Jesus the Messiah

 Jesus the Messiah

Matthew 1:18-25[1]

The assumption that everyone you meet has a similar notion of God is not one you can make these days. We live in a world in which people increasingly view the notion of “God” as irrelevant. They’ve grown up, lived their whole lives, and may be at the point of facing the end of life, all without any reference whatsoever to God. And we are living in a time when children are being raised by parents who have lived without any faith in God (in some cases grandparents). When you’re looking at the third generation of people who live their lives without any reference to God, it’s hard to find common ground as a basis for sharing the good news of Jesus’ birth.

Even the church, we can’t assume that everyone shares the same view of God. We believe in a God who loves us all unconditionally, undeniably, and irrevocably—from eternity past, throughout time, to all eternity. Most Christians would agree with that statement. But for many, God’s love is reserved only for those who do all the right things, say all the right words, and look acceptably “Christian.” Those who fail to “live up” to a particular standard are simply excluded from God’s love. And they believe that happens by design and for all eternity. I don’t know about you, but I find the idea that God only loves people who look and think and talk and act a certain way pretty scary!

Still others have been raised in a setting in which God comes off as anything but a loving father. The foundation for their whole framework of faith is not God’s love, but rather human sin. When you grow up in a church that constantly hammers into you that God disapproves not only of what you do but who you are, it can be hard to even want to have anything much to do with God. If your “faith” beats you down on a regular basis, it should come as no surprise that those who have a choice about whether or not to participate walk away from it. I wouldn’t want to subject myself to that kind of treatment either. It’s toxic!

One thing we have to understand about the story of Jesus’ birth in Matthew’s Gospel is that it is about reframing our view of God. What you may not know is that Jesus completely redefined the way in which people understood God. As I’ve mentioned before, there is a very different view of God in some books of the Bible. The sacrificial system was based in part on the belief that they had to kill an animal in order to keep from being killed by God, who was angry with them for their sins. The very idea of getting “close” to God was the opposite of what people believed: if you got too close to God you could wind up dead!

That understanding about who God is was literally set in stone at the Temple. The very walls of the Temple were there to keep the “wrong” people from getting too close to God. And only certain people, following certain rigidly prescribed procedures, could even dare to think about entering God’s presence. That was a privilege reserved for a select few, while most people could only watch from a distance, if they were even permitted to do that. In a very real sense, Jesus came to tear down the walls that had been built up around God by the Jewish religion and its leaders. He came to open the doors to God’s presence to everyone.

That was his role according to Matthew’s Gospel. And Matthew explains all of this by calling Jesus “Messiah,” “Savior,” and “Immanuel.” These ideas weren’t new in that day, but Jesus filled them with new meaning that most people didn’t expect. When the people of his day looked for a “Messiah,” they expected someone who would ascend to the throne of David. That was what Isaiah looked forward to: “For to us a child is born, to us a son is given; and the government shall be upon his shoulder, and his name shall be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace. Of the increase of his government and of peace there will be no end, on the throne of David and over his kingdom, to establish it and to uphold it with justice and with righteousness from this time forth and forevermore” (Isa 9:6-7, ESV).

Given our traditions of worship at Christmas, we naturally assume that Isaiah was predicting the coming of Jesus. But Isaiah was speaking to people living 700 years before Jesus was born. It seems clear that Isaiah was talking about the birth of a king who would lead the nation of Judah to freedom by establishing peace and justice. But even the best kings were only human. The promises God made to his people through the prophet were never fully realized. And that gave rise to the hope for one who would truly and finally bring peace to the Jewish people.

Given the fact that Jesus didn’t exactly follow the “script” people were expecting, we might wonder why Matthew would make such an effort to identify Jesus as the “Messiah.” Part of the answer is that Jesus also redefined what it meant to be the Messiah.[2] And, as we saw last week, this was about what Jesus did, not about trying to figure out the theological problem of Jesus as God and man. Jesus fulfilled the role of the Messiah by carrying out the promises of salvation, promises like “The blind receive sight, the lame walk, those who have leprosy are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the good news is proclaimed to the poor” (Mt 11:4-5). Matthew called those actions the “deeds of the Messiah” (Mt 11:2). Jesus was the Messiah because of what he was doing: he was acting to “save his people,” just like the Angel told Joseph in his dream.

But just as important was the fact that Jesus the Messiah was also “Immanuel,” or “God is with us.” Jesus also fulfilled this role by what he did. As he engaged in his ministry, he broke through all the boundaries that the Jewish religious leaders had thrown up to keep “undesirable” people away from God’s blessings. Jesus’ preference for spending time with the “common people” became such a scandal that he came to be known as a “friend of tax collectors and sinners” (Mt 11:19). That was not a good thing! What really turned the tables on them was the fact that Jesus shared meals with “unclean” people.

All of this was simply Jesus carrying out his role as “Immanuel,” “God-who-is-with-us.” It redefined not only their expectations about a Messiah, but also their prejudices about who was “acceptable” and who was “outcast.” By sharing God’s love with those who were despised and rejected, Jesus demonstrated that not only God’s love, but also God’s presence and God’s blessings could not be limited by the narrow constraints of those who were smugly “holier-than-thou.” As Jesus would tell them all, God “makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous” (Mt 5:45). This was Jesus fulfilling the role of “Immanuel,” the one who definitively and once and for all made it clear that God is “God-who-is-with-us,” and that includes all of us![3] 

When I think about the many ways people either misconstrue who God is or ignore God altogether, I’m comforted by the news of Jesus’ birth as “Messiah” and “Immanuel.” It reminds me of something that the Study Catechism that we use in Confirmation class tells us: that “God does not will to be God without us.”[4] Because of God’s very nature, God seeks us all out through Jesus.[5] And that means that no matter who we are, no matter what we’ve done, God is with us, loving us to all eternity. Whether we joyfully celebrate the embrace of a loving God, or we cringe  and shrink back from a God we fear will punish us, or we go about our lives without giving God a second thought, God is with us. Jesus made that clear just by being born. But he also made it clear by the way he lived, by carrying out the “deeds of the Messiah” in his ministry, by dying on the cross and rising again to new life, and by promising that “I am with you always” (Mt 28:20).

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[1] © 2022 Alan Brehm. A sermon delivered by Rev. Alan Brehm PhD on 12/18/2022 for Hickman Presbyterian Church, Hickman, NE. For a video recording of this sermon, check out my Pastor Alan YouTube channel: https://youtu.be/KD-rPMjNnJI

[2] Cf. M. Eugene Boring, “The Gospel of Matthew,” New Interpreters Bible VIII:270: “To say that Jesus is the Christ is not only to say something about Jesus, but to transform the meaning of Christ as well” (emphasis original).

[3] Cf. Boring, “Matthew,” New Interpreters Bible VIII: 138: “for Matthew, the story of Jesus is a way of talking about God.  In Jesus and his story, God is with us.”

[4] The Study Catechism, 1988 (question 88 in the full version, question 66 in the confirmation version). This originated with Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, II.2:735: “God does not will to be without us, but, no matter who and what we may be, to be with us, that He Himself is always ‘God with us,’ Emmanuel.” 

[5] Cf. Desmond Tutu, Made for Goodness, 198: “For Christians, finding our way home to God is not a ‘self-help’ project. Jesus Christ is our hope for complete wholeness, for healing that is salvation. And that hope has already been accomplished. So we are constantly called to experience the truth about us: that we are beloved of God.”

