Because He Lives

Because He Lives

Luke 24:1-12[1]

Today is the day when we celebrate one of the most important events in our faith: after Jesus gave his life for us all, God raised him from the dead on the third day. But, let’s face it, that first Easter Sunday happened a long, long time ago. And, truth be told, for most of us it’s something we only talk about in church. It’s not really something that impacts our lives on a daily basis. We may view faith as something that relates to our “eternal destiny.” But for many of us that feels like a future so remote that we may not really give it much thought. There are just so many other things going on in our lives that seem so much more pressing. Some of us may even wonder how something that happened so long ago and so far away could have much to do with our “real lives” right here and right now.

Of course, there are many of us who look to Jesus as an example for our lives on a daily basis. We find meaning in his teachings about how to live and how to love. But that doesn’t distinguish Jesus from any of the other great teachers throughout the ages. And the hard truth of this world is that from a certain point of view you could say it hasn’t really made much of a difference. There are plenty of people in this world who are still caught in vicious circles of poverty, violence, injustice, and despair. Right now, millions of people, tens of millions, if not hundreds of millions of human beings are at the mercy of those who put their faith in ideas like “might makes right.” In the face of all that, “love your enemies” can feel pretty empty.

But I believe that our Gospel lesson for today points us in a different direction—toward a hope that never dies, a hope for new life that makes a difference right here and right now. The story of the women discovering that Jesus’ tomb was empty doesn’t necessarily in and of itself prove anything. But there is more to it than just the empty tomb. Whatever you may think about “angels,” the gist of their message is couched in the question, “Why do you seek the Living One among the dead?” The point of the question is to make it clear that the one they thought was lying dead in a cemetery is actually “the Living One.”

Now, to fully appreciate this, we need to look at the background of that phrase in the Bible. Throughout the Bible, God is “the Living One.” He is the one who gives life to all creation, including those of us who are living and breathing here today. In contrast to the idols made of wood and stone and precious metals, the “Living” God is the one who is able to make a difference in people’s lives here and now. I’ll admit that doesn’t always happen the way we expect, but I will also insist that the God who is “the Living One” shows up in our lives in surprising ways. I don’t know about you, but in my experience, those surprises usually come at just the right time.

So when the angels at the empty tomb call Jesus “the Living One,” the idea is more than just a dead man who has come back to life. Rather, the idea is that Jesus again shares God’s own life. And the first Christians became convinced that this was true not primarily because of the empty tomb or the angels’ message, but because they encountered Jesus as “the Living One” personally. Those encounters made all the difference in the world for them. Instead of a tragedy that stole all hope away, the cross was transformed into good news. The cross shows us not the heartbreaking end of a failed would-be religious leader, but rather the suffering love of the God-who-is-always-with-us and the God-who-is-always-for-us. It shows us that not even death can prevent God’s love from claiming us all.

But more than that, encountering the risen Lord Jesus as “the Living One” points us to the power of God to bring new life even from death. That’s not just something that applied to Jesus all those centuries ago. It’s a promise that the goal toward which God has been working and continues to work even now is a whole new creation. Although it’s a pretty big concept to try to wrap your head around, that’s precisely the promise of Easter. It’s a part of God’s “plan” that I alluded to in our Good Friday service the other night. God’s plan is not only that Jesus would die to absorb all the vicious circles of sin and death into himself. God’s plan also includes raising Jesus from the dead, and in so doing restoring everything in all creation. I believe the plan has always been to return all of creation to the way it was intended to be in the first place.

As our affirmation of faith for today puts it, Jesus’ resurrection brings the promise of “a new world … in which God is really honored as God, human beings are truly loving, and God will … make all things right on earth.”[2] That may sound too good to be true, but it’s a theme that runs through the entire Bible. At the end of the book of Revelation, God declares “now I am making everything new” (Rev. 21:5). And we see it in the way the Bible ends where it began: with a whole new garden, on a whole new earth, in a wholly renewed creation. There the river of the water of life is available freely to all who are thirsty. There the tree of life is available to all, and its “leaves” are for “healing” all the nations. That’s where the Bible ends, where it began!

And what makes all this more than just “pie in the sky” wishful thinking is that God raised Jesus from the dead. In Jesus, “the Living One,” God’s new creation already breaks into this world. It changes our world by promising that all the pain and suffering will be turned into good, and all the death and destruction will be changed into new life. I know it seems too good to be true. But that’s the promise of what happened on that first Easter! It still has the power to change our lives right here and right now. One way it does that is the assurance that Jesus “the Living One” is with us gives us courage to face the present challenges of our lives. But more than that, as “the Living One,” Jesus points us to the final hope that we will all share the life of God with him in the end. We have this hope because Jesus is “the Living One.” Or, to borrow a phrase from the hymn, we have this hope “because he lives” in our hearts even now.

Without Jesus “the Living One” and the hope we have in him, life in this world can seem empty. When all you can see is the vicious circles of poverty, violence, injustice, and despair, there’s not much left to give life meaning. But the fact that Jesus overcame even death to become “the Living One” points us to the promise that nothing, not even death itself, can separate us from the hope we have through him. Because Jesus lives even now, the new life that raised him from the dead spreads from him to everyone who encounters him. And as we encounter the “Living One,” we each take our place and do our part in spreading that new life throughout all creation until finally God makes the whole world new again!

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[1] © 2025 Alan Brehm. A sermon delivered by Rev. Alan Brehm PhD on 4/20/2025 for Hickman Presbyterian Church, Hickman, NE.

[2] Adapted from “The Study Catechism: Full Version,” Approved by the 210th General Assembly (1998), qq 85, 87, 88.

