Showing posts with label idolatry. Show all posts
Showing posts with label idolatry. Show all posts
Wednesday, July 12, 2023
Tuesday, July 11, 2023
Tuesday, November 01, 2022
Wednesday, July 29, 2020
Sunday, July 26, 2020
Idolatry, Injustice, and Freedom
I read several chapters of Jeremiah for my quiet time with God today. Wow! That book has relevance to our contemporary situation.
While the United States is a secular republic, never intended to be a theocracy, the judgments of God on ancient Israel and on the nations of that era that had nothing to do with God were related to two things: idolatry and injustice.
God calls all nations and individual people to worship Him alone, not because God is an egomaniac, but because only the God first revealed to Israel and now to all people in Jesus, can give us life.
When nations or individuals start chasing after false gods, false sources of security, peace, or self-esteem, injustice always follows. Think of all the injustice unleashed in the world by people or countries that have followed fake gods:
- from the gods of self or family to the gods of racial or ethnic superiority,
- from the gods of materialism to the gods of sexual promiscuity,
- from the gods of politics and human philosophies to the gods of legalistic religions that promise people good if they only behave in certain ways,
- from the gods of social acceptance and popularity to the gods of comfort without regard to others.
Following them--worshiping them--also leads people and nations to perpetrate or to be complicit with the most heinous acts of injustices, injustices that become so much a part of idolaters' lives that they never question them. They assume, as God's ancient people did, according to Jeremiah, that God approves of their idolatries.
Jeremiah warns that God never approves of our chasing after false gods, which is exactly what we do whenever we allow any sin to take root in our lives.
Behind every violation of God's moral law, given in the Ten Commandments, is an act of idol worship. Above all, every willful sin commit is an act of self-worship, an example of the abiding human sin that can be traced back to Adam and Eve, the desire "to be like God," to BE God ourselves. That delusional ambition lay behind every injustice, heartache, relational breakdown, and sin that has ever been seen in human history.
Our call is simple: To daily turn from the idols that drag us down and to turn instead to Jesus for forgiveness and the life that only He, God the Son, can give.
Jeremiah's bracing message reminded me of that today. So, once more, I take refuge in Jesus so that He can free me from the idolatries of this world and the injustices to which they lead.
Thursday, July 02, 2020
Tuesday, April 28, 2020
Overcoming Our Addiction
"The sorrows of those who run after another god shall multiply..." (Psalm 16:4)
This passage hit me during my quiet time with God today.
The fundamental problem we human beings have is that we have a natural inclination for worshiping false gods. Naturally unwilling to trust in the God revealed in Jesus, the God we can't presently see and can never control, we prefer to bet our lives on other gods. They're everywhere: our own smarts, talent, and strength; our feelings; our families; our countries; money, success, sex, stuff. Even Christians are prone to idol worship when they make of Jesus a demanding dictator who is only placated by our religious acts.
Idolatry is addiction. Whatever our idols are--whatever we devotedly "worship" (i.e., prioritize) for the "blessings" we think they can give us--will, in the end, leave us disappointed, depleted, and dead. Only the living God revealed in Jesus Christ can give us life to the full.
Until we heed Christ's call to turn away from the little gods that make us miserable, we will never be free. And we will know self-inflicted sorrow.
God, set us free of our penchant for idol-worship. Help us to follow Jesus--the Way, and the truth, and the life. Help us to honor You alone as God so that we can live in the joy only You can give, now and always. In Jesus' name, Amen
This passage hit me during my quiet time with God today.
The fundamental problem we human beings have is that we have a natural inclination for worshiping false gods. Naturally unwilling to trust in the God revealed in Jesus, the God we can't presently see and can never control, we prefer to bet our lives on other gods. They're everywhere: our own smarts, talent, and strength; our feelings; our families; our countries; money, success, sex, stuff. Even Christians are prone to idol worship when they make of Jesus a demanding dictator who is only placated by our religious acts.
Idolatry is addiction. Whatever our idols are--whatever we devotedly "worship" (i.e., prioritize) for the "blessings" we think they can give us--will, in the end, leave us disappointed, depleted, and dead. Only the living God revealed in Jesus Christ can give us life to the full.
Until we heed Christ's call to turn away from the little gods that make us miserable, we will never be free. And we will know self-inflicted sorrow.
God, set us free of our penchant for idol-worship. Help us to follow Jesus--the Way, and the truth, and the life. Help us to honor You alone as God so that we can live in the joy only You can give, now and always. In Jesus' name, Amen
Wednesday, October 09, 2019
Humility
[This was shared this past Sunday during worship with the people and friends of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio.]
Luke 17:1-10
The whole idea of humility, of being humble, is taking a beating these days.
Snapchat and Instagram are full-up with selfies.
We revere athletes, actors, and politicians who arrogantly look down their noses on the rest of the world.
We celebrate and retweet the posts of those who specialize in unkindness and vindictiveness.
And every day, you and I are tempted whenever we go shopping to judge and deem ourselves superior to those we see along the aisles and at the checkout.
Of course, our penchant for arrogance goes back to the garden of Eden. There, the serpent tempted the first human beings with the idea that, if they broke free from God, their loving Creator, they could create their own life apart from God: they could be their own gods.
We’ve been mesmerized by this fiction ever since, inflicting a world of hurt on each other and on ourselves.
All wars,
every instance of child and spouse abuse,
all the feuds between families and among families,
all the prejudice and discrimination, petty egotism, snobbery, and gossip,
every case of murder, thievery, adultery, covetousness, not to mention every time human beings bow down to false idols they think they can control by their sacrifices or piety or good works,
every time we think that our race, ethnicity, nationality, or financial condition makes us better than others,
every time a person looks on the vast cosmos and dares to say that there is no God,
and every time a Christian thinks that God’s gift to them of faith in Jesus somehow makes them better than others,
every time any of these things appear, we cave into this delusion that we can be like God which we inherited from Adam and Eve.