Living Joyfully

 Living Joyfully

Matthew 11:2-19[1]

I think finding a way to enjoy life is perhaps one of the most fundamental human pursuits. One of the reasons I believe that is because we have become more cut off from the very ordinary sources that humanity has looked to for joy over the ages. With that loss of “ordinary joy,” we turn to the extraordinary, to “special events,” in our search for happiness. We plan bigger and grander vacations. We mark milestone events with “over the top” gestures that we then have to try to “outdo” next time. We find ways to extend our “celebrations” of birthdays, anniversaries, and holidays as long as possible to get “the most” out of them. But with all that energy and effort going toward making it more “special,” I wonder if it gets in the way of finding joy in the “ordinariness” that has always been a part of human life.

At the same time, I think we try to keep our distance from the extraordinary. The smartest student in the class is often viewed as “freakishly smart.” We honor the soldier who goes over the hill first, risking life and limb, but we want our loved ones to avoid “playing the hero.” When it comes to religion, I think we still have remnants of the old Roman Catholic reverence for “saints.” Because we both admire and fear them, we put those who have lived extraordinary lives of devotion to Christ on pedestals high enough to keep our distance. We do so to prevent their “extraordinary” piety from “rubbing off” on us and removing us from being comfortably “normal.”

I think something like this was going on with John the Baptist. The fact that he carried out his ministry in the “wilderness” was not “normal.” And then there was his lifestyle: he wore clothing made of camel’s hair and ate a strange diet of locusts and wild honey. But the real “clincher” that marked John off as extraordinary was his message: “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near” (Mt 3:2). But he went beyond that: “the one who is coming after me is more powerful than I …. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire” (Mt 3:11). This was very different from what people were used to hearing.

That last part became one of most important ways of identifying John the Baptist in the Christian tradition. He was the “the voice of one crying out in the wilderness: ‘Prepare the way of the Lord; make his paths straight’” (Mt 3:3). That marked him off as a “prophet” in the eyes of most people. That this was the way people identified him not only expressed that conviction, it reinforced it. That was because the very words came from the prophet Isaiah. That people would take a page from Isaiah and apply it to John only elevated him even higher on their religious pedestals. And like us, the people of that day both admired and feared anyone who behaved like a prophet.

Here was John, his message one that led many people to expect that he was the one to announce and even bring in the hopes the people had cherished for centuries. In our gospel lesson for today, Jesus endorsed the rumors that must have been going around: “if you are willing to accept it, he is Elijah who is to come” (Mt 11:14). And yet, Jesus seemed to say both that John was special, and that John was nothing special. He said it this way: “Truly I tell you, among those born of women no one has arisen greater than John the Baptist, yet the least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he” (Mt 11:11). I would say that Jesus’ point was simple: John was indeed extraordinary, and he played a special role in the fulfillment of God’s purpose. John was the one who prepared the way for the coming of the Messiah. But literally in the same breath Jesus said that John was also ordinary, no greater than the “least” of those who had the faith to follow Jesus.

I think we see John’s “ordinariness” in that John asked Jesus a surprising question. At least it’s surprising to hear it from a “prophet,” the one who was the “voice crying in the wilderness” to prepare for the coming Messiah. Matthew tells us that “When John, who was in prison, heard about the deeds of the Messiah, he sent his disciples to ask him, ‘Are you the one who is to come, or should we expect someone else?’” (Mt 11:2, NIV). Wait, what? How could John doubt whether Jesus was “the one who is to come”? It doesn’t make sense. I think this gives us a glimpse of the “ordinariness” of even one so “extraordinary.” For all of his unique devotion to God, John remained a man. And Jesus wasn’t behaving in the way that anyone expected from the “Messiah.” John included.

And that brings us to the fact that there is more going on in this Gospel lesson than just answering the question who John the Baptist was. More importantly, it’s about answering the question who Jesus was and is. When John’s disciples asked Jesus the question, “are you the one?”, he answered in a way that they might not have understood in the moment: “Go back and report to John what you hear and see: The blind receive sight, the lame walk, those who have leprosy are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the good news is proclaimed to the poor” (Mt 11:4-5). I would say that’s the closest thing we have in Matthew’s Gospel to Jesus claiming that he was indeed the Messiah.

But the way he demonstrates this is by pointing to what John already knows: that Jesus was doing the “deeds of the Messiah” (Mt 11:2, NIV). What follows is in one sense simply a summary of what Matthew had already reported about Jesus: healing and restoring people, raising the dead, and proclaiming the good news.[2] But it’s also a summary of the promises of salvation found especially in the book of the prophet Isaiah.[3] We heard some of those promises in our lesson for today: “Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened, and the ears of the deaf shall be opened; then the lame shall leap like a deer, and the tongue of the speechless sing for joy” (Isa 35:5-6). But not only does Isaiah promise healing. He says that all those who have been “ransomed” by the Lord will have “everlasting joy”; “they shall obtain joy and gladness, and sorrow and sighing shall flee away” (Isa 35:10). Jesus called John to rejoice because he was indeed fulfilling the promises of God’s salvation.

That’s where all this fits in with our ability to live with joy. Recognizing that Jesus did indeed come as the Messiah to fulfill the promises of God’s salvation is cause for joy. And the joy of God’s salvation in the process of being fulfilled by Jesus the Messiah can serve as the foundation for a life of joy. While it’s true that we still deal with “sorrow and sighing,” we have in Jesus the demonstration of the beginning of God’s salvation. And I would say that Jesus’ whole life serves as a demonstration of God’s intent to complete the work of salvation. When that kind of “everlasting” joy serves as the foundation for our lives, I believe it sets us free from trying to grasp at joy in ways that may be artificial. It sets us free to live joyfully in all the “ordinary” ways that are available to us every day.

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[1] © 2022 Alan Brehm. A sermon delivered by Rev. Alan Brehm PhD on 12/11/2022 for Hickman Presbyterian Church, Hickman, NE. For a video recording of this sermon, check out my Pastor Alan YouTube channel: https://youtu.be/vWDLT5ggoJA .

[2] Cleansing a leper: Mt 8:1-4; healing the lame: Mt 8:5-13; Mt 9:2-8; raising the dead: Mt 9:18-23; restoring sight to the blind: Mt 9:27-31; restoring hearing (and speech) to a mute: Mt 9:32-33; proclaiming the good news: Mt 9:35-36.

[3] Isa 26:19: “Your dead shall live; their corpses shall rise”; Isa 29:18: “On that day the deaf shall hear the words of a scroll, and freed from gloom and darkness the eyes of the blind shall see”; Isa 35:5-6:

Fill The Whole World With Peace

 Fill The Whole World With Peace

Isaiah 11:1-10[1]

This is the time of year when our thoughts turn toward “peace on earth.” It was, after all, the promise the angels made to the shepherds on that night so long ago. I must confess that I’m not sure we want true peace, lasting peace, peace that benefits everyone equally. I think most of us at this time of year just want a little “peace of mind.” And there’s a big difference between peace that benefits everyone equally and a little peace of mind. We can find a little peace of mind by simply watching TV, or working in the garden, or reading a good book, or listening to relaxing music, or taking a nice hot bath or shower. But true peace, lasting peace, peace that benefits everyone equally takes a lot more work than that.

