Test the Spirits: An Eastertide Meditation on 1st John 4

Beloved, believe not every spirit, 

but try the spirits whether they are of God: 

because many false prophets are gone out into the world.

Hereby know ye the Spirit of God: 

Every spirit that confesseth that 

Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is of God:

And every spirit that confesseth not 

that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is not of God: 

and this is that spirit of antichrist, 

whereof ye have heard that it should come; 

and even now already is it in the world.

Ye are of God, little children, 

and have overcome them: 

because greater is he that is in you, 

than he that is in the world.

They are of the world: 

therefore speak they of the world, 

and the world heareth them.

We are of God:

 he that knoweth God heareth us; 

he that is not of God heareth not us. 

Hereby know we the spirit of truth, 

and the spirit of error.

Discussing spirits in the 21st century is a challenging enterprise.  In scientific circles, the idea of spirits can seem superstitious and anachronistic— a way of explaining the undiscovered which no longer fits with educated modernity’s embrace of materialism and evolution.  Yet popular culture, movies, TV shows, books, and blogs reflect entire genres devoted to spiritualism where witchcraft, mediums, necromancers, ghost hunters, hauntings, and various other-worldly monsters are treated as dangerous possibilities for human encounters.  Even as one segment of society distances itself from traditional institutions which historically gave context to the spiritual world, other people in rapidly growing numbers find themselves in grave peril from exposure to dangerous spirits, such that churches from Rome to the Reformation are training more pastors to help as exorcists and spiritual combatants.  Such confusion is not unique to our time, as any rigorous student of history could attest— but it is a mark of our time, and St. John’s first epistle speaks directly to our situation.

In the fourth chapter, John clearly calls his readers not to believe every spirit, but to test them, acknowledging that they both exist and engage with people.  Such spirits can either be true, in that they speak the truth, or false, in that they lie and deceive.  While spirits may not always be visible to the naked eye, it is clear that Jesus, His Apostles, and the Prophets, not only believed they existed, but occasionally had direct contact with them— and a key distinction of those spirits was whether they were in fellowship with God and reflected His truth, or enemies of God who distorted His truth.  Whether those spirits were disembodied (like the angels who come to announce the birth and resurrection of Jesus, or demons who seek to posses and destroy those they deceive,) or incarnate (like the spirits of people still living in this world as a person united in body and soul,) the way to test a spirit is by whether it speaks the truth or lies.

Of course, fallen people such as ourselves are ridiculously easy to deceive.  Not only does fallen humanity already have a disposition not to believe in God (writ large in our post-modern western civilization’s idolization of science and technology,) but our fallen intellect is easily confused and leaves many with self-contradictory conclusions about life, reality, good, and evil.  As western societies distance themselves from the ancient pillars of the church which Jesus established by His Word and Spirit, fallen humanity becomes ever more gullible and triumphally hubristic.  Not only are fallen people easy to deceive, we are inclined toward self deception, and away from anything which might reveal our accountability before our Creator.  Thus we live in confused, chaotic, and dangerous times, where many ignore the Spirit of God, and harken instead to the dark whispers of malevolent spirits who deftly manipulate human lust, pride, wrath, greed, and hatred.

The solution, however, is always near at hand, with remarkable clarity and cohesion.  Unlike the endless variety of conflicting evil narratives, the truth of Jesus has been consistent and reliable since the foundation of the world.  He tells us we have a Creator who is both just and loving, before whose Law we stand condemned as wicked and evil, but by whose grace through Jesus’ Vicarious Atonement for the sins of the whole world, are now forgiven and free by faith in Him.  He tells us that the evils which surround and persecute us, which daily lie and deceive us, are overcome through the Cross of Jesus, and will find their final condemnation in the fiery prison of hell.  He tells us that through His life, death, and resurrection He has conquered sin, death, hell, and the power of the devil with all his lying hordes of demons, giving to everyone who abides in Him by faith in His Word that same victory and eternal life.  He tells us that He receives every penitent sinner who turns to Him, no matter how great or small his transgressions, for Jesus’ holy blood coverers all mankind.  He tells us that at the hour of our death, He comes to take us to Himself, and that at the end of the world, He will raise us all from the dead, never to die again.  He tells us that death, evil, corruption, and suffering will have an end with the new heavens and the new earth, and that the life He gives us today by grace through faith shall then shine forth like the stars of heaven forever.

