One Spirit, One People, One Peace

Texts:  Isaiah 2:1-5; Ephesians 2:11-22

WHEN I WAS A FRESHMAN IN college, I met a guy at a party who introduced me to the concept of world citizenship.  He said he was working with a group who were lobbying the UN to make my hometown of Kansas City a "city of the world."  Somehow, the very mention of this filled me with excitement.  There was something so big and thrilling about the idea, something larger and grander and more hopeful than anything I'd conceived of before, and the thought that I myself might be involved in it made it all the more amazing.

Well, nothing came of this plan as far as I know, and it's been a long time since I thought that humanity united under a single human government is a good thing.  Still, there's something inherently appealing about the idea of human oneness and unity.  How wonderful it would be-- No barriers, no conflicts, just perfect communication and peace between man and man.

But that's not how things are in this world.  In fact, it seems like parties, opinion groups, and factions are more polarized and more in opposition than ever before in human history.  You probably have friends you don't talk to much any more because every time you get together, you end up in an argument about some issue or other.  With some people you can't even talk about the weather without things getting political!  It wouldn't be so bad if people would stick to evidence and facts, but the dividing walls of hostility are erected so high and so thick things too often end up in name-calling and insults.  So we stay in our own camps with that figurative wall standing between us, and human oneness is only a dream-- if we think it's a good thing at all.

With the way things are today, it should give us perspective on the polarization between the Jews and the Gentiles in the Roman world, as we read in St. Paul's letter to the Ephesians.  But their conflict concerned more than current issues; it cut to the heart of created reality, for was over who or what should be worshipped as the true God and what that deity requires of us as humans.

This question is way bigger than the debate over, say, global warming or government-run health care.  In such matters let us take our stands based on the facts as we know them, but allow that more information may prove us to be wrong.  But in this matter of Jew vs. Gentile-- or, rather, Jew vs. pagan, the Scriptures leave us in no doubt as to who was and is right, or at least, more right, in this conflict.  The Jews absolutely were, before the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, the only people on the face of this earth who worshipped the true Lord and Creator of the universe, while the gods of the pagans were useless idols.  The Jews were the only ones who'd been given His laws to follow, the only ones whom the Lord had made His people through solemn covenant, the only ones to whom He had powerfully revealed Himself with unshakeable promises of blessing. And although the prophets spoke of a Messiah to come who would somehow bring benefit to the nations as well, they were also clear that it was through Israel alone that this Savior would come. When it came to the divisions between Jews and pagans, it was not a matter of each side giving up a little on the human level and coming to a friendly compromise.  Compromise was something Israel could not do and remain Israel.  For whenever Israel compromised with the Gentile nations, that's when they got into deep trouble.

No, as Paul writes in verse 12, time was when we who were born Gentiles were

separated from Christ [that is, the Messiah of Israel], alienated from the commonwealth of Israel, and strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world.

In fact, for many centuries the dividing wall of hostility was a necessary barrier to preserve Israel from total disobedience and dissolution before the Messiah could come.   It was essential that the pagans and their evil influence be kept at a safe distance from the commonwealth of Israel, and the further off the better.  But, Paul says, the time has come for the dividing wall to be taken down.  Better than that, the time has come when it has been taken down, and the two indeed have become one.

How?  By us holding interfaith councils and agreeing that all religions lead to the same god?  By us avoiding controversial subjects and just talking about puppies and kittens and blue balloons instead?

No.  It took Jesus Christ Himself to break it down and bring Jews and Gentiles together.  For as we see in verses 14 and 15,

He is our peace, who has made us both one, and has broken down the dividing wall of hostility, by abolishing in his flesh the law of commandments and ordinances . . .

Now when we read that Jesus has "abolished . . . the law of commandments and ordinances," we might conclude that the Jews were wrong all along and we can indulge in and celebrate all sorts of immoral behavior and do it with Jesus' blessing.  That'd save a lot of arguments, for sure!  But we'd be wrong if we did.  For Paul has just finished, up in verse 10, saying that God has created-- recreated, actually-- us in Jesus Christ for good works.  And all the Scripture tells us that a godly life is the only way to please our Creator.  So what is this abolition?

In such a case, it helps to look at the original Greek. The word translated "abolish" literally means "down-un-acting" and, in the case of this verse, scholars interpret it as "made ineffectual or powerless; nullified; invalidated."  So what was the law considered to be effectual or valid for previous to Christ?  Well, the Jews looked to keeping the Law as an effectual and valid way to please God and be justified in His presence.  And that is what Moses had said by the Spirit in Leviticus, "The man who does these things will live by them"-- that is, have life, peace, and fellowship with the Lord of life.  But by the same Spirit he also said in Deuteronomy, "Cursed is everyone who does not continue to do everything written in the Book of the Law."  And who can live up to that?  The Jews never could.  Certainly the Gentiles could not.  We cannot.  The Law which reflected the holiness of God only served to prove how unholy we all were.  But in His flesh-- in His perfect obedience in life and His sacrificial death on the cross, Jesus fulfilled the commands of the Law in our place and set it aside as the way to peace and fellowship with God.

And as Paul writes in verse 13, in Christ Jesus we (and we're included with the Gentile Ephesians here) who were far off from Israel and alienated from God's promises have been brought near by the blood of Christ, shed for us all on Calvary's cross.  In Christ the vision of Isaiah is fulfilled, when the nations would miraculously stream up to Mount Zion and know peace walking in the ways of the God of Jacob.

I've heard that outside the United Nations building in New York there's a sculpture called "Let Us Beat Our Swords into Plowshares," frankly taking its title from the verses from Isaiah 2 that read,

They shall beat their swords into plowshares,
And their spears into pruning hooks.

In other words, let's bring about peace on earth.  Well, people, if you're trying to achieve that by what goes on in that building, good luck.  You'll be at it a long, weary time.  No, the Scripture is clear: Man cannot end hostility: Our peace is Jesus Christ and Jesus Christ alone.  In Him is the one and only peace that can make Jew and Gentile one and create one new man out of the two warring peoples.  It took the Son of God made Man to make peace between God's covenant people and those who before had been excluded from His covenant, and He did it by His atoning death.

But His death accomplished even more.  As wonderful as it was that Jesus should make one people out of the warring human factions of Jew and Gentile,  He also reconciled humanity to Almighty God.

And we all needed reconciliation to God.  Because as we can read in Ephesians 2:3, by nature-- fallen human nature-- we are all children of wrath.  In our natural sinful state we are at war with God and God is at war with us.  But in Christ and through Christ and because of Christ, by the power of the Holy Spirit, God who is rich in mercy chose us in love to be saved through Him.  And so now, as verse 16 says, He has reconciled both groups "to God in one body through the cross, bringing the hostility to an end."

But how does this come to be true for you and me?  Verse 18 answers that question: it is the work of the Holy Spirit who gives us access to the Father through Jesus Christ our mutual Lord.  By His gracious work we're no longer illegal aliens who deserve no amnesty; God Himself as in Psalm 87 has declared us to be born citizens of the heavenly Zion and by Christ His living Word it is so.  In Jesus we are made fellow-citizens with the saints-- and by that Paul would have meant the holy men and women of faithful Israel-- and members of the household of God.  In Christ the earthly nation of Israel is redeemed and rebuilt together with the elect Gentiles into the spiritual Zion, founded upon the apostles and prophets with Jesus as the head and cornerstone.  The dividing wall has been broken down, and in its place one building rises under His power.  Together we are that building, and it is no ordinary house: it is a holy temple intended for the dwelling place of God in the Spirit.

I hope you have a sense of how beautiful this is!  But beyond that I want us all to understand the power these beautiful truths must have for our lives in this fallen world.

First of all, we were not saved to be lone-wolf, individualized Christ-followers.  Back up in verse 11, the apostle begins this passage with the word "therefore."  In the previous verses he was reminding us of our salvation in Christ and God's will for our lives in consequence of that.  But we are not on our own.  God raised us up in Christ to be incorporated into one holy people by the ministry of one Spirit.  It is absolutely false that you can be a perfectly good Christian without being part of Christ's church.  Membership in Christ's church is a fundamental part of what you were saved for.  Indeed, everyone who has been reconciled to God in Jesus Christ is a member of His Church whether he or she is able to sit in a pew or not.  Therefore, let us support and build up and act in love towards one another, for Jesus Christ is our peace.  In Him and in the power of His Spirit we can demonstrate that we are one new man, as we look out for the good of on another just as we would for ourselves.