It is our original sin.
We keep trying to ignore, deny, or live around the simple truth that God’s Word teaches: “Pride goes before destruction, a haughty spirit before a fall” (Proverbs 16:18)
And why is pride so destructive?
Because pride violates the first commandment. The proud have a false god: themselves.
But we can only find life through repentance and faith in Jesus. So, when we worship at the altar of ego, we place our hope in a god that will die.
A Christian songwriter put it simply: “Pride kills.”
We will either die in pride or we will live in humility.
In today’s gospel lesson, Jesus talks about humility as an essential element of Christian discipleship. Take a look at the lesson, please: “Jesus said to his disciples: ‘Things that cause people to stumble are bound to come, but woe to anyone through whom they come. It would be better for them to be thrown into the sea with a millstone tied around their neck than to cause one of these little ones to stumble. So watch yourselves.’”
The “little ones” Jesus refers to here seem to be the outcasts, those hated and disdained by society’s so-called “good people” with whom Jesus so readily interacted: People like prostitutes, extortionists, foreigners, beggars, the lame, and notorious sinners.
Jesus is warning those of us who call ourselves Christians to take care that instead of inviting and welcoming society’s “little ones” into fellowship with Christ and with us as He tells us to do, we turn them away or cause them to sin all the more unrepentantly.
This past week, several of us were talking about how often restaurant personnel hate working the Sunday afternoon shift because they know that the Christians taking in lunch after worship are going to treat them like garbage and leave either no tips or miserly ones. A disciple of Jesus understands that a Christian saint is no more than a recovering sinner undergoing reconstruction by the Holy Spirit. But an unbeliever will look at the parade of hypocritical church people eating lunch in their restaurant on Sunday afternoons and think, “If that’s what Jesus does to a person, I want nothing to do with Christian faith.”
Jesus says that when Christians act arrogantly toward non-Christians, we might as well put millstones around our necks and sink into hell. Proud Christians block the grace of God given in Christ not only to those they treat disdainfully but to themselves as well. “So,” Jesus tells us, “watch yourselves.”
Then, in verses 3 and 4, Jesus says, “If your brother or sister sins against you, rebuke them; and if they repent, forgive them. Even if they sin against you seven times in a day and seven times come back to you saying ‘I repent,’ you must forgive them.”
Refusing to forgive those who have genuinely apologized and sought our forgiveness is the height of human presumption and pride. And we will never be free until we set those who have apologized to us free from the debt they owe us.
This is why Jesus teaches us to pray, “Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.”
The word that Jesus uses for forgive in this passage is, in the Greek in which Luke wrote his gospel, aphiemi, literally meaning I release. When we forgive others as Christ forgives us, we not only release them of their debt to us, we also release ourselves from our bondage to sin. We let the forgiveness of God given in Christ flow into our own lives.
Skip down for a moment to Jesus’ words, starting in verse 7: “‘Suppose one of you has a servant plowing or looking after the sheep. Will he say to the servant when he comes in from the field, “Come along now and sit down to eat”? Won’t he rather say, “Prepare my supper, get yourself ready and wait on me while I eat and drink; after that you may eat and drink”? Will he thank the servant because he did what he was told to do? So you also, when you have done everything you were told to do, should say, ‘We are unworthy servants; we have only done our duty.’”
These words of Jesus may seem cryptic to us. But again, the theme is the essential place of humility in the life of a Christian.
As is often true in His parables, the short stories with deeper meanings He often tells, Jesus here creates a scenario which, to his original first-century hearers, would have seemed outrageous.
In that top-down society, no wealthy land-owner would tell his servant to take a load off his feet and eat with him. And he wouldn’t thank the cook on his payroll for doing his job.
The obvious conclusion is that if a follower of Jesus loves a neighbor, or sacrifices for a fellow believer, or shares the good news of new life through repentance and faith in the crucified and risen Jesus, she or he does so not for applause, recognition, or thank-yous. They do these things because Jesus so lives inside them that it doesn’t even dawn on them to not love their neighbor, to not sacrifice for the fellow believer, to not share the gospel of Jesus with someone in need of Him.
For them, such expressions of faith aren’t planned events. They’re simply the supernatural outgrowth of a life lived with Jesus in daily repentance and renewal.
Humility, you see, is not an acquired life skill, it’s something that happens in the lives of those who seek each day to walk with Jesus.
Our motives, our values, and the way we view everything get changed as Jesus takes up residence in the center of our lives when we take our gaze off of ourselves and fix our eyes firmly on God the Son, the Word made flesh, Jesus.
And that leads us back to the middle two verses of today’s gospel lesson. The apostles hear Jesus’ words and realize that, because of their (and our) inborn sinful nature, the kind of humility that Jesus commends in these verses is impossible. So, they make what seems like a reasonable request.
Verse 5: “Increase our faith!”
This may not be a pious request at all. It may be what can be called the “increase our faith dodge.” You hear it all the time.
Christians who don’t want to heed Jesus’ call to follow or be servants in His Church or share their faith in Christ, will say things like, “My faith isn’t strong enough” or “Everyone else knows more than I do or can do more than I can do.”
I suspect that people don’t really believe these things as often as they say them.
And I suspect that they’re really not that interested in having more faith or following Jesus or sharing Him with others.
I think that often, these are the expressions of a false humility. People figure they sound pious and Christian when they speak of what they can’t do, can’t give, can’t try. And so they keep right on, not doing, not giving, not trying.
Jesus’ response to the apostles is direct. Verse 6: “If you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can say to this mulberry tree, ‘Be uprooted and planted in the sea,’ and it will obey you.”
To follow Jesus, to heed His call to love and serve our neighbor, to get our minds off of ourselves and onto the God Who creates, gives us faith in Jesus, saves us from sin and death, and empowers us to live more selfless lives, is not about waiting around for God to give us more faith.
It’s acting on the little faith the Holy Spirit has given to us in the big, loving God of the whole universe we meet in Jesus Christ, then daring to live the life of love, joy, and connectedness to others for which He has set us free.
