"Reflections on the Book of Ecclesiastes"

(February 11, 2020)

Photos taken along the Columbia River
Near Mattawa/Desert Aire WA
February 2020

“Vanity of vanities, says the Preacher, vanity of vanities! All is vanity…. There is nothing for a man than that he should eat and drink and find enjoyment in his toil. This also, I saw, is from the hand of God; for apart from him who can eat or who can have enjoyment? For the man who pleases him, God gives wisdom and knowledge and joy; but to the sinner he gives the work of gathering and heaping, only to give to one who pleases God. This also is vanity and a striving after wind.” (Ecclesiastes 1:2; 2:24-26)

Let us simply go. Go forth and live; in the sheer wonder that there is nothing for us, in this life under the sun, except for God to lovingly give his gifts to us; or for God to lovingly give to others through us.

Through the power of God, offering himself in Jesus on the cross, carrying the sins, and the evils, and all the striving emptiness of this world, dying and rising from the dead, we are claimed by God to be God’s beloved ones. As God’s beloveds, we are “given to”; or, as sinners, we are “given through”; through God’s power in Jesus. 

Otherwise, what is there in life for us to hold onto? What is there to call our own?

Holding on and calling anything our own are vanity, emptiness, and worthlessness in comparison with being either given to, or given through.

The whole duty of human life is to live what human life is created for, under the care of Almighty God.

All of human life (the life of the whole of humanity) is the essence of living in the fear of God. This means that our life is always full of the apprehension of a strange and blinding beauty; and of a completely undeserved, untamable, and uncompromising majesty.

The whole of human life (the essence of life for the whole of humanity) is found in our genuine experience of the ways of God, in fellowship with God: given to us so as to become the laws of our own hearts. The law for life is the intimacy of knowing God from the inside of his own heart. In Christ, the law of God’s life becomes the law of our lives.

“The end of the matter; all has been heard. Fear God, and keep his commandments; for this is the whole duty of man. For God will bring every deed into judgement, with every secret thing, whether evil or good.” (Ecclesiastes 12:13-14)

It is the determined will and judgement of God, for his children and for his sinners, that God will allow nothing else for us but this. God will certainly preside (over our lives, and over everything in creation, for all time) to protect us from everything that does not bring this life to us. Everything else (in this world under the sun) will be refused, and taken from us. Anything else, and everything less than this, would be nothing but worthless: an empty vapor, dust, vanity, no life at all. God will give us nothing less than what is truly life.

Passionate Jesus - Rip the Veil and See

Preached on Good Friday, March 30, 2018

Scripture readings: Mark 15:21-40

I don’t know where all the pictures in my head have come from that show me the stories of Jesus. I’ve got these pictures in my head. Some of them are moving, talking pictures of the crucifixion.

Some Stations of the Cross
Our Lady of the Desert Parish
Mattawa, WA
Spring, 2017

I see Jesus struggling to breathe, and he raises himself up on the nails in order to take each and every breath. In the end, he’s trembling when he lifts himself to take his final breath. He shouts a loud shout, and I think he says, “It is finished.” Finished means that he has accomplished what he came for.

Then the earth shakes and cracks open in places. The rocking of the world moves the Temple, perched high on its terrace on what they used to call Mount Moriah.

This shaking does something spiritual and miraculous. By the hand of God, the curtain or veil that covers the entrance to the Holy of Holies is ripped open from top to bottom. The Holy of Holies, in Jesus’ time, was an empty room where God concentrated his presence and his attention.

Centurion means the commander of somewhere from eighty to one hundred men in the Roman army. Because it was supposed to have a hundred men, a centurion’s unit was called a century. That would make him the equivalent of something like the captain, or the major, of a company in the United States Army or Marine Corps.

Maybe there wasn’t a whole company or century of soldiers at the cross. Maybe the centurion brought some smaller detail to do the job of the crucifying and guarding of the convicts. But Jesus was a kind of security risk to the province and to the Temple. They were on alert because of Jesus.

I was surprised, this year, comparing the four gospels. I found that it wasn’t only the centurion who came to a strange, miraculous conclusion about Jesus. Matthew says that the whole detail was shaken from their mission and from their dice game.

In just a moment, they took it all in. They found themselves saying a bunch of stuff at the sound of the shout and the earthquake. Probably the whole scene came through for them, along with the uncanny darkness of the sky. What they had heard and seen of Jesus, how he conducted himself, and how the crowd (and how nature itself) responded to his execution.

Together, the detail became a military jury rendering their verdict: “This was an innocent man. This was a righteous man. Surely, this was the Son of God.”

Something grabbed them and changed them. They had done many, many crucifixions in this rebellious province. They weren’t overwhelmed by the cruel and boring detail of crucifying criminals. Jesus made this long, tedious day different.

With a body that was beaten and torn into a bloody pulp, Jesus heaved himself up on the cross to take his final breath. With that breath Jesus bellowed, and dropped, and hung still as the corpse that he was, upon the nails of the cross.

His shout seemed to shake everything. The earth itself shook, and the people steadied themselves upon it, but their hearts shook as well.

The Temple Mount and its sanctuary shook. Its marble walls seemed, almost, to pull apart and snap shut again, but the parting tore in two the veil that hid the holiest place from view. A shaken witness reported that he had seen the veil tear from top to bottom as if it were the work of some invisible giant.

