Neither Adding Nor Subtracting: A Meditation on Deuteronomy 4 for the Season of Pentecost

Now therefore hearken, O Israel,

unto the statutes and unto the judgments,

which I teach you, for to do them,

that ye may live, and go in and possess the land

 which the Lord God of your fathers giveth you.

Ye shall not add unto the word which I command you,

neither shall ye diminish ought from it,

 that ye may keep the commandments

of the Lord your God which I command you

 

The fifth book of Moses, Deuteronomy is a second telling of the Law, or a summary of the events covered in the four prior books.  What God had revealed to Moses about the origins of Creation, the Fall, the nature of God and His relationship with the descending families of mankind, Moses brought again into focus for the children of Israel as he neared his own death.  Moses had lived nearly 120 years (40 years in Pharaoh's house, 40 years in the wilderness with his father-in-law tending sheep with his wife and children, then 40 years in the Exodus and wandering of the Israelites as God led them out of Egypt and toward the promised Land) and was now reminding the people one last time of their covenant with God by His Word.  He knew that he must die and be buried by God without having set foot in the promised land due to his own sin against His Word, and now Moses would call the people once again to remember the Law and the Promises of their Savior.

 

Modern notions of progress, be they sociological, scientific, philosophical, or otherwise, often chafe at the premise of not adding to or subtracting from the Word of God, but those inclinations are not new to our times.  Moses knew, as God revealed to him, that when the people of Israel would grow comfortable in the land, they would eventually forget the Word of the God who saved and put them there.  Indeed, even during the 40 years of the Exodus, there was rebellion against God, and dramatic judgment (imagine seeing with your own eyes, the earth opening up and swallowing thousands of people who flocked to Korah’s banner in rebellion against Moses and God’s Word, or the Red Sea swallowing alive the hosts of Egypt’s pursuing armies,) but the nature of fallen people is to be forgetful and prideful, to presume to themselves a higher knowledge and wisdom than the God who gave them life.  While the Promise of God by grace through faith in His Word is life in this world and the next, to the Hebrews of a Promised Land physically located in ancient Canaan, and to all who would repent and believe, citizenship in an eternal heavenly kingdom that transcends heaven and earth, there is also judgment in that Word, as well.  To reject God and His Word is to abandon the free gift of the Promise, and to embrace the just consequence of His judgment—a type of estranged death in this world from the grace, wisdom, and providence of God, and an eternal, conscious, tortuous death in the infernal prison of hell.

 

But of course, people still like to forget about all that, and presume to teach other doctrines as if they were more enlightening that God Himself.  Who needs Moses when we have Darwin, Nietzsche, Freud, and Marx?  Who needs ethical insights from the ancient Middle East, when we have politicians, lawyers, socialites, and celebrities?  Who needs the books of God’s Wisdom, when we have the books of Dawkins, Sagan, Zuckerberg, and Hawking?  Ah, what a world we have built by forgetting the ancient principles of individual accountability, property rights, protections against theft, and the economy which arises from them, so to institute a Marxist socialism that has brought poverty, death, suffering and destruction everywhere it went.  What a world we have now, forgetting the ancient wisdom of the unique and eternal value of every human soul created in the image of God, so that we might farm the murdered corpses of aborted children to make our medicines, euthanize the elderly to control healthcare costs, and manipulate the genetic code of both our food and ourselves.  What communities we have built, trading the ancient wisdom of physical human communion in truth, dignity, and beauty, for the self-absorbed narcissism of social media, pornographic voyeurism, and the decay of both charitable and civic institutions.  For all our wisdom and progress, we have oceans filled with plastic, air poisoned by chemicals, cities looted and burning, communities wracked with hatred and violence, colleges churning out idiots with debt they cannot repay, and governments of manipulative malevolence seeking the totality of power.

 

For all our modern tools and toys and inventions, we have not improved the human condition, nor have we legitimately added or subtracted one jot or one tittle from the Word of the Living God.  As in Moses’ day, so in our own, the terms of our life in this world and the next are rooted in His Promises and His Commandments.  No one but Jesus has solved the human problem of death, having lived, died, and risen again to open the heavenly kingdom to all who will follow Him.  No one but Jesus can take the guilt and shame of our endless failures in progress, and salve the wounds of our haunted consciences through authentic forgiveness.  No one but Jesus can re-order the mind of fallen man to behold the summit of true human progress, rejoined in full communion to God the Father in the power of His Holy Spirit.  No one but Jesus can teach the world of a selfless, sacrificial love which transcends all time and space, breaking down every barrier of culture and language, so that the glorious diversity of creation is harmonized with the full and beautiful potential of every created being.  Only Jesus can open our eyes to see the enduring and eternal Promised Land, just as He opened Moses’ eyes to see it over 3500 years ago, before gently gathering His servant to Himself.