Truly Free

Truly Free

2 Corinthians 3:7-4:7[1]

I would say that our notions of freedom in this country are defined more by our secular values than they are by our faith. We believe, as the Declaration of Independence so eloquently puts it, that we are all “endowed” by our Creator “with certain unalienable Rights,” including “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” That was a truly revolutionary idea about freedom in that day. It was based, however, not on biblical teaching, but on the best political philosophy of the time. And while I agree with it, I would also point out that in 1776, that statement only applied to men who owned a certain amount of property. It wasn’t really a statement about how all people equally deserve to be free. It was a response to the tyranny of the day, but we’re still trying to work out what that means for all people.

For most of the history of the world, “common people” have lived in fear of “powers that be,” whether secular or spiritual. Kings ruled absolutely. What they said was the law of the land. Whether or not it was true or right didn’t really matter. Tyranny was simply the way things were. People have also lived in fear of spiritual powers they don’t understand and can’t control. In ancient times, the “gods” were no better than the rulers. They could be just as fickle and cruel. I think some of mythology was just projecting the unpredictability of life onto spiritual powers. At least that way people could make sense of their hardships. The “gods” or the “demons” were responsible. In response most people turned to various means from astrology to magic to try to fend off the troubles of life. It was, at best, a feeble attempt.

Many people through the ages have feared death above all else. Without the light that dawned on that first Easter morning, people live in fear of death. They’ve had all kinds of beliefs about death throughout history. Some saw death as a kind of shadowy place, where you were only a “ghost” of your former self. Some saw death as the doorway to hell, where everybody would spend the afterlife being punished for everything you did wrong in this life. Even those who worshipped the one true and living God feared death, because they saw the grave as a place where they would not only be cut off from the joys of life but also cut off from God.

As we’ve been discussing the last few weeks, St. Paul insists that Jesus’ death and resurrection sets us free from all that. As we’ve seen, Paul proclaimed that Jesus’ death on the cross has broken the power of all that threatens the meaningfulness of our lives. That’s because he willingly submitted himself to the “powers” of evil, and when they did their worst to him, they effectively “spent” their power. But Paul goes beyond that. He says that Jesus also broke the power of sin and death when God raised him from the dead. As we heard in our lesson from last week, Paul declared that “Just as everyone dies because [of] Adam, [because of] Christ everyone will be given new life (1 Cor 15:22, NLT).

That first Easter morning revealed a power at work in this world greater than sin or death. Jesus’ resurrection pointed to the power of God’s life-giving Word, the same Word he spoke over the darkness in the beginning, “let there be light!”, creating all life out of the vast nothingness. And in Jesus, God revealed that his Word still has the power to bring life out of death. As we discussed last week, Paul was ultimately pointing us to the hope that we will all live in God’s (re)new(ed) creation after Jesus has returned to “make all things new.” But more than that, St. Paul was convinced that through Jesus’ resurrection, God began the process of making a whole new creation right here and right now in the midst of this world.[2] The life that God effectively “injected” into this world by raising Jesus from the dead is like a transfusion spreading through all things and everyone.

That’s why St. Paul could say in our lesson for this week that we’re all in the process of being transformed to become “more and more like him as we are changed into his glorious image” (2 Cor 3:18, NLT). Because we have all seen the light of the “glory of God … in the face of Jesus Christ” and we now “have this light shining in our hearts” (2 Cor 4:6-7), it’s as if God’s new work of creation is already working in our lives. So it is that Paul could say later in 2 Corinthians that “if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here!” (2 Cor 5:17, NIV).[3]

What does all that Paul has to say about Jesus’ death and resurrection mean for us on this day? I may be wrong about this, but we don’t seem to fear sin or death all that much. That’s one reason why the traditional gospel tends to fall on deaf ears in our world. But I would say that sin still brings its own sting. We just have a way of denying it, or avoiding it, or rationalizing it away. I would also say that while we might no longer subscribe to ancient superstitions, death is still a very real enemy. We can see that power at work every time anyone anywhere abuses their power to harm or even kill innocent people. It happens all the time in our world. We just choose not to look. I would say that we still need freedom from sin and death, we just don’t see it that way.

So how then do we in the 21^st Century frame the good news that in Jesus Christ we are truly free? The biblical view of freedom is first and foremost that we are free to live in the way that God intended for us when he created everything very good (Gen 1:31). Paul says it this way in our lesson for today: “For the Lord is the Spirit, and wherever the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. (2 Cor 3:17, NLT). And in his mind, the Spirit of the Lord is at work throughout God’s creation, especially wher there is faith in Jesus Christ. The way we see that freedom is in the Spirit enabling us to become more like Jesus, aligning our lives with God’s purposes and ways.[4] Through Jesus and through the Spirit, God is setting us free to let go our selfish and self-centered efforts at justifying the meaning of our lives, by having the right title, or living in the right neighborhood, or knowing all the right people. That way of trying to find meaning in life still brings its own “sting.”[5]

Jesus sets us free to obey God, following his example of what it means to be fully human by surrendering fully to God’s will (1 Pet 2:16). That means we’re free to give without any thought of what we may get in return, which is the essence of how Jesus lived, and the essence of how Jesus taught those who would follow him to live (Lk 6:35). Because of Jesus, we’re free to serve others, sharing food with the hungry, compassion with the outcasts, and shelter with the refugees (Mt 25:35). You may see where I’m going with this: living in a way that’s truly free means loving without constraints.[6] We’re truly free when we love God with all our hearts, tearing down the shrines to false gods that we’ve all built. And we’re truly free when we love our neighbors as ourselves. All our neighbors. True freedom, from the perspective of our faith, is not found in rights or resources, not in privileges or buying power, not in influence or success or wealth. Regardless of who the powers that provoke our fear may be in our day and time, the promise of the Gospel is that true freedom is found in a life defined by love (Gal 5:13). Love for God and love for others. When our lives are defined by love for God and love for others, then we are truly free.

