The March for Life, however others view it, is a march behind the cross. The liturgical statement of the crucifix leading us both towards the altar and later out of the church is the statement that this alone is the good that overcomes the world’s evil….
“And there were set there six waterpots of stone, after the manner of the purifying of the Jews.” Six is the number of man, for man was made on the sixth day of creation. Because man—who is identified by the number six—fell into sin, six is also in the Bible a number designating incompleteness/lacking/deficiency. Because of this damaged deficiency, every man needs purification for the sins that he does and the sin that he is, i.e., the sinful nature we all have inherited from Adam. Not out of convenience, then, does the Lord select these six stone waterpots used for the Jewish purification ritual before a meal. The transformation of the water from these waterpots points to the transformation of the entire ritual system of purification – a transformation that culminates in the death of Jesus, where He gives His own blood for wine.
So Jesus answers His mother as He does, and John tells us that this miracle was a sign, so that we won’t miss the most important fact…
Read MoreJesus is the only real Somebody. The incredible scandal of His baptism is how He identifies with the nobodies, the bums, the morons, the sinners.
How can there be division—which is really competition—when there’s only one Somebody, one Lord, one Christ? Descending into the water, He is teaching us not to boast. There is no need for our worldly desires; no need to be counted wise by other people. No need for power, no need to be nobility, royalty – or in our context, celebrity….
Read More“An angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream.” It’s not an example. Many of our dreams are the fruits of anxiety or indigestion. I once had a dream that Fritz Pauling and I were in Italy stealing a pipe organ. I don’t plan to do what I dreamed. (Although it might make a pretty good buddy caper movie.) The kind of dream Joseph has is extremely rare. But it should remind us of another Joseph: the son of Jacob who had that amazing technicolor dreamcoat. His dreams got him thrown into a pit, then sold into slavery. To where? Egypt. See the similarities? With this new Joseph, and the Mother and Child, God is going to redo the Exodus.
So the “Angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream, saying.…” Angel means messenger. An angel speaks; that is his purpose: he brings God’s Word to particular people. What’s the message?
Read More“Eight days were completed.” Completed … or better, fulfilled. For this is no mere random passage of time. “The days were fulfilled” reveals the jurisdiction of God over all things. God is sovereign over time itself. This event, and every event recorded in Scripture, is governed by His plan.
We track the passage of time with calendars. Modern life requires us to juggle multiple calendars: civil holidays and tax deadlines; work calendars, school calendars, family birthdays and anniversaries. We Christians have our own calendar, often out of step with what everyone else is doing. The liturgical calendar reminds us that Christians are to be different.
We learn from the Gospels something about Joseph and Mary: they are pious. They follow the liturgical calendar, and they also conform their personal lives to what the Law of Moses expected, down to the day. “And when eight days were completed for the circumcision of the Child, His name was called Jesus, the name given by the angel before He was conceived in the womb.”
Read More“Sing to the Lord a new song, for he has done marvelous things! His right hand and his holy arm have worked salvation for him!”
Today, my friends, we remember that the only-begotten Son of God, who from eternity had no body, assumed a body in the womb of the virgin Mary. This unfathomable thing He did for us children of Adam—the Adam who once stretched out his arm, grasping fruit forbidden by God, plunging our race into bondage and our world into decay.
Adam’s son Cain stretched out his arm to slay his brother; and the human race has been at war with itself ever since.
Cain’s descendant Lamech stretched out his arms to grasp two wives, contrary to God’s design, showing the corruption of lust that has overtaken generations upon generations of men….
Read MoreThings Ain’t What They Used to Be. It’s a jazz standard from 1942, written by Duke Ellington’s son Mercer. It’s increasingly how I feel: Things ain’t what they used to be. In Flannery O’Connor’s story “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” one of the characters observes, “Everything is getting terrible.” Perhaps you’ve felt that way. “Everything is getting terrible.” Things ain’t what they used to be.
What does any of that have to do with Christmas? Much in every way. The cultural Christmas event is all about experiences. Adults want to recapture and experience anew our childhood Christmases, when things were better. We want to create great memories for our children.
Feelings of nostalgia are powerful. But they might just be a sin. We can’t recapture a golden age. Since man’s fall into sin, there never has been a golden age. The meaning of Christmas is not found in sentiment. The meaning of Christmas is not found in giving. As much as we should love our families, the meaning of Christmas is not found in family time….