It’s only in those who respond when Jesus says, “Follow Me” that God grows faith: Only when we refuse to look at other disdainfully, only when we dare to forgive those who seek our forgiveness, and only when we heed His call to believe, to love and share Christ’s gospel with others in our lives.
C.S. Lewis observed that, “Humility is not thinking less of yourself, it's thinking of yourself less.”
Without our consciously realizing it, humility becomes part of us as His Word works in us to create faith and we think of Jesus more and of ourselves, less.
When we turn to Jesus, humility begins to break through.
And when humility breaks through, we not only know joy for ourselves, we will share it with others.
We become the conduits of God’s grace for everyone we know.
Turn to Jesus each day and the pride that can kill us will meet its master.
Turn to Jesus each day and He will fill you love for Him instead of pride in yourself.
Turn to Jesus and live. Amen
[I'm the pastor of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio.]
Luke 17:1-10
The whole idea of humility, of being humble, is taking a beating these days.
Snapchat and Instagram are full-up with selfies.
We revere athletes, actors, and politicians who arrogantly look down their noses on the rest of the world.
We celebrate and retweet the posts of those who specialize in unkindness and vindictiveness.
And every day, you and I are tempted whenever we go shopping to judge and deem ourselves superior to those we see along the aisles and at the checkout.
Of course, our penchant for arrogance goes back to the garden of Eden. There, the serpent tempted the first human beings with the idea that, if they broke free from God, their loving Creator, they could create their own life apart from God: they could be their own gods.
We’ve been mesmerized by this fiction ever since, inflicting a world of hurt on each other and on ourselves.
All wars,
every instance of child and spouse abuse,
all the feuds between families and among families,
all the prejudice and discrimination, petty egotism, snobbery, and gossip,
every case of murder, thievery, adultery, covetousness, not to mention every time human beings bow down to false idols they think they can control by their sacrifices or piety or good works,
every time we think that our race, ethnicity, nationality, or financial condition makes us better than others,
every time a person looks on the vast cosmos and dares to say that there is no God,
and every time a Christian thinks that God’s gift to them of faith in Jesus somehow makes them better than others,
every time any of these things appear, we cave into this delusion that we can be like God which we inherited from Adam and Eve.
It is our original sin.
We keep trying to ignore, deny, or live around the simple truth that God’s Word teaches: “Pride goes before destruction, a haughty spirit before a fall” (Proverbs 16:18)
And why is pride so destructive?
Because pride violates the first commandment. The proud have a false god: themselves.
But we can only find life through repentance and faith in Jesus. So, when we worship at the altar of ego, we place our hope in a god that will die.
A Christian songwriter put it simply: “Pride kills.”
We will either die in pride or we will live in humility.
In today’s gospel lesson, Jesus talks about humility as an essential element of Christian discipleship. Take a look at the lesson, please: “Jesus said to his disciples: ‘Things that cause people to stumble are bound to come, but woe to anyone through whom they come. It would be better for them to be thrown into the sea with a millstone tied around their neck than to cause one of these little ones to stumble. So watch yourselves.’”
The “little ones” Jesus refers to here seem to be the outcasts, those hated and disdained by society’s so-called “good people” with whom Jesus so readily interacted: People like prostitutes, extortionists, foreigners, beggars, the lame, and notorious sinners.
Jesus is warning those of us who call ourselves Christians to take care that instead of inviting and welcoming society’s “little ones” into fellowship with Christ and with us as He tells us to do, we turn them away or cause them to sin all the more unrepentantly.
This past week, several of us were talking about how often restaurant personnel hate working the Sunday afternoon shift because they know that the Christians taking in lunch after worship are going to treat them like garbage and leave either no tips or miserly ones. A disciple of Jesus understands that a Christian saint is no more than a recovering sinner undergoing reconstruction by the Holy Spirit. But an unbeliever will look at the parade of hypocritical church people eating lunch in their restaurant on Sunday afternoons and think, “If that’s what Jesus does to a person, I want nothing to do with Christian faith.”
Jesus says that when Christians act arrogantly toward non-Christians, we might as well put millstones around our necks and sink into hell. Proud Christians block the grace of God given in Christ not only to those they treat disdainfully but to themselves as well. “So,” Jesus tells us, “watch yourselves.”
Then, in verses 3 and 4, Jesus says, “If your brother or sister sins against you, rebuke them; and if they repent, forgive them. Even if they sin against you seven times in a day and seven times come back to you saying ‘I repent,’ you must forgive them.”
Refusing to forgive those who have genuinely apologized and sought our forgiveness is the height of human presumption and pride. And we will never be free until we set those who have apologized to us free from the debt they owe us.
This is why Jesus teaches us to pray, “Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.”
The word that Jesus uses for forgive in this passage is, in the Greek in which Luke wrote his gospel, aphiemi, literally meaning I release. When we forgive others as Christ forgives us, we not only release them of their debt to us, we also release ourselves from our bondage to sin. We let the forgiveness of God given in Christ flow into our own lives.
Skip down for a moment to Jesus’ words, starting in verse 7: “‘Suppose one of you has a servant plowing or looking after the sheep. Will he say to the servant when he comes in from the field, “Come along now and sit down to eat”? Won’t he rather say, “Prepare my supper, get yourself ready and wait on me while I eat and drink; after that you may eat and drink”? Will he thank the servant because he did what he was told to do? So you also, when you have done everything you were told to do, should say, ‘We are unworthy servants; we have only done our duty.’”
These words of Jesus may seem cryptic to us. But again, the theme is the essential place of humility in the life of a Christian.
As is often true in His parables, the short stories with deeper meanings He often tells, Jesus here creates a scenario which, to his original first-century hearers, would have seemed outrageous.
In that top-down society, no wealthy land-owner would tell his servant to take a load off his feet and eat with him. And he wouldn’t thank the cook on his payroll for doing his job.
