Unfamiliar with the familiar. . .

Sermon for Lent 2A, preached on Sunday, March 8, 2020.

    The familiar things of life are familiar because we know them so well or so we think.  They have become familiar to us because we use them all the time.  But sometimes the thing most familiar to us is a stranger.  We are accustomed to it and it has sentimental meaning but that does not mean we know it well.  It may only mean we think we know it.  Nearly everyone on earth can quote John 3:16 but that does not mean we know what Jesus is saying or understand.  It is familiar to us what it actually says may not be.  We only think we know it when in reality we don’t know it at all.

    For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son that whosoever believes in Him should not perish but have eternal life.  I don’t need to quote it to you. That verse lives in the minds and hearts of most people and even non-Christians.  But because we know it and even love it, does not mean we understand this verse.  Take, for example, the word so.  We think that this word amplifies the lengths to which God would go to love us.  Why God loves us so much that He would give His only begotten Son.  No, indeed.  The little word so does not amplify God’s love but rather directs us to how and where that love of God is revealed and made known.

    So, God loved the world by giving His only begotten Son.  God’s love is not some theoretical love that lives in scribbling on paper or ideas that live in the imagination of the mind or even in the tear jerking sentiments of the heart.  No, God’s love is revealed by Christ’s suffering and death upon the cross.  John is telling us bluntly that if you want to know the love of God you must know that love as God has revealed it – in the gift of His one and only Son, begotten of the Father, enfleshed in the womb of the Virgin by the Spirit, and born in time as a man under the law to redeem those caught by the law in the guilt of their sin.

    We spend half our lives putting words in God’s mouth and ideas in His mind and sentiments in His heart.  We are forever saying “God would not want us to have to do or suffer this” or “God would surely want us to enjoy that” or “I cannot believe in a God who do this or say that.”  Our misunderstanding of John 3:16 only tries to put more words into God’s mouth.  Yet that is exactly the thing we cannot do.  The Word is the Lord’s and not ours.  It is not given to us to manipulate but to hear and hearing believe.  The love God has for us is not magnified by what Jesus did but revealed by what Jesus did.  It is not that God chose to go to such great lengths to save us but that He had no choice.  If He was to save us, it had to come at the cost of His only begotten Son and that Son had to be lifted up on the cross for sinners to be saved from sin and death.

    We all know John 3:16 but you cannot know John 3:16 without also knowing the verse that follows it.  John 3:17:  For God did not send His Son into the world to condemn the world but that the world might be saved through Him.  Jesus was not given to us to replace the Law.  He was not given to us to tell us how to live a god-pleasing life so that we could all please God with our words and deeds.  Jesus was given to us because you and me and the whole world was mired in dirt of sin, stinking of death, and blind to it all.  Jesus was given to us because you and me and the whole world had made peace with death and were content to live a short life if it was a good life.  Jesus was given to us because you and me and the whole world has grown so accustomed to bending the rules that we actually thought we were almost holy without any help at all from anyone.  Jesus was given to us because we could not die the death to save ourselves but could only die the death that lead us into hell’s eternal torment.

    Jesus came for the cross.  He came not to be lifted up upon a throne but to sacrifice Himself for us on the altar of the cross.  He came not for the joy of living but who, for the joy that was set before Him enduring the cross and scorned its shame to save us.  Jesus came not for the hosannas of the crowds or palm branches waving of organ pipes blaring “A Mighty Fortress.”  No, He came to suffer and shed His blood and die the agonizing death of the cross in our place and as our substitute.  This is what justification means.  Jesus did not come to suffer and die for the good or the righteous or the healthy or the holy but for sinners.  This means that we meet Jesus on the knees of our humble confession and in the hoarse voices of those who have been taught by the Spirit to say: mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. 

    And there is one more thing about this verse we think we know so well.  It is not all Gospel.  It is not all good news.  There is a sharp cut of the Law that none of us can afford to miss.  We do not proclaim that God has to save us or that He has chosen to save us no matter what.  No, we proclaim a God who saves those who believe in Him, who believe in the words of the prophets, who believe in the Word made flesh, and who believe that there is a body strong enough to hang upon the cross and redeem our bodies from all the death we carry around inside of us because of sin.  And the flip side of that we dare not miss.  Whosoever does NOT believe in Him will perish.

    Hell is not some occasional possibility but the ordinary end that awaits all people. It is not the exception but the rule.  Only because we stand in Christ, washed by His blood, given new life in His water, and called to faith by the voice of the Spirit that there is any destiny awaiting us OTHER than death and hell.  But the grace that bypasses the ordinary end called hell is grace that is accessed not by works or intention that earns or merits it but by faith – faith planted by the Spirit into our dark and fearful hearts.
    God is not nice.  And God does not save us because we are nice.  God is justice that has been tempered with mercy.  God loves what is ugly and dirty and dead and gives His only begotten Son to clean us up, clothe us with righteousness, save us for everlasting life, by taking on that ugliness, dirt, and death.  God is not sentimental.  God does not back away from justice because He does not have the stomach for it.  God has to answer justice and instead of answering it with you suffering death, His mercy has sent His one and only Son to suffer in our place and die the death we should have died that we might be saved.  Yet this is not some wide open gate but the narrow door that is Christ alone and through which we pass by faith alone.

