Showing posts with label John 2:1-12. Show all posts
Showing posts with label John 2:1-12. Show all posts

Friday, April 14, 2017

The Sacrifice for Sin (Maundy Thursday)

John 13:1-17, 31-35
During Sundays in the Lenten season as we bring our offerings to the altar, we often pray: “Almighty God, you gave your Son both as a sacrifice for sin and a model of the godly life…”

Of course, what’s most important about Jesus is not the life He models. You and I could repeatedly resolve that we are going to live like Jesus...and repeatedly fail.

Not that people haven’t tried. In his Autobiography, Benjamin Franklin, a deist who didn’t really believe in the God revealed in Jesus, decided to live his life around a set righteous virtues he had identified. Franklin wrote each of these virtues on the top of a piece of paper and gathered them in a small book. His plan was to conquer one virtue, then move to the next, conquering it, and so on. He never conquered the first one.

Without realizing it perhaps, Franklin had learned the truth of the apostle Paul’s words in Romans 7: “I do not do the good I want to do, but the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing.” (Romans 7:19) Paul concludes: “Now if I do what I do not want to do, it is no longer I who do it, but it is sin living in me that does it.” (Romans 7:20) In other words, we cannot live a godly life in our own power.

When we try, we seem to get in the way.

Some of you know that last year, I was losing the weight I needed to shed. But more recently, I’ve been eating too much and putting weight back on. God’s Word says that our bodies are “temples of the Holy Spirit” (1 Corinthians 6:19). That means that the abuse to which I subject my body is a spiritual issue. It’s a sin issue.

Right now, I must report, that as it relates to the food I’m putting into my body, sin is winning out.

And why has this happened? Because I took my eyes off of Jesus.

To be sure, I took Jesus as an example of the godly life because Jesus was always self-disciplined in the use of His mind and body. I also became subtly proud of my virtuous self-discipline.

I forgot what Jesus tells all who want to follow Him: “I am the vine; you are the branches. If you remain in me and I in you, you will bear much fruit; apart from me you can do nothing. If you do not remain in me, you are like a branch that is thrown away and withers; such branches are picked up, thrown into the fire and burned.” (John 15:5-6)

The point? If we see Jesus only or even primarily as our example as we set out to lead virtuous lives, we will fall on our faces every time.

We need help.

We need Jesus.

We need Him infinitely less as a model of the godly life than we need Him as the definitive sacrifice for our sin.

We need His righteousness because we are completely unrighteous.

We need His goodness, because God alone is good.

That’s why Jesus does and says things in the order in which He does and says them in tonight’s Maundy Thursday gospel lesson.

John is the most sacramentally minded of the four gospel writers. He begins his account of Jesus' earthly ministry with Jesus' first miracle, turning water into wine, pointing to the two sacraments, Holy Baptism and Holy Communion. He draws the curtain on Jesus' pre-resurrection earthly ministry with a soldier piercing Jesus' side and water and blood emanating from the wound, again pointing to Holy Baptism and Holy Communion.

Yet in recounting events on Maundy Thursday, John doesn’t talk about Holy Communion, which Jesus instituted on that night. Instead, he focuses on three things from the events of Maundy Thursday:
  • Jesus washing the feet of His disciples; 
  • Jesus telling the disciples to serve each other similarly; 
  • Jesus giving a new commandment, the only new commandment Jesus ever gave. 
Let’s look at each one of these.

During the course of the meal, Jesus ate with His disciples, got up, stripped down to nothing but a towel wrapped around His waist, and prepared to wash the disciples’ feet, starting with Peter’s. You’ve lived through enough Maundy Thursdays to know that washing people’s feet in the first century AD was the work of servants. It seems to get mentioned in every Maundy Thursday sermon.


But feet were seen predominantly in two ways in that culture.

One was to look on them with revulsion, encrusted as they were with dirt from walking in sandals through the sand and rocks of Judea.

The other was to regard feet as euphemistic representations of the most private places of the human body. This is what’s behind the otherwise cryptic passage of Ruth 3:14, which tells us that: “So [Ruth] lay at [Boaz’s] feet until morning, but got up before anyone could be recognized; and he said, ‘No one must know that a woman came to the threshing floor.’"

