The Third Son

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

Matthew 21:23-32

When I look back on the messages I’ve preached about today’s gospel lesson, Matthew 21:23-32, through the years, I’ve mostly gotten it wrong.  My sermons have basically gone like this: “Be like the first son in Jesus’ parable and not like the second son. Amen.”

Now, that’s godly law, of course. It is right to honor our fathers and mothers and others in authority over us, which is what the fourth commandment tells us to do. Both sons failed to do this, whether initially or later.

It is right to not bear false witness, which is what the eighth commandment tells us not to do. The first son violated this command by saying yes to his father’s order to work in the field and then not doing so.

We certainly need to hear these and the rest of God’s Laws given in the Ten Commandments:

You shall have no other gods;

You shall not take the name of the Lord, your God, in vain;

Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy;

You shall not kill;

You shall not commit adultery;

You shall not steal;

You shall not covet your neighbor’s house, spouse, workers, livestock, or anything that belongs to your neighbor.

These commands are still God’s will for us and as people born into sin, each of us is liable to the fire of hell for our violation of God’s Law.

The problem, of course, is that we all know the Law and the will of God is–it’s summarized by Jesus as “Love God with all your being and love your neighbor as you love yourself”--but we don’t obey God’s Law.

“In my inner being I delight in God’s law,” the apostle Paul confesses in the New Testament book of Romans, “but I see another law at work in me, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within me.” (Romans 7:22-23)

Knowing God’s Law informs us of God’s will for us human beings.

It may even lead us to regret our sin.

But knowing God’s Law or even having regret will not fit us for life with God.

Only the righteous will be fit for eternity with God. Jesus says, “Unless your righteousness [meaning, your innocence of sin, your perfect submission to God, your complete selflessness in relationship to others] surpasses that of the Pharisees and the teachers of the law, you will certainly not enter the kingdom of heaven.” (Matthew 5:20)

So, what’s to become of us?

How can we possibly be that righteous?

That innocent and pure and sinless?

The chief priests and the elders of Jesus’ day were sure they had cracked that code. They thought they could make themselves righteous by obeying God’s Law.

They were so certain that they had made themselves righteous that when John the Baptizer had called people to repent–that is, to turn from sin and to turn to God for forgiveness–in order to prepare for the coming of the Savior, Jesus, they refused to repent or receive John’s baptism of repentance.

Like the second son in Jesus’ parable, they claimed to say, “Yes” to God; but when God’s call to repentance and faith came to them, they said, “No.”

Meanwhile, prostitutes, corrupt tax collectors, and other notorious sinners who had been saying, “No” to God all their lives, like the first son in Jesus’ parable, heard John’s call to repentance, recognized and turned from their sin and turned to faith in God.

All of this lay in the background of today’s gospel lesson.

It takes place on the Monday of what we call “Holy Week,” the day after Jesus entered Jerusalem on Palm Sunday. On that day, you’ll remember, Jesus had turned the money-changers, extortionists authorized to be there by the chief priests and the elders, out of the temple, overturning their tables and loot and freeing the sheep and birds they were selling on the temple grounds.

The next day, when Jesus and His disciples show up at the temple, they ask Jesus, “By what authority are you doing these things?...And who gave you this authority?” (Matthew 21:23)

Jesus wasn’t a seminary graduate. Nor was He ordained by them. Where did His authority, not only for His Palm Sunday temple tantrum, but for forgiving sinners, healing, casting out demons, and raising people from the dead, come from?

Jesus’ exchange with them is well known. Jesus tells them that before answering their question about where His authority came from, they needed to answer His question to them: Did John the Baptizer’s authority to repent people, that is, to turn them from sin and turn them to God, through water and the Word, come from? Was it from God in heaven? Or had John simply authorized himself?

If they said John’s ministry had come from God, they would have to answer why they had rejected John; if they said John was a loose cannon with no authority from God to preach or baptize repentance, they would anger many who had valued John’s ministry.

So, the chief priests and the elders refused to answer Jesus’ question. “We don’t know,” they said.

Jesus then says if they won’t answer Him, He won’t answer them. To these hard-hearted men, sure of their own righteousness, Jesus used what we call the binding key of the Law, instead of the loosing key of the Gospel.

He let the chief priests and the elders stand in condemnation for their sin because they refused to acknowledge what is true for all of us: They were sinners in need of God’s forgiveness.

But Jesus doesn’t give up easily on sinners. So, he tells the priests and the elders the parable of the two sons we hear in our lesson. The first son is like the chief priests and the elders, and maybe like you and me, saying yes to God, but then turning away. These are the people of good intentions: their spirits are willing but their flesh is weak. I can certainly be like this.

The second son is like willful sinners, and maybe like you and me sometimes, saying no to God, but then, when God’s Word works on us, calling us to turn to God and to God’s way, for forgiveness and life with God, saying yes to His grace and forgiveness.

But, friends, there’s a third Son in our Gospel lesson for today. This son, unlike the other two, isn’t a fictional creation of Jesus. This Son is very real.

This is the Son Who said to His Father after His Father told Him to go to a cross to offer His sinless life on a cross so that sinners like you and me can be forgiven and can have life with God, “My Father, if it is possible, may this cup [of suffering and death] be taken from me. Yet not as I will, but as you will.” (Matthew 26:39)

This is the Son Who, though without sin, insisted that John the Baptizer baptize Him in the Jordan, where He took on the condemnation of our sin and our death in order “to fulfill all righteousness.” (Matthew 3:15)

Jesus gave up His righteousness to us, becoming sin who knew no sin, so that in the only perfect act of love and obedience this world has ever seen, rendered on the cross, He could take our guilt and give us His innocence.

He could overcome our selfishness with His selflessness.

He could take blame for our rebellion against God’s Law of love by submitting totally to God.