    You think you know John 3:16 but as familiar as the words are, the meaning of that verse is hard.  It means that we are sinners who cannot save ourselves.  It means that we are guilty and that our sin cannot be justified or excused.  It means that salvation will cost somebody suffering and death.  It means we have done nothing to earn or merit this gracious gift of a Savior.  It means that God is not tame or safe or anyone’s pet.  It means that there were not options on how sinners might be saved but only one choice and one path and that was the suffering of the cross and the cold darkness of the grave. 

    John 3:16 does not mean that we have come up to God or that we could ever ascend to Him on high.  Rather, it means that God has come gone down to us, walked among us as one of us yet without sin, and died alone upon the cross to spare a guilty and undeserving people.  I am not sure that after today John 3:16 will be your favorite verse still.  It is no cliché.  It is not greeting card sentiment.  It points to the cross.  It admits our great need.  It calls us to repentance.  It requires faith from us – even a faith which itself must be given by God.  It does not mean God loves you in a special way but that God loved you as only He could love you – by lifting up His one and only Son upon the cross that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have eternal life.

    Nicodemus thought he could understand God, reason with God, and meet God as an equal.  What shocked Him was not simply the idea of baptism but that he needed to be baptized, not simply the idea that He had to be born anew from above but that His life was worthless and marked for death, and not simply that Jesus saves him but that He saves him as one rescues an unworthy, undeserving, and common piece of trash.  So if you struggle with this, you are in good company.  Nicodemus was a great teacher in Israel and he did not get it either.  The Spirit had to intervene, tear down the walls of fear and unbelief, and plant the seed of faith with Nicodemus’ heart so that hearing he might believe and believing he might live.  It is no different for you.  The Spirit must intervene for you, destroy the unbelief in you, and plant faith in you.  It is a good verse, don’t get me wrong.  But there is nothing warm and fuzzy in it.  Only salvation that costs Jesus’ life to save ours, only blood that must be shed, and death killed by dying.

    Like Nicodemus, we wonder:  “How can this be?”  How can this be that I was not saved by a sweet love but by a love willing to die?  How can this be that I was saved not because I was worth it but because He loved even in my unworthiness?  How can this be that this salvation requires faith or it will save no one?  How can this be that sin has so tainted me that even this faith must be given to me by the Spirit?  With Nicodemus we are pointed to the cross where Christ is lifted up, to the blood that cleanses us from all our sin and death, and to the faith that says “amen” to this mighty act of salvation.  This is how God has loved you, loved Nicodemus, and loved me.  Amen.

Writing for those who skim read. . .

Recently someone suggested to me that our Sunday worship folder would look better if we had more white space and broke up the text a bit more.  A few have said something similar about this blog, advising me that blog posts are sometimes too long and could benefit from shorter sentences and more white space.  The reason for this is that we live in an age in which people do not so much read as skim the text.  This is why some periodicals pull out pivotal sentences and put them as graphic content in large and distinctive typefaces.  If you cannot force yourself to read the whole article, then you can get the gist of it all by focusing on those theme sentences so conveniently highlighted for you.

All of this coincides with (or perhaps is the cause of) growing Biblical illiteracy.  Scriptures turned into graphic novels or designed with a basic reading level (some as low as 3rd grade) are being published in the hopes of getting folks back into reading the Word of God.  While I will not diminish these efforts, the real issue is not a problem with the Word but with the people reading (or not reading) that Word.  We have become a people for whom the sound bite has become their in depth content.

The issues lie not with an imprint early on in the lives that cannot be changed but the result daily experience constantly re-imprinted upon brains.  The brain is remarkably pliable and elastic but it cannot escape the implications of a routine that constantly reinforces a pattern upon the mind.  It is a matter of the things which are being turned off as well as those things that are being turned on for our brains.  Only a fool would deny that our ability to concentrate upon and digest the information before us has been radically affected by ever present screens and the fast moving stream of stimulus.  While this is of great interest to those who educate our children, it is not without concern for those within the Church.

You cannot skim read the Scriptures and be equipped to resist the wiles of those who pervert the Word of God or be informed enough to identify those who distort that Word.  In other words, the less you know of God's Word, the more vulnerable you are to being led away from Christ the Way, the Truth, and the Life.  A shallow knowledge of God's Word is not a minor danger.  It leaves the Christian dependent upon others to know what is right and true and the religious marketplace is filled with hucksters and hacks who are like the blind leading the blind.  Their own lack of knowledge becomes the foundation of your own undoing -- not knowing the Word enough to identity if they are teaching you truth or error.

