May the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable in Your sight, O Lord, my Rock and my Redeemer.

What does it mean to be a follower of Jesus Christ? What does it really mean? What does it really mean to walk with Him? Do we really want to do it? Do we want to follow in His footsteps and ask Him to walk with us every day and all the way? Or might we choose our moments and keep others to ourselves?

Holy Week gives us a test of our sincerity. It stretches us in uncomfortable ways. It makes uncommon and perhaps unacceptable demands on us to do some things differently, to rearrange our priorities, to see how committed we really are to the Way, to the One Who alone is the Way, the Truth and the Life. Holy Week gives us the most vivid and realistic glimpse of what it might look like to be a follower of Jesus. Yet too few of those persons who name the Name of Jesus have truly walked His path this week or any week. Jesus had only three years in which to do the work the Father had given Him to do. Most of us have had at least 10 times that long, some 20 times or more.

In Holy Week those who have walked with Jesus have left the comforts of relaxed fellowship with dear friends in Bethany and have entered Jerusalem on Palm Sunday, an entrance tinged with apprehension, triggered by Jesus’ awareness of what would come next. Then, on Maundy Thursday, we withdrew into the Upper Room with the rest of His disciples, anticipating with joy the Passover Seder that recalls and celebrates God’s deliverance from bondage. But it turned into a night of surprises in which Jesus washed our feet and commanded us to love one another as He loves us. He predicted His betrayal by Judas, His denials by Peter, His own brutal death, and the sending of the Holy Spirit. Most of all, this was the night when He instituted the Holy Meal we call the Eucharist, our perpetual remembrance of His sacrifice and of our place of intimate fellowship with Him. Then last evening, in moments of unequaled poignancy, we walked with Him along what we call “the Way of the Cross,” or “the Way of Sorrows.” We left the Upper Room and followed Him to the Garden of Gethsemane, hearing His agonized prayer of anticipation. Then we followed Him to the place called Golgotha, hearing His anguished cry of “It is finished.”

Tonight we join His disciples, His followers, once again, resuming where we left off last night. Not everything has gone as we expected. Our walk with Jesus left us fearful, bewildered, wanting to run and hide somewhere, anywhere, to escape the harshness of an ending we never would have scripted. We try to recall His words to us and their deeper meaning, and we quake in the realization of all that we missed, that only now is beginning to be starkly clear. We think about the implication of those words and these events for us personally. We shudder.

But now, on this Holy Night, the dim light of Christ, the Light of the World, the Light that came into the world, the Light that the world rejected yet could not extinguish (John 1:3ff), that Light is shining before us, in us and through us. His light has become our light and has made us to be lights, bearers of His light in a world of darkness, the world we entered tonight carrying “the Light of Christ” and saying, “Thanks be to God.”

Now we remember His saying in the Upper Room, “Greater works than these will you do, because I am going to My Father” (John 14:12). By His grace He has given us time to do them. Time. It is among our most precious possessions; yet with it comes heavy responsibility. What will we do with it? Will we use it for Him Whose name we bear, Whose path we have trod, Whose Body was broken and Whose Blood was shed for each one of us? Will we try to come to terms with “sacrifice” and what sacrificial living really entails? We have looked at what sacrifice meant to our Lord and Savior. We have stared it in His face. What does it mean for us? How do we measure His pain and suffering against our discomforts? What are we willing to sacrifice in order to be His servants, as He commanded us to be?

“This is the night.” This is the night of deliverance, of restoration, of victory, of holiness. “How blessed is this night, when earth and heaven are joined, and we are reconciled with God.”

“Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus have been baptized into His death? We have been buried with Him through baptism into death, so that as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life. Our old self was crucified with Him, in order that our body of sin might be done away with, for he who has died is freed from sin. Even so consider yourselves to be dead to sin, but alive to God in Christ Jesus” (Romans 6).

In the next moments we will do something profound, something of deepest significance in our walk with Christ. It will take us back to our first entrance into a personal relationship with Him. It will be new to some of you and very familiar to others. It is called “the Renewal of our Baptismal Vows,” vows that were said by us or for us. For those to whom this is new, you may offer these same vows in recognition that everything contained in them, you have said before in some other context. You have pledged your life, the obedience of your faith, in most of these same words.

And tonight you simply have the opportunity to affirm afresh your determination to be a follower of Jesus, Whose paths we have walked this week. Think deeply about every word you will say, every pledge, every vow, every commitment. Think about how each one might change something in your life. These are far more than good intentions. We will say, “I believe, I will continue, I will persevere, I will proclaim, I will seek and serve, I will strive.” All of these are active concepts, serious pledges, life-altering vows. Nothing about them is pro forma, something followers of Jesus just say together from time to time. They are your re-commitment. They are your personal profession of your identification with the Crucified One, of your new life in the Resurrected One, and of your decision to follow and serve Jesus, the Lord of your life.

What does it really mean to be a follower of Jesus Christ? You are about to proclaim it.

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, Amen

May the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable in your sight, Oh Lord, my Rock and my Redeemer.

This is a service bathed in Scripture. In addition to the passages already read, we will hear once again in the Tenebrae service the account in Matthew’s Gospel that takes us from the Last Supper in the Upper Room, to the Garden of Gethsemane, then to the courtyard of the High Priest Caiaphas, to the judgment hall of Pontius Pilate, to Golgotha, and finally to the tomb of Joseph of Arimathea. Tonight our journey ends there, just as it does in the great musical settings of the Passion by Bach. Of course we know well how the story will end, and so we’re steeled to the pathos and have become somewhat immunized to the terrors of tonight’s account.

We just read the story that gives its name to this day, “Maundy” Thursday, a word that means “commandment” and is cognate with our modern English word “mandatory.” It refers both to the commandment to servanthood that Jesus gives us as He sets an example by washing His disciples’ feet, and to the commandment with which the passage ends: 34 “A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another, even as I have loved you. 35 By this all men will know that you are My disciples, if you have love for one another.”

These are words that strike a note of sadness in our hearts when we acknowledge the many times that Christians have failed to be identified by their love but more by their divisiveness, their separateness, their animosity towards persons who differ from them in even the slightest ways. We wince at the common barb that Christians are hypocritical, and our wincing comes from the recognition of how often this accusation is true. And if we are to ask God daily to forgive our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us, most of us have a long way to go before we can avoid any pang of conscience while saying that prayer.

