Category Archives: Sermons

“They Have Taken My Lord”

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(Jeremiah 31:15-17; John 20:11-18)

In one of his sermons, the Presbyterian pastor and writer Frederick Buechner observed,

When a minister reads out of the Bible, I am sure that at least nine times out of ten the people who happen to be listening at all hear not what is really being read but only what they expect to hear read. And I think that what most people expect to hear read from the Bible is an edifying story, an uplifting thought, a moral lesson—something elevating, obvious, and boring. So that is exactly what very often they do hear. Only that is too bad because if you really listen—and maybe you have to forget that it is the Bible being read and a minister who is reading it—there is no telling what you might hear.”

It’s a trenchant observation; but it occurred to me this week, as I was meditating on our passage from John, that Buechner actually doesn’t go far enough. He’s right that we tend to hear what we expect to hear, that which is safe and predictable, but there’s more to it than that. We also tend to see what we expect to see, for the same reason; and it’s not just the Bible we neutralize in this way, but God. We don’t see what he’s really doing, and we don’t hear what he’s really saying, because we already think we know what’s going on and what God has to say about it; and those who don’t think about God much or who don’t want to believe he exists just filter him out altogether, most of the time. Either way, we see and hear only what we’ve already decided we can see and hear, confirming our expectations by never looking beyond them or letting them be challenged.

That’s understandable, because it’s safer that way, and often more comfortable. That way, we don’t see a God who challenges our settled assumptions about how the world works, and how it ought to work; we don’t hear a God who challenges our ideas about what can reasonably expected of us, or who calls us to face things we’d rather not face and make changes we really don’t want to make. And if we don’t see the dead raised, the lame walk, the blind receive sight, and the slaves set free, since we don’t really expect to see such things—well, at least we don’t get our hopes up, either, and risk having them dashed by reality.

Faith, I think, is God taking the blinders off our eyes and the plugs out of our ears, removing the filters of what we expect to see and hear, unfixing our fixed ideas of what’s possible and impossible, and stripping away the defenses we erect against him; it’s the gift of eyes and ears that are open to him, so that we can see his hand and hear his voice, so that we can know him and recognize him at work. Without that gift, our perception will never go beyond what the world has taught us to understand.

That, I think, is what’s up with Mary Magdalene in our passage from John. I’d never really registered the first part of this passage before, but it’s remarkable. Mary’s crying, and she looks into the tomb—I don’t know why, since she’s already discovered that it’s empty; maybe she didn’t know why either, but she does—and when she does, she sees two angels sitting in there. But she doesn’t see two angels. In fact, she doesn’t seem to see anything odd about them at all. There’s no reason for two people to be sitting in there—that’s pretty strange; their clothes are bright white, which was very unusual in that age before washing machines; and presumably there hadn’t been two people sitting there just a few minutes before, when Peter and John looked into the tomb, so that’s suspicious; and yet, none of this registers with her. They ask her, “Why are you weeping?” and she says, “They’ve taken my Lord,” and pulls back out of the tomb. She doesn’t even ask them if they know anything about it.

And when she turns around, she sees Jesus—but she doesn’t see Jesus; she thinks he’s the groundskeeper. Strange man standing outside the tomb on the first day of the week? There must be a logical explanation; it must be the guy who comes by to mow the grass and water the flowers. He, too, asks her, “Woman, why are you weeping?”—and she asks him, “Are you the one who took Jesus’ body? If so, please tell me where you put him.” It’s hard to blame her for not making the immediate leap from “empty tomb” to “resurrection”—I don’t think any of us would have done differently—but the evidence is piling up that something strange is going on here, and she just can’t see any of it. It’s impossible, therefore it can’t have happened, therefore none of it can be there.

But with God, all things are possible, and so the unthinkable has been thought, and in fact has happened; those really are angels in the tomb, and this isn’t the groundskeeper. And when Jesus says, “Mary”—when she hears his voice speak her name—then she knows him, and then she can see. She can’t figure it out for herself, even with the evidence right in front of her—she needs to hear it from Jesus; she needs him to call her name, and by doing so to open her eyes.

And when he does, when her eyes are opened, she runs to him and embraces him in love and joy and wonder; but Jesus doesn’t just let her bask in that, because she has a mission to fulfill. He tells her, “Don’t cling to me—I’m not leaving yet; but I will be returning soon to my Father, who is now also your Father, so run to the disciples and let them know.” Her eyes have been opened, she knows that Jesus is alive again, but that knowledge isn’t just for her to enjoy—it gives her the responsibility to share it. Just as she needed her eyes opened, so do the rest of the disciples; she can give them that gift by telling them that she has seen Jesus, and what he said to her.

And so it has continued, on down through history, as the faith has spread and the church has grown as people bear witness to what they have seen and heard; thus, just a few years later, the Apostle Paul would write, “Faith comes from hearing, and hearing through the word of Christ.” Mary saw Jesus and told the disciples, and they in turn saw Jesus and told others, and those others told others; the Holy Spirit inspired the gospels and the rest of the New Testament, and we have continued to pass the word along, telling others what we have been told and what we have seen for ourselves, what Christ has done in our lives and in the lives of those around us. And as we bear witness, the Holy Spirit works through us to give faith to others, to open their eyes and ears so that they too may see and hear what we have seen and heard.

It’s important to note, it’s not on us to open anyone’s eyes; it’s not our job to make people come to faith. That’s the Holy Spirit’s job. There’s value in training in evangelism, but it’s not about sales technique or learning how to talk people into things; it’s simply to help us express our faith more clearly and confidently. It’s rather like a witness in court preparing to testify—the idea isn’t supposed to be to manipulate the jury or the judge, but simply to speak the truth more plainly and effectively so that those in the court understand what really happened. Once that’s done, the work is in the hands of others; and so it is with us. Bringing people to faith is God’s work; our part is simply to do the same thing Mary Magdalene did: to go tell people we care about, “I’ve seen Jesus—he died for me, and he’s alive again. Come and see.”

Seeking the Living Among the Dead

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(Isaiah 53:10-12; Luke 24:1-12)

As I was preparing to preach last Sunday, I came across an excellent piece by the Lutheran pastor and writer Russell Saltzman on the importance of preaching Jesus dead before we preach Jesus risen. It was good enough that I posted the link on Facebook; in response, I got a complaint from my brother. It was interesting, because he wasn’t complaining about me, which is the more usual form; actually, he didn’t have any problem with the essay, either, but it sparked him to note an issue he has with most Easter services. Specifically, he wrote, “One of these years I’d like to hear a sermon that spends time talking about what everyone must have been feeling on that Saturday. We’ve all had to live through the morning after something terrible: waking up and hoping it was all a dream, realizing that it wasn’t, just going through the motions while we start trying to put our lives back together. What must it have been like for Mary, the disciples, etc. on that long day when they thought it was all over?”