A liturgical church nearly drowns the Christian in the Word of God.  Far from snippets of that Word, the Christian is surrounded with the Word, prays that Word, sings that Word, and hears that Word.  With three readings and a Psalm, the lectionary adds to the mountain of God's Word that you encounter every Sunday.  The sermon is based not on a word or phrase but lives within the context of a system of readings and a liturgy that is itself Scripture sung, prayed, and read.  Yet even liturgical churches live within the pressure to reduce the length of the services and shorten the sermons.  If we succumb to our penchant for worship lite and for a cursory knowledge of Scripture, we not only work against our own endurance in the faith but we cripple our ability to pass on the faith to those who come after us.

God did not write for those who skim read.  From Old to New Testament, God did not shape the structure of worship for brevity or to satisfy those who choose not to read.  It is God's expectation that we will desire His Word as newborns desire the milk of their mothers and that we will grow from that mother's milk to the solid food that builds us up and enables us to grow into maturity as God's own baptized children.  This is the discipline of God's people and part of the training of the mind from that which is trivial to that which is profound.  This is what it means to be captive to the Word of God. 

Counter cultural. . .

Though we tend to live with the romantic image of the independent thinker who marches to the beat of his or her own drum, we are, in reality, herd creatures.  We find comfort and security in the herd.  From political opinions to taste in food to preference in clothing to our choice of decor, we follow trend and fad.  The romance of the individual is lived out within the harsh environment of a culture that values uniformity most of all.

Liberalism (or progressivism, which ever you prefer) delights in the idea that it is counterculture but liberalism, like conservatism, is in a fight for control of the herd.  The difference between them is that conservatism is more likely to allow different opinion whereas liberalism has shown itself intolerant of those who would dare to disagree.  Whereas conservatism has debated ideas within an open forum, liberalism no longer dares a choice except the politically correct opinion.  This is less about the value of conservatism or liberalism but simply an honest appraisal of the way both have operated, especially more recently.

In the past, the Church may have identified with one side or another.  With liberals, the Church has heralded the causes of the immigrant, the poor, and the weak.  With conservatives, the Church has lauded the place of the family, morality and ethics greater than individual choice, and the sacredness of life.  So from time to time the Church has been gravely tempted to side with one group or another in pursuit of the overall goal of shaping the culture.  The allies we may find within liberalism or conservatism are temporary and we should be wary of making friendships with groups whose positions may not be certain or trustworthy.

The Church is a counter cultural movement.  Though we may have forgotten this more recently, history shows that the Church has lived in the world but not of it -- and when the Church has forgotten this, the Gospel itself has suffered.  From the earliest days of Christianity, it was the Church that extended value and protection to women and children and family.  The Church did not take up a side against another but spoke from the heart of the Gospel to a world in conflict with that Gospel.  The mercy ministries the Church was noted for were on behalf of those least valued by the society around them.  From the orphan to the widow to the sick to the aged, the Church took their care under the wing of their love for neighbor and these became a hall mark of the Church's very identity in the world. 

But that has virtually disappeared in the West.  In its place, some have tried to use the Church's voice on behalf of minorities not so oppressed or bereft of protection.  Liberal Christianity turned the Church's embrace to the cause of sexual liberation.  From feminism to the LGBTQ+ agenda, liberal Christians have found a new cause.  In contrast, more orthodox Christians have worked tirelessly for the cause of traditional marriage, for the cause of the family, for the protection of the unborn, and for the protection of the aged and infirm.

It is high time that the Church rediscovered its counter cultural identity.  We cannot afford to be tied to political causes or to become a delayed echo of the most progressive forces of change any longer.  From the heavenly worship of the Church in which we anticipate the future God has prepared, to the message we proclaim within the community of the baptized and in witness to the world, we are a counter cultural force.  Ours is not just a message of condemnation, though we cannot be silent when condemnation is require, but a positive message of hope and redemption by the blood of the Savior acting out the love of God for us. 

The values of the Kingdom of God and the power of love are not theories meant as fodder for the mind but are lived out in the actions of a people who have been rescued by the redemptive love of Christ and brought to know Him and the power of His death and resurrection by the Spirit's work within us.  We are not do-gooders whose beneficence is designed to win friends and influence people but proceeds from God's own saving work which is manifested in us personally through the means of grace.  The good that we would do is Christ working in us and through us; there should be no daylight between Christ's saving work for us and our work on His behalf in the world.

The mountain on which we will live or die. . .

Worship not only ends up informing belief but it is the very place where belief is confessed and lived out before the world.  Lex orandi led credendi is not some theoretical idea but the most practical and profound truths to accompany Scripture and the living tradition of its confessors.  So what happens on Sunday morning is the mountain on which the Church will either live or die.  Faith which lives apart from its practice cannot survive in tact.  It will become mere theory and, as we all know, theories live in the mind but not in the heart.