Perhaps we let ourselves off the hook when we hear once again the story of betrayal and denial, false accusations, torture and death. We feel that we would have been unable to participate in any of those heinous things. But what if we had been in the Upper Room? We need to join the disciples in that space for a bit tonight. We need to imagine what it would be like to have the One we call Lord and Master coming to us to wash our feet. How many of us might have been like Peter, not wishing to accept such a humble gesture from the very One Whose feet we ourselves should be washing. We think of John the Baptist, who felt unworthy even to loosen the ties of Jesus’ sandals. What would we have said when Jesus approached us?

The greater question by far is this: how well are we doing at emulating the example of Jesus, of imitating His servanthood, of following His explicit commandment to do so? For the most part, we’re far too busy doing other things to have the time that servanthood requires. And at other times, when the occasion presents itself almost by surprise, our pride prevents us from jumping at the opportunity. Or is it simply our distancing ourselves, not as much from pride as from disdain or discomfort or perhaps the lack of genuinely compassionate concern?

How many of us are perceived by others as persons of servanthood? Think about that for a moment. This is not something Jesus threw out as a really good idea. He modeled it for us and passed it on as a commandment, right alongside that of distinguishing ourselves as persons who deeply love one another. If we think of servanthood and love for one another as “mandatory,” and not optional, we’ll begin to see ourselves as guilty persons in need of a fresh touch of the cleansing flow of Jesus’ blood. Then, instead of missing opportunities, we may find ourselves looking for them and having a heightened awareness of them. Many of them present themselves along our daily paths without our having to go out of the way or having to devote entire days to volunteerism. Servanthood does require action, but it begins as an attitude, a spirit, a conscious desire to be more like Jesus. Only then can it be lived out in the ways that we relate to others.

Let’s stay in the Upper Room a moment longer. As important as the servanthood lesson may have been, the deepest significance of this first Maundy Thursday lies in the meal that Jesus shared with His disciples. It was their Passover Seder. Obviously it’s not described in detail, though we know that Jesus had made arrangements in advance for the Passover to be prepared; and we can assume it was done meticulously.
The difference was that Jesus infused this meal with a new meaning, a meaning that made it not only a perpetual memorial of deliverance from the angel of death on the night before the Exodus from Egypt, but also a perpetual observance of the sacrifice of Jesus Christ for our sins. It became the meal that we celebrate at this table every Lord’s Day, the meal we celebrate this evening and again in the Easter Vigil, the meal where Jesus invites us to join Him in the Upper Room to feast with Him and to participate truly in His own Body broken for us and His Blood shed for us. It’s also our foretaste of that great heavenly banquet that we call the Marriage Supper of the Lamb.

Try to meditate on all these things when you come to the table tonight. This is the Lord’s Passover. This is the Last Supper. This is also the First Supper. This is our supper in which we are united with Christ in His finished work on our behalf. It’s the foundation of our life in Him, our very salvation. This is the night, the night that’s different from all other nights, eternally different because it looks backward to our history, it looks presently at our union with Christ, and it looks forward to our eternity with Him. This is the night of the mystery of faith: Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again.

In our first reading for Tenebrae, we will find ourselves reclining at the table with Jesus as He predicts that one of us will betray Him. We share that moment of stunned silence when we say only to ourselves, “Surely I would never be one to betray the Lord Jesus Christ into the hands of sinners who are determined to take His life.” We look around the table furtively, trying to imagine which of our fellow disciples might be able to commit such a treacherous act. We even discuss it among ourselves. Then it sinks in. Jesus is not suggesting that one of us might betray Him; rather He’s saying clearly that one of us will in fact do just that. And then, one by one, we ask, “Lord, is it I?”

Despite my certainty that I could not be the one, I will ask the question along with each of the disciples. Most of you have heard me say that this very moment forms one of the most compelling, soul-searching and gut-wrenching parts of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion. Exactly 11 times, the question is asked, “Lord, is it I?” But before the twelfth person, Judas, can ask that question, Bach inserts a corale, literally having the entire chorus and congregation sing this text in response to, “Lord, is it I?”:

’Tis I should sin be bearing,
         Both hand and foot be wearing
         The bonds of sin in Hell.
         The stripes and chains that bound Thee,
         The grief and pain around Thee
         My sin-sick soul deserved full well.
 
And there it is: not the spirit of looking around to see who else might be culpable for this betrayal of the Savior of the world, but in a spirit of looking ever more deeply within ourselves, we ask, “Lord, is it I?” And then we say, “Yes, ’tis I, gracious Lord. It may be Judas who will betray You, but mine is the sin that will nail You to the Cross. It is for me that You will die, willingly, painfully, sacrificially, in my place.”

As we prepare our hearts to meet the risen Savior at His table where He stands ready to commune with us in His very Body and Blood, may we recall with ever deepened understanding these words of Horatius Bonar:

Mine is the sin, but Thine the righteousness:
Mine is the guilt, but Thine the cleansing blood;
Here is my robe, my refuge, and my peace;
Thy blood, Thy righteousness, O Lord my God!
 
Too soon we rise; the symbols disappear;
The feast, though not the love, is past and gone.
The bread and wine remove; but Thou art here,
Nearer than ever, still my Shield and Sun.
 
+In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, Amen
 

​May the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable in Your sight, O Lord, my Rock and my Redeemer, Amen
 
Today is the day the Church long has called Palm Sunday, and it’s celebrated in many places with elaborate processions and many shoutings of “Hosanna.” Because it’s a celebratory re-enactment of the Gospel story, it’s a memorable favorite for young children. It stays with them all their lives, helping them to feel that they were actually among the children in the temple welcoming Jesus into their presence with cries of “Hosanna to the Son of David” (Matthew 21:15).

