Sermons

Do we really want a formless, shapeless love whose only rule is, ‘Do what feels right?’ What if our feelings and emotions and desires themselves are infected by the same poisonous air which prepares and nurtures people to commit whatever acts of evil we don’t like? Isn’t that a much more reasonable assessment of human performance through the ages than the adult fairy tale which begins with the heedless following of our desires and ends with a page reading, ‘And they lived happily ever after?’ The Son of God knows us, and He knows only too well our epic, centuries long failure to truly love God and one another, and so He sets down a simple definition of love which should drive us to our knees in repentance and supplication and hope. We learn here that love is not defined by the unreliable whirlpool of our emotions or the semi-regular sexual revolutions of the bored and privileged; no, any real understanding of love must center on real action directed toward the God who is Love. That is tremendously good news; love is not some unfeeling force as indifferent to us as a hurricane or a tornado; rather, true love is personal because love is an attribute of the personal God. God’s love, the love we are called to share in through our sacrifice and obedience to His will, becomes about so much more than desire or pleasure or security—real love is always about salvation, always about re-directing the confused and lost human soul back toward the true, the good, and the beautiful.

It is in Christ that we can burn down the pagan groves in our heart and cut down the idols poisoning our souls. It is in Christ that we bring the sacrifice of our souls and bodies to lay before the One who sacrificed everything so that we and our children will live. It is in Christ that we spiritually feast upon the Body and Blood of the great sacrifice for the sins of the whole world. Our perfect union with the everlasting temple allows us to rejoice with our sons and daughters before the Lord our God secure in the knowledge that our salvation is the product of thousands and thousands of years of careful preparation and hard promises kept. Our perfect union with Christ has made the Church of God unstoppable in her conquest of the hearts and minds of God’s elect.

Could God have just placed them 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.

In fact, it is this supreme gift of our regeneration which shines brighter than any star. For we were not made for the stars; the stars were made for us. And the God who made them, the God who never changes, the God who always keeps His promises, has remade His reborn children of grace into vessels fit to explore and enjoy the heavens. God displays the utter goodness of His will in saving undeserving creatures who will fill the new Heaven and new Earth, the new Mars and the new Alpha Centauri. The closer the Word of truth is to our hearts, the closer we are to these bright, undiscovered countries. The Resurrected Son of God has already shown that death itself is not strong enough to stop the light, not strong enough to contain the good and perfect gift of everlasting life. We will need it, for you and I have so much to do, so much to accomplish on the bright shores of eternity. We will build and create and love and feast surrounded by the fruit born of surviving even the darkest moments of this fallen world’s rebellion. We are the fruit of His harvest and glory beckons.

To describe this whole process, Jesus uses the simple but powerful analogy of a woman giving birth: a woman experiencing the terrible danger and pain which serves as a living link back to the fall of man. Built into this example is the inescapable fact of the human condition: all life is sorrow. After all, even our happiest moments on earth come to us tinged in the darkness of our future destruction. Jesus saves this world by embracing suffering along with us and conquering it with the love that perseveres through pain and abandonment. Just as a mother perseveres in the midst of toil to bring a new life into the world, Christ suffers the worst the world can throw at Him, and rises from His empty tomb as the new humanity all this suffering was pointing us towards. His new manhood—a humanity no longer plagued by pain and death and sorrow—ushers in a new era of joy into the world because, through the Holy Spirit, we too can embrace the life of real goodness humanity was created to embody. We too can begin to live our lives of resurrection glory because sorrow has been given a new meaning—we can gaze upon our bloodied Savior, our suffering savior, and know that His story has become our own.

And it is what comes out of this faith that is so amazing. If we do trust Christ completely, which only makes sense given the reality of the resurrection, then we are free to love God and man without the terrible burden of hoping and praying that our relatively minor contributions must be enough to save ourselves or the world. We don’t have to conquer nature or bend men to our wills or win every political battle or be on the right side of history (whatever that actually means). Jesus has already overcome the world and its darkness; history is His story, so we are free to treasure a peace the world will never understand and prepare for a new life of creation and discovery. We can be happy warriors rather than half-defeated losers who reek of desperation.