And so, the Spirit of Jesus comes to you again this day, with the old and eternal message of faith and repentance, life and salvation— the truth which overcomes the world of sin around us, and world of sin within us.  Hear Him call to you, and turn from the lying spirits who draw you away from His Word of life which He sends you through His Prophets and Apostles of Holy Scripture.  Leave the dark cacophony of the world’s deceptions behind, and find in Jesus the truth your soul so desperately needs, both now and for eternity.  Amen.

The Shepherd’s Voice: An Eastertide Meditation on John 10

I am the good shepherd: 

the good shepherd giveth his life for the sheep.

But he that is an hireling, and not the shepherd, 

whose own the sheep are not, seeth the wolf coming, 

and leaveth the sheep, and fleeth: 

and the wolf catcheth them, and scattereth the sheep.

The hireling fleeth, because he is an hireling, 

and careth not for the sheep.

I am the good shepherd, and know my sheep, 

and am known of mine.

As the Father knoweth me, even so know I the Father: 

and I lay down my life for the sheep.

And other sheep I have, which are not of this fold: 

them also I must bring, and they shall hear my voice; 

and there shall be one fold, and one shepherd.

Therefore doth my Father love me, 

because I lay down my life, 

that I might take it again.

No man taketh it from me, 

but I lay it down of myself. 

I have power to lay it down, 

and I have power to take it again. 

This commandment have I received of my Father.

Like so much of John’s recorded discourses of Jesus, chapter 10 is immensely rich in both depth and nuance.  The over arching theme is Jesus’ declaration of Himself as the good shepherd around whom His sheep are gathered by His Word, and who gives His life that His sheep might live forever.  Those sheep— His people— are the ones who hear Jesus’ voice and know Him as their true shepherd.  And just as Jesus is known by the Father, and the Father by Jesus, so do the people of Jesus know their shepherd, and are known by their shepherd.  But not only is Jesus the good shepherd who lays down His life to safeguard His people from the present threats and dangers of wolves and thieves, He is also the only shepherd who has received from His Father the power and command to take back up His life after He has laid it down.  Unlike many people who have died to protect or serve others in their care and have no power to raise themselves up again, Jesus declared (and then later proved on the first Easter morning) that He had the power to do both.  Such life, which is not a prisoner or slave to death, is the life which Jesus gives to His people, so that even though they die, they would live in Him forever, awaiting the resurrection of the dead on the Last Day.

That’s a pretty sharp distinction between Jesus, and every other shepherd of people who has ever lived.  Certainly there have been many, whether in the community of the church or in the world at large, who rose to positions of power and influence over people, only to use their power to kill, deceive, steal, and destroy.  Time would fail to recount all the televangelist hucksters of the last century, who used a corrupted message to separate countless people from their money, and eventually even from their hope; of pastors who treated their Office as a hireling, abandoning their sheep for the lure of money and ease in some other vineyard; of church leaders who lived opulently off the labors of the people, shifting their message to focus on revenue generating programs and membership drives which drew people to pews only to fleece them; of bishops and councils which put politics as their highest focus, surrendering to the spirit of the age and its unmoored ethics; of popes and patriarchs who secured for themselves honors, palaces, and decadence while their people starved and suffered unthinkable abuse under their rule.  As an old saying of the early Christian era lamented, the road to hell is paved with the skulls of unfaithful pastors.

Yet, though unheralded and often disdained by the world, there have been many good and faithful pastors who looked after Jesus’ people in His stead.  They have selflessly done without much in the ways of comfort or convenience, survived on humble means, and worked their entire lives in service to Jesus’ people.  Some gave their lives slowly over decades, until age and infirmity could no longer shoulder the burden of the day; others stood between their people and the wolves or thieves of their day, taking upon themselves the persecution of a violent and evil culture; still others spoke truth to corrupted secular or ecclesiastical powers, losing their vocations and their lives at the hands of unfaithful rulers.  And even these, knowing they had no power in themselves to take back up the lives which were being taken from them, used their last breath to point the people back to their one, true, and saving Shepherd.  What faithful under-shepherds know they cannot do, they guide others to see and hear in the only Shepherd who can:  Jesus.

