Bread from Heaven: A Meditation on Exodus 16 and John 6, for the 10th Sunday after Pentecost

Bread in the ancient world was synonymous with life.  To have bread was to have sustenance, and to be without it was to be in famine.  If the crops yielded well, there was grain enough for all to eat bread, but if the crops failed or were destroyed, the people might perish from hunger.  While the people might eat many things, bread was the foundation, since the grain necessary to make bread was also related to the crops necessary to feed the sheep, goats, oxen, and other livestock.  To have bread was to be sustained in life, and to be without it was to be in peril of death.

For the people of God in Exodus 16, they had been led from the slavery of Egypt into the desert wilderness, finding that there was little to eat.  They feared for their lives and the lives of their children, eventually complaining against Moses and their God, saying it would have been better to die by the Lord’s hand in Egypt where they had plenty to eat, than to die by the Lord’s hand in the wilderness of starvation.  As the people were reduced in their needs to depend solely upon their saving God for their very lives, God provided for them a bread from heaven to sustain them.  Every morning, He sent for them enough food for a day’s meals, and challenged the people to gather only what they needed for the day.  On the day before the Sabbath, He sent enough food for two days, and nothing on the Sabbath itself.  The people were given very specific terms for how to gather and consume their daily bread, violation of which led them to hunger, worms, and other foul consequences.  In this pattern the people of God lived for 40 years until they reached the Promised Land, sustained by the grace of God’s bread from heaven, received in faith on the terms by which God had given it.

In the sixth chapter of St. John’s Gospel, the image of bread returns.  Having fed the people earthly bread earlier, Jesus begins to teach the people about the bread they really need.  If earthly bread is sustenance for earthly life, there is also a bread which sustains the spiritual life.  Explaining to the people that striving only for earthly bread will result in the same kind of eventual physical death that their fathers experienced in the desert with Moses, Jesus goes on to teach them about a bread that will sustain their life forever.  And just as the people of God with Moses were confused about the manna provided so many centuries earlier, the people with Jesus were confused about this new bread from heaven He was offering them:

Verily, verily, I say unto you, He that believeth on

me hath everlasting life. I am that bread of life.

Your fathers did eat manna in the wilderness, and

are dead.  This is the bread which cometh down from

heaven, that a man may eat thereof, and not die.  I am

the living bread which came down from heaven: if any man

eat of this bread, he shall live forever: and the bread that I

will give is my flesh, which I will give for the life of the

world.

The Jews therefore strove among themselves,

saying, How can this man give us his flesh to eat?

Then Jesus said unto them, Verily, verily, I say unto you,

Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of man, and drink his

blood, ye have no life in you. Whoso eateth my

flesh, and drinketh my blood, hath eternal life; and I will

raise him up at the last day.  For my flesh is meat

indeed, and my blood is drink indeed. He that eateth

my flesh, and drinketh my blood, dwelleth in me, and I in

him.

As the living Father hath sent me, and I live by

the Father: so he that eateth me, even he shall live by me.

This is that bread which came down from heaven:

not as your fathers did eat manna, and are dead: he that

eateth of this bread shall live forever.

The other Gospel writers also refer to this bread from heaven, and make explicit reference to it when they quote Jesus establishing His Supper.  As Jesus celebrates the Passover with His disciples, He very clearly took the bread and said, “This is my Body, broken for you.”  Afterwards He took the cup and said, “This cup is the New Covenant in my Blood, which is shed for you, for the forgiveness of sins.” This Supper was to be, and has been every day since, the very ongoing connection of God’s people to the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus.  The same Jesus which was nailed to the Cross for their salvation, would be present in the bread and the wine of Holy Communion on every altar where His peopled gathered in faith around His Word.  Here the forgiveness of sins He won on His Cross would be literally eaten and drunk by his people, sustaining their spiritual life in Him forever.

In the time of Moses as in the time of Jesus, the people were scandalized by the means God used to sustain His people.  Many people in Moses’ time rebelled against God, and tried to have His manna in ways God had not provided it, with the result that instead of being a life sustaining bread, it became to them a curse of worms and disease.  In Jesus’ time, many of His disciples decided to abandon Jesus after He told them they must eat His flesh and drink His blood to have eternal life, leaving the life-giving Bread from Heaven behind so as to cling to their own disbelieving death.  St. Paul would even write to the Christians at Corinth, that their mistreatment of the Lord’s Supper—their disbelief and lack of discerning the real presence of Jesus’ Body and Blood together with the bread and the wine—brought a cause of physical illness and death in their congregation.  Today many Christians turn up their noses at the Lord’s Supper, either disbelieving what Jesus said about it, treating it with contempt, changing it according to human desire, removing it from the church’s Sunday worship, or avoiding it altogether.  Such unbelief is dangerous for anyone who would receive from Jesus the eternal life He came to give them, abandoning the terms of the covenant Jesus Himself established for their salvation.