It’s a good point, because while we celebrate Good Friday, we don’t emerge from that service into the world as the disciples knew it. That next day must have been the hardest day of their lives. For the rest of Jerusalem, things were back to normal after all the commotion; their fellow Jews would be getting up and going to the synagogue to observe the Sabbath, some of them probably with a sense of satisfaction that that Galilean gadfly was out of the way. For Jesus’ disciples, however, the reality and enormity of their loss was just beginning to sink in; life had a giant hole right through it that nothing could possibly fill or close or heal, and all they could do was try to figure out how to cope, how to go on, when their greatest hope had just been brutally extinguished.

That was, I am sure, a grey, empty, echoing day, with nothing for it but to keep taking one breath after another, putting one foot in front of the other, putting on the outward show of life and hoping somehow to find something to fill it with meaning; and as my brother says, we need to pay attention to that, because most people have been there at one time or another, and there are a lot of people in this country for whom that’s simply the world as they know it. Why else is the average age of onset for depression now just 14? Why else is suicide the tenth-leading cause of death in this country—and the third-leading cause among adolescents?

I used to believe that most people sailed through life with no major hurts or disappointments, but 37 years have taught me that’s an illusion; there are very few people like that, and most of those are fakes. We live in a world that’s just getting by, most of the time, a world of people trying to cope with broken marriages, abusive parents, drug-addicted children, broken dreams, evaporated hopes, one failure after another . . . There are a great many people in this world this morning, some in this community, who are standing exactly where Peter stood that Saturday: someone just pulled the rug out from under them, and they aren’t sure there’s a floor beneath it.

This is the world in which the Resurrection happened; this is the dirty grey hopelessness into which the light of Easter erupted; and this is the world as it still prevails wherever that light is obscured or changed or hidden from view. The light of the Resurrection should blaze forth from every church and every chapel into every community, but too often it doesn’t; whether because we’re comfortable and distracted and never quite talk about it, or because we think it’s not the most effective way to grow our churches and build our reputations, or because we don’t really realize that we have something important to say, or even just because we’re not sure how—it all comes down to fear in one form or another, I think, regardless—we hold back, and we don’t let the light shine.

And that’s sad, because our world needs the light—even here, where you can hardly throw a stone for fear of breaking a stained-glass window. People need to hear the angel’s resounding question: “Why do you seek the living among the dead?” For the women, that’s literally what they were doing, though they didn’t know it; but spiritually, isn’t that what we all tend to do? Our world is dominated by death; Benjamin Franklin said there are only two certainties in life, but given that our current administration seems to be making exceptions on taxes, death may be the only certainty left. And as we talked about when we looked at Genesis 3, the Devil brought Eve down in part by putting the fear of death at the center of her agenda—and that’s where it’s stayed ever since.

One of the lessons of history, I think, is that the fear of death is one of the main drivers of cultures and societies. For ancient times, you can look at the pyramids—all that work to build a tomb—or at the Chinese emperor Qin Xi Huang Di, buried with an army of terra cotta soldiers. Our culture makes a fetish of youth—dressing young, looking young, talking young, face creams and wigs and plastic surgery. Some seek to master their fear by attempting to master death itself, either by investing huge amounts of money in medical care to stave it off, or by asserting control over it through suicide. There are other ways, but in the end they’re all idols to which people turn because they’re afraid of death and of dying; they’re looking for life, they’re looking for the source of life, but instead of turning to the Living One, they are seeking for life in the jaws of death.

The only answer to that is to be interrupted in the search and told, “He isn’t here: he is risen.” The only freedom from that fear is to understand that God became one of us, God suffered, God died, and then God didn’t stay dead—he came alive again, and everything sad started coming untrue, as Tolkien had Sam Gamgee put it. When the church decides to accommodate itself to what people can believe and reduces this to a “spiritual resurrection,” that’s not enough; or when we reduce heaven to just a spiritual life, that’s not enough either—as you can see from all the questions people ask about whether we’ll have dogs in heaven, or this or that or the other thing. A purely spiritual afterlife is some comfort, but if it leaves the brute fact of death untouched—if death gets to keep its winnings—then it’s only a partial victory, and we need more.

And the gospel gives us more, because the gospel tells us that death itself has been defeated, and indeed, everything sad will come untrue, and nothing that is good will be lost, because Jesus Christ physically rose from the dead in a new and perfect body—and because he did, so in him we will do the same. We do not need to fear death, though we suffer it now, because Christ has defeated it, and he’s still here, and in the end we’ll still be here, and it won’t. This is the word of the gospel, and it’s a word that a lot of people need to hear; it’s a wonderful, amazing, powerful word, a word of joy and hope and peace, and it’s been given to us to speak—we need to go out and proclaim it, shouting it at the top of our lungs: “Death is dead!” This is our story as the children of God, and we need to tell it to everyone who will listen.

The Only Answer

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(Habakkuk 1:2-4, 1:12-2:4; Matthew 28:1-10)

Talking with Aaron last week down at 1000 Park, I commented on the price of coffee; in response, he noted that it’s expensive right now in part because of natural disasters in coffee-growing areas. Most recently, there was the eruption of Mt. Merapi in Java last October and November, combined with an earthquake off Sumatra that spawned a tsunami. Between the two events, hundreds of people were killed, and hundreds of thousands were evacuated; the coffee crop was far from the greatest loss. It only makes things worse that this was just the latest in five-plus years of disasters for Indonesia, beginning with the Boxing Day earthquake and tsunami in 2004. That one is estimated to have been the third-largest earthquake, and the fifth-deadliest, in recorded history.

It’s not just Indonesia, though; doesn’t it seem like we’ve had an awful lot of major natural disasters in recent years? We no doubt tend to overestimate our own experience, but there’s some reason to think so; of the 25 earthquakes I know of that are believed to have been of magnitude 8.5 or greater, five have struck since Christmas, 2004. Add in the Haitian earthquake of January, 2010—which was “only” magnitude 7.0 but one of the deadliest in history—the upsurge in hurricanes that has given us storms like Katrina, and volcanoes like Eyjafjallajökull in Iceland, and it’s been a rough time for our poor planet. What’s more, human action often makes these things worse, as we saw with Katrina, and most recently in Japan, where the natural disaster of earthquake and tsunami set off a very human disaster in the nuclear power plants in Fukushima Prefecture.

Equally part of the pattern is the human impulse to turn someone else’s disaster to our own advantage; it’s Rahm Emanuel’s advice: “Never let a crisis go to waste.” Mostly that seems to be political in nature; but when there was no obvious political gain to be had, with the Boxing Day tsunami, the responses were theological. This was especially true from atheists such as Britain’s Martin Kettle, who wrote a column titled “God and the Tsunami” which concluded with the question, “Are we too cowed now to even ask if the God can exist that can do such things?” Later, novelist James Wood wrote, “If there is a God with whom we can communicate, who (sometimes) hears our prayers, why does He not hear our suffering? Or why does He hear our suffering and do nothing about it? Theology has no answer, and never has had.”