The voice of this Good Shepherd calls out to you this day, over the din of worldly fascinations, self-serving tyrants, unfaithful leaders, greedy thieves, and the murderous howls of heretical wolves.  Jesus, the only shepherd who has ever laid down His life for you and then taken it back up again, so that He might give to you life in place of your death, victory in place of your defeat, and joy in place of your suffering, calls to you through His Word, that you might by grace through faith be gathered together with Him forever.  This Word He sends to you through the preaching of His Holy Scriptures, and applies to you through the waters of Holy Baptism, the bread and wine of Holy Communion, and the declaration of forgiveness in Holy Absolution.  This Eternal Word of the Father comes to you through humble human witnesses, who themselves live only by grace through faith in their shepherd, Jesus Christ, alone.  Regardless of all the error and speculation, of the marketing and the mess of modernity, the voice of the Good Shepherd continues to call everyone to forgiveness, life, and salvation— to gather the sheep of every fold into one great flock, with one divine Shepherd, in the eternal fellowship and love of the Most Holy Trinity, one God, now and forever. 

Hear Jesus calling to you this day, that you might turn aside from the lying cacophony of a dying world, and be gathered into a Kingdom which has no end, eternally governed by the one and only Shepherd who has given His life so that His people might have life abundantly in Him forever.  Amen.

Comprehending the Scriptures: An Eastertide Meditation on Luke 24

And he said unto them, 

These are the words which I spake unto you, 

while I was yet with you, that all things must be fulfilled, 

which were written in the law of Moses, and in the prophets, 

and in the psalms, concerning me.

Then opened he their understanding, 

that they might understand the scriptures,

And said unto them, Thus it is written, 

and thus it behoved Christ to suffer, 

and to rise from the dead the third day:

And that repentance and remission of sins 

should be preached in his name among all nations, 

beginning at Jerusalem.

And ye are witnesses of these things.

And, behold, I send the promise of my Father upon you: 

but tarry ye in the city of Jerusalem, 

until ye be endued with power from on high.

One of the great challenges which arises for anyone who encounters the Holy Scriptures, is understanding or comprehending them.  It is a book of books, composed and compiled over a period of centuries, as the people of God gathered and maintained His witness through prophets and apostles.  While Moses, living and writing around 1500 BC, opens our canon with Genesis, he is writing about things which God revealed to him and the people that occurred since the creation of the world— millennia before Moses’ time.  Exodus catches up to Moses’ present, with Leviticus and Numbers continuing God’s witness to and through him.  Deuteronomy recaps Moses’ witness to the people near the end of his life, with the final description of Moses’ death likely appended by Joshua, who picks up the story and the conquest of Canaan after him.  The Hebrew Scriptures continue to be composed by prophets and gathered by the people through the time of David and Solomon, through the Assyrian and Babylonian exiles periods, and the return of the people to Jerusalem several hundred years before Jesus and the Apostles.  The New Testament was composed in the first century AD during the lifetime of the Apostles who walked with Jesus and heard Him teach— who were witnesses to all that He did and said, including His death and resurrection.  Honest, traditional scholars know that the evidence is overwhelming for the reliability and accuracy of these ancient texts, as archeology and history studies continue to reveal.  All this is fairly easy to understand, if one simply takes the time to sit and read the Scriptures in a reasonable translation, and with appropriate linguistic, cultural, and contextual notes.