In our age, as in every age, God comes to His people on His own terms.  He comes to offer forgiveness, life, and salvation, but He does so according to His own wisdom and will.  To the Old Testament people, God came to them in ways that foreshadowed the fulfillment of His coming in Jesus.  For the people who have been brought to faith after Jesus’ resurrection and ascension by the preaching of His Word through His Prophets and Apostles, the terms of God’s free gift of grace and life are on the same terms Jesus established while He walked among us.  By the power of His Word, He established Holy Baptism to be a lavish washing away of sins, exchanging the sinner’s death for the Savior’s eternal life.  By the power of His Word, He sent forth His Apostles and their successors to preach repentance and the forgiveness of sins in His most holy name.  By the power of His Word, He established a Holy Communion in His very Body and Blood, by which His disciples of every time and place would be nourished in grace by faith unto everlasting life, fed upon the true Bread from Heaven who is and was and is come forever the very Word of Life.

For those who are afar off, and those who are near, the Word of the Lord calls.  He calls to you, dear sinner, that you might not die of starvation in the wilderness of your sin.  He calls to you, that you might abandon your unbelief, and embrace His means of grace by faith unto everlasting life.  He calls to you, that the life begun in you by His Holy Spirit working through the Water and the Word, might be sustained in you through all the battles and brutalities of this fallen world, through the blessed Communion of His Body and Blood.   Here is the true Bread from Heaven, who has given His life to save you, and even now beckons to you, that you might be fed by Him, never to hunger or thirst again.  Here is Jesus, the very Word of God made flesh, giving His flesh to you as food indeed, and His blood to you as drink indeed.  Here the Lord Jesus Christ sustains not only your body for life in this world, but your soul unto everlasting life.

Hear the Word of the Lord.  Behold the Body and Blood of the Lord Jesus Christ, given unto death, that you might partake by your lips of His everlasting life.  Repent, believe, and live by the true Bread from Heaven.  Amen.

The Rainbow Covenant: A Meditation on Genesis 9, for the 9th Sunday after Pentecost

Rainbows are fairly ubiquitous today.  30 years ago or more, the rainbow was often used in children’s story books, and in school classrooms for memorizing the color spectrum.  Today it has been adopted by certain political and social action groups as a banner for various sexual identities or causes, often abbreviated with the ever growing acronym:  LGBTQ…  Given the manner in which our day and place use the rainbow as a symbol or sign, it is worth remembering what God gave the rainbow to be.

In the early ages of the earth, after the Creation and the Fall, the world fell into such horrible and rampant evil that God destroyed every living creature which breathed air through a great and terrible Flood.  This Flood, the evidence of which remains on mountains all over the world and in massive jumbled fossil beds from Montana to Africa and Asia, was a judgment of Almighty God upon a fallen humanity which so polluted His good earth with their evil that He wiped them out.  We’re not told how many people there were on the earth at the time of the Flood, but we know that only eight souls survived, preserved in the providence of the Ark by God’s good and gracious will.  This Flood was a near total calamity, and absolutely justified by the evil propagated by God’s creatures against their Creator.  Alone on the Ark were the survivors of God’s wrath, and as they stepped out of that saving Ark into the world which had just been judged, God had a few things to say to them all.

After discussing murder and the created order of man to the animal kingdom, God addressed the fear of the Law which must have reigned in the hearts of Noah, his family, and the animals he tended.  No one on the earth either before or since, had seen that level of God’s wrath revealed upon the whole of creation.  For all the atrocities we have recorded in the volumes of histories across the world, the great murderous atrocities of atheist regimes in the 20^th century, or the great burgeoning atrocities of militant Islam at the start of the 21^st century, no one has seen the level of devastation rightly descended upon the whole of mankind like Noah and his cohort did.  The Law of God was written in the countless corpses of innumerable creatures, now settled into their earthen graves for later generations to dig up and ponder.  In the face of such judgment which would alone shatter the minds of men, God speaks a Word of Gospel hope to the world.

Never again would God judge the world this way through water, and never has He done so.  He made a covenant with Noah and the whole earth, and sealed it with the sign of the rainbow.  From that time on, the rainbow—God’s Bow—would be a sign of both His devastating Law and His life giving Gospel.  It would be a reminder of the price of evil, the depths to which man can descend, the righteous fury of the only true and holy God, and the preservation which alone comes from His grace.  The rainbow became God’s Word in physical form, left as a real and tangible reminder of His covenant with the whole world.