So, Jesus washing the feet of His disciples was not just an act of selfless servanthood, but also one of loving intimacy, the Bridegroom serving His Bride, the Church.

And Jesus points to His washing of the disciples’ feet as symbolizing the great act of servanthood and love that He’s about to accomplish at the cross. “You do not realize now what I am doing, but later you will understand,” Jesus tells Peter who, at first protests Jesus’ intention of washing the disciples’ feet.

Hebrews 10 tells us that through Christ’s act of servanthood and love on the cross, all who believe in Him “have been sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all.” (Hebrews 10:10)

And, Hebrews says that, through this sacrifice, we have an advocate for eternity: “...when Christ had offered for all time a single sacrifice for sins, he sat down at the right hand of God, waiting from that time until his enemies should be made a footstool for his feet. For by a single offering he has perfected for all time those who are being sanctified.” (Hebrews 10:12-14)

Baptized believers in Christ are washed clean of their sin. That's why Jesus says that we don't need to be completely rewashed of our sin again and again; once we have been born as children of God in Baptism, we only need to come again to God in the name of the Lord in which we have been baptized to repent and be renewed as God's people.

Each time we repent and trust Christ with our sins and our lives, remembering that we are baptized into His death and resurrection, Jesus cleans us again from the grime of sin and death that’s always dogging us and attaching itself to us in this life.

Jesus is the perfect sacrifice for our sin and when we trust in Him, He takes up residence within us. We experience what Paul talks about in Galatians 2:20: “I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I now live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.”

Martin Luther may have had this passage in mind when he said: "When [the devil] comes knocking at the door of my heart, and asks, ‘Who lives here?’ Jesus goes to the door and says, 'Martin Luther used to live here, but he has moved out. Now I leave here.'”

After pointing to His cross, Jesus gives us two commands, one a re-expression of the Old Testament law regarding hospitality, the other a totally new law with Jesus.

Command one: “Now that I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also should wash one another’s feet.” (John 13:17) In other words, Jesus is telling us, “Serve as I have served you. Without thought to your status in the world, or to how humbling it may be.”

Command two: “Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.” (John 13:34-35) In other words, Jesus is telling us, “Love your sisters and brothers in the faith sacrificially just as I have loved you.”

It’s no accident that Jesus gives these two commands after pointing to the cross, because it’s only after taking up residence in our lives through our faith in Him that Jesus can change the ways we live, the ways we respond to our neighbors.

Jesus may be an example for godly or wholesome living to the whole world, Christian and non-Christian alike; but unless Jesus lives in us and powers us, we cannot lead godly lives.

On Monday, I drove to Cincinnati, where God allowed me to administer Holy Baptism to Jameson, the little guy for whom we’ve been praying through his three years of life, and his older brother, Jackson.

After getting back to Dayton, I went to Columbus to be with my mom and my family at a hospital ICU, where mom died on Tuesday morning.

To tell you the truth, my thoughts weren't prone to focus on the homeless guy standing at the freeway off-ramp that day.

And the Old Mark battled with the Lord Jesus Who has taken up residence in my life. “Who knows if he’s really homeless,” I argued. “Besides, I’m out of the McDonald gift cards I keep for situations like this. And on top of that, I’m busy, I’m tired, I’m concerned about my family. Is this guy really that big a deal, God?”

But Jesus won the argument. (He usually does when you start talking with Him!)

I pulled out a five-dollar bill and handed it to the man at the ramp.

Listen: I would not have done that had I relied on my own reasoning. If I'd only been arguing with myself, I would have easily convinced myself to drive on by. Instead, because Jesus lives in me and I have the assurance that no matter how much duping, using, or humiliation this world may subject me to, I still belong to the God we meet in Jesus, Jesus set me free to part with a little of money.

It was, for all its simplicity and humanity, a divine moment that wasn’t done by me, but by Jesus living in me.

I’ve gotten to the point where I believe the line in the old Amy Grant singalong song: “If there’s anything good that happens in life, it’s from Jesus.”

And when you know that, in the words of the late Baptist pastor, Gerald Mann, through Christ you have "God's cosmic okie-dokie," the humiliations meted out by this world become less important to you. You know that the world cannot rob you of you dignity, because by God's grace through faith in Christ, your life is imbued with an eternity dignity.

