Second Sunday in Lent (Series B: Genesis 17:1-7, 15-16)

“I will establish my covenant between me and you and your offspring after you.” Grace, mercy, and peace to you from God our Father and our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, Amen. The text for our sermon this second Sunday in Lent comes from the Old Testament lesson read a few moments ago from the seventeenth chapter of Genesis. Dear friends in Christ, Abram and Sarai were sinful. Now, I’m sure this is not necessarily a surprise to you, though it is somewhat unusual. We would expect that the ‘heroes of the faith’ would be perfect examples of who we should be, shining stars for us to look to. But so often, we learn from them what not to do, how not to act. The Bible does not gloss over the sins of God’s followers, but in many places emphasizes them. In chapter fifteen, Abraham is given an amazing promise- his descendents will be as numerous as the stars in the sky, as plentiful as the sand on the seashore. And this will begin with the promise of a child to barren Sarai. What an amazing promise! Only a little patience is needed, as God fulfills His promises in His own time. But patience is in short supply in Abram’s tent. God is taking too long to fulfill His promise, and so Sarai offers her servant Hagar to conceive an heir. Hagar quickly becomes pregnant, and the drama begins. She looks in contempt upon Sarai, and so Sarai drives her out into the wilderness. All the while Abram allows this to happen, he allows his impatience to create strife and conflict in his tent.
It is into this domestic mess that God enters in. “When Abram was ninety-nine years old the Lord appeared to Abram and said to him, ‘I am God Almighty; walk before me, and be blameless.’” In the context of Abram’s impatience and sin, God is telling him to shape up! Act like one who has the very promises of God! Enoch and Noah walked with God, they provided the example for Abram and us to follow. Walking with God involves living constantly in His presence, it includes an intimacy and communion with God that encompasses one’s entire life. Abram is encouraged to live in the promises of God! His living before God, his walking in the presence of God does not earn these promises, but it is the life he is called to as one who has these promises.
Is it any different for us? We have been given the very promises of God, promises that were only a mist and a shadow for Abram, promises founded on the very blood of Jesus Christ, and so we are called to live a life in fellowship with God. We are to be immersed in the presence of Christ, living in fellowship and communion with Him. How often do we miss the opportunities to walk in the presence of Jesus? Our Lord has given us so many opportunities to live in His presence, to walk before Him, and so often we pass them by. He has given us the great gifts of prayer and His Word, and how often do we go through a day without immersing ourselves in either? He has given us the Divine Service, where His Word is proclaimed, His forgiveness declared, and His very Body and Blood is given for the forgiveness of our sins. But how often do we deprive ourselves of these gifts, and find something else to do on a Sunday morning? Just like Abram, we are called on here to walk before God, to walk before our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, and just like Abram we so often live like we do not have the promises of God.
“I am God Almighty; walk before me, and be blameless.” Even if Abram could claim that he was walking before God, even if we hear what was just said and are glad that Vicar is talking about someone else, this second command from our Lord sounds forth. In the face of the command to “be blameless,” even Enoch and Noah are reduced to tears of repentance. God is here commanding Abram, He is commanding you and me, He is commanding all people, to be perfect. The Jews who heard this command, in both the Old and New Testaments, would immediately think of the sacrificial animals, which God wanted to be blameless, without defect. These animals that bore the sins of the people were to be blameless, because the people themselves were not. And the situation has hardly changed. If Abram, you, or me had to rely on our ability to be blameless in order to receive the promises of God, we would be doomed to die in our sin.
But God has a strange, almost illogical habit of making unilateral covenants. His promises do not depend on man’s behavior, they depend on His grace. Our Lord said to Abram in our text for today, “Behold, my covenant is with you, and you shall be the father of a multitude of nations.” Despite all that had transpired since God first gave that promise, He declares His promise to Abram again! He received the great promise of many offspring, which would form nations and bear kings. “I will make you exceedingly fruitful, and I will make you into nations, and kings shall come from you.” His offspring would also bear the promise. “And I will establish my covenant between me and you and your offspring after you throughout their generations for an everlasting covenant, to be God to you and to your offspring after you.” And this would begin with the gift of a son: “I will bless her, and moreover, I will give you a son by her.” To be sure, God expected Abram to live like one who had the promise, but Abram’s life did not establish this covenant, it was God’s doing, it was His act, it was His promise. The grace of God does not wait for our perfection, but instead His grace is acting to destroy the source of our imperfection and deliver us from all that held us captive.
For the covenant with Abram was not to reward good behavior, it was intended for the salvation of all people, for the forgiveness of Abram’s sin and the sin of all. God did not give His covenant in the hope that we might improve our lives, but instead He gave it to do something about our sin, to wipe it away and break its shackles forever. That is why Abram received the promise, because His descendents would be the offspring of salvation, the messianic line. The promised offspring that would come from Abram’s line would be the One to deliver us from our sin, the covenant given to Abram had one purpose- our salvation through Jesus Christ. For Jesus was the promised seed, who came into the world when the covenant given to Abram was ready for fulfillment- and He did what Abram and we could not. He was the one who truly walked with God because He was God Himself, in intimate communion with God the Father and the Holy Spirit. Moreover, He was the blameless one, the one who had no sin of His own. He fulfilled what God commanded Abram in our text, and He did this for us.
The covenant with Abram brought Jesus into the world, and He came to establish yet another covenant. Israel had served its purpose, Abram’s descendant had come to our fallen world to redeem it, and now a new covenant, an everlasting covenant was needed. And once again, God is in the business of making unilateral covenants. He does not wait for us to shape up before He establishes a new covenant, but instead as Saint Paul tells us in our Epistle lesson: “while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly…. God shows His love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” Christ was blameless, just like the sacrificial animals in the temple, just as God demanded of us in our Old Testament lesson. And exactly like those sacrificial animals, He shed His blood and gave up His life for our sins. His blood established a new covenant with us, one that is everlasting. Jesus teaches this in the words of institution in Matthew’s Gospel: “Drink of it, all of you, for this is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins.” Forgiveness and eternal life are the gifts of this covenant, they are the promises offered by our Lord through His death and resurrection. For Christ died to fulfill one covenant and establish another- He came to deal with our sin once and for all by dying in our place, the blameless and perfect in place of the imperfect and sinful. He died, and through His death you have life!
The new covenant established in the shed blood and victorious resurrection of Jesus follows in many ways the pattern of the covenant with Abram. In between the two parts of our Old Testament lesson, God instituted a visible sign to accompany the covenant, the act of circumcision. “You shall be circumcised… and it shall be a sign of the covenant between me and you.” This was a daily reminder of the great promise God made to them. We too have signs of the covenant, Baptism and the Lord’s Supper, the great gifts of Christ to us. But, oh, they are so much more than simply signs! They convey the benefits of Christ’s death and resurrection to us, they enact the promises of Christ’s new covenant in us- through them we become God’s children, members of His family, we become part of the multitude of children promised to Abram. In them our sins are forgiven, and we are clothed with the righteousness of Christ. And in them we also receive a new name. “No longer shall your name be called Abram, but your name shall be Abraham, for I have made you the father of a multitude of nations… As for Sarai your wife, you shall not call her name Sarai, but Sarah shall be her name.” We bear the name of Christ because of our Baptism into His death and resurrection. We are blameless for His sake, and we will stand blameless around the throne in the new heavens and the new earth forever. Each and every day that we live out our Baptism by dying to sin and rising to Christ, and each and every time we receive the Lord’s Supper, we receive the benefits of what Christ has done for us.
And just like Abraham, we walk with God each and every day. We immerse ourselves in His word and prayer, we come to this place to receive His bountiful gifts. We are blameless in His eyes for the sake of Christ- what else can we do but walk in intimate fellowship and communion with Him? But this path, this walk with our Lord, is not an easy one. Jesus teaches us this in the Gospel lesson. “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me.” Bearing crosses is not a simple or easy task, but we do so with the knowledge that He bore it first for us and the promise that He bears it with us in our lives. May our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, the blameless one, continue to cover you with His shed blood so that you are blameless before the Father for all eternity, Amen.