For many of us, peace at this time of the year means that we lose our cares and worries, our fears and frustrations in the distractions of decorating and cooking and shopping and entertaining ourselves and others with Christmas festivities. And I get that. We all need to take a breather from time to time from the pressures we feel in our lives. When we face head-on the problems in our families, in our community, and in our world, it can all be whole lot more than a little overwhelming. Think about it: a housing market that’s priced a lot of people out of housing. Grocery bills that have gone up, or grocery lists that have had to be shortened considerably. More and more mass shootings, in schools and stores and workplaces. The feeling that we’re a nation badly irreparably divided against one another. A war with no end in sight. I honestly don’t blame anyone for wanting to take a break from all that right now.

But at some point, we’re going to have to think about true peace. Surely all of us want what the writer of “O Come, O Come Emmanuel” said: we want God to come and “fill the whole world with heaven’s peace.”[2] But I think we get hung up because true peace comes at a cost. As Pope Paul VI said on January 1, 1972, “if you want peace, work for justice.” Those of us who were alive at that time remember that it was a time very similar to this one. We were at the end of the Vietnam War, which had severely divided this country, setting family members against one another. Peace was not something that seemed any easier to achieve at that time than it does today. And I don’t think the Pope meant to suggest it would be easy, because achieving peace through justice takes hard work.

Our lesson from the prophet Isaiah for today addresses the peace that comes from justice. The prophet looks forward to a “branch” coming from the “root” of David’s family who will ^“give justice to the poor and make fair decisions for the exploited” (Isa 11:4, NLT). He speaks of one who would come to lighten people’s burdens, to right the wrongs, to restore all things in such a way that makes it possible for everyone to live the lives God intended.[3] This promise was spoken to the Jewish people when there were threats looming on the horizon. They were still relatively safe at home; they had not yet reached their darkest point in exile. But all was not well. The prophets like Isaiah pointed their fingers at the Jewish leaders for neglecting their duties when it came to caring for the least and the last and the left out in society, duties spelled out in our Psalm reading for today.[4] Instead the leaders relished their power and prestige and forgot about the widows and orphans and immigrants in their midst. And we know, as Martin Luther King said, “injustice anywhere threatens justice everywhere.”[5]

That’s why Isaiah spoke of the coming of one who would set things right. And the result of the justice the coming one brings would be peace: “Nothing will hurt or destroy in all my holy mountain, for as the waters fill the sea, so the earth will be filled with knowledge of the Lord” (Isa 11:9). The idea is that the coming one will teach the people the “knowledge of the Lord” so well that they will live in peace with one another. And the prophet said this peace would not only be for the Jewish people, but that all the nations would benefit as well: “In that day the heir to David’s throne will be a banner of salvation to all the world. The nations will rally to him, and the land where he lives will be a glorious place” (Isa 11:10, NLT).[6]

But more than that, the prophet speaking in the name of the Lord promised that the peace brought by the coming one would also restore the world of nature. Isaiah says, “In that day the wolf and the lamb will live together; the leopard will lie down with the baby goat. The calf and the yearling will be safe with the lion, and a little child will lead them all” (Isa 11:6, NLT). In a very real sense, Isaiah looked for a time when the peace found in the garden of Eden would fill the whole world. And that kind of peace would reunite even the natural world. Can you imagine a world where wolves lie down with lambs, taking care of them as if they were their own young? I think the prophet Isaiah could, and he believed that when the coming one brings true justice and lasting peace, it will change the face of the whole world. The peace he will bring to Israel will embrace all the nations, and it will even restore harmony to all creation.

All that may sound just too good to be true. And I understand that, because that kind of justice and that kind of peace is beyond what any of us can do. Filling the whole world with peace is a God-sized task. It will take the power of God, working through Jesus Christ, to bring about that kind of world. But I would say we still have a part to play in all of this. Those of us who know the “peace” that God has brought to the human family in Jesus Christ are called to be peacemakers in this world. And I believe that peace is “contagious,” like kindness. When you spread it around, it just keeps going. As Dr. King also said, “Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.”[7] When we treat people with a little more respect, a little more kindness, a little more dignity, perhaps they’ll “pay it forward.” When respond that way even to those whom we may view as a threat, I think it might just change the world.

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[1] © 2022 Alan Brehm. A sermon delivered by Rev. Alan Brehm PhD on 12/4/2022 for Hickman Presbyterian Church, Hickman, NE. For a video recording of this sermon, check out my Pastor Alan YouTube channel: https://youtu.be/dfgpUBt06sc .

[2] See the history of the English versions of  “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel” at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O_Come,_O_Come,_Emmanuel , accessed on 12/1/2022.

[3] Cf. Jürgen Moltmann, The Way of Jesus Christ, 121: “God’s justice and righteousness brings shalom [peace] to both his people and land.” 

[4] That this is to be the role of the King in Israelite society is made clear by the Psalm lesson from Ps. 72, especially Ps. 72:4 “May he defend the cause of the poor of the people, give deliverance to the needy, and crush the oppressor.”  Cf. J. Clinton McCann, Jr., “The Book of Psalms,” New Interpreters Bible IV:963: “Everything said about or wished for the king depends ultimately on God’s justice ... and God’s righteousness.  Justice and righteousness are first and foremost characteristic of God’s reign ....  In short, the role of the king is to enact God’s rule” (emphasis original).

[5] Martin Luther King, Jr., “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” 16 April 1963. Accessed at https://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Letter_Birmingham.html on 12/3/2022.

[6] This is essentially St. Paul’s point in the reading from Romans 15:4-13 (especially 15:8-12).  Cf. N. T. Wright, “The Letter to the Romans,” New Interpreters Bible X:747: “It is not that God has done one thing for Jews, and another thing for Gentiles; God has designed mercy for all (11:28-32).”  Referring to God fulfilling his promises, he adds, “The promises were both to Israel and through Israel to the world” (emphasis original).”

[7] Martin Luther King, Jr., “Loving Your Enemies,” in Strength to Love, p. 47. Cf. a similar statement in Martin Luther King, Jr., “Where Do We Go From Here?” SCLC Presidential Address, 1967 (Quoted from J. M. Washington, ed., A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings of Martin Luther King, Jr., p. 249): “Through violence you may murder a liar but you can’t establish truth. Through violence you may murder a hater, but you can’t murder hate. Darkness cannot put out darkness. Only light can do that.”

Seeing With New Eyes

Seeing With New Eyes

Isaiah 2:1-5[1]

Instead of my usual sermon, I’m going to tell you a story today. It’s the story of my relationship with the Scripture lesson from Isaiah 2:1-5. I want to tell you this story because I hope that it will help you make sense of one of the themes of my preaching: the hope of God’s new creation that includes everyone and everything. I’m going to let you “look up my sleeve” to get a glimpse of how I work with the Bible to understand not only what it was saying in its original setting, but also what I believe to be the enduring truth of its message for today.

The story goes back about 40 years. One of the first times I encountered this Scripture lesson was in the early 1980’s, when I took a class in college on the Prophets of the Hebrew Bible. I don’t really remember it making that much of an impression on me at that time, because I was reading Isaiah from the perspective of the call to repentance in the first chapter. I do remember distinctly preaching a sermon on repentance from Isaiah chapter one in those days.

The first time I truly remember Isaiah 2:1-5 making an impression on me was around 1990. It was the year that I spent studying at the University of Tübingen in Germany as a Fulbright Scholar. One of the goals I had set was to start reading through the Bible in English once more. I started with Genesis, Isaiah, and Matthew and read simultaneously from each section daily.