The obvious conclusion is that if a follower of Jesus loves a neighbor, or sacrifices for a fellow believer, or shares the good news of new life through repentance and faith in the crucified and risen Jesus, she or he does so not for applause, recognition, or thank-yous. They do these things because Jesus so lives inside them that it doesn’t even dawn on them to not love their neighbor, to not sacrifice for the fellow believer, to not share the gospel of Jesus with someone in need of Him.
For them, such expressions of faith aren’t planned events. They’re simply the supernatural outgrowth of a life lived with Jesus in daily repentance and renewal.
Humility, you see, is not an acquired life skill, it’s something that happens in the lives of those who seek each day to walk with Jesus.
Our motives, our values, and the way we view everything get changed as Jesus takes up residence in the center of our lives when we take our gaze off of ourselves and fix our eyes firmly on God the Son, the Word made flesh, Jesus.
And that leads us back to the middle two verses of today’s gospel lesson. The apostles hear Jesus’ words and realize that, because of their (and our) inborn sinful nature, the kind of humility that Jesus commends in these verses is impossible. So, they make what seems like a reasonable request.
Verse 5: “Increase our faith!”
This may not be a pious request at all. It may be what can be called the “increase our faith dodge.” You hear it all the time.
Christians who don’t want to heed Jesus’ call to follow or be servants in His Church or share their faith in Christ, will say things like, “My faith isn’t strong enough” or “Everyone else knows more than I do or can do more than I can do.”
I suspect that people don’t really believe these things as often as they say them.
And I suspect that they’re really not that interested in having more faith or following Jesus or sharing Him with others.
I think that often, these are the expressions of a false humility. People figure they sound pious and Christian when they speak of what they can’t do, can’t give, can’t try. And so they keep right on, not doing, not giving, not trying.
Jesus’ response to the apostles is direct. Verse 6: “If you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can say to this mulberry tree, ‘Be uprooted and planted in the sea,’ and it will obey you.”
To follow Jesus, to heed His call to love and serve our neighbor, to get our minds off of ourselves and onto the God Who creates, gives us faith in Jesus, saves us from sin and death, and empowers us to live more selfless lives, is not about waiting around for God to give us more faith.
It’s acting on the little faith the Holy Spirit has given to us in the big, loving God of the whole universe we meet in Jesus Christ, then daring to live the life of love, joy, and connectedness to others for which He has set us free.
It’s only in those who respond when Jesus says, “Follow Me” that God grows faith: Only when we refuse to look at other disdainfully, only when we dare to forgive those who seek our forgiveness, and only when we heed His call to believe, to love and share Christ’s gospel with others in our lives.
C.S. Lewis observed that, “Humility is not thinking less of yourself, it's thinking of yourself less.”
Without our consciously realizing it, humility becomes part of us as His Word works in us to create faith and we think of Jesus more and of ourselves, less.
When we turn to Jesus, humility begins to break through.
And when humility breaks through, we not only know joy for ourselves, we will share it with others.
We become the conduits of God’s grace for everyone we know.
Turn to Jesus each day and the pride that can kill us will meet its master.
Turn to Jesus each day and He will fill you love for Him instead of pride in yourself.
Turn to Jesus and live. Amen
[I'm the pastor of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio.]
Monday, August 05, 2019
Freed from Greed
[This message was shared yesterday morning with the people and friends of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio.]
Luke 12:13-21
Greed is rooted in fear.
Fear that the God Who provides daily bread won’t provide it for us.
Fear that the Christian message that this world isn’t all there is to life is untrue.
Fear that the God Who promises to be with us always will abandon us.
Fear that the God Who promises an eternal world to those who trust in Jesus won’t come through and that we need to grab for the good things we can enjoy in this world.
Greed is rooted in fear. Jesus warns us against in today’s gospel lesson.
Let’s take a look at it, starting at verse 13: “Someone in the crowd said to him, ‘Teacher, tell my brother to divide the inheritance with me.’”
Jesus has been teaching the crowd about the Kingdom of God, the eternal kingdom that belongs to all baptized believers in the crucified and risen Jesus. In the previous twelve verses of Luke, chapter 12, Luke tells us that Jesus:
Greed, you see, makes us forget what’s important. It makes us chase the things that are here today and gone tomorrow, rather than following Jesus for life with God that never ends.
Verse 14: “Jesus replied, ‘Man, who appointed me a judge or an arbiter between you? Then he said to them, ‘Watch out! Be on your guard against all kinds of greed; life does not consist in an abundance of possessions.’” (Luke 12:14-15)
Jesus' response here is ironic.
We know, of course, that Jesus is the judge of the world.
That’s the point of His portrayal, in Matthew 25:31-46, of the final judgment in which Jesus the King separates the sheep from the goats.
And we’re told in 1 Timothy 2:5, “...there is one God and one mediator between God and mankind, the man Christ Jesus…”
Jesus Christ is the judge and mediator of the universe. But the man in the crowd in our lesson is only interested in using Jesus to get what he wants. If we were to boil his request of Jesus down to a prayer petition, it would be something like, “Lord, my will be done.”
But Jesus tells him and the crowd that life, the gift of God to those who believe, doesn’t come to those who set their ultimate ambitions on the things of this world. “Life does not consist in an abundance of possessions.”
Jesus' words echo those He spoke to Martha, the anxious hostess greedy not for money but for attention, affirmation, and compliments, resentful of the different role to which God was calling her sister Mary. “‘Martha, Martha,’ [Jesus told her], “you are worried and upset about many things, but few things are needed—or indeed only one. Mary has chosen what is better, and it will not be taken away from her.” (Luke 10:41-42)
In today's gospel lesson, Jesus effectively tells yet another resentful sibling, “Choose life over death. Choose life with God over death by things.”
To undergird His point, Jesus then tells one of His parables.