I don’t have to know whether the ramp guy spent those five bucks on cigarettes, alcohol, drugs,  lottery tickets, or food.

I don’t care to know whether he was, from the standpoint of the world, “worthy” of my help.

But I do know two things.

First, I know that on the night of His betrayal, even though He knew what Judas was going to do, Jesus washed Judas’ feet. Jesus gives grace to all, worthy in the world’s eyes or not. Think of that!

Second, I know that, in the eyes of heaven, I’m not worthy of the grace, forgiveness, and love God makes available to us through Christ.

I’m a sinner. So, who am I to withhold from another person any smidge of grace God puts it in my power to give away?

Despite my sin, Christ served, loved, and died for me anyway. Romans 5:8 reminds us that, “...God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.”

Christ is the “sacrifice for sin and a model of the godly life.”

But Maundy Thursday reminds us that if we would live a godly life, a useful life, a life that even unbelievers would acknowledge to be a life filled with goodness, it doesn’t begin with any of us trying to be good. 

It begins and continues only with Christ loving us, serving us, dying for us, rising for us, and our day in, day out, letting Him into our lives so that God’s will becomes our will, God’s love for others becomes our love for others. 

It begins and ends with Jesus alone!

Jesus’ message for us tonight is simple. Don’t try to be a good person on your own steam. Let Jesus into your life, let Jesus live in you, and He will lead you in the godly life, empowering you to love and serve today and preparing you to joyfully love and serve for all eternity. Amen

[Blogger Mark Daniels is pastor of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio.]


Sunday, March 08, 2015

Where God Lives

[This was shared this morning during worship with the people and guests of Living Water Lutheran Church in Springboro, Ohio.]

John 2:13-22
Talk to anyone who has ever had their home broken into and they will always speak less of what was stolen and more about their sense of being violated, the feeling that their personal space has been desecrated by greedy hands. The experience evokes anger, even fury. Remembering this may help us to understand something of what Jesus felt and why He acted as He did during the incident recounted in today’s Gospel lesson.

Please turn to the lesson, John 2:13-22 (page 740 in the sanctuary Bibles). Jesus went to the temple in Jerusalem to celebrate Passover. Verse 14: “In the temple courts he found people selling cattle, sheep and doves, and others sitting at tables exchanging money.”

The temple was the one place on earth where God had promised to dwell among His chosen people. It was a holy place. The word holy, as we’ve mentioned before, means set apart. God had set apart this place on all the earth as the place where He would encounter all who worshiped Him.

But what Jesus saw when He arrived at the temple infuriated Him!

This holiest place on earth, set apart for the worship of God, was being violated, turned into a shopping mall.

As you know, one of the things worshipers did when they arrived at the temple was offer sacrifices to God. Depending on their incomes, they might offer oxen, lambs, doves, or, if they were exceptionally poor, grain. Because many Passover celebrants traveled long distances, they didn’t always bring their offerings with them, instead purchasing them at the temple. Merchants sold livestock there. And because the temple had its own money system, “money changers,” people who dealt in foreign currency exchange, also did business in the Temple court.

This was all authorized by the temple priests. They would have argued that, by doing so, they provided a service to people who had traveled hundreds, maybe thousands, of miles to obey God by celebrating the Passover in Jerusalem.

But these practices were far more sinister than that.

Under the Romans and their pretender kings, the Herods, the chief priests of the Jewish faith were appointed by the Roman governors. Being the chief priest was a plumb job for which many of the priestly types vied. In exchange for priestly appointments, the Romans got a cut of all the temple taxes collected.

The rates of exchange charged by the money changers and the prices commanded by the sellers of sacrificial livestock were inflated exorbitantly to allow the Romans and the priests to profit handsomely. It’s easy to do that when you have a monopoly.

This entire system was driven by greed and selfishness.

It desecrated the holy place where God dwelt.

This explains what happens next, in verses 15 and 16. Jesus “made a whip out of cords, and drove all from the temple courts, both sheep and cattle; he scattered the coins of the money changers and overturned their tables. To those who sold doves he said, ‘Get these out of here! Stop turning my Father’s house into a market!’”