Mission Focus: Rev. Dennis Meeker (March article for church newsletter)

Our mission focus this month starts with a good story, but probably one Hollywood would turn down. It starts with an Iowa hog farmer (that is probably where we lose Warner Brothers) who was called out of that vocation to become a pastor (there went the other studios!). He traveled to Fort Wayne to begin his studies, and met a Kenyan pastor studying at the seminary. This pastor introduced him to a woman in his congregation in Kenya, a woman named Lorna. The rest, as they say, is history, as the seminarian took a break from school and married Lorna, then she joined him in Fort Wayne, becoming part of the deaconess program. When it came time for vicarage, it was only natural that they would serve in Kenya. And so the Vicar from Iowa served God’s people in Africa, teaching, preaching, and learning. It seemed natural for him and his wife to stay in Kenya and serve as LC-MS missionaries. But the LC-MS thought that it knew better, and another student was chosen for that spot. Though they were disappointed, the story did not end there. Instead, this story ends with the Bishop of Kenya’s Lutheran Church, Walter Obare, traveling to Iowa to ordain this one-time hog farmer as a pastor in the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Kenya. Ah, a story only a Lutheran could love!

Rev. Meeker and his wife Lorna then traveled back to her homeland to serve a church in the Kibera slums outside of Nairobi, Springs of Life Lutheran Church. They knew that serving amongst poverty and disease (especially AIDS) would not be easy, but this sinful world had much more to send their way. In the turmoil of presidential elections at the end of 2007, Springs of Life Lutheran Church was looted and burned. You may have even watched it burn, as it made the national news here in the U.S. But at a time when many mission organizations (including the LC-MS, if you want to get me going, ask me about that subject!) were pulling missionaries out of Kenya, the Meekers refused to leave. They sheltered displaced parishioners and were even able to hold a communion service at the church just days after it was burned. It has been over a year since that terrible time, and while the Meekers are still rebuilding, they are also able to continue the wonderful work they had been doing previously. This includes serving an active congregation, but also much work amongst those living in poverty or afflicted with AIDS.

To support the important work of the Meekers, I encourage you to look at the Friends of Mercy, an organization here in the U.S. who is supporting them (along with other projects). Their website is http://thefriendsofmercy.org/ Friends of Mercy does wonderful work in supporting efforts in Africa to care for the victims of AIDS and spread awareness about the effects of that disease. I encourage you to consider supporting the important work that this Iowa farmer and his wife are doing amongst the slums in Kenya. May the Lord bless you as we travel through Lent on our way to the cross!

In Christ,
Vicar Maronde

What is a Lutheran? Part III (March article for school newsletter)

We heard last month that Christ won forgiveness of sins and eternal life for us though the cross and empty tomb. But these gifts would not do any good for us unless He delivered them to us. One of Luther’s most important contributions to our understanding of the Gospel was the distinction between salvation accomplished and salvation delivered. Salvation was accomplished through the cross and empty tomb, but we should not go running to Jerusalem to find it. Instead, salvation is now delivered to people in desperate need of it through His Church in several ways:

The first is through the Word. Through the Bible, or through people speaking (or preaching) the good news of Christ, the Holy Spirit comes to us to create faith within us, faith which receives His promised gifts. In Baptism, Jesus works through water to bring us into His kingdom, giving to us those gifts in another, more tangible way. Lutherans are encouraged to look back to their Baptism every day, and remember what Christ did through that washing. Our entire lives are to be shaped by that washing, as we drown our sin daily. Finally, He established the Lord’s Supper, a means of strengthening faith, where He comes to His people to give them His Body and His Blood for the forgiveness of their sins. Salvation is given as a gift, there is nothing that we can do to earn it, there is nothing that we can do to claim it. Instead, Christ comes to us in His Word or through Baptism to create faith within us, faith which grasps the salvation won on the cross.