Jesus is the Son Who says “Yes” to God’s call to die and rise for us and then, despite the pain, the humiliation, and sorrow of it, does just that.

It’s because of Jesus and through Jesus, the faithful Son, that you and I, fickle and often faithless sons and daughters of God, can daily turn to Him, unloading our sins onto Him at the cross and be justified, made righteous and clean and eternally new in the eyes of God.

This is Christ’s promise to you, friends: the repentant receive God’s yes through Christ, no matter how many times we may have previously said, “No” to Him.

“For,” as Saint Paul writes, “ no matter how many promises God has made, they are ‘Yes’ in Christ.” (2 Corinthians 1:20)

Jesus, the obedient Son, has said yes to the Father and in doing so, has said yes to you!

Because of that, you can turn to Him and live forgiven and free, today and always. Amen

The King Who Ignores Our Expectations

[This was prepared to share during the morning worship services of Living Water Lutheran Church in Springboro, Ohio.]

Matthew 11:2-15
Life sometimes throws us curveballs.

The curveballs can be good or bad.

But whether good or bad, they break from our expectations.

They can leave us breathless with horror.

Or dazzled with wonder.

Grateful beyond expression.

Saddened beyond telling.

A man looks forward to retirement, expecting long years of enjoyment with his wife, but learns he has Stage 4 cancer weeks before his retirement date.

A woman, long hurt by life, assuming that she will always be alone, suddenly and amazingly falls in love with a wonderful man she hadn’t dared to hope existed for her.

Expectations dashed.

Expectations exceeded.

The curveballs of life are enough to counsel us, I think, to check our expectations.

For believers in the God Who has revealed Himself to the world in Jesus Christ, it means, above all I think, learning to pray the hardest prayer of all: “Thy will be done.”

I can tell you that much of my life as a Christian, even to this day, has been spent learning to conform my expectations to the will of God, to truly learn to pray with my Savior, “Not as I will, but as you will."

I have not yet learned how to fully yield to God’s will for my life over against my expectations of what my life should be.

I have not yet fully learned what Paul teaches in 1 Corinthians 6:19, that my life is not really my own. And that is doubly true. It's true first, because I didn't bring my life into being. And it's true second, because Jesus Christ died and rose to give me new and everlasting life. Still I struggle over proprietary rights with God. I struggle to accept that my life does not belong to me and God doesn't dance to the tune I punch in on life's juke box.

Maybe you struggle with this just like I do.

If that is our common struggle here this morning (or one of them), our Gospel lesson for today tells us that we are not alone.

John the Baptist had certain expectations of the Messiah or the Christ. Messiah (Meshiah) is the Hebrew word for Anointed One; Christ, Christos in the original Greek of the New Testament, carries the same meaning.

John rightly understood that the Messiah, Who He correctly identified as Jesus, was going to bring judgment on this old world of sin.

John also understood that Jesus was to be the legitimate King of the Jews Who would bring the Kingdom of heaven to this earth.

But John’s expectations of what that meant, of what kind of King Jesus would be, of what the kingdom looked like, were very different from what Jesus seemed to be as Jesus traveled from place to place, preaching, teaching, and performing miraculous signs.

John was looking for a king who, acting in God’s righteousness, would supplant the corrupt and violent Herod, the king who had slapped John into jail in his own house because John’s proclamation of a new king threatened him.

John wondered what was going on.

Jesus wasn’t what he had expected.

That’s where our Gospel lesson starts and this morning, I hope you don’t mind, I want to focus on just the first few verses of the lesson today. Please go to it, Matthew 11:2-6 (page 682 in the pew Bibles). It begins: “When John heard in prison what Christ was doing, he sent his disciples to ask him, ‘Are you the one who was to come, or should we expect someone else?’ Jesus replied, ‘Go back and report to John what you hear and see: The blind receive sight, the lame walk, those who have leprosy are cured, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the good news is preached to the poor...’”

John was all-in for Jesus. Yet Jesus wasn’t doing any of the things John had expected of God's Anointed One!

Jesus hadn’t taken the reins of political power, hadn’t purified the temple and the priesthood, hadn’t put the righteous into power, hadn’t established the kingdom of heaven.

In His response, Jesus’ told John He needed to change his expectations. There was to be more to the kingdom of heaven than judgment!

Do you remember what happened when, near the beginning of His ministry, Jesus went to His hometown of Nazareth? To define His mission as the Messiah and the Kingdom He had come to earth to bring, Jesus chose to read from Isaiah 61:1-2. Please turn to it on page 517. It says: “The Spirit of the Sovereign LORD is on me, because the LORD has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim freedom for the captives and release from darkness for the prisoners, to proclaim the year of the LORD's favor and the day of vengeance of our God, to comfort all who mourn...”

Jesus does bring judgment, of course. It’s the judgment we pass on ourselves when deciding whether or not to receive the offer of life and forgiveness and joy that comes from God through Jesus alone. As Jesus told Nicodemus: “This is the verdict: Light has come into the world, but men loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil.” And the aged Simeon said of Jesus when the Lord was only eight days old, brought to the temple by Mary and Joseph to be circumcised: "This child is destined to cause the falling and rising of many in Israel, and to be a sign that will be spoken against, so that the thoughts of many hearts will be revealed."

People cast judgment on themselves--we cast judgment on ourselves--whenever we choose the darkness of life without God and when we choose sin over the brightness of forgiveness and fresh life that comes from Jesus, the Light of the world.

But judgment is not ultimately why Jesus came into the world.

And it isn’t why He will one day return to the world.

Jesus also told Nicodemus: “God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him.”

All who believe in the Name of Jesus are saved to live in the kingdom of heaven where, Revelation 21:4 says that Jesus “will wipe away every tear from [believers’] eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.”