The house of God and the grace of God had been monetized.

People who should have known better were ignoring the fact that the Temple was a space set apart for God to meet His people, not a place to transact business or to steal from the pious.

The understandable anger that people feel when their homes are broken into is but a fraction of the fury that Jesus felt on seeing the house of God being used wrongly!

Verse 17 says that Jesus’ disciples remembered a passage from Psalm 69:9, written by King David about one-thousand years earlier: “...zeal for your house consumes me.”

There, David was saying that God was so central to his existence that passion for God’s house, for the place where God lived, had subordinated all his other thoughts, motives, and priorities! This is what Jesus was feeling as He entered the temple.

But truly, it wasn’t the desecration of the temple as a place that aroused such fury in Jesus.

In the end, the Temple was just a building.

It was never meant to be anything other than “a shadow” of the heavenly throne room from which God reigns.

The real issue in all this commerce in the temple was this: If the people were buying and selling as though they were lining up for an attraction at Disney World had no zeal for the place where God had graciously promised to meet them on earth, what sort of zeal did they have for God Himself?

Verse 18. “The Jews [meaning here, the Temple authorities] then responded to him, ‘What sign can you show us to prove your authority to do all this?’”

Jesus had already given one sign of His authority and identity as God in the flesh, at Cana, where He turned water into wine.

Now, in response to the priests’ demand, Jesus gives a new sign of Who He is, a miracle that will require patient faith to see and believe. Look at verses 19-22. “Jesus answered them, ‘Destroy this temple, and I will raise it again in three days.’ They replied, ‘It has taken forty-six years to build this temple, and you are going to raise it in three days?’ But the temple he had spoken of was his body. After he was raised from the dead, his disciples recalled what he had said. Then they believed the scripture and the words that Jesus had spoken.”

The temple in which Jesus and the others stood at that moment wasn’t the first one built on the temple mount in Jerusalem. And, the one in today’s Gospel lesson would, in 70AD, about forty years after Jesus' death and resurrection, be destroyed by the Romans. Today, all that remains is a wailing wall in Jerusalem.

But the temple’s days were numbered in another and more important way. Look at John 1:14: “The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us.” You’ll remember that this literally means that Jesus, God the Word, tabernacled or pitched His tent in the world. God no longer would live in buildings so easily desecrated by human beings who forget the fear and love for God that make up faith in God. God would live among us on this earth in other ways.

First of all, God would come to the world in the person of Jesus Himself. Colossians 1:19 says that, “...God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in [Jesus Christ].” Jesus is the Holy of the holies. He is God.

Short-sighted human beings thought they could be their own gods, buying and selling salvation and sinning with no accountability to God. (We still think that, it seems.) So, just as Jesus foretells in our Gospel lesson, they tried to tear down the new and best Temple, Jesus. They crucified Jesus. But He rose again.

In John 10:18, Jesus says of His crucifixion and resurrection: “No one takes [My earthly life] from me, but I lay it down of my own accord. I have authority to lay it down and authority to take it up again. This command I received from my Father.”

This, Jesus says, is the sign of His authority, that He, by his own decision voluntarily gives Himself as the perfect sacrifice for our sin that nobody has to buy or pay for and He, not human beings, has the power to take up the life He voluntarily sacrificed.

Nobody--not the devil and not sinful people trying to swipe our money, or plague our consciences, or build their own egos at our expense--can put themselves between God and us. In Jesus, God has acted and today, He lives.

But if Jesus is God among us and He is the temple, how can we be made right with Him? The temple was a place where people made sacrifice for their sins. This is like a question once asked of Jesus: “What must we do to do the works God requires? Jesus answered, ‘The work of God is this: to believe in the one he has sent.’”

Jesus was outraged that people who should have known better forgot that God had blessed them out of pure fatherly and divine mercy, made them His own people, and called them to be a light to all nations, helping the nations see that all who will turn from sin and believe in Him will live with God forever.

Because of God's grace, through Jesus, God’s presence on earth is no longer confined to a tabernacle on a Judean hill!

He can be seen today in God's Word and in the Sacraments, of course.

But He can also be seen in the people who follow Jesus.

