Lent 5 - Hebrews 5:1-10

In Matthew 18 Jesus tells a parable about a shepherd who goes after one of his sheep. “What do you think?” he says, “If a man has a hundred sheep and one of them has gone astray, does he not leave the ninety-nine on the mountains and go in search of the one that went astray? [13] And if he finds it, truly, I say to you, he rejoices over it more than over the ninety-nine that never went astray. [14] So it is not the will of my Father who is in heaven that one of these little ones should perish.”
Now Jesus' parable is a little weird. Let's admit it. If one sheep is lost you cut your losses and thank God for the 99 that you still have. Would you really leave the 99 that you still have and risk loosing them by leaving them to fend for themselves out in the wilderness while you went off in search of that one stupid little sheep that got himself into trouble in the first place. It really doesn't makes sense.
And that is the point that Jesus is trying to get across. The actions of Jesus our Good Shepherd are (in our mind) a bit reckless. What he does defies explanation. What he does defies logic and reason. He does things that smart businessmen wouldn't ever think of doing. He takes risks that you and I could not imagine. Yet that is who he is and that is what he does. He would have no risk be too great that it would keep him from doing all he could to keep from loosing even one of his little lambs. This is Jesus. This is our Good Shepherd. And This is profoundly comforting.
This is comforting especially after the text I preached on for last week's sermon. Do you remember? The text was hard. It was hard. Hard for you and me to get our heads around. Hard for you and me to understand. God sent snakes. He sent them. He didn't stand back and let them come. He didn't turn his head for a moment to pretend he didn't know what was happening. He sent them. He bent down and whispered in the ear of those snakes, “Do you see those Israelites there? Go bite them.” God motivated them to do what was not in their nature. Snakes are frightened of people. They hide from people. The slink away under a rock when people walk by. God caused these snakes to come. It is the same thing he did when he sent Satan to afflict Job. It is the same thing he did when he sent Nebuchadnezzar to march his armies against Jerusalem and tear it to the ground. God sent bad things to afflict his people. That is challenging. That is hard to wrestle with. That is hard for us to understand.
In our minds, in our shallow understanding of ourselves and of god, a loving god should not do that. He should not cause pain. He should not create suffering. He should not be the one who is stirring the pot and causing the strife, he should be the one who brings peace and calm and prosperity. He should bless, not curse. Last week, you might have been tempted to think that you heard me wrong, that I did not say God sent the snakes or that God sent the disaster. Or if you heard me correctly, you might have been tempted to dismiss what I said. “I think our pastor has gone a little too far – perhaps he is spending too much time watching the Spartans in the NCAA tournament and not enough time studying his bible. We'll cut him a little slack here and hope he brings it back around after the tournament is over.”
It's not me. Your struggle is not with me, with what I have said, your struggle is with God. That is what the text says. You can read it for yourself. In the Hebrew text it is the same word used when God sent Adam and Eve from the Garden after they sinned. He drove them out, cast them out. Or when Noah sent the dove out the window of the ark to see if there was any dry land. There is purpose and intention with this sending.
We are tempted to believe that this truth is a horrible truth. We are tempted to believe that this undermines everything we have ever learned about God's love and his goodness and his kindness and his mercy. We are tempted to believe that this must mean that God is extreme. Remember what we have said. God is reckless. God is drastic. God is extreme. But not because he wants to be. God is reckless and drastic and extreme because he has to be. Because he needs to be. God is simply doing what he needs to do so he can get us to turn from our sin and repent.
You see, we are tempted to believe that the more serious sins are the sins of adultery, theft, abuse - you know, those things that other people do, those things that we look down on other people for doing, those things that we love to gossip about. Those things are sin. But we know they are wrong and most of the time when people commit those sins they are ashamed of them and want to confess them. Most of the time the sins that damn us to hell are not those sins. Most of the time the sins that damn us are the sins of pride, the deepest sin that lives in the human heart is the sin that says “I have done nothing wrong. I don't need forgiveness for what I have done.” Remember what John writes in his epistle. If we say we have no sin we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us.
It is God's will to break us of that sin. It is God's will that we confess our sin, all of our sin, even the sins that we have hidden away deep in our hearts that no body else knows about, even those sins that are so deep we do not know about them ourselves. God knows those sins are deadly and because he loves you so greatly he will not let those sins take you away from him. He loves you so greatly He will not be content to stand by and watch as those sins take you to hell.