The harder part comes in asking, “What’s the point?”  Why does Moses or any of the other ancient prophets matter to me and my modern community?  Why does the witness of Jesus matter to me, nearly 2000 years after the last of his eyewitnesses died?  What is the purpose that God, who reveals Himself to be our Creator, Sustainer, Judge, and Savior, communicates to the world through His prophets and Apostles?  What is the point in having in our possession the longest contiguous, internally coherent writing project in history, composed over 1500 years by different people in different genres and styles and languages, and preserved among a community of faith which reaches back to the dawn of time?  Why do the Scriptures matter to me, my family, my neighborhood, my time, and my place?  These are the questions at which people stumble, even after they have dispersed the pretentious fog of modern theologians and scholars who disingenuously hack the Scriptures to pieces for their own popularity and to protect their own unbelief.  Even after the liars and frauds have been cleared away and a person encounters the Scriptures honestly and plainly, the questions regarding significance and applicability can remain:  what’s the point?

Our text for today in Luke 24 gives that answer, as the risen Jesus opens the minds of His disciples to understand how all of Scripture points to Him.  All the witnesses to God’s revelation in the Hebrew Scriptures were looking forward to the time in which God would fulfill His promise to save the people whom He created.  From Moses, the prophets, the psalmists, the writers of wisdom and history, came a golden thread which weaves from Creation, the Fall, the Cross, the Resurrection, to the Apocalypse:  Jesus the Christ, only Son of the Father, in the communion of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever.  Jesus, who St. John tells us is the Eternal Word of God made flesh, is the true inspiration, author, subject, and fulfillment of His Holy Scriptures.  Having their minds opened by Jesus to comprehend this, He then sends them out as His witnesses to preach repentance and the forgiveness of sins in His name to all the world.  What letters on a page cannot do alone, Jesus by His Holy Spirit accomplishes through that same Word, opening minds to understand who they are and who God is, how we stand condemned before His holy Law on account of our wickedness, and by grace through faith in Jesus stand forgiven and free in His holy Gospel.  Through His Word and Spirit, we see Jesus as the sum and summit of our faith, our redemption, our eternal life, and our peace with God through His Vicarious Atonement for us.

And what is Jesus’ command to His newly enlightened disciples?  To preach repentance and the forgiveness of sins in His name— to preach the Law with all its severity, and the Gospel with all its sweetness— in the power which He would give them by His Spirit on the day of Pentecost.  This Holy Spirit abides with Jesus’ people to this very day, and will continue to abide with His church until He returns at the end of time to judge the living and the dead.  Here, in the fellowship of Jesus and His Word, enlightened and enlivened by His Holy Spirit, reconciled and at peace with the Father through Jesus’ Cross, living in the present joy of His victory over sin, death, hell, and the devil which shall never end, the Word of God reveals why it matters for you and for me.  The point of the Scriptures is to bring everyone who will repent and believe into saving fellowship with the Triune God, by grace through faith in Jesus alone.

Today, the Word and Spirit of Jesus comes to you, opening your mind to understand the divine story which has been unfolding since the dawn of time, calling you to repentance and faith in Jesus, that you may be forgiven and live forever in Him.  Hear Jesus calling to you this day, turn from your evil, receive His free gift of forgiveness, life, and salvation through faith in Him.  And as the power of the Holy Spirit falls upon you, bear witness to Jesus and His saving Word to all who will likewise hear, repent, believe, and live— and see the thread of your own life woven into the golden thread of Jesus’ eternal story of redemption and life.  Amen.

Even So, I Send You: An Eastertide Meditation on John 20

Then the same day at evening, being the first day of the week, 

when the doors were shut where the disciples were assembled for fear of the Jews, 

came Jesus and stood in the midst, and saith unto them, 

Peace be unto you.

And when he had so said, 

he shewed unto them his hands and his side. 

Then were the disciples glad, when they saw the LORD.

Then said Jesus to them again, 

Peace be unto you: as my Father hath sent me, 

even so send I you.

And when he had said this, he breathed on them, 

and saith unto them, Receive ye the Holy Ghost:

Whose soever sins ye remit, they are remitted unto them; 

and whose soever sins ye retain, they are retained.