Second, we cannot take our position as citizens of the heavenly Zion for granted, as something that simply comes with our living in our particular time and place.  No, for if things had kept on going as they had for hundreds of years, we who are not ethnic Jews would have remained strangers and aliens, unforgiven sinners, with no hope and without God in the world.  It is by grace you have been saved, just as it is by grace that the Jews who believe in Jesus as their Messiah have by grace come to know that reality.  This should give us all a sense of humility before God and a heart of compassion towards our unsaved pagan neighbors.  For we were once as they are, and the blood of Christ that brought us near to God will, in His mercy, one day bring them in as members of the household of faith, too.  So let us conduct our lives in the power of the Spirit so Christ indeed will be seen in us, that through us others might also be reconciled to the God who made them.

This brings us to the third and final truth I believe we should take from our Scripture readings today.  Despite our compassion, there will always be plenty of people around us who are perfectly content to be without God in this world.  We Christians, they charge, are the ones who are unenlightened.  Indeed, when we conduct ourselves as citizens of God's holy nation and stand up for His righteousness in this world, we will be reviled as fools, bigots, even as enemies of humanity.  It can be hard living as a Christian in this world, the way things are going.  It may threaten your position, your income, and your reputation.  But you are members of Christ's one holy nation, and our heavenly citizenship takes precedence over all other loyalties.  Yes, let us be good Americans, good members of our political parties, good trade union members, good service club members, good members of our families.  But when any direction or practice or mindset of our nation, party, union, club, yes, even of our own families contradicts the will and nature of God as we know it from His revealed Word, He calls and commands us to stand firm in the Spirit and hold fast to the truth of Christ.

It won't be easy, but we can do it.  We can do it because we are God's one new people through His one Holy Spirit.  And the one peace we rest in is Jesus Christ Himself.  He is the Peace that will always last and never fail.  He has already accomplished the cosmic work of making peace between Jew and Gentile, and between both of us and God.  And so we can find our peace in Him, no matter what our conflict with the world may be.  Rejoice, Church of God!  We are His people, bought with His blood and brought together by His Spirit.  We are God's holy temple, His dwelling place on earth, and He will see to it that His temple, His spiritual Zion, stands forever, to the glory of His name.

The Faithful Worker

Text:    1 Thessalonians 5:12-24

    TOMORROW AMERICA CELEBRATES the Labor Day holiday.  Kids and comedians like to joke, "Hey, it's Labor Day, why aren't we all laboring?"  But of course the day is set aside to honor all those whose hard work makes America as great as it is, and to give the workers recognition and a well-deserved special day of rest.  The idea that Labor Day is a day of rest would come as a surprise to workers in retail stores and car dealerships and other enterprises that use the long weekend as an occasion to attract customers.

    But there's a group of people who should never stop working, no matter what the day is, and that is the members of Christ's Church when we're doing His business for the sake of His kingdom.  God calls us to be faithful workers for Him, day in and day out, for He has chosen and elected us to be like the one supreme faithful Worker, Jesus Christ our Lord.

    You, the members of the Calvin Presbyterian Church of N--- City, are in a crucial position in your work in the name of Christ.  I know nothing about your now-former pastor or his time here (though I hear he's a pretty good bagpipe player), only that this past Sunday was his last time in this pulpit.  I know nothing about your time with him, the successes and failures, the plans accomplished and the ideas that fell flat.  What I do know is that from this Sunday on you will be starting a new phase in the work of this congregation.  However you choose to proceed, whether you will be going on with pulpit supply for the foreseeable future, or hiring an interim pastor, or whether you hope to begin searching for a new pastor as soon as possible, there are both possibilities and pitfalls in your way, that will have a strong effect on the work and future of this church.

    It might be tempting to come up with scenarios.  But it will be more useful, more edifying for us to examine how the work of this church should proceed as God our Father has laid it out Himself in our reading from 1 Thessalonians, chapter 5.

    The Thessalonian church of the 1st century A. D. was in pretty good shape as to doctrine, ministry, and practice.  It was dear to St. Paul's heart as one that didn't need a great deal of correcting and rebuking.  In chapter 1, verses 2 and 3, he writes,

    We give thanks to God always for you, making mention of your in our prayers, remembering without ceasing your work of faith, labor of love, and patience of hope in our Lord Jesus in the sight of our God and Father.

The Thessalonians were faithful workers in the Lord, and the Apostle wanted to encourage them to stay that way. 

    In our passage from chapter 5, the apostle puts first things first.  In verse 12, he writes (as we have it in the New King James Version), "And we urge you, brethren, to recognize those who labor among you, and are over you in the Lord and admonish you . . . " Now, I usually preach out of the New International Version, 1984 edition.  But with this text, I've found that the NKJV gives a more accurate and stronger rendition of the original Greek. 

    This word "recognize," for instance.  As in English, this word (which literally means "to see") urges us rightly to perceive the worth of pastors, elders, and teachers, and to pay close attention to them.  Why?  Because first and foremost, whether you have an installed pastor or in this interim time, the preaching and teaching of Word of God must take priority.  My seminary field-education pastor impressed this one thing upon me especially: That the laypeople of the church could carry on most of the work of the ministry, but the one indispensable job of the pastor, the one thing the laity could not do, was to be the theologian of the parish.  It is the pastor's job to set a faithful course in interpreting the Scriptures so Jesus Christ is glorified and the saints are built up in sound doctrine and practice.  In turn, the elders take their lead from the pastor as they teach the Word (and the Scriptures say that elders must be able to teach), and they guide all other teachers by overseeing curriculum and so forth. 

    As Paul says, pastors and elders are over you in the Lord.  That's "in the Lord"-- for His sake and His glory, not for their own power or pride, but to nurture the church in holiness and service.  You elders must resolve not merely to rule over the church and administer its business affairs, but along with that to be concerned about your brothers and sisters in this congregation, to care for their spiritual well-being, and give them all necessary aid in their Christian lives.  This you primarily must do by encouraging and admonishing them with the good news of Christ and Him crucified.  For without your labor in the Word, your labor in the Lord will be faithless and in vain.

    As a congregation, you're in a very delicate position for the next few weeks.  Without an ongoing pastor, it can be difficult to ensure that your work here is grounded in Christ and His work as recorded in Scripture.  You must do all you can, in cooperation with the presbytery, to make sure that the good food of faithful preaching and teaching continues to come to you.  Never let yourselves believe for one minute that it's not important or that you can get along without it.  As a former pastor of mine would say, a church without the faithful preaching of the Word is just the Rotary Club with hymns.

    Verse 13 reminds us we are to esteem or honor those who labor in the Word very highly for their work's sake.  You honor the surgeon who successfully treats your diseases: how much more highly you should rate the man or woman who week after week applies to you the holy medicine that brings you spiritual health and eternal life! 

    And be at peace among yourselves.  Nothing destroys a church faster than gossip, backbiting, and arguments.  Defend what is right, by all means, but always in a spirit of love and graciousness, knowing that the Lord Jesus who made peace between God and us with His blood is the only Head of the Church, not we ourselves.

    But what about difficult people in difficult circumstances?  Verse 14 addresses this issue.  We don't notice it in the English, but all these situations are taken from military life.  And isn't the church of God like an army under His command?  The exhortation-- that's a good old word we need to use more often-- is a combination of command, encouragement, and advice we'd better follow-- this exhortation is primarily addressed to pastors and elders, but all of us have a part in this work.  First of all, the unruly must be warned.  Some translations say "the idle,"or "the lazy," but it's "idle"or "lazy" as in "Idle hands are the devil's workshop."  Think of a soldier goofing off in the ranks.  Or a disruptive student sprawled out in a desk in the back of a classroom, mouthing off at the teacher.  Inevitably will be some who think the commands of Christ to live holy, upright, and moral lives do not apply to them.  They must be warned-- based on Scripture, not on our particular preferences-- that they may shape up and stop abusing the grace made available to them, lest their Christianity be revealed as a sham. 

    But the timid or fainthearted are not to be warned, they are to be comforted and encouraged.  Here we see a picture of the recruit the night before the battle, worried about what's going to happen, afraid lest he prove to be a coward and turn tail and run.  For the Thessalonians and many Christians today around the world, this fear is real.  Anti-Christian persecution is rife and our brothers and sisters are losing their lives daily for confessing Jesus as Lord.  Our own culture is making it clear in many ways that the less we say about Jesus as God, the safer we'll be from damaged reputations and lost friendships.  The temptation to timidity is there.

    So let us comfort the fainthearted.  How?  By telling each other it's okay to be afraid?  Certainly not!  Let's remind one another of who Jesus is and what He has done for us.  Let's commend one another to the ministry of the Holy Spirit, who applies the steadiness of Christ to us through the ministry of His Word.