Zion Lutheran Church is not the only place where Christ comes with His gifts, nor do Lutherans claim to be the only ones to receive these gifts. Christ works through His Gospel to bring salvation wherever it is proclaimed. I thank you for taking this journey with me through the basics of Lutheran teaching. Remember that Pastor Werly and I are both resources for learning more. Lutherans are all about Jesus, and what He has done for you and all people. God’s richest blessings as we journey through Lent!

In Christ,

Vicar Maronde

First Sunday in Lent (Series B: Mark 1:9-15)

“And a voice came from heaven, ‘You are my beloved Son; with you I am well pleased.” Grace, mercy, and peace to you from God our Father and our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, Amen. The text for our sermon this first Sunday in Lent is from the Gospel lesson read a few moments ago from the first chapter of the Gospel according to Saint Mark. Dear friends in Christ, Baptism forms the core and essence of our Christian life. It constructs a framework for the rest of our lives, it provides to us the gifts that sustain us every step of the way. For in those waters, God claimed you as His own, He came to you who could not come to Him. He saw you in your sinful state and acted to rescue you, even if you were only a few days old. We may not have been able to see it with our fallen eyes, but on that day what Jesus saw in our text for today happened again. “And when He came up out of the water, immediately He saw the heavens opening and the Spirit descending on Him like a dove.” Just think about it- the heavens were literally torn open in your Baptism, and there the Holy Spirit came to you, to work faith in your heart and forgive your sins. “And a voice came from heaven, ‘You are my beloved Son; with you I am well pleased.’” The Father spoke these words to Jesus at His Baptism, and He spoke them to you at your baptism. For the sake of His Son, who cleansed you in the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, God the Father now says to you, “You are my beloved child; with you I am well pleased!”

Baptism acts as an anchor, an assurance throughout our lives that God loves us and has claimed us as His own. We need this anchor and assurance because our lives conform to that of Christ. “The Spirit immediately drove Him out into the wilderness. And He was in the wilderness forty days, being tempted by Satan. And He was there with the wild animals, and the angels were ministering to Him.” Jesus was cast out from His Baptism, from the beautiful words of His Father, directly into the wilderness. The wilderness is a place of isolation, of danger, of hunger and thirst, it is a place where one feels completely and utterly alone. That is ironic, because Jesus had company in the wilderness- Satan himself came to do battle with our Lord, to use the isolation of the wilderness to make Jesus abandon the mission for which He became man.

Our lives dimly mirror that of Christ, and so we too were cast away from our Baptism and into the wilderness. We left the font, where God declared us His beloved child, where the heavens opened and the Holy Spirit worked faith in our hearts, and were literally flung into a world that has little use for God or His promises. The wilderness of this world is a place of danger, it is a place of evil, it is a place of temptation. “And He was in the wilderness forty days, being tempted by Satan.” Just as Satan used the wilderness to tempt our Lord, so he used the wilderness to tempt us. He wants us to feel isolated, alone and separated from God. That is ultimately His goal- to separate us from God, to tear us away from the one who claimed us in the waters of Baptism. He tempts us to separate us from others and then from God. You know how he does this. He uses your thoughts and actions to drive wedges between you and others. He wants to see you isolated, and He delights in seeing groups of people in disunity. Disunity in families, disunity in churches are his special projects. We have here at Zion a group of people working together to spread the Gospel of Jesus Christ, and oh, how Satan works! He drives wedges between Church and School, between boards, between members on boards, between every member of this community. Every time that we point the finger and refer to ‘they’ we have given into his temptation, we have isolated ourselves from one another. And while Satan is the one tempting, we have no one to blame but ourselves, as James says in our Epistle lesson: “Each person is tempted when he is lured and enticed by his own desire. Then desire when it has conceived gives birth to sin, and sin when it is fully grown brings forth death.” And that is the end of our isolation, of our disunity, that is all that we deserve.

But the wilderness is not only a place of isolation and temptation, it is also the place of redemption. At Zion I am teaching a class on the Minor Prophets. As we walk through these fascinating little books, it is amazing to see how often the prophets of God mention the Exodus. The bringing out of Israel from bondage in Egypt was truly the salvivic event in all of the Old Testament. There God acted with a mighty and outstretched arm to deliver His chosen people from slavery. He humbled Egypt and her gods, then destroyed Pharaoh’s army with the crushing weight of the Red Sea waters. God acted to save His people, and He acted with power and might. He then preserved His people on a forty year journey through the wilderness, a journey that pointed forward to Jesus. “The Spirit immediately drove Him into the wilderness. And He was in the wilderness forty days, being tempted by Satan.” Jesus triumphed over Satan during His forty day stay in the wilderness, just as God preserved His people during their forty year journey. But following Christ’s triumph, something amazing happened: “And He was with the wild animals, and the angels were ministering to Him.” For this Jesus was not simply a guy who God declared His Son at His Baptism, He was no mere man. But Jesus was true God and true man, God in the flesh come to His fallen creation to restore it. The wild animals recognized what sinful man refused to acknowledge- this man in the wilderness was more than a man, it was Yahweh Himself come to save! And He would save through a new Exodus. Isaiah describes this new Exodus in chapter forty three of his prophecy: “Thus says the LORD, who makes a way in the sea, a path in the mighty waters, who brings forth chariot and horse, army and warrior; they lie down, they cannot rise, they are extinguished, quenched like a wick: ‘Remember not the former things, nor consider the things of old. Behold, I am doing a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it? I will make a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert. The wild beasts will honor me, the jackals and the ostriches, for I give water in the wilderness, rivers in the desert, to give drink to my chosen people, the people whom I formed for myself that they might declare my praise.’” In Christ God is doing a ‘new thing,’ and the angels and wild beasts recognize it and fall down in worship.