On the other hand, this is also the 6th and last Sunday of Lent. Since 1970 the official name of this day in the Catholic Church has been "Palm Sunday of the Passion of the Lord," acknowledging that in addition to the liturgy of the palms this service also includes the reading of the Passion story from one of the Gospels, often done with various parishioners taking the roles of persons in the story and the congregation calling out for Jesus to be crucified. This day ushers us into Passion week, when we bring ourselves once again face-to-face with the sacrifice of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, for our sins, as we say every week in the Creed, “for us and for our salvation.”

And so this is a Sunday of contradictions, of conflicting emotions, of both highs and lows. Because in our human nature we have a strong preference for highs, many churches have let go of any emphasis on the Passion, preferring by far just to wave palm branches in celebration and rejoicing over the Triumphal Entry of Jesus into Jerusalem. But this definitely is a “both/and” sort of day, one where we are called on to observe all that this day represents.

Admittedly there are those who may go too far in draining Palm Sunday of any hint of “triumph,” while there are others who try to make the Cross itself either disappear as the primary symbol of our faith or who in the name of “triumphalism” turn the whole of Holy Week into one protracted Hosanna-happening. Do you know that “Hosanna” is best translated into English as “hip, hip, hooray?” There’s definitely more to Holy Week than that!

Was it this same Hosanna-shouting crowd that only days later transmuted their cry from “Hosanna” into “Crucify Him?” Perhaps some of the same persons were in both crowds, just being the sort of people who enjoy a festive gathering and will submit to peer pressure to shout whatever is the slogan of the day. We see a lot of that on both sides of the American political scene today.

But assuming for the moment that the Palm Sunday crowd was made up principally of persons who were genuine in their acclaim of the prophet from Nazareth, the One coming in the Name of the Lord, the Son of David Who was about to restore David’s Kingdom, we still wince in hindsight over their misunderstanding of Jesus’ mission. Would we have done any better? Wrong expectations characterize every generation of human beings; and it’s hard to fault us for continually clinging to some level of optimism, whether it’s misplaced or not.

Welcome to Holy Week. It does get off to a rousing start. We’ve come in with our palms, we’ve placed them by the altar, we’ve blessed them, we’ve heard the Gospel story, and maybe, just maybe, we’ve remembered that ashes from these palms will be imposed on our foreheads next Ash Wednesday, as we hear these words: “Remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return; turn away from sin and be faithful to Christ.”

Our faith is the source of greatest comfort: truthfully, the greatest comfort that’s available to anyone in this world. It sustains us in our times of deepest sorrow and of greatest pain. It keeps us looking upward and forward when looking down is depressing. We’re comforted by our faith because we know it to be true, even when we struggle with some of the spiritual fine print.

Yet we always are aware that the comfort comes with its challenges. That’s a truth that fundamentally underlies this day in the Church calendar. Do you think that the Son of David, riding into Jerusalem on the back of a donkey to unprecedented acclaim, really thought that the throne of David was awaiting Him? Or did He realize that He was about to be enthroned on the Cross? Listen to the words of this collect that we read every evening this past week for Evening Prayer:

Blessed are You, Lord God of our salvation, to You be glory and praise for ever. As we behold Your Son, enthroned on the Cross, stir up in us the fire of Your love, that we may be cleansed from all our sins, and walk with You in newness of life, singing the praise of Him who died for us and our salvation.

That collect summarizes all that this day represents. It both begins and ends with our giving praise and glory to God. In between, it views Jesus on the Cross cleansing us from our sins and inspiring in us the desire to be stirred up with the fire of God’s love and to be walking in newness of life. Were we all to cling to those thoughts throughout the week ahead, our paths would be flooded in the light of what Holy Week truly means.

As the apostle Paul wrote to the Galatians, “God forbid that I should glory, save in the Cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by whom the world is crucified to me, and I to the world” (6:14). We echo those very words when in our hymn, “When I survey the wondrous Cross,” we sing: “Forbid it Lord that I should boast, save in the death of Christ my God; all the vain things that charm me most, I sacrifice them to His Blood.”

Do we think about that when we come to receive the Body and Blood of Jesus in the Eucharist? One of you wrote this to me a few weeks ago:

It was always very difficult for me to understand and accept Jesus saying, “Unless you eat my flesh and drink my Blood.” Now I believe that it’s the symbol that Christ used to set forth the assignment for us to become like Him. Every time one receives the consecrated Body and Blood of Christ one has the opportunity to become more like Him in one's life, which is our duty and responsibility as Christians.”
 
Holy Week gives us more opportunities than usual to receive His Body and Blood, and there’s no time in the changing seasons of the Church year that this intense focus is more desirable or more meaningful. Holy Week reminds us that the holy sacrament is not just something we do: it’s something God does. He does it in and through us in order to change us, to make us more like His Son, to allow us spiritually to participate in His sacrifice on our behalf, to shower us with His grace. It’s a week dedicated to surveying the wondrous Cross and to assessing our lives in its shadow. Only then are we prepared to say, “I take, O Cross, thy shadow for my abiding place.” And only then are we truly prepared to come to Easter morning understanding more fully why without the Cross there is no Easter, without the sacrifice there is no victory, without the shedding of our Savior’s Blood there is no remission of sin (Hebrews 9:22).

But with those things there is also victory over sin and the grave, and the power to overcome ourselves, our failures, our temptations, our reluctance to surrender the things of this world for the sake of the One “Who yielded His life an atonement for sin and opened the life-gate that all may go in.” “To God be the glory, great things He has done, and great our rejoicing through Jesus, His Son.”

For the word of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God” (I Corinthians 1:18).

In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, Amen

​May the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable in Your sight, O Lord, my Rock and my Redeemer

Today’s Gospel reading may be among the most assiduously avoided passages in the Gospel of John. First, it tells a story without connecting all the dots or fully explaining the significance of what’s going on; then, second, it moves on to a spiritually profound level that somewhat mystifies us and perhaps frightens us with its personification of Satan; third and finally, it moves to the practical level where Jesus challenges us as deeply as anywhere else in the Gospels.

Let’s start with the story line, the seemingly easy part. We have an anonymous group of “Greeks,” generic for “Gentiles,” who presumably are converts visiting Jerusalem on a Passover pilgrimage; we have the Apostle Philip, from Bethsaida on the north shore of the Sea of Galilee; we have Andrew, also from Bethsaida; we have Jesus; and we even have the voice of God the Father speaking words of affirmation from heaven that those standing by mistake for thunder or the voice of an angel, even though Jesus says without further explanation that the voice was meant only for their benefit, not His.