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[1] © Alan Brehm 2025. A sermon delivered by Rev. Alan Brehm PhD on 3/2/2025 for Hickman Presbyterian Church, Hickman, NE.

[2] Cf. Viktor Paul Furnish, Theology and Ethics in Paul, 126: “while the salvation which God effects is first of all an object of hope, God’s power is nevertheless already effective for men [sic] in Christ. … Salvation, then, is not unambiguously ‘future,’ and it is not only a ‘hope.’ Even in the present age the ‘first fruits’ of salvation may be savored and the authenticity of hope confirmed.”

[3] Cf. Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics 4.1:311, where he connects 2 Cor 5:17 with the complete “alteration” of the “human situation,” of “our whole existence,” through Jesus’ death and resurrection. This not only means the reconciliation of those who are “in Christ” with God, it also means “the reconciliation of the world with God”! Barth speaks of this “alteration” throughout the Dogmatics, but especially so in volume four, where he relates it not only to those who are in Christ, but to all humanity. Cf. also Jürgen Moltmann, Ethics of Hope, 55, where he says that in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ “the eschatological turn of the world begins, from transience to non-transience, from the night of the world to the morning of God’s new day and to the new creation of all things” (emphasis original

[4] Cf. Jürgen Moltmann, The Spirit of Life: A Universal Affirmation, 271, where he argues that since in the Bible (not just the New Testament!) “‘Lord’ is the name for the experience of liberation and for free life, then the name is misunderstood and brought into disrepute if it is interpreted in terms of masculine notions of rule.” He also insists that “living freedom and free life can endure only in justice and righteousness. In justice, human freedom ministers to life—the life shared by all living beings. In justice, human life struggles for the freedom of everything that lives, and resists oppression.”

[5] Cf. A. C. Thiselton, The First Epistle to the Corinthians: a commentary on the Greek text, 1301: “it is sin, the human turning away from God to become centered upon the self, that has turned death into such deadly poison, so that it hurts and kills like a sting.”

[6] I would suggest that this idea of freedom to love is a central theme in Jürgen Moltmann’s understanding of the Christian life in his works. See for example, The Church in the Power of the Spirit: he begins with the idea that Jesus establishes the freedom of God’s kingdom by sacrificing himself for others (117), by breaking the powers of oppression through the resurrection (98-99), and by assuring us that we are accepted by God, and therefore enabling us to accept others (188-89). On this basis Moltmann understands the freedom of God’s kingdom as that which enables us to serve one another in the effort to bring freedom to others (84, 195, 278, 283-84, 292). He construes the Christian life under the concept of “friendship” which Jesus models and we are called to emulate  as those who are “open for others” and who “love in freedom” (121, 316). 

Not In Vain

 Not in Vain

1 Corinthians 15:25-28, 35-58[1]

I mentioned last week that hope is something we all need to thrive in this life. But hope can be tricky, because it can be hard to know what to place your hope in. Especially in times when it feels like everything you thought you could count on in life has dropped out from under you. Those of us who practice faith in Jesus Christ have a hope for something more, beyond this life. But that hope has resulted all too often in an attitude that what happens now doesn’t really matter. That was why Karl Marx criticized religion as a kind of drug that made people passive in the face of the wrongs that were being perpetrated against them. I think that’s why we need the full version of the Christian hope: not just that we’ll go to heaven when we die, but also that God is working to restore all our lives and everything he created in the same way that Jesus was raised to new life. The miracle of the resurrection on that first Easter Sunday points us to the promise that God is working to change this world, and everyone and everything in it.

Even with that hope, there are still some pitfalls to avoid.[2] For some of us, it becomes all too easy to take an overly optimistic view. Because we have the hope of being with Jesus at our death, we can treat death like it’s no “big deal.” It’s just “passing on” to another stage of our journey. That’s not the biblical view. As Paul puts it in our lesson for today, death is an “enemy” (1 Cor 15:26). Death has a “sting” that is real and harmful (1 Cor 15:55). Paul’s not just talking about physical death, although as many of us have experienced, that can be truly harmful to those of us who have lost loved ones. Paul is also talking about the destructive power that “death” exerts in our lives and in our world to this day through the powers and persons who align themselves with evil.[3] Our hope is not that somehow death is no “big deal.” Our hope is that in Jesus’ very real death on the cross, and especially by raising Jesus to new life, God has overcome the power of death.

The other pitfall goes to the opposite extreme. For some of us, it becomes all too easy to take an overly pessimistic view. Because of the harm that death continues to inflict in our lives and in our world, we can decide that God must not be able to do anything about it.[4] But that’s also not a biblical view! Not by a long stretch! The God to whom the Apostle Paul points us is the God who not only worked in the lives of the people of Israel and in the lives of believers in the early church all those centuries ago. This God is the God who continues to work in and through us to bring life out of all the harm that death can inflict on us. We have this faith, this confidence, this hope, because Jesus died a very real death on the cross. But we also have this faith, this confidence, this hope, because God raised Jesus to a new life that is just as real. That means death will not have the last word for anyone.