 

In our times and our places, marked by whatever the winds of popular culture may be in their hurried quest of progress, the Word of the Lord still comes to us as it has in every generation.  There is nothing we can add to it, and there is nothing we can take away from it, because the Word of the Living God is Jesus Christ.  We hear Him as He speaks to us by His Word and Spirit in the ancient Prophets and Apostles, and we hear Him as He calls each of us to daily faith in His Promises and repentance before His Commandments.  We hear Him as He declares to us our desperate need for forgiveness, life, and salvation, even as we hear Him declare to us that we are forgiven, enlivened, and saved for the sake of His sacrifice for us upon His Cross.  Hear Him as He speaks to you this day, adding nothing and subtracting nothing from the life-giving Word He breathes into you, that you might be raised up in Him forevermore, and your eyes be opened to that Promised Land.  Amen.

 

Image and Reality: A Meditation on Mark 7 for the Season of Pentecost

Then the Pharisees and scribes asked him,

Why walk not thy disciples according to the tradition of the elders,

but eat bread with unwashen hands?

He answered and said unto them,

Well hath Esaias prophesied of you hypocrites, as it is written,

This people honoureth me with their lips,

but their heart is far from me.

Howbeit in vain do they worship me,

teaching for doctrines the commandments of men.

 

In Mark 7, a conflict emerged between the apparent relative righteousness of the Pharisees and Jesus’ disciples.  The Pharisees had inherited (and likely adapted or added to) a rabbinical tradition regarding washing one’s hands before eating.  Keep in mind that this had nothing to do with modern notions of sanitation or microbiology, but rather in presenting an image of holiness separated from the world around them.  The Pharisee washed his hands because he did not want to be seen as polluted with the unclean things around him, such as the market place, or the common work of common people, or even of the common people themselves.  Such ceremonial washing was a show of their own holiness, and by direct implication, a judgment upon the unholiness of those around them.  Thus their inquisition of Jesus about His disciples’ eating patterns was not about the propriety of the ceremony itself, but rather a self-justifying attack on Jesus to show how much better they were than Him.

 

Such impulses are not uncommon in our time, either.  And while religious people have a particular flair for creating their own religious rules and ceremonies to make themselves appear better than those around them, secular people have similar tendencies.  Religious people might make up rules about drinking, or smoking, or prayer methods, or mission work, or contributions, or liturgies, or clothing, or phraseologies that are peculiar to their own historical group.  And not that any of these things are particularly wrong in themselves, but when used to prop up one’s own pride over another, to create an image of holiness that is also used to deride others as less holy, they become reflections of evil in the heart.  Secular people in the era of Marxist woke ridiculousness create their own virtue signaling practices and ceremonies, too, using them to elevate one group over another.  The inner problem is the same, which is the evil heart from which come all kinds of murders, adulteries, fornications, and greed.  It is the darkened heart which brings forth dark thoughts and deeds, or as some of the old philosophers might have said, it is our ideas and convictions which precede our actions.

 

And there’s the rub.  The reality is that each and every person has within them a heart which is darkened and twisted by evil as a consequence of our common Fall.  For the secular person, there really should be no surprise that their efforts to show themselves righteous and better than their peers manifests in family pedigrees, elite educational institutions, political groups, and social clubs of the wealthy and powerful—and all the rites and ceremonies which go along with them, to create their images of rank and pretense.  But for the Christian, there must always be a battle between this dark inclination of our fallen nature and the higher calling of our life which is hidden in Christ.  By the witness of Jesus’ Word and Spirit, the Christian knows that an image of holiness is meaningless apart from its reality, or worse, an active hypocritical attack against the true holiness of God.  Still possessed of the same fallen nature that secular people have, the Christian still has the same temptations to pride and avarice, to adultery and fornication, to hatred and murder and covetousness and theft that everyone else has.  But what they have which the secular world does not, is the knowledge that they are not holy in themselves and can never be by their own works—they know that what is holy in them does not come from them, but from Jesus alone.