The inner room of the presence of God could be clearly seen, even by those who, in spite of the shaking earth, stood outside the Temple and looked through the line of now completely opened doors. “Look! There’s the room of God!”

The shouting and drooping Jesus was the wounded and bloody hand of God himself, shaking whatever was capable of being shaken. The bloody hand of God tore the veil from the forbidden door.

That same hand also tore the veil that hangs over the place, in human souls, where our hearts go to hide: where we hide our hearts in order to avoid knowing ourselves too well.

Just now, we may not know where our own hearts are, or what they’re hiding, until that wounded, bloody hand of God in Jesus shakes us as it shook the Roman soldiers and officers.

That wounded hand (or maybe it would be better to call it the wounded heart of God) has a special power to shake things up. It has the power to shake and to carry the sins of the world.

That power can shake the whole planet. Its wounds carry the authority of a proven faithfulness (faithful to death) to judge the whole planet; the whole universe; and each and every one of us.

When we meet that hand and heart we meet his carrying that same authority of long ago. We find ourselves shaken, and carried, and judged, and changed.

Through their army life, the centurion and his soldiers understood power and authority. They understood coming into an order of command, and training, and discipline. They understood being changed by that into something they had not been before.

That’s what I wanted to happen to me, at one time, when, late in 1968, I considered enlisting in the armed forces. Then I told my parents what I had decided, and they freaked.

They freaked out big time. They wore me down for days, till I gave up my plan.

I thought it might have made me a new man. In the end, Jesus did that in his own way. He changed me. But it was with the power of that bloody hand and heart. I couldn’t resist that when he grabbed me and held me in his grip.

I think the centurion and his detail became the first converts to Jesus after his death. That would make sense to me. They found out who Jesus is by crucifying him themselves.

Jesus, himself, changed before their eyes into someone they could never have imagined, even though they had crucified so many people before. They became changed because they saw their whole lives, up to that point, in a completely different light, once they recognized what it meant for them to have crucified Jesus (just as we all have). They knew what it meant that Jesus had died because of them (just as he has died because of each one of us). Their understanding of the whole world changed because they now saw how Rome, and its famous laws and Roman peace, that claimed to shape the world for good had been the enemy of the kingdom of God.

The mighty Roman Empire called their Emperor the Son of God, and yet Rome had killed Jesus the true Son of God. These soldiers knew this.

The soldiers would change how they would see themselves from now on. Their real life would change from representing the power of war and military security to serving Jesus the Prince and Servant of Peace, even if they still wore the uniform of Rome. Their true aim in life would turn them into servants of peace.

We all change like that down to our heart and core. We all change like that, down to every detail, when the sacrifice made for us by that wounded, bloody hand and heart have grabbed us and shaken us.

Now we see God and his Son with the eyes of faith. We recognize who God and his Son are, and what they want for us, and what they give to us. We will all be changed. In God’s time everything will change.

Reformation - Martin Luther's Last Sermon

Sermon used by Dennis Evans on Sunday, October 15, 2017, in preparation for the 500th anniversary of Reformation Day, under the title: “Reformation – Martin Luther’s Last Sermon; February 15, 1546”

AN EDITED, ABRIDGED, AND PARAPHRASED VERSION OF A SERMON BY

MARTIN LUTHER:

The Last Sermon, Preached in Eisleben,

Matt. 11:25–30, February 15, 1546

On the Saturday following the preceding sermon Luther set out for Mansfeld to mediate a dispute between Count Albert and Count Gebhard. Most likely his last sermon was preached on Monday, February 15, not on February 14, to a large crowd which gathered from all over the countryside to hear him. On the day afterward, while confined to his bed, he signed the treaty between the brothers, on the eighteenth he died, and on the twenty-second his body was buried in Wittenberg. The last four sermons, preached in Eisleben, were published in Wittenberg, 1546. Who the transcriber was cannot be determined.

Original Text in German; WA 51, 187–194.

(MY NOTE: The additions or changes within the brackets, in this edited version, are mine, except for “Predigtampf”.)

This is a fine Gospel and it has a lot in it. Let us talk about part of it now, covering as much as we can and as God gives us grace.

Walking around Crab Creek, Mattawa/Desert Aire, WA
September 2017

The Lord here praises and extols his heavenly Father for having hidden these things from the wise and understanding. That is, he did not make his gospel known to the wise and understanding, but to infants and children who cannot speak and preach and are not knowing and wise.

Thus, he indicates that he is opposed to the wise and understanding. He dearly loves those who are not wise and understanding, but are rather like young children.

…To the world this is very foolish and offensive, that God should be opposed to the wise and condemn them, when, after all, we have the idea that God could not reign if he did not have wise and understanding people to help him. But the meaning of the saying is this: the wise and understanding in the world so contrive things that God cannot be favorable and good to them.

 [They think they know better,] for they are always exerting themselves. They do things in the Christian church the way they want to, themselves. Everything that God does they must improve, so that there is no poorer, more insignificant and despised disciple on earth than God. God must be everybody’s pupil, everybody wants to be his teacher and preceptor.

…They cannot let things be as they were ordained to be. They think they have to do something too, in order that they may be a bit better than other people and be able to boast: “[Here] is what I have done; what God has done is too poor and insignificant, even childish and foolish; I must add something to it.”

