Get Up; Don't Be Afraid!

[This message was shared yesterday morning during worship with the people and friends of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio.]

Matthew 17:1-9

Ann and I had lived in the house we rented from our home church in Columbus for only a short time when, early one Friday evening, an emergency squad went to the house across the street. 

Later, I saw EMS personnel pack up their things and leave. 

I had just returned to faith in Christ. As I saw the squad pull away without taking anyone from the home on a stretcher, I prayed, “Lord, what should I do?” My thought was that someone was ill and that maybe I could run to a drug store and pick up a prescription for them. I didn't want to be a busybody, but God kept impressing on me the need to cross the street and find out what I could do.

Within seconds, I found myself crossing the street to the house of neighbors I hadn’t yet met. 

The elderly man who answered the knock on my door looked dazed, in a state of shock. 

“I’m sorry to bother you,” I said. “But I saw the squad and wondered if I could do anything to help.” 

At that, the man flung open the front door with his left hand and waved his right hand, gesturing to the figure of an elderly woman on the floor. 

“My wife just died. We were having dinner. She didn’t feel well. I brought her into the living room. She collapsed. I called the squad. She had a heart attack. They couldn’t do anything.” 

It was, at that moment, the last place I wanted to be. I had always been terrified of death. I even avoided funerals whenever I could. 

I prayed as I spoke next. “Why did they leave your wife here?” I asked, trying to make some sense of the situation. “The police have to come to certify her death before they can take her,” he told me.

The next forty minutes or so, I called my neighbor’s adult children, his priest, and the funeral home. After that, I sat with him as we waited for the police and the others to arrive. 

Once people got there, I  walked back across the street, thanking God that I had listened to what He had told me to do (you know, “Love your neighbor”) and thanked Him for banishing my fear. 

God had moved me from cowering in fear to being emboldened by His grace. That seemed like a miracle to me. It still does.

Our gospel lesson for this morning, Matthew 17:1-9, tells the familiar story of the Transfiguration. 

In it, the trio of Peter, James, and John, three of Jesus’ disciples, go to the top of an unidentified mountain with Jesus. 

There Jesus’ appearance is transfigured, His face shining like the sun, His clothing as white as the light. Then, Jesus is visited by Moses, Israel’s great giver of God’s Law, and Elijah, Israel’s greatest prophet.

But what exactly does the Transfiguration mean? What is the Goe we know in Jesus telling us in this incident? 

Above all, I think, in the Transfiguration, God demonstrates that in Christ, He can move all of us who cower in fear before the realities of life, be they the reality of death and that of the infinite perfection--the holiness--of God, Who has every right to condemn us for our sin, to a place of assurance and peace and life through faith in Jesus. 

Jesus shows us that, despite what we may deserve as sinners who have violated God’s holiness, God wants to save us not condemn us. God wants to comfort us, strengthen us, give us life with Him that never ends.

Six days before the events recounted in today’s gospel lesson, Jesus tells His disciples: “Truly I tell you, some who are standing here will not taste death before they see the Son of Man coming in his kingdom.” (Matthew 16:28)

In today’s lesson about the Transfiguration, surrounded by the light of eternity itself, Jesus’ promise comes true. 

In Jesus, the kingdom of heaven comes into the world and Peter, James, and John know that it’s true, even if they don’t understand exactly what Jesus means when He speaks, as He often does, of suffering, dying, and rising, or when He tells us of our need to take up our crosses--to own our sin and morality and need of Him for life--and follow Him.

Imagine being those three disciples with Jesus on that mountain, especially after they heard the Voice from heaven tell them: “This is my Son, whom I love; with him I am well pleased. Listen to him!” 

Matthew says that the three fell on their faces, terrified. 

What happens when human beings, mortal and marred by the imperfection of their sin, come into the presence of God? 

Well, if they have any sense, they do what we do when we begin our worship each Sunday: They recognize that they “fall short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23). 

Hebrews 10:31 tells us that, “It is a dreadful thing [a dread-filled thing] to fall into the hands of the living God.”

Friends, it is a dreadful thing, unless, hear me now, your sins and imperfections are covered over by God’s grace through your faith in Jesus. 

