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Philippians 4:1 "Is It Alive?" A sermon by the Rev Roland Kubke February 28, 2010
2nd Sunday in Lent: Jeremiah 26:8-15; Philippians 3:17-4:1; Luke 13:31-35
Every year or so, as spring approaches, countless Canadians fumble through their junk drawers looking for vegetable seeds. They look for the seeds that they seem to have forgotten to plant year after year and wonder if they can't somehow use them this year for a change. The problem is that sometimes those seeds are really old. Very old seed may not sprout, and it is a shame to put all the work into planting them and to invest all the time into waiting for them to sprout only to have nothing come up. In our short growing season, you can run out of time if that happens. What is a person to do when confronted with a drawer full of seeds that are ready to receive their pensions? Well, instead of simply throwing those seeds out, or taking a risk in finding out the hard way if they are alive, there is a test you can do on them. You can put a few onto a damp paper towel and put that towel into a plastic bag. After a few days, if most of them have sprouted, then you know the packet of seeds is still good. That test is called a viability test and it's a handy test to assure you that you are not wasting your time sowing suspect seeds. Sometimes people wish that they had a similarly easy test when it comes to checking out what is happening in pulpits nowadays. In one church, a pastor will firmly and convincingly preach about the grave sinfulness of homosexual activity or of abortions, or casual sexual relationships, or gambling. In the church next door, another pastor will proclaim that these are not sins at all and are only choices. On it goes with one teaching after another, not just on social issues but also on some of the most basic doctrines of faith. In the end, honest, sincere Christians are often left totally confused. They wonder how they can know which teachings are right. They wonder, "How in the world can I stand firm in the Lord when Christian pulpits are pulling me in two directions at once?" Well, there is a viability test that Christians can use. There is a test that Christians can use that can give them a good idea about which teachings will lead to life. Paul gives us a clue about that test in our epistle lesson this morning. You see, Paul points us not to this life, but to the next. He reminds us, "Our citizenship is in heaven and we eagerly await a Saviour from there, the Lord, Jesus Christ." Paul reminds us that if our teachings show us Jesus as Saviour, then we will be able to stand firm in the face of those people who are the enemies of the cross of Christ. That is our viability test. Do the teachings we hear point us to Jesus and to what only He has done so that you might have eternal life? If they do, we can be sure those teachings are worth hearing them!
God has given us a viability test so that we can be sure we are hearing the teachings that will lead us to heaven. Yet, there is only one way that such a test will really work for us. It will only work if, through faith, our minds are on heavenly things, and not the things of this earth! Paul told the Philippians in our lesson this morning, that the enemies of the cross of Christ are like this: "Their god is their stomach and their glory is in their shame. Their mind is on earthly things." That point explains almost immediately why there can be such a difference between one pulpit and the next when it comes to doctrines or to social issues. Often, the issues is that people have their minds on an earthly understanding of freedom. If people and their pastors are interested in getting the most personal freedom that they can in this life, and not so interested in being closer to Jesus Christ, then that will show in their teachings. They will end up reading the Bible very permissively when it talks about sin. They will question if sin really exists. They will say that the clear Words of the Bible that speak against godless living no longer apply today to all people. They will question the truth of God's Word and say that the Bible cannot be entirely trusted. They will try to read the Bible in such a way that they can feel good about it no matter how worldly these people are. They will talk a great deal about "love" and "peace" and they will claim that "love" is the only trustworthy way to interpret the Bible! The sad fact is that not everybody believes that the Bible is fully the Word of God. Not everybody will accept God's Word as God's Word stands. Not everybody is willing to let the Bible have the last word on a number of important issues. The root cause of this is that they cherish their sense of personal freedom. The demand the freedom to let their own opinion be the last word and the best word on anything. Their minds are on earthly things and they are so much preoccupied with things down here that they can't imagine that God might not agree with them! If people are not willing to have their minds on heavenly things, then there is no way that they will recognize those heavenly things when they see them! In fact, if their minds are on earthly things, they will come to resent the truth when they hear it! Instead of receiving God’s Word with humility or even with joy, they will receive it with anger and even hatred and contempt. You can see that in the example of our Old Testament lesson this morning. The prophet Jeremiah was in a great deal of trouble with the people. He was in trouble with them because he told them things that they did