In a world nearly 2000 years removed from Jesus’ resurrection, across seas and continents from where the event actually happened, it is not unreasonable to ask what the point of all this is for us.  Today we have cars which drive themselves, spacecraft which navigate between planets, phones with artificially intelligent assistants, and access to data which the ancients couldn’t begin to conceive.  Our people vacation around the world, conveyed by aircraft which travel over 400 miles per hour, while titanic ships circumnavigate the globe nearly autonomously.  We are unlocking the secrets of our own DNA, manipulating the building blocks of life, and genetically modifying our crops to radically increase their yield over anything antiquity could have produced.  We have schools for every level and age of person, together with endlessly growing archives of videos and documents, to train almost anyone in how to do almost anything.  Lurching as we are into the 21st century of the common age, what could we possibly need from a crucified Galilean, even if He did rise from the dead?

Forgiveness.  For all our technological wonders and modern contrivances, for all our geographic and cultural diversity, we are still a people who need forgiveness.  For every gift we’ve been given down through the ages, from medicine to technology to politics, none have stopped us from abusing, oppressing, betraying, and even murdering our neighbors.  Politicians use technology to manipulate and inflame mobs of people, both within and outside their own borders; captains of industry use technology to squeeze every dime out of every person they can, crossing oceans to economically enslave foreign peoples and leverage their low labor rates against the people of their own nation; educators turn classrooms into propaganda laboratories, shaping a new generation into ignorant dependence on an ever growing governmental leviathan; the advances of medicine are smothered under the greed and graft of lawyers and insurance companies, who contrive a system which bankrupts those most in need while enriching themselves; militaries and governments and oligarchic companies race to build, own, and control the first super-intelligent AI systems, which will harvest and thrive upon the nearly incalculable data every person has so willingly given over to closely guarded data warehouses, and via the internet of things, manipulate the world in ways nearly impossible to fathom.  Beneath all our wealth, our prosperity, our technology, and our futuristic hubris, we remain a fallen people whose proclivity is to use every good gift for our own narcissism and hedonism, while subjugating and oppressing our neighbors for our own benefit.

The rise and fall of nations, of cultures, of philosophies, and technologies does not change the human heart, anymore than the passage of time or the location of geography.  People are still people, and hidden under the accidents of particular citizenship, epoch, race, color, or creed, our fallen nature still drives us to prioritize our disordered passions, while ignoring the Natural Law of divine, selfless love upon which the whole universe is constructed.  We harm those we should protect, abuse those we should help, and enslave those we should serve.  No matter how fine our clothing or how refined our aires, we are still guilty of the daily evil which brings death and despair upon ourselves and our neighbors, and disgrace upon the Name of our Creator who gives each person life and a good world in which to live it. 

This is why Easter still matters, here in our time and our place— why a betrayed and murdered Jew of ancient Palestine who rose from the dead just as He predicted He would, still matters to every person who will ever be born.  Jesus’ resurrection proved to every time and every place that He was who He said was:  the eternally begotten Son of the Father, full of grace and truth, the Author of Life, and the Judge of the world.  As the second person of the Holy Trinity, one God, now and forever, Jesus took our humanity into His divinity, bore the suffering, death and hell we all deserve for our evil, and returned the third day— Easter Day— to bring peace, forgiveness, and life to our fallen race.  Huddled as they were on the first Easter for fear that the treacherous leaders who killed Jesus would next come for them, the Apostles encountered the risen Jesus who gave them peace with each other and with God, breathed on them His Holy Spirit, and sent them into the world as He was sent, to forgive the sins of the repentant, and to retain the sins of the recalcitrant.  What Jesus alone could secure through His life, death, and resurrection, He gives freely to His disciples, that they might freely give it to everyone they meet.

Easter still matters, because we still need forgiveness, life, and salvation from sin, death, hell, and the power of the devil.  We still need to hear Jesus’ Word of Law and Gospel through the lips of those He has sent to preach repentance and the forgiveness of sins in His Name.  We still need the forgiveness and peace which only Jesus can give, so that His love might flow through us to our neighbors, transforming us all into His image.  Hear the Easter Word of the Lord Jesus pierce through your time and place, through the affectations of your circumstances and the accidents of your status, so that you may receive His peace, His forgiveness, and His life which not even death can overcome— and the mission He would give you, to freely forgive your neighbors, just as He has forgiven you.  Hear Him, repent, believe, and live.  Amen.