We prayed earlier in the Collect: “You led Your ancient people through the wilderness and brought them to the promised land. Guide the people of Your Church that following our Savior we may walk through the wilderness of this world toward the glory of the world to come.” Christ has come to lead all of fallen humanity out of the wilderness of sin and into the promised land of heavenly glory. But He could only do this by submitting to the wilderness for us. Only by triumphing where the first Adam failed could He deliver us, and He did so in the desert at the very beginning of His ministry, setting the stage for the ultimate victory to come, a victory that would be accomplished by being bound. In our Old Testament lesson for today, Abraham is tested by God, who tells Him, “Take your son, your only son, Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains.” The same God who would declare to Jesus that “You are my beloved Son; with you I am well pleased,” first ordered Abraham to sacrifice his beloved son. Abraham dutifully obeyed, taking his son to the mountain and binding him for sacrifice. And you notice that Isaac did not protest, he did not struggle, but instead allowed himself to be bound. “Then Abraham reached out his hand and took the knife to slaughter his son. But the angel of the Lord called to him and said, ‘Abraham, Abraham!’ And he said, ‘Here am I.’ He said, ‘Do not lay your hand on the boy or do anything to him, for now I know you fear God.’” My friends, God stopped Abraham from sacrificing his son, but He did not halt the sacrifice of Christ. God did not withhold the knife, but instead poured all of His wrath upon His only begotten Son. He did this because Christ willingly and obediently bore all of the sins of the world to that cross. Your sin, my sin, our sin of falling into temptation, of isolating ourselves from God and dividing from others, each and every one of those sins were paid for on Calvary’s cross. Christ showed the same obedience that Isaac did, willingly taking this burden on and then shedding His blood for all people. And when the moment came God did what He prevented Abraham from doing. His Son was sacrificed for us all, because only by paying for our sins with His blood could Jesus defeat Satan, only then, in seeming defeat, could the lord of darkness be ultimately defeated. Jesus entered the wilderness to crush Satan, and He left with the victory.

And now, because of His shed blood and death, Jesus leads us through this wilderness of sin. Satan is defeated, but the dog still barks- he still threatens, he still attempts to isolate and divide people. We cannot fight Satan’s attempts to isolate and divide by simply ignoring differences or pretending they don’t matter, but by turning to His Word, the only sure defense and bond of unity we have. Just as Jesus taught us, we turn the Word of God against each and every one of Satan’s temptations. And this Word gives us confidence in God’s gracious protection and deliverance. In the Lord’s Prayer, Jesus shows us that we are not alone, but instead that He is beside us in every temptation, giving us the strength to stand up under it. Luther teaches us in the explanation to the sixth petition of that great prayer: “God tempts no one. We pray in this petition that God would guard and keep us so that the devil, the world, and our sinful nature may not deceive us or mislead us into false belief, despair, and other great shame and vice. Although we are attacked by these things, we pray that we may finally overcome them and win the victory.” We win the victory when for the sake of Christ we are delivered from the wilderness of this world to eternal life with Him in the new heavens and new earth. May our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ bring us through this wilderness until by means of His shed blood we dwell with Him in eternal glory forever, Amen.

Transfiguration Sunday (Series B: Mark 9:2-9)

“This is my beloved Son; listen to Him!” Grace, mercy, and peace to you from God our Father and our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, Amen. The text for our sermon this Transfiguration Sunday comes from the Gospel lesson read a few moments ago from the ninth chapter of the Gospel according to Saint Mark. Dear friends in Christ, I’ve always been perplexed when I see a movie with a ‘special appearance’ by someone. It kinda makes me feel bad for the other actors- they are all just making ‘regular’ appearances, but that guy, he’s making a ‘special’ appearance. Or maybe I should feel bad for the actor or actress who is singled out. Maybe they have low self-confidence, or a big ego, and so they need to be called ‘special’ in the credits. Either way, I think it’s a bit odd, but we see it in our Gospel lesson for today, so I guess its okay. Here we have two people who make a ‘special appearance’ on the Mountain of Transfiguration. “And there appeared to them Elijah with Moses, and they were talking with Jesus.” You know Moses, of Ten Commandments fame? Or Elijah, who on Mount Carmel took on the prophets of Baal in a Rocky-esque battle royale? Both of these guys showed up on that day, they made their ‘special appearance’ with Jesus and the disciples.

But even if they were making a ‘special appearance’ that day, they were not doing anything different than they had done before. They were pointing to Christ, something they had dedicated their very lives to. Moses and Elijah pointed to Jesus with their writings, their preaching, and their very lives. They were there on the mountain that day as a proof to the disciples that Jesus was the One foretold in the Scriptures, the promised Messiah, the One who was to come. For Transfiguration day was a day on which Jesus was revealed for who He truly is, the Son of God, God in the flesh, on the top of the mountain in the presence of James, John, and Peter He uncovered His glory. “And He was transfigured before them, and His clothes became radiant, intensely white, as no one on earth could bleach them.” The glory that Jesus kept hidden throughout His time on this earth was revealed for brief moments on the mountain of Transfiguration, there He proved to the disciples that He truly was God.