It’s exasperating; as my colleague and friend Jim Berkley noted at the time, it seemed that the secular press had all of a sudden discovered the problem of evil—and assumed that the discovery was equally sudden for the church. Actually, they were the ones who were late to the discussion, and asking the wrong question. They wanted an explanation for the disaster—as, I admit, a great many Christians did as well; as a result, they fell into the trap identified decades ago by H. L. Mencken when he wrote, “For every problem, there is a solution that is simple, easy to understand, and wrong.”

The truth is, we can’t find a satisfactory explanation for such things as the Boxing Day tsunami, or the abuse of a child, or the Deepwater Horizon disaster, or any of the other myriad ways in which human and natural evil devastate lives—there just isn’t one out there; and that should lead us to ask whether an explanation is really what we want. After all, let’s suppose that someone came along and offered an explanation of evil which really was sufficient, which really did explain everything in a satisfactory way, with no holes in it. What would be the cost of such an explanation? What would that mean? It would mean that evil is explainable, and thus that evil makes sense.

And for that to be the case, evil would have to belong in this world—there would have to be a proper place for it. For us to be able to explain why evil happens, evil would have to fit in with the way things are supposed to work; it would have to be somehow necessary to the proper order of things, which would mean that God deliberately created this world flawed from the beginning. If that were so, we would never be able to get away from evil; evil would be as eternal as good, because good would not be able to exist without it. That would be far too high a price to pay for any mere explanation.

Truth is, we could either have a world in which we can find a rational answer to the problem of evil, or a world in which the final defeat and total destruction of evil is a possibility; and it is the consistent testimony of Scripture that the latter is the world we have. Scripture doesn’t explain evil, because it offers no compromise with evil at all, only unrelenting denunciation of evil in all its forms. Trying to make sense of evil is futile, because evil doesn’t make sense. It can’t be rationally explained, because it doesn’t belong to the world God made; it’s fundamentally alien to the way things are supposed to be, and so it’s fundamentally inexplicable.

Does this mean that our faith has no answer to the problem of evil? Does this mean that God has no answer? No; he offers us the only answer possible: he offers us himself. Thus when Habakkuk complains about the evil God allows, what is God’s response? “There is still a vision for the appointed time; it speaks of the end, and it does not lie. If it seems slow in coming, wait for it; it will surely come, it will not delay. . . . The righteous live by their faith.” The apostle Paul picks this up in Romans 1:17, applying it to the gospel of Jesus Christ: it is through Jesus, by faith in Jesus, that the righteous live by faith. It’s faith in a God who doesn’t fob us off with explanations, as if such thin soup would really make our lives any easier or any better, but instead comes down to bear evil with us, and ultimately to defeat it by his death and resurrection.

This is what Easter is about; this is God’s answer to evil. He doesn’t explain it, for to explain it would be to dignify it, to give a reason for it, and ultimately to excuse it, when evil is utterly inexcusable. Instead, he says, “I have overcome it.” He takes it on himself, paying the price for all of it and thus taking away the claim of evil on our lives; and then, when evil has done its worst, he undoes all of it, exposing its ultimate futility by rising again from the dead, unbeaten, unbroken, uncorrupted, undiminished. Evil takes its best shot, it does the most and the worst it can possibly do, and accomplishes . . . nothing. Indeed, it accomplishes worse than nothing, because it undoes itself; as John Piper put it, “God did not just overcome evil at the cross. He made evil serve the overcoming of evil. He made evil commit suicide.”

In the resurrection of Jesus, life has defeated death, and love has broken the power of sin, once and for all. Yes, there are still times when the pain of this world drives us to cry out with the Psalmist, “How long, O Lord?”; at times we wonder why God is waiting so long to raise the curtain. But we know that at the cross, he turned evil against itself, and on that first Easter, he broke it; and when the time is right, he will complete the victory he won that day. Evil will be banished, and all things will be made new; God will live among us, and he will wipe away every tear from our eyes, for death itself shall die, and grief and sorrow and pain will be no more. This is the promise, and the one who makes it is the beginning and the end, and all that he says is trustworthy and true. This is the meaning of Easter; this is why we celebrate this day; for the day of resurrection is the victory that has secured the promise.

 

Hokusai, The Great Wave off Kanagawa, woodblock print, 1830-33.

Simon the Disciple

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God, who said, “Let light shine out of darkness,” has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. But we have this treasure in clay pots, to show that this all-surpassing power belongs to God and not to us. At all times and in every way, we are hard-pressed, but not crushed; at a loss, but not lost; hounded by enemies, but not deserted by God; thrown down, but not shattered. We are always carrying around in our bodies the killing of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be revealed in our bodies. For we who live are always being given over to death for the sake of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus also may be manifested in our mortal flesh.
So death is at work in us, but life in you.

—2 Corinthians 4:6-12

Thus writes the Apostle Paul in 2 Corinthians 4, sounding one of his central themes: we have been united with Christ in his death and resurrection, which means that when we suffer—not for sin, but for other reasons—we are somehow suffering with Christ; and more, that suffering with Christ is part of the way God works in us and uses us.

We have been given an incalculable treasure; we have been given new light by which to live, the light which is the knowledge of who God is and what he is like, which has been revealed to us in Jesus Christ. But receiving that treasure hasn’t immediately made us perfect and perfectly beautiful; the light is brilliant and glorious, but we’re still just drab, workaday clay pots, cheap, easily broken, not worth repairing, common as the day is long. Sometimes, that’s intensely frustrating, and sometimes it seems to make no sense; but when we start to imagine ourselves more than that, we start to think that the beauty is really ours, not God’s, and we start to take the credit for it ourselves—and we don’t let his light shine through. Put a light in a whole, unbroken pot and put the lid on, and no light escapes; but if the pot is cracked, then the light can shine through.

And we are cracked, and life keeps cracking us. None of us here, I think, can come close to the catalogue of Paul’s trials, but we all suffer; and while some of it we know comes to us as the consequences of our own sin, there is much that we do not deserve. We suffer because we aren’t properly appreciated, because we don’t get the credit for what we do, because we make a convenient scapegoat, because things simply go wrong and we lack the money or the influence to fix them; we suffer because we’re too honest to pass the blame when the fault is ours, or because we take the blame in order to protect someone else, or because we keep our commitments when everything is going wrong or when others have broken faith with us, rather than seeking a loophole and getting out. We all know times when we are hard-pressed, when we are at a loss; some of us at least have known what it is to be persecuted by another, and most of us have felt the pain of being thoroughly defeated. We are cracked pots, and no mistake.

And through those cracks, the light of God shines, and within us, his power holds us together; and so though life presses us hard indeed, he bears us up under the pressure, and he makes a way out in his time. Though we are all too often bewildered, unsure, at a loss, we are never truly lost; we may not know where the next step is, but God does, and he’ll guide us, one step at a time. We may indeed find enemies hounding us, for who knows what reason, but even then, God is with us—we are not left alone; and though we are sometimes thrown down, we don’t shatter on the ground, because God keeps us in one piece, and so we bounce back.