I remember encountering this passage at that time because it was the first time that I really heard the Bible speak about “all the nations” streaming to the “house of God” “that he may teach us his ways and that we may walk in his paths” (Isa 2:2-3). You see, I had been raised in the traditional faith most of us grew up with: that each of us is responsible for our salvation. Whether or not we choose to place our faith in Jesus in this life determines our final destiny.

What struck me about this passage was that there don’t seem to be any limits on who can come to “the mountain of the Lord’s house” in the end to be instructed in “the word of the Lord.” In fact, the prophet Isaiah speaks of an ultimate future in which “all the nations” come “streaming” to know God and to learn his ways. It sounded to me like the prophet believed that there would come a day when all people would turn to God! It was hard for me to understand how that could be true if only those who trusted in Jesus could be “saved.” I don’t know exactly how long I wrestled with this problem, but I can tell you, it was years!

In the meantime, I kept reading my Bible. In fact, over the course of that decade I read through the Bible about 5 or 6 times. And I discovered something in the process Isaiah 2:1-5 isn’t the only Scripture that talks about “all people” coming to worship God. In fact, there are many. Take, for example, Psalm 22:27-28: “All the ends of the earth shall remember and turn to the Lord, and all the families of the nations shall worship before him.”[2]

That took me to another Bible passage that I knew: Philippians 2:10-11: St. Paul says that God exalted Jesus at the resurrection “that at the name of Jesus every knee should bend, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father”! The cross references in my Bible showed me that St Paul was quoting Isaiah 45:22-23. There, the prophet says, “Turn to me and be saved, all the ends of the earth! For I am God, and there is no other. By myself I have sworn; from my mouth has gone forth in righteousness a word that shall not return: ‘To me every knee shall bow, every tongue shall swear.’”

From my original perspective that only those who trust in Jesus in this life will be saved, I believed that St. Paul was saying that everyone would acknowledge God through Jesus whether they wanted to or not. But that’s not what Isaiah says. According to the prophet Isaiah, God invites “all the ends of the earth” to “turn to me and be saved,” and goes on to take an oath that in fact that is what would happen![3]

This was like an earthquake for me, like scales falling from my eyes. Once I was able to see—to really see—this amazing hope in Scripture I was shocked that I hadn’t seen before.[4] I hadn’t seen it because I was looking through eyes that couldn’t see it. I had been so schooled in the traditional view of salvation that when I read passages like these they just didn’t make an impression on me. Until they did!

By reading through the Bible over and over I began to see with new eyes the promise of God’s salvation, not only for everyone, but also for all creation. At that point I went back to the very beginning of God’s saving work: back to Abraham.[5] You remember how God called Abraham to leave the land of his ancestors and go to a place that God would show him. And God promised that he would bless Abraham, and that, “in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed” (Gen 12:3). I finally realized that it had been God’s plan all along to “bless” all the families of the earth, not just a select group. After that, I really couldn’t look at Scripture—any passage of Scripture—without this in mind.

What’s the “moral” of this story? Well, there are several. First, the assumptions we bring to the Bible make a big difference in our ability to hear its message. That’s especially true with this “big vision” of God’s salvation. Another moral of the story has to do with the “good news.” I could never get past the notion in the traditional version that God was ultimately going to reject the vast majority of people. By the way, if you’re wondering why so many young people have left the church, that’s one of the main reasons they cite when they’re asked.

I guess for me the real “moral of the story” is that our salvation depends on God. In this life we all wrestle with the question of whether we really “matter.” For me, when I look back at the choices I regret, and those I celebrate, this hope helps me believe that what I do matters. Because it’s not just about me, but it’s about God’s “big vision” of salvation. I believe the one who had the power to create all the heavens and the earth, and the one who had the power to raise Jesus from the dead, has the power to make good on that promise. As we begin the Advent journey toward the birth of the one who personally embodies the fulfillment of all God’s promises, I believe this hope is one that’s worth celebrating.

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[1] ©2022 Alan Brehm. A sermon delivered by Rev. Alan Brehm PhD on 11/27/2022 for Hickman Presbyterian Church, Hickman, NE. For a video recording of this sermon, check out my Pastor Alan YouTube channel: https://youtu.be/_raNLlgK5ho .

[2] Similar affirmations in the Psalms include Ps 36:7-9; 67; 86:9; 145:10-13, 21.

[3] Cf. Similarly, Isaiah 55:10-11: “For as the rain and the snow come down from heaven and do not return there until they have watered the earth, making it bring forth and sprout, giving seed to the sower and bread to the eater, so shall my word be that goes out from my mouth; it shall not return to me empty, but it shall accomplish that which I purpose and succeed in the thing for which I sent it.”

[4] Cf. Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics 4.3.1:478, where he says regarding the notion of universal salvation, “If we are certainly forbidden to count on this as though we had a claim to it, as though it were not supremely the work of God to which man can have no possible claim, we are surely commanded the more definitely to hope and pray for it as we may do already on this side of this final possibility, i.e., to hope and pray cautiously and yet distinctly that, in spite of everything which may seem quite conclusively to proclaim the opposite, His compassion should not fail, and that in accordance with His mercy which is ‘new every morning’ He ‘will not cast off for ever’ (La. 3:22f., 31).”

[5] Cf. Galatians 3:8: “the scripture, foreseeing that God would justify the Gentiles by faith, declared the gospel beforehand to Abraham, saying, ‘All the Gentiles shall be blessed in you.’ ”

God's New World

 God’s New World

Isaiah 65:17-25[1]

The three most important Christian virtues—faith, hope, and love—challenging to all of us. But I think hope may challenge us in special ways. We’re people who need something almost physical to hang onto when it comes to our spirituality. With faith, we have Jesus, and with love we have other people. But hope is something that seems to be just “out there.” Of course, we have a tendency to frame hope in ways that are specific. Most of us focus on being reunited with our loved ones. I can identify with that, and it’s a part of my hope as well. For my part, I look forward to being able to stand face-to-face with Jesus and experience his love in person. I look forward to the smile on his face and the comfort of his arms.

“Going to heaven” when we die is the point of hope for most of us. And with good reason. The church has been teaching that version of the Christian hope for about 800 years. Before that time, the church focused more on the view that we would all share a common destiny, a view that’s grounded in Bible passages like our lesson for today. But in the 13^th Century, in the “High Middle Ages,” church leaders and wandering preachers started urging people to take their faith more seriously. And the way they did that was by teaching that each of us face our destiny alone.[2] They taught that we should be thinking about what will happen to us individually when we die. In this way the church used the fear of death and judgment to try to motivate people to become “better” Christians.

To some extent, we might say that effort succeeded. The fear of death and judgment those medieval church leaders introduced has deeply affected generations of people to try to be “good enough” to “go to heaven.” But I would have to say that in the end, using fear as a motivation cannot truly inspire anyone to live a more godly life. Jesus called for people to embrace the ways of God’s kingdom, the ways of love for all, even our “enemies,” the ways of caring and sharing, the ways of freely giving our lives for the sake of others. If we’re really going to “be Christ’s faithful disciples, obeying his word and sharing his love,”[3] we’re going to have to find a better reason than fear.

I believe that’s where passages like our lesson from the book of the prophet Isaiah for today come into play. They speak of God’s future for the whole human family, and beyond that, the whole creation. The hope that the prophet holds out for us is a beautiful vision: a whole new heaven and a whole new earth. Isaiah describes the destiny he saw as the ultimate outcome of God’s saving purpose for all people together. It’s a vision of all children thriving, and of all people living full and fulfilling lives. It’s a vision of houses built, and vineyards planted. It’s a vision that includes even natural enemies in the animal kingdom living together in harmony. Isaiah virtually breaks into song over the awe-inspiring future God has in store for the whole world.