This is the nature of the shameful wisdom of the world, especially in the Christian church. One bishop and one pastor hacks and snaps at another, and one obstructs and shoves the other. We have seen this at all times in the government of the church to its great detriment.

These are the real wiseacres, of whom Christ is speaking here, who put the cart before the horse and will not stay on the road which God himself has shown us, but always have to have and do something special in order that the people may say: “Ah, our pastor or preacher is nothing. There’s the real man, he’ll get things done!”

But is this behavior not a disgusting thing, and should not God grow impatient with it? Should he be so greatly pleased with these fellows who are all too smart and wise for him, and are always wanting to send him back to school? As it says [in the parallel in Luke]: “Wisdom must be justified by her own children” (Luke 7:35

Things are in a fine state, indeed, when the egg wants to be wiser than the hen. A fine governance it must be when the children want to rule their father and mother, and the fools and simpletons [rule] the wise people. You see, this is the reason why the wise and understanding are condemned everywhere in the Scriptures.

The pope has also done the same thing. For example, when Christ established and instituted the ministry [Predigtamt] and the sacrament of his body and blood in order that Christians should use it to strengthen and fortify their faith, the pope cried: “No, that’s not the way it should be; it must be wisely handled!” For the pope’s decree says that, when the priest reads the mass for the living or the dead it must be a sacrifice [that purchases a product].

For example, when a merchant is about to go on a journey, he should first have a mass read for him, and then it will turn out fortunately for him.

…So it is, with our Lord God in the world; whatever he institutes and ordains must always be not only perverted but also reviled and discredited by the devil and his followers. And then the world even thinks that God should be pleased and look with approval upon the fact that every fool wants to master and rule him.

In worldly affairs and government, the same thing happens, as Aristotle too has written. A few people are often endowed with great wisdom and understanding, unlike ordinary people. Often God gives us a fine, noble, intelligent man, who could serve principalities and people with wisdom and counsel. But such persons flee from the business of government, and it is hard to bring them to govern.

On the other hand, however, there are others who want to be and to do it, but they have no ability. [And yet, they do it anyway.] In worldly government, these are [the] jackanapes and wiseacres. These fellows [get it all wrong] and we are quite rightly hostile to them. Everybody mourns the fact that we can never be safe from these fools. They are good for nothing and they do nothing but put flies in the ointment.

That’s why the people say of them: The devil has slobbered us with fools.¹ And Aristotle,² who observed in governments that few people are properly qualified to govern, makes a distinction between the truly wise and understanding and others whom he calls… the wise who only think they are wise and understanding; just as we say in German: “Conceit keeps the dance going.”

They imagine that because they are in the government and are higher-ups they must surely be wise. And one such fool in counsel hinders the others from getting on with anything at all; for he wants to be wise by force, in the devil’s name, and still he is a fool.

Now, if in worldly affairs one is quite rightly opposed to these people who want to be wise and are not. [It’s much worse with those], whom both God and men rightly dislike, who want to be wise in the holy Christian church and are not. For these people hinder the ministry, so that the people cannot come to God….

…So, the pope, too, wants to be a very wise man, indeed, the wisest of the wise, simply because he has a high position and claims to be the head of the church; whereupon the devil so puffs him up that he imagines that whatever he says and does is pure divine wisdom and everybody must accept and obey it, and nobody should ask whether it is God’s Word or not. In his big fool’s book,⁴ he presumes quite shamelessly to say that it is not likely that such an eminence, meaning himself, could err. So, too, the emperor, kings, and cardinals; because they sit in such high places, they too think they cannot err or be wrong….

…It sounds almost as if, when Christ spoke these words: “I thank thee, Father, Lord of heaven,” etc. (Matt. 11:25), they were spoken with ill will. And yet there was no ill will or hatred in his heart; for, since he gave himself, body and life, for us, how could there be any ill will there?

…His annoyance and displeasure comes from the fact that these miserable, foolish people presume to become masters of the divine Majesty. This he cannot and should not tolerate, and all devout hearts thank him for it, for otherwise there would be no end to this affected wisdom and mastery.…

…Here we ought to say: “Dear heavenly Father, speak thou, I am willing to be a fool and a child and be silent; for if I were to rule with my own understanding, wisdom, and reason, the cart would long since have been stuck in the mire and the ship would long since have been wrecked. Therefore, dear God, do thou rule and guide it thyself; I will gladly put out my eyes, and my reason besides, and let thee alone rule through thy Word.”

…Likewise, the hearers also should say: “I do not believe in my pastor, but he tells me of another Lord, whose name is Christ; him he shows to me; I will listen to him, in so far as he leads me to the true Teacher and Master, God’s Son.”

Then things would be right in the church and it would be well governed, and there would be harmony all around. Otherwise there will be the same displeasure as there is in secular government….

…Therefore, this is what we say: “I grant that emperor, pope, cardinals, princes, and nobles are wise and understanding, but I shall believe in Christ; he is my Lord, he is the one God bids me to listen to, from him he bids me to learn what real, divine wisdom and understanding is.”

…The Lord says: “All things have been delivered to me by my Father” (Matt. 11:25)….

