First Sunday in Lent
(B)
February 18, 2018
Text: Mark 1:9-15
St. Mark paints a picture
of stark contrasts in our Holy Gospel this morning. First the beautiful
Trinitarian picture of our Lord’s Baptism in the Jordan, the heavens torn open
and the Spirit descending on Him as a dove (Mark 1:10), and the voice of the
Father from heaven: “You are my beloved Son; with you I am well pleased”
(v. 11; ESV). But then a violent transition. That beautiful dove,
the symbol of peace, the Holy Spirit now filling our Lord Jesus to the brim, “immediately
drove him out into the wilderness” (v. 12). Drove Him out, cast Him
out, the same Greek word used when Jesus casts out the evil spirits.
Threw Him out, you could say. Immediately upon His Baptism, the Holy
Spirit threw Jesus out into the wilderness, the place of nothingness, where the
demons are said to dwell, the home of Satan. Utterly alone except for the
company of wild beasts, our Lord languishes for 40 days in the place of hunger
and thirst, loneliness and desolation, death. Why? To be
tempted. To do battle with His archenemy, Satan. To be
tested. To be faithful. To be victorious where you, and Adam, your
father, have not. To love the Lord His God, His heavenly Father, with all
His heart and soul and mind and strength (Mark 12:30; cf. Deut. 6:5). To
love His neighbor, love you, even more than Himself. And to do it all in
your place, for you, so that it counts for you, so that His victory is your
victory. “For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize
with our weaknesses, but one who in every respect has been tempted as we are,
yet without sin” (Heb. 4:15). He wins the battle! And the holy
angels minister to Him (Mark 1:13).
You are baptized into Christ. You are clothed with Christ. You are
in Christ. And so what happens to Christ, happens to you. You are
baptized, and the Spirit comes upon you, and God says that you are His beloved
child, with whom He is well pleased. But then immediately, violently, the
Spirit throws you out into the wilderness of this fallen world. He throws
you out into the place of nothingness, of doubt and unbelief, of sin and sorrow
and death. This is where the evil spirits are said to dwell. And
they do. You know it by experience. You only have to turn on the
evening news to see the evidence of their handiwork. And it is not for
nothing that Jesus calls Satan “the ruler of this world” (John 12:31;
14:30; 16:11). It is a dangerous place, this wilderness, a place where
you hunger and thirst for righteousness, a place that is often lonely and
desolate (that’s why we need each other in the Church), a place where, on your
own, you would die. Spiritually. And eternally. You would
die. Why does this Spirit put you here? This life, in this world, is
the Spirit’s school of cross and trial. You are here to be tempted.
You are here to do battle. You are here to be tested. You are here
to be faithful.
But there is a great difference between you and Jesus in this wilderness
sojourn. Jesus’ faithfulness is the faithfulness that counts for
you. And thank God for that, because you aren’t always faithful.
You fall. You sin. You are hit by Satan’s arrows. Sometimes
you even like it. You’re perfectly happy to trade the bread of God’s holy
Word for the bread of stones. You’re
perfectly happy to trade preaching and God’s Word for entertainment. You prefer the fleeting pleasures of this
world to the eternal joy of Christ crucified.
You want power. You want
glory. Not humiliation, death, and
blood. Repent. The only Jesus we
know is the one nailed to the cross.
Yes, risen from the dead, absolutely, but first crucified, for you
cannot have a risen Lord if He is not first a dead one. But thank God,
this isn’t that kind of test for you, to see if you’ll be faithful enough to be
saved. Jesus did all that already. This time of trial and
tribulation is different. It is a time to crucify your flesh. To
drive you to despair of yourself, your righteousness, your abilities, your
talent, your loveable-ness. To sing
about your own helplessness, bondage, and death. To make you realize
that, in and of yourself, you are as empty and dead as the wilderness.
That apart from the Holy Spirit who is in you, you would be the dwelling place
of evil spirits, under the rule of Satan. You would be dead. You
would be, not a son of God, but a son of hell.
The wilderness is not a pleasant place to be, but it has its good
purpose. The Holy Spirit has done this kind of thing before.