And in that, we come to understand a little more, from the inside, what Jesus suffered for us—and as others see God bring us through the suffering that comes in this life, they come to understand that a little more, too, and they see his light shining in us. As people see the dying of Christ reflected in us, they can also see the life which overcomes and has overcome death, his resurrection life. We bear witness that we can in fact gain life by giving it away, that we can receive life by letting go of it, that we can find joy and peace even in the midst of pain and hardship, and that we have in truth been given a life which overcomes even death itself; and in so doing, we point people to Jesus, in whom they too can find life, eternal and overflowing.

In a sense, wherever else we might find ourselves in the story of the crucifixion, we are all Simon of Cyrene: called to carry his cross, and to find in that our witness to Jesus and our ministry to this world.

Only the Dead Rise

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(Isaiah 52:13-15; John 12:20-32)

If you look up the page in John at the first part of this chapter, you’ll see Jesus enter Jerusalem to celebrate the Passover, what’s commonly called his triumphal entry. It is, it seems safe to say, the high point of his fame in his earthly ministry. He rides into the capital city on a donkey, like the king prophesied in Zechariah 9; the crowds are shouting phrases from Psalm 118, which is a triumph psalm, celebrating the return of the king of Israel to Jerusalem after a glorious battle. It is of course a psalm of praise to God for giving his people victory, but there is great honor in that for the king through whom God worked to bring it about; thus the king’s procession through the streets is a triumph, accompanied with the waving of palm branches, which were a symbol of victory. The crowds that day were welcoming Jesus as a conquering hero, as the heir of David reclaiming his throne to restore Israel to its rightful place among the nations. The Pharisees were in despair at the popular reaction, declaiming theatrically, “This is getting us nowhere. Look, the whole world has gone after him!”

Now, from their point of view, that was hyperbole; their concern isn’t for the whole world, but only for a few thousand Jews. But John knows very differently, and so he skips over the cleansing of the temple—he’s already mentioned the first time anyway, back in chapter 2; instead, immediately following the Pharisees’ melodramatic lament, we get this: “There were some Greeks who were there to worship God, to celebrate the Passover, and they kept asking to see Jesus.” The Pharisees don’t really care about the world beyond Israel except as it affects the Jews, but Jesus is different, and here we actually have the world, non-Jews (though clearly non-Jews who worshiped God) coming to Jesus. Somehow or other they get connected to Philip; Philip, predictably uncertain, grabs Andrew for advice, and Andrew, equally predictably, goes to tell Jesus.

Now, I imagine these Greeks trailing along behind Philip and Andrew—that’s how these things usually work, after all—but John doesn’t say; and indeed, the Greeks are never mentioned again, as Jesus doesn’t directly address them or even refer to them. Instead, he takes their arrival as a sign: “The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified.” Which sounds completely, ludicrously obvious. Jesus has just been glorified—the donkey, the palm branches, the crowds yelling “Hosanna! Blessed is the coming king! Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord!”—it’s already happening. I’m sure the disciples’ split-second reaction was simple agreement.

And then, as he so often does, Jesus turns everything inside out. He says “glorified,” and they’re thinking, glorified—power, success, honor, fame, the priests and Pharisees worshiping Jesus, the Romans out—maybe even a place to live, no more of all that walking around; but what does he mean by “glorified”? Try this: “I tell you the truth, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit. Whoever loves his life will lose it, and whoever hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life.” I’m telling you, hold your ear close to the page and you can practically hear the disciples’ jaws hit the ground and bounce. Glory equals death? Where did that come from? Sure, many cultures have believed firmly in the possibility of earning glory through death in battle, but that’s clearly not at all what Jesus is talking about; his idea of glory is a long way outside the norm.

Which is precisely why this little parable is so important. This world ties glory to self-assertion, to conquest, to pride, to being better than others, and so the gods we make in our own image do just the same; our view of who we are and of what we should pursue frames and shapes our understanding of who God is and what he wants from us. Jesus shows us that God isn’t like that—that in fact, God is on about something profoundly different. Life as we know it isn’t as we know it; there’s something much bigger going on, calling us to a very different way of living.

In particular, human religion has a “do this, not that” model of the human relationship with the divine. Different religions do it very, very differently, but the basic idea is the same: god tells us to do certain things and not do other things and to behave in particular ways so that he’ll be pleased with us, while we ask god to do certain things and not do other things so that we’ll be happy with him. What the reasons are for what god says, what the justifications are for what we can ask and when, and the balance between them are different with every religion, but in the end, that dance of mutual obligation is the structure of every human religion.

That is not the gospel, and it’s not what Jesus is on about. His purpose is to give us true life, and he doesn’t seek to do that by giving us a list of dos and don’ts; instead, he declares that he will do it by direct donation. He will die, he will let go of his life, so that he can give it to us. Thus his death will be his glory, for it will be through his death that he will win his victory: the defeat of death itself.

And in so doing, in giving us his life, he shows us what it means to live his life, and he gives us the example to follow; this is not simply the way he wins the victory, but it’s also the way we win the victory in his name. Thus Jesus declares, “Whoever loves his life will lose it, and whoever hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life.” As you may remember, we’ve talked before about the way the Bible uses love/hate language to express absolute contrasts; Jesus isn’t advocating suicide, he’s talking about what is and should be our first love. He wants us to love him so much that if following him means giving up our own life—whether symbolically, letting go of the things we enjoy most in this world, or literally dying in his service—that we’ll do so, and gladly. To love Jesus in that way is to find eternal life. To love our own lives more than Jesus is to miss his life, and ultimately to lose everything that matters most.

The fact of the matter is, if we love our own lives most, we end up living to avoid death; we end up, indeed, very like this grain of wheat I hold in my hand. We clutch everything tightly to ourselves, and in the process make ourselves small, and hard, and narrow, with all our potential for life locked tightly inside for fear of losing it. If we will not give up our lives, time will yet take them by force in the end, crushing us into powder and leaving nothing that abides. But if we follow Jesus who did not clutch hard to his status and prerogatives as God, but who let everything go and accepted death in order that he might give us his life—if we let go of our lives and follow wherever he may lead, even if that means accepting death as he did—then we sow them into the ground where God can use them to bring forth much fruit.

And in so doing, we prepare ourselves to receive his greatest gift. God promises that we will experience his life in this world, but only in part; his greatest promise is that if we die with Jesus, we will also be raised from the dead with him, resurrected to eternal life in Christ. Those who love life above all, those who would avoid death, end by likewise avoiding resurrection, because resurrection is only possible through death. Letting go makes the promise possible, our surrender opens the door to victory, for as sure as the sunrise can only come after the night, this is true: it is only the dead who can ever rise.