First Corinthians 6:19-20 says that whoever turns from sin and believes in Jesus Christ is a temple of the Holy Spirit where God dwells! Imagine that.

Through Jesus, Christians are the places where God today dwells on this earth.

We don’t need to go to buildings to find Him.

We don’t need to make sacrifices to reach Him.

We don’t need to burn candles in order to attract Him.

He comes to live in all who welcome Him into their lives. In Revelation 3:20, Jesus says: "Here I am! I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in and eat with that person, and they with me."

Now, the holy of holies can be found in all who repent and believe in Jesus Christ and who daily live that belief by turning to Christ for grace, guidance, forgiveness, and hope.

God lives in all who acknowledge with both their lips and their lives that Jesus Christ is Lord and Savior and King over everything.

That's a somewhat scary thought because, speaking for myself, I know that I can be a somewhat shaky temple for the Holy Spirit. I can forget to trust God. I sin. The truth is that like the temple in Jerusalem, we frail temples of the Holy Spirit, we believers in Jesus, must regularly be cleansed by the savage grace of Jesus Christ.

Without regular prayer, confession and repentance, worship with God’s people, receiving Christ’s body and blood, personal study of God’s Word, and submission to examination and correction by our Lord, these temples of flesh and blood can be desecrated by sin as certainly as the temple in Jerusalem was.

In Psalm 51, David prays: “Wash away all my iniquity and cleanse me from my sin.” Each day we need to pray, “Lord, cleanse this temple.”

Christ can cleanse the repentant, forgive our sin, strengthen our faith, and fill us with His Holy Spirit’s power for living.

Christ can make each of us ever fitter places for the King of kings to take up residence, places where the devil, the world, and our sinful selves are kept at bay and Jesus reigns as our loving God, Lord, and King.

May we daily submit to Christ so that, like the temple cleansed, God will live in us and through us, now and eternally. Amen

Sunday, March 03, 2013

Holy Communion (Part 9, The Augsburg Confession)

[This was shared during both worship services with the people and guests of Saint Matthew Lutheran Church in Logan, Ohio, this morning.]

This morning, we continue to consider what it means to be a Lutheran Christian. Our topic today is what we Lutherans believe about Holy Communion. To understand what Lutherans confess about Communion, it helps to consider how we have historically read the Bible.

The entire Lutheran movement is rooted in taking the Bible’s witness about God, including both the Old and New Testaments, seriously. Martin Luther, the Roman Catholic priest and scholar whose work with the Bible led him to discover anew the truth that human beings are saved from inevitable sin and death by God's grace through their faith in Jesus Christ alone and to the Reformation and the Lutheran movement wrote:
No violence is to be done to the words of God, whether by man or angel; but [the Scriptures] are to be retained in their simplest meaning wherever possible, and to be understood in their grammatical and literal sense unless the context plainly forbids it. 
More than one Lutheran pastor and theologian through the centuries has said that Lutheran Christians take the Bible as it comes, seeking to avoid imposing the preferences, prejudices, and prevailing philosophies of their own times on God’s eternal word.

So, for example, when a Lutheran views passages that say, “The mountains skipped like rams,” or “Let the hills sing for joy,” Lutherans don’t believe that mountains skipped or hills sang. Clearly, the Biblical writers in these instances were speaking metaphorically.

And the Bible “comes at us” with many forms of literary expression: history, poetry, song, wise adages, prophecy, and strange apocalyptic literature, to name a few.

There are passages of Scripture that are clear works of fiction, as in Jesus’ parables, stories Jesus made up to make important points. That’s why a Lutheran traveling in the Holy Land would never fall for the advertising of a hotel between Jerusalem and Jericho claiming to the be the inn at which the good Samaritan deposited the wounded man from Jesus’ parable about what it means to love one’s neighbor.

But Lutheran Christians have also historically believed that when the Bible witnesses to events with seriousness and consistency in places that don’t purport to be metaphor or parable, the plain sense of a passage is always to be preferred. This is why Lutheran Christians have historically never shied away from confessing that Jesus was born, miraculously, of a virgin’s womb; that He performed miracles as signs of His being God, with dominion over life and death; that He died on a cross for our sins; that He actually physically rose from the dead; and that faith in this Lord of heaven and earth is, as Jesus insisted repeatedly during His earthly ministry, the only way to forgiveness of sin and eternal life with God.