My friends, don't be foolish. We all know human nature, we all know how deep our sins lie. We all know the pride that live in our hearts. It is our own foolishness that will look around at the suffering of other people, it is our own foolishness that will measure one suffering against another and say – “Ooh! Look! This person is suffering a lot. I wonder what sin he has committed. It must be really bad if God has got to strike him so hard.” That's what Job's friends did and God rebuked them and called them the fools that they were. That very thought grows from pride. You ought to confess it and all its ugly friends that live in your heart and beg God for mercy.
Our text this morning is from Hebrews. Chapter 5, the first 10 verses. The Epistle of Hebrews connects the Old Testament covenant with the temple, the priests and all the sacrifices with the work of Christ, with Jesus and who He is and what He has done for us on the cross. As our text says, God gave priests to his people to serve as the go between, an intermediary, or an ambassador. Someone to go before God on behalf of the people and bring their gifts of repentance that were requests for forgiveness. The Israelites would come, bring with them their sacrificial lamb, perfect and spotless, and the priest would take this gift into the temple and slaughter it before God and burn it on the altar. God accepted this sacrifice – God gave his Word that whenever His people came to the temple, whenever the people came close to where God was, in spite of their sin he would permit them to live and he would accept the life of the lamb in their place.
This was a good system. The people were sinners. People have been sinners ever since Adam and Eve. It is risky and dangerous for sinners to be anywhere near where God is because God is just, he sees those sins, even the ones that we have hidden away in our hearts that we are not even aware of and he knows that they must be punished. The sacrifice was a substitute, a stand in that suffered God's wrath so the sinner could be forgiven. And when the people brought their sacrifices to the priest, the priest did not look down his nose at them, the priest did not judge them or deal harshly with them. The priest did not say, “Didn't I just see you here a few days ago? What kind of trouble have you gotten yourself into that you need to come back so soon?” Because the priest himself was a sinner. The priest was weak, and wandering just as the people were weak and wandering. That' what our text means when it says, “He was able to deal gently with the ignorant and the wayward because he himself was beset with weakness.” It was the job of the priest, every day, before he could sacrifice for anyone else, he had to to sacrifice for himself.
While that made the priest gentle, it also made him weak. It also made the entire system weak because as an imperfect priest, he could only offer imperfect sacrifices. As imperfect priest offering imperfect sacrifices, he had to sacrifice every day, multiple times every day. The temple was, in effect a slaughter house where the blood of lambs and bulls ran freely.
So God gave us a new priest, a better priest, a priest who experienced human weakness, in all its frailty and in all its limitations. God gave us a priest who suffered with every temptation that we undergo, with every trial and tribulation, with every pain that we feel. God gave to us Jesus. And because Jesus has suffered the way that we suffer He deals gently with us. He doesn't ever say, “I saw you here just last week.” He doesn't ever say, “I have forgiven you for that sin already.” He doesn't every say, “You don't deserve my forgiveness.” He doesn't ever say, “I forgave you last time, this time you're going to have to earn it.” He just simply forgives.
But that forgiveness is not free. It never is. Forgiveness always comes with a price. There is sin and that sin needs to be satisfied. It needs to be paid for. But not by you. Jesus the new priest, the better priest, the gentle priest takes your sin and for it he offers a sacrifice. Not an imperfect sacrifice, not a sacrifice that will need to be repeated the next time you sin, but a perfect sacrifice, an eternal sacrifice, a comprehensive and complete sacrifice. A sacrifice that covers all your sin for all time even for all ages, even until the end of the age.
And so here's the thing: our sin has been forgiven. It has been washed away, it has been covered, it has been taken away from us and it is gone. We are no longer guilty of it. There is no price that we need to pay. That doesn't mean that you are not a sinner, that doesn't mean that you and I have stopped doing things that are worthy of punishment, it means that we do not have to suffer the punishment for it. There is no punishment for sin. Therefore when you suffer, God is not punishing you.
God is teaching you. God is teaching you to repent. God is teaching you to know your own heart and to know your own sin. God is teaching you to know how far you have fallen, but this is not so to make you feel bad, this is not to make you worry or panic, this is to make you see how deeply he loves you. This is to confront you with how far you have fallen so that you can see how far he has gone to save you.
Remember, we are like those wayward sheep. We wander off. We get lost. We are so lost that we don't even know we are lost we just keep going and getting ourselves more lost and further away from home. But he finds us. No matter what it takes, no matter what the cost, he searches us out, he brings us back because he would have it no other way.
Amen.

