what is going on in the real world and what is going on in the new world Jesus is inaugurating through His righteous invasion. That being said, it might be helpful to compare today’s parable with Aesop’s fable of the Ant and the Grasshopper—a pagan story told to far more children than today’s bit of divine revelation. In the tale, written about 500 years before the birth of Christ, the grasshopper plays all summer while the ant diligently gathers food, but when winter comes, the grasshopper begs for food from the ant, only to be refused, and so, the grasshopper starves while the ant survives. The moral is usually stated as, “If you want to succeed tomorrow, you have to start working today,” that is a good lesson, but what lesson does it also teach? The hungry beggar is getting what he deserves. This moral makes perfect sense in the Greek pagan world of Aesop where this temporary existence is everything, and therefore, “to the strong go the spoils.” But, we know that the ant’s bounty is a gift from the God who has created a natural world where hard work is rewarded; surely, the grasshopper is guilty of the sin of sloth, but does that deserve a death sentence? Hasn’t the ant been given the gift of a hard-working spirit in order to help the grasshopper, in order to make the fallen world a little less horrible and to reveal the love and mercy of his Creator? In the real world that Creator made flesh is revealing, the pagan moral logic which says, “Let the grasshopper die,” is merely a symptom of our fallen brokenness. For Jesus, the ant isn’t the hero in the story—he is a monster because he hasn’t shared with the grasshopper. The ant is the rich man, and the rich man is in hell.

And so, as we contemplate what it means to be saved by the Trinity, we must lean on the faith and trust with which it is our duty and privilege to offer our gracious God. This faith and trust must be in God alone because all other paths lead to the sucking, unending darkness we are daily asked to join. There is no hope there. Whatever side we think is right is just one more distraction from the truth we have been set free to proclaim. How easy it is for us to become like men on a life raft bobbing in the Pacific who in their madness and thirst begin to drink saltwater only to find it makes them thirstier and thirstier until the darkness comes and makes thirst their everything.

As an example of this beautiful, unfolding revelation of God, our Lord begins today’s Gospel reading with a conditional statement: ‘If ye love me, keep my commandments’ (John 14:15). This simple statement is not a threat but a definition of what love actually is. If I were to say, ‘The purpose of life is to love,’ most people would nod their head in approval, but when we actually define love, as Christ does here, does our answer change? Most, when given this definition would shake their heads and recoil in terror, saying: ‘No, love is about me’ or offer the nonsense tautology: ‘Love is Love’ or maybe the only slightly better ‘Love is about how another makes me feel,’ but do we really live in a world where love is just a fleeting attraction or an emotional support blanket, a world where love is merely a chemical reaction or some biological necessity? How can we agree that the purpose of life is to love but have such a low opinion of what love actually is?  This month we will be inundated with strange religious ideas about what love is from celebrities and corporations and governments—all of which are simply modern versions of this same toxic inversion. These hollow-hearted priests of our culture always present a love we have to discover and become masters of to bring heaven on earth—a false love designed to prick the consciences of elites and mow down those who dare question supposedly universal truths being constructed, minute by minute, by moral children and the mentally ill: love presented as a tool not a person. This month, the children of men will have the opportunity to reveal the God who is love, but unsurprisingly, most will sacrifice to a love that is Godless.

And so, we are called to acts of prayer and sacrificial love, hospitality and divine service, not because these save us, but because they show us and the world who has saved us. These defiant acts of divine, loving obedience unite us with our ascended Savior, who even now, presents His body and blood as a sacrifice for us in the heavenly court, so we can humbly present the sacrifice of our redeemed hearts to the rusty thrones of the world’s fading powers. They may spit on our sacrifice; they may call us fools and zealots, but we will welcome the chance to share in the suffering of Christ that we may share in His glory.

Could God have just placed the Israelites in the promised land? Yes, of course, but the value of the journey derives from how it shapes and forms a person to be fit for the destination. It was fitting for the Israelites to be humbled and proved because there was no better way to be prepared for the promises which awaited them. Of course, the same is true for we who are their children, for as Paul makes clear, the journey of the people of God from Egypt to Canaan was a living illustration of our journey from the slavery of sin and death to the perfect freedom of the New Heaven and New Earth. We are being formed and shaped by the good and evil we encounter in this life and all of it will be applied by God to prepare us for the grand work of eternity. We must remember that eternity is not going to be spent sitting around on our backsides playing harps on clouds; no, we will need to be the sons and daughters of God for which the creation has been longing since Adam and Eve betrayed their great calling. We will need to take dominion as only God’s image bearers can. The easy way would have been to stab that lying serpent in the throat; the hard way will require us to follow Christ through the valley of the shadow of death until He puts evil down like the sun-crazed jackal it is.

The Prince of this World loves hypocrisy because it is a sure sign of a society’s worshipful disorder—a rebellion against the beautiful order from chaos God first created Man to honor and defend. These types of inconsistencies and injustices are all over our fallen world, and what do people say when they are questioned about them, “It’s all for the greater good.” But, when faced with this solemn pronouncement designed to silence our concerns, we should always ask, “What is good?” From the fallen world, the answer one will always get is the same: the greater good is service to the gods. In ancient times, this reverence would have meant service to Odin or Isis, Mithras or Baal, Molach or Mammon, but all these ancient gods were personified gateways to the gods of our own unimaginative age—the gods named money or power or sex, and it is these gods the supposed “greater good” defends; it is these gods to whom we are asked to sacrifice ourselves and our children. The Holy Spirit has come to challenge these gods in every part of this dying world. In fact, the Holy Spirit has come to burn these gods from our hearts.

God is the One saving the world. Christians join in that work by offering our gifts, our intellect, strength, love, and labor, to Him. Our faithfulness becomes a monument to the God who is re-creating the world. This eternal perspective makes us better parents, neighbors, scientists, artists, plumbers, and teachers. Unlike those who work without hope, Christians labor for a world that God is already renewing. Our work matters because it’s part of something eternal. That means the good we do will not be lost. The smallest act of love done in Christ will echo forever.

But why? My God, why would Christ do this for us? What have we done to deserve the beautiful and brave shepherd dying for His ignorant and selfish sheep? The only answer we have is love. As Christ says, “Therefore doth my Father love me, because I lay down my life...” To save the creation born of divine love, Christ will die for the creation which hates Him. It isn’t fair, and like scared sheep watching their shepherd fight off a hungry wolf for them, we should be confused and terrified by this incomprehensible act of God, for indeed, we have never experienced a love like this in our lives, not yet anyway. This love is the perfect love which exists in the Trinity, the love which will be the beating pulse of the new creation. What we do know of this love is a shadow cast from the inevitable glory to come: the first smile of a newborn, the last embrace of a husband and wife, and all the other graces which would be impossible in a universe created by anyone other than the God who addresses us today. The God who is love.