Remembering what the rainbow actually is, we should shudder at the use to which it is put by so many today.  Taking the sign of God’s judgment and grace and using it to celebrate wickedness is nothing short of a demonic fist in the face of God.  Exactly what are we trying to communicate, when we use the rainbow to trumpet our disregard for the order of creation or the complimentarity of the sexes?  What message do we wish to send to our God, when we use the rainbow as a sign for discarding the sexual ethics He established in creation, and which we can read plainly even in Natural Law?  What precisely do we think God will see, when we put His Bow upon our churches as a sign that we have in our new wisdom called good what He has irrevocably called evil? 

But more than political action committees, campaigns, courts, groups, and even churches, what is it you are saying to God, when you take that rainbow upon yourself and use it promote sodomy and gender confusion?  Have you placed the rainbow over your Facebook cover photo or the bumper of your car as a sign of support for homosexual marriage?  And if you have not personally flown God’s Bow as a banner for evil, have you even begun to conceive the horror of this popular rebellion against our holy God, and pleaded with your neighbor to avoid His wrath which is surely coming upon us all?

Of course, in all and every way, we have failed in this.  We have honored neither God’s Law nor His Gospel, and we have been guilty in either our action or inaction.  We have failed to remember the holiness of our God, the depth of our sin, the righteousness of our judgment, or the grace of our salvation.  We have dishonored the Bow of God’s covenant, and for that we deserve a fate worse than a watery death—we deserve the fires of hell.

There was, however, one Man who saw a judgment far greater than the judgment Noah saw.  As Christ hung upon the Cross for the sins of the whole world, He not only saw, but in His own flesh received the eternity of hell which was due to every sinner ever to live upon the earth.  His eyes beheld tortures far beyond the woeful wounds of Roman crucifixion, far worse than the panicked gurgling of a billion drowning souls; and yet He willingly gave Himself into this judgment as a ransom for us all.  For every evil doer from Adam to our own day, and every day to come:  for the genocidal maniac, for the despot, for the idolater, for the letch, for the glutton, and even for the desecrators of God’s rainbow covenant, Christ has entered into our eternal judgment that we might live by His grace.  He has built for us His Holy Church which has become for us our Ark of salvation from the fires to come.  He has sealed us in His covenant by the waters of Holy Baptism, spoken His Word of Absolution to us through the Office of the Keys, and fed us upon His own life giving Body and Blood through His Holy Supper—all everlasting signs of this greatest and final Covenant.  We are a people saved by His grace through faith in His vicarious sacrifice for us, alive by His Word and sustained by His providence.  Enlivened by His Holy Spirit we are reconciled to His Father through His most holy Cross.

The sign of God’s covenant in His Bow is good indeed, but it points us forward to a greater covenant:  the Gospel of salvation in Jesus Christ by grace through faith in Him alone.  Here in this covenant written in the blood of Jesus, we find His Word which calls us to faith and repentance, to forgiveness, life, and salvation.  Here there is forgiveness for all who will repent and believe.  The Lord has judged once by water, and shall judge again by fire.  Do not be consumed by the wickedness of this perverse and twisted generation, dancing as marionettes upon the devil’s strings until the yawning mouth of hell opens to swallow them all.  Repent of your mocking of the most holy God, that you might not die under His Law, but live according to the grace of His Gospel.  That final judgment of fire is coming for us all, more surely than the waters of Noah’s Flood came upon the whole ancient world.  Receive the refuge of Christ’s forgiveness against those coming flames, and rest secure in the grace He pours out by His Word through the Ark of His Holy Church. 

Repent.  Believe.  Live.

Amen.

Good and Worthless Shepherds: A Meditation on Jeremiah 23, for the 8th Sunday after Pentecost

In the time of Israel before the Babylonian Captivity, there was a general sense of prosperity and peace.  Unfortunately, this time of general peace and prosperity also came in a time of wide spread disregard for God and His Word.  While many had resources to spare and no foreign army was threatening the life of the nation, there was great apostasy going on throughout the land:  the people engaged in financial abuse of their neighbors, various forms of sexual immorality, and multiple forms of idolatry, just to name a few.  What made it all the worse, was that the shepherds who God had ordained to call His people to faith and repentance by His Word, had largely abandoned that same Word, substituting their own for His.  Whether it was the people who left God and His Word first and the shepherds followed to appease the people, or it was the shepherds who left God and His Word and the people followed them, the end result was the same:  divine judgment was coming like a fiery whirlwind to consume them both.  The focus of Jeremiah’s 23^rd chapter is the specific and eternal condemnation justly coming to the shepherds for their apostasy, and their abuse of the Office God had entrusted to them for the good of His people.