And it’s precisely at the moment that the moment the disciples realize how imperfect they are and how perfect Jesus is, how Jesus is God and they need Him for life and forgiveness, that the grace of God comes to Peter, James, and John. It comes to loud-mouthed, impulsive, know-it-all Peter and it comes to the two other disciples who, just like us, were mortal, imperfect, and sinners.

After the Voice spoke heaven’s affirmation of Jesus as the Messiah Who would suffer, the sinless God Who would die for His sinful children, Matthew says--in a beautiful passage of Scripture--that “Jesus came and touched them. ‘Get up,’ he said. ‘Don’t be afraid.’ When they looked up, they saw no one except Jesus.” (Matthew 17:8)

For God to banish our fear, to give us the power to live each day, to give us the certainty that God has us in the palm of His hand for all eternity, we need to look to Jesus and no one except Jesus. 

That’s because no one but Jesus can overcome the terror we feel in the face of this world’s realites: The realities of death, suffering, adversity, relational discord, self-doubt, prejudice, fear, our own inadequacies, our pride, our ego, and all the other horrors wrought by human sin, by our sin. 

We may try to cover our fears over with bravado or false notions that if we’re good enough or work hard enough that death and suffering won’t touch us or that God will owe us a place in His kingdom. But listen: God owes us nothing. On our own, we can never be good enough and we will forever live or die in our fear or our bravado. 

But when we listen to God’s Word about Jesus--”This is My Son...listen to Him,” God creates within us a faith in Jesus that vetoes, overpowers, and negates our fears. 

He gives us the capacity to trust in the resurrected life Jesus promises to all who trust in Him. 

That isn’t to say that we never feel fear as human beings; as long as we live on this earth, we will know fear, especially in the face of death. We will be like the guy who said, “I don’t fear dying. I just don’t want to be there when it happens.”

But when Jesus comes to us--as He does today in His Word, in the fellowship of believers, and in His body and blood in the sacrament, He touches us again and He says, “Get up. Don’t be afraid.” 

And when we respond to that call, we will find that wherever we look, we will see Jesus. I saw Him that night long ago in the dazed and grieving features of a neighbor who had just lost His wife. 

Jesus, Who touches us and calls us to get up and follow Him, empowers us, as He did Peter, James, and John, to go into the places where life and death, birth and suffering, joy and sorrow intermingle. 

With Jesus, we can face anything: Readied by His gracious forgiveness to look our Lord face to face, to face life and death, to love God and love neighbor, to share the good news of new life through faith in Jesus even with skeptical friends. 

When you turn to Jesus each day, He will move you from being one who cowers in fear before life’s realities to one emboldened to live--fully live--in the kingdom of heaven, now and always. 

Today..and tomorrow too...don’t be afraid, friends. Follow Jesus. Amen

[I'm the pastor of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio.]

God can be my friend, never my buddy

Here are reflections from a recent quiet time with God. I try to do this five days a week, letting God's Word speak to me in a dynamic, relational way. To see how I approach quiet time, read here. I hope that these journal entries are helpful to others. But nothing can replace your own personal quiet time encounters with God!

Look: “...And Moses hid his face, for he was afraid to look at God.” (Exodus 3:6)

God has just revealed Himself to Moses in Midian at the burning bush. When Moses realizes that he’s in the presence of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, he hides his face. Moses understands the infinite distance between God and himself: God is immortal; Moses is mortal. God is perfect; Moses isn’t. God is the Creator; Moses is the creature. God is sinless; Moses is, like the rest of the human race, sinful.

No wonder Moses hid his face. His response is appropriate, understandable. Centuries later, Isaiah was conscious of the infinite distance between God and himself when he encountered God. He knew that for an unclean human to dare to look at God meant death. He cried out after God had initiated His call to Isaiah to be His prophet: “ “Woe is me! For I am lost; for I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips; for my eyes have seen the King, the LORD of hosts!” (Isaiah 6:5)

Theologians and experts in comparative religions say that Moses and Isaiah experienced “numinous awe,” awe, respect, terror, fear in the presence of the God of all creation.