Remember Moses was exiled to the wilderness for 40 years after killing the
Egyptian. 40 years spent in the middle of nowhere, tending the flocks of
Jethro, marrying Jethro’s daughter, living the life of a Bedouin. Moses
was 80 when YHWH called him from the burning bush, and he had four decades of
wilderness wandering still ahead of him. For those 40 years Moses spent
with his father-in-law Jethro, were just a trial run, a practice, a
preparation, for the 40 years Moses would spend shepherding God’s flock, God’s
holy Bride, the children of Israel, in the wilderness between Egypt and the
Promised Land. St. Paul tells us the people of God were baptized into
Moses in the cloud and in the sea, when they went through the Red Sea as on dry
ground (1 Cor. 10:2). And then they immediately found themselves in the
wilderness, the place of nothingness, the place of hunger and thirst, and,
apart from God, the place of death. They had to live by faith that God
would bring them into the Promised Land, that God would be faithful to His
Word, that His Word would keep them alive and bring them joy and blessing, that
He would feed them with His manna. It was all a picture of our life in
the wilderness, as the Church, the people of God, the New Israel.
For just as Israel of old failed to be faithful in their wilderness wandering,
so are we. Just as they grumbled and looked back longingly to the flesh
pots of Egypt, so we moan and complain about our lot in life and pine after the
good old days of our slavery to sin. Just as they fashioned idols and sat
down to eat and drink before them, and rose up to play, so we run after other
gods and follow after the pleasures of the flesh. Just as they trembled
and feared before their enemies and forgot that it is the LORD their God who
fights for them and wins the victory, so we tremble and fear before the devil,
the world, and our own sinful flesh. And we think we will never receive
our inheritance in the Promised Land, because our enemies are too strong for
us. Of course, we’re half right. They are too strong for
us. But our Lord is stronger. He fights them. He defeats
them. Our Holy Gospel is all about that. Where Israel, where we,
have failed in our wilderness journey, the Lord Jesus Christ has not. He
did not grumble or complain, but went willingly into the wilderness for
us. He did not eat and drink and rise up to play, but fasted and denied
Himself, for us, living not by bread at all, but by every Word that proceeds
from the mouth of His Father. He did not fear before His enemy, but
triumphed over him for us, by the sword of His holy Word. And now,
baptized into Christ, His victory is our victory. His faithfulness is our
faithfulness. And He does not leave us in the wilderness alone. He
is with us, as our Mighty Fortress, protecting us, providing for us, picking us
up when we fall, speaking to us His Word of life, feeding us with His Manna,
His true Body and Blood. And the angels are ministering to us,
surrounding us to keep us safe in body and soul.
Lent has this way of making this all so vivid for us. Lent is about our
baptismal life in this wilderness, our journey from the font to our Father in
heaven, our battle in the meantime with Satan, a battle which has already been
fought and won for us by the Lord’s faithfulness, by His cross and death, by
His resurrection life. Many of us give something up for Lent, but we
don’t do it to impress God or impress others or make ourselves more
righteous. We do it to remind us how weak we are, how impossible it is
even to give up chocolate, much less give up sin. Some of us add a
discipline for Lent, which is always good. We certainly add the
discipline of more services and more devotions. But again, we don’t do it
to impress God or anybody else. And we don’t do it because it makes us
that much more worthy of heaven. No. We do it because we know that
man does not live by bread alone, but by every Word that proceeds from the
mouth of God (Matt. 4:4). Even as we fast, we feast on the gifts of our
Lord Christ. Lent gives us to see our cross in the shadow of His.
Your suffering, your sorrow, your sin, your death… it is all taken up into
His. Lent imposes the cross of Christ on our foreheads and on our
hearts. It is the banner of our Lord’s victory over the devil, that the
serpent who once overcame by the tree of the garden, has now likewise by the
tree of the cross been overcome (Proper Preface for Good Friday). And
after the cross, there is Easter and the empty tomb. After the Lenten
fast comes the Feast. After the wilderness, there is the Promised
Land. Christ is risen. Christ will raise you from the dead.
Blessed Lent. In the Name of the Father, and of the Son (+), and of the
Holy Spirit. Amen.
Lenten Midweek I
“Garden to Garden:
Eden to Heaven”[1]
February 21, 2018
Text: Gen. 3:22-24; Rev. 22:1-5
Two
Gardens, one in the Beginning, one in the End.
They are bookends of the Holy Scriptures, of the story of man… our
story. And there are similarities
between the two, but there are radical differences. The first Garden is Eden. Paradise, we call it, a word that has its
origin in Persia, where the great kings enjoyed an inner sanctum in their
palaces, an enclosed garden of delights with exotic plants, exotic animals,
creature comforts, and exotic pleasures.