Isaiah’s vision is filled with the language of God’s love, God’s freedom, God’s joy, and God’s life.[4] In a setting where conquerors continually displaced the people, taking their children away from them, throwing them out of their homes and off their own lands, Isaiah sees a people returned from exile to live free from fear. But Isaiah’s vision doesn’t just concern Israel; their restoration leads to the restoration of the whole world. Beyond that, this vision of restoration and renewal extends to all creation—even the animal kingdom will be transformed when God liberates all people. Isaiah’s vision is that what God will do at the end of all things will be consistent with what God did at the beginning: create a world full of beauty and love.

I readily admit that all of this may be incredibly difficult for us even to imagine. As the prophet put it, this hope for God’s new world would be something that doesn’t even compare with the “former things” (Isa. 65:17). While that may seem too much of a “pie in the sky” dream to put stock in, it’s entirely consistent with other promises about God’s future in Scripture. Promises like “I will wipe away every tear” (Isa 25:8), and “they will all know me, from the greatest to the least” (Jer 31:34), and “as all die in Adam, so all will be made alive in Christ,” (1 Cor 15:22), and perhaps my favorite, “I am making all things new” (Rev 21:5).

These and many more promises point us to a future in which we all experience God’s salvation together with the whole human family, indeed together with the whole creation! While it’s true that the good news creates for each of us a renewed experience of God’s love on an individual level, that’s only the beginning of what God is up to in this world, not the end. In fact if we focus our hope of salvation only on ourselves, we’re selling short God’s purposes and the power of what he has done for us in Christ.[5] From the biblical perspective, our faith is about more than just the hope that we get to “go to heaven” when we die. It’s about the hope that the power to raise to life one who was imprisoned in death is a power that can restore everything and everyone to the goodness that God created in the first place.

It’s true that the hope of “going to heaven” when we die has a long tradition in the history of the church. And it’s also true that there are some Scriptures that speak of our destiny in individual terms. But I would say that one of the failures of that approach to the Christian hope is that by thinking about our own destiny, it turns us in on ourselves. Perhaps a bigger problem is that it leads us to assume that we don’t really have to take seriously the problems in this world because we’re looking forward to leaving it. But that makes the promise of God’s salvation “too small a thing” (Isa 49:6). Our hope in the risen Lord Jesus Christ points toward nothing less than God’s new world, a world of love, and freedom, and joy, and life for all. We put that hope into practice as we invest our lives through faith that looks forward to more than we can imagine and through love that empowers us to give ourselves away in service to others.

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[1] © 2022, Alan Brehm. A sermon delivered by Rev. Alan Brehm PhD on 11/13/2022 for Hickman Presbyterian Church, Hickman, NE. For a video recording of this sermon, check out my Pastor Alan YouTube channel: https://youtu.be/ZAT-qQdT6sM

[2] Charles Taylor, A Secular Age, 67-68.

[3] Book of Common Worship, 2018, 422.

[4] Jürgen Moltmann, The Trinity and the Kingdom of God, 124, 178.

[5] Jürgen Moltmann, Way of Jesus: Christology in Messianic Dimensions, 284-85.

The God of Life

 The God of Life

Luke 20:27-38[1]

Life has a funny way of teaching us the lessons we need to learn. As much as we may try to deny it, one of life’s basic lessons is that, as William Faulkner is famously quoted, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” All of us live our whole lives under the influence of our experiences. We can either make peace with our past, accept it for what it was, and move forward with our lives. Or we can try to ignore our past, making an effort to forget the memories that can come back to haunt us. But whatever we try to suppress festers to the point that it exerts even more power over us. And when it does come out, it’s usually quite ugly.

While it’s true that we can never escape our past experiences, I don’t believe for a second that we are trapped by them. If that were the case, there wouldn’t be much point in living. Then Benjamin Franklin was right when he said, “in this world, nothing is certain except death and taxes.” That kind of outlook is common, but it’s a prescription for a pretty hopeless view of life. From this perspective, death has the final word on everything. And that means that the human family is hopelessly trapped in the vicious circles of selfishness, hatred, poverty, violence, injustice, and despair. All that’s left is just to resign ourselves that “Life is useless, all useless,” as the “preacher” of Ecclesiastes says (Eccl 1:2, TEV). There’s not much room in that outlook for faith or hope or love.

In our Gospel lesson for today, Jesus was responding in part to this kind of pessimism about life. He had been answering questions from various groups of Jewish leaders, each one intent on embarrassing him in front of the people. One question posed came from the Sadducees. They were the ruling priests who controlled the Temple. They were also the ones who cooperated with the Roman empire. And they were not above bribing the Roman governor for the privilege of serving as the chief religious leaders of the Jewish people.

As Luke tells us, the Sadducees didn’t believe in “resurrection.” They lived in a closed system, and they weren’t open to the idea that there could be anything more to life than what they already knew. The Sadducees came to Jesus and asked him about the practice of a man marrying his brother’s widow. Moses had told them to do this so that the first child would be the descendant of the dead brother, to ensure that his name would continue to live on through his offspring. This was the Sadducee’s view of “resurrection”: people “live on” through their children. Their question to Jesus was about seven brothers who in turn married the same woman. They asked him, “In the resurrection … whose wife will the woman be?” (Lk. 20:33). I don’t think they were really looking for an answer. They were just trying to make the idea of a “resurrection” look ridiculous. And Jesus with it.

But Jesus “corrected” them by recalling the time when Moses met God at the burning bush. There, God spoke of himself as “the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob” (Exod. 3:6). When Moses had this encounter, the patriarchs had been dead for centuries. Jesus drew the inference that this proves that the dead are raised, for he said that God is “God not of the dead, but of the living” (Lk. 20:38). Jesus went on to explain that in the next life there would be no need for ways to ensure that a dead man had descendants, because they would all be “children of the resurrection,” no longer subject to death (Lk. 20:35-36). In other words, their question was irrelevant.

I think one of the most important points Jesus was trying to make here is that you cannot limit God’s work to the past. If God is the God of life, he is also the God of the living. And that means that our future is not one that’s defined by death, but rather by life. God’s work in the world is based on promises that point toward a future with hope and life. Promises like “I will wipe away every tear,” and “they will beat their swords into ploughshares,” and “I am making everything new.” The Christian faith is at heart the hope that God has begun to do just that through Jesus Christ. Our faith insists that from God’s perspective, the final word that defines us all is not death, but life.

I think that how we choose to look at all of this makes a great difference in our attitude toward stewardship. As I mentioned last week, in the Reformed tradition we believe that stewardship is not just about money, but it’s about seeing our lives as a gift from God to be invested for the sake of the Kingdom. If we choose to live within a closed system and assume that there’s only so much to go around, we’re probably not going to be willing to take much risk when it comes to our money or our lives. But if we can look at things from the perspective of God’s open future, a future in which life is the final word rather than death, then perhaps maybe we can step out in faith. If we can see the future as one in which our “labor in the Lord” is “not in vain” but rather makes an important contribution to advancing God’s purposes in our community and our world, it puts our stewardship in a whole different perspective.