Neither in Biblical history nor in the history of Jews and Christians since would this be the first time that people experienced awe or terror in God’s presence. During their wilderness wanderings, the people of Israel, who God called Moses to lead, caught a glimpse of God’s holiness and were terrified. They asked Moses to act as a go-between so that they wouldn’t have to look at God and be killed by the infinite distance. "Speak to us yourself and we will listen. But do not have God speak to us or we will die." (Exodus 20:19)

Decades later, Israel would marvel at how Moses enjoyed an intimate relationship with God. Deuteronomy 34:10 says, “Since then, no prophet has risen in Israel like Moses, whom the LORD knew face to face…”

Here’s what strikes me in this passage: Where is my numinous awe?

I often seem to treat God as an afterthought.

Or I take Him and, maybe worse, His grace for granted.

I often ignore Him or treat Him like a buddy.

Listen: Of course, with Jesus, the new covenant or the new testament has come. God has revealed Himself to all people in Jesus Christ. John writes in the prologue to his gospel: “No one has ever seen God, but the one and only Son, who is himself God and is in closest relationship with the Father, has made him known.” (John 1:19)

In Jesus, to use Martin Luther’s phrase, all are able to see God’s friendly face, the same friendly face Moses, Isaiah, and others came to “see” as their relationship with God developed.

God IS perfect. God IS immortal. God IS sinless, righteous, and, in Lutheran theologian Paul Tillich’s phrase, “wholly other.”

But God loves us, cares for us, and wants a relationship with us. If these things weren’t true, God wouldn’t have met Moses and Isaiah. And if these things weren’t true, He wouldn’t have reached out to Gentiles as well as Jews, to the whole world, in Jesus Christ.

God wants to be reconciled to us, to forgive us our sins, to give us new life, and to shower His love on us for all eternity. Jesus told Nicodemus: “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him. Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe is condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the only Son of God.”

To all who repent and believe in God as revealed to us in Jesus, God offers life, forgiveness, citizenship in His kingdom, and intimacy with God.

Through Jesus, we can speak with God and ask of God anytime, anywhere. “Until now you have asked nothing in my name. Ask, and you will receive, that your joy may be full,” Jesus says (John 16:24).

“...we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin [God has been subjected to temptation and death when He shared in human life in Jesus]. Let us then approach God's throne of grace with confidence, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need.” (Hebrews 4:15-16)

Citizens of God’s kingdom, believers in Jesus, are to approach the God revealed in Jesus, our “high priest,” “with boldness,” the preacher in Hebrews says. But it’s interesting to see where Jesus is as we approach Him: “God’s throne of grace.”

No matter the intimate friendship with God that Jesus opens to those who believe in Him (John 15:15), He is still the King of all creation, my God, my Creator. He still deserves our honor, praise, and submission. When unbelieving Thomas finally realized all of Who Jesus is, he fell to his knees and confessed Jesus, “My Lord and my God” (John 20:28).

The God Who seeks intimacy with me is also owed by submission, surrender, awe, and praise. In fact, His desire for intimacy with a sinner like me, along with His desire to cleanse me of sin and make me fit for living in His kingdom, should incite me to the deepest and most reverent of fear, honor, and praise.

But too often, I turn Jesus into a buddy.

Or my prayers are like emails dashed off to an indulgent uncle, an easy mark.

Not only does such an approach to God mock Him and His desire for closeness with us, it risks turning God into an idol, a good luck charm. Instead of being an expression of an intimate friendship with God, my “prayers” risk becoming messages to a false god I’ve created in my own head, a god I use for my convenience and comfort. I don’t want that! I want real intimacy with God! And I never want to forget that God is God and I am not!

Forgive me, Lord! For taking You for granted. For forgetting, in the words of the preacher of intimacy with You, that it is nonetheless, “It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God” (Hebrews 10:31). Forgive me for forgetting that only You are God and I am not. With the saints in the heavenly city, help me to say and believe, “Worthy is the Lamb, who was slain, to receive power and wealth and wisdom and strength and honor and glory and praise!" (Revelation 5:12).

I realize that this is a practical issue. If I don’t reverence, fear, honor, praise, and glorify God, it indicates a deficiency in my understanding of You, a deficiency in my relationship with You.