Lent 4 - Numbers 21

How could God do such a thing! It is so hard for us to understand. Yes, the Israelites complained. They were whining against God and against Moses. What they had done was a sin. But how in the world could God do such a thing?

He sent serpents, snakes, poisonous and painful, God sent them to bite the Israelites. God sent the snakes even to kill a large number of the Israelites. How could he do that? Why would he do that? What kind of a god is this anyway?

These days people who are looking for an excuse to bad mouth Christianity and religion point to this exact sort of thing. Richard Dawkins an evolutionary biologist and best selling author as well as an outspoken atheist has written in his book, The God Delusion that “The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.” (He has certainly gotten his money's worth out of his thesaurus.)

But he is not alone. Entertainer and comedian Penn Gillette is quick to point out that so much violence has been done in the name of religion. Bill Mahr has claimed that Christianity and religion in general is harmful to a society and should be regulated by the government . And Bible texts such as the one we have before us right here today give them ample ammunition.

We say God is love. Yet here in our text God afflicts his own people with poisonous snakes. We say God cares, but here God deliberately kills his own people. We say God is gracious and merciful and abounding in steadfast love, yet what kind of a loving God unleashes suffering and death on those who believe in him? Perhaps the naysayers and the atheists are right. Perhaps you and I are as they say, a deluded bunch of weak-kneed idiots.

Oh and we are. We found that out last week. “God chose what was foolish in the world to shame the wise. God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong. God chose what is low and despised in the world, even the things that are not to bring to nothing the things that are so that no human being standing before the face of God can boast.” (1 Cor 1:18-31) We weak. We are idiots. And we are proud of it.

Because the foolishness of God is wiser than men and the and the weakness of God is stronger than men. And the weakness and the foolishness of God is seen in no greater clarity than when he sent his own Son Jesus to be the sacrifice for us and for our sin as He died for us on the cross. He who has all power in heaven and on earth controls the bite of the serpent, he controls the sting of death and he has died for you and for your sins on the cross.

By earthly standards we are fools, but that is okay. We don't plan on spending much time here on this earth. Oh sure, if 80 years was all you had to expect out of your entire existence then maybe you should go for the worldly wisdom and the worldly strength, but we are planning on living forever. That tends to change your perspective a bit. 70, 80 years of foolishness and weakness can be tolerated in exchange for an eternity of blessing and joy in the new creation. There is no comparison. The world can call us fools as much as they wish, and we will wear that label as a badge of honor. Because our wisdom is God's wisdom and our strength is God's strength. We depend on him.

The thing that makes this such a challenge is that while we are busying ourselves trusting and depending on God, the foolishness of men is quick to point out the many evil things that happen in this life and in this world. The foolishness of men loves to harp on these things because in their mind it is proof that there cannot be a god, it is proof that if there were a god he would be all of those things that Richard Dawkins says he is. After all, look at our text. God sends snakes. There is no way around that. The text says he sends the snakes. The snakes who come to bite and to kill. The snakes who cause suffering and pain; they were sent by God. Just like God sent the Manna from heaven that they grumbled and complained about as food for them to eat, God also sent the snakes. We struggle with that. We have such a difficult time with that. How could God do that?

We don't understand. We don't understand at all. How could this be?

What is even harder to come to grips with is the greater reality that this then turns us on to. If God sent the snakes on the Israelites, what else has he sent? The recession? The bursting of the housing bubble? The loss of income and livelihood? Or perhaps worse than that, what about September 11? Or Katrina? Or the Tsunami? If God sent the snakes, then does that mean that God sent these other tragedies as well? Does that mean that God is somehow responsible for the great loss of property not to mention the great loss of life?