    And the weak must be upheld and built up.  Think of a new and flabby recruit who can't possibly run the obstacle course the first time through.  But gradually, he undergoes strict physical training, his muscles are made hard and powerful, and he gets so he can carry a 200-pound pack for twenty-five miles and ask for more.  In the church, again, we grow our spiritual muscles and overcome weakness by reading, hearing, and meditating on the Word of God.  We stop being flabby Christians.  But Paul makes it clear that the church leadership is to make sure this happens, not simply to hope everyone is taking care of it on their own.

    And this, as we see, takes patience.  It can be frustrating always to be warning, or encouraging, or trying to strengthen the same people over and over.  Never mind.  Keep on doing it, in the love, serenity, and peace of your Lord, knowing how patient He has been with you.

    Don't be looking out to get revenge, whether against fellow Christians or against nonbelievers.  Pursue, strive for, seek after, aspire to what is good for all people, for this is how Jesus has dealt with you.

    Verses 16 to 18 go together.  "Rejoice always," Paul says.  Why?  Because events and conditions in this world are so wonderful all the time?  No.  Rather, because Christ our God is so wonderful all the time.  Keep Him by your side in prayer all the time.  Refer every problem, every difficulty, every joy to Him at every moment.  Be in constant inward conversation with Jesus, and so in everything you will be able to give thanks, for you will be focussing on Him who is the Giver and Provider of all that is good, lovely, and meaningful.

    And do not quench the Spirit.  We think of this in terms of pouring water on a fire, and yes, that applies.  But think also of putting out a candle's flame, or turning off a light.  We can quench the Holy Spirit by refusing to pay attention when the Scriptures are being read and preached, for His special work is to shed light on the Word.  We can quench the Spirit in one another, when we refuse to listen to what might be His inspired ideas for new ministries and new possibilities in the church.  "Do not despise prophesies," Paul writes.  In our day, the canon of Scripture is closed and God is not giving us anything new to add to it.  Very rarely does He give a message that foretells the future.  But whenever the Word is faithfully told-forth, there is prophecy for our day.  There are churches who think preaching is dispensable, that if you want to get the crowds in you have to have loud music! smoke! mirrors! light shows! not some individual up front talking from the Bible.  But preaching is the means that God has ordained to bring sinners to salvation; do not despise it.

    But even as you hear the Word preached, make sure the preacher is preaching the Word.  "Test all things," says verse 21, and do so by the revealed Word itself.  The Holy Spirit is the author of Scripture, and He does not contradict Himself.  And once you know that what you have been taught is the genuine article, hold onto it with all your strength.  There is no virtue in being open-minded about matters the Spirit has proven to you.

    And in all your labor for the name of Christ, as a congregation and as individuals, abstain from every form-- or, more specifically-- even every appearance of evil.  We represent Christ in the world.  This is our job for His sake.  Let's not associate Him with anything dubious or shady. 

    All this is a lot of work!  When will we ever get any rest?  Is it all up to us to do it ourselves?

    No, brothers and sisters, it is not all up to us.  In a way, it's not up to us at all.  For as we read in verse 23, God is the God of peace, and He has already given us rest in the blood of Jesus Christ.  It is He who makes us holy and enables us to live holy; as it says in Philippians, He works in us both to will and to work according to His good pleasure.  He Himself sanctifies you completely, and He will preserve your whole being: spirit, soul, and body, blameless when Jesus our Savior comes again.

    For isn't that what we are working for in the church?  The day will come when we will sit down with Jesus in His kingdom and enjoy His everlasting feast.  We will hear Him tell us, "Well done, good and faithful servant!"   We will rest and rejoice forever in His love.  He will throw away the wages of sin, which is death, and give us instead the pay He has earned for us, the riches of eternal life.  On this Labor Day weekend and always, celebrate the finished work of the One who died and rose again for you, the Master who keeps His promises.  In His sanctifying strength, keep on working, for Christ is the faithful Worker, and He will do it.

How Did You Get Here?

 Texts:    Ephesians 3:1-19; Matthew 2:1-12

    YOU KNOW HOW IT goes.  You can't find something, you're looking all over the house for it, you find it at last, and it's in some out-of-the-way place you never could have imagined.  And you think, "How did that get here?" 
    Or maybe you're not looking for whatever it is at all.  But you come across it, where you never expected it to be.  Same reaction: "How did that come to be here?"  Well, it's a mystery.  You shake your head and move on.

    Sometimes it's people who turn up in expected places.  You think a friend is at the other end of the country, or tied up doing something else, but here they are at some event you're attending.  You're happy to see them, but still it's a bit of a shock.  How did they get there?  Again, it's a mystery. 

    But sometimes somebody shows up like that, all unexpectedly, and you feel they shouldn't be there at all.  By all rights, they're intruding.  They don't belong.  It's still a mystery how they dared to come, but the question "How did you get here?" takes on a whole different tone.  It becomes a challenge and even a threat. 

    That's how Herod and "all Jerusalem" felt about the Wise Men when they showed up at Herod's palace one fine day in the reign of Caesar Augustus.  Magi they were: philosophers, sages, advisors to kings, come all the way from Persia with their pack animals and all their entourage, inquiring "Where is He who has been born King of the Jews?  We have seen His star at its rising and we have come to worship Him."  Imagine the shock of it!  Foreigners!  Uncircumcised Gentiles!  Come all that way, to ask such a question!  O Magi, how did you get here?  And with such an intention!?  No wonder, as Matthew puts it in chapter 2 of his gospel, "When King Herod heard this he was disturbed, and all Jerusalem with him."

    To Herod and the officials in Jerusalem, Jewish or Roman, the Magi weren't expected and they weren't wanted.  The political situation was unsettled enough  without strangers talking about rival kings being born in the province of Judea.  You've heard what sort of tyrant Herod the Great was.  Several of his sons and one or two of his wives he'd already put to death because he thought they were conspiring to take over his throne.  His youngest surviving son was about sixteen at the time and Herod wasn't in the way of producing any more rivals-- I mean, heirs.  Now he has to deal with these Magi and their shocking news.  "Looking for the one born King of the Jews, indeed!  You intruding foreigners, how did you get here!?"

    And what business did the Wise Men have with the long-awaited King of the Jews at all?  The priests and scribes in Jerusalem, Herod himself, knew the Magi weren't seeking any ordinary newborn heir to a human throne.  This was no routine diplomatic mission.  No, they understood totally that the Wise Men had come to pay homage to the great everlasting King who was to come, the Messiah, the Anointed One promised by God's prophets since days of old.  But how could it be that these foreign, alien, uncircumcised strangers should be the first ones to show up and announce His birth?  And why should they want to worship Him?  The Christ belonged to the Jews!  How then did these easterners get here?

    What a shock that would have been for all Jerusalem!  In many places in the Psalms and the writings of the prophets, it is written that the time would come when Gentiles would bow down and worship the God of Israel.  But the general Jewish interpretation was that they'd worship Him by force, out of compulsion, thrown down on their faces before Israel's promised King, the way a war captive would be.  But now these strangers-- uncircumcised Gentiles!-- have arrived willingly, eagerly, come hundreds of miles across the desert to worship and adore Israel's Messiah. It was an intolerable mystery.  No wonder the whole city was thrown into confusion!  Men of the East, how did you get here?

     But there they were.  And we know the rest of the story, how the Wise Men heard the word of the prophet Micah and learned that the Christ was to be born in Bethlehem of Judea.  How with joy they saw the star rest over the house where Mary, Joseph, and the young Child Jesus-- no longer an infant, but a fine Boy one or two years of age-- were now living in that town.  How they entered and bowed before Him and offered Him kingly gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh. 

    Christian brothers and sisters, let's not take their presence with the Baby Jesus for granted.  Because it's still a valid question, how did they get there?  Because the Jewish authorities to a great extent were right.  The promised Christ was to be the King and Ruler of God's chosen people Israel.  As St. Paul says in his letter to the Romans, to the Jews belong "the adoption as sons; theirs the divine glory, the covenants, the receiving of the law, the temple worship and the promises.  Theirs are the patriarchs, and from them is traced the human ancestry of Christ, who is God over all, forever praised!"  By traditional rights, Jesus belonged to the Jews! How could any Gentile foreigner have a share in Him and His blessings?  First and foremost, as Jesus said Himself, Christ was born for the Jews.  Yet here are the Gentile Wise Men, in at the front of the line.  "O Magi, how did you get here?"  But as we ask that question about the Wise Men, let's also ask it about ourselves.

    For here we are, on this first Sunday after Christmas, gathered together to celebrate,  worship, and adore Jesus who is born King of the Jews.  Here we are, Gentiles, likely without a drop of Jewish blood in our veins, bowing the knee before Him who is the Messiah and God of Israel.  In wonder and joy, let us inquire, "How did we get here?"