Ready for the Sun

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(Malachi 3:13-4:6; Luke 1:57-80)

These last sections of Malachi—the last block of God’s argument with his people, and then a few verses of epilogue—tie the book and its themes together, but they work a bit differently than we’ve seen in Malachi to this point. To understand what’s going on here, we need to take a look back. If you were here when we started this, you probably remember that the book begins with God declaring his love for his people in the face of their skepticism. He reasserts that he has chosen Israel, the descendants of Jacob; but they’re doubtful, and we see the expression and results of their doubt all through Malachi. We see their stinginess with God, both in their inadequate sacrifices and in their failure to tithe; we see as well their unwillingness to commit to following him faithfully, which is revealed and reflected in their faithlessness in marriage.

And perhaps most of all, we see their complaints that God is not demonstrating his love for them the way they think he should. A couple weeks ago, we saw the accusation that the God of justice was absent, or had maybe even converted to injustice and decided to favor those who do evil. Here we see the logical conclusion to that: “Why should we serve God? What’s the point? We don’t get anything out of it—he doesn’t give us what we want.” Some of the doubters probably want to believe, but they’re struggling; others are most likely ready to give up; and you can be sure that some aren’t the least bit sincere, just cynically looking for any excuse to ignore God. Whatever their motives, though, this is where they land.

There are a few things to note about this. First off, you can see their focus: “what is the profit?” They’re measuring the faithfulness of God purely in material terms, when (as we’ve seen) that’s not necessarily the main way he blesses us; in a sense, they’re trying to dictate terms to God, which is nothing God’s going to accept. Second, in that respect, there’s an irony here in verse 15; God has just said, “Test my faithfulness, and watch me bless you,” and they say in response, “Blessed are the faithless, blessed are the evildoers, because they test God’s patience and get away with it.” Their sense of their relationship to God is more than a little askew here.

Third, consider the first question in verse 14: “What is the profit of keeping his requirements?” How would they know? They haven’t tried. They haven’t been keeping his requirements in worship, in their giving, in marriage—what exactly do they imagine they’ve done to deserve blessing? If you connect this with the next clause—which asks, what is the profit in going around as mourners, probably referring to formal rituals of penitence and expressions of grief for sin—it seems to me they want to get credit for just doing the stuff. They’re offering sacrifices, they’re giving something, they’re going around in sackcloth and ashes or whatever, and they want that to be good enough to satisfy God, and they’re mad that God isn’t going along with it. The reality is, God is only going to bless us on his own terms, as he sees fit, not on the basis of how we think things ought to go or what we think we deserve.

Interestingly, though, this time God doesn’t argue with his people. Instead, we get something very different in verse 16: we get a response to the prophet’s message. “Those who feared the Lord talked with each other,” and though we’re not told anything more than that, the Lord’s response is telling: “a book of remembrance was written before him of those who feared the Lord and honored his name.” Clearly, these are people who have truly heard what God is saying through his prophet, and they’ve been moved to recognize and repent of their sin; Malachi’s message has gotten through to them, and they’ve been inspired to a proper fear of the Lord.

This is something worth stopping to consider for a minute, because we don’t tend to talk about the fear of the Lord much, and yet it’s one of the key things that’s supposed to mark and define his people; and quite frankly, it’s an entirely appropriate response to some of the things Malachi has said. This is not an unhealthy fear, as if we were afraid God wanted to hurt us or might fail us; fear that God will not be as good as he has always been is not what we’re talking about. This is, rather, the same sort of healthy fear that you might feel standing on the edge of the Grand Canyon: this is something great and glorious and beautiful and far, far bigger than you, and while it bears you no ill will, if you treat it with disrespect, you will probably die.

In the same way, God is so good and holy and beautiful that we in our sin cannot bear the sight of him; nothing unholy and no impurity can survive in his presence—it burns like a moth in a flame. To come into the presence of God is, of necessity, judgment, as everything flammable burns away, and everything impure is refined and purified by fire. We cannot evade our unrighteousness when we look at God, and we can’t control him—not at all. We can’t make him do what we want, or keep him from doing what we do not want, and we cannot ensure that he will only ask us to do what we want to do and feel comfortable doing. As Mr. Beaver says of Aslan in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, God is good, but he isn’t safe—he isn’t tame, and cannot be tamed. He is wild, unpredictable, utterly beyond us, and completely unrestricted by our sense of the possible; and while he has promised to provide all our needs, that doesn’t mean he’ll give us everything we think we need, nor does it mean he’ll let us keep those things we’re sure we can’t live without. As such, whoever commits to serve the Lord without being afraid of what they’re getting into clearly has no idea what they’re getting into.

And yet, those who fear the Lord are those who, in the end, have nothing to fear. Earlier, Malachi asked, “Who can endure the day of the Lord’s coming, and who can stand when he appears?” Here, he answers that question: those who fear the Lord and serve him, whom the Lord allows to stand. For them, the sun of righteousness shall rise with healing in its wings—for in truth, the refining fire of God, our God who is a consuming fire, is his healing work in our lives; it’s painful, yes, but that pain is sin leaving the body. When at last he has fully purified us, when the light of his righteousness has fully risen upon us, we will finally be free from the blighting power of sin and death, and we will be released in his joy and his peace.

The Circle of Blessing

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(Malachi 3:6-12; 2 Corinthians 9:6-15)

I spent some time last week talking about our need for mercy, and I know that puzzled a couple people, since there’s nothing at all about mercy in last week’s passage from Malachi; but it seems to me that while that passage, which is the pivot point of this book and the central element in the prophet’s message, does indeed deal with the justice of God and his judgment on sin, it isn’t merely about justice.

As we saw, the initial complaint God raises in the end of chapter 2 is against those who are accusing him of being unjust for not judging their enemies, failing to recognize that by that same standard he’s also unjust for not judging them. I talked about this in terms of mercy, but the biblical language is more often of the patience or forbearance of God—his withholding his anger and his judgment on sin in order to give sinners opportunity to repent. Before we complain about this, we should remember that we, too, are its beneficiaries.

That’s underscored in verse 6, which is something of a transitional verse from the previous round of argument into this one; and what’s particularly interesting is that this verse links the patience of God with his people to his faithfulness, his unchanging nature and commitment to his word. “You, O children of Jacob”—righteous and unrighteous alike—“are not destroyed”: why? Because “I the LORD do not change.” Because when God says a thing, he will do it, when he makes a commitment, he holds to it, when he gives a promise, he keeps it—and when he chooses a person or a people, he does not let go, and he does not go back on his choice. He declares to Israel, in effect, that the only reason they still exist is because he is trustworthy—and the same is true for us. If we couldn’t trust God, we wouldn’t be here. Some of us wouldn’t be anywhere at all.