…The Lord, who is the only one we ought to hear in these matters, says: “No one knows the Father except the Son and any one to whom the Son chooses to reveal him” (Matt. 11:27). [That means] to the childlike and simple, who consider themselves neither wise nor understanding, but rather hear and accept his Word. So, if it is his Word you hold up to me and command, I shall gladly accept it, even though it be spoken by a little child, or even the ass [or donkey] that spoke to Balaam (Num. 22:21–30)….

…Our wisdom and understanding in divine things is the eye which the devil opened for us in paradise, when Adam and Eve, too, wanted to be wise in the devil’s name. God himself taught them and gave them his Word, which they were to adhere to, if they wanted to be really wise. Then came the devil and made improvements; he closed the eyes with which they had previously seen God and not seen the devil. This is the plague which still continues to cling to us—that we want to be wise and understanding in the devil’s name.

But to combat this we must learn what this means: “All things have been delivered to me.” In other words: [Jesus] must rule, teach, counsel, give orders, and command in [his] church. And when he said that, Christ openly confessed that he is true God; for no angel nor any other creature can say that all things have been delivered to him.

It is true that the devil once tried to seat himself on the throne and be like God; but he was soon flung out of heaven for it. Therefore, Christ says, “All things have been delivered to me,” that is, “to me, to me, you must be obedient. If you have my Word, then stick to it, and pay no attention to anybody who teaches and commands you differently. I will rule, protect, and save you well.”

…God has set his Son at his right hand and said in Psalm 2:7, “You are my son”; I have made the whole world and all nations your possession; hear him, you kings and lords, if you would be wise; do homage to [Jesus] as your Lord; and know that what he says to you I am saying to you.

This we Christians should learn and acknowledge, even though the world does not want to do it. We should be grateful to God that he has so richly blessed us and granted that we ourselves are able to hear him, just as Christ himself here gives joyful thanks to his heavenly Father.

In times past, we would have run to the ends of the world if we had known of a place where we could have heard God speak. But now…. Father and mother and children sing and speak of [Him]. The preacher speaks of [him] in the parish church—you ought to lift up your hands and rejoice that we have been given the honor of hearing God speaking to us through his Word.

“Oh”, people say, “what is that? After all, there is preaching every day, often many times every day, so that we soon grow weary of it. What do we get out of it?”

All right, go ahead, dear brother, if you don’t want God to speak to you every day at home in your house, and in your parish church, then be wise and look [somewhere] else. [Go on pilgrimages to look at the relics.] In Trier is our Lord God’s coat, in Aachen are Joseph’s pants and our blessed Lady’s chemise.

Go there and squander your money. Buy indulgences and the pope’s secondhand junk. These are valuable things! You have to go far for these things and spend a lot of money….

…[No, instead] we should listen to God’s Word, which tells us that he is our schoolmaster, and have nothing to do with Joseph’s pants….

This is the first point in this Gospel—that Christ and God the Father, himself, are opposed to the wise and understanding….

…When, therefore, the great lords, the emperor, pope, cardinals, and bishops are hostile and wrathful toward us because of all this, excommunicate us, and would gladly burn and murder us all, we must suffer it and say: “We did not start this on account of the pope, the bishops, and the princes, nor shall we stop it on account of them.” Christ says, “Come to me, all who labor and are heavy-laden” [Matt. 11:28],

…It is as though he were saying: “Just stick to me, hold on to my Word and let everything else go. If you are burned and beheaded for it, then have patience, I will make it so sweet for you that you easily would be able to bear it.”

It has… been written of St. Agnes⁵ that when she was led to prison to be killed, it was to her as if she were going to a dance. Where did she get this? Ah, only from this Christ, from believing this saying, “Come to me, all who labor and are heavy-laden, and I will give you rest.” That is to say: “If things go badly, I will give you the courage even to laugh about it; and if even though you walk on fiery coals, the torment shall nevertheless not be so severe and the devil shall nevertheless not be so bad, and you will rather feel that you are walking on roses.⁶ I will give you the heart to laugh even though Turk, pope, emperor, and everybody else be filled with horrible wrath and rage. Only come to me; and if you are facing oppression, death, or torture, because the pope, the Turk, and emperor are attacking you, do not be afraid; it will not be heavy for you, but light and easy to bear, for I give you the Spirit, so that the burden, which for the world would be unbearable, becomes for you a light burden. For when you suffer for my sake, it is my yoke and my burden, which I lay upon you in grace, that you may know that this your suffering is well pleasing to God and to me and that I myself am helping you to carry it and giving you power and strength to do so.”

So also say Psalm 31 (:24) and Psalm 27 (:14): “Let your heart take courage, all you who wait for the Lord,” i.e., all you who suffer for his sake.

Let misfortune, sin, death, and whatever the devil and the world loads upon you assail and assault you, if only you remain confident and undismayed, waiting upon the Lord in faith, you have already won, you have already escaped death and far surpassed the devil and the world.

Lo, this means that the wise of this world are rejected, that we may learn not to think ourselves wise and to put away from our eyes all great personages, indeed, to shut our eyes altogether, and cling only to Christ’s Word and come to him, as he so lovingly invites us to do, and say: “Thou alone art my beloved Lord and Master, I am thy disciple.”

This and much more might be said concerning this Gospel, but I am too weak and we shall let it go at that.^[1]

---

WA D. Martin Luthers Werke. Kritische Gesamtausgabe (Weimar, 1883– ).