Their time is not so unlike our own.  Here in 21^st century America, our financial system is rigged to reward those with money while perpetually abusing those without it.  We tell our children that education is their ticket out of poverty, and then we send them off to schools they cannot afford, saddling them with enormous debt that makes them slaves of the banks for decades afterward.  If a person steals $10,000 from a bank, they go to jail for a very long time, but if a Wall Street broker or company CEO/CFO steals billions, they retire with their fortunes while the people they defrauded lose their retirement funds.  In terms of sexual immorality, we protect in law pretty much any sexual perversion we can dream up.  Fornication has been institutionalized in youth culture, and celebrated by celebrities of every genre; adultery is the norm, having its own social media hook up sites; divorce is rampant, as spouses can abandon each other and their children at will and without immediate consequence through no-fault divorce laws; homosexuality is not only condoned, but championed as a protected class under law, and taught to children as normative in the youngest elementary school classrooms..  In our time and place, greed and self gratification are driving principles that undergird the way we approach everything from entertainment to medical care… and with advances in technology, we can do these things faster and more efficiently than any generation which came before us.

When it comes to idolatry, the violation of the first commandment, our civilization excels.  We enshrine a generic god in our governing documents which many assume to be the Christian God, but which in fact is so amorphous that anyone can pour any identity into it they wish.  Though a majority of Americans are Christians of one stripe or another and assume a Christian God when they recite things like the Pledge of Allegiance, read the Declaration of Independence, or examine the back of their printed money, in reality that generic god is never identified with the Most Holy Trinity in our legal system.  A Jew, Buddhist, Muslim, Hindu, Deist, Pagan, Satanist, or even a self worshiping Atheist can all pour their individual deity into that generic term for god… and in practice, that’s exactly what they do, because our system of government is built on the idea of a syncretistic national god everyone can get behind, and everyone can assume will support our Constitutional rights and laws.  While our founding may have been much more homogenously Christian in assumptions and practice, we now have a place in our civilization for every god, every sacred text, and every rejection of the Triune God that people can organize around.  When it comes to idolatry, like greed and sexual immorality, we’re way ahead of ancient Israel.

First, it’s important to remember that the United States is not Israel.  God did not descend upon Mount Rushmore to deliver the Ten Commandments to George Washington, nor did He guide the Puritans’ ships to Plymouth Rock in a pillar of cloud by day or a pillar of fire by night.  America is not Israel, and we cannot read ourselves into Scripture that way.  What Jeremiah wrote by the Holy Spirit was directed to Israel, even though it was also written for us (just as it is written for every nation, tribe, and culture on the face of the earth across history)—and that’s a key distinction.  The real question becomes why God wrote these words of His for us, and as always, that boils down to the revelation of His Law and Gospel with Jesus at their center.

Do we have rampant sin in our day and place?  Absolutely.  Do we have shepherds in the pastoral Office, called by God to deliver His Word to the people, who prefer to deliver their own words instead?  Indeed, and far too many.  As we look at ourselves, pastors and laity, believers and unbelievers alike, the Law revealed in Jeremiah’s 23^rd chapter should terrify us to our core.  If God would deal with His special people of Israel with such great severity (military devastation and captivity by Babylon, disease, death…) for sins much less rampant than our own, we should tremble in fear for the just wrath of God which is surely coming toward us.

It’s probably alien to most Americans to think about themselves as worthy of judgment, but it’s true—both individually, and as a nation.  It’s probably not vogue to think of God as having a limit to His patience with us, and bringing a calamity upon us that justly overwhelms both us and our children.  But we should remember that God is the same yesterday, today, and forever—He is forever just and good, forever the Judge of the Universe He created and sustains, and forever offended in His very being by the evil we cavalierly commit.

But it is also true, that God has revealed Himself as forever being love and compassion; as a good and faithful Shepherd who will tend to His people, even to the point of dying for them.  Where earthly shepherds fail to both live up to and proclaim God’s Eternal Word, God has Himself sent His Eternal Word into our flesh that He might forever unite us to Himself through His Cross.  All the judgment we deserve, that we have brought down upon ourselves both in this world and the next, He has taken and placed upon the shoulders of His only begotten Son.  Jesus becomes for us the Good Shepherd who excels all earthly shepherds, and who gathers together in Himself all His people by His grace.  There, in the embrace of our Good Shepherd, all His people find His call to faith and repentance:  all His undershepherds who have failed to reflect His Law and Gospel rightly, and all the people who have failed to receive it rightly, there find in His deadly wounds the price of their salvation.  It is a salvation not accomplished by human works or faithfulness, but by divine satisfaction—a salvation freely given and freely received, for Christ’s sake alone.