And yet, though we can trust him with our very lives, and with every part of our lives, we don’t, not consistently; sometimes we do better, but distrust keeps creeping in, and the desire to put our trust in ourselves. This is the crux of God’s charge against his people here in Malachi: they’re robbing him because they don’t trust him. They are literally faithless—lacking in the necessary faith to obey God fully. Obedience is an expression of trust; they do not trust, and so they do not obey.

We talked about this earlier this year with respect to money, considering our tendency to put our trust in our money (and our ability to earn more of it) rather than in God; and we’ve talked about it more generally as well, looking at the various ways that we draw back from obeying our Lord and heeding his call in our lives because we don’t quite believe that what he commands us to do is really best—we think we have a better idea. What I think we really need to hear is God’s response to this, which we see clear as crystal in the prophet, because it isn’t the demand for obedience that we tend to imagine.

Consider: the people of Israel are struggling to survive, and so they’re holding back on their giving to God—as they were cheating him with their sacrifices, as we saw a few weeks ago—because they don’t think they can afford to give the full tithe, the full 10%. In response, God says, “Robbing me with your giving isn’t the solution to your financial problems—it’s the cause of your problems. You’re struggling because I’m not blessing you, because you’re not being faithful to me in your giving.”

And then we get this: “Bring the whole tithe into the storehouse, that there may be food in my house”—why? “Or else I’ll continue to curse you?” “Because it’s your duty?” “Because I said so?” No; instead, God says this: “Bring the whole tithe into the storehouse, and thereby put me to the test. See if I won’t throw open the floodgates of heaven and pour out so much blessing that there won’t be room to store it.” In a nutshell, God says, “Just trust me. Just trust me enough to obey me, that I will take care of you better than you can.”

Now, as we’ve noted before, this doesn’t necessarily mean that everyone who gives faithfully will end up materially wealthy; God’s blessings go beyond just numbers in the bank account. But it is a promise that those who are faithful will be blessed in many ways, and that if the nation as a whole will give God what he requires, he will bless the nation and everybody will have enough, without having to fight so hard to survive. We will not have all we want, but he will never fail to give us all we need.

In 2 Corinthians, Paul takes this and develops it in a more individual direction. “You know how it works,” he says: “you reap what you sow. If you only sow a little seed, you only get a small harvest, but if you sow a great deal of seed, you reap a huge harvest.” This, Paul says, is how our giving works, too. We need to remember, first, that God owns everything, including all that is ours to use, and thus that he is ultimately the one who gives us success in our labors, not we ourselves; and second, that not only is he able to bless us with all good things, he wants to do so.

Thus Paul says in verse 8, “God is able to provide you with every kind of blessing in abundance, so that in every circumstance you may always have everything you need and still have ample resources for every kind of good work.” The word “blessing” here is the word kharis, the word “grace,” which underscores the point that the blessings in view here are spiritual, not just material; at the same time, the promise is clear that we don’t have to worry about money. If we give freely, generously and gladly to God, we will always have enough to live as he has given us to live, and to do what he has called us to do.

Note that “freely, generously and gladly” really does matter—how much we give matters, but so do why and how we give. Thus Paul tells the Corinthians, “If you really don’t want to give, or if you’re only giving under pressure or because you’re worried what others will think, then don’t; for it’s the cheerful and open-hearted giver that God loves.” The call is to give generously and gladly back to God from what he has given us, in gratitude for all the ways in which he has blessed us, believing that if we do so, he will continue to bless us and provide for all our needs. Again, the point is trust: are we willing to stake our lives on trust in God rather than trust in our own sweat and our own wits? That kind of trust, that kind of faith, is what God wants from us.

The fact that Paul describes the blessing of God in terms of grain, seed and bread, is telling, I think; because with grain, what you eat and what you sow are the same thing. As such, there’s always the tension—especially in poor areas—between how much of the crop you eat now and how much you sow back into the ground for next year. You can’t sow it all, obviously, or you’ll have nothing to eat this year; but if you eat too much of the harvest, then your harvest next year is guaranteed to be poor, because you can’t reap the benefits of seed you didn’t sow. That’s how it is with the blessings of God, because God hasn’t just blessed us for our own benefit: he’s blessed us so that we have things with which to bless others, and opportunities to do so. Like the grain, God’s gifts are partly for us to keep for ourselves and partly for us to sow in his service.

As such, there’s a feedback loop here; there’s a cycle, the circle of blessing. God provides for us, and out of his providence we give back to him, and that then becomes the basis for more of his blessings to us. This is how it works, how it’s designed to work; this is the nature of the blessings of God. It is God who gives the harvest, it isn’t our own doing, but he gives it out of what we have given back to him as our expression of humble faith in his provision; and then we give back to him again, and he returns again the harvest, and so it goes. Faith in action.

Justice like Fire

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(Malachi 2:17-3:5; 1 Peter 4:12-19)

Some years ago I got an interesting comment on a blog post from a guy with whom I’d exchanged the odd e-mail; he was a prosecutor down Dallas way, and he noted that he’d spent a while in the traffic division, prosecuting tickets and the like. He wrote of his experience there that “when defendants would say in court that they were there seeking justice, one of the judges before whom I would appear would ask them if they wanted justice or mercy. Amazingly, most of them got the answer wrong.”

Tell truth, though, it’s really not all that amazing—especially if you have kids. Taking justice and fairness as roughly equivalent for our purposes here, one of the things I’ve learned in raising mine is that kids have a clear and strong innate concept of fairness: “fair” means “I get whatever I think I deserve.” Some are more strongly that way than others, of course, and growing up usually broadens our perspective, but that’s about where we all start—and many people never develop the humility or self-awareness to move past that way of thinking. After all, none of us has ever been inside another person’s head, or spent any time looking through anyone’s eyes but our own; we each have our own little peephole into the rest of the universe, and it’s the only one we ever get. Learning to think beyond that one point of reference to try to understand where other people are coming from is really not all that easy, either intellectually or emotionally.

In fact, let’s go a step further here and recognize that even those of us who try to do that only ever succeed in part. Inevitably, we must always begin from our own position and our own perspective, and seek to broaden our understanding out from there; equally inevitably, in any disagreement, we always start off on our own side. This is why, I think, though “judgment” is often received as a bad word—we don’t want to be judged, and we don’t like people who are judgmental—“justice” for most people is a good word, because we think of the justice we deserve as a good thing, as justice being done on our behalf against those who have done us wrong. After all, most of us don’t really think of ourselves as bad people—sure, we’re not perfect, but we aren’t the ones doing injustice; it’s those people out there. If there were any justice, they would learn their lesson and everyone would see that we were right all along.

Except, says Malachi—not so fast. This is an interesting passage, because while the prophet certainly promises judgment against the really bad people in Israel, as we see in verse 5, he’s not primarily talking to them. Rather, the people he’s addressing first and foremost are the righteous in Israel, the good people, who are frustrated that God’s not doing his job—which is to say, that he isn’t responding to things the way they in their infinite wisdom are sure he ought to respond to them. They know who the bad people are—and have probably been spending a lot of time in prayer giving God this information in considerable detail—but God hasn’t blasted them yet. In fact, looking around, the wicked in Israel seem to be doing just fine; and as for the other nations, well, Israel was still under foreign rule, so God obviously hadn’t judged them yet either. Hence their complaints that the God of justice seemed to have taken a holiday—or, worse, had thrown in his lot with the evildoers and decided to reward them instead.

