Sermons

But how? How can we possibly keep fighting in our weakness and our fear, keep fighting as more and more pieces fall off of us and the losses pile all around us; we can keep going because of what St. Paul says next, ‘..I press on to make it my own, because Christ Jesus has made me his own’ (Phil. 3:12). It is, once again, the One who tells today’s parable who makes all things new and possible; it is Christ who transforms the cries of the truly penitent man into the first words of one truly free: a new creation finally able to raise his eyes to heaven as he carries his own cross to the next battle, the next sacrifice, the next chance to show thanksgiving for the One ‘whose property is always to have mercy.’

The Cross, it is there the Judge takes upon Himself the same punishment Jerusalem has so sadly earned. After all, no matter what, Justice is coming to Jerusalem, and it’s riding on the back of a donkey. So, with Justice riding into town, the only question is, will men be justified by the Just One who takes the punishment they deserve, or do they wait for Jerusalem to be ravaged by evil—torn down to the ground with its children dashed against the stones? We face a similar question. We must see that Jesus has stepped into Jerusalem to be the dead son Evil always desires, but of course, He is no ordinary son.  Jesus is the Son of God, and if the price for which Evil always asks is the death of innocents then He has descended from heaven to be that innocent child who forever breaks the gaping jaws of death. He has volunteered to be the child dashed against the stone. Our Lord was murdered for our transgressions so that you and I and our children might not just be spared from the just judgment to come, but rather, He died and rose so that you and I could be participants in the final battle against Evil our Lord’s inevitable return will signal. We are to be men and women who even now are preparing for the last battle by living lives of thanksgiving and praise, sacrifice and love, gathering the forces of good to stand against the evils of our world, marching together with our own crosses held high.  For if we bear Christ’s name in our hearts, if we carry His cross into battle every day, there is no enemy over whom we are not already victorious. And if we are victorious, we can follow the Great High Priest even into death singing hymns of praise, wiping away tears of joy.

Gloriously, when we do recognizes our place in created time, when we do look about the desert of our fallen world and seek everlasting sustenance in the God who is faithful, then we can finally see we are living in the blessed age of fulfillment. Christ has won the victory, the Holy Spirit has broken loose our chains, and we are marching toward the Jerusalem not made with hands. Our fulfillment in this life comes only from our progress toward this goal—our progress toward the resurrected earth which awaits the children of God at the end of their journey. Just as Moses called the Israelites to be a nation of priests, we have been called to be a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a peculiar people who every second show forth the praises of Him who has called us out of darkness into marvelous light. We are to walk from room to room in this darkened land and bless it with the presence of the Holy Spirit and a dead human made alive by His power. May we dead men and women made alive always know our history and our destiny, and may we worship our God and Savior with every hour we have breath.

Which brings us to the question, Why then would anyone possibly choose to either murder God’s prophets or ignore them, and in turn, murder themselves? As Jesus says today, ‘Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep's clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves’ (St. Matthew 7:15). The terror of this imagery should strike right to our hearts. Christ is describing a creature which looks like a Christian, but instead of being a sheep in the church’s pasture, he is a sheep’s worst enemy: a hungry wolf who will only be satisfied by not merely our destruction, but by gaining from our destruction, by tearing us apart until we are no longer a recognizable image bearer of God but merely an object to be consumed and digested. We usually think of men in authority when we imagine this monstrous creature; we think of greedy televangelists or priest who prey on young boys, but much more dangerous than these figures of obvious moral debasement are the characters who fill pulpits and pews with their lies and half-truths. The people who say things like, ‘God’s love is whatever I say it is,’ or ‘Be true to your heart and everything will turn out fine,’ or ‘Nothing really matters except loving yourself and being happy’ and on and on. Have you ever asked yourself, what does a person have to gain from saying these evil, banal lies to another person? Of course people say them because they simply know these memorized nonsense phrases better than the life-saving truth of God’s Word, but they originate and are evangelistically spread by those who wish to use us and destroy us for money or sex or power. All of the bad advice and circular logic we are given by false prophets so that we might feel better about joining them in sin will never save us or anyone, in fact, quite the opposite

There is one question then: ‘Is the god you serve weak and impotent like Pharaoh or is the god you serve the One who defeated the Egyptian god king, the One who has, in fact, defeated death itself?’ Remember, the entire weight of the apostle’s argument rests on the historic resurrection of Jesus Christ, that event is the great public example of the Evil One’s defeat at the hands of the Living God: the second exodus for which the glory of the first was only a shadow. To be a ‘slave to righteousness’ is not to be a slave to virtue, not a slave to do-goodery or good manners; no, to be a slave to righteousness is to be a slave to the God who breathes into chaos and makes life, the God who liberates slaves and makes sons, the God who reaches into the hearts of men to burn the image of His love where no man or devil may take it. To be His new born creature is what it means to live after being saved, and it is a relation so close and intimate and unyielding in its intensity and loving obedience that the only word which Paul can use to describe it is the total allegiance of a slave to his master. To be God’s slave is to be free from sin’s life-sucking ailments for the purpose of following Christ to the death: the death of our selfishness and evil, the death of the cruel gods we allow to control us, the death of the shame which taints our every friendship and love. In its place, we have been set free to be slaves to God, to live in His world-saving purpose, to die and rise again into His new world of heavenly grace. We are to be living contradictions in a broken world where the truth will always seem like madness.