In our text God sent the snakes with the intention that they bite the Israelites to cause them pain and suffering and even to take from them their life. But God had a greater plan in mind. God was working to accomplish something more, something bigger and better in the lives of those people. Yes they were on their way out of earthly slavery in Egypt and into an earthly promised land in Canaan, but God was working out their salvation from spiritual slavery to sin so that he could take them to a spiritual promised land, so that he could take them to an eternal promised land in the new heaven and the new earth. Their grumbling was getting in the way of that.

When we deal with these questions of God's actions in human suffering, the one piece of information that is always left out is sin. We see the evil in the snakes, we see the evil in the economic hardship, we see the evil in natural disasters or terrorist attacks or in war and bloodshed and we assume that the evil in those things comes from sin. We forget that we live in a sinful world and we forget that we are a part of the problem.

The world is a dung heap. It is a festering, oozing, stinking, pile of sin. Sin that we create with our own actions born from our own evil hearts. A newspaper once asked its readers to write in with answers to the question, “What's wrong with the world today?” Christian apologist G.K Chesterton wrote in simply, “I am.” Brilliantly put, he was simply stating the biblical and theological reality that we are sinners in a sinful world. We are merchants of refuse living in a dung pile. We pile up the dung to make ourselves king, but we are then only kings of rot and stench. Worse than worthless.

The Israelites had forgotten. They had gotten used to the smell, they forgot that the world stinks and so they became upset that their dung pile wasn't a little larger, that they weren't standing a little taller on top of it. God didn't create the stink, they did. God simply reminded them of its smell.

So there it is. Do you see it now? Do you see the foolishness of men? Men scrape and fight and scratch and kick to be lords in this sinful world. Their sin and their greed, their lust for power and domination leads them to pile up for themselves the trash that a sinful and evil world has to offer. Christians have seen God's salvation. Christians have seen the trash pouring forth from their own hearts and coming out of their own mouths. Christians have seen their own evil and have wept because of it. Christians have smelled their own stink.

And so look. Look what God does. He gives them a sign. After reminding them of their stink, after driving them to repentance He reminds them of the master plan. He remind them of what he has got cooking behind the scenes. A savior. One who will come to rescue them from stench and give them a new life. One who will suck into himself the sin that we have spewed out, one who will take from us our guilt from all of the evil that we have done. God had plans to send His one and only son to become the poison and sin that is ours. God commanded Moses to make a snake and put it on a pole as a sign that he would send a savior. Moses did this. The repentant Israelites looked to this sign, this reminder of Jesus and they lived.

If a bronze snake that pointed as a sign to Jesus on the cross can save from the poison of snakes, how much more can Jesus on the cross save us from sin? Jesus is the real thing. No signs, no symbols, no marker of indicator – Jesus was the real thing, the real savior who came to really save us from real sin. If we are truly evil inside and out, if it is true what GK Chesterton had to say about us being a part of the problem then we need to be saved, we need to be cleaned and cleansed and scrubbed and purified and if all that is true than Jesus on cross is the answer to that problem of problems, Jesus is the answer to not just the symptoms, but the actual sickness. Jesus takes it away so that we can live – and not just as kings in the dung pile, but as princes in heaven.

Baptism. Baptism plays so prominently into this whole thing. This morning were baptized. Today Jesus himself washed these two boys clean from the sin that lives inside of them so that as they stand in the mud and the muck of a sinful world God see them dressed in gleaming white. But more than that, they are sealed. They are set aside. They have been given Christ's promise that he will save them out of this refuse. As with any change is wardrobe, we are free to take off the robe of righteousness that Christ has provided. If we prefer to be kings here, God won't stand in our way. But we can't have it both ways.

So, from time to time, God send snakes, snakes that bite, that sting and that might even kill. But these snakes are not with evil intent, the evil does not reside in God's heart but in ours, the snakes simply drive us to the cross. The snakes chase us back to Jesus where we look to him and are healed. Where we look to him and are cleansed. Where we look to him and we are saved, not for this life, but for the next.

May you rejoice in the salvation that God has given to you in his death, his resurrection and in your baptism.

Amen.

Now may the peace that passes all understanding keep your hearts and mind in Christ Jesus.

Amen.