¹ Hat uns der Teufel mit Narren beschiessen.

² Luther may have had in mind Aristotle’s reference to epistēmē and doxa in Nichomachean Ethics, VI, 10; cf. WA 51, Nachträge und Berichtigungen.

⁴ I.e., the papal decretals, part of the Corpus Iuris Canonici.

⁵ St. Agnes who died ca. 304 is commemorated in the Roman church on January 21 and 28.

⁶ The allusion is to St. Vincentius, early Christian martyr who was laid on fiery coals, etc.

^[1]Luther, Martin: Pelikan, Jaroslav Jan (Hrsg.) ; Oswald, Hilton C. (Hrsg.) ; Lehmann, Helmut T. (Hrsg.): Luther's Works, Vol. 51 : Sermons I. Philadelphia : Fortress Press, 1999, c1959 (Luther's Works 51), S. 51:383 (Edited 2017 by Dennis Evans for use in his pulpit to celebrate the 500^th anniversary of the Reformation.)

Reformation - Faith Alone from God Alone

Preached on Sunday, October 8, 2017

Scripture reading: Rom. 3:21-26; Luke 18:9-14

A man was on his way home from work, and he stopped at a florist’s shop. He went to the roses, and picked up a dozen of them, and he took them to the clerk at the cash register. She asked him, “Are these for your wife, Sir?”  “Yes, they are!” “For her birthday?”  “Nope.” “For your anniversary?” “Nope!” And as he headed for the door, she called after him, “I hope she forgives you!” (Reader’s Digest, Jan. 96, p. 59)

Walks around home and Crab Creek
Mattawa/Desert Aire, WA
August-September 2017

The word forgiveness is not in the verses we have read. But there is the issue of how we can stand before God when we have gone wrong: and we have all gone wrong.

Perhaps most people in our society would just smile, if we bring this up, and say that we shouldn’t worry our little heads about this. They have learned some famous words from the New Testament, and they will say that, “God is Love” (1 John 4:8), and they know that, since God is love, that God will smooth over any and all difficulties, and they don’t have to do anything.

We can answer back and say, “Yes, you are right. God has done something to give us peace and confidence in the way we share our life with God. “For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and are justified (set right) freely, by his grace, (his beautiful, undeserved love) through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus.”  (Romans 3:23-24)

And they might say, “Whoa now! Don’t bring up this sin stuff. I’m not a sinner. And why would Jesus have to die for me, I’m not that bad. I haven’t killed anybody.” (You know, some people have really given me the fact that they haven’t killed anybody as proof that they’re not sinners.) They probably mean: “What I have done doesn’t matter that much to God.” 

Later, I’m going to tell you a little bit more about the meaning of the word sin. For now, in Paul’s common Greek (hamartia), it was a word from the sport of archery. Sin is a kind of missing the mark, missing the bull’s eye. It’s overshooting, undershooting, missing off to the left, missing off to the right.

I have known only two people in my life who were not sinners.

One was a guy who lived in the town where I served my first church. I can see his face, but I can’t remember his name. Let’s call him Bob. I knew Bob for five years through the Lions Club. I had gone over to him and his wife’s house for a visit, and I must have been talking about why Christ came and died.

When they know you’re a pastor, people talk about themselves and God. They bring this up even when they don’t believe in anything at all. I guess they think they’re supposed to.

Anyway, all of a sudden, Bob said, “I’m not a sinner!” And I said, “Well, we’re all sinners. We all go wrong!” And Bob said, “You might be a sinner, but I’m not.” 

I never called him a sinner, in the first place, but he got really steamed about it. Now it so happens that, even if Bob wasn’t a sinner, he was still a stubborn, egotistical, hard-nosed, hard-drinking, loud-mouthed, foul-mouthed, belligerent man, and, if you disagreed with him, he would tell you that you were just plain stupid. Aside from that, I really liked the guy. He was a lot of fun, but I was glad I never had to spend more than an hour or two at a time with him.

The other person who wasn’t a sinner, was a woman named Orleana. She never told me this about herself, because she clearly believed that she was a sinner. But, once, I was visiting her husband Ken when she wasn’t around, and he was the one who told me that she wasn’t a sinner. 

We were talking about Jesus on the cross, and about Jesus rising from the dead, and we were talking about heaven, because Ken was dying of cancer, and Orleana had told me that Ken had never really committed his life to Christ. She was concerned about this.

I told Ken, “Orleana believes this.”  And Ken said, “My wife is not a sinner. She’s a wonderful woman. She couldn’t be any better, and I wouldn’t want her to be any different. I don’t know why she has to go and believe that she’s a sinner.”

Ken believed that Orleana’s faith had burdened her with an attitude of unworthiness, or a guilt, that she didn’t deserve. What could such a sweet woman ever do to feel that she needed to be forgiven?

I had to admit that even her faults were endearing. This was simply true. Ken was right about that. I wasn’t sure what to say about his idea that she would be better off, emotionally, if she didn’t accept what the Bible teaches about sin and human nature. 

I can’t remember how that conversation ended, except I told Ken that Orleana’s faith was the very thing that had made her the woman he loved. I never saw an unhealthy guilt in Orleana. I only saw a woman with great love, patience, gentleness, generosity, and strength, and faith.