This is why Jesus presents the evidence for His being Messiah to the emissaries of John the Baptist that He does. The words Jesus cites come from Isaiah 35:5-6. Please go there, page 497. Here, God’s ultimate intentions--beyond sin and death and judgment--and the content of life in His kingdom are described: “Then will the eyes of the blind be opened and the ears of the deaf unstopped. Then will the lame leap like a deer, and the mute tongue shout for joy. Water [living water?] will gush forth in the wilderness and streams in the desert.”

Jesus didn't come into the world to force God’s kingdom on us.

He came so that all who trust in Him will receive a new Eden, an eternal city where there is no darkness, only light; no death, only life; no despair, only hope!

Jesus performed the signs of the coming Kingdom so that people would not feel forced or coerced into following Him but so that, in seeing, they would be open to believing in--to betting their lives on--Jesus and Jesus only! And so that by believing in Jesus, that kingdom would invade their (our) daily lives in this world and, one day, at what one of the old hymns called “the consummation,” believers in Christ will live in that new Eden, the new heavens and the new earth, the new creation.

In essence, Jesus tells John's disciples, “Tell John about the signs."

Then, Jesus says: “Blessed is the man who does not fall away on account of me."

In verse 11 of our lesson, Jesus says: “among those born of women there has not risen anyone greater than John the Baptist.” Yet John, like you and me and every other human being on the planet this morning, was left with a critical decision when considering the life, deeds, signs, death, and resurrection of Jesus:

• Would he yield to the testimony of Christ’s activities on earth and the promptings of the Holy Spirit to leave himself open to accepting that Jesus is the One Who came into the world to destroy the fallen kingdoms of this world and to bring God’s kingdom into being?
• Or would John turn his back on Jesus because Jesus didn’t match the limited expectations he had of the Savior?

I have known people who have rejected Jesus because Jesus didn’t turn out to be what they wanted Him to be.

He didn’t do what they wanted Him to do when they wanted Him to do it.

He didn’t thwart the unfair boss.

He didn’t save the marriage.

He didn’t help them get into the National Honor Society.

He didn’t cure a loved one’s cancer.

I don’t say any of this to condemn those who reject Jesus because they have been hurt! Through the years, it’s been my experience that atheists are generally more sensitive about the hurts of the world than are we Christians. (To the shame of we Christians.)

It’s that very sensitivity and the belief that life in this world should be better than it is that leads many atheists to spurn God.

But, when I was an atheist, I had to ask myself, “Where does my sense that things ought to be better come from if not from the God Who made us for something better?”

The truth is that a godless universe would give us no reason to hold up things like love, justice, or grace as ways of life to which human beings should aspire.

If we are all the result of some random collision of elements derived from some unknown force and if all of life is a contest for the survival of the fittest, our stubborn human ideas about right and wrong would be inexplicable.

For me then, atheism, though perhaps understandable as a reaction to life, simply doesn't account for all of life's realities.

Others become atheists because, like John the Baptist who wrestled with doubts in a cell in Herod’s prison, the God they tried to believe in didn’t meet their expectations. Their picture of what God should be like was based on their preferences, not on Who God has revealed Himself to be. They tried to domesticate God.

In the first volume of C.S. Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia, in which four children from our world visit an alternative universe and are told about Aslan. Aslan is a figure of Christ in Lewis' books, "the great King, Son of the Emperor-beyond-the-sea." When informed that Aslan was a lion, one of the children asks, "Is he safe?" The reply: "Course he isn't safe. But he's good. He's the king..."

Jesus is like that. He is the King. He is good. But if we're looking for safety, we should look elsewhere for our Savior. Jesus calls us to turn away from the safety of our favorite sins, the safety of lives turned inward for our own ends to a life lived for Him and for our neighbor.

It’s at those moments when God fails to meet our expectations that we need to consider Jesus. We need to look at Him closely.

The gospels’ accounts about Jesus’ time on earth tell us all we need to know to have saving faith and to expand our faith in Jesus, despite the hard realities of life.

The four Gospels in the New Testament--Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John--make it possible for us to do exactly what Jesus said that John the Baptist should do: Look at what He did and why. See how He had control of life and death, yet never used that control for selfish purposes, not even self-preservation when they nailed His hands and feet to a cross. See the compassion of God evident in Jesus.

In effect, Jesus says, “Decide for yourself from the evidence Who I am!” Look at Jesus closely and we see the God of the universe Who may be different from our expectations, but Who is exactly the King we need!

Toward the end of his Gospel, another John writes: “Jesus did many other miraculous signs in the presence of his disciples [including, most miraculous of all, His death and resurrection], which are not recorded in this book. But these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name.” If you would know God, look to Jesus!

Someone once wrote that life in this world is “nasty, brutish, and short.”* There is truth in that, although there is also much beauty, love, and wonder in this world.

I got another precious glimpse of that yesterday. One of the littlest of our Christmas carolers approached us in the kitchen after we'd been singing in the neighborhood, her nose running. She asked for a tissue. There were no tissues there, so I handed her a few napkins from the dispenser. She took the napkins and blew her nose as well as she could, then handed the napkins back to me. If that isn't precious and beautiful, I don't know what is!

Beauty and wonder still rise stubbornly "like grass through cement" in this fallen world. Despite our sin and the calamities it has brought to our life on this planet, we see glimpses of how perfect this world was meant to be, how dependent and trusting we were made to be toward God and one another, every day.

But if we expect that Jesus is going to make this world--unrepentant and self-driven--into Eden, we misunderstand Him.

If we think that Jesus has laid down a political program by which people of can live out certain principles and give the world a makeover.

One of the worst sins we commit in post-modern Christianity, whether conservative or liberal, is the sin of idolatry, turning Jesus into the God we prefer, replacing His deity and Lordship with our particular political preferences and programs so that we can get what we want in this world. That, friends, is a scandal!