We all have the choice: we can live as if the past overrules any hope for the future, and death ultimately makes life “useless.” If we choose to assume that our best is back there in the past—which means it’s gone—I doubt that we’re going to be interested in going out of our way to invest anything for God’s Kingdom. But if we choose to live based on the faith that the “God of life” is at work around and among us to make everything new, then maybe we can have the courage to stake our lives on God’s promises. When we embrace God’s vision for the future, perhaps we’ll begin to realize that we have no idea what God can or cannot do in our lives, in this congregation, and in this community!

The next step is to put our faith into practice every day through prayer, giving back what we’ve been given, helping those in need, inviting others to join us,  promoting community, studying the Bible together, and joining together for worship on the Lord’s Day. When we invest our lives for the sake of the kingdom of God, it’s a big vision we’re taking on. None of us can do it alone. It will take all of us doing all we can together in a spirit of humble prayer, asking the “God of life” who is the source for everything we have to send us what we need. More than that, it will take God himself working in and through us, whose last word is not death but life!

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[1] ©2022 Alan Brehm. A sermon delivered by Rev. Alan Brehm PhD on 11/6/2022 for Hickman Presbyterian Church, Hickman, NE.For a video recording of this sermon, check out my Pastor Alan YouTube channel: https://youtu.be/JSjQzIxI7HE

The Vision Will Surely Come

 The Vision Will Surely Come

Habakkuk 1:1-4, 2:1-5; Luke 19:1-10[1]

One of the challenges facing the church today is that we live in a marketplace that is filled with very different perspectives on life. I mentioned last week that we all search for meaning, purpose, and a sense of belonging in our lives. But the fact that there are so many different options for finding that sense of meaning, purpose, and belonging makes our choices all the more complicated. We no longer live in a time when everyone shares a common vision for what life is about. It’s hard to find a way to figure out how the church can be relevant to people searching for meaning in life when the very definitions have changed so dramatically. All of that means that it’s not so easy for people to find meaning, purpose, and belonging in our world.

Part of the reason for this is there are so many different versions of what it looks like. Some people are just trying to make ends meet, hoping not to run out of paycheck before they run out of month. Others are hoping to make a mark in this world, to ensure that people remember their name for their great achievements. Some want nothing more than to raise a family that’s healthy and happy, and they devote most of their time and energy toward achieving that goal. Others are simply fighting like crazy to fend off the boredom or the loneliness that threatens to engulf them most days. Some people are trying to juggle multiple options for making sense out of life, because they’re afraid of putting all their eggs in one basket. It’s all quite a bit more than confusing.

In our lesson from Habakkuk for today, the prophet was trying to figure out the meaning of what was happening in his world as well. His problem was that Israel and Judah were being effectively dismantled by powerful empires like the Assyrians and the Babylonians. What troubled him is that this was a judgment from God. The Assyrians and Babylonians were some of the most violent people in the world of that day. It didn’t make any sense to Habakkuk that God was using such violent and ungodly people to carry out his judgment. So Habakkuk questions God’s fairness and then basically decides to watch and wait to see how God would answer.

God’s answer to Habakkuk is that even though it might seem like the events around him invalidated his faith in God as well as his hope for any future for his people, God did indeed have a future in store for them. It might not look like exactly like what Habakkuk expected, but that didn’t mean there was nothing left to hope for. God’s vision for what he planned to do in this world was still very real, and his message to Habakkuk was to write the vision so plainly that it could be read at a glance and carried by runners to all who needed to hear it. And the reason for this was the promise that “This vision is for a future time. It describes the end, and it will be fulfilled. If it seems slow in coming, wait patiently, for it will surely take place” (Hab 2:3, NLT). In spite of the people’s continual unfaithfulness to God, God would remain faithful to them.

As we’ve been working through Luke’s Gospel this year, we’ve seen a unique perspective on the vision of the kingdom of God. It started with Jesus’ announcement at the synagogue in Nazareth that the promise of Isaiah had been fulfilled: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free” (Lk. 4:18). In our Gospel lesson for today, we see that God’s “salvation” is extended even to Zacchaeus, who was one of the most despised of the despised. In fact, Zacchaeus was so despised that all who witnessed his encounter with Jesus “grumbled” about it. In Luke’s Gospel, this includes not only the crowds but perhaps also the disciples themselves!

The point of this story is that it’s a kind of “finale” to all that Luke wants to convey to us about Jesus and the kingdom of God. Luke’s story of Jesus began with the promise that the poor, the blind, and the captives were all included in God’s salvation. As Jesus’ ministry progresses, we find that the despised are included as well—Samaritans, tax collectors, and all who were considered “unclean” for any reason. Jesus encounters misfits and outcasts, those whom both society and religion had rejected as “unworthy,” and he embraces every one of them with the love of God that never fails. And in our lesson for today, we learn that this was all intentional: Jesus as the “Son of Man” came “to seek out and to save” every one of them (Lk. 19:10), especially the least and the last and the left out.

Trying to be the church in our world gets harder every year. There are so many different versions of “a meaningful life” that compete with the message of the gospel. It’s hard for the church to stay relevant when the meaning of the word “relevance” keeps changing! And as our traditional measures for how well the church is doing in our world continue to diminish before our eyes, all of this can create a crisis for us as well. Some may find it too discouraging to keep on trying. Some may think they have to go out and find a “better” church somewhere. Some may wonder whether supporting this or any other church is throwing away good money for a lost cause. But the vision of the kingdom of God that Jesus proclaimed and enacted in the lives of people like Zacchaeus is still just as real as ever.

As we approach our stewardship campaign, some of you may be asking whether God has a future for this church. I would answer with the words that God gave to Habakkuk: God does indeed have a vision for the future of this church, and “if it seems slow in coming, wait patiently, for it will surely take place.” God’s vision for this church may not look like what we expect, but it is real nevertheless. It’s the vision of the kingdom of God that brings salvation to all who would trust in Jesus, including the poor, the blind, and the captives; including the despised people of our world; and including especially the least and the last and the left out. That’s what motivates me to give as much as I can to support the work of this church and of the larger church in the world. This vision gives meaning and purpose to what we do, and I believe it will surely come in God’s time.

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[1] ©2022 Alan Brehm. A sermon delivered by Rev. Alan Brehm PhD on 10/30/2022 for Hickman Presbyterian Church, Hickman, NE.For a video recording of this sermon, check out my Pastor Alan YouTube channel: https://youtu.be/XU-xHhcPxYg 

(Not) All About Me

 (Not) All About Me

Luke 18:9-14[1]

We all search for meaning in life in a variety of ways. Many of us center our sense of meaning, purpose, and belonging in our hopes and dreams. Most of you know that I was never very close to my parents. Some of you know that life in my childhood home was more like “All in the Family” than “It’s a Wonderful Life.” Actually, that’s understating things, but I’m trying to be respectful toward my parents. As a result, from an early age a big part of my sense of meaning, purpose, and belonging focused on my “dream” that I would do things “right” with my family. Of course, in my child’s mind the “dream” I had for my family wasn’t quite realistic. But more to the point, my “dream” was really all about me.

I think all of us have some kind of “dream” for our lives. It may be about the “right” career and the rewards that will bring us. It may be about having a certain lifestyle. Living in the “right” house, driving the “right” car, having the “right” friends. “Success” for most of us has a very definite look to it. Often, our dream brings with it the underlying assumption that we’re going to make the “right” amount of money. Many of us have hopes and dreams about family, perhaps involving marriage and children. Of course, life rarely turns out just like we imagine it in our hopes and dreams. But if we’re completely honest, we’d all have to admit that the real problem with orienting our lives in this way is that it’s always all about ourselves.