After the Battle for the Bible wars found in the 1970s, I have grown more and more concerned that it is thoroughly possible and perhaps even probable to win that major battle and lose the war entirely.  For Missouri, the Battle for the Bible was the defining point of our existence and one for which we were willing to split in order to preserve.  Yet living with this battle in the rear view mirror, the things we struggle against today are enemies just as formidable as doubt about the veracity of God's Word.  We live in the arid desert of a world in which congregations do as they please and wear it as a badge of honor to do so, in which adiaphora has come to mean everyone can do what is right in their own eyes and God will still be pleased, and in which worship has become merely a neutral tool to be styled as people prefer while presuming somehow to keep the content of the faith.  All of these will become our undoing every bit as much as the surrender of the historicity of God's Word in the generations past.

Every Sunday there are LCMSers who go to church and experience vastly different realities.  This is not a mere matter of more or fewer ceremonies but an absence of the Ordo, an omission of any hint of our liturgical past, and a disconnect with the rest of the church around them.  The lectionary is missing, the setting has more in common with malls and other secular public spaces than with the church's unique purpose, and the music has a beat but not much to say about Christ and Him crucified.  The kerygma is in sync with the times but it is terribly out of step with the Scriptures.  Jesus is an occasional reference to the sermon and justification and the atonement are barely mentioned but the sermon is replete with stories to entertain, inspire, and encourage people to reach their potential and their dreams.  For too many congregations, Lutheran as an identifier has become excess baggage and with it their commitment to the Lutheran Confessions and to the worship life that flows from those Confessions have moved from the practical to the theoretical.  Lutheranism has become a legacy term more than an apt description of the content and shape of the faith and life of the congregation and the people.

This is the mountain on which Lutheranism will live or die.  Abandon the liturgy and you have nothing.  In an interesting anecdote, a parent of a young adult worshiped together in a traditional liturgical (though not ceremonial) congregation.  The young adult, accustomed to an evangelical style of contemporary worship, told the parent how it was all coming back.  The words, the music, and the shape of the liturgy was embedded in this young adult's memory.  But the small child in that young adult's arms will never know this, will not have it framed into the memory, and will not be able to return to what was.  That child has nothing to fall back upon.  This is what I mean when I say that worship is the mountain on which Lutheranism will live or die.  Once we raise a majority generation that has not been raised with or learned the liturgy, hymns, and rhythm of the church year as a child or youth, it will be foreign turn to them and they will be a stranger to our own confessional and liturgical history.  It will be like a modern generation of people looking back at Sunday mornings of the past the way we look at pictures of our ancestors and wonder about them.  This is the mountain on which Lutheranism will live or die.

We may have won the battle fifty years ago, but we are losing the war every week.

Beauty vs Ugliness

Much is made of urban decay and urban blight.  Indeed, there is no shortage of raw material to contrast the rarity of beauty with the commonplace of ugliness.  All of this happens, of course, in the context of Churchill's famous rejoinder that we shape our buildings and then they shape us. So it is no surprise that the buildings in which we experimented with whim and forgot their purpose have become an albatross upon our vision and our pocketbooks.  From the stark walls of poured concrete with all its rawness to the silly repetition of mirrored glass and stainless steel, we have endured the brutal result of form follows function.  It is true of the concrete jungle but also true of the places within that jungle that were supposed to be outposts of beauty, namely churches.

After the death of Roger Scruton, I was directed to his pursuit of those who would abandon beauty and make their peace with the dehumanizing nature of what passes as modern architecture.  In the BBC documentary “Why Beauty Matters,” Sir Roger connects architecture to the result of  urban decay.  In it is this comment:

“This building is boarded up because no one has a use for it. Nobody has a use for it because nobody wants to be in it. Nobody wants to be in it because the thing is so…ugly.”

It is perhaps an obvious truth that beauty invites us in, helps us to find a place, and to see who we are.  So for the great Gothic tradition of the past, the individual looked small in comparison to the size of the structure and the individual was overcome with the greatness of God and the majesty of His presence.  This is both compelling and terrorizing.  Light from great windows shed its brightness upon the dark and the images in that glass told the story of the God who loved even me.  The grand expanse of the structure from door to altar did not simply display distance but drew attention to the God who transcended that gulf by sending His own Son to come to us.  The high altar and elevated pulpit drew attention to the solemnity of what was happening when God invited us into His presence, spoke to us His living voice, gave us new identity in baptismal water, and became our food of eternal life.  Finally, the entry and the exit are pretty effective at establishing the boundaries between sacred and secular while at the same time reminding the congregant that he was in the world but not of it.

In contrast, the architecture of the church and the world puts man at the center.  In some cases that means drawing the sight lines down and in other cases it means an absence of the pedagogical role of art so that the person is himself the adornment of the space.  In other cases, the space becomes monument to the greatness of the builder and its empty walls and windows merely canvases for the imagination to paint.  In this way, architecture has become temporary and it is expected that a future generation will tear down the structures of a previous generation and build its own temple to the moment.  In America we are much better at destroying the structures of the past than we are refurbishing them for the present or preserving them for the future.

Ugliness is an enemy of more than beauty but the Gospel.

Past expiration date. . .

