Sermons

This analogy breaks down, of course, because the Christian life is infinitely bigger than even the most beautiful and solemn obligation. Christian love is about more than the old law we repeat every week before we willingly give some of God’s treasure back to Him through the offertory: our pledge to do unto others as they do unto us (which is just another way of saying: “love our neighbor as ourselves)” if that noble ideal was the ultimate summit of love then you and I would be doomed. If this dream shared among other religions and philosophies, a specter that has never been truly grasped, if this hope is all that love can be then we will continue to pound on the coffins of our loved ones and wonder why love wasn’t enough to save them. This shadow cast by the true love isn’t enough (you know it; I know it; we all know it), and that is why our Holy Communion service continues each week, it doesn’t just stop at the offertory or the Ten Commandments, the service makes us part of God’s loving sacrifice of Himself for a world which hated Him. Jesus did not love His neighbor as Himself; no, our Lord pushed His enemies’ heads above the water as He drowned in the blood red sea of our sin. Jesus didn’t hold anything back as He fought for the very soul of creation; He fought evil with the only weapon evil will never understand: pure, sacrificial, self-giving Christian love. By the power of God the Holy Spirit, we spiritually eat Christ’s flesh and drink His blood to remember that the only love powerful enough to save the world is a love we have not yet begun to comprehend—a love we must live and die in to ever fully know. We taste Christ’s death to know the love that saves.

Just imagine for a moment all the things which drag us away from reading and hearing and studying the word of God, all the things which draw us away from our only hope and comfort in this lie-riddled world. What’s on my list? Fear, of course, a ridiculous, grownup fear that God won’t be enough. This feeling is insane since God has given me everything I have and everything I will ever have, but its there like the other lies my recovering heart still contains. What about fatigue? I know I live in a time and place filled with inventions which make my life easier than all the generations which came before me, but it’s still so easy to say, “I’m just too tired to hear the words of truth and life today.” What about boredom? Who do we think has convinced us that the blessed means by which our divine Creator reaches into our hearts and souls could ever be boring? Jesus tells us today that whenever I experience boredom upon coming into contact with the God-breathed Scriptures I am engaging in a fight to the death with Satan himself—this reality alone should banish boredom from my vocabulary, but there it lingers, a symptom of the fall it is my duty to fight alongside the Holy Spirit who dwells within me.

What is the good life then? Jesus has already told us, “As for what was sown on good soil, this is the one who hears the word and understands it. He indeed bears fruit and yields, in one case a hundredfold, in another sixty, and in another thirty” (St. Matthew 13:23). Our good life is to bear witness to the sacrifice and resurrection of Christ to which the Holy Spirit has connected us in the waters of baptism and in the real Spiritual food of the Eucharist. We all were dead, and God has made us alive; we were without purpose, and God has given us the blessed task of a lifetime. And decisively, no one can take away our holy purpose. We could lose our jobs, all our children could die, a husband could leave, a wife could cheat, we could find out retirement isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, we could get cancer or we could be crucified and none of those evils would change the call of our Master nor the eternal life He freely offers to His children.

The Almighty God of the Universe created mankind to enjoy a personal and loving relationship with Him for all time, but sin has perverted that relation, not in that it is no longer personal—as all people, saved or condemned, have a personal relationship with God—rather, our sinful nature makes us prejudiced against God and his justice. The tragedy of the fall is not that we no longer know that there is a God; the tragedy of the fall resides in our cultivated spiritual blindness, our proudly hardened hearts, and our seemingly infinite capacity for self-deception.  This image of unregenerate man from Romans drips with anger and sorrow and shame because St. Paul, one of the greatest minds of his generation, knows what it means to claim to be wise and become a fool. He knows what it feels like to exchange the glory of the Immortal God for temporal praise and self-satisfying comfort. We can only imagine those three lonely and painful nights of blindness and sadness as the apostle was confronted by the signs he had ignored and the truth he tried to destroy.

Finally, St. John would have us see that the self-manifestation of God through the incarnation and signs of Jesus Christ changes everything about human life. We no longer have to peer into the vastness of the night sky and be crushed by fear and questions. Every activity of our lives has been given a new meaning because the Creator of those stars and planets, comets and quasars has stepped into the confusions of human existence and written a new story with His own body that gives meaning to our every breath, every loss, and every love. It is love that has been the most changed by God revealing and establishing a new way to live. Our age is obsessed with sex, and there is a strong temptation to avoid talking about it from the pulpit, but that temptation has ceded the field to the restrictive, animalistic faith statements of the materialists who would have us act like chimpanzees with cell phones.  The new humanity Jesus embodied and now offers the world through His church transforms human love from being a contest of dominance and self-satisfaction into a sacramental sign of the spiritual union with Christ. Our Lord has saved love from ending at the grave or a lawyer’s office or the fornicator’s regret sullied heart by making sex and love and marriage an instrument of greater union with Him. Real Christian marriages are a living sign, a miracle, that shows the world how Christ will love his bride—the church—after she wins her final battles in this fallen world. The pure life lived in a Christian marriage, or in Christian single life, or in a Christian life assaulted by divorce, reveals the transformed heart of the Christian and shakes the foundational beliefs of an evil world that would have us be slaves to our desires.  Jesus is saving people, but He is also saving weddings, saving love, and saving all those crushed by the sexual confusion of our age. Only Christ can heal the real pain we suffer when our enemies and friends and spouses use the world’s cheap, counterfeit love to hurt us. His love is the purpose of our life, and that love has already built an eternal home for us in the new earth to come. So, let us pray that as Christ transformed plain water into celebratory wine, that we may be transformed from the uninspired lovers of the fallen world into the liberated bride of Christ—prepared for His wedding feast, ready for eternity.