For many, faith and church are a part of our “strategy” for achieving those hopes and dreams. We try to ensure that what we want will come true by saying all the right words and doing all the right things. That includes how we practice our faith. We go to church so that we can be confident of going to Heaven when we die. But we also do so because we hope it will give us some measure of control over the way our lives turn out. We think that if we go to church, our family will turn out “right,” our career will be a “success,” and life will go “according to plan.” But that’s taking faith and church and trying to make it into some kind of magic way to get all we want in life. And in the end, it’s still all about ourselves.

In our Gospel lesson for today, Jesus tells us a story about two men who went up to the Temple to pray. One man was a Pharisee, and he would have been a respected member of the community. Pharisees were known for their devotion to studying and obeying God’s word in all aspects of their lives. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with obeying God in all aspects of life. But the problem with this Pharisee was that he was living his life in a manner that was all about himself. If you pay close attention to his prayer, it’s hard not to think that he was bragging about himself to God!

The other man was a tax collector. As such he would have been despised by more than just the Pharisee. He would have been viewed as a thief and a traitor to his people. Now, some of us might still think that way about tax collectors, but the situation in that day and time was different. There were a variety of taxes, and some of them were collected by people who basically “bid” for the right to do so. Since it involved paying a fee up front, tax collectors like this man could keep whatever they could extract from people. It’s not hard to see why the tax collector would have been viewed as a thief and a traitor by the public.

Two very different men came to the temple to pray. Both had made their lives all about themselves. The Pharisee had set out to be seen by others as a respected leader of his community by following the letter of the law. And all indications are that he had succeeded in that. For the tax collector, it was about taking the “fast track” to getting rich. He had thrown honesty and decency to the wind, and was basically robbing his own people. But for both of these men, the fact that they were living all about themselves made their success hollow.

Two men came to the temple to pray. Two men not so different in their attempts to live their lives all about themselves, although the paths they took were on opposite ends of the religious and social scale. But I think the real difference was this: one of them was thoroughly satisfied with the way he lived his life. He was quite convinced that his life was right and even pleasing to God. The other one came to the temple not satisfied, or pleased, or confident, but broken. He was so broken that he wouldn’t even look up and he kept beating his chest in remorse. And that’s the whole point of the story according to Luke: Jesus “told this parable to some who trusted in themselves” (Lk 18:9).

That’s one of the most important choices we have to make in this life. It comes down to whether we put our trust in ourselves, in our hopes and dreams, and in our own efforts or we put our trust in God, in his faithfulness, mercy, and love. While the people to whom Jesus told this story would have expected him to say what a good man the Pharisee was and what a rotten scoundrel the tax collector was, he shocked them. Speaking about the tax collector, he said, “I tell you, this man went down to his home justified rather than the other” (Lk 18:14). Jesus said this because the tax collector had learned a lesson that’s important for us all. When we make our lives “all about me,” our hopes and dreams may thrive for a while, but they will eventually collapse. Only when we base our sense of meaning, purpose, and belonging on our trust in God do we really find the life we’re looking for.

That’s the message of a Bible verse that may be familiar to you: “Trust in the LORD with all your heart, and do not rely on your own insight. In all your ways acknowledge him, and he will make straight your paths (Prov 3:6-7). I don’t think we set out to live our lives “all about ourselves.” It kind of sneaks up on us. For some of us, perhaps our families of origin were such that the only “safe” place we had was inside our own hearts and minds. And that’s where our hopes and dreams took root and grew so strong. And so we put our trust in those hopes and dreams because that’s all we had. For others, we may have noticed that our ideas differed from most of the ones we heard from other people. And so we began to trust primarily in our own viewpoints. This process becomes like second nature to us, and I would say it goes unnoticed. But that’s still a form of making life all about me. And that’s not what life is all about. It’s all about God, and what God wants to do in and through us in this world.

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[1] © 2022 Alan Brehm. A sermon delivered by Rev. Alan Brehm PhD on 10/23/2022 for Hickman Presbyterian Church, Hickman, NE. For a video recording of this sermon, check out my Pastor Alan YouTube channel: https://youtu.be/kRzsxfzmyck .

(Not) Losing Heart

 (Not) Losing Heart

Luke 18:1-8[1]

I think all of us at some point find ourselves in a place where we just want to give up. Most of us know that life can be hard at times. But one of the “uncomfortable” truths is that it can be so hard that we wind up feeling like we’re just beating our heads against a wall. When life gets that hard, we may find ourselves just wanting to quit. We have all kinds of ways of doing that. Usually, it’s about indulging in our preferred means of escape. And, truth be told, we all need to take a break at times. No one can stand up to the relentless pace of life, especially when it feels like we’re getting nowhere.

The question becomes how we take a break. There are some “escapes” that are good for us. I readily own up to the fact that I spend hours on my bicycle because it’s one of the ways I take a break and clear my head. Other “escapes” are relatively benign; they don’t help us, but they also don’t hurt us. The problem comes in when our primary means of “escaping” from the frustration, discouragement, or even just plain boredom we can face in life is through something that actively harms us. All we have to do is look at the statistics regarding substance abuse to see that too many of us take that route.

Our Gospel lesson addresses the question of how we deal with life when it gets hard. Particularly the Christian life. I think many of us expect our faith to make life easier. And, of course, our faith does make it easier to bear with life when it gets hard. But faith doesn’t offer us any guarantees that we’ll somehow be magically spared from struggles. In fact, I would say that if we pay attention to the Bible, those of us who embrace faith as a way of life can expect it to bring some of the very hardships that we’d hoped to escape. And when that harsh truth sinks in, many “lose heart,” give up, and walk away from faith.

In our Gospel lesson, Jesus tells a story. Sometimes it can be tough to figure out what Jesus’ parable stories are about. But Luke gives us clues. He introduces this story by telling us that “Jesus told them a parable about their need to pray always and not to lose heart” (Lk 18:1). To figure out who “them” was, we have to look back into the verses that come before. There, Jesus was warning his disciples about the hardships they would face as they followed him in a world that operates very differently from the kingdom of God. Because they can fall on anyone at any time, Jesus calls those who follow him to “pray always and not lose heart.”

The story itself is about a woman and a judge. The judge would have been responsible for resolving disputes in the community, like a justice of the peace, or perhaps even a county court judge. The woman was a widow who was supposed to receive special care from the community. At least that was what it said in the “Law of Moses” that the leaders of the Jewish people were always claiming to be so devoted to. But this widow had to keep coming back to this judge to demand what was due her until he got worried that she was publicly humiliating him. That should tell us something: leaders aren’t always so keen on what the Bible says.

Jesus describes the judge as a man “who neither feared God nor cared about people” (Lk 18:2, NLT). That’s quite a contrast from loving God with all your heart and loving your neighbor as yourself. Even the judge said he cared nothing for God nor for anyone else. It would seem all that he cared about was himself. This woman who had lost her husband had to hound this dishonest, corrupt, and godless judge very likely just to be able to access the property she was due from her husband’s estate. In the end, a man who defrauded his own people every chance he got gave in not because it was the right thing to do, but because he was worried about his image getting tarnished in public

It’s easy to mistake the point of this passage. We may be tempted to think that God is like the judge in the story. But the opposite is true. Jesus reminds us time and again that God is always loving, always faithful, always generous. God knows what we need before we even know to ask and delights in caring for us. The point of Jesus’ story is that if a dishonest, corrupt, and godless man would grant the request of someone he didn’t even care about, how much more can we trust that God not only hears us when we “cry out to him day and night” (Lk 18:7, CEB), but also that he will keep his promise to make right all the wrongs we may have endured.