The hope of the Gospel is the promise of Jesus’ resurrection. It’s the promise that the life God revealed in Jesus’ resurrection is a new kind of life that is stronger than the worst that death and all its powers and those who align themselves with them can throw at us. Paul points to this hope when he insists that “Death is swallowed up in victory” (1 Cor 15:54), the victory Jesus won when God raised him from death. Paul can go so far as to “taunt” death like one might do to a defeated and humiliated bully: “O death, where is your victory? O death, where is your sting?” (1 Cor 15:55, NLT). The reason he can act so confidently in the face of the harm that death still can and does inflict on us is because he knows that God has given us “victory” over all of it “through our Lord Jesus Christ” (1 Cor 15:57). The life that God has injected into this world through Jesus’ resurrection has already defeated death and all the powers and persons aligned with it. And the promise of our faith is that this new life will finally and fully define all creation. For everyone and everything!

Our faith and our hope exist in a balance. We don’t naively water down the power of death or the very real harm those who align themselves with evil can do in our world. Rather, with Paul we take all of that seriously as an “enemy.” But on the other hand, we don’t just give up in the face of the sometimes overwhelming discouragement we feel over the influence of those powers and persons. That’s because we’ve seen the light of new life that dawned on that first Easter morning, and with Paul and the hosts of believers throughout the ages we put our faith and our hope in the power of that new life.[5] We hold our faith and our hope in the power of God to overcome evil in this world in a balance. But the scale is tipped in favor of hope, because Jesus’ resurrection points us to the day when the final victory will come.

We don’t place our hope in some idealistic vision that attributes to humanity a goodness that can prevail against all evil. There is much goodness to be found in the human family, to be sure. But it’s not equal to the task of overcoming the powers of evil and those who align themselves with it. Neither do we place our hope in sheer determination and willpower to resist in the face of all the wrongs that are so blatantly perpetrated in our day, every day. Human willpower isn’t sufficient to the task either. We place our hope in the confidence that, as the great Swiss theologian Karl Barth said, “God is not God in vain.”[6] Or as Paul puts it in our lesson for today, ultimately God will be “utterly supreme over everything everywhere” (1 Cor 15:28, NLT).[7] And so we place our hope in God, and in the victory he has won in Jesus Christ. And that hope leads us to the confidence that God will fulfill all that he has promised to do. One day, we will share in the new life that Jesus now enjoys.

So how then shall we live in these times of turmoil? Do we retreat behind the walls of our homes and churches and sit back, waiting for God to work a miracle? Or do we “plunge into the present struggle” as our affirmation of faith last week called us to do, putting the courage and energy our faith and hope give us to good use here and now?[8] I think St. Paul would have us do the latter. After all that he had to say about the reality of Jesus’ resurrection and the hope it gives us, Paul concluded this chapter by saying, “So, my dear brothers and sisters, be strong and immovable. Always work enthusiastically for the Lord, for you know that nothing you do for the Lord is ever useless” (1 Cor 15:58, NLT). That last phrase is often translated more literally “in the Lord your labor is not in vain.” We may or may not see tangible results from our work. But I believe that every act of integrity, every act of kindness, every act motivated by faith and hope and love can and does make a difference.[9] Not just because of our sincerity, or our determination, but because the new life of our resurrected lord Jesus means that what we do here and now is “not in vain”!

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[1] © Alan Brehm 2025. A sermon delivered by Rev. Alan Brehm PhD on 2/23/2025 for Hickman Presbyterian Church.

[2] Cf. Shirley C. Guthrie, Christian Doctrine, rev. ed, 378.

[3] Paul speaks of this especially in Romans 5, where he contrasts the effects of death’s “reign” with the effects of God’s grace that lead to the “victory” that we have through Jesus Christ (cf. esp. Rom 5:17). See especially The Message translation: “If death got the upper hand through one man’s wrongdoing, can you imagine the breathtaking recovery life makes, absolute life, in those who grasp with both hands this wildly extravagant life-gift, this grand setting-everything-right, that the one man Jesus Christ provides?” Cf. also Anthony C. Thiselton, The First Epistle to the Corinthians: a commentary on the Greek text, p.1302.

[4] This was Harold Kushner’s view in Why Bad Things Happen to Good People. He and his wife had experienced the loss of a child, so while I may disagree with his view, I would not want to criticize him personally.

[5] Cf. Guthrie, Christian Doctrine, 283. See also ibid., 285, where he says that Christians “know of a power at work here and now greater than the power of evil, a power that keeps breaking into our godless and godforsaken world to heal old wounds, make new beginnings, and (if only now and then, here and there) give us a glimpse of the final victory of God’s compassion and justice that are on the way.” See further, ibid., 375: “The God in whom we hope is a God who not only will be but is the powerful and compassionate Creator and Ruler of the world. The crucified and risen Christ who will come to overthrow all the powers of darkness and evil that spoil God’s good creation and human life in it has already triumphed over them and even now is at work to complete the work he has begun.”

[6] Cf. Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, 3.4.1:196. While he concedes that work of reconciliation that Jesus has accomplished through the cross and resurrection (elsewhere he calls it “the accomplished alteration of the whole world situation”; ibid., p. 191) still faces opposition in this world, he insists that we must see this “battle” as resulting in the victory of God.

[7] Cf. Jürgen Moltmann, Theology of Hope, 163, where he points to the final victory of Jesus’ resurrection as serving “the sole and all-embracing lordship of God.”

[8] Cf. “A Declaration of Faith,” 10.5 (Presbyterian Church in the United States, 117th General Assembly 1977, reissued by Presbyterian Church [U.S.A.], 1991).

[9] Cf. Guthrie, Christian Doctrine, 280-81: “we can and must confidently throw ourselves into the fight against evil in our own lives and in the world around us, knowing that we do not fight alone but with the one who is stronger than all the forces of evil.”