And it's stupid because this world is under a death sentence!

This world must die so that the new world, the new Eden can come into being.

We must die--in the waters of Baptism and in daily repentance and renewal--so that the Kingdom can enter us and so that we can be part of the Kingdom.

The God we know in Jesus, “able to do immeasurably more than we ask or imagine” has bigger plans for us than remodeling this dying creation.

Eternal plans.

Plans not to harm us, but to give us a future no longer darkened by sin or death or futility.

He has come and will come again to establish a kingdom in which tears are dried, the lame walk, even run, and the aggrieved know joy.

Jesus is the sign and the seal of God’s good intentions for the human race.

His death and resurrection are God’s guarantee of life free from sin and death for all who dare to surrender to Jesus Christ.

The kingdom Jesus died and rose to bring into being is living in and among those who believe in Him, the Church, despite the imperfections of we individual Christians.

We are even today empowered by His Spirit to give sight to the blind, cleansing to the leprous, life to the dead, food to the hungry, shelter to the homeless, and good news that brings everlasting life.

We see that in the many ministries pursued by the people of Living Water.

May we remain open to being conduits of Jesus’ kingdom each day.

May we become ever more receptive to going wherever our King calls us to be.

And may others see the signs of Jesus in our life and so, with us, come to everlasting life in His Name.

Amen

*The writer was Thomas Hobbes. He was actually specifically referencing war. But in my lifetime, war has been a sufficiently central feature of human existence that I feel no hesitation in saying that it reflects life in this world.

Which Do We Need: Fixer or High Priest?

[This was shared today during worship with the people of Saint Matthew Lutheran Church in Logan, Ohio.]

Hebrews 5:5-10
In the movie, The Painted Veil, Naomi Watts plays a spoiled daughter of wealth who marries a scientist committed to doing good for others. She finds her husband a bore. One night in a remote Chinese village, she and her husband are at the home of an Englishman whose Chinese wife, unable to speak any English, clearly adores her husband. Why, Kitty Fane, Watts’ character, asks the English man, does his wife love him so? He translates Kitty’s question for his wife and the answer comes back, “She says because I am a good man.” Kitty nearly spits out her reaction: “As if a woman ever fell in love with a man for his virtues.”

We all know men and women like that who think that the only kind of person worth falling in love with is one who is self-centered, physically imposing, rude, or inclined to ignore or disrespect those less “gifted” than themselves.

But good women or men who fall for bad members of the opposite sex aren’t the only ones who throw in with people who sin with little sense of dishonor or shame.

Whole nations--like Nazi Germany--have been known to give their allegiance and even worship to people they knew to be evil but who “kept the trains running on time.”

Less dramatically, we ourselves have a tendency in our own culture to wink at evil-doers while labeling those who try to do the right things in life as “wimps.”

“Marketing” Jesus in a world like this, a world that loves sinful heroes who impose their wills on others, has always been a tough sell for Christians.

Our second lesson for today, Hebrews 5:5-10, says that Jesus is our “high priest.” The question, I suppose, is why would anyone want a high priest when what we really want is to wink at us as we “get away with murder,” to experience what we imagine being God, the master of the universe, must be like?

And what exactly is a high priest, anyway?

Please look at the verses just before our lesson, Hebrews 5:1-4 for an answer to that question.

Hebrews is describing the faithful descendants of Levi, one of Jacob’s sons, back in Old Testament times. Levi’s descendants were the priests of ancient Israel.

In verse one, we’re told that the high priests offered “both gifts and sacrifices for sins.” The priests made offerings to God as the people repented for their sins and trusted God to forgive them.

In verse 2, we’re told that a high priest “can have compassion on those who are ignorant and going astray, since he himself is subject to weakness.” The high priest had what we call empathy. He knew what it was like to be human and understood how human beings can fall into sin.

Verse 3 says that the high priest so identified with the weaknesses of the people that he offered sacrifices for his own sins as well as those of the people. Faithful priests never held themselves up as being superior to others. They were servants. Jesus exhibited this very attitude when He went to the Jordan to baptized by John. John's baptism was a sign of the baptized person's repentance. Jesus was sinless and had no need to repent. That's why John objected to baptizing Jesus. Matthew's gospel says:

Then Jesus came from Galilee to John at the Jordan, to be baptized by him. John would have prevented him, saying, "I need to be baptized by You, and do You come to me?" But Jesus answered him, "Let it be so now; for it is proper for us in this way to fulfill all righteousness." (Matthew 3:14-15)

Like the high priests of the Old Testament period, Jesus identified with you and me and our needs for reconciliation and rightness with God.

Hebrews 5:4 then says that no one dared to take the honor of the priesthood for himself--something that was going on in the first century world in which Hebrews was written--but was called to it by God.

The high priest wasn’t a dictator who kept the trains running on time! He:

• prayed for those who fell into sin, 
• bore compassion for those subject to temptation, 
• identified with the people he served, and 
• didn’t do the job because he thought he was qualified or because he loved the honor or felt himself to be better than others. He served as high priest just because God had called him. 

Fine, we might think, the high priests were “nice” guys. But when we’re up against the calamities of life--job loss, relational discord, divorce, disobedience in children, irresponsibility in parents, violence, terrorism, fatal disease, death, grief--what good is a high priest?

What good is a virtuous servant of God when what we want is a “fixer” who can get us out of the fixes we’re in?

God evidently thinks that in the face of all our life’s enemies, including sin and death, a high priest is precisely what we need.

Look now at what Hebrews tells us about Jesus in our lesson, Hebrews 5:5-10.

Verse 5: “Christ did not glorify Himself to become High Priest...”

Don't be mistaken about what this means. Jesus was clear about proclaiming Who He was: God in human flesh. “I and My Father are one,” He says in John 10:30, for example.