Now, these sorts of comments, whether meant seriously or intended to be unfair, have two real problems. The first is that some folks are going to hear them, take them seriously, and act accordingly; such comments incite people to do what they please without regard to the will of God. They encourage people not to take God seriously, which is a very bad thing. And more than that, to accuse God of being unjust or of failing to do what is right is to slander him, and he will not tolerate that.

His response is eloquent, and sharply ironic. “You want the God of justice?” he says. “Fine, but understand this: you won’t be as pleased about it as you think.” Those who complained about the absence of divine judgment failed to realize their own unrighteousness; they complained that God was showing mercy to others, not recognizing their own need for mercy, and thus not understanding that the patience of God was for them, too, not just for everyone else. They assumed that God’s judgment would only fall on their enemies, but God says no: it will start with you. As Peter says, judgment begins with the household of God.

Of course, the judgment of God serves a different purpose with those who follow him than with those who do not. Malachi says the Lord is like a refiner’s fire and like fuller’s soap, and you may remember we talked about this during Advent: it isn’t that God arbitrarily decides to destroy certain things, it’s that he cannot endure sin, and that which is sinful cannot endure in his presence. His justice and his holiness are a consuming fire that burns away everything that is impure and unjust; only that which is pleasing to God remains. For those who do not fear the Lord, there is nothing that can survive that fire; for those who reject salvation, there will in the end be nothing beyond judgment. For those who follow him and seek to be faithful to him, on the other hand, God’s judgment is painful, but ultimately a blessing; thus Peter says, “Let those who suffer according to God’s will entrust their souls to a faithful Creator while doing good,” knowing that the fire of the trial is an instrument of God’s good and purifying purpose in our lives.

Even so, we do well to be humble when we consider the justice of God, and still more when we ask for justice; this is not a prayer we should ever offer lightly, or with any sense that we ourselves are somehow above judgment. We cannot rightly call anyone to repent of their sin if we are not ourselves repentant of our own; we must humble ourselves before others if we would have any right to ask them to humble themselves; and we should not ask God to judge others if we do not also ask him to judge us, to purify our hearts and refine our lives.

Now, if we cannot talk about justice without also talking about humility and our need for mercy, this may remind you (as it reminded Sara this week) of Micah 6:8, where the prophet declares: “He has shown you, O man, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you?” Three things Micah names. One, to do justly, to treat others rightly in accordance with God’s will. Two, to love mercy; mercy here is hesed, the covenant love and faithfulness of God. Note the way this is put together. Micah doesn’t tell us to be lovers of justice; that’s an attitude which, all too often, makes people stern and merciless advocates of an increasingly narrow idea of justice. Rather, he tells us to put our hope and trust in the faithful love and grace of God, accepting God’s goodness not as our right but as his free gift; justice should be not what we demand from others but what we seek to do for others. And three, tying it all together, we are called to walk humbly with God—not asserting our independence, insisting on our own rights or demanding our own way, but accepting that we need his grace, and that we need to follow his way.

I didn’t think of this until later—which is too bad, it would have made a great sermon illustration—but behold the lover of justice in all his glory:

Faithless

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(Malachi 2:10-16; Mark 10:2-12)

This is one of those moments when any preacher with an ounce of wit stands in the pulpit with a sense of trepidation, because there are just so many ways to go wrong. On the one hand, it’s perilously easy to slide into judgment here, and wind up hurting and discouraging a lot of people. On the other, it’s equally easy—and at least as perilous—to let the desire to avoid doing so move us to misuse the word of God and misrepresent his will and his holiness. As Mark Driscoll put it last Sunday, this is one to thread the needle on; it’s critically important to say the right thing the right way with the right heart.

As such, there are a few things we need to say right off the bat. First, our passage in Malachi deals with divorce, but it isn’t actually about divorce—God has a broader concern here, which we will most definitely talk about. Second, neither Malachi nor Jesus are issuing blanket condemnations of everyone who has ever been divorced, nor does this mean that anyone who has ever been divorced is permanently unfit or disqualified or second-class. It’s important to remember here that Jesus is in the redemption business; the fact that we sin doesn’t disqualify us from being redeemed, it’s the reason we need to be redeemed in the first place—all of us. It’s also important to remember that all divorces, and all divorced people are not the same.

This is a particularly important point because it helps us focus on the central concern of the Scriptures here. I know there are those in the church who will always tell people never to get divorced, no matter what, but that’s not really the message here. On the other hand, when pastors and teachers talk about Scriptural justifications for divorce, there’s something wrong with that. I think they’ve rightly identified the sins which can truly destroy marriage—the four As, if you will, adultery, addiction, abuse, and abandonment, based either on the explicit teaching of Scripture or as logical extensions of that teaching—but when we start talking about justifications for divorce, we have the order all wrong. We justify what we have already decided to do: the desire comes first, the reasons afterward. That, too, is not what Scripture is on about.

Rather, if we look at the reasons that are adduced from Scripture for divorce, what is the common thread? They’re all about breaking faith. Marriage is a covenant, held by God; when you marry someone, you covenant with them that they will always come second in your life only to God, that you will love no one else more and have no other priorities ahead of them. None of us ever perfectly keeps that covenant—this is why grace and forgiveness are necessary—but we must hold to it in the essentials; any ongoing betrayal of the core of that covenant, such as adultery or abuse, destroys the covenant relationship. Divorce is merely a recognition and formalization of the covenant death which has already happened.

The key aspect here, the fundamental sin, is faithlessness—the willful failure to keep the faith one has promised. It is this that Malachi attacks, and on which his judgment falls; and it’s this that is the common thread between verses 13-16 and verses 11-12. In 11-12 the complaint is not divorce, but that Israelites are marrying people who worship false gods. It’s not a matter of ethnic purity here, but of purity of worship: their marriages are pulling them away from God and toward the gods of the nations. They may well be keeping faith in marriage, but they aren’t keeping faith with God in choosing to marry someone who does not worship him; they are choosing to honor their own desires rather than their commitment to God.
In doing this, they aren’t just affecting themselves, either. That may sound strange to some in our culture, which has an increasingly individualistic view of marriage—I marry the person who fulfills me, who meets my needs and satisfies my desires and makes me happy, and never mind what anyone else says about it—but the fact is, marriage is a community act, and the decisions we make regarding marriage ripple through the communities to which we belong.