To all people, and even to we fallen Americans, comes the Word Made Flesh.  He speaks to us His terrifying Law which reveals us for the sinners, and sinful nation, we are; that we do not deserve His prosperity, providence, nor peace, but rather to be wiped off the face of His good earth.  Yet He also speaks to us a Gospel sweeter than any other words in all creation:  that He has suffered and died for all mankind, and even for sinners so gluttonous, debauched and idolatrous as us.  To us and to our nation, the Good Shepherd calls all to repentance and faith, that He might renew us again with His forgiveness, life, and salvation.  To you His Word has come.  Hear Him, believe, and live.  Amen.

The Word Cannot be Silenced: A Meditation on Amos 7 and Mark 6

In both Amos 7 and Mark 6, we have examples of the attempted silencing of God's Word through the persecution of its bearers.  Though separated by several hundred years, the prophets Amos and John the Baptist encountered resistance from the religious and secular powers of their day-- not so much because of the men they were, but because of the Word they bore to the people.  While tradition holds that Amos was killed by Amaziah's son, Scripture records in fairly clear detail how John was killed by Herod.  Both men of God bore faithful witness to His Word, calling people to repentance and faith.  Both were persecuted and killed for doing so.

This is not a phenomenon unique to Amos and John.  Indeed, most of the prophets of the Old Testament and the Apostles of the New Testament met with grisly fates, and those who didn't still struggled with persecution and adversity.  Bearing the Word of God is dangerous in this world, as the blood of the martyrs has well testified both in antiquity and today.  Those who dwell in darkness and rebel against the light of God's Word, will always have an aversion to those who carry that light into their darkness.

The same was true of Jesus, who is and was and is to come, the very Word of God incarnate.  He came as the Light and Life of God to dead and dying sinners, and under the influence of the devil, those dead and dying sinners persecuted, tortured, and crucified the Word of God.  The devil is the original rebel against the light and life of God's Word, and his will holds sway over the whole fallen world, most especially among those who themselves rebel against God.  There is no length to which the devil will not go to silence the Word of God, and no atrocity he will not inspire in the hearts of wicked men to stomp it out.

But as with Jesus, so with those who abide in Him by His Word:  they cannot be stomped out, and death itself cannot hold them.  The Word of God is the very source of life, and it is not possible for death to contain it.  The devil may so possess the minds of men to the futility of wiping the Word of God out of creation, but it is an insanity not unlike words on a page attempting to un-write themselves, or the cloth of a garment trying to unweave itself.  No one can undo the Word of God in creation, because no one other than God is the Author of that Word.

Everyone else in all creation is either a more or less faithful witness to that Word which is their own life and light and salvation.  Just as Jesus was the Word by which the Father spoke the universe into existence, and the Word by which the Holy Spirit continues to work salvation by grace through faith in Him, this same Jesus is the light and life of the world in our day as well.  He is the Word of Law which pricks our conscience and shows us for the sinners we are.  He is the Word of Gospel which shows us His sacrifice on His Cross was for us, that we might live forgiven and free in Him by grace through faith.  He is the Word of judgment against all who refuse to repent of their evil, preferring their darkened hell to the heavenly light.  He is the Word of salvation to all who will turn from evil to embrace the good, keeping them in His light and life forever.

And it is His indomitable and everlasting Word which He has given us to shine forth in this world of darkness, despair, rebellion, and demonic insanity.  Though the world may take from us our life, liberty, and happiness for bearing witness to the Word of Jesus, they cannot take from us either that Word nor that life which is Jesus Christ our Savior.  Those like Amos and John the Baptist hold forth that Word in the world by the fearless testimony of the ever-living and all powerful Spirit of the Living God, who cannot be bound by death, and who posses a Kingdom which cannot be taken away.  It is the Spirit who bears witness by the Word which enlivens and keeps the whole household of faith, raising us up to bear faithful witness in our own time and place.

O His people, hear the Word of the Lord!  Feel the warmth of its life giving light.  Receive the sting of it's convicting Law, and the sweetness of its eternal Gospel.  Receive the new birth from above by Water and Spirit, and go forth in the power of Jesus Christ as fearless and unconquerable ambassadors of the gracious King of Glory.  The Word in which you abide, abides forever-- thanks be to God!  Amen.