You know it well. A man is blessed with a particularly fertile piece of land. It grows so abundant a harvest that the farmer has no idea where he’s going to store all of it. (This was obviously in the days before those sprawling self-storage units you see everywhere today.) The farmer decides to build bigger grain silos to store it all, take care of himself for life, and then just chill, happily self-sufficient, happily heedless of the will of God or the needs of others. “But God said to him, [Jesus tells us] ‘You fool! This very night your life will be demanded from you. Then who will get what you have prepared for yourself?’” (Luke 12:20) Someone was paraphrasing Jesus here when she or he famously said, “There won’t be a U-Haul trailer hitched to the hearse when they take your earthly remains to the cemetery.”
The things of this world, including money and stuff, will not bring us life. And when the call of greed takes hold in our lives, nothing we do, nothing we own, nothing in our investment portfolios or bank accounts, will ever be enough. Greed will compel us to want “just a little more.” God, the life He offers through Christ, and other people will be crowded out of our lives and our concerns. Jesus says: “This is how it will be with whoever stores up things for themselves but is not rich toward God.” (Luke 12:21)
Greed is a killer, a creation of Satan designed to make us think that the God we know in Jesus Christ isn’t enough. That is a lie.
There is a better way to live. God has created it for us in Jesus Christ. It’s the life of certainty and security in God’s love and provision, the life of freedom to love God and love neighbor and to share with one another, the life that Jesus makes possible for those who trust in Him, for those who daily fall into His arms and seek God’s will for our lives.
We can live in the kingdom of God, no longer viewing life as a zero-sum game where if someone else gets more, I get less.
In the kingdom of God, we know that in the God we meet in the crucified Jesus, there will always be “daily bread” and there will be more grace, love, and security than we can imagine, in Jesus’ words, “good measure, pressed down, shaken together and running over” (Luke 6:38).
Jesus gives those who trust in Him so much of Himself that their lives can be spent in finding ways to share our blessings, not hoarding them!
As God’s ancient Hebrew people were about to enter the land He had promised them, God told the people: “...This day I call the heavens and the earth as witnesses against you that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Now choose life…” (Deuteronomy 30:19).
Each day, as we come to God in repentance and faith in Jesus, we choose life. We choose God’s kingdom over our greed and over all of our sins. We choose to rest in God’s grace rather than stewing in the anxiety and futility of self-worship.
One New Testament scholar says this of Jesus’ words to us today, “The kingdom of God is, at its heart, about God’s sovereignty sweeping the world with love and power, so that human beings, each made in God’s image and each one loved dearly, may relax in the knowledge that God is in control.”
That’s Jesus’ message for us today: Relax and live in His grace. Amen
[I'm the pastor of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio.]
Luke 12:13-21
A few years ago, I watched an interview conducted by a talk show host with a musician. “I’ve never understood what was so bad about greed,” the musician said. “Neither have I,” the talk show host agreed. The talk show host agreed with greed.
I think that most people would do the same. They may not feel comfortable with overt expressions of greed, like the character in the old movie Wall Street, who said, “Greed is good.” But their behaviors and attitudes speak volumes.
I think that most people would do the same. They may not feel comfortable with overt expressions of greed, like the character in the old movie Wall Street, who said, “Greed is good.” But their behaviors and attitudes speak volumes.
A woman I knew was dying. Her daughter sat down beside her deathbed and said, in what was to be their final conversation on this earth, “Mom, if you’ve got any money hidden, you’d better tell us where it is now.” (Isn’t that heartwarming? A real Hallmark moment.)
You’re familiar with the old quote, sometimes attributed to Henry Ford, other times to John D. Rockefeller, who was supposedly asked, “How much money does the average person need to get by these days?” The reply: “Just a little more.”
In today’s gospel lesson, Luke 12:13-21, Jesus underscores how destructive, how fatal greed is.
You’re familiar with the old quote, sometimes attributed to Henry Ford, other times to John D. Rockefeller, who was supposedly asked, “How much money does the average person need to get by these days?” The reply: “Just a little more.”
In today’s gospel lesson, Luke 12:13-21, Jesus underscores how destructive, how fatal greed is.
Greed, the constant desire for “just a little more,” is a violation of the first commandment: “You shall have no other gods.”
Jesus and God’s written Word don’t tell us to refrain from having ambitions in life. Christians are allowed ambitions.
Paul’s ambition was to plant the gospel throughout the Gentile world.
Martin Luther’s ambition was to reform the Church and set people free from sin and darkness with the gospel word about Jesus.
The ambition of Gregor Mendel, a monk, was to understand how God engineered life, becoming the father of modern genetics.
William Wilberforce set out to see slavery outlawed in the British Empire and it happened, thirty years before it happened in America and without a Civil War.
Mother Teresa’s ambition was to serve the dying in Calcutta.
There’s nothing wrong with the ambition to maximize the talents and gifts God has given to us.
And there's nothing wrong with the ambition to take care of our families.
These are all holy, God-blessed, and I would say, God-prompted, ambitions.
And, it should be said that human beings are ambitious by nature. It’s part of how God made us.
And, it should be said that human beings are ambitious by nature. It’s part of how God made us.
“Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it,” God told the human race at our creation. “Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground.”
God made us co-conspirators with Him in nurturing and, where needed, making better the life of the world, in the power of His love and grace. That is an ambitious undertaking!
But when our ambitions revolve around self-worship or the worship of the things of this dying world, they become expressions of greed, false gods, tickets to hell.
Greed is rooted in fear.
Fear that the God Who provides daily bread won’t provide it for us.
Fear that the Christian message that this world isn’t all there is to life is untrue.
Fear that the God Who promises to be with us always will abandon us.
Fear that the God Who promises an eternal world to those who trust in Jesus won’t come through and that we need to grab for the good things we can enjoy in this world.
Greed is rooted in fear. Jesus warns us against in today’s gospel lesson.
Let’s take a look at it, starting at verse 13: “Someone in the crowd said to him, ‘Teacher, tell my brother to divide the inheritance with me.’”