Is it any wonder that Peter wanted to stay? He loved the glory of God, he wanted to bask in it forever, dwelling amongst Moses and Elijah, and God in the flesh, Jesus Christ Himself. “And Peter said to Jesus, ‘Rabbi, it is good that we are here. Let us make three tents, one for you and one for Moses and one for Elijah.” He has seen the glory of God face to face, and this little glimpse convinces him to set up shop and stay. Peter wanted the glory- right now! We like to get after Peter, but as I have said before, his only problem is that he says out loud what everyone else is thinking. We too want to stay among the glory, we thirst for that glory, we want God to deliver us the glory right now! The glimpse of God’s glory we see on this day threatens to suck us in, to make us want to remain aloof from the problems of this world. We don’t want to leave the mountain, we don’t want to face the challenges of this world. Our sinful inclination is to want glory first and glory last- the glory of God is itself not bad, but Satan uses it to severely tempt us. It surely tempted Peter, and Satan worked through this apostle to tempt Jesus. That is why the gospel of prosperity and glory has swept through our world, extolled by Pentecostalism in South America and TV preachers here at home. That is why too many Christians avoid engagement with this sinful world, that is why we seek glory over others even in the church, that is why we expect the victorious life here on this earth. And this is only our more pious thirst for glory. We are too often tempted to seek out the glory of this world, whether it is money and fame, or reputation and how we look in the eyes of others. Glory can capture us with even a glance, even a glimpse, as it did to Peter in our text.

And Peter’s suggestion could’ve been the end of the story. Jesus, Moses, and Elijah could’ve stayed in their tents, with Peter, James, and John worshipping them, sitting in the glory of God forever. Two thousand years later they would still be there, a sight to behold, perhaps a permanent shrine to the glory of God in the flesh, perhaps even you or me would’ve traveled to Israel to see them. And we would still be in our sins. Thanks be to God that Jesus did not listen to Peter, but instead came down from the mountain and walked to Jerusalem and the cross! For a Jesus in glory on the Mountain of Transfiguration could not save us, only a Jesus hanging from a cross could do that. Suffering always comes before glory, no matter how much we humans want to turn it around. Before He went up onto the mountain, Jesus “began to teach them that the Son of Man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders and the chief priests and the scribes and be killed, and after three days rise again.” Only then could Jesus reign in glory, only after He suffered and died, paying the price for our sin, for our thirst for earthly glory. He went to the cross because of His love for us, His love for you and me. This love was so overwhelming, so powerful, that it drove Jesus from the mountain, it compelled Him to come down. He had to face Pilate’s soldiers, He had to face the cross, He had to face abandonment by the Father because He did not want us to- His love refused to let us suffer the consequences for our sin, so He took it upon His shoulders. Only then, only after the suffering, could glory come. “And as they were coming down the mountain, He charged them to tell no one what they had seen, until the Son of Man had risen from the dead.” Easter Sunday held the glory, and it only came after suffering.

It is the same pattern in our lives. Suffering comes before glory. We want to stay with Peter in the glory of God, but like Peter, we must come down from the mountain. For we too are to bear crosses in this life, our lives follow His pattern. This cross may be sickness or disease, it may be the raising of children, it may be care for aging parents. A cross may come from our confession of Christ to others around us, it may be persecution for the faith that mirrors Christ’s own suffering. Jesus says before our text: “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me.” Ultimately, the bearing of crosses comes from our Christian life, the fact that we deny ourselves and follow Christ, the fact that we put others in front of ourselves. This causes suffering, this causes heartache, this causes persecution. A Christian’s life in this world is characterized not by glory but by the bearing of crosses, with being shaped by the cross, shaped by Christ. We bear our crosses looking toward the glory that is yet to come. And we do not do this alone. The cloud of God’s presence surrounded the disciples on the mountain of Transfiguration, and even if they had to leave the mountain, God’s presence continued to surround them like a cloud. The disciples walked the way of the cross, but they did not walk alone. Christ walked beside and with them, just as He walks beside and with you and me in this life. We do not journey through this life alone, but instead we walk with Christ on the road He trod, and we journey with the cloud of God’s presence around us.

“And a cloud overshadowed them, and a voice came out of the cloud, ‘This is my beloved Son; listen to Him!’” The cloud of God’s presence declares to us what it first declared to the disciples. God had a point to make with the Transfiguration. He wanted to show the disciples that Jesus was true God, that He was the one foretold by Moses and the prophets, that He truly was who He said He was, the Son of God. But there is much more than that. For with the redemption of Christ by means of His suffering and death, God now speaks these words to you. He said it in your Baptism- “This is my beloved child!” He says it to you each and every day- “This is my beloved child!” For the sake of Christ, we have been adopted by God as His children, we have been incorporated into His family, the rift between God and man has been bridged by the blood of Jesus. It is for that reason that Jesus stands beside us and with us each and every day, it is for that reason that He helps us to bear our crosses. And it is for the sake of Jesus that on the Last Day God will look at us and say, “This is my beloved child!”

“And a cloud overshadowed them, and a voice came out of the cloud, ‘This is my beloved Son; listen to Him!’” God has a set of instructions for us all on the mountain of Transfiguration. If this is His beloved Son, then we are to listen to Him! It is only through the Word of Christ that we are incorporated into God’s family, it is only through His Word that we are adopted as His children. The Word of Jesus does this, the Word of forgiveness, the Word of life, the Word that applies His death and resurrection to you. It is through this Word that Jesus removes your veil of unbelief, as Paul says in our Epistle lesson: “For God, who said, ‘Let light shine out of darkness,’ has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.” With the veil removed, we now believe, we are now God’s children, we can now face all the crosses that come our way because we are God’s children, and we know that suffering comes before glory.

For we are awaiting our own transfiguration. Paul says again: “And we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another.” The word that Paul uses here for ‘transformed’ is the same word that Matthew uses for ‘transfigured.’ We will be transfigured, Transfiguration day is a picture of our future! Jesus on that day showed us what we will look like in the glory of heaven, in the glory of eternal life! We know that suffering comes before glory, we know that following Christ and denying ourselves is not an easy task, we know just how hard it is to tear our eyes away from the mountain top and go back to the world below. But go we must, for Christ has placed us on this earth to serve others and speak of Him. But my friends, never lose that picture of glory in our text today. We know that glory comes after suffering, but that doesn’t mean that we don’t look forward with eagerness to that Day on which we will be transfigured and glorified to live before God forever. Transfiguration Day is a glimpse of heaven, it is a glimpse of our future, and it is a glorious future. Suffering always comes before glory, but oh the glory that awaits us! Thanks be to God for His great gifts, thanks be to Jesus that He came down from the mountain for us and for our salvation, that we may look forward to the day on which God says to us as we enter His kingdom, “This is my beloved child!” Amen.

