Sermons

St. Paul tells us to ‘Let love be genuine. Abhor what is evil; hold fast to what is good. Love one another with brotherly affection. Outdo one another in showing honor. Do not be slothful in zeal, be fervent in spirit, serve the Lord. Rejoice in hope, endure in tribulation, be constant in prayer. Contribute to the needs of the saints and seek to show hospitality’ (Romans 12:9-13). 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.

Here is why Christian ethics is so much more than a list of things to do or not do, so God won’t be mad at us. We are living in the merciful age foretold by the prophets. As we read in Isaiah, ‘Arise, shine; for thy light is come, and the glory of the Lord is risen upon thee. For, behold, the darkness shall cover the earth, and gross darkness the people: but the Lord shall arise upon thee, and his glory shall be seen upon thee. And the Gentiles shall come to thy light, and kings to the brightness of thy rising’ (Isaiah 60:1-3). We are living in the light of this prophecy, and so our lives are governed by something bigger than the moral calculations of politicians or celebrities, blind professors or internet keyboard warriors; none of these victims of our ever-changing age are allowed to have sway over a living sacrifice. How could they? I am not my own. What about my anger or disordered sexual feelings, aren’t these just manifestations of who I really am? No, because I am not my own. What about my past sins and the shame I carry from all those I have hurt with my terrible selfishness, isn’t that who I really am? No, because I am not my own. It is God’s love which makes a dead man alive: a son of wrath into a son of grace. We are more than we could ever be without Him, for without Him we will live as empty, unloving imitations of the glorious, fully-realized humanity which is every Christ follower’s destiny.

Joseph had to wait, like the rest of us, for the one sacrifice once offered by which his adopted son would give all the redeemed their freedom from slavery and their adoption by the heavenly Father. But Joseph also demonstrates that the grace of God is never idle and that God created men for something better than slavery. Almost all we know about Joseph is that he was a just man, a decent man, who refused to be a slave and who put his trust in the child born of Mary. If as much can be said of us, then we too shall never be slaves. We shall have understood the true meaning of Christmas, and we shall be the adopted sons and daughters of God forever.

We are invited this morning to dwell in the gospel of new creation. Too often, Christmas propels our minds to the past—whether in memory of long-ago celebrations or lost loved ones or even through an idealized picture of God’s first breath as a man. What we must not lose in the warm glow of nostalgia is the pulsating heart of this holy day: God is with us. I beg you, pause for a moment and recognize just how much this historical reality makes everything new and beautiful. The race of man is no longer defined by his greed or pettiness, violence or shame; no, humanity has been everlastingly united to the divine being who is love. The very nature of being human has been irreversibly transformed into a determined quest to make our hearts and souls and minds match this reality which now binds mankind to the restoration of the universe and the perfect peace of being God’s sons and daughters.

But, the mercy does not just end there. Just as we see the prophecies regarding God’s loving mercy already begin to break into creation through the healing and mercy of God the Son, we also see the beginning of God’s judgment of sin break into creation through the death of God the Son. It isn’t just that Jesus postpones the righteous wrath of God; no, Jesus walks in front of the punishment we all deserve and inaugurates a season of mercy through the fulfilled covenant in His blood. Jesus takes the violent, destructive madness of a rebellious humanity and uses it to create the new life necessary to live forever in His kingdom. This ultimate sacrifice of the Messiah is the actual liberation from sin and death St. John needs because it makes all the violence and prisons of this fallen world nothing more than temporary hardships for a people whose eternal glory can never be silenced by a gun or contained by prison walls. Herod’s thugs will eventually behead John the Baptist, but it will be the victorious Savior who will reach down into the pit of the dead and bring him up to heaven to prepare and make ready for the coming fiery justice St. John rightly and boldly proclaimed before the powerful and rebellious sons of the devil.

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.