Jesus has been teaching the crowd about the Kingdom of God, the eternal kingdom that belongs to all baptized believers in the crucified and risen Jesus. In the previous twelve verses of Luke, chapter 12, Luke tells us that Jesus:
- warned the disciples about the false teachings of the Pharisees;
- encouraged them to live without fear, knowing that every human life is precious in God’s eyes, so valuable that Christ came to die and rise to set all who trust in Him free of sin and death;and
- told them--and us--that we must fearlessly and publicly follow Him, Jesus, as our Savior, and not keep our faith hidden from the world.
Greed, you see, makes us forget what’s important. It makes us chase the things that are here today and gone tomorrow, rather than following Jesus for life with God that never ends.
Verse 14: “Jesus replied, ‘Man, who appointed me a judge or an arbiter between you? Then he said to them, ‘Watch out! Be on your guard against all kinds of greed; life does not consist in an abundance of possessions.’” (Luke 12:14-15)
Jesus' response here is ironic.
We know, of course, that Jesus is the judge of the world.
That’s the point of His portrayal, in Matthew 25:31-46, of the final judgment in which Jesus the King separates the sheep from the goats.
And we’re told in 1 Timothy 2:5, “...there is one God and one mediator between God and mankind, the man Christ Jesus…”
Jesus Christ is the judge and mediator of the universe. But the man in the crowd in our lesson is only interested in using Jesus to get what he wants. If we were to boil his request of Jesus down to a prayer petition, it would be something like, “Lord, my will be done.”
But Jesus tells him and the crowd that life, the gift of God to those who believe, doesn’t come to those who set their ultimate ambitions on the things of this world. “Life does not consist in an abundance of possessions.”
Jesus' words echo those He spoke to Martha, the anxious hostess greedy not for money but for attention, affirmation, and compliments, resentful of the different role to which God was calling her sister Mary. “‘Martha, Martha,’ [Jesus told her], “you are worried and upset about many things, but few things are needed—or indeed only one. Mary has chosen what is better, and it will not be taken away from her.” (Luke 10:41-42)
In today's gospel lesson, Jesus effectively tells yet another resentful sibling, “Choose life over death. Choose life with God over death by things.”
To undergird His point, Jesus then tells one of His parables.
You know it well. A man is blessed with a particularly fertile piece of land. It grows so abundant a harvest that the farmer has no idea where he’s going to store all of it. (This was obviously in the days before those sprawling self-storage units you see everywhere today.) The farmer decides to build bigger grain silos to store it all, take care of himself for life, and then just chill, happily self-sufficient, happily heedless of the will of God or the needs of others. “But God said to him, [Jesus tells us] ‘You fool! This very night your life will be demanded from you. Then who will get what you have prepared for yourself?’” (Luke 12:20) Someone was paraphrasing Jesus here when she or he famously said, “There won’t be a U-Haul trailer hitched to the hearse when they take your earthly remains to the cemetery.”
The things of this world, including money and stuff, will not bring us life. And when the call of greed takes hold in our lives, nothing we do, nothing we own, nothing in our investment portfolios or bank accounts, will ever be enough. Greed will compel us to want “just a little more.” God, the life He offers through Christ, and other people will be crowded out of our lives and our concerns. Jesus says: “This is how it will be with whoever stores up things for themselves but is not rich toward God.” (Luke 12:21)
Greed is a killer, a creation of Satan designed to make us think that the God we know in Jesus Christ isn’t enough. That is a lie.
There is a better way to live. God has created it for us in Jesus Christ. It’s the life of certainty and security in God’s love and provision, the life of freedom to love God and love neighbor and to share with one another, the life that Jesus makes possible for those who trust in Him, for those who daily fall into His arms and seek God’s will for our lives.
We can live in the kingdom of God, no longer viewing life as a zero-sum game where if someone else gets more, I get less.
In the kingdom of God, we know that in the God we meet in the crucified Jesus, there will always be “daily bread” and there will be more grace, love, and security than we can imagine, in Jesus’ words, “good measure, pressed down, shaken together and running over” (Luke 6:38).
Jesus gives those who trust in Him so much of Himself that their lives can be spent in finding ways to share our blessings, not hoarding them!
As God’s ancient Hebrew people were about to enter the land He had promised them, God told the people: “...This day I call the heavens and the earth as witnesses against you that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Now choose life…” (Deuteronomy 30:19).
Each day, as we come to God in repentance and faith in Jesus, we choose life. We choose God’s kingdom over our greed and over all of our sins. We choose to rest in God’s grace rather than stewing in the anxiety and futility of self-worship.
One New Testament scholar says this of Jesus’ words to us today, “The kingdom of God is, at its heart, about God’s sovereignty sweeping the world with love and power, so that human beings, each made in God’s image and each one loved dearly, may relax in the knowledge that God is in control.”
That’s Jesus’ message for us today: Relax and live in His grace. Amen
[I'm the pastor of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio.]
Sunday, October 14, 2018
The Only Thing We Need
[This was shared during the Sunday morning worship services with the people and friends of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio, earlier today.]
Mark 10:17-22
Our gospel lesson for this morning, Mark 10:17-22, begins: “As Jesus started on his way, a man ran up to him and fell on his knees before him. ‘Good teacher,’ he asked, “what must I do to inherit eternal life?’”
To understand Jesus’ answer to the man’s question, we need to unpack two things he says in asking it.
The first is this: The man assumes that if he’s going to inherit eternal life, he will have to do something. “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” he asks. The man is trapped in the idea that if he’s to get anything good from God, he must earn it.
It’s not hard to understand where he would get such an idea. It seems like the whole world tells us that we have to earn, or claw, or steal, the things that are valuable.
People even apply this to their thinking about God. One modern commentator says that in first century Judea, where Jesus lived, religious groups from the Pharisees to the Essenes, sects of Judaism, would have told the man to follow their stringent rules and he could earn his way into God’s kingdom. In fact, in order to make a point, the first part of Jesus’ answer to this man will sound very much like the traditional religious answer, do more.