Read MoreSermon for the Fourth Sunday in Advent
December 19, 2021
Philippians 4:4-7
“He is a perfect little boy,” the doctor said to the new parents. But it was a lie. The flaws were hidden where the physician could not see. But you want it to be true. You have plans, hopes, dreams for the child. Just as you’ve had plans, hopes, dreams for yourself.
All these plans and dreams are rooted in self-love. The etymology of ambition is “the love of honor.” We want our children, just as we’ve wanted ourselves, to be on a trajectory toward success. The perfect child will become the perfect student, the perfect athlete, the perfect musician, the perfect carrier of our legacy.
At the hospital, nursing home, mortuary, a very different trajectory is plotted. Physicians work to arrest the rate of decline, but they can only delay the inevitable. The ambitious dreams of youth always come crashing down and into the earth.
This is what makes John the Baptist such an utterly unique figure. He voluntarily reverses his own upward trajectory of success. “I am not the Christ.” Elsewhere he says of Jesus, “He must increase, I must decrease.”
In other words, his own trajectory doesn’t matter. All our striving, all our contention, all our ambition is folly at best. The dream of building our own kingdom, personally, or for family, church, nation – it’s all vanity, self-love. Repent.
For as St. Paul says, “The Lord is at hand.” The Epistle for this Fourth Sunday of Advent, especially the larger context, shows the true trajectory of the Christian’s life according to God’s Word.
We’re in Philippians 4, but if we back up into chapter 3, we hear Paul talking about what a great student he had been, and how his career was on the rise - until he realized it’s all dung. “Whatever gain I had, I counted as loss for the sake of Christ. Indeed, I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord.” Everything, he says, is rubbish, save one thing: having a righteousness outside himself: the righteousness “that comes through faith in Christ—that I may know Him and the power of His resurrection” (3:8-10).
So he doesn’t care if his worldly trajectory makes a rapid decline; one thing matters: “That I may know Him and the power of His resurrection, and may share His sufferings, becoming like Him in His death, that by any means possible I may attain the resurrection from the dead” (3:10-11). Death and resurrection is the trajectory. Do you see how it’s inverted? Our life experiences growth and success, then declination and mortality; but Christ becomes man to take us through death into resurrection.
Now in the meantime, we’re surrounded by enemies. St. Paul says in Philippians 3:18f, “Many … walk as enemies of the cross of Christ. Their end is destruction, their god is their belly, and they glory in their shame, with minds set on earthly things.” All around you, the culture of this world encourages you to worship self, and set your mind on earthly things.
But St. Paul says we’re citizens of a different kingdom, “And from it we await a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ, who will transform our lowly body to be like His glorious body, by the power that enables Him even to subject all things to Himself. Therefore, my brothers … stand firm … in the Lord” (3:20—4:1).
And then Paul names names. Two women in the church at Philippi weren’t getting along. I know it’s hard to imagine, but sometimes people in the church quarrel. What does he tell them? “I entreat Euodia and I entreat Syntyche to agree in the Lord” (4:2). And he tells the rest of the congregation to help them, reminding them that their names are written in the Book of Life.
The discussion of quarreling in the congregation is what comes just before the magnificent words of last Sunday and today: “Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, Rejoice.”
The American holiday is a rejoicing devoid of substance. Listen to how many Christmas songs use words like cheer abstractly. There’s no cause for the cheer, and so it cannot last. The cause of joy for the Christian, though is the Lord who is at hand, who is coming to bring His bride the Church through the grave to the transformation of all things.
The next words, then, are directed to those two quarreling ladies and to us all: “Let your reasonableness be known to everyone.” It’s difficult to translate this passage into English; reasonableness is sometimes rendered as moderation (KJV) or gentleness (NKJ); none of these capture the whole idea. The Roman politician and historian Tacitus called it one of two qualities that a leader must have. He must be sensible (phronimos), and epieikēs which the ESV puts as reasonableness. It’s the quality of being honest, balanced, courteous, and generous, but particularly, you deal with other people mercifully.
So you’ve got these two people in the church arguing, and Paul is saying, “Be honest with each other, and in your honesty, be courteous, be generous, be merciful.” And that, he tells the congregation, is how all Christians are to be to all people. “The Lord is at hand.” When He appears, will He find us arguing? Or will He find us moderate and gentle towards each other?