 

So the life of the Christian becomes one of faith in the promises of God’s forgiveness and life for Jesus’ sake, even as it is one of repentance before God’s commands to be truly holy as He is holy.  It is a life that pursues more than the fleeting and deceptive phantasms of imagery, instead piercing through to the deeper bedrock of what is truly real.  What is real in the human condition is that no one may save himself, nor rescue himself from death in this world or the next, because no one can recover their originally created holiness by themselves.  What is also real, is that every Christian, born from above by Water and Spirit, living by grace through faith in Jesus Christ alone, is while still in this world both a sinner and saint.  The Christian is called to daily drown that sinful nature in the promise of their Baptismal waters, and to rise in faith to a new life in the power and triumph of Jesus and His Word.  And when the Christian leaves this world, laying down his corrupted flesh in the earth, he will rise again in Jesus so that his image and reality are returned to perfect harmony forevermore.

 

In a world where everyone is awash in false and deceptive images which hide dark realities below their shiny surfaces, the reality of Jesus reaches into the reality of our lives, and breathes a new hope into every breast by His Word and Spirit.  In that moment where faith clings to the real promise of Jesus, where real faith leads to real repentance and a real conversion of the heart, there is found a real eternal life which no false pretenses can destroy.  There, our individual reality is daily reformed into the image of Christ, so that while our darkened intellect may not yet be able to grasp what we shall one day be, we know that we shall one day be like Him.  This is the promise which gives eyes to see past the diabolical distractions of false imagery, and to see more deeply into the saving reality of Immanuel—God with us, in reality and truth.  Amen.

 

Of Words and Bread: A Meditation on John 6 for the Season of Pentecost

Jesus therefore answered and said unto them,

Murmur not among yourselves.

No man can come to me,

except the Father which hath sent me draw him:

and I will raise him up at the last day.

It is written in the prophets, And they shall be all taught of God.

Every man therefore that hath heard,

and hath learned of the Father, cometh unto me.

Not that any man hath seen the Father, save he which is of God,

he hath seen the Father.

 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 for ever:

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.

 

These things said he in the synagogue, as he taught in Capernaum.

Many therefore of his disciples, when they had heard this, said,

This is an hard saying; who can hear it?

When Jesus knew in himself that his disciples murmured at it,

he said unto them, Doth this offend you?

What and if ye shall see the Son of man ascend up where he was before?

It is the spirit that quickeneth; the flesh profiteth nothing:

 the words that I speak unto you, they are spirit, and they are life.

But there are some of you that believe not.

For Jesus knew from the beginning who they were that believed not,

 and who should betray him.

And he said, Therefore said I unto you,

that no man can come unto me,

except it were given unto him of my Father.

From that time many of his disciples went back,

and walked no more with him.

Then said Jesus unto the twelve, Will ye also go away?

Then Simon Peter answered him, Lord, to whom shall we go?

thou hast the words of eternal life.

And we believe and are sure that thou art that Christ,

the Son of the living God.

 

It should probably not be surprising that the 6^th chapter of John’s Gospel has fueled controversy and offense down through the ages and into our own day, since it records controversy and offense when Jesus had this actual dialogue with the people who followed Him.  Today as in 1^st century Judea, the people who fall into the orbit of Jesus are of mixed hearts and motives, just as any group of people tend to be who gather around anything.  People in this world are never really monolithic in their hearts and minds, because every person has a unique consciousness, an individual existence, and a particular history which has led them into their present moment.  No two people are ever exactly alike, even though many people can share some likeness or conviction or ambition or hope.  When Jesus spoke to the crowds around Him, He was unraveling some of these individual distinctives and group dynamics, piercing to the heart of every person around Him, clearing away false conceptions and calling them into a deeper engagement with Him.  Then, as now, Jesus’ Words work to strip away our confusion and lead us to Truth.