Over at the Get Religion site I read this great line about the deep sorrow one member expressed over the replacement of the Service Book and Hymnal with the Lutheran Book of Worship.  It was no different for LCMSers when the '41 book was replaced with the '82.

What I was hearing was a cry from his heart, as well as his head. Church officials had ruled that his faith — his life —  was out of date and he was hurting.

This is exactly the point I make when I say liturgical change needs to be deliberate, incremental, and careful.  This is what BXVI called the hermeneutic of continuity within the liturgical context.  Both Rome and Wittenberg suffered when this was broken and the change is jarring and abrupt.  When that change was not an evolution but a repudiation of the past, the people heard it rightly as a judgment against that past.  This is not the shape of faithful, pastoral liturgical change.  For LCMSers, this was resolved by the rescuing of that past and its restoration of place along side the change.  It is not the best option since it also creates competing liturgical traditions and a variety of rites (though not nearly as many as some Lutherans) which is not necessarily salutary either.  But it is a better option by far than forgetting our past or ignoring it.

For Rome the dilemma is more difficult.  There is no real reconciliation between Novus Ordo and the Extraordinary Form.  It is possible to try to celebrate the NO more reverently and Ad Orientem but this cannot mask the inherent conflict between the rites.  Curiously, this is not the only conflict between rites in Rome since you also have the Eastern Rite churches and their liturgical tradition that also represents a distinct challenge to the Western Rites.  Perhaps this is minimized by the fact that there are few places where both Eastern and Western traditions stand in direct conflict with one another but it does not resolve the multiple personalities of Rome on a Sunday morning.

For Lutherans the challenge is different.  It is less between competing rites that clearly show a common ordo or identity but the competition between a-liturgical types and very liturgical types.  And that is the landscape of Missouri at this point of time.  We have no competing hymnals and we have no contradictory rites but we have a significant number of our larger churches who live without any liturgical identity on Sunday morning and whose worship life reflects a generic Evangelical style at odds with our confessional identity.  And with this comes the soft underbelly of some Lutherans who have decided either the means of grace do not work or do not work quickly enough and so have substituted human effort, gimmick, and marketing tools to speed up the process of filling the pews, bank accounts, and esteem of the churches.  But that last point is for later consideration.

Cough on cue. . .

The smug dismissal of incense is a curiosity to me. Why would Lutherans who take Scripture and tradition seriously so quickly shrug off incense?  One would have to be predisposed to ignore what Scripture says to miss the distinct and profound role of incense in the worship life of God's people in the Old Testament (Lev. 16:13). The Bible does not only presumes but prescribes its use. This is not simply true for the Old Testament, but is obvious within the New Testament as well.  Consider Lk. 1:9, the incense offered by the Wise Men (Mt. 2:11), and the incense at the heavenly altar in Revelation 8:3-5.  For Christian worship, this made incense a regular part of the Eucharistic liturgy and daily offices as soon as legality made the more clandestine practices uniform, public, and regular.  This is shown by the use of incense within early Christian liturgies at least as far back as the 4th century by St. Ambrose. The Liturgy of St. James, found in such eastern rites (such as the Syrian Catholic, Malankara Catholic and Marionite) incorporates the use of incense. So at least dating to the 5th century, this oldest of the Christian liturgies still in use today maintains the role of incense.

³ And another angel came and stood at the altar with a golden censer, and he was given much incense to offer with the prayers of all the saints on the golden altar before the throne, ⁴ and the smoke of the incense, with the prayers of the saints, rose before God from the hand of the angel.  Rev. 8:3-4

I guess those who abhor the smell of God on earth will find it tolerable as the smell of heaven, unless they want to trade in their gracious place for one with other smells and no grace.  In any case, incense has virtually no chance of being restored to regular use within the churches of the Augsburg Confession and will remain an oddity hotly objected by the coughing and strenuous complaints of people who, as on this blog, insist upon enforcing their preference against incense upon those who think it normal, at least from a Biblical sense. 

I find this so interesting that incense and chanting evoke such anger and objection.  Curious, predictable, of course, so oddly curious. 

If we won't. . .

If we will not reign in the excesses of our liturgical chaos, the enemies of the faith will direct the confusion and fog to draw people away from Christ and the means of grace by which He is present to us and bestows upon us the gifts He has won for us by His death and resurrection.

If we will not reign in the excesses of preaching that tells people what they want to hear, the enemies of the faith will use this to erode the foundation of the Word and still the voice of God until both that Word and the voice of God is foreign and strange to their ears.

If we will not reign in the excesses of those who view the Church entrepreneurially and who market themselves and their version of the Gospel as a product, the enemies of the faith will steal the Gospel from us and substitute their own will, purpose, values, and goal and the Church will be a religious business instead of the Body of Christ.

If we will not reign in the excesses of so-called Contemporary Christian Music with its appeal to emotion and taste, the enemies of the faith will like thieves turn God's gift of song into something cheap and even pornographic in its sensual appeal -- not to mention deprive the faithful of one of the primary means of learning and expressing the faith.