Orleana had a tender conscience because she had a sense of the Lord’s glory. She had a powerful sense of the Lord’s holiness and perfection. Glory, holiness, and perfection can seem frightening or, at least, off-putting. Well, when certain people seem to be full of their own glory, holiness, and perfection they are definitely off-putting.

If we meet God, as he truly is, we find that his glory, holiness, and perfection all work hand in hand with his love. Perhaps the power of God’s love takes God’s glory, and holiness, and perfection by the hand and makes them beautiful, and desirable, and powerful in their ability to humble us and (surprisingly) to make humility absolutely beautiful and desirable to us. It’s love that has the most power to make us truly like Jesus, and not be off-putting.

Paul says something like this in his second letter to the Corinthians. Paul writes, “And we all with unveiled faces, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being changed into his likeness, from one degree of glory to another.” (2 Cor. 3:18)

It is true that we don’t feel very glorious. But what if the beautiful things we see in Jesus, the plain humble things we see in Jesus, in the gospels, are exactly the glory he wants to give us? Imagine for a moment that being lovingly truthful is glorious. Imagine that forgiveness is glorious. Imagine that a strong sense of justice and fairness is glorious. Imagine that using your life to serve others in any way is glorious. Imagine that compassion is glorious.

We see how glorious all of these things are in Jesus. Seeing him, we also can see how far we miss the mark. This makes our consciences tender. We know what we are not giving. We know what we are not doing. We know how what we say, and what we do, often accomplishes exactly the opposite of what Jesus is working for.

But why set ourselves up for this frustration and this sense of failure, by setting our sights so high? And, why should God care if we are not like Jesus?

When we meet God, in Christ, we begin to care, because we know how great this goal is. We know that this is what God created us for. We know how much is lost in a world like ours, where all the billions of missed targets add up to such great pains, and sorrows, and evils. The glory of God, the beauty of the Lord’s goodness, is what helps us understand sin.

Orleana loved the Lord. She knew how great the Lord is. She knew she needed him, but she also trusted the Lord’s great love for her.

I know what Ken was afraid of. I once saw what he was afraid of. I saw it in a little girl.

Once I was at a church picnic, and I was talking to this girl. She was about ten years old. She was being raised by her grandparents. I can’t remember why that was.

She was a serious and religious child: really much too serious. She had been reading some good stuff in the Bible, about the creation, in the first two chapters of Genesis. She asked me, “Do you know what God made us out of?”  And I said, “Yes, God made us out of dust.  And that means we are made of the same things everything else is made of.” And she said, “No, it means we’re dirt.” And I said, “But, do you know what the dirt is made of?” And she said, “It’s made of mud and worms.”

And I said, “Don’t you know what the mud and the worms are made of? They’re made of rocks, and roots, and trees, and grass, and lots of other living things. And everything they are made of comes from up in the sky, where you can look up and see the stars at night. You are made of the same stuff the stars are made of.” And she said, “No, we’re dirt.” I looked into her eyes and saw that, somehow, this little girl had taken to heart a great and sad distortion of herself, in the guise of the Christian faith.

Paul said, “For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and are justified freely by his grace...” (Romans 3:23-24) To be justified, or set right, by God is to become a sinner living in the presence of glory. There, in a single sentence written by Paul, Sin and Glory come together when God has bridged the gap. 

I have told you about three people. Each one had a different way of thinking about sin and glory.  Bob had no use for either one. The little girl, sadly (really sadly), had no sense of beauty and glory. Orleana showed an awareness of both sin and glory: her own sin and God’s great glory. Because of this, she knew that part of God’s glory was his way of loving her just as she was, and making his glory a part of her.

I believe that the good news of Jesus tells us that every bit of human goodness is a gift. It is not a human achievement, but a gift from God. It is, in some way, a partnership with God, but, most of all, goodness is simply a gift from God. Just as life, itself, is a gift from God.

I don’t think that many people want goodness or righteousness to be given to them from the outside. They don’t want the goodness in them to come, not from themselves, but to come from someone else. Maybe they have a hard time believing it’s possible (or even fair) to be given someone else’s goodness. They don’t want to be dependent or in debt to another, not even to God.

In Jesus’ parable of the two men praying in the Temple (the Pharisee and the tax collector) something in our heart really wants to be the Pharisee. But the true goodness comes to us only when we pray: “God have mercy on me, a sinner.” (Luke 18:13)

The Lord gives us goodness through the cross, and so we are, “justified freely by his grace, through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus. God presented him as a sacrifice of atonement, through faith in his blood.” (Romans 3:24-25)

The sacrifice of atonement means that God makes peace with us: and even makes himself one with us. Knowing Jesus means knowing God as our friend. Redemption means being bought and being set free from slavery, Jesus Christ is God breaking the power of sin over us, and in us.

God justifies us. This means that God, our judge, acquits us. He doesn’t make excuses for us, but God pardons the guilty, he treats us just as if we had never gone wrong.

We don’t work for his love, as Christians. We begin with his love. Martin Luther rediscovered the ancient truth of the Bible. Only a few months after Luther nailed the Ninety Five Theses (or the points of argument about the selling of indulgences), back in the year, 1517, he wrote, a few months later, another set of points for debate to be argued in the city of Heidelberg. One of his points was this: “The love of God does not find, but creates, that which is pleasing to it…. Rather than seeking its own good, the love of God flows forth and bestows good. Therefore, sinners are attractive because they are loved; they are not loved because they are attractive.” (Thesis #28 of the “Heidelberg Disputation”; “Luther’s Works”, 31:57) Our life, in which we are born again as a child of God, begins with God’s love alone.