Now is the Time

Now is the Time

John 12:20-32[1]

Our faith makes some pretty big promises. Of course, the biggest promise is that if we trust in Jesus, we’ll go to heaven when we die and spend all eternity in the presence of his love. For some of us, that may have been what drew us to faith in the first place. But the problem with that promise is that we really have no way to test it in this life. We won’t “know” whether it’s true until we die. In the meantime, we do have reasons for confidence in that promise. The most important one is that Jesus defeated death on the cross and God raised him to new life on that first Easter Sunday. But then, that did happen a long time ago. So I can understand why some people may have doubts about it. We also have the experience of Jesus living “within our hearts” as the hymn puts it. But again, that’s not something easily demonstrated to someone with questions.

There are other promises that do relate to this life, however. One of them is a promise that we often use in our Assurance of Pardon: “if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new!” (2 Cor 5:17). I think the point is made a bit clearer in the New Living Translation: “anyone who belongs to Christ has become a new person. The old life is gone; a new life has begun!” We might be tempted to think that this is just one particularly dramatic promise. But that’s not the case at all. It’s one of the themes of the Christian faith: those who trust Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior and who entrust their lives to him become whole new people. We heard it last week in our lesson from Ephesians: “because of his great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, made us alive with Christ” (Eph 2:4-5, NIV). It’s the promise I like to use when we observe Ash Wednesday: just as God raised Jesus from the dead, so we too may live a new life (Rom 6:4).

Of course, the problem is that there’s a lot about our lives that doesn’t look or feel very “new.” We might very well agree with the objection quoted in 2 Peter: “From before the times of our ancestors, everything has remained the same since the world was first created” (2 Pet 3:4, NLT). Or even before that, we might agree that “there is nothing new under the sun,” as the “preacher” of Ecclesiastes put it (Eccl 1:9). I’m afraid that’s one of the changes that’s taken place in the last generation or two. People have lost the optimism that used to define our culture. At least for some of us. These days skepticism is much more widespread. I’m not talking about conspiracy theories. I’m talking about the fact that my children’s generation, and the generation after that, look at the world and they see the rich getting richer at their expense. They see people abusing power for their own benefit, regardless of whom they hurt. They see a world that doesn’t look like there’s much reason to believe in the promise that God is “making all things new” (Rev 21:5).

This point of view relates to our Gospel lesson for today. Jesus makes a pretty big promise in this passage. He says, “Now is the judgment of this world; now the ruler of this world will be driven out. And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself” (Jn 12:31-32). It’s a pivotal point in John’s Gospel. The Jewish leaders have just made the decision that Jesus must die to keep them from losing their position and power. Up to this point, Jesus says his “hour has not yet come.” But now, the way events have unfolded convinces him that he has indeed come to his “hour.” But then just what that “hour” means takes a little more attention to John’s Gospel as a whole.

The theme of Jesus’ “hour” in John’s Gospel signifies that Jesus has a sense that his life and ministry are heading toward a conclusion. We saw something like that a few weeks ago in Mark’s Gospel when he told the disciples there that he “must” be handed over, rejected, killed and then raised from the dead. In John’s Gospel, the idea is similar, but a little different. We see a glimpse of that in our lesson when Jesus speaks of being “lifted up.” Of course, we would understand that to mean being “lifted up” on the cross to die. But the whole idea here is that the “hour” toward which Jesus is heading is the entire set of events that would lead to him “glorifying” God, and through which God would “glorify” him: his death on the cross, his resurrection from the dead, and his ascension to return to his place in God’s presence. That gives the idea of being “lifted up” a whole different meaning.

There is a sense in which John’s Gospel presents Jesus’ death, resurrection, and ascension to the Father as the crucial event by which God would change everything. Jesus says it this way in our lesson: “I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself” (Jn 12:32). The fact that Jesus will draw all people to himself also means depriving the so-called “the ruler of this world” from any and all power whatsoever. Just as the “light of life” that Jesus has brought means that the darkness has been dispelled once and for all, so also Jesus’ “lifting up” on the cross, in the resurrection, and at the ascension deprives the powers of evil of any further ability to control our lives.

Well, that’s a really big promise, isn’t it? And the truth of the matter is when we look at the way life goes in our world, we can see all too much evidence that the powers of evil are thriving as much as ever. How many people in this world are affected right now by war, hunger, poverty, addiction, or abuse? How many more are subject to injustice, violence, and oppression? When you look at the fact that those who align themselves with evil in this world seem to be gaining power, not losing it, it can make you wonder whether we can trust Jesus’ promise at all.

But I think it comes down to how we choose to look at things. We can choose to focus on the negative things in this world. We can choose to focus on the negative things in our lives. And when we do, it should come as no surprise that we see a lot of evidence that life in this world is getting worse, not better. Or we can choose to look at things differently. We can choose to look for glimpses of “the beginning of the fulfillment” of God’s promise to make everything new again.[2] We see it every time someone stands up in the midst of all that’s wrong with this world and demonstrates their hope by choosing to make a positive difference for others. We see it every time someone turns away from all that would keep them trapped in darkness and chooses to believe that God loves them and to live their lives in the light of that love.

We all constantly stand before that choice. Whether to focus on all that’s wrong and surrender our lives to the control of those who would harm us and others. Or to focus on the good things that show God is indeed already working among us to make all things new. Jesus’ “hour” came for him to “lifted up” in his death, resurrection, and ascension to reign at God’s right hand. Since that time, the time has come for us everyone in every generation. And so, for us now is the time to decide what we believe is truly real: the hatred, violence, corruption, and oppression in this world, or the new life that God has begun in all of us through Jesus. We can choose which one we believe, and now is the time to make that choice. Now is the time for deciding whether we will give up our lives for the sake of others. Now is the time to decide whether we will open our eyes to see the “beginning of the fulfillment” of God’s promise to make all things new among us and around us already here and now.