    It's a mystery, but it's a mystery that's been revealed.  For hear what St. Paul says in Ephesians chapter 3 about the mystery of Christ that God had revealed to him.  He writes:

    This mystery is that through the gospel the Gentiles are heirs together with Israel, members together of one body, and sharers together in the promise in Christ Jesus.

How did we get here?  We got here through the Gospel of Jesus Christ, the good news that the Man Jesus was God in human flesh.  That He died for our sins and was raised on the third day for our justification.  That through faith in Him we can have eternal life with God.  As Paul writes in Ephesians 2, it is Christ who has made peace between Jew and Gentile; it is His shed blood that has broken down the dividing wall between us and made it possible for us, too, to belong to God's chosen people and share in all the blessings of His covenant with them.

    Paul writes in Ephesians 3:5 that this mystery of grace had not been made known to men in previous generations.  Up to the time of Jesus' earthly life, death, and resurrection, no one could even have imagined that Gentiles could have any part in the Messiah who was to come.  The mystery was kept hidden in God, as Paul says in verse 9.  Only in God's good time would it be revealed. 

    And God began to reveal it by bringing the Wise Men to worship the Child Jesus Christ.  They didn't arrive in Bethlehem out of their own human initiative or ingenuity; it was God's work from first to last.  The credit and the glory all goes to God the Father, who gave the Magi the knowledge of the expected King, who gave them the yearning to find Him, who raised up the star to lead them out of their faraway homes, who brought them at last to bow the knee in the humble home of their Saviour and Lord, the young King of the Jews.

    And it is solely God and His power that brings us to the feet of Jesus to worship Him as our Saviour and receive the blessings of His love.  For in all justice we don't belong there in His presence, any more than the Magi did.  It's not just that we're Gentiles, it's that all of us, ethnic Jews and ethnic Gentiles, are unworthy sinners.  We had no share in the blessings of heaven!  How did you get here, how did I, when we were rebels against the God and King of the universe and deserved only His wrath?

    Brothers and sisters, it is grace alone that has brought us here, and that grace comes to us by the preaching of the gospel of Jesus Christ crucified and risen.  We read in Matthew how the authorities of Jerusalem were astonished at the arrival of the Wise Men.  Here in Ephesians we see that our inclusion in God's people is a sign and a testimony to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly realms.  By the grace of God you and I are included in the Church of Jesus Christ, and the very fact that we are here, worshipping Him and enjoying His life and His gifts, that very fact makes known to angels and archangels the wonderful and manifold wisdom of God.  Did you know that your salvation causes the angels to rejoice and give praise to God?  Who could have thought it?  How could it have been possible?  We who were foreigners and outcasts from the people of God, now share in the unsearchable riches of Christ!

    From all eternity, God made it His purpose and goal to bring a people to Himself, not identified by any human bloodline, but by the blood of His only-begotten Son.  He accomplished that purpose through the holy life, atoning death, and glorious resurrection of Jesus the Christ.  Now, as Paul says in verse 12, in Christ and through faith in Him we--even we!-- can approach God with freedom and confidence.  How did we get here, how did you, how did I?  We got here through God's grace shown to us in Christ Jesus our Lord!  We belong here, we are His, and no sufferings and discouragements we experience on this earth can change that fact.

    Never, ever, let us take our position in Christ, our membership in His Church, for granted!  Paul yearns that our brothers and sisters at Ephesus might understand the wonder of what God the Holy Spirit had done in them and for them.  By the same Holy Spirit, his yearning and prayer is for us as well.  Now, at the beginning of this new year, may you be strengthened with power through the Spirit in your inner being, that Christ may dwell in your heart by faith.  May we, in our deepest thoughts, wills, motivations, and desires know fully that Christ is ours and we are His.  He is our beloved King and Lord, not because we decided to love Him, but because He first loved us and brought us to His side.  We are rooted and established in His love, as it is written in verse 17, and there can be nothing more wonderful than for us to have the power, with all the saints,

    [T]o grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge—that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God.

    How did you get here to the feet of Christ, to worship Him and call Him King and Lord?  It's no longer a mystery!  You got here by the grace of God, through His eternal purpose, by His love shown to you in the salvation won for you in Jesus' death and resurrection.  He has bought you, He has brought you, and you are His.  With the apostles and prophets, with the Wise Men, with ethnic Jews and ethnic Gentiles and all He has called to belong to him by faith, let us worship Him with our lives, our lips, and our love, ascribing to Him all honor and glory:

        Now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, for ever and ever!  Amen.

The Word of the Shepherd King

 Texts:    Acts 9:1-6; Galatians 6:7-10; Matthew 25:31-46

     IT'S BEGINNING TO LOOK A lot like Christmas!  At least, the merchants have had the decorations up for the past three weeks or more.  And up where I live in B--, some people already have their wreaths up in their windows.  However you feel about rushing things like this, in five weeks Christmas will be here.

        But there may be signs something else is coming soon, too.  A lot of people are asking, "Could we be getting closer to the end of the world?"  It's not just false prophets like Harold Camping and chatter about the Mayan calendar and December 2012.  We've got natural disasters coming so thick and heavy.  Civil unrest all over the world, especially in our own streets.  Our whole economic system seems to be headed for collapse, with greed and selfishness championed all the way up and down the economic ladder.  Our moral standards are getting worse and worse, faith is growing cold in many hearts, and even those who call themselves Christians proudly follow their own devices and desires instead of clinging to Jesus their Lord.

    Could these all be signs of the end?

    Maybe, maybe not.  As Christians, we need to be ready for our Lord's return as King and Judge no matter when it occurs.  In Matthew chapter 24 Jesus' disciples asked Him what will be the sign of His coming and of the end of the age.  He told them, and us, that no one knows that day or hour, and that He, the Son of Man, would come as a thief in the night.  Therefore, we must be prepared.  But prepared for what?  Beginning in the 31st verse of Matthew 25, Jesus our coming King tells us what will happen when He returns.

    First of all, Jesus will come as King, King of kings and Lord of lords.  And He will come as the Son of Man.  He will sit on the throne of the universe as a glorified Human Being, in the same flesh He brought with Him resurrected from the tomb.  In Christ, for our sakes, God has become Man forever!  He will sit on His throne as King in heavenly glory, and all the nations will be gathered before Him.  All the nations.  Not just the so-called Christian nations, but all of them, regardless of what religions they professed here on earth.  All people will learn that Christ is King, and Christ alone.

    But what does Jesus mean by "the nations"?  Remember, God ordained that Jesus should be born a Jew.  Jesus was speaking to Jewish disciples in a Jewish context.  For a Jew, the word "nations" (ethne in Greek and goyim in Hebrew) meant the Gentiles.  That is, everyone who wasn't a part of God's chosen people Israel.  The disciples would assume-- and assume rightly-- that God's faithful remnant would find blessedness when Israel's Messiah and King came as Judge.  But what was going to happen to all those other people Out There?

    Something the disciples would not have suspected.  Jesus says He will take the people of the nations and separate them from one another, and some He will put on the right as sheep, and some on His left as goats.  That tells us first that all mankind are under His staff as the universal Shepherd, whether they ever confess faith in Him or not.  In verses 37 and 44 we see that all the dead acknowledge that, they all call Him "Lord."  When Christ sits on His glorious throne, all nations will bow the knee and every tongue will confess that He is King and Lord, to the glory of God the Father.  But on that day He will sort out some who did not visibly belong to His chosen Israel, and He will put them with His chosen ones, with the sheep He loves. 

    These days, we often assume that almost anyone can be saved, if only they're nice enough.  For good 1st century Jews like Jesus' disciples, it would have shocked them to think any Gentiles who didn't convert to Judaism could get into the kingdom at all!

    To these unexpected sheep Jesus the King will say, "Come, you who are blessed by my Father; take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world."  Who could have thought it?  Ever since the world began God had included these sheep from the nations in His glorious kingdom, along with His chosen people Israel!

    But why?  On what basis?  Because He was hungry and they fed Him; He was thirsty and they gave Him something to drink; He was a stranger and they invited Him in; He needed clothes and they clothed Him; He was sick and they tended to Him; He was in prison and they came to visit Him.

    These righteous from the nations are amazed.  They don't understand how they could have rendered all these good services to Him, the Lord of glory.  And the King will reply, "I tell you the truth, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me."

    We think we understand this.  But again, Jesus is out to undermine our modern understanding of how things will be at the Judgement, just as much as much as His word subverted the ideas of the typical 1st century Jew.  Here's the question: Who are Jesus' brothers?  Who are His sisters?  Who are this family with whom He identifies so closely?