If you study the overall structure of John’s Gospel you’ll discover that this is the climactic and pivotal moment in Jesus’ earthly ministry, an event during which Jesus makes two astonishing statements: “The hour has come,” and “Now judgment is upon this world:” all of that came just from learning that a group of Gentiles were asking for Him! These are cosmic statements, having sweeping implications for the spiritual history of the world, of all humankind, the very axis of God’s dealing with His creation. This is it!

I don’t think we’ve come to terms with this passage very often other than quite superficially. And I left out perhaps the most important piece of all: in this very moment, when these Gentiles come seeking Jesus, only Jesus Himself fully recognizes the magnitude of what’s happening. The saving grace of God is not first imparted to Gentiles at Pentecost or with the conversion of Saul of Tarsus when he becomes Paul the missionary to the Gentiles. Nor does the extension of salvation to the Gentiles come through Peter’s encounter with the Gentile centurion, Cornelius. It doesn’t even begin with the Jerusalem Council in Acts 15 when the parties of Peter and Paul hash out the requirements for Gentile conversion. It’s right here, in this very moment when Jesus is informed of the Gentiles’ seeking for Him that Jesus says, “the hour has come,” and He adds, “For this very purpose I came to this hour!” Until now, Jesus only encountered Gentiles sporadically and individually. This is different, and its sweeping implications embrace every one of us. Bookmark this passage in your Bible! It’s truly monumental!

Who were these Gentiles? How many were there? Where were they from? We’ll never know. Did they ever actually get to meet Jesus? The story doesn’t tells us. Why did they first approach Philip rather than Peter, the spokesperson, or John, the beloved? The usual explanation is that Philip had a Greek name, though he certainly was Jewish. But how would they even have known his name? We’re not told. Why did Philip then go to Andrew rather than going directly to Jesus? We can’t know or even make an informed guess.   

What more do we know about Philip? Not a lot, and all we do know comes from John’s Gospel. We know that Andrew and Philip were the first two disciples to be called by Jesus and that both seem previously to have been followers of John the Baptist. While Andrew went at once to tell his brother Simon Peter about Jesus, Philip went straight to Nathanael, saying, “We have found Him of Whom Moses and the prophets wrote.” And meeting skepticism from Nathanael, Philip added the simple words, “Come and see.”

After that, apart from today’s Gospel, we encounter Philip only twice more, and both times he appears to have been the skeptic. The first was at the Feeding of the 5,000, when Philip tells Jesus that it would take over half a year’s wages to buy bread for such a crowd (John 6:7). The other time is in the Upper Room, when Philip interrupts Jesus to say, “Show us the Father and it will be enough for us.” He said this immediately after Jesus had said, “If you had known Me, you would have known My Father also. From now on you do know Him and have seen Him.” Jesus seems unable to mask His disappointment when He responds personally to Philip, saying, “Have I been with you all this time, Philip, and still you do not know Me? Anyone who has seen Me has seen the Father. How can you say, ‘Show us the Father?’” (John 14:7-9).

Returning to our story in John 12, the response of Jesus to Philip and Andrew must have astonished them. The narrative ends abruptly, and Jesus immediately moves on to the spiritual level, the deep, complex, mystifying and frightening level. He says, “The hour has come.” For what? He tells us: “for the Son of Man to be glorified.”

What could that mean? How did the approach of the Gentiles trigger such a response from Jesus? First, we have to remember that when Jesus sent out the 12 disciples, He specifically told them, "Do not go in the way of the Gentiles, and do not enter any city of the Samaritans; but go rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel” (Matthew 10:5, 6). Jesus said that even He "was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel” (Matthew 15:24). Now He alone understands that these inquiring Gentiles were sent by God to signal a new plan, a broadening of the playing field, a game-changing moment, the ushering in of an inclusive mission to both Jews and Gentiles.

Knowing His purpose on earth, Jesus also immediately recognized the significance of this hour, the hour for Him to be “lifted up” in order to draw “all men,” whether Jews or Gentiles, to Himself: not all without exception, but all without distinction. John, writing 6 decades later and with 20/20 hindsight, adds editorially that by “lifted up,” Jesus was signifying the means of His death, just as He had some years before when, speaking to Nicodemus, He said, “As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of Man be lifted up; so that whoever believes in Him will have eternal life” (John 3).

As confident as Jesus was as to the meaning and import of this hour, He was still the earthbound God/Man Jesus, Who could admit that His soul was troubled and that some part of Him wanted to say, “Father, save Me from this hour.” Nonetheless, He displays His awareness of His Messianic mission and its connection to this hour, something that God the Father affirms when He says from heaven that He has glorified Jesus’ Name and He will glorify it again. For that glorification of His Name to be complete, Jesus first had to pass through the Cross and the Resurrection, leading to His Ascension to the Father’s right hand. Then and only then could the Father say, “This day have I begotten You.”

Now Jesus adds a critically important tag: that the coming of the hour involves not only the covenant inclusion of the Gentiles and the time for Jesus to be “lifted up,” but it also ensures the defeat of Satan: “Now the ruler of this world will be cast out.” We may wish from our perspective that “now” had meant immediately, but the fact that it did not in no way diminishes its certainty. Jesus, viewing Satan through the Cross and the Resurrection, clearly states that Satan will be cast out. As Martin Luther wrote in his great Reformation hymn [that we sang this morning], “The prince of darkness grim, we tremble not for him: his rage we can endure, for lo, his doom is sure, one little word shall fell him” [A Mighty Fortress Is Our God].

We tend not to like being confronted with descriptive names that personify evil in our world. We would rather regard evil as some vague negative force that tries to counterbalance God’s positive force. “Satan,” the “devil,” the “ruler of this world,” the “prince of darkness,” the “father of lies” and the “prince of the power of the air” are all personifications we could do without. But even in the original words of the Lord’s Prayer that Jesus taught His disciples, a prayer that many of us say daily, what Jesus really taught us was to ask that God not bring us to the time of trial, but deliver us from the evil one. I’ve often wondered whether it’s been to Satan’s delight that both the Latin and the English versions of the Lord’s Prayer contain the same translation error, one that transmutes “the evil one” into just “evil.” Certainly Satan would not wish the billions of Christians who have recited that prayer to be praying against him personally!