And yet, Jesus never forced anyone to acknowledge Him as God and Savior. Jesus never sought honors from the world. He only sought to do the will of the Father. Like the high priests of old, Jesus never glorified Himself or pushed Himself ahead of others. Jesus didn’t take the job of the great high priest of creation; it was conferred on Him by God the Father Who said, “This is My beloved Son, in Whom I am well. Hear him!” (Matthew 17:5)

In Hebrews 5:6, the preacher says too, that the Father spoke the words of Psalm 110:4 to Jesus: “You are a priest forever, according to the order of Melchizedek.”

What on earth is that about?

Melchizedek is mentioned in just two places in the Old Testament: in the Psalm quoted here in Hebrews and in Genesis 14:18-20.

There, we’re told that Abraham has just returned from a battle in which he saved his nephew Lot and Lot’s family and possessions from a coalition of five kingdoms that had kidnapped them. After the battle, Melchizedek comes from Salem, Shalom in Hebrew, a word that means Peace, among other things. Salem existed at the very site on which Jerusalem and the temple would be built hundreds of years later.

Now, think of this: Long before Abraham’s grandson Jacob had a son named Levi, who would become the ancestor of Israel’s high priests...long before there was a temple or a Jerusalem, God had a high priest bringing God's shalom, God's peace, and the availability of reconciliation with God to the human race.

Already, 2000 years before Jesus was born, crucified, or resurrected, God was laying the foundation for our salvation from sin and death through Jesus.

Priests, you see, are the conduits between heaven and earth of God’s law and promise.

They offer up prayers for sinful humanity and they convey the call of God to humanity to repent and believe in God. (The New Testament book of 1 Peter says, by the way, that every baptized believer in Jesus is a priest of God. That includes you and me. That though, is a topic for another sermon some day.)

Genesis says that Melchizedek was “the priest of God Most High” long before the ancestors of Israel’s high priests were even conceived. And unlike the descendants of Levi who inherited their priesthood, Melchizedek received his call, not by inheritance, but directly from God.

And Melchizedek wasn’t just a high priest. He was also the king of Salem.

That may not seem earth-shaking to us. But in those days, kings were kings and priests were priests and the twain rarely, if ever, met...usually with terrible results.

Even today, it would seem strange if a pastor were elected president, wouldn’t it? The two functions--priest and ruler--don’t seem to go together.

But Jesus, our second lesson tells us, is a priest in the order of Melchizedek. That means that like the Levitical priests, He never sought His priesthood. But unlike them, He didn’t inherit the priesthood from an earthly father. God the Father made Jesus a priest in the same way He had made a priest of Melchizedek. Hebrews 7:3 says of Melchizedek: “Without father, without mother, without genealogy, having neither beginning of days nor end of life, but made like the Son of God, [Melchizedek] remains a priest continually.”

Like Melchizedek, Jesus is a king. But unlike Melchizedek, He is the King of all kings, Who brings shalom, peace with God, to all who will turn from sin and believe in Him!

In the rest of our lesson from Hebrews, we see how Jesus the King of all kings, accepted human limitations in order to bring salvation to us. We’re told, starting with verse 7, that while on earth, Jesus offered up prayers and requests to God “with vehement cries and tears to Him Who was able to save Him from death...” And verse 8 says that Jesus learned obedience through what He suffered, meaning, above all, through His cross.

Jesus doesn’t sound much like those rogue heroes we love so much, does He? He sounds like He willingly accepted human weakness as He prayed to God, “not my will, but Your will be done.” (Matthew 26:39)

In the garden of Gethsemane on the night of His arrest, He told Peter to put away his sword when Peter tried to protect Jesus from the soldiers and the temple police who had come to arrest Him. Jesus asked Peter, “Do you think that I cannot appeal to my Father, and he will at once send me more than twelve legions of angels?” (Matthew 26:53).

Even at the point of His death, Jesus renounced the sword and all the other signs and symbols of human power. He accepted the weakness under which the old high priests had also lived and so, went to the cross.

“So, Jesus is our high priest?” you may be asking. “Can a high priest who accepts the same limitations and weaknesses we have, even our subjection to death, do us any good?”

Writer Louis Cassels wrote a story called, The Man Who Stayed Home.

A man believed that the idea of God becoming a human being was silly. One Christmas Eve, because He couldn’t accept Jesus being both God and human, he refused to attend the candlelight worship service. 

Shortly after his family left for the service, the snow began to fall and he was startled by a thud. Then another thud. Then another. He thought someone was throwing snowballs at his house.

But on looking outside, he found a flock of birds, some of them occasionally flying toward the light coming from his house, looking for shelter.

The man thought he should try to help them. So, he put on his coat and took a loaf of bread outdoors. He then created a trail of bread crumbs that would lead the freezing birds to a barn where his kids kept a pony.

But the birds weren’t interested in the bread. They wanted to get warm.

He tried catching the birds, shooing them, corralling them, walking around them, waving his arms. But nothing he did would get the birds to go into the warm barn.

He realized that they were afraid of him.

“If I were a bird,” he thought, “I guess that I could speak their language. I could tell them not to be afraid. I could promise to help them and lead them to safety. But I’d have to be one of them so that they could see and understand.”

At that moment, church bells rang in the distance and the man’s eyes filled with tears. He fell to his knees in the snow.

What good is a high priest...

• Who has become one of us? 
• Who has offered up desperate prayers when His throat was choked by fear and his face was streaked by tears? 
• Whose anxiety was so great that blood was secreted through the pores of His skin, along with His sweat? 
• What good is a Savior Who went to a cross and tells us that the way to life leads through Him?

All the good we need, that’s what good Jesus is! 

Only the high priest Jesus, Who understands us and has compassion for us, gives us forgiveness and life forever.

Only the high priest Jesus has the love to stick by us for eternity, no matter what.