The documents we Lutherans have always said express our understanding of what it means to be Christians--from the Apostles’ Creed to The Augsburg Confession, from the Small Catechism to the Smalcald Articles--have always insisted that those facts about God and salvation that Scripture insists to be absolutely true are facts and truths we absolutely believe. While today’s Evangelical Lutheran Church in America has never repudiated this Lutheran understanding of Biblical truth, you will find that many of our pastors, theologians, bishops, and others do repudiate things like things like the virgin birth, the physical resurrection from the dead, and the necessity of faith in Christ for salvation, expressed in conferences, assemblies, official papers, and publications by our own publishing house and no one in the hierarchy of our denomination steps in to say, “No, actually, this is what Lutheran Christians confess.”

All of which leads us to Holy Communion and a simple verb, is.

Please pull out a Bible and turn to Mark 14:22. Three of the gospel writers and Paul write about Jesus’ institution of Holy Communion. And while John doesn't mention the institution of either Baptism or Communion, the two sacraments of the Church, He starts His account of Jesus’ ministry with the miracle of turning water into wine, symbolic of Baptism and and Communion, and describes how, within moments of Jesus’ death, a sword was driven through His side and out came water and blood. So, we can conclude that both sacraments are important. Look at what we’re told by Mark about the night when Jesus instituted Holy Communion: “And as they were eating, Jesus took bread, blessed and broke it, and gave it to them and said, ‘Take, eat; this is My body.” Then, look at verse 24, where Jesus says, “This is My blood of the new covenant, which is shared for many.”

Our Roman Catholic friends read this passage and, employing the Aristotelian philosophy favored by Saint Thomas Aquinas who was influenced by the Greek philosopher Aristotle, say that in Communion, bread and wine become Jesus’ body and blood and remain so beyond a congregation’s time of worship. This is why the bread is stored in a box called a tabernacle next to the altars of Roman Catholic sanctuaries.

Our Protestant friends say that the bread and the wine represent Christ’s body and blood and that Communion is a time, not to be re-membered to Christ and His Church of every time and place, as we believe, but only to recall what Jesus has done for us, a ceremonial memorial.

Lutherans have historically said, in effect, “It all depends on what your definition of is is.”

We believe that the bread is Christ’s body because Jesus says it is His body.

We believe that the wine is Christ’s blood because Jesus says it is His blood.

We believe that Christ’s body and blood are in, with, and under the bread and the wine of Holy Communion.

We have no way of understanding or explaining it. If we could explain it, we ourselves would be God...and we're not!

We only have Christ’s promise that when His words of promise, what we call the Words of Institution, are said again over the bread and the wine as His people worship, He comes to us again.

Holy Communion is a way that the risen Jesus, now ascended into heaven, can come to us and assure us of the truth of His promise that He is with us always, that He will never leave us nor forsake us.

It’s though Jesus is telling us, “I know that it’s hard to believe in Me or My promises when you can’t see me. But here’s My body. Here’s My blood. Taste and see the goodness of the Lord. See my wounds, touch my body. I am with you.”

Someone has said that Holy Communion is like “the hat on the invisible man.” If a man were invisible, you might not know he was around unless he put on a hat. We can’t see Jesus. But when we invoke His words of promise over bread and wine, He really is with us.

But Holy Communion is more than just an assurance of Christ’s presence with us, wonderful though that is. For those who trust in Christ when He says that He is in the bread and is in the wine, there is also assurance that His forgiveness of our sins--sins which would otherwise send us to eternal separation from God in hell--is ours.

Turn, please, to John 1:29. Early in Jesus’ ministry, John the Baptist catches sight of Jesus and says: “Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world.”

Before Jesus came into the world, God’s people would annually sacrifice unblemished lambs on the altar in Jerusalem. The lambs were stand-ins for themselves. The lambs died to take the punishment for sin that every human being deserves. The ancient Hebrews understood that blood had power. It contained the very power for life. Loss of too much blood brings loss of life. Blood is life.