You may have noticed that I skipped over a few things in our passage, saving for last the third aspect, the practical one, the “so what” factor that has to do with us, how we should live in accordance with what’s being taught here. And guess what? It’s very uncomfortable territory! Now we’ll see why this passage is so frequently glossed over as though it were merely a parenthetical bit sandwiched between the Triumphal Entry into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday in the preceding verses, and the withdrawal into the Upper Room in the next chapter. It also is one of those passages where Jesus, instead of leaving us with just a vague aphorism about a grain of wheat, cuts to the chase with words that directly invade and challenge our comfort zones.

Listen again to what Jesus says to us, not just to those gathered around Him long ago: “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit. He who loves his life loses it, and he who hates his life in this world will keep it to life eternal. If anyone serves Me, he must follow Me; and where I am, there My servant will be also; if anyone serves Me, the Father will honor him” (John 12:24-26).

Is that upside down or what? Does this make any sense to 21st-century American Christians? It’s so loaded with self-denial and self-sacrifice that we can hardly bear it. And it absolutely and explicitly contradicts our notion that self-love is the key to happiness. Whatever we may mean by that, Jesus says that we’re to hate our lives if we’re to keep them “to life eternal. That’s precisely why, on the one hand, this is a seriously neglected pericope in John’s gospel and why, on the other hand, it’s among the most critically important passages for our understanding of God’s grand plan for us.

These words constitute a concise Christian guide to “obedience,” something to which all Christians give lip-service, as long as obedience is on our own terms. All sorts of worldly practices and forms of entertainment take precedence over obedience in our lives, and we develop elaborate schemes of self-justification to fortify ourselves against the demands of Jesus. But the demands of Jesus are completely predicated on our willingness to surrender our sacred cows, to relinquish the things that keep us away from worship and fellowship, to step away from the many distractions that we allow and that we even invite to invade our lives and diminish our focus on God Himself.

Perhaps you’ve heard from some pulpit or read in some devotional book a line that is misrepresented as a quote from the early Church father, Irenaeus. The so-called quote is this: “The glory of God is man fully alive.” Those who cite this line usually go on to say something very engaging and contemporary about how God actually wishes us to be self-actualized persons so that we will be truly happy and fulfilled in this life. But the truth is that Irenaeus said just the opposite. In fact, what Irenaeus actually said is completely consonant with the words of Jesus we just heard.

Listen to Irenaeus:       [“Gloria Dei est vivens homo.” Against Heresies IV, 20, 7 & 5]
The glory of God is a living man; and the life of man consists in beholding God.
​
If the revelation of God through creation gives life to all who live on the earth, much more does the revelation of the Father through the Word give life to those who see God. He, [although] beyond comprehension, and boundless and invisible, rendered Himself visible and comprehensible [in Christ Jesus], and within the capacity of those who believe, that He might give life to those who receive and behold Him through faith. The actualization of life is found in fellowship with God; but fellowship with God is to know God, and to enjoy His goodness.
 
Did you hear anything in those words that sounds like “the glory of God is man fully alive?” No, those words and that thought are conspicuously absent in Irenaeus, just as they’re absent in the teaching of Jesus, Who said: “He who loves his life loses it, and he who hates his life in this world will keep it to life eternal. If anyone serves Me, he must follow Me; and where I am, there My servant will be also; if anyone serves Me, the Father will honor him.” In other words, the glory of man is in his vision of God, and for the Christian, that vision is through Christ alone (John 1:12ff.).

What does it mean to follow and serve Jesus? You remember only three Sundays ago our Gospel reading contained these well-known words of Jesus: “If anyone wishes to come after Me, he must deny himself, and take up his cross and follow Me. For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for My sake and the Gospel’s will save it” (Mark 8:34, 35). Both Jesus in today’s Gospel and blessed Irenaeus in the second century said this same thing. Is making some sacrifices in this life worth keeping our lives “to life eternal?” Absolutely. God is not glorified when we’re absorbed with pursuing the contemporary version of being “fully alive.” He is glorified when we live according to a vision of Him in all His righteousness, a vision we have through His Son, Who was lifted up on the Cross “so whoever believes in Him will have eternal life.” It’s sacrificial living that most pleases God, because only through sacrifice are we living in the image of Christ, Who gave His life for us.

How should we respond to all of this? Some of the things about sacrificial living sound very familiar because we’ve read and heard them over and over. Some of those things seem “over the top,” as though they surely must be intended for someone else. But Jesus is addressing anyone who wishes to serve Him and be honored by God. And His message is not one of being “fully alive,” but of being “fully dead,” as His analogy of “the grain of wheat that falls into the earth and dies” suggests. Only then will the followers of Jesus “bear much fruit” and keep their lives “to life eternal.”

When we truly follow Jesus, He promises that we will be where He is, which may not be where we generally find ourselves. For His part, He has promised that He will be with us to the end of the age (Matthew 28:20). And He also promises that once we’ve died to ourselves in order to become alive in Him, we will have “life abundantly” (John 10:10). Then we’ll know what Irenaeus meant when he said that “the life of man consists in beholding God,” that “ the actualization of life is found in fellowship with God,” and that “fellowship with God is to know God, and to enjoy His goodness,” a goodness that surpasses even the greatest good that we seek in this world.

And so, as Paul wrote to the Ephesians (5:2), “Walk in love as Christ loved us and gave Himself for us, a fragrant offering and a sacrifice to God.” That’s our true calling, yours and mine.

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, Amen

​May the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable in Your sight, O Lord, my Rock and my Redeemer
 
What constitutes our Christian identity? Do we have one? Is it our core identity? Should it be? Is it all that important? Are we people of the Book, the Word, the Gospel? Or are we just people of the Church, an institution and a building where we find social interaction and comfort for ourselves? What would change in our daily lives if our Christian faith drove everything that we do and say? What might tomorrow look like? What might your Holy Week look like? How might your worship patterns change?