If we will not reign in the excesses of congregationalism which simply adopts into the group the rampant individualism of our culture, the enemies of the faith will leave us with a paper unity, a shallow and meaningless confession, and structures as the only thing that binds us together.

If we will not reign in the excesses of sentiment that parades itself as faith, the enemies of the faith will turn faith itself into a feeling subject to the whims of desire, the shifting sands of mood, and the temporariness of the moment.

It is not about rules but self-control.  Not everything possible is beneficial.  I read that once.  It is time for us to be much more careful and to consider the rest of the body and not simply our own freedom.

Appearances are deceiving. . .

Sermon for Lent 1A, preached by the Rev. Daniel M. Ulrich on Sunday, March 1, 2020.

               Look at Adam and Eve’s temptation.  Look at Christ’s temptations.  Look at your temptations.  They’re not the seedy and blatant evil that we often think of, are they?  Most of the time, temptations look pleasant and harmless.  That’s why we struggle to resist.  They look good, or at least they look like no big deal.  But they are a big deal, and they’re not harmless.  Far from giving the good things temptation promises, sin only brings death. 

               Everything was good in the Garden of Eden.   All of creation was in perfect order and harmony.  Adam and Eve walked with God and they were joyfully living the life God gave them.  They tended to the plants and cared for the animals.  They loved each other completely;  husband and wife, one flesh, united perfectly.  Everything was how it was supposed to be.  And then Satan, the serpent, came and asked Eve what seemed to be a harmless question: “Did God actually say, ‘You shall not eat of any tree in the garden’? (Gen 3:1).

Eve could’ve answered by simply restating God’s command and leaving at that, but she didn’t.  She added to it.  She correctly answered they could eat from any of the trees, except for the one in the middle, but then she added, “neither shall you touch it” (Gen 3:3).  She played with God’s Word, and the door was now open.  Satan crept in and with twisted words he made it look like a good thing to go against God’s. 

He promised that eating that fruit would open Adam and Eve’s eyes; they’d know good and evil and they’d be like God.  How can that be a bad thing?  Obviously it’s good to know good and evil.  Obviously it’s good to be like God.  So it must obviously be good to eat the fruit.  Satan dressed up evil and made it look good.  And he did the same thing when he tempted our Lord.

Again, the temptations of Christ don’t seem to be a big deal.  They aren’t blatantly evil.  Turning stones into bread, where’s the harm in that?  Obviously it's a good to take care of our bodies, bodies God has given to us.  If Jesus turned those stones into bread He’d be benefiting it, not harming it.  And Satan’s second temptation, encouraging Jesus to jump from the temple, this too can’t be all bad, because by jumping Jesus would be showing His faith, right?  God’s Word does say He will command his angels to watch over us and guard us (Ps 91:11).  And lastly, bowing down to Satan, what’s so terrible about that?  Jesus only had to bend a knee.  Seems like a small thing.  Just a little prostration.  It wasn’t like Satan asked Jesus to sacrifice children to him.

It’s easy for us to look at temptation and see good.  Like Satan, we’re very skillful at twisting God’s Word.  We can reason and self-justify just about anything in order to get what we want.  We see Satan and sin’s temptation and they look good.  Sin promises us happiness, and doesn’t God want me to be happy?  So, in pursuit of happiness, we fulfill our lustful desires; even at the expense of our spouse and family, even when it goes against the design of God’s creation.  In pursuit of happiness, we let loose anger filled words because it’s not good to keep our feelings bottled up.  In pursuit of happiness, we convince ourselves that murder of children is okay because this world is a painful place to live and it wouldn’t be fair to bring a child into it.  In the pursuit of happiness we shirk the responsibilities of our vocations: fathers and mothers who complain their children ask too much of them, children who think only of their wants instead of honoring mom and dad, church members who decide it’s better to sleep in on Sunday morning instead of being in God’s house to encourage their brothers and sisters in Christ through worship.

Temptation looks pleasing to our eyes, but looks are deceiving.  Sin promises happiness and joy and fulfillment, but it can’t deliver.  Our eyes are easily deceived looking at those false promises.  Even when we’re told the full story, even when God’s Word lays it all at and plainly tells us that sin brings nothing good, we still choose to give in.  We still want to believe what our eyes think they see, trusting in the pleasing fruit of sin. 

               When Adam and Eve ate that fruit, their eyes were opened, but they didn’t see the good that Satan promised.  They saw their nakedness and felt great shame.  Their shame didn’t come from being naked though.  They’d always been naked and it never mattered before.  No, this shame came from their guilt.  It came from looking at each other and instead of seeing the wonderful gift of husband and wife, they saw a person they could use for their own selfish desires.  So they tried to cover up thinking it would get rid of that shame and guilt, but it didn’t.  God would have to be the one to do that, and it would require blood. 

               God told Adam that if they ate from that forbidden tree, they would die.  Sin brings death.  This is the fact that Satan and temptation tries to hide, but it can’t.  Adam and Eve saw firsthand what sin caused as God made clothes for them. 