Of course, one of the problems we have with trusting God is that sometimes it seems like God “delays” in keeping that promise. We may wonder about God’s notion of what it means to answer us “quickly,” as Jesus insists he will (Lk 18:8). We may even wonder whether God is listening, whether God really does care about us, or even whether God is there at all! When our prayers aren’t answered “soon enough,” it’s tempting to lose heart, just give up and walk away.

But this is where the real point of the story comes in. Just like the widow who never gave up, so we are called to live a life of “persistent faith” (Lk 18:8, MSG). That means coming to God with all our cares, all our fears, and all our doubts. And we keep coming back to God no matter what life throws in our path because we not only pray by ourselves, but we also have each other for encouragement when we feel like giving up. We keep coming back because we’ve learned by experience that none of the other “escapes” we use to deal with life really satisfy us in the end. We keep coming to God because we trust in Jesus’ promise that God will set things right for us in God’s way and in God’s time.

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[1] © 2022 Alan Brehm. A sermon delivered by Rev. Alan Brehm PhD on 10/16/2022 for Hickman Presbyterian Church, Hickman, NE. For a video recording of this sermon, check out my Pastor Alan YouTube channel:  https://youtu.be/Njg2A8yXcxM .

Where Jesus Is

 Where Jesus Is

Luke 17:11-19[1]

There’s an ancient saying that has defined what “church” meant for hundreds of years: “Where Christ is, there is the Church.”[2] For most of church history, it really meant the opposite: “where the church is, that’s where you find Christ.”[3] It was another way of saying that there’s no salvation outside the church, which was what Christians believed for centuries. But I find that vision of what Christ is doing in the world to be too small. God is working in Christ through the Spirit to accomplish his work of salvation in this world in all kinds of ways that we may never even know about. And that means nobody can put limits on where Christ is!

One of my favorite theologians insists that we should read this ancient saying differently: “Where Christ is, there is the church” is more of a mission statement.[4] In other words, where we can perceive that Christ is working in the world, that’s where the church should be working. As the Matthew 25 initiative of the PCUSA reminds us, Jesus said he was with the hungry, the thirsty, the naked, the strangers, the sick, and those in prison. In fact, Jesus told his disciples that he was the hungry, the thirsty, the naked, the strangers, the sick, and those in prison whom they had encountered. My favorite theologian concludes that if that’s where Christ is, then that’s where the church should be.

We’ve already heard the message in Luke’s Gospel that Jesus came bringing the kingdom of God that breaks through all kinds of prejudices and boundaries. In our Gospel lesson for today, we see that played out with the bitterness that separated the Jewish people from the Samaritans. The Samaritans were descended from those who were left behind when the Northern Kingdom of Israel fell. But they were also descended from the gentile peoples that the Assyrian conquerors brought in to solidify their hold on new territory. That took place 700 years before Jesus’ day, but the bitterness between the Jewish people and the Samaritans hadn’t diminished one bit over all that time. 

I find it interesting that when we meet the group of “lepers” in this Gospel lesson, there’s no initial mention of ethnic boundaries. Their common illness made them all unclean and outcast. And like many who are outcast, they bonded together despite any other boundaries that might have otherwise kept them apart. Because these men were all “unclean” and therefore socially outcast, they were excluded from all the normal activities of life—from family to community to worship. When they cried out to Jesus for mercy, they were obviously asking him to heal them from their disease so they could go back to their lives.

Jesus’ response that they go show themselves to the priest might seem strange to us, but when someone was healed from a skin disease, that person was to appear before the priest. The priest examined them, and if there was no further sign of disease, he declared them to be “clean.” That meant being able to re-enter their lives—family, community, and worship. I wonder whether when these ten men first heard Jesus tell them to go show themselves to the priest, they might have looked at their mutilated skin, and then back at Jesus. I wonder whether they may have thought that he had forgotten something: the part where he was supposed to actually heal them. But he said “go,” and they went. And in doing so their skin was restored. 

Luke tells us that one of them, when he saw that he was healed, returned praising God with a loud voice, and fell at Jesus’ feet to thank him. It’s only at this point that we learn he was a Samaritan. As a Samaritan, no Jewish priest anywhere was going to pronounce him clean. Simply because of the fact of his birth and his heritage, he would always be viewed by any Jewish person as “unclean” and therefore outcast. But it was this man, who had lived his whole life on the wrong side of the prejudices of his world, who had the ability to “see” that he had been healed by Jesus. He had the faith to see that it was through Jesus that he had been given God’s mercy that healed him.

In response, Jesus said to him, “Your faith has saved you.” This man’s ability to see beyond his healing and to recognize the grace of God at work through Jesus was a kind of faith that not only made him physically well, it also made him spiritually whole. I think this story reminds us that those who live on the “wrong” side of the prejudices of our world are often more sensitive to the presence of God’s grace than those of us who are “respectable.” Jesus asked where the other nine were, and why only a “foreigner” returned to give thanks. I think part of the answer might be that they were so excited about being healed they didn’t walk but ran to the priest. They couldn’t wait to be declared “clean” so they could return to their lives on the right side of the boundaries and become “respectable” again.

I wonder if this might provide us with a way to think about the church in our time. I wonder whether the church isn’t a bit like the other nine men in this story. We can still get so caught up with living our lives on the right side of the boundaries in our world that we miss the fact that Jesus is out there working with the “outcasts.” If that’s where Jesus is, then that’s where we should be. It leads me to think that if we want to personally experience the new life of God’s kingdom, or if we want to see renewal in our church, we need to be out there working among the people on the other side of our prejudices, because that’s where Jesus is.

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[1] ©2022 Alan Brehm. A sermon delivered by Rev. Alan Brehm PhD on 10/9/2022 for Hickman Presbyterian Church, Hickman, NE. For a video recording of this sermon, check out my Pastor Alan YouTube channel: https://youtu.be/91tpPTkHVYo .

[2] This idea originated in the early Second Century with Ignatius of Antioch, in his letter to the church at Smyrna: “wherever Jesus Christ is, there is the universal church” (Ignatius, Smyrnaeans, 8.2; often translated the “Catholic church” but in the setting of the early Second Century that translation is anachronistic).

[3] This development started with Ambrose of Milan in the late 4^th century, who said “Where Peter is, there is the church, and where the church is there is eternal life” (From his commentary on Psalm 40 [41]). In more recent days, the phrase has developed in the Roman Catholic Church to “Where Peter is, there is the church, and where the church is, there is Christ.”

[4] Jürgen Moltmann, The Church in the Power of the Spirit, 126. He understands Christ’s presence in the world in two ways: “whoever hears you, hears me” (Lk 10:16), in which Christ promises to be with us in the proclamation of the gospel, in the sacraments of baptism and the Lord’s Supper, and in the fellowship of the body of Christ (cf. ibid., 123-25). The second way is the one alluded to above, “whoever visits them visits me” (Mt 25:40). Moltmann insists that we can only truly be the Church and truly live in the presence of Christ if we link the and “seek the fellowship of the crucified one in the poor” (ibid., 127).