There’s no joy in winning the argument. There’s no joy in getting your way. That trajectory leads only to judgment, where there is wailing and gnashing of teeth.
The Lord is at hand. Repent. Rejoice in His appearing. He sets your life on a different trajectory. His trajectory is the story of the world: The way of humility, through death, into resurrection and the transformation of all things. +INJ+
Sermon for the Third Sunday in Advent
St. Matthew 11:2-11
December 12, 2021
When Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique in 1963, it launched so-called second wave feminism. Friedan asks a critical question in the famed opening:
The problem lay buried, unspoken, for many years in the minds of American women. It was a strange stirring, a sense of dissatisfaction, a yearning that women suffered in the middle of the twentieth century in the United States. Each suburban wife struggled with it alone. As she made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slipcover material, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauffeured Cub Scouts and Brownies, lay beside her husband at night — she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question — Is this all?
“Is this all?” Others said long before me that the man who works in a factory all day might have the same question, along with the man stuck behind a computer screen processing spreadsheets. “Is this all?” is not a feminist question, it’s a human question. I think our metropolitan area is particularly susceptible to it. People come here seeking to change the world; they will fight for freedom and justice, along the way climbing ladders and collecting buckets of cash.
It’s a religious question, too. You come to the church hoping to get your life changed, but you find squabbles over documents and budgets, pugnacious personalities, and meetings lasting so long you start to believe in Purgatory. “Is this all?”
Enter stage right John the Baptist. Things had gone surprisingly well. People thronged to hear him preach; the river was full of converts seeking baptism.
But it turns out the Sixth Commandment was as unpopular then with Galilean kings as it is today with New York governors. But hey, you’re no different. Everybody likes calls to repentance until they come your way.
John’s in prison for saying “You shall not commit adultery” to Herod Antipas, who has taken up with his sister-in-law who’s also his niece.
Gone are the crowds. Gone the success. A few loyal disciples cry out to John in his dungeon, “Is this all?”
Have you been there? Have you asked about your self, your life, your identity as a disciple of Jesus, “Is this all? Are we not to expect anything else?”
This is a trial, just as when you struggle with illness, or temptation, or challenges your children face. These all cause doubts to rise up in us. “Where is this all going?”
In the dungeon, doubtless miserable, John the Baptist does the only thing there ever is to do: he turns to Jesus. He sends his disciples to Jesus with the question, “What are we waiting for? Who are we waiting for? I thought it was You.”
Jesus answers by showing them the nature of His work: The blind see, the lame walk, the dead are raised, and then the capstone, “The poor have the gospel preached to them.” That seems less exciting, doesn’t it? Give me tangible results, not religious words, amirite?
But that little word—gospel, good news—is the heart of all the rest. This was John’s mission from the beginning. You remember his father, Zacharias, sang at John’s birth, “And you, child, will be called the prophet of the Highest; for you will go before the face of the Lord to prepare His ways, to give knowledge of salvation to His people by the remission of their sins” [Lk 1.76f].
Sin brought corruption into the world. Don’t be surprised that everything has gone to hell. That’s original sin, man. Genesis 3: work is hard, then you die. Or to put it in a more refined way, “The wages of sin is death.” We’re all in the dungeon, we all fell in the pit.
But whatever bad news you’re facing, John the Baptist is telling us the same thing he told his disciples: “Go take it up with Jesus. He’s your answer. In Jesus you have knowledge of salvation by the remission of sins.”
I don’t know what you’ve been up to the last three months, but I bet there’s been some sinning going on. True confession: sometimes a Lutheran pastor gets bored talking about the forgiveness of sins. It’s the devil’s temptation to the preacher. “Is this all?” The simple answer is, “Yes, it’s everything!” Because with sins forgiven, all the rest follows: Forgiveness with your brothers and sisters, reconciliation, and the patient anticipation that Jesus will do what He promised: raise the dead and renew the world.
Is this all? Yeah, that’s all! And it’s enough. So rejoice in the Lord always. +INJ+
Every day is a battle, a battle against the darkness, a battle against the lie, a battle against our own impulses. But David had not gone out to the battle. He had already put himself in a position to sin.
When we skip our prayers and Bible reading, when we take the drink we know we shouldn’t, when we go out when we should go home, a thousand times a day we have opportunities to put ourselves in a position to sin, or a position to do what God has called us to do.
“So David sent and inquired about the woman…”
Read More