We remember the fig leaves that Adam and Eve sewed together, but we forget that God made them clothes, garments of skin from an animal.  Imagine what Adam and Eve must have thought seeing that animal slaughtered, witnessing its blood being spilt so that their shame could be covered.  There’s no way they could see that and say it was a good.  But it was, because it pointed forward to the redemption God promised to accomplish through His very own Son.

We say Jesus on the cross is a bad, it’s an ugly sight.  It’s not something we enjoy seeing.  I’ve only seen Mel Gibson’s Passion of the Christ once because I can’t watch the crucifixion again.  Looking at Christ on the cross, we see what our sin truly brings.  Sin’s temptation promises pleasant things, but it only brings death.  “Sin came into the world through one man, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all sinned” (Rom 5:12).  We all bare the shame and guilt of sin.  Not one of us is innocent.  With Adam and Eve, we stand naked with our guilt and shame before God.  We stand condemned, deserving death.  But just as sin entered the world through one man, righteousness and salvation are given through One Man.

The shedding of that animal’s blood in the Garden pointed to Christ’s blood shed on the cross that covers all sin.  Jesus’ innocent death saves us from our deserved death.  Jesus didn’t give into Satan’s temptations.  He resisted the devil’s false promises and spoke the complete and untwisted Word of God.  He was righteous and without sin.  But with grace and mercy, He took your guilt and shame and carried it to the cross.  He died your death in your place, and because of that, God freely gives you Christ’s righteousness.  He clothes you with the white robe of Christ’s righteousness, received at your Baptism. 

               Christ recognized the deception of Satan’s words.  He resisted, continued in righteousness so that He could save you from your unrighteousness.  Christ is the Lamb who shed its blood to cover your shame and guilt.  The killing of that first animal appeared bad, and yet it was God’s way of covering shame.  Christ on the cross looks bad, and yet it’s what brings you life!  Don’t be deceived by the good looking fruit of sin.  With eyes of faith, see it for what it truly is.  With eyes of faith look to your Savior, look to His blood.  It may look bad, but don’t be fooled.  Christ, His cross, His blood, His redemption, these are the true good things.  In Jesus’ name...Amen. 

But not in death. . .

I was reminded by President Matthew Harrison presenting on Hermann Sasse that the vapid and vague shell of good feelings and good thoughts may well suffice during good times but in time of great trouble and trial and in the face of death it offers no help.  It is an obvious truth but not so obvious that it cannot be omitted and found missing from the vision of Christians and Christian churches today.  We find ourselves living at a time when the Gospel has become offensive and the preaching of the Gospel an offense in a world looking for a reason to be offended.  Yet it is a culture of death that surrounds us.  From the insistence of so many voices on the right to view the child in the womb as so much garbage if you wish to the abhorrence of expecting to have live any life that you might deem not worth living, death is all around us.  We as a culture have surveyed the landscape and decided that there is no truth but that which fills the moment and there is no truth that lives beyond that moment. Now you might expect that without boundaries to restrain desire and norms to define what is acceptable desire, happiness would result.  Yet the reality is that we are not happy.  Our culture has found itself so fragile that some cannot accept the possibility that some might disagree with them or the politically correct view of things.  Individuals live within the threat of fear and violence to their safety and the threat that we are killing our creation and have only the most limited future ahead of us. Social media has left us without a social life except a virtual one. We have retreated into the comfort of our homes behind the screens that light up our days and nights and do not even go out for food or entertainment.

Strangely, many refuse to see believe that this is a problem or one worth a reconsideration of the religious claims of life stronger than death and a clear conscience that has addressed sin and guilt and shame with something more than profound than a shrug of the shoulders.  World wars tended to give pause to the idea of modernity and progressivism.  Even great depressions and economic downturns begged people to look for a real source of security and hope.  But if the churches have nothing to offer but a pale regurgitation of what culture has already said, the people have little choice but to make friends with death and to live in the moment without regret.

Feast of the Word

Apparently Pope Francis has expanded the observance of St. Jerome and turned it into a Feast of the Word.  Anyone who knows St. Jerome, knows how fitting it is to remember him and to urge people to be in the Word of God together on January 26.  That said, it is odd that in so many ways the Word is less central to Roman Catholic worship and piety than it is to, say, Lutheran.  St. Jerome is famous for having said, "Ignorance of Scripture is ignorance of Christ."  Sacred Scripture has a central role in the faith, prayer and lives of believers.  We study the Word not as a quest for information or trivial fact or curiosity but because it speaks of Christ and it is Christ's voice speaking.  The Feast of the Word is not about how we feel about it or even if we agree with it but rather that we are captive to it, as Luther so famously said.  Captive to the Word of God means that the Church and all believers hear the Word of God through the ears of faith, informed by the Holy Spirit but not only informed by the Spirit.  Rather, the Spirit works in and through that Word to bring the dead heart to life by faith, to arouse within that heart the discernment to hear Christ speaking in the Word, and to recognize that the subject of the Word is Christ.