If we marry someone who pulls us away from God, or if we betray our spouse and destroy our marriage, we aren’t the only ones that hurts—it hurts our family, our church, and everyone we might have helped if we had chosen to honor Christ instead. Most of all, it hurts our children, and makes it less likely that they will grow up to love and follow Jesus—which in turn hurts the community of faith for the next generation. I said some time ago that when we live by faith in Christ, we never know how many people we may bless; in the same way, when we break faith with him and with each other, we never know how many people we may hurt.

God created marriage—and all of a piece with it, he created sex—as a very particular thing, for very particular purposes. He is forming us to be a faithful people—faithful to him, to each other, to our commitments—and faithfulness to his call and commands in marriage is an important part of that. If we let our desires drive us to break faith—to marry someone who will turn our heart away from God, to betray a loving and faithful spouse in pursuit of new pleasures—then we undermine the work of God in our own life and in the life of the church. However anyone may justify them, such acts are wrong; and whatever anyone might think in the heat of the moment, they are not the path to real blessing. The world might bless them—or maybe not—but God won’t.

So what do we say from this? Two things, I think. First, where does Malachi end? “Guard yourself in your spirit, and do not break faith.” He’s talking to a people who have already done this stuff, but obviously you can’t undo the past, and there’s only so much you can do to make it right; judgment will come as the Lord wills—as for example the prayer of Malachi in verse 12 that whoever marries outside the people of God should die childless—but how do you go forward? Answer: you set right what you can set right, and when the temptation comes to break faith, you guard your heart and don’t give in. To take the obvious example, if you’re divorced and remarried, be faithful to the person you’re married to now. You can’t unscramble the egg, and you can’t unweave the past; but you can keep the faith in the present time, and that’s what God asks of you.

Second, we need to stand up and bear witness to the biblical vision of marriage—which is a lot more than just saying “divorce is bad.” For that matter, it’s a lot more than just saying “marriage is between a man and a woman,” which is one reason the Christian Left likes to beat on evangelicals with an old axe handle; the claim that evangelicals divorce more often than the general population is actually false once you take church attendance into account, but still, we could do a better job on this point.

If we only tell people “God says ‘no,’” they’ll tend to come away thinking of God as someone who just says “no” for the fun of it—which is the exact backwards of the truth; God says “no” to some things because he’s said “yes” to something much, much better, and we need to communicate that. Our culture has an increasingly impoverished view of marriage, as it has an increasingly impoverished view of faith, because of its increasingly shallow individualism; we have a much richer alternative to offer, a better understanding, a more excellent way, and we need to bear witness to it. We have good news—about life, ourselves, marriage, everything; we need to understand it as good news, and we need to tell it, every chance we get.

The Table of the Lord

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(Malachi 1:6-2:9; 1 Corinthians 10:14-22)

I think this is the first time I’ve ever introduced a sermon series with the second sermon; but while we started our journey through Malachi last week, the service last week was busy enough that there really wasn’t time for more than a homily, so the introductory stuff really had to wait. I didn’t want to just let it go, though, because Malachi’s a bit of a difficult book. On the surface, it looks like an angry book, full of judgment; it’s structured as a series of arguments, with the Lord making his case against Israel like a prosecutor, and crushing his people’s feeble attempts to justify their behavior. If you don’t read more closely, you could easily miss the fact that the core of the book is not God’s anger but his covenant faithfulness; his fundamental complaint is that his people have not been faithful to him because they don’t trust him to be faithful to them.

That’s where the first section, which we read last week, comes in, and that’s why it’s so important. God doesn’t begin with the indictment, he begins by telling his people that he loves them. Some of them, at least, doubt this—hence their response, “How have you loved us?”—and so he challenges their doubt. The most important thing for Israel to understand is that God does indeed love them, that his covenant love and faithfulness are unchanging and unchangeable, unmoving and unshakeable; everything else flows from that. In particular, everything else in this prophecy flows from that; the opening argument that we read last week is the context in which all the rest of the book must be read, and it is the answer to all the charges the Lord makes. Every word of judgment in Malachi must be understood as an expression of the frustrated love of God for a people who are unwilling to take him seriously enough to love him back.

At bottom, this is a problem of worship, and so as the Lord calls Israel to account, he begins with the priests. God has made it clear to his people what he requires from them—they aren’t supposed to sacrifice just any old animal; they are to give him their very best, the first and the fattest and the strongest of their herds. They’re supposed to give him their very best because in doing that, they are showing him true worship—putting him first in their lives, showing that they value him more than anyone or anything else, including their own comfort and the approval of their rulers. It’s the same thing we talked about a few weeks ago, that giving God our best before we give to anyone else reveals something profoundly important about our heart attitudes. In this case, however, the people of God aren’t doing that; in fact, they’re bringing him the least they possibly can, the blind, the lame and the sick. It’s the minimum necessary to be able to say they went to church, and the priests are letting them get away with it.

Now, to understand where the priests are coming from, you have to know that when sacrifices were offered, only a small part of the animal was actually burned on the altar; most of the meat went to the priests. Along with the tithe, this was how the Law provided for their support—which meant that they depended on the sacrifices to get enough to eat. If they figured that the blind, the lame and the sick were the best that they were likely to get, you can imagine them being afraid to challenge the people for fear of driving them to stop sacrificing altogether; better to let it go and have some food than to stand on principle and go without. But in letting that pass, they were forgetting that it wasn’t their table, but God’s—they ate there as his guests; they weren’t just making do with worse food for their own sake, they were compromising his holiness and allowing the people of Israel to lose respect for him. Who deserves more honor—the God of the universe, or the latest local politician? Israel was effectively saying, the local politician; the priests were letting them do it, and so making it worse. That had to change.

At this point, some might be wondering if this is really that big a deal; if we’re talking about the love of God, wouldn’t it be more loving for God to just let it slide? But the thing is, our worship is at the core of our being; if we worship him falsely and he were to just let it slide, that would let everything else in our lives slide along with it—into ruin, ultimately. For God to let that happen to his people would be an act not of love, but of indifference; as the Presbyterian scholar Elizabeth Achtemeier put it, “It is only when God leaves us alone that he no longer loves us.”

The fact of it is, God wants our worship—and wants us to live lives which are the fruit of true worship—not just because he likes it and fully deserves it (though he does), but because it’s what’s best for us. God has made his covenant with us so that he can give us his life and his peace, delivering us from the powers of strife and death that dominate this world; he has invited us to his table because he has a feast to offer us, and he wants us to share in it. When we don’t give him our best, when we shortchange God so that we can keep more of what we have for ourselves, we’re not really making him any poorer—who we’re really shortchanging is ourselves. This angers and grieves God, not because he’s losing out, but because we are.

Let us, then, this morning come to the table of the Lord to worship him with our whole heart and mind and soul and strength, because he is worthy of all honor and all praise; let us come to give him the best of what we have and are, because he has given us everything we are and everything we have. Let us come because he loves us, and deserves our love and gratitude in return; and let us come because it is the best thing we can possibly do. Let us come to the table of the Lord, for this is the table of life.