But you and I know that this is not the way for dying sinners like you and me to inherit eternal life. You can’t earn an inheritance. An inheritance is a gift that you may renounce, but you can never earn. This is no less true of the inheritance of eternal life that God wants to give to us. Ephesians 2:8-9, reminds us, “For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God— not by works, so that no one can boast.”
Here’s the second thing to unpack from the man’s question, the phrase eternal life.
In the Greek and Roman worlds of the first century, that phrase would have carried the idea of some milky, spiritual world that the disembodied souls of good people supposedly enter into when they die. This would have been completely foreign to the man who asks the question, to Judaism, to Jesus’ disciples, and to Jesus Himself.
From the perspective of Biblical faith, it’s impossible to separate a soul from a body. We are bodies, containing our minds, souls, and spirits all wrapped up in one, indivisible package.
That’s why the human fall into sin was so horrible. Sin brings death to the whole human self. That’s why we desperately need to be saved from ourselves!
In the Bible, eternal life refers to the coming age, the age that will come after God has judged all people, an age not in some wifty spirit world, but in a renewed creation like this one--filled with atoms and molecules, rock and granite, canyons and water, lions and tigers, and strawberry shortcake.
The Bible teaches that Jesus rose, the first-born from the dead, still identifiable by the scars on His hands and feet and side.
We confess each Sunday what the Bible teaches, “the resurrection of the body.” This is the life--the resurrected life--that the man is asking Jesus about when He says, “Good teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?”
Jesus challenges the man right away. Verse 18: “‘Why do you call me good?’ Jesus answered. ‘No one is good—except God alone.’”
“Say what you mean and mean what you say,” Jesus is telling the man. “If you think I’m good, then I must be more that just a teacher. Don’t patronize me with honorary titles you don’t mean.”
A merely human teacher is incapable of being good. In numerous places, the Bible says of the human race, “There is no one righteous, not even one; there is no one who understands; there is no one who seeks God...there is no one who does good, not even one.” (Romans 3:10-12; Psalm 14:1-3; Psalm 53:1-3; Ecclesiastes 7:20)
Jesus is good because He’s truly God as well as truly human. Jesus wants the inquiring man to understand this.
Jesus proceeds with His answer. Verse 19: “You know the commandments: ‘You shall not murder, you shall not commit adultery, you shall not steal, you shall not give false testimony, you shall not defraud, honor your father and mother.’”
Notice both the commandments Jesus mentions and the ones He leaves out.
It’s these exclusions that are the key to understanding this whole passage because Jesus understands precisely what is lacking in this man’s life.
Verse 20: “Teacher, he declared, ‘all these I have kept since I was a boy.’ Jesus looked at him and loved him. ‘One thing you lack,’ he said. ‘Go, sell everything you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me.’”
Did you know that Adolf Hitler, one of the most brutal dictators in the history of the world, responsible for the deaths of millions because of his sick racism, was always polite in social settings, never cursed, and drank no alcohol?
You can be outwardly virtuous, yet still filled with the fire of hell. The questioning man was excited to tell Jesus, “I’ve been doing all those good things since I was a boy.” But Jesus saw that there was something this rich man lacked. He was a nice man who worshiped money and possessions more than he worshiped God. They were his gods of choice. They were the means he used to measure the blessedness of his life. Jesus loved the man and wanted to set him free.
In short, the man lacked God, the God revealed in Christ. He didn’t trust in God. He trusted in His money. He had everything but God.
And so, Jesus gave the man His prescription, “Sell everything you have, give the proceeds to the poor, and follow Me, trust in Me. Trust in Me and not in your money.”
This prescription isn’t precisely the same for everyone. Abraham was a rich man; God didn’t tell Abraham to get rid of his wealth. Wealth wasn’t something Abraham was tempted to worship. But there is no shortage of candidates for the gods of our lives besides money--success, power, conviviality, happiness, influence, popularity, food, alcohol and other drugs, good times, our families, our work. Any god we follow other than the One we meet in Jesus Christ will always demand more of us, wringing life itself from us. When anything other than the God we know in Jesus is someone’s god, they end up dead, far from God. Death, not eternal life is their inheritance.
But when we follow Jesus, we have the inheritance we cannot earn, eternal life that begins not in the sweet by-and-by, but right now as we follow Him.
Jesus tells those who lay aside their idol gods and their sins that the kingdom of God is among them now, even before we are raised from the dead (Luke 17:21).
This crucified and risen Jesus can promise us, “I am the resurrection and the life. The one who believes in me will live, even though they die; and whoever lives by believing in me will never die.” (John 11:25-26)
Our gospel lesson is capped by one of the saddest passages in all the Bible: “At this the man’s face fell. He went away sad, because he had great wealth.”
I think that Jesus was even sadder than the man, who couldn’t bring himself to let go of the idol that would lead him to death so that he could grasp the outstretched hand of the good God Who offers us life.
Jesus wants to give us our inheritance, eternal life. This doesn’t happen when we make Jesus our top priority, as though Jesus is meant to be an item on our daily planner. It happens when Jesus becomes our life, when we accept what He has taught us to be the bottom line truth of human existence: “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me” (John 14:6). May Jesus be our life today and always. Amen
[I'm the pastor of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio.]
Mark 10:17-22
Our gospel lesson for this morning, Mark 10:17-22, begins: “As Jesus started on his way, a man ran up to him and fell on his knees before him. ‘Good teacher,’ he asked, “what must I do to inherit eternal life?’”
To understand Jesus’ answer to the man’s question, we need to unpack two things he says in asking it.
The first is this: The man assumes that if he’s going to inherit eternal life, he will have to do something. “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” he asks. The man is trapped in the idea that if he’s to get anything good from God, he must earn it.
It’s not hard to understand where he would get such an idea. It seems like the whole world tells us that we have to earn, or claw, or steal, the things that are valuable.