This love we are called to then makes absolutely no sense outside of the law. There is simply no way to ‘just love’ because without the law and without the God/Man who fulfilled it, the word ‘love’ will always be a cruel shadow of the reality all lesser loves point us toward. Any supposed Christian teacher who tells you we are no longer called to follow the moral law, but rather, instructs you to “just love,” worships a different God than He who says, ‘If you love me keep my commandments’ (St. John 14:15). Anyone who says we can abandon the new way to be human revealed by Jesus and the apostles He chose is an anti-Christ who seeks nothing less than to build their little earthly kingdom with the pain and misery of human failure Christ suffered and died to eradicate forever. The debt of love we owe God and our fellow man is honored through the obedience and trust we give to God before the eyes of the world, and this purpose for our lives is but an humble imitation of the loving obedience and trust our Lord carried to the Cross. This loving obedience and trust between God and Man is more important to the salvation of the world than any nation or war, king or president, and God has blessed us all with the call to participate no matter our strength or weakness, intelligence or beauty. All men can daily kneel and ask God to use them as part of the world’s salvation. All men can love as Christ loved.

Which brings us, of course, to the 3rd Passover of Christ’s earthly ministry: the upper room where Jesus was surrounded by that same 12. And here at the Last Supper, once again, God feeds His people. It is in this feeding, that all the hopes of the world rest. For it is here that the people of God’s new covenant, reborn in baptism—escorted safely through the second Red Sea—are given the food we need to make it through our own wilderness wandering, to stand firm against the Serpent’s temptations and lies. God feeds us from Himself, from His own perfect holiness and love, and we are finally made whole. Through the Holy Communion, we are made partakers of the sacrifice of Christ on the Cross so that we may never again say, ‘Where is God?’ The only haunting question which remains for us, and our family and neighbors and enemies, is this: ‘Where are we?’ Are we the allies of God? Are we the holy family of the new Adam once again feasting with the true God in the little Eden of our church? Or, are we on the outside looking in—hoping the gluttonous extravagances of the dying world will fill us, hoping one more betrayal of the God who feeds us will bring happiness rather than the same desperation which carried Judas to the tree of his suicide. Let it never be so. God has taken our meager offerings of cheap bread and wine, He has looked into our bread plate and chalice, and He has promised to use these gifts to fill us with love and hope. For the first time since Adam voluntarily gave his crown to Satan, humanity has a perfect king truly worth dying for. Christ is the LORD OUR RIGHTEOUSNESS, and He is calling us to the feast. Let us eat at His table and be filled forever.

And then we are faced with the dying little girl; we are faced with the greatest condemnation of our empires of sin and filth and folly; the greatest sign of our powerlessness in the face of death’s crushing totality. Humanity doesn’t deserve children; we deserve ash and pain, but through children, God blesses our cruel world with little, living glimpses of a perfect humanity to come. Children are not innocent of sin, but they are less scarred from the great war which is slowly killing us all. Children make our world immeasurably better because they seek out and share joy, pure joy, joy even in the smallest gifts their heavenly Father gives them. So, it is right and good that we mourn when children are taken home to be with that same Father, but the mourning is only for our incalculable loss, not for what they have lost, for they have lost nothing but pain and gained everything in return.

Blessedly, none of these broken ways of life is how reality actually works. God is not a concept or a program or a method of fulfillment; He has not given us some new method for self-improvement; no, instead, God has definitively answered the great question of human existence: who will save Man from himself? The beautiful answer to this question comes in the first advent of Jesus Christ. It is here that a human first transcends His own sinful temptations to live a life of love and justice; it is here that a human first transcends the lies of this world to live in truth; it is here that a human first transcends the terrors of death to save the new race of Mankind and rise as its glorious first citizen. This king of the new creation, whose public resurrection vindicated Him for all time, is the only real, concrete hope for a transcendent humanity, and that is why we await His return. We wait because we acknowledge two key realities: we need a Savior and Jesus Christ has established Himself as the conqueror of death—the master of mortality and thus the master of time itself. We can trust that Jesus Christ will transform our bodies of humiliation into bodies of glory because, if we are His people, then He suffered and died and rose again to make us members of Humanity 2.0—citizens of a new world saved from us and for us forever.