Help me, Lord, to heed the words of the preacher in Hebrews 12:28: “Therefore let us be grateful for receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken, and thus let us offer to God acceptable worship, with reverence and awe,”

Respond: Lord, to help me to get in the habit of acknowledging Your holiness and giving it to You, help me to spend time next week contemplating several passages of Scripture for five consecutive days: John 9:16-24; Revelation 5; psalms of praise. Help me to note reasons to honor and praise You. Help me to understand more fully the depths of Your love and grace. Teach me to honor You more fully as God. Help me to not be flippant. Help me to know You more fully as my best Friend, but not my buddy. In Jesus’ name I pray.

[I'm the pastor of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio.]

How Christmas Looks from Heaven

John 1:1-14
The Gospel of John, from which today’s gospel lesson comes, is both the easiest and the hardest to understand of the New Testament’s accounts of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection.

John’s gospel is a bit like Jesus Himself, I suppose. A child can understand that Jesus died for our sins and rose from the dead so that all who turn from their sin and trust in Him have forgiveness and new, eternal life with God. But even a mature believer who has given steady attention to an intimate relationship with Jesus over many years, will never be able to fully understand everything about Jesus.

There will always be some mystery about Jesus and that’s as it should be because, after all, Jesus is God and you and I aren’t.

On Christmas Day, we encounter the mystery of God in full through the prologue to John’s Gospel.

It’s appointed as our Gospel reading, even though, unlike Matthew and Luke, John never tells the story of Jesus’ birth in Bethlehem.

The Christmas story is in the first fourteen verses of John’s gospel, though. Whereas Matthew tells the story from the perspective of Joseph, the carpenter chosen to be Jesus’ earthly father, and Luke tells it from the vantage point of Mary, the virgin chosen to be Jesus’ earthly mother, John through the first thirteen-and-a-half verses of our lesson, tells us what happened on the first Christmas from the perspective of eternity, from the vantage point of God Himself.

Then, starting in the middle of verse 14, John switches perspectives. But let’s not jump ahead of ourselves.

Go to our lesson, starting at verse 1: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.”

John’s Gospel starts out like Genesis 1: “In the beginning…” But while Genesis only goes back to the beginning of the universe God made for us, John’s “in the beginning” goes back before God had created the first thing.

John starts when the only life that existed was God, ever one, ever three persons.

We will meet the Holy Spirit later in John’s Gospel, but for now, his focus--like our focus at Christmas--is on the second person of the Trinity, the Word.

God the Word, God the Son, was, John says, the very power by which God brought creation into being. According to Genesis, God spoke and creation happened. According to John, God the Word was that word that God spoke into chaos and nothingness and made life, order, peace.

God the Word was God’s, “Let there be life” and there was life, including life for you and me.

This eternal Word seared the darkness of nothingness with the blazing light of His powerful, life-giving love. Darkness, John says, “has not overcome it,” or more literally, “has not seized it, overcome it, arrested it, or comprehended it.”

Created light, you know, travels at 186,000 miles per second, but its power dissipates over distance. The Word, the Light of God though, cannot be chained, inhibited, hid, or brought under control. It never fades or gives out.

Whenever humanity has sought to stop or avoid this Light, the Word has kept on shining: showing us our sin, showing us the way to be free of our sin, lighting the way to free others of their sins, so that the Word can keep doing what He did at the creation, make life.

Verse 6: “There was a man sent from God whose name was John. He came as a witness to testify concerning that light, so that through him all might believe. He himself was not the light; he came only as a witness to the light.”

Some scholars believe that the John who wrote our gospel lesson was originally a disciple of the John he writes about here, John the Baptist. (Is that confusing enough?)

The gospel writer says that the Baptizer was, above all, “a witness,” pointing the world to the Word. “Don’t get confused,” our gospel writer is saying, “John the Baptist was a great and faithful man. But he wasn’t the Word and he wasn’t the Light of the world. His job was to point to the Word and the Light.”

By now, some of the gospel’s original hearers and listeners would have likely become impatient. “Spit it out, John,” they might have thought, “what’s this whole Word business about?” So far, you’ve told us Who He isn’t; but you haven’t told us Who He is. We’ve heard of God before. We’ve even heard of God’s Holy Spirit before. But what is this Word you keep talking about in circles?”