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[1] © Alan Brehm 2024. A sermon delivered by Rev. Alan Brehm PhD on 3/17/2024 for Hickman Presbyterian Church, Hickman, NE.

[2] Cf. Henri J. M. Nouwen, Sabbatical Journey: A Diary of his Final Year, 166-167: “life is not empty waiting. It is to wait full of expectation. The knowledge that God will indeed fulfill the promise to renew everything … makes the waiting exciting. We can already see the beginning of the fulfillment. Nature speaks of it every spring; people [speak] of it whenever they smile; …and all of history speaks of it when amid all devastation and chaos, men and women arise who reveal the hope that lives within them … .”

Unprecedented

Unprecedented

Mark 1:1-11[1]

This is the time of year when people think about what will be “new” about the “New Year.” But for those of us who have made more than a few trips around the sun, turning over the calendar may just mark another day. We may find ourselves thinking along with the “preacher” of Ecclesiastes that “What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done; there is nothing new under the sun” (Eccl 1:9). Or to put it in a more familiar way, “The more things change, the more they stay the same.” It’s the moral of the story of Sisyphus, the mythological Greek figure who thought he could outsmart the gods and even cheat death. As a result, he was sentenced to push a boulder up a hill only for it to roll back down again, over and over and over. In both cases, the idea is that all our efforts are in vain.

This sentiment has been around for a long time—for millennia in fact! The myth of Sisyphus goes back to ancient Greece, and Ecclesiastes may be one of the older books in the Hebrew Bible. And yet, there are genuinely “new” things that happen for some of us. Students graduate from High School and move on to the next level. Or they complete their studies and start a career. Couples get married and start their lives together. Or they have children, which changes everything! Those are exciting times for all who are involved. But after a while, even a “new” career falls into a routine. Couples and even families can deal with the same thing. As the years continue to roll around, they may start to feel like every year turns into a repeat of the last one. Monotony sets in, and that leads to boredom. Our flourishing entertainment industry gives ample evidence of the fact that many of us, despite whatever “new” things come our way, feel like our lives are just an endless loop of the same old thing, day by day, month by month, and year after year.

To some extent, that’s a normal part of our human experience. Seasons come and seasons go. We rely on that. Our days and nights and weeks and months and years tend to follow a pattern. That’s not all bad. It’s comforting to know, for example, that the sun will actually come up tomorrow. Having a “normal” life gives us a sense of stability. But when stability turns into monotony, and boredom sets in, we can find ourselves struggling with the idea that none of it really matters. And that leads to despair, a state of mind and heart and soul that results from losing hope that anything we do or say makes any difference at all. More than that, despair cancels out any kind of faith: in God, in life, in the future, in anything. When we lose hope, and we lose faith, we also lose the heart and the will to truly live and love and find joy in doing so.

The message of the Bible, despite the pessimistic declaration of the “preacher” of Ecclesiastes, is a very different one. As the prophet Isaiah declares in the name of the Lord, “I am about to do a new thing” (Isa 43:19). In fact, the new thing that God promised to do would change everything. As the prophet said in the name of the Lord, “I am about to create new heavens and a new earth; the former things shall not be remembered or come to mind” (Isa 65:17). In that setting, the prophet was primarily talking about what God was going to do to set his people free from their captivity in Babylon. The promise was that God was going to change everything; in fact, God’s work was going to change even the heavens and the earth! As we’ve discussed, when the people returned from exile, the reality they faced wasn’t as “new” and as all-encompassing as they expected. There was a lot that stayed the same.

Some might think that God didn’t fulfill his promise after all. But the reason why things didn’t turn out quite the way they expected was because God wasn’t finished fulfilling his promise. The “good news” that the prophet Isaiah proclaimed almost three thousand years ago was a sweeping vision that included all God has in store for his precious creation. And, of course, the essential piece of that “good news” had to do with the birth, ministry, death, resurrection, and reign of Jesus Christ as Lord! We get a glimpse of that “good news” in our Gospel lesson for today. Not only does Mark tell us that the events surrounding Jesus’ birth were part of the fulfillment of God’s promises through the prophet Isaiah. He also demonstrates in several ways that the story of Jesus is the “good news” about the “Son of God.” Now there had been others before Jesus who were called “sons” of God, but Jesus fulfilled that role uniquely.

That’s the point of the affirmation that the Gospel of Mark opens with: “The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God” (Mk 1:1). One of the ironies about Mark’s Gospel is that the only person who truly recognizes Jesus as the “Son of God” is the Roman Centurion who witnessed his death on the cross. Nobody else truly recognizes Jesus as the “Son of God” in Mark’s Gospel. I think the reason for this is that Mark believed people could only truly understand what it meant that Jesus was the “Son of God” in light of the fact that he suffered and died on the cross. In that day, “Sons of God” were supposed to do miraculous deeds, draw huge crowds of followers, enjoy tremendous success, and be recognized by one and all! “Sons of God” in the ancient world were the “stuff of legend,” the focus of mythical stories. But Jesus demonstrated that he was the true “Son of God” by following through with God’s purpose: he took all the suffering of the world onto himself by dying on the cross.

As important as it is that Jesus was born as “God-who-is-with-us,” as important as it is that Jesus died as “God-who-is-for-us,” as important as it is that Jesus was raised to new life and ascended to the right hand of God to reign over all things, as Mark reminds us, this is the “beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.” The change that God made in Jesus was only the beginning. The work of fulfilling the promise of making a whole new heaven and a whole earth would continue through the first Christians, as the New Testament tells us. Through those who were bold enough to declare the news that in Jesus Christ God had begun working to change the whole world, the “good news” continued to be fulfilled in the lives of all who heard the message and took it to heart.