Lent 3 - 1 Corinthians 1:18-31

For Jews demand signs and Greeks demand wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified: a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to gentiles, but to those who are called, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God.


Well, There you have it folks. That right there - those few simple verses, that's the whole deal, the whole kit and caboodle. The reason we go to church. The very purpose for our existence, the reason we are here. St Paul Chuckery Lutheran Church. Any Lutheran Church, and any Christian Church. Christ Crucified for sinners.
That is our message. That is what we preach. Sunday after Sunday, year after year, the same old thing. But that same old thing is “the power of God for salvation for those who believe.” That truth, that single piece of information is the thing that draws us together. IT is the sum and substance of the Christian faith. It is the thing that saves us. It delivers us from sin, from the devil, and it gives to us eternal life. Christ on the cross crucified for me is the single most important thing in the whole entire world.
Sadly however, for most of the world, this one thing that is more important than any other thing. This one thing that offers them eternal life and salvation is so often dismissed, cast aside and thrown away as foolishness, a stumbling block. Not good enough, not powerful enough, not entertaining enough, it doesn't get me what I want for the here and now so it is put away and it is forgotten.
How many ways have you forgotten the cross of Jesus?
Oh, we all have. We are all guilty of it. One way or another we find a way to discard the cross. Paul talks about it in our text. He talks about how the Jews and the gentiles of his day forgot the cross.
According to Paul, there were those who said it was “foolishness”. Instead, he claimed they searched for wisdom. “Where is the wise?” Says Paul, “Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age?” Because of the influence of Greek philosophy on the Ancient culture there was a strong emphasis on rhetorical style and the ability to form an argument in public discourse. There were many who were trained in public speaking. Therefore, they had sophisticated tastes when it come to preaching. And according to many at Corinth, Paul didn't fit the bill. He was criticized Paul because he was a lousy preacher. They were looking for power. They were looking for polish and pizazz. These days churches have become quite good at polish and pizazz. Things like fancy light shows, computer graphics, music and sound – multi media. Power Point – as though the power of the points is in the presentation style. That extra visual spice. That's what brings them in, that's what keeps them coming back. That's what we need, people will say.
No said Paul, Not bright and flashy. Not sparkle and shine. Not worldly wisdom. Just Jesus dead on the cross. There for you and your sin. Is that you? Have you lost sight of Jesus because the glitz of polished presentation has dazzled your eyes?
Or maybe you are like the Jews. Paul tells us that they demanded signs. (The Jews always demanded signs) They followed Jesus around asking him to prove his authority through some miracle. “Part the sea, give us bread from heaven, heal the sick.” When the Jews demanded signs, all he offered them was the sign of Jonah – shut him up in a tomb and he'd be back in three days – (there we go again pointing to a dead Jesus). We like signs too. We look for them all the time. We are eager for a “coincidence” that we could attribute to the work of the Spirit. We want there to be some proof or evidence or miracle where we could hang out hat. The only thing God promises for certain is Jesus on the cross. The stumbling block, the fool. Crucified? Dead?, buried? Yes. But crucified, dead and buried for you.
So perhaps you are like the Jews. Perhaps you are like the Gentiles. Perhaps you are pragmatic and just looking for something that works for you. Whatever the case may be, the faith that God has given to us is Christ on the cross for sinners. A message that doesn't appear to be powerful or polished, it does not appeal in any significant way. But to those of us who are being saved it is the power of God.
You see, Paul draws a distinction. He separates two categories of people, those who are perishing and those who are being saved. The cross is foolishness for those who are perishing. But for those who are being saved it is the power of God. This only makes any sense to us at all if we first understand sin.
The trouble we so often have is that we forget the reason why we come to church in the first place. We forget the reason why we peal ourselves out of bed on a Sunday morning to help fill a room of people to sing some songs and listen to some guy in a white robe talk. Blah Blah Blah. It's not for a pick me up. Its not for help. Its not for good advice. It's not to get on God's good side so He'll give you what you want.