Only the high priest Jesus is worth surrendering our whole lives to, because only Jesus can give us what nobody and nothing in this world has in their power to give: life with God.

You know, we can look for life and fulfillment and happiness in many places. (It's like the old country song, Lookin' for Love in All the Wrong Places. We do that.)

But only our great high priest can give us--can give you--all that God wants for you to have and enjoy for all eternity. Only the high priest Jesus can give you God and lead you to God.

Jesus is reaching out to you again this morning.

Don’t turn away.

Follow Jesus.

Fall in love with Him.

Take hold of Jesus and never let go and know that, for His part, our great high priest and king, will never, never let go of you!

Amen

Jesus, Slip 'n Slides, and the Purpose of Your Life

[This was shared during worship with the people of Saint Matthew Lutheran Church in Logan, Ohio, earlier today.]

Matthew 25:14-30
A young man came to see me. “I know that Jesus loves me and that I’m saved by grace through my faith in Christ,” he said, “but what exactly is the purpose of my life?”

The short answer is that you and I are alive for only one purpose: To glorify God.

In Isaiah 43:7, God says, “Everyone who is called by My Name…I created for My glory.”

We most glorify God though, not when we look at the Bible’s portrayal of holy living, like we see in the Ten Commandments or in Jesus’ Beatitudes and then grit our teeth and strive to be good and holy people, whether it makes us or others miserable or not.

We most glorify God when we enjoy God and use His gifts to us in ways that honor Him.

Following Jesus from here to eternity presents its challenges. But there will be no joy in living with Christ if we think we must face those challenges on our own or in our own power.

The Lord Who saved us by going to the cross for us will also be glorified within us (and we will enjoy His company), if we will begin to learn one simple prayer of faith: “Lord, live within me and give me joy so that You are glorified.”

“Lord, live within me and give me joy so that You are glorified.”  

The parable Jesus tells in today’s Gospel lesson is the story of two men who didn’t grit their teeth to do the right thing, but who remembered the goodness of their master and so enjoyed and used the blessings of the master.

It’s also the story of a third man who ignored the blessings given to him by his master, relying on his own personal sense of what was right and wrong, and so, denied himself a continuing relationship with him.

You know the story. A master, clearly a stand-in for God the Son, Jesus, is about to go on a journey. As we read Jesus’ story, we understand the “journey” Jesus is talking about. Since the crucified and risen Jesus ascended into heaven, we know that He has been enthroned in heaven, giving His followers millennia to share the Good News that all who turn from sin and believe in the crucified and risen God of all creation, will not perish in eternal separation from God, but will have eternal life with God!

There will be a day though when the millennia cease and Jesus returns here to judge the living and the dead and to establish His eternal kingdom in the new heaven and the new earth.

Anticipating his journey, the master in Jesus’ parable entrusts some of his money to three different servants. Even the measly single talent—a unit of money—the master gave the third servant could be worth between 20 and 600 years of a day laborer’s wages!

In the same way, God entrusts a fortune of blessings to every human being. It’s called being alive.

And that’s just the start for followers of Jesus Christ! Jesus expended His life on the cross so that all we fallen, sinful, imperfect human beings can, like the thief who was crucified next to Jesus on the cross, acknowledge our sin, turn from that sin, and turn to Him Jesus in faith to live with God for eternity.

What a gift! Living lives that joyfully express gratitude for these two gifts--the gift of life and the gift of life made new that comes to us by grace through faith in Christ--is not a burden. It’s joy, pure it’s-so-great-to-be-alive-that-I’m-belly-flopping-downhill-on-a-Slip-and-Slide-joy!

If you’ve ever done a Slip and Slide, you know that as much fun as it can be, there will often be a few painful bruises as a result of throwing yourself to the ground with abandon. I've even been known to throw myself onto a Slip and Slide in my adult years and every time I have, I've ended up with bruises and sore spots and friction burns.

Throw yourself with similar abandon into the life of following Jesus and you’ll get bruised too. Maybe more than bruised.

Today is an international day of prayer for the persecuted church around the world. There are Christians today who live in 52 nations in which it is illegal to confess that Jesus is Lord. (That's a huge percentage of the globe's 196 countries!)

Many Christian believers are losing their lives or being tossed into jails right now because they believe in Jesus. I think of Asia Bibi, a Pakistani mother of five condemned to death for blasphemy--for which there is no law on the books--against Allah simply because she is a follower of Jesus Christ. She is just one of many Christians throughout the world for whom it isn't safe to confess belief in Jesus!

Other Chrisitans, in safer places, feel afraid to follow Jesus because of what their friends, their neighbors, their bosses, or their family members may say about them.

But anyone who dares to follow Jesus is bound to be attacked by more than just flesh and blood enemies. Follow Jesus and you will be bruised by Satan, who hates no human being more than the one who seeks to follow Jesus.*

A woman told me a few weeks ago that she cannot speak with her father about her relationship with Christ. “He thinks I’m crazy,” she told me. That's hard!

But all who are bruised for believing in Jesus need to remember the words of James in the New Testament: “My sisters and brothers, whenever you face trials of any kind, consider it nothing but joy, because you know that the testing of your faith produces endurance; and let endurance have its full effect, so that you may be mature and complete, lacking for nothing”—or, as I would put it, you will be completely ready for everything in this life and the world to come!

In Jesus’ parable, the master came back, as Jesus one day will return to the earth, and, like Jesus on judgment day, the master demanded an accounting for how the servants had used all he had given to them.

The master was delighted to see that the first two men had enjoyed and used their gifts and so brought glory to his name.

The last man, not so much. His failure to honor and enjoy either his gifts or the giver brought him total separation from the master, just as happens to those who refuse to honor or enjoy Jesus, the Giver of the best gifts of all.