The apostle, while referring to our logical or reasonable worship, is using the same technical words for a sacrifice in the Old Testament Temple. It was there that a live animal was brought to the priests to become holy and set apart for God and from the world: a sacrifice acceptable or well-pleasing to God. To be holy is to be offered and owned by God, and if we desire holiness, if we desire sanctification, then we must look to become more and more the possession of the God whose property is always to have mercy. The alternative is not some kind of radical freedom; it is merely to sacrifice ourselves to the dying gods of this world. St. Paul is keenly aware that all men have a god to whom they sacrifice, the only question becomes, “Who is that God?” And, perhaps more importantly, “Can that God save me?” The scope of the human problem only becomes truly visible when we recognize how many people, despite all the empirical evidence, still choose to worship sex or money or power as their god—even as it fails generation after generation.

We see that we are saved when Christ died on the Cross for our sins, saved when the Spirit regenerates our dead hearts, saved when we are buried with Christ in baptism, saved when we make our confession of faith, saved when we live a life following Christ, saved when death is personally defeated before us in our assured resurrection. This entire process is the work of Almighty God to which we humbly join our hearts and souls and minds in the same way the infant Jesus joined with Joseph and Mary during His circumcision. Was Jesus a mere puppet or automaton? God forbid. No, Jesus, in fully submitting to the salvific mission of the incarnation by taking on our full humanity, was simply showing us what utter trust in the promises of the Father looks like just as Joseph and Mary were showing that same trust in marking their precious, beautiful son for the war against evil. Each of us is marked to fight in that same war through the baptism that same God/Man’s blood now makes the “sign and seal” of our covenant righteousness.

The Innocents “confess and show forth” God’s praise by suffering with Christ, the same Christ who is murdered Himself by the mob in Jerusalem on Good Friday, the same Christ who is attacked time and again by human sin. God made us all, so He made children to glorify Him, and as long as mankind attacks God, tries to destroy God, children will die, glorifying God by their deaths because they are victims by virtue of their union with Him. This fits no earthly definition of holiness because the earthly definition is corrupted by sin. We think of holiness as saintly actions: doing things for God. But God does not need the things that we do. The holiness that God offers us is our being, cleansed of the corruption of sin by the perfect obedience and love of His son born in Bethlehem as a man for us all. Faith in Christ and love of God which grows out of that faith, and the lives we live because of that faith are the only true holiness. Actions the world calls “good” if they are done for selfish reasons are sins, because we seek to be our own justification and our own god. Living with God, however weak we are, however powerless we are, even if we are as weak and powerless as little babies, is holiness.

Where then can we draw true hope? Our hope comes not from self-righteous posturing or temporary saviors, our hope comes from the unshakeable promises of God. We need nothing else, and our desire for more is a symptom of our fallenness: a sin for us to repent, not a need for the church to fill with tricks and gimmicks and idols. God has nothing to prove to us today or tomorrow or the next day; He doesn’t need to win our allegiance because He has already won our salvation on the Cross: death is dead, and we need no longer fear its sting or despair in its horrible application. Yes, it’s been 2,000 years since God so dramatically demonstrated His sovereign authority over life and death in the victory of Christ’s resurrection, and maybe it will be another 2,000 years until the victorious messiah returns in his second advent to raise the elect and the damned from their graves, but we are not called to speed things up because we’re so special. The truth is we aren’t special. If St. John the Baptist, the prophesied harbinger of the Kingdom of God, if he calls himself a voice who’s only role is to announce the coming Messiah, if he compares himself to a slave unworthy to remove a dirty sandal from the Messiah’s foot: where do we think that puts you or I? The preposterous idea that we are too good for the worshipful waiting of the saints who came before us is a cancer we must purge from the church and from our hearts; we are privileged to live in this age of mercy wherein we find ourselves, the age in which we can hear the Word of God and know it’s all true because God has shown us the truth in Christ, the age in which we can go out into the world and tell friends and neighbors and enemies, ‘Behold the Lamb of God, behold him that taketh away the sin of the world.’

What we should now begin to see is that the strange and unusual ministry of Christ is not accidental or hap-hazard or tentative; no, the first coming of Jesus was and is a time of blessed mercy in which the rightful, avenging wrath of God has been temporarily held back. From the inside of his prison cell, John thinks he wants God to bring the fire and burn away the evil of this world, but what John doesn’t yet fully understand is that if that were to happen then all of creation would stand condemned before the holy and good God. The vengeful messiah John wants would indeed swat the Herods of the world into the swirling oblivion, but He would also crush every human being who stands before God wearing the weighted down garments of sin and death dragging us deeper and deeper into the abyss—deeper and deeper into the selfishness and fear from which we can never free ourselves. Rather than death and destruction, Jesus calls the battered and bruised people of earth to join Him in a centuries long campaign of sacrificial love and God-honoring morality fought against the forces of naked aggression and blood-soaked power which seek to turn lies into truth, death into life, and sin into virtue. This campaign will cost Jesus his life, the life of His cousin, the lives of His 12 apostles, and the lives of all those who daily die to the world and live in supernatural, loving gratitude for the mercy God gives to our undeserving race. This life of mercy and holiness and sacrifice is the path to which Jesus beckons us.