How might your stewardship patterns change? Where does your money go? How much time and money do you spend on the Church compared to what you spend on entertainment and earthly pleasures? As Jesus said, “where your treasure is, there will your heart be also” (Matthew 6:21). If you truly think about this objectively, you may discover where your hearts really are. Your patterns of living and giving, measured against your commitment to Jesus Christ and His Church, are all you need to examine.

We cry out against the total secularization of contemporary American society, yet we ourselves are awash in it and have been for decades. It’s the life we know best. The Christian life as described in the Bible is less familiar to us experientially. We have redefined Christianity as a “comfort zone” to which we can retreat “as needed” by us, but certainly not as demanded by the claims of Christ on our lives. Our Christianity is pretty much confined to periodic church attendance when it’s not in conflict with our other activities, with competing attractions, with inclement weather or with a bad case of the sniffles.

What does any of this have to do with today’s Scriptures? Absolutely everything! Today we have two of the best-known and most frequently quoted passages in the whole of the Bible. Yet both are most often quoted out of context and given a spin that is almost in contradiction to what each passage actually says and means. There’s a popular saying that “a text without a context is a pretext for a proof-text.” Yet we’ve taken John 3:16 and Ephesians 2:8 & 9 and made watered-down proof-texts out of them that would have astonished and dismayed Jesus, John and Paul.

What am I saying? Let’s start with Ephesians 2 and end with John 3:16. What use do we make, almost exclusively, of Ephesians 2:8 & 9? We use it to prove that salvation is solely by God’s grace, appropriated by faith, and has nothing to do with good works. We use it to combat the “heresy” of those Roman Catholics who believe that they have to do a variety of other things to procure their salvation from week to week if not from day to day. We’ve used it that way so often and for so long that we’ve lost a sense of what these verses mean when examined in the light of Paul’s overall argument in this section of Ephesians.

It’s easy to forget that when Paul wrote Ephesians and all the rest of his epistles, there were no chapter divisions and no verse numbers. And I think we’ve allowed chapter and verse citations to become a convenient and catchy short-cut instead of reading more and challenging ourselves with the complexities of Pauline thought, logic, instruction and, yes, demands. In other words, we’ve indeed made texts without contexts into pretexts for proof-texts, often without even realizing it.

Is it Paul’s point in what we call Ephesians 2 that salvation is “by grace through faith plus nothing?” That’s what we say. But in the way of context, let’s first of all look at the very next verse, one that hardly anyone who quotes verses 8 & 9 could quote or even paraphrase! Verse 10 says, “For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, that God prepared beforehand so that we would walk in them.”

If we go back to the beginning of our passage, we get Paul’s actual point: he is telling believers that while we were dead in trespasses, sins and transgressions, living under the control of “the prince of the power of the air,” now we have been made alive in Christ so that, as His re-born followers, we might no longer indulge in “the desires of the flesh and of the mind.” We must show ourselves no longer to be “by nature children of wrath.” This passage is less about how to be saved than about how to live as Christians. And it’s all about no longer indulging in our fleshly appetites but engaging our whole selves in doing those good works that God prepared for us before we ever came to faith.

So what’s wrong with the way we quote John 3:16, the verse that is found on countless T-shirts, posters, road signs, church signs, internet sites, letter-heads, signatures, etc. It’s what we use as the most common formula for salvation: “God so loved us that He gave His Son to be the object of our faith, thereby providing eternal life.” But what was Jesus really saying in the context of what we know as the third chapter of John’s Gospel?

This verse is appended to a conversation of Jesus with Nicodemus, a member of the Jewish ruling body known as the Sanhedrin. Presumably Nicodemus was a man who knew his Scriptures quite well. He certainly knew the story about Moses holding off one of God’s punishments of His impatient and grumbling people by raising a fiery serpent on a pole so that they might look on it and live. He was a bit perplexed about the business of being “born again;” but he was an honest and earnest inquirer, even if he did approach Jesus under the cover of darkness.

Ultimately Nicodemus was one of the very few persons still standing at the foot of the Cross when Jesus died, helping Joseph of Arimathea to prepare the body of Jesus for burial in his tomb. By then Nicodemus seems to have shed any reluctance to be openly identified with Jesus regardless of the cost. He would have had to learn what it means for a Christian to be an exile from his society, something few of us have been willing to risk in our day. We’re more prone to compromise and accommodation, things that render us invisible in a society that has essentially abandoned the way of the Cross. We’re actually doing rather little to stem the tide of secularization. But it may be time for us to view ourselves and Christians in general as exiled immigrants, as Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathea became in their day.

Our society is quick to celebrate diversity of every sort, being almost passionate about embracing other religions, other ideologies, other systems of government, other cultures, other practices associated with those cultures, alternative sexual identities and behaviors, just about anything that’s radically opposed to Biblical Christianity. Notice I did not say that our society merely accepts these alternatives, which might even be a Christian way to regard them. I said that our society “celebrates” them; it “embraces” them, it incorporates them into the very ways that they think and act. And that is decidedly antithetic to Biblical Christianity!

Back to John 3:16. What was it that caused the Israelites to go off the rails over and over, even at the cost of their becoming exiled immigrants, first in in Assyria, then in Babylonia and ultimately throughout the world? The answer is simple: syncretism, a repugnant inclination to integrate into their own faith and practices those of their pagan neighbors. And that’s precisely what we’re doing today as Christians. We do it under the guise of enlightened tolerance and cross-cultural enrichment. But what it really is, is a readiness to compromise our faith at every turn in the road until, in the end, our own faith no longer has very much in common with the steadfast faith of our spiritual fathers and mothers.

In the process we’ve hidden the light of Christ under a bushel because we’re too often embarrassed by our identification with Him. All sorts of other identities are acceptable and may be spoken of openly, even with approbation. But our identity as followers of Jesus Christ and the Holy Scriptures is best kept to ourselves, as it might be perceived as being extremist, fundamentalist, narrow-minded, judgmental, sexist, homophobic and isolationist. We fear those labels far more than we fear the compromise of our faith.