That’s why, after Cain, a son of Adam and Eve, killed his brother Abel, God said that Abel’s blood was crying out to Him.

Many millenia later, when God’s people were slaves in Egypt, God delivered them from slavery through an action that, to this day, Jews celebrate at Passover. They smeared the blood of lambs on the doorposts of their dwellings and while the angel of death brought the deaths of firstborns all across Egypt, the angel passed over the homes of the Jews.

In a sense, as we receive Christ’s blood in Holy Communion, we are covered by the sacrifice of Himself that Christ made when He willingly went to the cross for us. The blood of Jesus cries out for us to say to God the Father, “This man belongs to Me. This woman is one of My own. This child is My child.”

This is why we should never receive the Sacrament flippantly or with anything other than the joy and reverence it deserves. I’m not saying here that you must affect a particular emotion in order to receive the bread and the wine. Fortunately, the power of Holy Communion doesn’t depend on how we’re feeling on any given day. Whether you’re sad or happy has no bearing on Christ’s promises, “This is my body”; “This is my blood.” But the Sacrament must be received with faith, even if that faith is only the size of a mustard seed. We must be willing to trust Christ when He promises that He is with us and that He brings us forgiveness of sin when He comes to us in the Sacrament.

This is what Paul is talking about when he says in 1 Corinthians: “Whoever, therefore, eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be answerable for the body and blood of the Lord. Examine yourselves, and only then eat of the bread and drink of the cup. For all who eat and drink without discerning the body, eat and drink judgment against themselves” (1 Corinthians 11:27-29).

Please open the buff and brown edition of The Augsburg Confession and turn to Article 10, "The Lord’s Supper":
Our [Lutheran] churches teach that the body and blood of Christ are truly present and distributed to those who eat the Lord’s Supper...They reject those who teach otherwise. 
Holy Communion is one of the greatest gifts a Christian can receive, which is why the people in the early Church received it every single time they worshiped.

It’s why Martin Luther and the early Lutherans received Holy Communion every single Sunday they worshiped. Luther also offered it every single Wednesday of every week and on other occasions as well.

It was only in America, where there was a shortage of pastors, that every Sunday celebration of Holy Communion fell into disuse.

If a church has a regularly called minister of a Word and Sacrament and Holy Communion isn’t being celebrated every single week, that church is a bit like a motorcycle with one wheel, trying to move along with only one of the blessings God intends to give His people every time they gather to worship Him.

But no matter how often the Sacrament is shared, if those who receive Holy Communion don’t believe in Jesus, believe in the Word of God in the Bible, or believe in Christ’s promises regarding Holy Communion, the elements are only bread and wine.

As Luther says in the Small Catechism, we must believe in Christ’s promise, “Given and shed for you.”

When we do, we are blessed beyond all telling!

Thursday, February 26, 2009

40-Days to Servanthood: Day 2

Above all, God means for you to be a servant.

Yesterday, we established that God’s goal for you is that you become like Jesus. But when God came to the world in Jesus Christ, what was He like?

Paul tackled this question in a letter that appears in our New Testament. There, the apostle urges the members of the first-century church in the city of Philippi to think and act like Jesus in their life together:
“Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death— even death on a cross. Therefore God also highly exalted him and gave him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bend, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father” (Philippians 2:5-11, New Revised Standard Version).
You see, Jesus had nothing to prove. He was God. So, when a crowd, impressed that He had filled their bellies with food, chased after Him to force Him into becoming the sort of King they wanted, He refused (John 6:22-40). When the crowds who welcomed Him on the first Palm Sunday pressed Him to throw the Roman Conquerors out of Jerusalem, Jesus again refused. He would be a King on His own terms, a Servant King. Jesus served in small ways--turning water into wine at a Judean wedding (John 2:1-12)--and in the very biggest way of all, giving His life on a cross. But, confident of Who He was, Jesus had no need to “throw His weight around,” coercing people into following Him. He lovingly served others and as a result, many wanted to follow Him.

Because of your confidence in the risen Jesus, you can dare to live like Him. Above all, God means for you to be a servant.

Bible Passage to Ponder: “Think of yourselves the way Christ Jesus thought of himself...he took on the status of a slave...” (Philippians 2:5-11, The Message)