Had he been challenged in this way, John might have thought, “Glad you asked.” Verse 9-14a: “The true light that gives light to everyone was coming into the world. He was in the world, and though the world was made through him, the world did not recognize him. He came to that which was his own, but his own did not receive him. Yet to all who did receive him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God— children born not of natural descent, nor of human decision or a husband’s will, but born of God. The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us.”

The Word of God didn’t remain in the comfort of heaven.

He refused to be a mere philosophical proposition.

He wouldn’t be a distant deity.

He wouldn’t be, as some people picture God, a cosmic watchmaker who set the mechanics of the universe and then left His creatures to their own devices.

No!

The brilliant blazing second Person of the Trinity decided to brave the darkness of this sinful, fallen world to light our way to life with God.

He took our flesh upon Himself and “made His dwelling among us,” literally, “pitched His tent” with those He first made in His own image.

He became a baby subjected to death by exposure as he lay in a manger on a silent night, who cried from hunger and pain, who soiled His diapers and would need to learn to walk and run eventually, do the work of a fix-it man.

The Word came to live lives like ours, full of challenges, tragedies, joys, fulfillment, and temptations. He came to live one perfect life, so that, in the words of Hebrews 4:15, He could be: “...tempted in every way, just as we are--yet he did not sin.”

Then He could give His sinless life as the perfect sacrifice for our sins. The Word was born into this world so that He could die in our places and so that all who turn from sin and believe in Him will have life with God, given “the right to become children of God— children born not of natural descent, nor of human decision or a husband’s will, but born of God,” as John puts it.

The Word Who once spoke the world into being, has come into our world. By His death and resurrection, He pronounces the good news that, by His grace, all who believe in Him are saved and made new. By grace through faith in Christ alone, we become God’s children.

At the end of verse 14, as I mentioned, John’s perspective changes. He moves from what God has done through this Word to explaining how he and his friends who followed this Word experienced Him on earth.

He talks about what He saw in the Word Who said of Himself, “Anyone who has seen Me has seen the Father.” [John 14:9]

And: “The Father and I are one.” [John 10:30]

And: “Before Abraham was born, I AM.” [John 8:58]

John writes in our lesson: “We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.”

In the book of Exodus in the Old Testament, we’re told that after Moses met with God at Mount Sinai, his face shone with the reflected light and glory of God Himself. The Israelites were so afraid of God’s brilliant light--fearful that their sins would be exposed, fearful that they would clearly see the way God wanted them to live and be forced to trust in Him, rather than themselves and their own preferred and sinful ways--that they told Moses, “Speak to us yourself and we will listen. But do not have God speak to us or we will die.” [Exodus 20:19] They were terrified to be exposed in their sinfulness in the fiery presence of God.

Their terror was not ill-founded.

If we dare to stand before God without repentance and without faith in the Word, the only one Who can make us clean, we don’t stand a chance. Hebrews 10:31 says: “ It is a dreadful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.”

But remember: Jesus came not just in truth; He also came in grace. Grace means charity, God’s charity for people born in sin like you and me. (The word we translate from the Greek in which the New Testament was written as grace is charitas, from which we get our English word, charity.)

The Word Who came to pitch His tent among us also came to cover us in the favor, resurrection, new life, and grace He won for all who believe in Him.

Because of His grace, we can say with the preacher in Hebrews 4:16: “Let us then approach God’s throne of grace with confidence, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need.”

An intimate and eternal relationship with the Almighty King and Lord of the universe! That’s what the Word made flesh came to make possible for you and for me.

We know this Word as Jesus, truly God and truly man.

Jesus, the Word, is more than a Hallmark card, words of love spoken from afar by God.

Jesus is God with His sleeves rolled up, doing the hard work, making the painful sacrifice of love for each of us.

Jesus, the Word, is Immanuel, God with us, God for us, God our redeemer.

Even a child can understand this about Jesus. And even an adult needs Jesus just as much.

Always receive Him and you will have what you can find nowhere else: Life--new, eternal life--from God and with God, now and always.

That’s what Christmas is about.

Amen

[Blogger Mark Daniels is pastor of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio. This message was shared during worship this morning.]