And we keep beginning with his love every day of our lives. Jesus died on the cross to give us this love, this freedom, this friendship, as a gift: a pure gift. And faith means receiving this gift from the Lord, like a little child who receives everything from his or her parents. We receive this gift of God just as a child receives life from his or her parents.

Martin Luther put it this way: “This is wonderful news, to believe that salvation lies outside ourselves.  I am justified and acceptable to God, although there are in me sin, unrighteousness, and horror of death.  Yet I must look elsewhere and see no sin.  This is wonderful, not to see what I see, not to feel what I feel.  Before my eyes I see a [coin], or a sword, or a fire, and I must say, “there is no [coin], no sword, no fire.” The forgiveness of sins is like this.” (Martin Luther, quoted in “Here I Stand”, by Roland Bainton, Chapter 13, p. 178)

This is the kind of grace and faith that will reform any church and its people. This kind of grace and faith will reach out to others, and change the world, and point to the coming kingdom of God.

Faith's Underbelly - The Long View of Hope

Preached on Sunday, September 17, 2017

Scripture readings: Deuteronomy 32:36-47; Romans 15:1-13

Around Tall Timber Ranch (Camp), Cascade Mountains
Above Leavenworth, WA
Between the White and Napeequa Rivers

When I was little, when I would do something wrong and absolutely no one was there to see it, my mother would immediately know about it. She would say to me, “I can read you like a book.”

I don’t know what scared me most about this. Was it her ability to read me? Or, was it my frightening ability to be read by anyone who took one look at me?

The Book of Deuteronomy tells us that God can read his people like a book. God tells Moses to finish his book by writing into it what God reads in his people. God gave it to Moses in the form of a song.

It’s a very long song. As a whole, it isn’t pretty, but it is beautiful. The song is the story of God and his people from beginning to end; or from the first beginning to the new beginning, in the kingdom of God. The song tells us the long, long story of God’s plan to make a new world out of the one that causes us, and him, so much distress.

The song tells Israel the long story of what their history was going to be, and their part in God’s plan to include the whole world in the joy of his good news. The song teaches them that their part in the story does no credit to them.

It also speaks to us about what our own long history consists of, and our part in that same plan. Those who come to the God of Israel, though Jesus, the King, Son of David, Son of God, from all the nations, also become part of “The Israel of God”, as Paul tells us in the New Testament. (Galatians 6:16 - see also Gal. 3:39; Rom. 9:6; and Phil. 3;3))

So, the long song is our story as well. Because of this, the song tells us that we share the same credit in the story as Israel.

The song has its beauties. The Lord is like rain, and showers, and dew on new grass. The implication is that we definitely need the Lord to be rain for us. It also makes us think about the real rain we need at the end of this year’s fire season.

The Lord is like a rock, everybody loves a rock. In Desert Aire, there are never enough rocks on the ground, but people building a new house always have to bring in more rocks, the bigger the better.

The Lord is our creator and, more than that, the Lord is our Father.

The Lord is like a mother eagle, who catches us (her eaglets) when we fall out of the nest. The Lord carries us on his wings, so that we can learn to fly with him.

So, our place in the song, on the wings of God, is beautiful, but we’re not pretty. God finds us in the middle of a desert. God has to bring us out of the barrenness, and out of the lonely wasteland.

Perhaps you can remember something like that, yourselves. Could the desert mean a fruitless life, a lonely life, a howling angry life? Could the desert mean lovelessness, helplessness, emptiness, failure, or blame?

But there’s grace in the desert: the grace of God. Even a single life can make a long, long song with grace at the beginning and at the end, and grace is there to set right all that goes wrong in between. For all of us, this is a long song of the life of every soul, through all the ages of time, in this world as we know it. (32:1-43)

The song is a picture of all time, and it doesn’t have a lot of concrete, definable events. The desert in the song is Egypt, where the Lord found Israel in slavery. The heights are the high country of The Promised Land with its walled cities on the hilltops. The honey, and milk, and curds, and oil, and wheat are the abundance of the new land which the Lord gives to them. It’s a land that makes them fat. (32:10-14)

Even in the Bible, being fat can be bad. When Jeshurun (which is God’s pet name, or love name, for his people, and it means “My Upright One”). When the upright one gets fat, he kicks and abandons God. (32:15)

This lesson goes all through the Bible: of being so close and blessed by God that you forget who he is. You worship what God gives you, instead of worshiping God. You don’t think you’ve changed, but you have.

To say, as the song says it, “They are a nation without sense,” could happen to us, in our own way. We could worship our work or our retirement. We could worship our freedom or our commitment. We could worship church instead of Jesus.

Even when we come into God’s country, with God’s help, God often has this new work to do. His job becomes getting rid of our new false gods, showing them up for what they are. When God takes those new false gods down, the Lord will say (in the words of the song): “Now where are their gods?”

This long song is, for Israel and for us, sort of a long view of our history: past, present, and future. Long as it is, it’s too short to tell us everything. Even the Bible, long as it is, is too short to tell us everything. It’s designed to tell us not what we want to know, but what God believes we need to know, and God does not think like us.