    Two thousand years ago, the assumption would be that since He was the Jewish Messiah, His brothers and sisters would be the nation of Israel, people who were born Jews by blood.  But over and over again in His teaching Jesus kept letting everyone know that the true Israel was not those who attempted to keep the law in their own righteousness; rather, His brothers and sisters are those who do the will of His Father in heaven, as we read in Matthew 12.  And what is the will of the Father?  St. John tells us that the Father's will is that we believe in the One He has sent, the Man Jesus Christ.

    The consistent teaching of the New Testament is this:  that Christ's brothers and sisters are His believers, the Church.  They-- or rather, we-- are His Body, the New Israel made up of ethnic Jews and ethnic Gentiles alike, formed by the new covenant in His blood, shed on the cross.

    So in Acts 9 the risen Christ casts Saul of Tarsus down on the road to Damascus and demands, "Why are you persecuting Me?"  Like the righteous from the nations at the Judgement, Saul can't understand.  He'd been attacking a rabble of Nazarene heretics, not this heavenly Being he now had to call Lord!  But Jesus identifies with His Church and says, "I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting."  To do evil to His disciples is to do evil to Him; to do good to His disciples is to do good to Him.

    And who are "the least of these"?  Please note that this doesn't mean "only the least of these."  No, Jesus is saying that the surprised  righteous have done good to Christians even when those believers were so humble no earthly credit could possibly come from it.  Jesus taught us in Matthew 18 that the greatest in the kingdom of heaven are those who humbly repent and become like little children and follow Him.  In Luke 12 Jesus calls His disciples His "little flock" and says that the Father has been pleased to give them the kingdom.  Jesus exalts the humble in His kingdom, and at the judgement the nations will share in their exaltation.

    I realize that this goes against much popular thought on what this passage in Matthew means.  The usual interpretation is that some people will enter the kingdom by believing in Christ, while others can get in by doing good to the financially poor.  But nowhere does the Scripture hold out any possibility of any man or woman entering eternal life on the strength of his or her own good works.  It is only through the blood of Christ shed for us that we can inherit blessedness forever with Him.

    Yes, you might say, but if "the nations" in this passage are those who didn't identify with Christ's Church in their lifetimes, doesn't it sound like they can earn their way in by good deeds done to those who belong to Him?

    Well, think of it this way: When are Jesus' disciples most likely to be hungry, thirsty, refugees, naked, sick, or in prison?  In times of persecution for the faith.  Today, particularly in Muslim and Hindu countries, Christians are being harried, arrested, burned out of their homes, put to death-- all because they dare to confess Jesus Christ as Lord.  Now think of yourself as a Muslim neighbor of one of these despised Christians.  Everyone else is pouring on the violence.  But something moves you to step out and help the followers of Christ.  Even though your friends will shun you for it; even though you could be arrested yourself as a Christian sympathizer, you go ahead and open your home to the refugees.  You visit the tortured pastor in prison and work for his release.  You make sure those orphan Christian children are fed and clothed, and you don't pressure them to convert to Islam. Whether you realize it or not, you're identifying with the believers and identifying with Christ.

    In Matthew 10 Jesus sends His disciples out with the good news of the kingdom, warning them they'll face danger and hardship for His sake.  But in all this, He says, "He who receives you receives me," and "anyone who receives a righteous man because he is a righteous man will receive a righteous man's reward," and "if anyone gives even a cup of cold water to one of these little ones because he is my disciple, I tell you the truth, he will certainly not lose his reward."

    At the Judgement there will be many who never considered themselves to be part of Christ's flock the Church, but they sympathized so strongly and actively with Christians because they were Christians that Jesus will recognise them as His sheep themselves.  To their surprise they will receive eternal life, the righteous man's reward.

    But what about those on the left, the "goats" who did not minister to Christ's faithful in their need?   To say they didn't identify Christians with Christ will be no excuse.  When they see the King enthroned in glory it's too late to say, "Oh, my Lord, I'd do anything for you!"  What about that insignificant Christian they saw beaten, tortured, starving, or simply slandered out of a job, and they did nothing to intervene?  The King will reply, "If you did it not for the least of these my brothers, you didn't do it for Me."

    So.  Here we are, and we belong to Christ's church on earth. Can we sit satisfied and sure we'll go to the King's right hand in the Judgement?  Not necessarily.  This passage is a warning to us, too.  A lot of people are members of Jesus' New Israel on paper, but actually they belong to the unbelieving nations.
    We have to examine ourselves!  How do we treat our fellow members in the Church?  The truly committed disciple will feed and clothe and help and heal their fellow Christian precisely because he or she is a fellow Christian.  A true believer in our Shepherd King will strive in the Spirit to see and serve Christ in everyone in the congregation, no matter how humble or struggling that other believer may be. 

    In the course of my life I've seen too many churches and church people focus all their ministry on those outside the church.  And yes, like Christ Himself we do extend the love and grace of God to all.  But sitting all around you are brothers and sisters who are hurting.  They're struggling with troubles of body, mind, and spirit.  They need someone to help them repair their house, to watch their kids for an afternoon, to sit for awhile and just listen.  But there's this assumption in the Church today that as soon as someone becomes a believer, they're set up for life and have all they need.  No!  Jesus calls us into His little flock because we do need each other, and He expects us to minister to one another for His sake.  As St. Paul says in his letter to the Galatians, "Therefore, as we have opportunity, let us do good to all people, especially those who belong to the family of believers."

    Remember, Paul puts the command for Christians to do good in the context of judgement.  If we take one another for granted, if we live to please our sinful natures, we will reap destruction.  Goats all along we will show ourselves to be, and as Jesus says, we'll go into eternal punishment.  But if we follow the Spirit of Christ who has saved us and do good to one another, we will show that we are His sheep. We will reap eternal life and enter into the blessed inheritance prepared for us by our heavenly Father before the creation of the world.

    As baptised believers, we no longer belong to the nations; we are citizens of Christ's new chosen people and sheep of His little flock.  Since this is true, let us strive in the Spirit to do the things that belong to Christ.  Do good to all, but especially to your brothers and sisters in the faith, from the greatest to the least.  Care for, help, and build up one another because you belong to Christ.  And so by His grace, His judgment at the end of the age will bring no fear for you, but only exultation, blessedness, and joy as together with all the saints you enter the realm of your Shepherd King.

Always Being Reformed According to the Word of God

Texts:    Nehemiah 7:73b-12; Matthew 23:1-12

TODAY WE OBSERVE Reformation Day.  It was October 31, 1517, when the issues that'd been fermenting for decades  in the Church of Jesus Christ came to a head and nothing would ever be the same.  Reformation Day marks the official beginning of the Protestant Church, for when Martin Luther hammered his Ninety-Five Theses to the door of the castle church in Wittenberg, Germany, he was protesting against the evils and degeneracies that were rife in the church he loved.

    Luther was followed by Calvin, and Melanchthon, and Knox, and all the other great Protestant Reformers who lived and died by this confession: That we are saved not by our works, but by Christ alone by God's grace alone through faith alone to God's glory alone, this truth being revealed to us in Scripture alone.  In the life of the people of God, reformation is not a one-time thing; it's required again and again, as often as we go astray from the truth of the grace of God and as often as He sends His Spirit to bring us back to Him again.

    In our Scripture passages this morning we read of two occasions in Israel's history when God's people were in desperate need of reformation.  In Nehemiah, the reformation is underway.  In Matthew, it appears to be too late.

    The assembly in Nehemiah 8 takes place about a hundred years after the Jews were first given permission to return to the land of Israel after the exile to Babylon.  The exile shook to the foundations everything the Jews understood about their covenant with God.  But as they studied the Law and the Prophets, they came to realize that even in this terrible situation the Lord was still with them and still had a purpose for them.  They saw that it was their sins that had caused the Lord to drive them out of the land, and they returned to Judea with a heart of repentance and reformation.

    But as we read in the twin books of Ezra and Nehemiah, and in the book of the prophet Haggai, after awhile the returned exiles became complacent and lazy towards God.  They erected their own houses and didn't restore the Temple.  They feared the opposition of their non-Jewish neighbors and didn't trust God to protect them.  So they didn't rebuild the walls of Jerusalem.  Worse, they began to fall back into the same sins that had gotten them thrown out of the Promised Land in the first place: Marrying foreign wives and adopting their religious practices.  Desecrating the Sabbath.  Oppressing the poor, not supporting the worship of the Temple as prescribed by the Law of Moses, and so on.  Spurred on by Ezra and Nehemiah, they put in the effort and the Temple and walls were rebuilt.  But spiritually, they needed reformation.  How was it to come about?  Would it be enough if all the heads of households simply pledged to keep God's covenant?  They did do that.  But how were they to know what God's covenant will was?