The reason we do this, the reason we come here is because we are sinners. Through to the core. Because of our sin we are perishing. It's like we are in the middle of the ocean without a life preserver. It's like the doctor has just come in and told us we have only weeks to live. It's like we are face to face with a freight train that is bearing down on us. We are perishing. Because of sin we are dying. Because we are dying we need to be saved. We need Jesus.
We come here to church because this is where Jesus has promised us that he would be. If you're hungry you go where you can get food. If you are thirsty you go where you can get a drink. If you are sick you go where you can get medicine. If you are a sinner you go where you can get forgiveness. You go to church. Because it is right here where God has promised you that he will show up to offer to you forgiveness of sins life and salvation.
And so you come here on Sunday morning to listen to your own lousy preacher, going on in a decidedly un-miraculous sort of way, without any polish or pizazz. But you put up with it because you haven't come here to see me. You have come here to see Jesus. And Jesus is here to forgive you for your sin. To rescue you from death. And to offer to you life that never ends.
We preach Christ crucified. Yes, foolishness. Yes a stumbling block. But we preach Christ crucified because that is what we sinners need.
Jesus died on the cross. The God/man. The second person of the trinity. The “wisdom of God” as the Father created this world from nothing only a few thousand years ago gave himself up to be treated shamefully and violently so that he could suffer for you in your place. God gave his only Son to die for you as the perfect sacrifice for the sin of the whole world. And die he did. Jesus was arrested, beaten, whipped, shamed and humiliated. And the worst of all his suffering was that he was abandoned by God to suffer hell, left to himself to be punished in our place. The cross is our altar of sacrifice where God eliminated our problem of sin, where God heaped upon Jesus our guilt and shame. Even our shame and embarrassment at worshiping a god who would be nailed to a cross – Jesus died for that. Even our pride at thinking we could dress up the cross and make it more appealing to ourselves and to others – Jesus died for that sin too. Jesus died for all of our sin, he paid for them all on the cross.
So that is why we are here. That is why we have come to church. Because this is the palce that Jesus has promised he would be. This is the place where he has promised we could return Sunday after Sunday to once again be forgiven for our sin. This is the place where he would once again wash us and make us clean. This is the place where he would hand out his gifts of forgiveness and salvation. This is the place where he would administer the antidote for death.
God did the work for our forgiveness and salvation when He sent his son to die for us on the cross. The place that God hands out this salvation is right here. The means that he has chosen to deliver this gift to you is His gift of preaching.
The most important thing about your preacher is his mouth. There are lots of things that people expect from preachers these days. Some look for a good administrator who can help run the church in an efficient and productive way. Some look for a good preacher who can catch your interest and hold your attention. Some look for a compassionate and loving demeanor. Some just want someone who can remember their name. Every preacher you ever get will have some strengths and a lot of weaknesses. Every preacher will appeal more to some and less to others for some reason or another. What is important about all of them and the thing that you should treasure about all of them is their mouth. The job of your preacher is to accomplish the thing that Paul sets out here for you to know and understand. He says, “We preach Christ crucified.”
In other words. Paul was saying, “Our mouths speak of the Jesus who was nailed to a cross, who bled and died for you and for your sin so that you could have life.” God has given to you the forgiveness of sin through this Word of truth.
The way a Lutheran preacher has traditionally dressed is designed to preach to you a sermon. Believe me, this outfit is not just for the sake of fashion. It's not about polish and pizazz.
The pastor wears black – a color that reminds us of the darkness of our hearts that are filled with sin and death. Your pastor is a sinner.
The pastor wears a white robe – a reminder of the righteousness that God has given to all of us in baptism to cover over our sin.
The pastor wears a collar that is white here at his voice box – because Christ himself has sanctified the voice of your pastor to be His voice. When your pastor preaches to you, when he speaks to you about the death of Jesus for you on the cross, when he absolves you for your sin, you hear his voice. You hear my voice, but the voice is the voice of Jesus in heaven telling you that your sin has been forgiven. Telling you that he died for you. Telling you that he suffered on the cross for you.
Jesus died for you. Your sins have been forgiven. GO in peace.
Amen.