If you are a baptized Christian, a member of the covenant, and empowered by God the Holy Ghost to remember His commandments and do them, then you are not lost but found; you are not a rebel or a stranger; you are a wounded son or daughter being carried to heaven in the arms of the shepherd who will always leave the ninety and nine to find you. You are complete, whole, even as this awful world rips pieces off you until there is nothing left to take. For in the end, our bodies will betray us as the great, final lesson revealing how much we aren’t God, how much we need God, but the people of God need not fear it, for the Holy Ghost has already reached down to us in the waters of baptism and united us to our resurrected brother and Lord. This spiritual resurrection has already occurred in us, and we are living in its magnificent, unfolding reality. Sin is no longer our master, but a pathetic, wounded tyrant and Christ has given us the blade to finish the job. Death is no longer to be feared, for we are tethered to heaven and the bodily resurrection to come by our unbreakable link to the victorious God/Man. Life is no longer a slow-motion tragedy numbed by drugs, legal and otherwise, but rather a daily march towards holiness, towards the wonder and glory humanity was always meant to embody.

If you hear my voice, and the voice of God reigns in your heart, then you are the people born of blood and iron nails, the people made from the sacrificial love which bore the weight of sin and death that humanity might rise from the ashes of despair into the dawning light of eternity. We will spend this holy week remembering that glorious day of days because we must remember we are not Judas; we must drown out the black voices in our world trying to convince us to die in despair and misery so they can feed off our time and treasure and broken hearts. Roar back at them, ‘My seed shall serve him, and they shall be counted unto the Lord for a generation; I shall serve Him, and death will be my defeated foe.

If salvation, if life beyond the few years we spend on this fallen planet is a matter of our common sense or collective wisdom, then our race is as doomed as these confused and angry men. St. John, however, has already told us how the children of God are born, ‘But to all who did receive [Jesus], who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God, who were born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God’ (St. John 1:12-13). Every plank upon which the self-righteous, Christ denying men of today’s reading stand—whether it be their ethnic lineage or assumed cultural superiority or adherence to the law or allegiance to their way of life—all of these tokens of false hope are ripped away from them by the God/Man’s revelation that He alone is the cure for death. Truly, all our false hopes become meaningless when the Word of God made flesh proclaims Himself as the perfect liberation from the great plague of human existence, from the death which robs all of us of our humanity.

The first step to salvation, the first step to being among the true sons of promise is to know we are all barren, but blessedly, God gives life to the barren. God looked upon the barren, childless Sarah: guilty of unbelief, pride, jealousy, and attempted murder; He looked upon her, and He united her to the Trinity’s world saving mission by giving her the son of promise. He gave her a life she didn’t deserve because God keeps His promises. The salvation of the world took its first step forward through a tiny heartbeat inside the womb of an old woman given up for dead. That heartbeat would grow up to be the man Isaac and from him would come generations of men and women, each in their own way a living testimony to the throbbing, human need for salvation. Until another woman, clothed in her virginity, was blessed with the new life which would take away all barrenness—the Son of Promise who came to reverse the fall of man, to restore the garden of creation, to create new life in us where men see only death. It is Jesus Christ’s resurrected glory which changed Paul from persecutor to martyr, and it is Christ’s resurrected glory which should lead all of us barren, unfruitful, human deserts to join in with prophets and apostles, saying, “Rejoice, thou barren that bearest not; break forth and cry, thou that travailest not: for the desolate hath many more children than she which hath an husband” (Galatians 4:27). God’s grace is for the barren, and so the barren can now rejoice. We can rejoice instead of worrying, we can rejoice instead of complicating our lives with all the fruitless pursuits of our neighbors, we can rejoice and know that Christ has promised life to those who believe; He has promised everything to those who are free. By God’s grace, we are the sons and daughters of promise, and by God’s grace we are free.