This shouldn’t be that hard to see. God has a plan, and he’s planned it to be good to Israel, and the same plan is planned to be good to everyone else, as well. Israel goes wrong and gets disciplined, to say the least. All the nations go wrong in their relationship with God’s people, and with each other, and they all get disciplined, to say the least. All of this happens in this one song.

Songs are poetry, and Hebrew poetry often works by repeating the same idea over, at least twice, in adjacent phrases, or a progression of phrases. The mystery of the way God works can be seen in one pair of phrases: “The Lord will judge his people and have compassion on his servants.” (32:36) The poetry of this half sentence is an equation of judgment and compassion. Judgement and compassion are not two separate things. They are two measurements of the same thing.

They aren’t two stages of the same thing. They aren’t a process, as we might think. Judgment and compassion are two expressions of God’s love, or God’s faithfulness. Any good parent can understand this.

Preachers can get this wrong. We are warned about the dangers of judging because it’s so easy to get it wrong, even though we have to do it.

Preachers can get this wrong. For instance, some preachers blamed the sinfulness of the city of New Orleans for bringing on the destruction caused by Hurricane Katrina, but I didn’t hear any preachers blaming the sinfulness of the city of Houston for bringing on the destruction caused by Hurricane Harvey. When preachers do this, they create many of the unnecessary problems that the world has with the Bible.

I’m just saying that when we are confused about (and when we misapply) God’s judgment and compassion, we can misunderstand everything that happens in this world.

The song is really about the Lord’s unchanging love. It tells us that, in the end, the Lord will bless all the nations and bring them together in joy and praise. This comes out right at the very end of the song. “Rejoice, O nations, with his people, for he will avenge the blood of his servants; he will take vengeance on his enemies and make atonement for his land and people.” (32:43) And so it’s all good.

Paul says that this verse is about bringing Israel and all the nations together, and it’s about a gracious acceptance of other people who are different from you. He says that this verse is about the gentiles, but the word “gentiles” means “nations”, not merely non-Jews. Paul’s quote is the same as the verse in Deuteronomy. “Rejoice, O Gentiles, with his people.” (Romans 15:10) “Rejoice O Nations.”

Paul means us to know that this whole long view of the history of humanity is about the mercy of God. It’s all about hope.

We don’t often look at the world around us with hope, or thoughts of mercy. Mw might not even look at our own lives with thoughts of God’s mercy. Because of this, the long song of God and his people is God’s loving provision for us. Our life needs hope.

The song was written into God’s law, and God’s law isn’t only a matter of rules. The law of gravity isn’t about a rule like “what goes up comes down”. That often shows up, with gravity, but it’s about much more.

Any truly important law is more about the nature of a thing: like the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States are more than rules. They define the nature of what we are as a nation. God’s law presents us with a picture of the nature of God and the nature of God’s ways.

The song is about God’s ways of judgment and compassion working as one. Paul makes the two one in the gospel: the gospel is the good news of the righteousness of God given to us in Jesus (the King of the Jews), crucified for the sins of the world (and for our sins), and risen from the dead.

The song in Deuteronomy tells us that the hope and joy of Israel and the nations will be complete because of God’s atonement of his people’s sins. But the song has the nations joining Israel in their joy, praising God with one voice. God’s atonement doesn’t only work for Israel. It works for everyone.

Atonement is a solution to a problem. Atonement, heals a conflict or a division. You could say that (by happy chance) atonement means “at-one-ment”. The problem that atonement solves is the conflict and division between the human race and God because of human pride, self-worship, missing the mark, and sin.

Jesus is God becoming human and (by dying and rising from the dead) bridging the gap between God and his fallen children, who have been caught by the power of sin and death. The atonement that changes the world, and all people, is a bridge built by God, in Jesus.

In another way, atonement means “covering”. It refers to the blood of a sacrifice covering the wrong, and the sickness, and the sin that divides us. God provides the covering blood, in Jesus.

I know this can sound yucky. It works in such a strange way, as if God, looking at us covered with the blood of Jesus, sees his Son in us, and upon us. We have peace with God through the blood which God, himself, provided for us to give us a new identity in Jesus.

In the song, and in Paul, we see the long view of history: the wars, the brutality, the pride, the wrong, and the injustice of it all. The long view, without answering all our questions about how and why, tells us that the long view is about the hope which God, in his love, has worked out for us.

I saw a post on Facebook that said this: “The hardest part of being a parent is watching a child go through something really tough and not being able to fix it for them.”

This is true on a human level. But “we live, and move, and have our being” in God. (Acts 17:28) God has the power, and the judgment, and the compassion to fix us, and to fix this world as we know it.

All of us, as God’s people, like those who traveled with Moses to the promised land, have a long view held up to us for our learning and for our encouragement. Our part is often not very pretty, but God’s part makes it beautiful.

We are told to learn God’s song. We are told that: “They are not idle words for you – they are your life.” (32:47)

In Moses’ song, we can read ourselves like a book. Our life depends on being able to read ourselves, and our part in this long journey, in this long song.

Our life depends on receiving the gift that comes from God’s good judgment and compassion: his infinite love for us, and for the whole world, in Christ. In Christ, God covers us with compassion and with faithfulness. We need that if we want to make our journey of faith with hope.