In his book, The Purpose Driven Life, Pastor Rick Warren gives five portraits of what people who glorify God look like.

First, they worship God all the time. As Warren puts it, “Worship is a lifestyle of enjoying God, loving Him, and giving ourselves to be used for His purposes.”

Second, they love other believers. Long before Jesus walked the earth, God had already commanded all people to love God and to love neighbors. But just before His crucifixion, Jesus told believers, “I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you…”

Jesus’ sacrificial love for us brought us eternity with God and He commands us to love our fellow believers in exactly the same way.

Echoing Jesus' command, Paul writes in the New Testament: “Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility regard others as better than yourselves.” That's sacrificial love.

I know that I can only love like that by relying on the supernatural power of God’s Holy Spirit, asking God to love others I find unlovable through me.

Loving sacrificially does not mean that we become spineless yes-women or yes-men.

It doesn’t mean that we go along with sin.

Jesus shows that sacrificial love must be tough in confronting evil, even when we find it among fellow believers. When Peter chastised Jesus for insisting that He must go to Jerusalem to be crucified, then rise from the dead, in order to claim an eternal kingdom, Jesus was blunt. “Get behind Me, Satan,” He told Peter.

Sacrificial love will always speak and live out the truth in Christian love toward our fellow believers, even when the truth isn’t pleasant.

Third, they glorify God by allowing Him to shape them into the likeness of Jesus. The New Testament teaches that it’s God’s aim for all of us to be transformed into the likeness of Jesus. Submitting to God reshaping us into the likeness of Jesus is a difficult process that doesn’t end this side of our resurrection.

Submission to Christ means that the Word of God and the will of God must always trump our preferences, our emotions, our reason, and our experiences.

This is something we are at risk of totally forgetting in North American Christianity and for which we must repent or risk losing all connection to Jesus. Like our Savior in the garden at Gethsemane, we must be committed to daily telling God, “Nonetheless, not my will, but Thine alone be done.”

Fourth, we glorify God by serving others with our gifts. No matter what our gifts or our limitations, God has gifted every Christian to glorify God by serving others in some way or another.

Finally, Warren says, we glorify God by telling others about Jesus. As some readers of my blog know, this past week I heard a colleague tell the true story of a contractor he recently met in Ethiopia, a lay member of the Lutheran Mekane Yesus Church. This contractor takes on big jobs in various parts of his country.

Along with the rest of the work crews at any site, he also hires two pastors for every project. Every morning, the pastors lead worship among the crew before the start of the workday. After that, the pastors go into the nearby towns to see if there are any needs they can address, any prayers they can offer, any people who might want to know about Jesus and the new life He offers.

If there’s a group of people in that community who want to be part of a new Lutheran congregation, this contractor will then also pay the salary of one of the pastors for an additional year in order to develop the new church.

Sometimes, this guy gets flak for his witness for Christ from local government authorities or from leading people in the community. He always meets the skeptics, gives them Bibles, invites them to read the Bibles, and, if after they’ve read some of God’s Word, they still have questions about why he does what he does, he offers to meet them again.

It's because of committed lay Christians like this man that the Lutheran Church in Ethiopia gained 300,000 new members between 2009 and 2010. It already has 1-million more members than our own Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. And, recognizing how desperately America needs Jesus Christ, the Lutherans in Ethiopia are about to send missionaries to the United States.

Not all of us can do what that contractor does to tell others about Christ. But each of us can do something to tell others about Jesus, even something as simple as using one the “This meal’s on us!” cards you can still find in the back of the sanctuary.

We can be like the first two men in Jesus’ parable. We can use the gifts our Master has given to us to glorify God and joyfully use our gifts.

We do this when we worship God in our daily lives, love our fellow believers, ask God’s help to become more like Jesus, use our gifts to serve others, and tell others about Jesus and the new and everlasting life only He can give to those who turn from sin and believe in Him.

Today, I want to close with one simple question. Who among us is willing to belly flop with utter abandon to enjoy and follow Jesus Christ?

If you are, I promise you that Jesus will always be there to catch you...and you will glorify God!

Amen!

*Ephesians 6:10-12, in the New Testament, explains this well:

Finally, be strong in the Lord and in the strength of his power. Put on the whole armor of God, so that you may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil. For our struggle is not against enemies of blood and flesh, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers of this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places. ¹¹¹²

Goal-Setting, A Christian Approach, Part 4

Joseph Sittler was a great theologian, celebrated around the world. But he never lost his simple faith or his simple touch.

He was one of first twentieth-century Christian thinkers to write about the relationship between faith and concern for the environment. But in a 1975 interview, a portion of which appears in a collection of Sittler’s thoughts and writings, Grace Notes and Other Fragments, he said that this hadn’t come about through deliberate forethought on his part. What he said in explaining this is worth quoting here in its entirety:

I have never found it possible to lay down a program regarding the apparitions of the providence of God. I look at my own life and I cannot be absolutely sure that the things that have happened to me, that seemed to be positive and useful, had a direct line to God’s providence. Some of these seemed to have been accidental. I was in the right place at the right time, and I happened to have been studying a subject just when somebody wanted something said about it. Maybe that’s the way the providence of God works, but I have no mathematics of providence. I feel that I have been providentially led, in that I had motivations I cannot fully understand.

For reasons that have nothing to do with Christian commitment, I have always been interested in nature and I just kept acting on that interest, not out of a service to God but because I enjoyed it. Then I found that what I did for enjoyment served well to help me relate theology to the environmental problem. That may be the way God gets his providential things done; and I hope it is. But I don’t want to stick him with it. You know, people often tell me, “Now I will make this decision, I will pray about it.” I must say (not with pride, because it’s nothing to be proud of) that I don’t pray about such things. When I was called to the University of Chicago, what I did was come down here for one brief quarter and try it out before making my answer to the invitation. Then I woke up one day to discover that inwardly I had already accepted the invitation. There was a thing to be done here; I felt competent to do it; it needed doing; it was worth doing.