not want to hear. By Jeremiah's day, the people of Judah were pretty comfortable in their religion. They had found a way to do essentially what they pleased in life with the blessings of their priests. The people had found prophets who told them what they wanted to hear. These false prophets told them that all the gods were really just the one God, and the people merrily bowed down to the idols that represented wealth and fertility and sexual freedom. The false prophets proclaimed that God's purpose in our world is only to bring peace, and they assured the people they would have that peace in any case. The people loved that kind of freedom. They loved those kinds of words. They loved having prophets who would give them religious support for their own sinful attitudes. By the same token, they hated hearing prophets who told them otherwise. Jeremiah was the prophet they hated the most. He was hated by the majority of the people because he refused to go along with what the people wanted him to say. Instead, Jeremiah told the people what God's Word really says, "I am against those prophets who wag their own tongues and yet say,'The Lord declares'." Jeremiah reminded the people that nobody is going to be saved if clergyman think they can rearrange God's Word to fit more easily into our lives and our times. In fact, we are the ones that must be rearranged to conform to God's Word; it doesn’t work the other way around.! Jeremiah told the people, "God says, 'If you do not listen to Me and follow My law which I have set before you and do not listen to the words of My servants and prophets...then I will make you an object of cursing throughout the earth." It is at this point that our Old Testament lesson comes in and we see how the people responded. They wanted to kill Jeremiah. They wanted to get rid of him because he had told them the most terrible words they could ever hear: "Reform your ways and your actions and obey the Lord your God." A person would really wonder what kind of success Jeremiah would have had in Canada today with a message like that! He would be told here even by some sincere conservative Christians not to preach about things that are controversial, even if everyone agrees those teachings are clear and true. “Why risk offending someone, they say, if you don’t have to?” He would be told here that it is rude to preach in such a way that this is the only truth in a “thus says the Lord” kind of way. He would be encouraged in many churches to always say things like, “This is what I personally believe” or “I invite you to consider this opinion.” Instead of saying, “The Bible teaches...” He would be challenged by people who would essentially say, “What makes you think that you’ve got all the answers.” as if the Bible were not clear enough in its basic teachings for us to be confident that we indeed have the most important answers right there in God’s Word. He would be told by people, “We understand what you are trying to say, but we don’t like how you are saying it. Go ahead and confront us with God’s Word, but do it in such a way that we don’t feel confronted!” At the very start of Jeremiah’s ministry, God told the prophet that he had to stand firm on God’s Word. God said to him, “You must go to everyone I send you and say whatever I command you. Do not be afraid of them, for I am with you and I will rescue you.” (Jeremiah 1:7-8) God made it very clear that anyone who speaks God’s Word with courage is going to find people pushing back. He made it clear that there would be extreme pressure from people to tone things down a great deal. He promised Jeremiah, though, “They will fight against you, but will not overcome you, for I am with you and will rescue you.” (Jeremiah 1:19) In the end, you can't judge the truth about a church's teachings by how popular those teachings are among the people. You can't judge the success of a congregation just by the numbers of people who crowd into a building or how influential that congregation is in the community. The only objective way to judge the teaching of a congregation is to see how closely that teaching follows the clear words of the Bible. The only honest way to judge the success of a congregation is to see how eagerly the people desire to hear both the law and the Gospel. The only clear way to judge the vitality of a congregation is to see how willingly the people obey God's Word and put their faith into practise and how faithfully they handle Baptism and the Lord’s Supper. You see, it is these things, God’s means of grace, that are the closest we come to handling the heavenly things of God. They are the closest we get to being touched together by heaven itself as we live on this earth. Sure, we feel that touch of heaven at times when a warm feeling wells up in us or we are overcome with love for God, but we receive that touch of heaven only through God’s means of grace. Those things: God’s Word, the Lord’s Supper and Baptism are the things that Jesus Himself brings the Holy Spirit upon us. We must understand that and appreciate that if we are ever going to have any appreciation of heaven itself. God desires that we remember the heavenly things. He wants us to remember that no matter what kind of blessings we have through faith in this life now, our citizenship is in heaven and we eagerly await our Saviour from there. You can judge the truth of a church's teachings by how faithfully those heavenly things are taught and by how clearly our Saviour is revealed, not by how happy the people are with what they have just heard! If we look at things from the popularity