Epiphany 6 of Series B (Mark 1:40-45)

“Moved with pity, He stretched out His hand and touched him and said to him, ‘I will; be clean!’” Grace, mercy, and peace to you from God our Father and our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, Amen. The text for our sermon this morning is from the Gospel lesson read a few moments ago from Saint Mark, the first chapter. Dear friends in Christ, Naaman had a problem. Our Old Testament lesson describes him as “a great man with his master and in high favor, because by him the Lord had given victory to Syria.” He was a great man, a powerful man, someone who had the world on his plate, but he had a problem. “He was a mighty man of valor, but he was a leper.” Disease has a way of leveling society. The greatest general and the poorest bum on the street are all susceptible to it. The curse of our sin picks its victims at random, and in our Old Testament lesson, it picked someone who could defeat armies, but could not defeat leprosy.

In our Gospel lesson for today, we hear that “A leper came to Jesus, imploring Him, and kneeling said to him, ‘If you will, you can make me clean.’” This poor, lonely man, alongside the dusty roads of Galilee, was in the same situation as Naaman. Both were unclean, unable to participate in society, cast out until they were healed. Naaman’s country surely had its own laws about leprosy, but only Israel worshipped the true God, a God who was holy, a God who was clean, a God who could not stand having anything unclean in His presence. That unnamed man in our Gospel lesson was under the condemnation of God’s just Law- he could not come into contact with His people, and He could not worship God. We learn about this in Leviticus: “The leprous person who has the disease shall wear torn clothes and let the hair of his head hang loose, and he shall cover his upper lip and cry out, ‘Unclean, unclean.’ He shall remain unclean as long as he has the disease. He is unclean. He shall live alone. His dwelling shall be outside the camp.” Both Naaman and the leper had a disease that had no cure, a disease that would take their lives, a disease that separated them from their people, a disease that separated them from the God who created them.

Our situation was hardly different. We were conceived and born in sin, our bodies have been filled with the corruption that Adam and Eve brought us since the very moment that our lives began. Every child comes from the womb unclean, and not just physically unclean, they come out spiritually unclean, filled with the disease of sin. And this disease clings to us like leprosy, and just the same as that deadly disease, it makes us unclean before a holy God. And the unclean cannot stand in the presence of a holy God. But if we were only unclean because of the disease passed onto us from Adam and Eve, we could find a way to pass the buck, to blame others for that corruption. But you and I know that this sin that we have inherited has only led to more and more sin. The leper in our text chose to disobey the words of Jesus, when told to go to the priest he instead went all around the countryside. The leper may have not have actively done anything to earn his leprosy, just as we have not actively done anything to earn the inheritance of sin, but he made himself unclean by disobeying the words of Jesus. Even a brief look at the Ten Commandments reveals that we are in the same situation. We disobey God in our thoughts, words, and actions each and every day, making ourselves unclean in His sight.

What is our response to this? Like the leper in our text, we have inherited sin, we were unclean since conception, and have only added to that uncleanness since. We have no other option but to follow the leper in begging for forgiveness. “A leper came to Jesus, imploring Him, and kneeling.” The leper has the posture of repentance; he is summoning Jesus to come near to him, to take pity on his pitiful state. He kneels in repentance; he kneels before the Lord of all heaven and earth, begging for mercy. We do the same each and every day, we continually come to our Lord with bowed knees, begging Jesus in repentance to heal us. “Almighty God, our Maker and Redeemer, we poor sinners confess unto Thee that we are by nature sinful and unclean, and that we have sinned against Thee by thought, word, and deed. Wherefore we flee for refuge to Thine infinite mercy, seeking and imploring Thy grace for the sake of our Lord Jesus Christ.” But notice that here we have something else in common with the leper- we confess our sins with the confidence that Jesus is able to cleanse us. “A leper came to Jesus, imploring him, and kneeling said to him, ‘If you will, you can make me clean.’”

And what is the response of Jesus? “Moved with pity, He stretched out His hand and touched him and said to him, ‘I will, be clean!’” Jesus is moved with pity, the same pity for our sinful and unclean situation that God the Father had when He sent Jesus to this earth. The word for ‘pity’ here means to literally be ‘torn at the guts,’ to feel anguish and compassion for the situation of another. Jesus had this compassion for the leper that day, just as He had compassion for the sinful state of all people, including you and me, the compassion that sent Him to this earth. He came to this earth as the One to clean up the filth of our sin, and He began by healing disease and cleansing leprosy, one person at a time. The leper cries out with confidence in Christ’s ability to heal: “You can make me clean.” Christ has this ability because He is God Himself, God in the flesh, the one born in Bethlehem on Christmas Eve is the One to restore fallen humanity, to remove disease and demons, the One to cleanse this earth. And He does so with His word. “I will; be clean!” He gives an order that the leper cannot follow. He cannot make himself clean, but the Word of Jesus does what it says, and here it is joined with a touch. A leper is a walking corpse, any contact with that person makes others unclean, a touch passes this highly contagious disease to others. But when Jesus, the Clean One, touched this unclean man, his leprosy did not pass to Jesus, but instead the holiness of Jesus passes to the man, and he was cured. “And immediately the leprosy left him, and he was made clean.” The cleansing power of Jesus overcomes the uncleanness of fallen man- Jesus is the clean one, the one whose cleanness, whose holiness, is greater than our sin.