It was man’s best attempt to fulfill the instinctive desire, built into
every one of us, to return to the Garden, to Eden, to the Paradise of God. But of course, such a garden paradise was
only acquired by the greatest, the richest, the elite among us. We still have that today. It used to be featured on a show called Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, which
many of you probably watched religiously.
Oh, how we envied the palaces and gardens
and pleasures that money could buy. Now
we have reality shows that basically do the same thing, only without Robin
Leach. This is why we covet. We want to get back to the Garden. We don’t usually logically process that, but
that’s what the emptiness is. We know
we’re missing out. We know we’re far
from home. We try to fill the gaping
black hole in our hearts with things that resemble the Eden we never knew. But even when champagne wishes and caviar
dreams come true, they fall far short.
What
was Eden like? What made it so unbelievably
good, the true Paradise of which our best efforts are only a dim and degenerate
copy? Eden was beautiful, of course, or
we should say, the Garden within Eden.
Eden is the region, the Garden is the specific location. God planted it Himself. Before other places on earth had vegetation,
before it had even rained, God planted the Garden and caused every kind of
plant and tree bearing fruit to spring up.
It’s worth a re-read sometime this week, the creation account. And there He placed man, Adam, breathing into
him the breath of life, or, as you know, “spirit,” “wind,” and “breath” are all
the same word in Hebrew, so you could say, “He spirited into Adam the Spirit
of life,” the Holy Spirit, giving man his own spirit, or soul. And He brought all the animals to Adam to
name them, to be classified, and to show Adam that it is not good for him to be
alone, that the male has his mate, that male and female go together. And so, God put Adam into a deep sleep and
did a surgery. He opened Adam’s side,
and from that side God formed the woman, and the two were now one flesh and
were to cleave to each other from now on, for the rest of their lives (which at
this point, before sin, would have been forever). That’s what marriage is, incidentally. Our culture is wasting a lot of time and
effort trying to define, or undefined, as the case may be, marriage, when here
it is written down for us. One man, one
woman, united as one flesh in love and faithfulness, for life. But I digress. The man and his wife were given to work the
garden, to tend it, which probably consisted of expanding it. And it wasn’t hard. It wasn’t burdensome or toilsome. They loved it. Work only became a four letter word after the
Fall, after sin, after the curse. But
here, they were having the time of their life. Think about what a great
honeymoon it must have been! Time alone
in paradise to get to know one another and make a marriage.
But
as great as all that is, that’s not even it, yet. That’s not what made it so unbelievably good,
the true Paradise. What made it so
unbelievably good is that God was in it, in perfect Communion with His people,
Adam and Eve. He visited them
visibly. He walked with them in the cool
of the day. He spoke with them face to
face. (And no, this is not where we sing
your favorite hymn, “In the Garden,” which works just as well as a song about
you and your boyfriend. Sing it if you
want, but not around me. Although,
wives, if you want to put your husband in a good mood, sing it to him, and
about him… he’ll be puddy in your hands.)
We often say things like, “ I wish I could just see Jesus, and ask Him everything on my mind, and have Him speak
His assurances to me face to face.”
There’s that longing for the Garden again. Adam and Eve had that! That’s what made it a Paradise. Perfect fellowship, perfect Communion with
our God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
Until… Until that fateful moment, probably very
early on, as in days or hours after their creation, when Eve was standing
around gazing at the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil and its forbidden
fruit. Now, this was not yet the
sin. This tree, you have to understand,
is the place of worship for Adam and Eve.
Luther calls it their altar. For
here they were to demonstrate their love for God by obedience to the
commandment, which was given for their good: Don’t eat of this tree, for in the
day you eat of it you shall surely die.
Well, you know how the rest of this goes. The serpent appears, Satan, our old wiley
foe. Eve listens to his argument, agrees
with it after a little theological discussion about the finer points of the
commandment, believes God is holding out on her, and she takes and eats what is
not hers to take and eat. And Adam, who
has been entrusted with the preaching of this commandment as the first
Christian pastor, and apparently has been standing there silently the whole
time… He listens to the preaching of his wife instead of the Word of God, and
he takes and eats what is not his to take and eat. And this is not a Communion meal. This is an anti-Communion. Communion with God is broken, and Adam and
Eve die. Because of their separation
from the Lord and Giver of Life. They
die spiritually in that moment. They
begin to die physically. They age. Their body begins to deteriorate. And they will die eternally, slaves of the
serpent. As will their children, you and
I, who inherit their sin and guilt.