viewpoint, Jesus had some terrible failures! When Jesus told the people that He had come to fulfill the promises of the Old Testament, they became angry and kicked Him out of the synagogue. When Jesus told the people that He is and will always be the only Saviour, most of the people quietly left the room. When Jesus told the people that being a Christian means doing things very differently from the way that the world does them, the people did not want to understand. When Jesus told the people that being born again means giving your old life away as the first response after the Holy Spirit has brought you into a new life and a new way of thinking, many of His own followers deserted Him! When Jesus told them that believers would be rejected by the same people who reject Jesus Christ, many of these people simply joined the ranks of those who reject our Lord. In the end, Jesus was told to stop. He was told to leave. He was even threatened with death for insisting He is our Saviour. He was not wanted by the majority of the people who heard Him! Jesus was not wanted by the majority, but that did not stop Him from being available to those people who truly believed. That did not stop Him from being willing to accept all those people who realized that they were indeed like lost and aimless sheep. Our Lord's lack of popularity did not cause Jesus to change His message or His methods. He pressed on toward the goal that God Himself had set. He told the Pharisees in our Gospel lesson this morning, "I will drive out demons and heal people today and tomorrow, and on the third day I will reach My goal." He told them He would simply keep on doing what God called Him to do. He would keep on ministering and caring and loving and showing compassion even in the face of hardship. He would keep on doing that work that would earn us our salvation and He would accept those who repent so that they could share in those benefits. Jesus reached His goal. He reached His goal to stand firm, even when the last thing in the world He wanted from His human perspective was to be brutally tortured and despised and rejected and killed. Jesus reached His goal to stare down those sins that keep pulling you back into this world. He reached His goal to overcome your own sinful thinking and sinful ways. He reached the goal to shed that blood that simply had to be shed on your behalf so that you could be washed clean to stand in the glory of heaven. He reached His goal to turn you away from this world and keep you looking at Him and your own place as a child of God. There is far more waiting for you in heaven than you even begin to imagine. There is a depth to God’s love and His grace and His joy over you, who have been forgiven through Jesus Christ that you cannot even begin to understand. We do have God’s promise, though, repeated in our lesson today, that the day will come when He transforms our lowly bodies so that they will be like His glorious body. They day will come when we will have the capacity to understand God’s Will entirely and agree with God’s Will completely and rejoice with God as fully as it is possible to rejoice. This will be ours by the very power of God that already enables Jesus to bring everything under His control. In the meantime, you, as a child of God, have the privilege of living your life with the glimpses of heaven that come upon you as you hear God’s Word and experience His grace in the Sacraments. In the meantime, you have the gift of a hope that allows you the chance to see life in ways that can bring joy even when others over overcome with despair. You have the gift of being able to do all the right things for all the right reasons, out of thanksgiving and praise to God. You have the assurance that brings a meaning to life like no other assurance can. Your citizenship is indeed in heaven. Even as you live life to the fullest in obedience to God’s Word and in service to our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, you can eagerly await that day when you are in heaven. Even as you enjoy the blessings of this world, you know that there are even greater, more perfect blessings to come. What a wonderful way to stand firm in the Lord when you know that God’s own promises are firm for the sake of Jesus Christ! You can tell that a seed is still alive if you put it in a warm place on a damp piece of paper, giving it the right conditions to sprout. You know that your own faith is alive when you make sure to keep it in a place where the conditions are just right. Those right conditions are that place where you eagerly hear God’s Word and receive His sacraments and be uplifted by His grace. Those right conditions are the place where you rely not on your own feelings or your own opinions or your own experiences, but on what God Himself offers you. Those the conditions that set things in such a balance that you remember your citizenship in heaven even as the Holy Spirit blesses you to deal with the challenges and the disappointments and the opportunities and the joys that exist for you on this earth. Jesus kept His mind on the heavenly things so that you could appreciate God's ways. He used God's power to bring everything under His control and now He uses that same power to keep you true to His Word. He does this for you. He does this for you so that you could believe and you could care about those heavenly things and recognize God's truth when you hear it! May He bless you so that you truly care for, appreciate, and support the timeless truth of God's Word! Amen. |
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