And what does God think? What should we think? One of the most mis-quoted and mis-applied verses in our day is not John 3:16 but the following verse, 3:17: “God sent not His Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world through Him might be saved.” I cannot tell you how many times in recent years I have heard evangelical Christians quote a few words from that verse and stop. They quote, “God sent not His Son into the world to condemn the world.” There they stop quoting and start adding non-Biblical words to the effect that since God did not condemn the world, neither should we. Yet all the subsequent verses in our passage go on to say exactly what it is about the world that God does in fact condemn! And the final verse in this chapter says, “He who believes in the Son has eternal life; but he who does not obey the Son shall not see life, but the wrath of God abides on him.” Note that faith is coupled with obedience!

How much of the Bible are we actually reading when we say our “enlightened” things? Can we really think that God tacitly condoned the ways of the world when, in sending His Son, He is thought not to have condemned them?

John 3:17 does not say that God did not condemn the world. It says, quite clearly, that God’s purpose in sending His Son was not for condemnation but for salvation. Salvation from what? Salvation from all those highly condemnable things about the world that cost the Son of God His very life. They were the same things that our society now celebrates, embraces, incorporates and accepts. They were the very things to which Paul said we have died when we were made alive in Christ Jesus.

We still cling to some of those things, especially the ones that are our personal favorites, somehow excusing ourselves because we believe we’re not saved by our good works nor are we condemned for our not-so-good ones. Is that really what we think Scripture teaches? On the contrary, Jesus said that “men loved the darkness rather than the Light, for their deeds were evil. But he who practices the truth comes to the Light, so that his deeds may be manifested as having been wrought in God.” Those are the deeds Paul had in mind, the “good works that God prepared beforehand so that we would walk in them.” How would our deeds stand up to exposure in God’s light?

What should it mean for us to be John 3:16 people? For starters, it means that we should put the verse back into its context. Then we’ll see that the lifting up of God’s only Son on the Cross for our salvation was so that we might fix our gaze on the crucified Christ, a very Lenten thing to do, and examine our lives in the light of His sacrifice. And having done that, we must move on to the following verses that inform us as to how that fixed gaze ought to change the way we live from day to day. When we do that, we discover again that both John 3 and Ephesians 2 are all about good works, works “prepared beforehand” for us by God Himself, deeds that “may be manifested as having been wrought in God.”

Here’s what I would like to ask you to do this morning: I would like to ask every one of you to take your page with today’s lectionary readings, fold it up and put it in your purse or pocket; then take it home with you and commit to a daily reading of these passages as one of your Lenten disciplines from now until the end of Holy Week. Read John 3:14-21 and Ephesians 2:1-10 once every day. Read and absorb the larger context.

Then spend some serious time doing the most important Lenten task of all: self-examination. It’s an exam you take with only one handbook, the Bible, and only one mentor, the Holy Spirit. It’s serious hard work. Measure your life against what Jesus and Paul are saying in these passages. Figure out whether you are trying to serve both God and earthly gain, something Jesus said was impossible. See what things from your former life you still might be trying to retain versus what things you are doing that might qualify as “good works that God prepared beforehand” and deeds that have “been wrought in God.” Remember the words of James, who wrote, “to one who knows the right thing to do and does not do it, to him it is sin” (4:17).

Pray about these things. Open yourself up to the promptings of the Holy Spirit. Remember that conscience itself is a gift from God, decidedly not our favorite gift, but one He’s given to every human being, Christian or not. Acknowledge that anything we do that offends our own conscience, even just a little bit, is defined by Scripture as sin. Remember Paul’s words: “everything that does not come from faith is sin” (Romans 14:27). See whether the faith you profess comes only from God’s Holy Word or whether you have allowed what our permissive society preaches to distort your faith.  

Self-examination is seldom fun. But not only is it the most important Lenten task of all, it also is the only one that reaps eternal rewards.

In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.

​May the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable in Your sight,
O Lord, my Rock and my Redeemer.  

In our epistle reading this morning, Paul told the Corinthians that his message to them was about the crucified Christ. He termed it “the word of the Cross,” a message that was then and is now “foolishness to those who are perishing; but to (those) who are being saved it is the power of God… and the wisdom of God.” He wrote to the Galatians, “God forbid that I should glory save in the Cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by whom the world is crucified to me, and I to the world” (6:14).

We worship the crucified One Who is “risen indeed,” as we will say throughout Eastertide in our Easter acclamation. But the Cross comes first, and it’s the crucified Christ that we preach and Whose symbol we bear. There is no Resurrection without the Cross and there is no redemption without it.

The Cross remains at the very center of our faith, whether we like it or not. Christianity without the Cross is heretically incomplete. We may have pure motives in trying to sanitize our faith and make it less repugnant to those who find our religion too bloody, too sacrificial, too costly, too frightening. But Christianity is indeed all of those things and much more. Anything less is no longer Christianity, even if it is made to seem more appealing and less “foolish,” to use Paul’s word.

We are followers of the Cross of Christ and the Christ of the Cross, and, as we heard last Sunday, Christ Himself told us that if we would come after Him we must first take up the Cross ourselves and follow Him; apart from that, He said, we are none of His. He bore the Cross for us, and we must bear the Cross if we are to participate in His sufferings and His redeeming grace.

Martin Luther wrote: "The Cross alone is our theology." According to Andrew Trotter in Baker's Evangelical Dictionary of Biblical Theology, “The importance of the Cross as a theological motif in the New Testament is impossible to overestimate.” Not only that, but Trotter adds, “the Cross is as central to living the Christian life as it is to entering into it.” Paul wrote to the Colossians (1:19-20) that “it was the Father’s good pleasure for all the fullness to dwell in (His Son), and, through Him to reconcile all things to Himself… making peace by the blood of his Cross.” God’s will to “reconcile all things” is part of a continuous, eternal divine plan that triumphs over sin, death, and Satan, while at the same time passes judgment on all of them. The Apostle John makes this clear when in Revelation 13:8 he refers to “the Lamb that was slain from the creation of the world.” As John Stott noted, “John is telling us nothing less than that from an eternity of the past to an eternity of the future, the center of the stage is occupied by the Lamb of God Who was slain” (The Cross of Christ, pp. 44, 45).