Most distressing is the fact that Protestants have become adept at hearing the Word as general direction while ignoring and dismissing specific words within Scripture.  While we see this most clearly in the acceptance of the LGBTQ+, it is typical in the way that cultural change both informs and trumps the truth of God's Word and its consistent address through the ages.  This radical departure has eviscerated the claim of Protestantism to herald the Word in the face of Roman preoccupation with the Sacraments.  The claim is now rendered hollow and empty by the refusal of most Protestants to let the Word inform them and by their insistence that individual and corporate reason sift the truth of Scripture for the precious ore and for the slag that must be discarded.  At the same time, Roman Catholics had led the way in a renewal of Biblical theology in the past fifty years.  Yet even Rome is not immune from the great temptation to either tailor the Scriptures to fit their pre-existing conclusions or the press of culture against the witness of the faith.  Some in Rome have been adept at accepting historical criticism of Scripture with its inherent skepticism toward the text and the content of the Word.

Finally, something must be said by the trivial use of Scripture.  The plethora of Bible versions and study Bibles directed to individuals and individual circumstance belies the central truth of Scripture that it is one Word with one message and story.  In this way those who often lay claim to being Biblical have betrayed their claim by treating the Scriptures as a curious book of niceties whose appeal is to sentiment more than truth and to the moment more than through the ages.  It is an embarrassment not of riches but of our poverty that you can walk into any book store and see the Scriptures treated as an article of clothing chosen for taste, preference, and fit to the individual.  The variety of opinions about what the Scriptures say only reinforces the idea that its message is not clear or different to different hearers and times or it does not really matter all that much.  It was not without a prescient view toward the future that the Missouri Synod was organized in part to publish orthodox materials and faithful study Bibles.

A God sized hole. . .

I was reading something in which it was said that man was created with a God sized hole in the heart -- a hole that only God can fill.  It is a cutesy way of saying what Augustine said more eloquently You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in you. The problem with this, of course, is that our sinful heart does not acknowledge the hole or know what to do with the longing within.  So, as the song says, the sinful heart looks for love and other things in all the wrong places.  The end result is that, like Augustine, a life of self-indulgence precedes any real awareness or longing for the courts of the Lord's House or the promise of God fulfilled in Christ.

If you recall, the first chapter of Mark’s Gospel includes a line about this.  On the edges of Capernaum, early in the morning, Jesus is nowhere to be seen.  He had healed a small mob at the house of Simon Peter and word had gotten out.  Some wanted Jesus to fix them and their lives and others just wanted to watch.  But where was Jesus? The text says that Jesus had slipped away to a place without distraction and people so that He might pray.  The default leader of the group was frustrated by Jesus' absence and went about finding Jesus. When Jesus was finally located, Peter mutters his exasperation by stating the obvious.  Everyone is looking for you! Mark 1:37 But were they?

Were they looking for a good fit for the God sized hole in their hearts or were they looking for selfish interest to be met or an experience to remember and tell about?  We enjoy the romance that people are hungry for the Gospel and waiting to hear it as if it were a pearl of great price they have just unearthed.  But that is not the case.  It is for this reason that the Law must be preached.  Sinners unconvinced of their sins are not so enamored by a God who forgives and the dying who have already made their peace with death are not necessarily ripe candidates for the promise of the resurrection.  The people are restless but their restlessness is chaotic and aimless until the Holy Spirit points it to Jesus.  This is, in part, why the Law cannot be absent from the witness of the Church to the world and the preaching to the people outside or inside the Church.

Lent is, for most liturgical folks, the time when that focus is more narrowly proclaimed both on Sundays in Lent (but not technically of Lent) and in the mid-week services.  The call to repentance is renewed to the voice of the Church and to the ears of her people in a more deliberate way than perhaps the rest of the year.  We hear in the Gospel for the First Sunday in Lent the story of Jesus' temptation -- basically the temptation to set aside the Lord and put self forward.  It is the temptation we face daily and it is the temptation the world knows as normal.  Only the Holy Spirit can teach us the difference between the norm of the Old Adam and the norm of the new person created in Christ Jesus through His own death and resurrection.

Finally, the God sized hole is filled and the sinner rests in the arms of a merciful God but that does not mean life becomes easy or simple.  Just the opposite.  Our hearts finally know the rest God has appointed and yet our lives are filled with persecution, trial, and even threat of death at the same time.  One most not forget this.  For this reason the Word of the Lord is not a simple turn of a key in a lock but the daily turning out of the captive into the light of His love and the freedom only Christ can give.  We come back to the Church to remember our baptismal identity, to hear anew the voice of absolution, to listen to the Word read and preached, and to eat and drink the body and blood of Christ.  And to be directed by the Word so that we know what the shape of our lives is to be.  God sized holes need giant boulders to fill them and God does not disappoint but it is not the end.  Only the beginning that begins anew each day, each week, each month, and each Lent.