I think what I want to emphasize today is that the “good news” is that God isn’t finished with his work even now. The “good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God” is still in the process of being fulfilled. And God will not stop working to make all things new until he has changed everything and everyone by the power of his unfailing love. To those who say, “there is nothing new under the sun,” I say that through Jesus Christ God is continually doing something new among us, even now. To those who say, “The more things change, the more they stay the same,” I say that it’s time to open your eyes to see the light of God’s love in Jesus Christ that is still shining on us all to this day. To those who say that the promises of the Bible are just a lot of wishful thinking because life doesn’t ever really change, I say that it’s time to break the chains of hopelessness and despair. It’s time to open our hearts to the faith that the God who loves us will not stop changing everything until his work is finished, and it’s time to celebrate with joy the signs of God’s work that are all around us. In Jesus, God did something truly new and unprecedented. And he continues to do so among us and through us to this day.

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[1] © 2024 Alan Brehm. A sermon delivered by Rev. Alan Brehm PhD on 1/7/2024 for Hickman Presbyterian Church, Hickman, NE.

God's Mighty Power

God’s Mighty Power

Ephesians 1:15-23[1]

I’ve said many times recently that it’s a difficult time to be the church. It seems like the pandemic and everything we went through changed so many things. One of the great challenges we face is the diminished influence we seem to have in our communities. People of all ages view Sunday as “fun day,” not the “Lord’s Day.” And as such a great many people who once regularly attended worship are spending their Sundays doing everything but coming to church. It can leave those of us who are here feeling inadequate, weak, and wondering where we’ve failed. It makes us question whether we’re doing anything right. It may even cause us to doubt whether it’s “worth it” to continue to devote our time and energy to the church at all.

Believe it or not, church attendance is not at its lowest point in history. It’s not even at the lowest point in the history of this country. Church attendance in this country was at its lowest point by percentage of the population in the early 1800’s. I’m not entirely sure why that was the case. It was a time when the world was turning from “superstition” to reason. I’m sure that played a role. But the simple truth was that the people in that time didn’t think the church was an important part of their lives. The fact of the matter is that it was even worse during the Middle Ages. Most people literally only went to church on Easter Sunday. That was the case for centuries. It wasn’t until the changes leading up to and following the Reformation 500 years ago that people began attending worship more regularly. It makes me wonder how those who continued to worship at that time kept going in the face of such overwhelming odds!

The church to which Paul was writing his letters, like our lesson from Ephesians for today, was facing overwhelming odds. Although they looked to the same scriptures and worshipped the same one true God as the Jewish people, they were opposed and harassed by many of the Jewish religious leaders. And they faced the same opposition from their own former friends, neighbors, and family from all the different people groups that made up the church. Because they no longer worshipped the “gods” their communities worshipped, they were harassed, attacked, and even expelled from their lives. And although the Romans were in charge, they could care less about what they considered an offshoot sect of the Jewish religion.

It was in that setting that the Apostle Paul wrote Ephesians. He begins this letter with long expression of his thanks to God for all that God had done in their lives to bring them to faith in Jesus, and to change them into a people who would love and serve God. God’s grace had already been at work in their lives through the message of the Gospel and through the power of Jesus’ death and resurrection. In our lesson for today, he shifts to a prayer for the church. There is a sense in which Paul could say that he knew they already had everything they needed in Christ to live fully into their commitment to following him. At the same time, I think Paul knew the struggles they faced, and so he prayed for this church, just like he prayed for all the churches he had encountered.

The gist of his prayer was that they would be able to continue to live out their faith confidently in the face of all they had to overcome. The focus of his prayer was that they would know “the confident hope” God had given them through Jesus Christ (Eph 1:18). As we saw last week, the hope that the Psalmist held out for the people of Israel in hard times was that their help came from the one who made all the heavens and the earth. If he had the power to create all things, then he had the power to help them. This week, we hear the Apostle Paul encouraging the believers of his day that, despite the hardships they faced, their hope was in the one who raised Jesus Christ from the dead and seated him at his right hand, “far above any ruler or authority or power or leader or anything else—not only in this world but also in the world to come” (Eph 1:21, NLT).

We may take that for granted because we’ve heard it many times—perhaps all our lives. But Paul doesn’t want us to take it for granted at all. In fact, he “piles up” words to describe God’s mighty power in raising Jesus from the dead. The reason for that is because Paul calls us to take a step beyond trusting the God who created all the heavens and the earth. He calls us to trust in the God who has the power to overcome everything that opposes his purposes in this world, as well as everything that threatens to harm us in any way. And he demonstrated that power once and for all by raising Jesus from the dead and giving him the “name that is above every name.”

Although we may not always see it visibly, the promise is that God’s mighty power is working right now to change all things and all people. And he is doing that precisely by what he is doing in and through the church. Paul could compare what God is doing in and through us to what God did when he raised Jesus from the dead. With the same power God exerted when he raised Jesus from the dead, he is working in and through each and every one of us right now! When we doubt whether what we’re doing is making any difference, we can look to the empty cross and remember this promise! The empty cross is a visible reminder to us that Christ is not ruling over all things from afar, but in and through the church! In fact, Paul celebrates the victory of Christ’s reign over all things as if it is something that has already been accomplished.[2] You may have noticed that today is “Christ the King” Sunday. It is the day in the church calendar when we celebrate the wonderful promise that Christ is reigning in and through us to make all things new. In a very real sense, every Sunday is a celebration of the resurrection of Jesus, which points us to the final victory through God’s mighty power in and through Jesus Christ.