    Nehemiah the governor and Ezra the priest and scribe knew:  True reform would come to the people only if they were brought back to the written Word of God, delivered to Moses in the Torah: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy.  So in Nehemiah 8 we see the people, men, women, and all children who were old enough to understand, standing in the square beside the Jerusalem Water Gate, listening to Ezra read the Word of God to them. 

    How could they know God's will unless they knew God's Word?  God's people could be remade and remolded only according to the original plan and pattern He set for them.  The people listened to the Word of God read to them in Hebrew.  Most of them no longer understood their ancestral language, so the Levites went through the crowd and translated the Word into Aramaic for them, so, as it says in verse 8, the meaning would be clear.

    And the message of the Word became clear, painfully clear.  These spiritual ancestors of ours were devastated.  They were cut to the quick by the enormity of their sin.  They mourned and wept, as we read in verse 9. 

    Any true reformation born of God's Word and Spirit first convicts us of our sin.  The Scripture confronts us with how far short we fall of God's will for us.  It exposes how we have gone wrong, and God's Spirit moves us to grieve at how we have offended against the Lord who saved us once and loves us still.

    But after grief, the Word brings hope.  Its message of salvation does not leave us in our distress.  It doesn't stomp us into the ground and tell us how worthless and meaningless we are.  No, God's Word calls us to lift up our heads and rejoice in the Lord, for He has saved and forgiven us.  Through His power we can amend our lives and our practices and be the church He intends for us to be.  This is cause to celebrate!  As Nehemiah says to the people in verse 10, "Go and enjoy choice food and sweet drinks, and send some to those who have nothing prepared. This day is sacred to our Lord. Do not grieve, for the joy of the LORD is your strength."

    "The joy of the Lord is your strength"!  True reformation according to the Word of God brings joy!  Joy in the Lord who is our salvation, and strength, because God Himself is joyful when His people return to Him in faith and humility.

    God's people the Jews needed to be reformed by the Word of God.  And again and again up to the coming of Jesus Christ, their Lord and Messiah, they needed reformation. 

    The Pharisees began as a reform movement.  They started out well, in the days of the Maccabean kings, about two hundred years before Jesus was born.  They worked hard to call their Jewish brethren back to the Law of God and away from Greek and secular innovations.  But so zealous were they, that over the years they began to see themselves as the only true interpreters of the Word.  They were so anxious that everyone should keep all the laws of worship and ritual just-exactly, that they came up with all sorts of additional guidelines and rules setting out their ideas of what God in His Word had really meant.  This oral law took on the same force as the original Law that the Lord delivered to Moses, whether it was faithful to the original meaning or not.

    By Jesus' day, things had gotten very bad with the Pharisees, but they didn't realize it.  They didn't see they'd missed the whole reason that God had given the Law to Moses in the first place-- to prepare a holy people through whom the Savior of the world should come.  They were like a bride who's so concerned with getting the pearl decorations on her headdress just right that she forgets to show up at the altar to meet her groom.  The Word of God no longer had power to bring repentance and joy in their lives.  Or, should I say, the Lord had withdrawn His Spirit from them so that they could not and would not hear the truth of the Word, and repent and be saved.

    In chapter 23 of the gospel according to St. Matthew Jesus pronounces woe and condemnation on the Pharisees.  They were beyond being reformed and they sought to keep others from being reformed, too.

    Yes (as He says in verse 2), "The teachers of the Law and the Pharisees sit in Moses' seat."  They were like college professors with multiple doctorates.  By training they were qualified to teach what God had given through Moses.  They were the only sect in 1st century Judaism who made any effort to instruct the common people in the word of God.  So, as they taught according to the Torah, the people should obey them and do as they say.  But do not do as they do, Jesus warns us.  Do not follow the way they show off their outward obedience and inwardly are full of impurity, meanness, and unbelief.  Do not follow the way they claim to love God, but reject His Messiah, Jesus Himself.  Do not make the teaching of the Word of God all about ourselves and our greatness, instead of us being all about what God has done.  Do not be like them and make the voice of Scripture a burden and a trial to one another, instead of a light bringing repentance and the joy of the Lord.

    The Pharisees thought they didn't need to be reformed.  They thought the way they were doing things was a reformation in itself. In Matthew 23 Jesus tells His disciples and the crowds that God was finished with the Pharisees and their pretensions.  So do not aspire to be called "Rabbi," which literally means, "My great one."  Do not look to any human being as your spiritual master or teacher, for Christ alone is your supreme teacher.  In the life of the spirit, do not adorn any man with the title "father," for God in heaven alone is the Father of all the faithful.  No, for "whoever exalts himself will be humbled, and whoever humbles himself will be exalted."

    As Presbyterians, we celebrate the Protestant Reformation.  We proudly stand in the tradition of Luther and Calvin.  So is it enough for us to look back five hundred years to a reformation that is finished, accomplished, complete?  Or are we, in our own time and place, in need of reformation so we will be a church pleasing to our Lord Jesus Christ, the Head and Cornerstone of the church?

    Considering what's been going on in our denomination lately, I think most of us would give that question a resounding "YES!!"  As a church body, we do need reformation in our time.  But let's not deceive ourselves.  Yes, it's harmful for us to celebrate open transgression.  It's distressing when we who call ourselves "Reformed" don't extend the redeeming grace of Jesus to those who tragically identify with their besetting sin.  But it's worse when we fall away from the faith of Jesus Christ in ways that seem innocent, even helpful, and don't even notice how faithless we've become and don't realize how much in need of reformation we really are.

    How many of us would agree to the following tenets:
1) "A god exists who created and ordered the world and watches over human life on earth."
2) "God wants people to be good, nice, and fair to each other, as taught in the Bible and by most world religions."
3) "The central goal of life is to be happy and to feel good about oneself."
4). "God does not need to be particularly involved in one's life except when He is needed to resolve a problem."
5) "Good people go to heaven when they die."

    Does this sound like Christianity to you, let alone Reformed Christianity?  It is not.  It's a counterfeit, false religion called moralistic therapeutic deism.  There is no room here for the sovereign Lord of the Bible.  It says nothing about our sin and our desperate need for a Savior.  It has no real need of the Son of God who hung on a cross to purchase forgiveness for us.  It does not acknowledge that our sovereign God has a claim on every part of our lives, nor does it bow the knee in awe and thanksgiving at His grace that alone will allow us into His presence when we die.

    But this is the creed many of us live by, a false creed we must reject.  The watchword of the Reformed churches is that we are "Ecclesia reformata, semper reformanda secundum verbum Dei"-- "The Church Reformed, always to be reformed according to the word of God."  Without close knowledge of God's Holy Scriptures, without the Holy Spirit confirming their truth to our hearts and conforming us to the image of Jesus Christ the living Word, our attempts at self-reformation will be worse than useless. 

    God's good news to us is that we are saved by Christ alone by God's grace alone through faith alone to God's glory alone.  This truth is revealed to us in Scripture alone, the Word of God that is as close as the Bible on our shelf.  Take up, read; repent, rejoice, and be reformed, for the joy of the Lord is your strength.

Earth's Wrongs and Heaven's Rights

Texts:  Isaiah 61:10 - 62:5; Matthew 19:1-12

          WHEN I WAS A KID, ONE thing my dad would always say was, "Two wrongs don't make a right."  He'd catch me doing something I shouldn't, and I'd plead, "Well, Big Sister did it, too!" but it never worked.  Two wrongs didn't make a right.

    Sadly, in our denomination, and indeed, in our whole culture, people do make the argument that two wrongs make a right.  We're all aware that homosexual rights groups are lobbying relentlessly for same-sex marriage throughout America. The arguments in favor of it have come from all angles.  People say that marriage is a good thing, and no human being should be deprived of it, no matter what their sexual habits are. On the other hand, it's also argued that "You can't really say that the marriage bond is sacred, since heterosexual couples get divorced and violate it all the time.  You heteros have already trashed it.  So it's not going to hurt anything if homosexuals get married, too."

    We can't say, "No, that's not true!"  Divorce rates are skyhigh in America, even among those who claim to be committed Christians.  These days, any and every cause seems to be a reason for husbands and wives to split up.

    So do we give in to the proddings of the homosexual rights groups and let two wrongs make a dubious right?

    No, we don't.  We can't.  For heaven has a say in this question as well as earth, as we see in our Gospel passage from St. Matthew, chapter 19.

    A group of Pharisees come to test Jesus.  They ask, "Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for any and every reason?"