And yet there is more. While we are new and free even now, we have not yet begun to partake in the fullness of a glorified humanity. If death no longer has dominion over the risen Christ then by virtue of our baptisms (our union with the great sacrifice for sin and death) we too will enjoy an existence no longer darkened by loss. It has been said that life is just watching the things we love be taken from us. We hear that refrain again and again in Ecclesiastes. I look around this room today, and I know we all bear the undeniable marks of loss: fathers and mothers, husbands and children, brothers and friends—the longer we live the larger the choir of our lost becomes, singing to us in the rhymes and melodies of our past, reminding us of the people we once were and never can be again. Against this terrible noise, the sound of loss multiplied by the broken hearts of every man and woman who has ever lived, it is against this crushing wall of mournful sound that St. Paul defiantly declares the truth by which all that grief and pain is finally harmonized into the righteousness and beauty creation has always been destined to reveal. He writes, “...Christ being raised from the dead dieth no more; death hath no more dominion over him” (Romans 6:9).

Now, Jesus making a bunch of fish appear might not seem like it has any connection to this death-struggle for the universe, but it is miracles like this one which reveal just who it is that marched from Mary’s virgin womb to the cross-shaped battlefield upon which human sin lost and divine love forever won. Jesus stands on Peter’s boat and commands the fish to be caught because the God/Man is the same divine Word who caused the first fish to feel the water against its scales. This God/Man is the new Adam preparing for new creation: the ultimate human come to gift our redeemed-rebellious race with the authority and dignity and beauty which humanity was always meant to proudly bear. God has come to restore the crown and identity of Adam to humanity, and as we see today, the creation itself longs to do the will of its Creator; it longs to rise and serve the first man not to give His royal human dignity away for sin’s burning slavery.

And if we recognize our place in salvation-history, if we recognize our place in the mighty acts of God in time and space, we can take each day for what it actually is: one blink of the eye for a royal priestly people preparing to storm the castles of evil and take back what is rightfully ours. As St. Paul writes to the Thessalonians, ‘For the Lord himself will descend from heaven with a cry of command, with the voice of an archangel, and with the sound of the trumpet of God. And the dead in Christ will rise first. Then we who are alive, who are left, will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air…’ (1 Thessalonians 4:16-17). The Lord who returns on that day will not be coming back to attend anyone’s church picnic. On that day, Jesus Christ—the 2nd Joshua—will return to cleanse the new earth, the new Holy Land, the new creation, of the evil which the 1st Adam was too weak to exterminate. The evil which smiles at the death of children, laughs at the slaughter of men, and lives to keep humanity weak and enslaved to idols. Jesus is returning to bury evil forever, and St. Paul is telling us today that by the free grace of God it will be the resurrected victims of evil’s tragic reign who will follow our resurrected king into the last battle of the last war in the last hour of this fallen world. We learn that our entire life has been about winning this battle.

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.’

The Pharisees who invited their Creator to dinner to try and murder Him, could not have embarked on this insane course unless they were sure they were the most righteous in the land. They tragically believed that their adherence to the law in some areas gave them the right to claim authority over not just the law but the Lawgiver Himself. This same virulent cancer of the soul affects American Christians in countless ways. From the religiously progressive Christian who decides he is specially qualified to tell Jesus and His apostolic witnesses what love really means, to the conservative Christian who thinks as long as he’s not gay or trans he’s sexually pure. From the progressive Christian who thinks the church should look just like every poisoned institution of the 21st century, to the conservative Christian unwilling to purge the false Christianity of the 20th century from God’s church. We (layman, bishop, priest, deacon, or lay deaconess) will never obtain some hypothetical level of righteousness by which we can be the judge of God; in fact, we are called to an embodied trust which manifests itself in everything we do. If the head of our church made Himself a slave to save the world, what does that mean we should do? Every part of us that bristles at the idea of surrendering to the infinite wisdom and providence of God is insane, illogical, and self-righteous. Every part of us that bristles at the idea of surrendering to the grace and justice of God is a part of us that doesn’t think sin is that bad, or at least doesn’t think our sin is that bad.