Misogyny, Murder, and Accountability

Our small town has been shocked and saddened by the kidnapping and murder of a young woman, the mother of three small children. Charges of kidnapping have been lodged against her estranged husband, William Inman, Jr., and his parents, William, Sr. and Sandra. Since Sandra was the one who told authorities where the young woman's body could be found, it's widely expected that murder charges will be brought against at least the two men. Sandra, it's expected, will face a lesser charge as part of a plea bargain.

The body of Summer Inman, who was kidnapped on March 22 outside of a local bank where she worked as a janitor, was found little more than a week later in the septic tank of the church building where her husband's parents were married in 2004. She had been strangled.

Evil is real.

The evil that led to Summer Inman's murder was of a particular kind and it grew for a particular reason.

A story from WBNS TV in Columbus presented these facts about the family with which Summer had lived before moving out and filing for divorce:

Neighbors said Sandra and Summer Inman were rarely seen outside of the home, and when they were, they were both dressed entirely in black.

A close friend said it became clear to her "that the men had taken over the women" in the family.

Those who knew them said William A. Inman considered himself a religious leader and conducted church services in an outbuilding at their home.

Neighbors said he would often go door-to-door, soliciting donations for what he called "Mercy Ranch," a plan to turn his home into a place for the wayward and homeless.

It appears that the older William Inman had set himself up as a religious dictator overseeing his own misogynist kingdom.

Two particular forms of evil seem to have caused the years of hellish living and horrible end to which Summer Inman was subjected.

First, there is the evil represented by the presumption of anyone announcing on they have a call from God. This is what William (Bill) Inman did.

Nobody is authorized to hang up a holy shingle on their own initiative. An individual can swear up and down that she or he has a call from God to pastoral ministry, or any other ministry, but swearing won't make it so.

Recently, the members of our congregation, Saint Matthew Lutheran Church in Logan, Ohio, have begun a venture of reading the Bible in the course of a year. We have daily readings and once a week, folks get together to discuss the readings. During the week after the discovery of Summer Inman's body, we read portions of the Old Testament book of Exodus in which God calls Moses to act as intermediary between God and the people and then, the people call Moses to act to this same role. The will of God about Moses' role was confirmed by believing people. The will of God as to whether a person is to be a leader among His people will always be reflected among His people.

Lutherans have always believed in this "dual nature" of the call. A potential pastor's sense of call must be affirmed by the Church. Otherwise, it's just a feeling on the part of a would-be pastor and feelings are never a sufficient basis for Christian decision-making.

There's a lot of authority associated with being a pastor. It's not like the authority of a political or military leader or a business executive. It's the authority associated with God's Word and God's Sacraments and no one should dare to enter this ministry unless the call from God is confirmed by the Church. That never happened with Bill Inman. He simply took what wasn't his to take.

That in itself is a flashing light signaling possible trouble. If someone is that presumptuous with God, it's hardly a stretch to think that he will be at least that presumptuous in claiming authority over people that is not theirs.

The second evil in this case is the utterly un-Biblical and un-Christian male domination practiced by the two Inman men.

From the beginning, Scripture makes clear the utter equality of women and men. When Genesis recounts the creation of humanity, it says:

So God created humankind in His image, in the image of God He created them, male and female he created them. (Genesis 1:27)

Both the man and the woman were created in God's image, each in equal relationship with their Creator.

Later, in the New Testament, Paul, often wrongly accused himself of being a sexist, says plainly that, "As many of you as were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus" (Galatians 3:27-28).

When Paul first came to faith in Christ, a woman was among those who "catechized" him in the faith. Where the culture allowed it, women served as leaders in churches founded by Paul.

Even passages in the New Testament sometimes trotted out by those who try use Christianity to justify sexism backfire in their faces. For example, Ephesians 5:21-33, which some claim commands husbands to be lords over their wives, actually, on a close reading, can be seen to command husbands and wives to live in mutual submission. Husbands are told to love their wives as Christ loved the Church, which, is a clear call for the husband to give himself utterly and sacrificially to their wives. After all, Christ went to a cross for His Church.

People who fail to maintain their connection to Christ's Church, who are accountable to nobody, can rationalize anything: misogyny and kidnapping and, if the hints and allegations prove true, even murder. 