Here is the testimony of one faithful follower of Jesus Christ whose notions about how to make decisions and set goals probably would strike some as being less than Christian. These folks believe, not without some warrant, that you first begin with an overall vision of your mission in life, then with dogged determination you pursue that vision through all your goals and decisions. They believe that one must wrest God's will for them out of God's reluctant hands.

I must confess that I have grown wary of such notions. Writer and blogger Rob Asghar agrees and mentioned a discovery he made after recently reading the autobiography of college basketball coach, John Wooden:

...Wooden didn't become the greatest college basketball coach in history by having a vision about being the best college basketball coach in history; he didn't win 10 titles by envisioning 10 titles; he didn't "focus" or "unleash" all his and others' energies on a specific goal.

John Wooden, the Wizard of Westwood, simply set out to build his team and program so that each time his players stepped onto the court, they could win. He took on his job in daily increments and put one foot in front of the other.

Life is composed of a succession of small moments, each one adding up to a lifetime. The goals embraced by some whose achievements are noteworthy or exemplary have been no more cosmic than to put their hands to the next worthy thing needing to be done. That’s what Sittler did. It’s what John Wooden did. The results in both cases were stunning.

This was the same approach to goal-setting taken by God-in-the-flesh, Jesus. Jesus knew full well what His overarching mission in life was. He was to go to Jerusalem where, as the perfect sacrifice for sin, He would die on a cross. The Gospel of Luke says that Jesus was so intent on that mission that “He set His face to go to Jerusalem.” [Luke 9:51]

While Jesus came to save the whole world from its sin [John 3:16], He practiced what I call the principle of the ripple. Jesus worked to have an impact on His own people, the Jews, never deliberately seeking out contact with non-Jews. (These are people described in our English translations of the Bible as gentiles, a word that translates the Greek term, ethnon, literally, the ethnics.) “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel,” Jesus once explained. [Matthew 15:24] Under this principle of the ripple, Jesus, Who had come for the whole world, seemed intent on first creating an impact through His life, death, and resurrection among the Jews, thereby unleashing the message of forgiveness and new life for all with faith in Him on the whole world. [Acts 1:8]

But Jesus also practiced what has been called a theology of interruptions. When a Roman soldier came with a request for the healing of his servant, Jesus paid heed [Matthew 8]. When a Samaritan woman of low repute asked Jesus for “living water,” He let her in on how she could have a new life [John 4].

When asked to depart from His normal modus operandi, Jesus laid aside His immediate agenda, to pursue His deeper goals. Jesus went to work on the next worthy thing at hand and clearly believed  that no matter whether it was part of His plan for the day, it was always the right time to do God’s will, loving God and loving neighbor. [Matthew 22:34-40] He even took this attitude when confronting arrest and execution. In the garden of Gethsemane, He prayed to God the Father, "My Father, if it is possible, let this cup [His suffering and death] pass from Me; yet not what I want but what You want." [26:39]

In fact, Jesus told a celebrated story commending His theology of interruptions:

Just then a lawyer stood up to test Jesus. ‘Teacher,’ he said, ‘what must I do to inherit eternal life?’ He said to him, ‘What is written in the law? What do you read there?’ He answered, ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbour as yourself.’ And he said to him, ‘You have given the right answer; do this, and you will live.’

But wanting to justify himself, he asked Jesus, ‘And who is my neighbour?’ Jesus replied, ‘A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and fell into the hands of robbers, who stripped him, beat him, and went away, leaving him half dead. Now by chance a priest was going down that road; and when he saw him, he passed by on the other side. So likewise a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side. But a Samaritan while travelling came near him; and when he saw him, he was moved with pity. He went to him and bandaged his wounds, having poured oil and wine on them. Then he put him on his own animal, brought him to an inn, and took care of him. The next day he took out two denarii, gave them to the innkeeper, and said, “Take care of him; and when I come back, I will repay you whatever more you spend.” Which of these three, do you think, was a neighbour to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?’ He said, ‘The one who showed him mercy.’ Jesus said to him, ‘Go and do likewise.’ [Luke 10:25-37]

You can't love others if you're not interruptible and you can't fulfill God's plan for your life if you don't love others.

A friend of mine once told me about a pastor who had gotten himself into so much trouble with his congregation that he felt compelled to resign his position.

“What was the problem?” I asked.

“He was a kook about efficiency,” my friend explained. “He made these pronouncements about his vision for the congregation and about his mission as the pastor. Then he’d spout things like, ‘Plan the work; work the plan.’ “

“So far,” I told my friend, “ with the exception of his being an annoying aper of cliches, he sounds like a good leader.”

“You’re right,” he said, “The problem was that he was so intent on his plan that he forgot about God’s plan. He ignored the needs of people that He could have helped, ignored things that in the long run, would have advanced his mission and vision. He was so focused on the minutiae of his plan that he forgot about the bigger plan of which he was a part.”

I wonder how many of us do that.

How many parents become so consumed with making the money they think is needed to give their children good lives that they become inaccessible and unknown to the kids?

How many managers become so involved in implementing a program they believe will make their company better that they forget to do the basics of leading people and maintaining good relations with their customers?

A good theology of interruption, with its openness to loving God and loving neighbor, even when it’s inconvenient and it’s not on that day’s to do list, serves God, our neighbors, our families, and all of us well.

Sometimes the shortest way to achieving our goals in life is to take a detour from them and put our hand to the next thing life throws our ways.

[Read the first three installments of this series:

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3]

[Note: An article on the 'theology of interruptions' appeared in a 1982 edition of the now-defunct, Lutheran Standard magazine. I can't find my copy. I'm sorry that I'm unable to give proper attribution at this time.]