    When the Pharisees ask Jesus if easy divorce was "lawful," they're thinking of a command of Moses recorded in Deuteronomy 24:1-4, and a current debate among various rabbis over allowable grounds for divorce.  One group said divorce was only allowable for sexual lewdness, the other that a man could divorce his wife for about anything, bad cooking or body odor or simply because the man saw someone else he liked better.  However He rules, the Pharisees figure Jesus will get Himself into trouble.  For one thing, easy divorce was popular with the people-- the male half, at least.  But Jesus doesn't waste time weighing in on this debate over allowable grounds.  No, He goes straight to the heart of the matter.  He upholds the basic integrity of marriage as recorded by the Holy Spirit in Genesis 1:27 and 2:24.  He says,

    "Haven't you read," he replied, "that at the beginning the Creator ‘made them male and female,' and said, ‘For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh'?  So they are no longer two, but one. Therefore what God has joined together, let man not separate."

Do you see what our Lord has done here?  In one fell swoop He  has managed to offend or wrong just about everybody, His original audience and us living today.  He offends the Pharisees by implying they don't know how to interpret Scripture.  He offends the homosexual rights advocates of our day by reminding them that marriage is the union of a man and a woman, instituted by God since the beginning of Creation.  He offends all of us who think marriage is for our personal fulfillment or convenience, by pointing out that in the marriage bond, especially in the relations of the marriage bed, husband and wife are no longer themselves, but together they are a new creature, one flesh.  He offends all of us, married or single, who regard marriage as something we can define and do with what we will, by asserting that God is the active agent in marriage, and when God has joined a man and woman together in matrimony, no human person, not even the spouses themselves, have a right to break that union apart.

    A pastor at my home church once preached around this by saying that if a marriage ends in divorce, that means that God didn't actually join that couple together and the marriage wasn't a real one according to Genesis and Jesus.  I spoke to him after the service and said, "Thank you very much, Pastor, you've just declared my sisters and brother and me to be illegitimate children."  I don't recall how he answered me; it was pretty lame, as I recall, and not worth remembering.

    We can't get this out of what Jesus is saying!  God joins couples together wherever and whenever a man and a woman get married, whether they're Christians, Jews, or pagans, whether they acknowledge Him as the Creator or not!  In this word, Jesus convicts us all of wrongdoing, and at the same time, He asserts heaven's right. 

    The Pharisees think they've got Jesus after this.  And if you've ever been through a messy divorce, you might be secretly cheering for the Pharisees at this point.  "Oh yeah, Jesus?" they retort, "then what about Moses' command that a man should give his wife a certificate of divorce and send her away?"

    That's Deuteronomy 24:1, and the Pharisees have twisted the text into a pretzel.  You'd think God wanted men to find excuses to divorce their wives!!  Bur Moses never commanded men to divorce their wives, he didn't even command them to give the women certificates to show they had been divorced.  Moses merely takes it for granted that as sinful human beings sinful, marriage-breaking things would happen between husbands and wives, and he passively allows the break-ups to proceed, since the evil of divorce was perhaps less than the evil of a cruel and miserable marriage.  As Jesus says, Moses permitted divorce because of the hardness of people's hearts.

    But earthly wrongs never make heaven's right.  This custom of divorce is not the way God planned it, it's not the way God wants it, it's not the way God ordained it from the beginning.  In His will, it has always been one man, married to one woman, for life, till death did them part.  And so Jesus tells us, "Anyone who divorces his wife, except for marital unfaithfulness, and marries another woman commits adultery."

    Jesus' standard is both beautiful and fearsome.   We gaze on that ideal and we think, "Oh, how beautiful!"  But then, we lower our eyes to the earth and see how messy and painful the reality gets to be. How can this word of Christ have any practical meaning for us?

    But this word of Christ is one that has to be preached and heard, because marriage is not just an arrangement we make for our own good.  It's not even merely a contract entered into for the good of society.  Marriage is a model of the relationship that God desires and commands between Himself and all of humankind. 

    All humanity-- not just Christians, not just Jews, all humanity--was created to be in an eternal, unbreakable, sublime love relationship with our Creator God.  As a bride marries her husband, we were all as one to be married to Him.  But as we know, humanity sinned, and was unfaithful.  So God called out Israel to be His spouse, to live in faithful relationship with Him alone, to seek no other lovers, whether they were the foreign powers of this earth or the false gods of the nations.  Over and over in the Old Testament the covenant between the Lord and Israel is described in terms of marriage; our passage from Isaiah is only one example of this.  The earthly nation of Israel foreshadowed the spiritual Israel, the Church, and we read in Ephesians 5 how earthly marriage is a reflection and model of the eternal relationship between Christ and His Bride.

     So a man who divorces his wife for any reason other than adultery is not modelling the behaviour of God who keeps on seeking humanity out, keeps on sacrificing Himself for us, regardless of how spitefully we behave.  Unlike God, he has broken the most important covenant he will ever enter into in this life.  And a woman who leaves the marriage and weds another for anything short of her husband's sexual unfaithfulness makes of herself a living picture of humanity's unfaithfulness and idolatry against God.

    This is the word of Jesus.  Whatever the cause, divorce is a sign of our failure and sin, to be repented of, not celebrated.  But here we all are, sinful, failing, and very uncomfortable human beings, thinking about all the divorces our loved ones have gone through, thinking maybe about the divorces some of you have gone through yourselves.  The disciples cry out: "If this is the situation between a man and an woman, it is better not to marry!" Maybe you're thinking the same.  Why bind yourself to a impossibility Why make promises you can't keep?

    You may have heard of the Rev. Dr. Jack Rogers.  He used to be known as a prominent evangelical in our denomination.  Several years ago I was at a pastors' training conference where Dr. Rogers was one of the presenters.  This passage in Matthew came up, along with the corresponding passage in Mark, which doesn't mention the exception for adultery.  Dr. Rogers said that the exception must have been added in by some later church scribe, and that made Jesus' standard for marriage so impossibly high, no one could achieve it.  And since heterosexuals can't avoid divorce, neither should we expect homosexuals to fulfill the requirements of Scripture and repent of their sexual sins.   The very fact that the standard was so strict, Dr. Rogers taught, gave us all leave to ignore it and do whatever we pleased. Dr. Rogers, I'm afraid, had joined the world in proclaiming two very big wrongs to equal one very non-existent right. 

    But for our Lord Jesus, the alternative to accepting the godly standard of marriage is not "anything goes," it's celibacy.  It's making oneself a eunuch for the kingdom of heaven, as He puts it in verse 12. 

    But Lord, how can we accept either of these words?  Both perfect godly marriage and perfect godly celibacy are out of our ability.  After all, here many of you are, divorced and remarried. And if you're not, like me you may have loved ones who are. What's done cannot be undone!  And even if it could be, would it make things any purer or better?  No, most likely it'd just make things worse.   Two, three, or more wrongs never make a right!  But what can we do?  We can't pray God's favor on our sin!

    No, but we can receive His mercy and forgiveness.  In our Isaiah passage, Israel is likened to a bride who has been divorced.  But God her husband is taking her back.  He is rejoicing over her as His chief delight., for He has made her new.  Brothers and sisters, this is a picture of what Jesus Christ even now is doing for us.  In Christ, the right of heaven will prevail for you.  Whatever you have done in your marriage, regardless of whether you've been married once, twice, three, or more times, regardless of the sins you have committed in any area of your life, the blood of the Lord Jesus Christ washes you clean and His broken body nourishes you to eternal life.   In all the ambiguities and uncertainties of life, He can and will bless you with His grace.  You with all the Church are His beloved Bride, and He invites you to this Table to enjoy sweet communion with Him.  Will you come to Him and be stored?  Will you flee to Him to find your deep enduring love and only true joy?  He is your Lord, whose love and faithfulness endure forever, and in Him, every wrong is made right.  Amen.

The Greatness of Humility

Texts:    Exodus 32:7-14     Matthew 18:1-10

    IT'S GREAT TO BE GREAT.  ABOUT ten years ago BBC television in the UK and PBS here in America produced several programs, all testing the question, "How well could modern people cope if they had to go back in time and live as their ancestors did?"  Ordinary people were selected to live for months in an historically-authentic, isolated environment where the only modern things were the film cameras.  Barring emergencies, the participants had to survive with only the tools, clothes, diet, and social relations used by the people of the long-ago time.  

    Recently I found these programs posted on YouTube, and I started watching a series called Edwardian Manor House.  But before I'd even gotten through the first episode, I couldn't help but feel upset.  As a 21st century American I found it hard to stomach the idea of everyone being kept strictly in their place and the people at the bottom having to be humble whether they wanted to be or not.  On the BBC website they interviewed the participants after the filming was over, and as you can imagine, those who'd been the "servants" were glad to get back to the freedom of 21st century Britain.  But the family who got to act as the family of an Edwardian baronet?  Not surprisingly, most of them wished they could have stayed in 1905 forever.  After all, it's great to be great.