Unless God acts.
But
they are afraid of God. They are
naked. They sew fig leaves. They hide.
God comes anyway. He knows. They will not confess. They blame God and the devil and one
another. Broken Communion. Broken relationships. Broken lives.
And God curses, first the serpent, but then the man and his wife. Work will now be a four letter word. It will require blood, sweat, and tears, and
there will be thorns and thistles. There
will be pain in childbirth and rivalry between the sexes. And man can no longer live in the Garden,
lest he eat of the Tree of Life, and live forever, which is to say, live a
half-life. Live physically, while dead
spiritually and eternally. Continue to
deteriorate, get sick, get hurt, sin and be sinned against, suffer… but never
die. No end. No relief.
No rest. So it is a gracious
thing that God does in casting man out of the Garden and guarding it with
cherubim and flaming swords. It is for
our protection. But now, we long to get
back. We try to get back by our own
works, by our own reason and strength, by creating our own paradise, a
McMansion, two cars, 2.5 kids, and a dog, or whatever Paradise looks like to
us. But as wonderful as those things
are, they miss the mark. They don’t fill
the hole. Because what makes a paradise
Paradise, is Communion with God.
What
shall we do? What can we do? Not a thing. We are helpless and hopeless. We are bound to sin and death. But God does something. And that is what will bring us home. God did not send our first parents away
without a Promise. The Seed of the woman
will come. He will crush the serpent’s
head. By Himself suffering the heal crushing,
mortal bite of the serpent. God will be
born of a woman, and He will suffer and die.
This is all about the cross. This
is all about Jesus. But in doing that,
He will defeat the serpent forever. He
will die our death, the death that comes as a result of Adam and Eve taking and
eating. He will put our original sin
(which is what we call our inherited sinful nature and guilt) and every actual
sin you and I have committed to death in His body on the tree. It will be done away with by His blood. And, therefore, we will not die, but
live. For Christ is risen from the dead,
but our sins will never rise. And there
is Communion with God once again. We
even call it that. The body and blood of
Christ, crucified and risen for you, given to you to take and eat, take and
drink, the fruit of the tree of the cross, the tree of life. And eating of it, and drinking of it, you
live forever, a full, God-given life as He has always meant you to live
it. The altar, beloved, is your
Eden.
But
there is another Garden described in our readings this evening. It is the Garden of which the altar is only a
little glimpse and foretaste. It is the
Garden of Heaven, the forever Garden of new creation and resurrection. This is the Garden where the Scriptures leave
us in the end. This is the culmination
of our story, where we all live happily ever after, for eternity. Only this isn’t fantasy. It is real.
It is the truth. And what makes
it so unbelievably good, better, even than Eden? Oh, it is beautiful, to be sure. There is the river of the water of life, just
as there were the rivers in Eden, but this river is that which flows from the
throne of God Himself, and of the Lamb, Jesus Christ. Its tributaries flow into our baptismal
fonts. And there is the tree of life
once again, on either side of the river, and we have full access to its
fruit. Twelve kinds it bears, the number
of the Church, the twelve patriarchs, the twelve apostles, the whole Church of
God from all times and places. We are to
take and eat its fruit. And thus we are
healed. Its leaves are for the healing
of the nations. What a spectacular
place. But that’s not yet it. That’s not what makes it Paradise.
God
and the Lamb are there. We will see our
God face to face, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
Jesus. We will be with Him. Communion restored. Fully.
Worship. Singing. Eating and drinking. His Name on our foreheads. His Name is already on us, in fact, in
Baptism. But then, we’ll see it with our
eyes. No more curse. No more bad.
No more fear or hurt. No more
night. God Himself, and Jesus Christ,
His Son, the Lamb, will be our Light. And
we will reign with Him. We’ll be the
kings and queens with the Garden Paradise.
Forever and ever. Paradise
restored. Because Communion is
restored. And now, we have a little bite
and sip of it. In the Name of the
Father, and of the Son (+), and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
[1] The theme and structure of
this sermon are from Jeffery Pulse, Return
from Exile: A Lenten Journey (St. Louis: Concordia, 2017).
I have never heard it described like that before. Insightful and beautiful.
ReplyDeleteBut now I have to go find the lyrics to In the Garden as well. :)