That may not make much sense when you look at things. Life seems to go on just as it always has. Those who are willing to stop at nothing to gain wealth and power are still getting away with it. Those who use violence to control and oppress others are still wreaking havoc in people’s lives. And it can seem like our gathering here to sing the songs of the faith, and hear the Scriptures read, and pray the prayers that have been prayed for centuries isn’t making much difference. But the mystery of Christ’s reign in and through his body, the church, is that God’s mighty power is at work in all of it, right here and right now. Everything that we do in this church, even that which may seem “ordinary” and “insignificant,” is a part of that hope. The risen Christ who reigns at God’s right hand over all things is working even now, though it may seem frustratingly hidden and subtle. Though all has not yet come to the place where “every knee” bows and “every tongue” confesses Jesus Christ as Lord, everything we do here today, and as a church, is a part of what he is doing in and through us to reach that final goal.[3] May we continue to serve Christ faithfully in that confident hope!

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[1] ©2023 Alan Brehm. A sermon delivered by Rev. Alan Brehm PhD on 11/26/2023 for Hickman Presbyterian Church, Hickman, NE.

[2] Ralph P. Martin, Ephesians, Colossians, and Philemon, 23: Paul offers the “assurance that there is no part of the created order which is capable of effectively and finally thwarting the divine purpose, since Christ the head of the universe has already been installed in place.” Cf. Pheme Perkins, “The Letter to the Ephesians,” New Interpreters Bible, XI:384-85

[3] Cf. A. T. Lincoln, Ephesians, Word Biblical Commentary 42, 79-81.

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—are 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 Living One

 The Living One

Luke 24:1-12[1]

Sometimes I wonder whether what we do and say here still makes a difference in people’s lives. After all, the focus of our faith is on events that happened a long time ago in a far away place. I think it’s easy to just set it all aside because it doesn’t seem like something that happened so long ago and so far away could have much to do with “real life” in the 21^st century. Or we may view faith as something that relates to our “eternal destiny,” which for many of us feels like a future so remote that we don’t really give it much thought. So on a day like today I may not be the only one wondering whether anything we hear or do makes a real difference in our lives right here and right now.

Of course, many of us do look to Jesus as an example for our lives. We find meaning in his teachings about how to live and how to love. But that doesn’t distinguish Jesus from any of the other great teachers throughout the ages. And the hard truth of this world is that from a certain point of view you could say it hasn’t really made much of a difference. There are plenty of people in this world who are caught in vicious circles of poverty, violence, injustice, and despair. Right now, millions of human beings are at the mercy of those who put their faith in “might makes right.” In the face of all that, “love your enemies” can feel pretty empty.

But I believe that our Gospel lesson for today points us in a different direction—toward a hope that never dies, a hope for new life that makes a difference right here and right now. The story of the women discovering that Jesus’ tomb was empty doesn’t necessarily in and of itself prove anything. But there is more to it than just the empty tomb. Whatever you may think about “angelic messengers,” what they told the women was confirmed in their encounters with Jesus. And the gist of their message is couched in the question, “Why do you seek the Living One among the dead?” The point of that question is to make it clear that the one they thought was lying dead in a cemetery is actually “the Living One.”

Now, to fully appreciate this, we need to look at the background of that phrase in the Bible. God is “the Living One” throughout the Bible. He is the one who gives life to all creation, including those of us who are living and breathing here today. In contrast to the idols made of wood and stone and precious metals, the “Living” God is the one who is able to make a difference in people’s lives here and now. I’ll admit that doesn’t always happen the way we expect, but the God who is “the Living One” shows up in our lives in surprising ways. I don’t know about you, but in my experience, those surprises have come at just the right time.

So when the angels in the empty tomb call Jesus “the Living One,” the idea is more than just a dead man who has come back to life. Rather, the idea is that Jesus again shares the life of God. And the first Christians became convinced that this was true not primarily because of the empty tomb or the angels’ message, but because they encountered Jesus as “the Living One” personally. Those encounters made a great deal of difference for them. Instead of a tragedy that stole all their hope from them, the cross was transformed into good news for us all. The cross shows us not the heartbreaking end of a failed religious leader, but rather the suffering love of the God-who-is-with-us and the God-who-is-for-us. And nothing, not even death, can prevent God’s love from claiming us all.

But more than that, encountering the risen Lord Jesus as “the Living One” points us to the power of God to bring new life from death. It’s the promise that the goal toward which God has been working and continues to work is a whole new creation. As our affirmation of faith for today puts it, it is the promise of “a new world … in which God is really honored as God, human beings are truly loving, and God will … make all things right on earth.” That may sound too good to be true, but it’s a theme that runs through to the very end of the Bible. At the end of the book of Revelation, God declares “now I am making all things new” (Rev. 21:5).

And what makes all this more than just “pie in the sky” wishful thinking is that God raised Jesus from the dead. In Jesus, “the Living One,” God’s new creation breaks into our lives here and now. It changes our world by promising that all the pain and suffering will be turned into good and all the death and destruction will be changed into new life. Just the assurance that Jesus “the Living One” is constantly with us encourages us in the challenges we face. But more than that, as “the Living One,” Jesus points us to the final hope of sharing the life of God’s new creation with him in the end.

Without Jesus “the Living One” and the hope we have in him, life in this world can seem empty. When all you can see is the vicious circles of poverty, violence, injustice, and despair, there’s not much left to give life meaning. But the fact that Jesus overcame death to become “the Living One” points us to the promise that nothing, not even death itself, can separate us from the hope we have through him. The new life that raised him from the dead spreads from him to everyone who encounters him. And as we encounter the “Living One,” we each take our place and do our part in spreading that new life throughout all creation until finally God makes a whole new world!

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[1] © 2022 Alan Brehm. A sermon delivered by Rev. Alan Brehm, Ph. D. on 4/17/2022 for Hickman Presbyterian Church, Hickman, NE.