At no place is this shown more clearly than on Good Friday, for there the Holy One, the Clean One, shed His blood, and there His holiness, His cleanness, was greater than our sin, it was greater than all that made us unclean, it cleansed us. In our text, Jesus says to the cleansed leper: “See that you say nothing to anyone, but go, show yourself to the priest and offer for your cleansing what Moses commanded, for a proof to them.” Our Lord did not come to abolish the Law of Moses, He came to fulfill it, He came to die in obedience to it. And what did the law require? It required blood. Leviticus tells us: “The priest shall command them to take for him who is to be cleansed two live clean birds... And the priest shall command them to kill one of the birds... He shall take the live bird…and dip…the live bird in the blood of the bird that was killed... And he shall sprinkle it seven times on him who is to be cleansed of the leprous disease. Then he shall pronounce him clean and shall let the living bird go into the open field.” Jesus Christ shed His blood as the sacrificial offering for our uncleanness, as the offering that God required through Moses for our sin. Jesus told the man to “offer for your cleansing what Moses commanded,” but glory be to God that Christ offered Himself for the cleansing that Moses commanded- Jesus paid the price for us; His shed blood cleanses us because it is the required offering for all of our uncleanness, all of our sin, and all of our disease. Jesus took the place of the bird that was killed when He was hung on a cross and was killed by Pilate’s soldiers. It was on that day that our cleansing was accomplished. It was only the basis of His death on Good Friday that Jesus could make this world clean, because only His blood could atone, only His blood could make clean what was unclean by sin. But there were two birds, weren’t there? Leviticus commands that the priest “shall let the living bird go into the open field.” On Easter Sunday Jesus fulfilled the second bird, when He went free from the open tomb resurrected- the price was paid and now victory over sin and death was accomplished. He rose as a proof to the entire world that He died to cleanse, and He died to cleanse all.

And He does so now through means. Naaman came to Israel in search of healing, and when Elisha, the prophet of God, heard about it, he said, “Let him now come to me, that he may know that there is a prophet in Israel.” Elisha did not have the power to cleanse in himself, as Jesus did, but the ability to cleanse came from the Word of God, and he spoke that word to Naaman: “Go and wash in the Jordan seven times, and your flesh shall be restored, and you shall be clean.” Naaman could not believe that water, joined with the Word of God, could do such great things, but the wise words of a servant convinced him, “so he went down and dipped himself seven times in the Jordan, according to the word of the man of God, and his flesh was restored like the flesh of a little child, and he was clean.” How remarkably similar is our cleansing today! We don’t have Jesus visibly standing here and touching you to cleanse you of your sin, but He does so through means, most especially through the washing of water with the Word. It is easy to doubt that water with God’s Word could cleanse you of sin, but here today a fellow believer says to you that it is true! In your baptism Christ made you clean, just as He made Naaman clean, and just as He made the leper clean.

The wonderful thing about the cleansing of Christ is that it extends throughout our lives. Each and every time that you come to this place and Christ touches your lips with His very Body and Blood, you are cleansed. Each and every time that you hear you’re your sins are forgiven, you are cleansed once again. Christ’s cleansing is overflowing, it is amazing, it is abundant throughout your life. And because you are clean, you will dwell with our holy God forever in the new heavens and the new earth, the heavens and earth that have been renewed and restored, cleansed from all impurities forever. We too will fulfill the two birds of Leviticus- we will die like the first bird, but for the sake of Christ, we will live free eternally like the second bird, more free that we could ever be on a sinful world. May the Lord continue to cleanse us with His blood through the means that He has appointed until we live free before Him in His kingdom, Amen.

Epiphany 5 of Series B (Mark 1:29-39)

“Let us go on to the next towns, that I may preach there also, for that is why I came out.” Grace, mercy, and peace to you from God our Father and our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, Amen. The text for our sermon this fifth Sunday after the Epiphany of our Lord is from the Gospel lesson read a few moments ago from the first chapter of the Gospel according to Saint Mark. Dear friends in Christ, God’s preachers throughout history have always felt a desire to preach the Word of God. Jeremiah describes it as a “burning fire shut up in my bones.” He is weary of holding it in, in fact, he cannot. Paul expresses the same sentiments in our Epistle lesson for today. He cries out “Woe to me if I do not preach the Gospel!” He is bound to God by his position as an apostle, and so he must preach God’s Word, He must bring that message to others. Paul says: “For if I preach the gospel, that gives me no ground for boasting. For necessity is laid upon me.”

This urgency, this necessity, this ‘fire shut up in the bones’ does not seem to be present with our Lord in the first chapter of Mark. In our Gospel lesson for last week, a demon of all things makes the bold confession: “I know who you are- the Holy One of God!” And what is Jesus’ response? “Be silent!” In the Gospel lesson for next week, Jesus cleanses a leper, and what does He tell him? “And Jesus sternly charged him… ‘See that you say nothing to anyone.’” And in our text for today, Jesus is healing disease and casting out demons right and left, and what does He do to the demons? “He would not permit the demons to speak, because they knew Him.” What’s with the big secret? Why does Jesus want to remain hidden? The disciples couldn’t figure it out either, for when the morning came Jesus was gone. “And rising very early in the morning, while it was still dark, He departed and went out to a desolate place and there He prayed.” Jesus is by His very nature elusive, He is constantly doing something unexpected. And that makes humans panic. “And Simon and those who were with him searched for him, and they found Him and said to Him, ‘Everyone is looking for you!’” The word Mark uses here for ‘search’ should be translated much stronger; it has the meaning of ‘pursue’ and ‘search earnestly.’ The disciples were hunting for Jesus- how ironic is it that the very ones sent into the world to fish for people, to catch them for the kingdom, instead turned around and hunted Jesus?