People even apply this to their thinking about God. One modern commentator says that in first century Judea, where Jesus lived, religious groups from the Pharisees to the Essenes, sects of Judaism, would have told the man to follow their stringent rules and he could earn his way into God’s kingdom. In fact, in order to make a point, the first part of Jesus’ answer to this man will sound very much like the traditional religious answer, do more.
But you and I know that this is not the way for dying sinners like you and me to inherit eternal life. You can’t earn an inheritance. An inheritance is a gift that you may renounce, but you can never earn. This is no less true of the inheritance of eternal life that God wants to give to us. Ephesians 2:8-9, reminds us, “For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God— not by works, so that no one can boast.”
Here’s the second thing to unpack from the man’s question, the phrase eternal life.
In the Greek and Roman worlds of the first century, that phrase would have carried the idea of some milky, spiritual world that the disembodied souls of good people supposedly enter into when they die. This would have been completely foreign to the man who asks the question, to Judaism, to Jesus’ disciples, and to Jesus Himself.
From the perspective of Biblical faith, it’s impossible to separate a soul from a body. We are bodies, containing our minds, souls, and spirits all wrapped up in one, indivisible package.
That’s why the human fall into sin was so horrible. Sin brings death to the whole human self. That’s why we desperately need to be saved from ourselves!
In the Bible, eternal life refers to the coming age, the age that will come after God has judged all people, an age not in some wifty spirit world, but in a renewed creation like this one--filled with atoms and molecules, rock and granite, canyons and water, lions and tigers, and strawberry shortcake.
The Bible teaches that Jesus rose, the first-born from the dead, still identifiable by the scars on His hands and feet and side.
We confess each Sunday what the Bible teaches, “the resurrection of the body.” This is the life--the resurrected life--that the man is asking Jesus about when He says, “Good teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?”
Jesus challenges the man right away. Verse 18: “‘Why do you call me good?’ Jesus answered. ‘No one is good—except God alone.’”
“Say what you mean and mean what you say,” Jesus is telling the man. “If you think I’m good, then I must be more that just a teacher. Don’t patronize me with honorary titles you don’t mean.”
A merely human teacher is incapable of being good. In numerous places, the Bible says of the human race, “There is no one righteous, not even one; there is no one who understands; there is no one who seeks God...there is no one who does good, not even one.” (Romans 3:10-12; Psalm 14:1-3; Psalm 53:1-3; Ecclesiastes 7:20)
Jesus is good because He’s truly God as well as truly human. Jesus wants the inquiring man to understand this.
Jesus proceeds with His answer. Verse 19: “You know the commandments: ‘You shall not murder, you shall not commit adultery, you shall not steal, you shall not give false testimony, you shall not defraud, honor your father and mother.’”
Notice both the commandments Jesus mentions and the ones He leaves out.
- He mentions the Fifth Commandment, the Sixth, the Seventh, the Eighth, then adds His own commandment about fraud, and goes back to the Fourth Commandment.
- But Jesus leaves out the First (“You shall have no other gods.”; the Second (“You shall not take the name of the Lord in vain”); the Third (“You shall remember the Sabbath”); and the Ninth and Tenth Commandments, which deal with coveting.
It’s these exclusions that are the key to understanding this whole passage because Jesus understands precisely what is lacking in this man’s life.
Verse 20: “Teacher, he declared, ‘all these I have kept since I was a boy.’ Jesus looked at him and loved him. ‘One thing you lack,’ he said. ‘Go, sell everything you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me.’”
Did you know that Adolf Hitler, one of the most brutal dictators in the history of the world, responsible for the deaths of millions because of his sick racism, was always polite in social settings, never cursed, and drank no alcohol?
You can be outwardly virtuous, yet still filled with the fire of hell. The questioning man was excited to tell Jesus, “I’ve been doing all those good things since I was a boy.” But Jesus saw that there was something this rich man lacked. He was a nice man who worshiped money and possessions more than he worshiped God. They were his gods of choice. They were the means he used to measure the blessedness of his life. Jesus loved the man and wanted to set him free.
In short, the man lacked God, the God revealed in Christ. He didn’t trust in God. He trusted in His money. He had everything but God.
And so, Jesus gave the man His prescription, “Sell everything you have, give the proceeds to the poor, and follow Me, trust in Me. Trust in Me and not in your money.”
This prescription isn’t precisely the same for everyone. Abraham was a rich man; God didn’t tell Abraham to get rid of his wealth. Wealth wasn’t something Abraham was tempted to worship. But there is no shortage of candidates for the gods of our lives besides money--success, power, conviviality, happiness, influence, popularity, food, alcohol and other drugs, good times, our families, our work. Any god we follow other than the One we meet in Jesus Christ will always demand more of us, wringing life itself from us. When anything other than the God we know in Jesus is someone’s god, they end up dead, far from God. Death, not eternal life is their inheritance.
But when we follow Jesus, we have the inheritance we cannot earn, eternal life that begins not in the sweet by-and-by, but right now as we follow Him.
Jesus tells those who lay aside their idol gods and their sins that the kingdom of God is among them now, even before we are raised from the dead (Luke 17:21).
This crucified and risen Jesus can promise us, “I am the resurrection and the life. The one who believes in me will live, even though they die; and whoever lives by believing in me will never die.” (John 11:25-26)
Our gospel lesson is capped by one of the saddest passages in all the Bible: “At this the man’s face fell. He went away sad, because he had great wealth.”
I think that Jesus was even sadder than the man, who couldn’t bring himself to let go of the idol that would lead him to death so that he could grasp the outstretched hand of the good God Who offers us life.
Jesus wants to give us our inheritance, eternal life. This doesn’t happen when we make Jesus our top priority, as though Jesus is meant to be an item on our daily planner. It happens when Jesus becomes our life, when we accept what He has taught us to be the bottom line truth of human existence: “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me” (John 14:6). May Jesus be our life today and always. Amen
[I'm the pastor of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio.]
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