    In our reading from the Gospel according to St. Matthew, the disciples come to Jesus "at that time" and asked, "Who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven?"  At what time?  Well, at the end of chapter 17 the collectors of the temple tax came to Peter on the street in Capernaum and asked whether Jesus paid it.  Peter said Jesus did, but when he came into the house where Jesus was, our Lord spoke first and taught him that by rights, He and His disciples didn't have to pay.  After all, they were sons of the kingdom, sons of God the heavenly King, and in those days, kings never collected taxes from their own families.

    So here are the disciples, and Jesus has just included them as sons of the kingdom of heaven.  Well!  It was also the custom, even up to a century or two ago, for kings to give the best jobs in the kingdom to members of their families.  So the disciples are thinking, "Hey, we're sons of the kingdom: Jesus must have some really high positions waiting for us when He comes into His own.  But who's going to be His prime minister?  Who will be the greatest?"  If you were one of them, wouldn't you want to know?

    In response, Jesus gives them a visual parable.  He calls in a little child and has the boy stand where they all could see him.  And he says, "I tell you the truth, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.  Therefore, whoever humbles himself like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven."

    It's popular these days for us to impose our modern view of children on this episode and miss what Jesus is saying.  We're all guilty of it, including me.  We say, "Oh, Jesus is saying we have to be innocent like a little child."  But a 1st century Jew, especially a Jew who was also the Son of God, would never imply that children were born innocent.  All of us are born in trespasses and sins, all of us stand guilty before God.  And in case you don't believe me, watch a two-year-old having a temper tantrum.  Or we say, "Children don't care about position and advancement."  Oh really?  Just observe a toddler who's been supplanted by a new brother or sister, and you'll see just how heedless of position kids are.  (Not hardly!)  Or we think Jesus is referring to how teachable children are.  Well, I substitute teach, and some kids take in knowledge readily, but a lot of them rebel and don't want to hear about it.  And absolutely, Jesus doesn't expect any one of us to go around talking ourselves down and talking about being "A worthless worm."  What normal child ever did that?  No, Jesus was telling His disciples and us that in the kingdom of heaven; that is, in the sight of God in His church, we must take a position like that of an insignificant little child.

    Maybe if you come from an old-school family where children were seen and not heard, you might be able to conceive of the radical upheaval this statement of Jesus must have produced.  It was like telling the lady of the house to take the role of the scullery maid, or the master of the house to do the job of the slave who washed everyone's feet.  Children, especially little children, simply had no say or authority in 1st century Jewish society.  In a great household even the adult slaves bossed them around.  And Jesus says we must humble ourselves to that extent, if we want to be great in the kingdom of heaven.

    And not only do we have to be humble like little children to have any greatness in the kingdom of heaven, Jesus says we have to change-- to deny ourselves-- and become like children even to enter God's kingdom in the first place.

    We can fight against it all we want, but it's true:  We cannot believe in Jesus for salvation until we admit that we have nothing to offer God in return for His mercy, there's nothing in us that could attract God's favor; that as we are in our sins, to God we are obligations and not assets.  As with children, we have to realize that everything we have from our heavenly Father is a gift that we did not and could not earn.  We are helpless in our sins, we can't even be properly humble! until Jesus Christ reaches down to us in love and adopts us and makes us great in Him.

    This need for childlike humility applies to all believers, to the disciples, to you, to me.  But what about those who actually are children?  Does Jesus just use the kid as an illustration then send him away?  Can we?  No!   In verse 5 He goes on to say, "And whoever welcomes a little child like this in my name welcomes me."

    Did you get that?  Jesus Christ the Son of God identifies with the child, the low, the insignificant, the humble.  This was not just cheap talk from our divine Master.  In Philippians chapter 2 we see how He put His words to work.  There it says that He was

    . . . in very nature God, [but he]
               did not consider equality with God something to be grasped,
    but made himself nothing,
          taking the very nature of a servant,
           being made in human likeness.
    And being found in appearance as a man,
           he humbled himself
       and became obedient to death—
        even death on a cross!

    "Even death on a cross."  When we receive a little child in His name we welcome our crucified and risen Lord, and when we welcome our crucified and risen Lord, His humility for us should remind us to welcome and look out not only for young children, but for all who are the humblest of the humble and the lowest of the low, the little ones of His kingdom.  Because it's not about us anymore.  It's about Jesus Christ and each other in Him.  If you and I will focus on seeing and honoring Him in one another, Jesus knows that will go a long way towards keeping us from hurting and harming one another.

    For our Lord knows what's in us.  He knows that even in His church it's hard for us to keep on finding our greatness in Christian humility.  It's difficult to keep on weighing our actions and words in light of the good or bad effect they might have on  the little ones of the body, whether they're children in years or those who are young in the faith.  Even in God's congregation there will be people and actions that put stumbling blocks in the way of the humble. 

    The phrase in verse 6 that the New International Version translates "cause . . . to sin" is the Greek word σκανδαλίση [skandaliseh]-- the word we get  "scandalize" from-- and it literally means to trip someone up by putting a stumbling block in their way.  To quote R. T. France, one of my teachers in theological college, "One can be ‘tripped up' as much by a disparaging attitude, a lack of concern and pastoral care, or a refusal to forgive, as by a ‘temptation to sin.'" The ultimate evil in "scandalizing" a fellow-member would be that it turned him or her away from Christ and His salvation, or at least to made his or her Christian journey a trial rather than a joy.

    But what can we say?  All of us do or say insensitive or unhelpful things to one another out of sheer carelessness, and here Jesus says that anyone who trips up the young and humble in the church may as well have a humongous millstone hung around his neck and be drowned in the depths of the sea.  How can we avoid such sin and its condemnation?

    We must return to what Jesus has already said: Whoever wants to be greatest in the kingdom of heaven must humble himself and become like a little child.  When we're looking out for others' welfare we'll have a lot less time to be asserting ourselves and putting stumbling blocks in each others' way!

    And it isn't like we can watch out for the spiritual welfare of children and new converts, but go ahead and hurt and harm those who are older or who have been believers longer.  Jesus shows us in verse 7 that He wants us to be careful for all the members of the church.  In this fallen world it's inevitable, Jesus says, that skandalon-- stumbling blocks-- should come, but woe to the one through whom they come!  The way of the world must not be the way of the Church of Jesus Christ.  No, we who are His disciples should be so anxious for our mutual growth in Christ that if our hand or foot causes us or anyone else to stumble-- same word skandalizei again-- we should cut it off.

     Jesus is speaking in hyperbole, but does that mean we can disregard what He says?  No.  He intends to convince us of how deeply we must humble and deny ourselves for His sake and for the sake of our salvation.  There's nothing more important on earth than to persevere in faith in Jesus Christ and at last through Him to attain to the resurrection of the dead.  So if there's anything in your life, any sin, any habit, any ungodly relationship that harms others and separates you from Him, end it, cut it off.  If there is any attitude in you or me, any way of thinking or being that says, "I'm the greatest, I'm going to do things my way, and God and everybody else had better just give me room," end it, cut it off.  Even if you had to go through eternity maimed, that would be better than to depart from the way of Christ and go into the fires of hell with your self-image and pride intact.

    So does humbling ourselves means exercising no power or authority at all?  The story of Moses disproves that idea.  In Numbers 12:3 it says, "Now Moses was a very humble man, more humble than anyone else on the face of the earth."  We see Moses' humility in our reading from Exodus 32.  When the Israelites sinned by making and worshipping the golden calf, God offered to destroy them and make of Moses a great nation, a replacement chosen people.  But in his humility Moses sought the Lord's mercy for the Israelites.  He admitted their sin and appealed to the Lord's promise to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.  Moses was the leader of the Israelites, but he claimed nothing for himself.  Rather, he sought the good of the people, even in the depth of their sin.

    Whether we have major responsibilities in the church or simply faithfully attend, Jesus calls you and me to carry out our duties for the good of one another and to the glory of God.  As Paul writes, again in Philippians 2, we should "do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit, but in humility consider others better than yourselves."  In the end, if all of us strive to outdo one another in humility, encouragement, tender-heartedness, and love, none of us should ever have cause to complain that we're being oppressed or that others in the church are lording it over us. 

    And if we ever should think that Jesus doesn't understand how difficult being humble can be, let us look again to the cross where He died to take the penalty for our sins.  When Jesus calls us to find our greatness in humility, He is calling us to find our greatness in Him, the One who came not to be served, but to serve and to give His life as a ransom for many.  Jesus says, "Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls." It's great to be great, and in the kingdom of heaven, true greatness is found only in the humility of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, to whom by all wisdom, honor, and glory.  Amen.