It's evil and you can be sure that, barring some uncharacteristic repentance (and, at the prompting of God's Holy Spirit, such miracles can happen), there will be a horrible reckoning because the God revealed first to ancient Israel and ultimately, in Jesus Christ, is a consuming fire.* To trifle with Him, to claim His authority without His permission, is a fearful thing.

*See here.

How Can We Keep From Serving?

[This, the last of a series of midweek Lenten sermons for 2009, was shared during worship with the people of Saint Matthew Lutheran Church in Logan, Ohio, earlier this evening.]

Ephesians 2:1-10
Each year, Jewish believers celebrate something called the Feast of the Tabernacles or the Festival of the Booths.

It remembers the forty-year period during which the ancient Hebrews, freed by God from slavery in Egypt, wandered in the wilderness before finally arriving in the land that God had long ago promised their ancestors.

During those forty years in the wilderness, they mostly lived in temporary booths or huts. (Another word for these structures is tabernacle, which basically means tent.) The purpose of the annual Festival of the Booths is to remind modern believers that God cares about aliens and strangers and that for people of faith, our only home is with God. To this day, many Jewish believers erect tents or huts in their yards to celebrate the Festival of the Tabernacles.

A prominent German scholar of the New Testament, Joachim Jeremias, once visited a Jewish friend in Israel during this festival. The friend led Jeremias to his backyard to show off the family’s festival tent. There was nothing distinctive about it except for two signs, one posted on the left and the other on the right side, of the opening. One sign said, “From God.” The other read, “To God.”

Those two signs, with just four words, describe the wilderness wanderings in which you and I and everyone we know are living right now. The Bible says that we were formed by God in our mother’s wombs. It also tells us that one day, every one of us will stand before God. We move from God to God.

The Bible affirms that you and I are on that same journey. That could fill us with fear. The New Testament book of Hebrews affirms that, “it is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.” Even those certain of their places in eternity and of God’s love would agree that only a fool or a misinformed person wouldn’t be a bit weak in the knee about coming face to face with the omnipotent, perfect God of the universe.

Yet, fear need not have the last word in our relationship with God.

In our Bible lesson for tonight, the apostle Paul writes to the first century church in the Asia Minor city of Ephesus. Before coming to faith in God, many of the Ephesian Christians had little notion that they were on this journey from God to God. Ephesus was a place with lots of idol worship and especially heavy-duty worship of the world's favorite god, the almighty buck.

At the beginning of our lesson, Paul reminds them of their former life, when they were mired in sin, ignorant of God, and going nowhere.

But Christ changed all that. When they’d heard the Good News of new and everlasting life for all who renounce their sin and entrust their lives to Jesus, God enacted a midcourse correction in their eternal journey, turning their lives around, back to God and eternity with God.

“By grace you have been saved through faith,” Paul reminds the Ephesians, “and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God.”

Christians should never be blasé about God’s passionate desire to change the courses of our lives and eternal destinies. We always have reason to celebrate and to wonder!

Just this afternoon, I got a telephone call from a woman who was a member of the first parish we served in northwest Ohio. I’m presiding at the wedding of one of her daughters this summer and she asked if, at the rehearsal, I could also baptize her two grandchildren.

We also chatted. “You know,” she told me, “God is hard to understand sometimes. I never considered myself a great Christian. I believed and I tried my best. But I always thought my husband was the committed one and I was sort of along for the ride. If you had told me seven years ago that I’d start and own a Christian bookstore, I would have told you that you were crazy. Yet God led me every step and opened every door.”

And then she said, “But sometimes, I ask God, ‘Why?’”

You see, God’s grace and the way of life he made for this woman beforehand were things she never would have guessed. Now she's walking in the life that God had in mind for her, a gift more fulfilling than she could have ever imagined. And all she can do is offer back a life of service in Christ’s Name.

And this is where servanthood, the topic of our Lenten midweek services begins and ends: In the God from Whom we first received life and in the God Who gives us new life in Jesus Christ.

I don’t know why God loves me. I find myself much less lovable than God apparently does. And yet, God does love me and you.

Once our lives were going nowhere. But, in Christ, God claims us as His own and changes us for all eternity. As Paul writes later in Ephesians, “now in Christ Jesus you who were once far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ.”

In the face of such undeserved love, grace, and favor, how can we not be servants?