First Sunday in Lent

I tell my son that he is a hero. He loves to play pretend. And it is not an uncommon occurrence that as I am making my way through the house I am greeted by a ½ sized Spiderman, or Batman or Superman as he runs off chasing the bad guys down the hall slinging webs and wielding swords as he goes.
So I tell him that he is a hero.
In a sense, all of us are heroes. We are all fighting in the same battle, our Bible texts make mention of that battle today. Our epistle from James tells us to remain steadfast under trial. Our Gospel tells us of Jesus out in the wilderness doing battle against the devil. Our Old Testament text tells us of Abraham standing firm and believing God when he was tested. You and I are all like heroes engaged in battle, fighting against evil and hoping to win the victory. Every day the contest begins anew.
So what kind of a hero looses every battle he enters?
Not a very good one! After all, isn’t that what it means to be a hero? Aren’t heros supposed to win? We wouldn’t want to see Batman if the Joker wound up winning. We wouldn’t want to see Spiderman if the Sandman ruled the day. A hero is supposed to win. If you and I are heroes then how is it that we loose so often and so regularly? What kind of a hero looses every battle!
You and I are heroes, of a sort. Waging war and fighting battles on the arena of sin and temptation. We loose all the time – but Christ who fights for us has the ultimate victory in us and despite our losses the victory in the end belongs to the Christian. We are the anti hero. Christ is the true hero.
But still we fight. In spite of our losses. In spite of our failures we fight.
The battle is over sin and temptation. Just like in the Gospel text for today, where Jesus squared off against Satan, we too fight battles of temptation. God has given to us Christians His commandments and we arm ourselves to battle against the temptation to break those commandments. We read the commandments. We rehearse the commandments. We study up on the bible. We go to church. We are strengthened for the day of battle. And then the encounter comes. The day comes when we are weak, when we are tired, when we are stressed, when we are distracted, when our defenses are down, and there comes the devil. . Eager to provide just the right temptation, to point out the opportunity that you have to do that thing, you know what it is. That thing that violates God’s command, that you struggle with, that you fight against. Satan is there to eagerly give you the opportunity. Every hero has his arch enemy. Batman has the Joker. Superman has Lex Luthor. We battle Satan.
If only he was our only enemy. It gets worse. Not only do we fight against Satan. Satan has friends. Friends who live in the world. Friends who gang up on us and fight against us. Friends who help to provide those opportunities to sin. Friends in the world who despise the Word of God and the Command of God. Friends who believe that God’s commands are too strict and too stringent, that they will damage you self esteem, that they should be thrown off and thrown away and so they do, and they tell you that you should too. We fight against the devil and the world
But if only those two were our only enemies. It gets worse still. The eager accomplice of the devil and his friend the World is our very self. Our sinful nature. We love to sin. We can’t wait to sin. We are eager for every opportunity to indulge the sinful self, to throw off God’s commands to do the things we do. The hero inside of us in easily overwhelmed and easily outnumbered. It is a dark day when the Superhero is too weak to enter the battle, when the superhero cannot even get up to fight. There is no chance. It’s not even a fair fight. We sinful Christians make lousy super heroes.
Superhero movies are all the rage these days. A fan favorite has been the Spiderman franchise. One of the promotional posters from the last movie depicted Spiderman hanging upside down from his web face to face with his reflection in the glass windows of a sky scraper. The Spiderman that stared back at him from the reflection was dressed all in black.
If you saw the movie, you know the storyline. Spiderman was taken over by a black substance that fed off his anger. Spiderman became selfish. He fought for revenge instead of justice. He became evil.
There was a scene in the movie where Spiderman recognized the ill effects of this blackness that had overcome him and he began to struggle against it. He tried to pull it off and tear it away and emerge from its grip.
We would like to think of that as a metaphor that describes our struggle with sin. We would like to think of sin as a substance that has grabbed a hold of us and all we have to do is dig deep enough to find some good in our hearts. All we have to do is fight against that blackness that comes on to inspire evil in us and we can defeat it. We would like to think that the good is there in all of us and like Spiderman we have the power to win.
We don’t. remember, we are lousy Superheros. We don’t have the strength. We don’t have the power. We don’t have the will to even enter the battle. WE are doomed to loose.
But there is one. There is one who fights for us, who fights on our behalf. There is one who has the strength, who has the power, who has the will to win.