The disciples wanted to keep Jesus to themselves, when He disappeared that morning, they were driven to a frenzy in their search for Him. And it wasn’t only the disciples, either. Simon says that “Everyone is looking for you!” The town of Capernaum had lost its personal healer and teacher, and they wanted Him back RIGHT NOW! How sad is it that this often characterizes our own relationship with Jesus? We have been claimed as His own, rescued from death and hell through His love, and then appointed as fishers of men, those sent out to spread this message to others. But what do we do? Too often we cling to Jesus, we hold Him tight so that no one else can get to Him. Jesus can be seen as a personal possession, someone that only is for us and for those within these walls. The town of Capernaum wanted Jesus for themselves, they didn’t want to risk Him moving on to anywhere else. How often does this church building become like Capernaum, where we keep our Jesus that is only for us? We can be so possessive about our Jesus, we keep Him here where He is safe, instead of out in the sinful world that probably doesn’t deserve Him anyway. Jesus is ours, no one else can have Him! How ironic is it that the very ones sent out to catch people instead turn around with the disciples and hunt down Jesus? And when we hunt down Jesus, we are doing so in order to keep Him to ourselves.

Jesus is elusive, He keeps Himself hidden for reasons that we cannot quite understand. But I think that He does so because He decides when He will be revealed. And He was revealed in a powerful way at Capernaum that day. “And immediately He left the synagogue and entered the house of Simon and Andrew, with James and John. Now Simon’s mother in law lay ill with a fever, and immediately they told Him about her. And He came and took her by the hand and lifted her up, and the fever left her, and she began to serve them.” The healing touch of Jesus removed the fever from this pious woman, and she immediately started serving our Lord. But Christ had first served her with healing, He had revealed Himself as the One who has come to defeat disease, as the one who has come to engage the effects of sin on our fallen earth and restore what God had originally made perfect. This was a private healing, but soon He would become much more public. “That evening at sundown they brought to Him all who were sick and oppressed by demons. And the whole city was gathered together at the door. And He healed many who were sick with various diseases, and cast out many demons.” That night, Jesus took on the soldiers of Satan, the agents of the lord of darkness, casting them out with the authority of His Word and the power of His touch. Jesus revealed Himself as the one with the authority, as the one with the power, as the Holy One of God who has come to do battle with sin and Satan and defeat them.

This battle raged throughout His life, as Jesus continued to destroy sin and its effects, and do battle with Satan’s followers, one by one. But Jesus continued to keep His work under a cloak of secrecy. This tension between Jesus revealing Himself for who He is- the Holy One of God, God in the flesh, the one come to defeat sin and Satan- and the hiddenness that He demanded from so many, continued throughout His life. This was because Christ would only truly reveal Himself while hanging on a cross on Good Friday. It was on that day that the centurion would be the only human in Mark’s Gospel to confess these words: “Truly this man is the Son of God!” For it was only on the cross that Jesus could ultimately be revealed as God in the flesh come to die in the place of all people, it was only on the cross that Jesus was revealed as the sin-bearer, as our sin-bearer. Without the cloak of secrecy that covered much of His ministry, people would misunderstand who Jesus is and what He had come to do. He was waiting for the moment of ultimate revelation. On the cross, all was quite literally laid bare for the world to see- Jesus was revealed as the one who had come to deliver you and me, as the one who would shed His blood for our sin, the one who would die in our place.

And now that Jesus has been revealed for who He is on the cross, we reveal Him to others. We make Him known for who He is, the one who came to this sinful world to cleanse it, to defeat the power of sin, Satan, and death. We proclaim Christ’s death to this sinful world, but we do not stop there. For Jesus did not remain dead, but was raised on the third day, triumphant over the power of death. We proclaim Jesus for who He is, the one who died but was raised, and therefore gives life to us all. Just as He lifted up Peter’s mother in law and took away her fever, so He will someday raise us up, free of all diseases and sins, to stand before Him around the throne forever. That is the message we proclaim, the message that was hidden until the moment of the cross and empty tomb, the message that we now reveal through our words and actions. Just as the disciples searched earnestly for Jesus, saying to Him, “Everyone is looking for you!” so we search earnestly for all who do not know Christ, bringing this message to them, acting as the couriers of His message, the instruments of His call. The words we speak are not our own, but are instead His Word, and that Word brings healing from sin and life to all.

We do this because Jesus is not our own personal possession, but instead has been revealed as for all people. There is now no shroud of secrecy over Jesus- we know who He is, the One who came to suffer and die to deliver us. He is now revealed as for every person everywhere. He was for every person in Capernaum, as Mark tells us: “that evening at sundown, they brought to Him all who were sick or oppressed by demons. And the whole city was gathered at the door.” Jesus was for each and every person in Capernaum, He was there for their healing and He would soon die on a cross for them. But the mistake that Capernaum made, a mistake that we also too often make, was to think that Jesus was only for them. Jesus shattered that illusion at the end of our text. “And He said to them, ‘Let us go on to the next towns, that I may preach there also, for that is why I came out.’ And He went throughout all Galilee, preaching in their synagogues and casting out demons.” But even Galilee could not contain Him. For Jesus died and rose again for every person everywhere. He died for all! Each and every sinner who has ever lived or ever will live is the object of Christ’s love. He died for all! Every person that you see during your lifetime is another child that Christ showed His love to on the cross. He died for all! The love of Christ is so overwhelming that it covers up every sin ever committed. He died for all!

Jesus is for everyone, but this proclamation should not obscure the fact that Jesus died for you. Every sin that you have ever committed, or ever will commit, even the sin of keeping Jesus to yourself, has been covered by the blood of Jesus and forgiven for His sake. We read in our Old Testament lesson for today: “Lift up your eyes on high and see: who created these? He who brings out their host by number, calling them all by name, by the greatness of His might, and because He is strong in power not one is missing.” The same God who created everything, who knows all of the stars by name, sent His Son, Jesus Christ to suffer, die, and rise again to deliver you, to forgive you, to give you life, life everlasting in Christ. Each of us looks forward to that day when Christ will raise us up healed and renewed, to live without sins and tears forever in the presence of God, because Jesus died for all! May the same Jesus who cares for you and loves you preserve you in faith and trust in Him until life everlasting in His Name, Amen.