I want us to look briefly at the crosses that are before us today. I’m wearing two crosses: the one you see is a gift from Gayle, a simple but exceptionally beautiful one. Underneath it I’m wearing a Jerusalem cross from Dawn Margaret, one that belonged to Father Joel, her late husband, a priest in God’s one holy, catholic and apostolic Church, a cross that she purchased for him in Jerusalem.

Above our altar is a crucifix, one on which hangs our Savior’s lifeless body, sacrificed for us. Next to the altar is our processional cross, a very simple one, a gift from friends in the Bishop Butler Society in Rochester, NY. And on the altar rests a cross that was there for the first time last Sunday, a special sort of cross known as the “Budded Cross.”

The “Budded Cross” is reminiscent of Aaron’s rod that budded (Numbers 17:2,5,8). Later on Aaron’s rod was placed inside the Ark of the Covenant in the Holy of Holies along with some manna and the tablets of the Law given to Moses. It’s interesting that the oldest word in English for the Cross was “rood,” an Anglo-Saxon word meaning “rod.” The “Budded Cross” also reminds us of the Resurrection life that blooms from the Cross itself. The Holy Trinity is represented by the three buds in each of the 4 “arms” of the Cross. The “Budded Cross” also came to be called the “Apostles’ Cross” because there are 4 three-budded flowers making up a total of 12 buds.

At the center of the transept are the letters IHS, Greek capitals for the first three letters in the name of Jesus (ΙΗΣΟΥΣ, Iesous). In the Middle Ages this abbreviation came to replace the Chi-Rho symbol ⳩ (χριστός, Christos) that had become the dominant Christian symbol after the emperor Constantine converted to Christianity (c. 320).  

Perhaps you will see this cross differently now that you know its special meaning. It also sits on the altar itself as a constant reminder that here we meet with our risen Savior “Who yielded His life an atonement for sin, and opened the life-gate that all may go in.”

Why did Paul say that he wished to share in Christ’s sufferings, even to “fill them up?” (Col. 1:24). Clearly Paul did not skip the Cross and jump directly to the empty tomb to suggest that he worshiped only the resurrected Christ. Quite the contrary, Paul wrote to the Corinthians, “I determined to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ, and Him crucified” (1 Cor. 2:2). Paul worshiped the Christ Who died for him, Who died for us, Whose Cross becomes our cross.

And so Paul wrote that the Word of the Cross in itself is “the power of God and the wisdom of God.” God’s power was not displayed only in the Resurrection: it was displayed first in the Cross, the instrument of torture, the instrument of shame and pain, because it was to become the symbol of victory over sin and death. For, as the author of Hebrews wrote, “without the shedding of blood there is no remission of sin.”
We don’t naturally like blood. In fact, most of us dislike it. We want to ask why it could not have been otherwise, why God did not devise some other more aesthetically pleasing way to cover sin. Of course we can say that God, being God, could have come up with a more appealing and equally satisfactory Plan B. But He did not, and that’s all we need to know - all that any of us needs to know. Our faith begins with a Cross, the Cross of Jesus. And Paul was right: that very Cross “is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.”

A faith without the Cross is powerless. It’s powerless to save. Our very life is in the blood: it’s our life source, our life-stream. And in it lies the power of God to cleanse us from all sin, the sin that every one of us bears. It becomes for us the cleansing stream. And what did Jesus say? “Unless you eat My flesh and drink My blood, you have no part in Me.” That blood was shed at the Cross, not in the empty tomb.

Never make the mistake of believing that the empty tomb somehow eliminates the Cross from being the primary symbol of our faith. There can be no triumphant resurrection faith that does not first embrace the death of Christ on the Cross. Without the Cross there is no redemption, no remission, no atonement, no salvation. Ours is an Easter faith only because it is first of all a Good Friday faith. John Stott wrote, “the only authentic Jesus is the Jesus Who died on the Cross” (op. cit., p. 50).

Whether you prefer an empty Cross or a Crucifix with a Corpus* is among the hairsplitting diversions that keep separating us from each other and from the core of our faith. The Cross started out with a Body on it: the Body of the Son of God. It became empty after He died on it, and His lifeless Body was removed by the few believers who remained at the foot of the Cross. They laid it in the tomb of one Joseph of Arimathea, someone whose name was immortalized by this one act of compassionate love. Little did he know how short a time his tomb would be occupied by the body of Jesus.

The Resurrection proved the victory of the Cross, validated the Redemption that it provided, showed it to have been an oblation sufficient for the sins of the world, a sacrifice acceptable to a Holy God Whose justice required the Cross, the Cross of Christ in which we glory as it towers over the wrecks of time.

“Never shall the Cross forsake me. Lo! it glows with peace and joy.” Those are words from a hymn that was written nearly 200 years ago (1825) and, sadly, we have drifted far away from that very Biblical and very Pauline focus on the Cross as the foremost symbol of what it means to be a Christian, both in our salvation and in our sanctification as we strive to become more Christlike. Again, as Trotter wrote, “the Cross is as central to living the Christian life as it is to entering into it.”

In his book De Corona, written in 204, Tertullian tells how it was already a tradition for Christians to trace repeatedly on their foreheads the sign of the cross. He wrote, "At every forward step and movement, at every going in and out, when we put on our clothes and shoes, when we bathe, when we sit at table, when we light the lamps, sit on a couch or a seat, in all the ordinary actions of daily life, we trace the sign" of the Cross (De Corona, chapter 3). If the early Christians were so fastidious in identifying with their Savior, thereby sanctifying even the most mundane functions of daily life, we never should be reluctant to make the sign of the Cross when we’re gathered together in corporate worship.

Yes, Paul, that Word of the Cross is what we preach: Christ crucified (vs. 23). And if we have in our day a power shortage, if not a power outage, it may be traced back in large measure to our having abandoned the message of the Cross, the wisdom of the Cross and the power of the Cross. May that not be said of us, neither in an abstract theological sense nor, much less, in a daily practical sense. May we take our stand “beneath the Cross of Jesus” in the very “shadow of a mighty rock within a weary land.” “I take, O Cross, Thy shadow for my abiding place. I ask no other sunshine than the sunshine of His face. Content to let the world go by, to know no gain nor loss; my sinful self my only shame, my glory all: the Cross.”

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, Amen.