We saw this hero in action today in the Gospel. Our arch enemy came against him with all he had. He pulled out every trick that he has used for thousands of years against us – there are none that are new – every temptation that has seized you is common to man. But with this man and against this man the devil’s tricks were strangely ineffective. He appealed to his appetites. He appealed to his pride. Yet nothing worked. Those same battles that would have taken us under were of no effect against this man. This man fought back. He fought off the temptation and the tempter was forced to flee.
That hadn’t happened for a while. Not since the garden had this tempter met with such resistance. Even there Adam and Eve proved to be an easy target. Yet this man was different, this Jesus was different. His only weapon was the Word of God, but that Word was powerful. That Word was truth. Satan could not be get around it. He was soundly defeated. Jesus won the day.
And so it went. Wherever Jesus went, wherever the Devil had his strongholds Jesus entered. He commanded Satan. He fought against him. He overpowered him. He fought him off. He sent him packing. Jesus won victory after victory in his battle with the devil.
But the battle wasn’t over Jesus. The battle wasn’t over his soul. The battle, the thing that Jesus came to fight for, to earn possession of was you. Jesus came to fight against the devil, against the world so that he could have you.
In order to earn this victory, in order to take possession of the spoils the cost was going to be high. There would have to be blood. There would have to be sacrifice. So Jesus, the hero of heroes surrendered himself. He himself became the victim. He suffered defeat so that you could be set free. The cross became the place of Jesus’ ultimate demise, where he was defeated for you. He took responsibility for your wrong, for your sin so that you could be set free.
When Jesus the hero came up out of the Jordan River, when he had defeated the devil in the wilderness, he came for you. And as he came he preached. Mark has written down for us the sermon that he delivered. “The kingdom of God is at hand. Repent and believe the gospel.”
The kingdom comes with the king. Salvation comes with the savior. The war is won with the warrior. Jesus was those things. He was the King who came to be your savior, the warrior who came to fight for you with his own blood and death. What is left for you it the second half of the sermon.
Repent and Believe the Gospel!
Repent! So many times we think that this is something that we do. Repentance is my work. It is my action. It is me saying I am sorry, feeling bad for my sin, turning my back on my old way of life, deciding to follow Jesus. But we can’t! We can’t do it! Look into your heart! Look at what you find there. Nothing but sin and evil and weakness and death. Even your good works, even those things that everyone else thinks are good you know your motives. You know you are less than sanctified.
I found out recently that an old friend thinks of me as righteous because of how I handled an overbearing counterpart. In his eyes I was patient and longsuffering. The truth is that I was lazy. And that’s the way it goes with our righteousness – even our righteousness is dirty before God. So we repent! We turn in horror from who we are. No excuses. No self justification. No pretending we’re not that bad. We just recoil in disgust.
And Believe. Believe in the Gospel.
In spite of what we find when we look inside, Jesus the hero who fights on our behalf, who has fought for us has declared us to be righteous. He has declared you to be without sin. You are perfect because he has loaded your sin on himself. He has taken the blame for your sin so that it is no longer yours.
Ralph Burns died on Friday. He has been approaching that moment for weeks now. He knew he was going to die. So did the devil. So the devil came at him with everything he had. I know because he told me. But Jesus did not leave Ralph to fight this battle alone.
The devils weapons are arrows – small flaming arrows of accusation. “See” he says, “look at what you have done. You are no Christian. Christians don’t do those things, think those things, say those things.” Those arrows find the holes in our armor.
But faith! Faith extinguished those arrows. Faith holds on to promises of Jesus.
Sunday mornings, we have as a regular part of our worship the confession of sin. We all say the words, “I am a poor miserable sinner” and always the response is the same. I speak back to you the words of the absolution. “For the sake of Jesus I forgive you your sin in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.” IT comes. It goes. We move on to the next thing.
Not Ralph. Not as he lay on his death bed. Not as he fought and battled against Satan. He was a sinner. There was not denying it. He knew it. He felt it. Yet Jesus spoke to him words of forgiveness using the mouth of his pastor. Ralph believed those words.
Repent and believe the Gospel.
Satan’s fiery darts were extinguished. “Pastor” said Ralph, “It’s so nice you can say that.”
And so to you. Repent. See the sin inside your heart and run away. Repent and Believe! Just as I said to Ralph so I say to you. Your sins are forgiven in the Name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.
Amen. Now may the peace that passes all understanding keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. Amen.