 

What is important when hearing Jesus, is to believe Him.  Sometimes He says things that are easy or pleasant to accept, as He did with this crowd just a day prior when He fed the multitude on bread and fish by the power of His Word.  Sometimes He says things that are hard or disconcerting to contemplate, as He did when He said that unless we eat His flesh and drink His blood, we have no eternal life in us.  Such hard sayings revealed in the people around Him hard hearts unwilling to believe Him, and thus unwilling to follow Him where He was leading them.  Many would ask then, as they do today, how could Jesus give Himself for the life of the world?  How could a man in ancient Judea have actually come from and be God?  How could someone like Jesus, destined to die at the hands of manipulative and treacherous men, be Himself the hope of a dying world?  And how exactly could a specific Judean man of whatever his particular height and weight was, feed a countless multitude of people across all the ages of history by his own body and blood?  They are questions people still ask today, together with a host of others like them, that are fundamentally intended to insulate the individual from Jesus... to keep Him at arm’s length or further away, so that their encounter with Jesus might not make them uncomfortable.

 

Regardless of our rationalizations and sophistry, Jesus’ Word is still true, and it still calls all people to Himself.  And though His Word calls to everyone just as they are, as the old hymn goes, it never leaves anyone just as they were.  To hear the Word of the Lord is to be enlivened by it, convicted by it, challenged by it, inspired by it—the Word of Jesus is alive, empowered by His Holy Spirit to accomplish the task for which He sends it.  To those who hear Him and believe, turning from their sinful and confusion filled lives to embrace Him, Jesus becomes their Savior by grace through faith, feeding His people by His Word and Spirit so that they will never hunger again through all eternity.  For those who reject Him, His Word which they have rejected becomes their judge, leaving them in their sin and confusion, forever gnawed by a hunger they can never satisfy.  Jesus and His Word always accomplish what they set out to do, and our response of faith or unbelief, of embrace or rejection, is a fate the Holy Spirit enlivens each hearer to take.  Thus it is always true that whoever is saved by grace through faith in Christ alone is never saved by his own works or merit, but all those who are condemned shall burn forever by their own most grievous fault.  To each the Word of Jesus remains eternally true, either as beloved Savior or as terrifying Judge.

 

In this context, the endless debates about just how Jesus can be the bread of the world, how He is present in His Supper, how He is consumed by those who eat and drink the bread and the wine, and how exactly Jesus will raise all these people up on the Last Day, fall into distant insignificance.  What remains of tremendous and eternal significance, is that He is in fact the bread and life of the world, that He is actually present in His Supper, that He certainly is consumed by those who partake of the bread and the wine, and that He shall raise up all who have done so on the Last Day.  It is not the Sacrament of the Supper, nor the transient elements of bread and wine, which accomplish these things, but the Word and Spirit of the Living God.  We are not magicians nor alchemists, seeking some potion or ritual which will transform us into what we are not, as if prancing about in fancy vestments and genuflecting at the proper moments could achieve through our works the salvation of souls.  To the contrary, Christians approach Jesus in faith as their Savior, believing what He has said, because like St. Peter we believe in who He is:  the Son of God, the Messiah who takes away the sins of the world, and the only One who has the Words of eternal life.  The detailed how of our salvation where the transcendent omnipotence, omnipresence, and omniscience of the Lord God Almighty converge in unfathomable love through a Roman Cross and break forth from a Jewish tomb, are likely beyond the contemplative power of any finite mind.  But the what and the who of our salvation, the Vicarious Atonement of the Lord Jesus Christ for the sins of the world, which opens wide the portals of heaven to all people through faith and repentance by the present and unconquerable power of His Word and Spirit, this means everything.

 

Hear the Word of the Lord as He encounters you this day.  Feel His Spirit pierce your own, carving away the false pieties, self-justifications, rationalizations, and sophistries you have composed to shield you from the light of grace.  See Jesus for who He really is, and hear Him for what He really says, knowing that our flesh profits nothing, but His Word and Spirit give eternal life.  Approach His table in faith and repentance, receiving what He freely offers according to the terms which He has set by His own Eternal Word.  Let His Word and Spirit fill you even as you consume such humble elements as bread and wine, knowing that the Word of Jesus has made Him present to you, that He might raise you up this day just as He will on the Last Day.  Amen.

 

Jezebel and the People of God: A Meditation on 1st Kings 19 for the Season of Pentecost

And Ahab told Jezebel all that Elijah had done,

and withal how he had slain all the prophets with the sword.

Then Jezebel sent a messenger unto Elijah, saying,

So let the gods do to me, and more also, if I make not thy life

as the life of one of them by to morrow about this time.

And when he saw that, he arose, and went for his life,

and came to Beersheba, which belongeth to Judah,

and left his servant there.

 

But he himself went a day's journey into the wilderness,

 and came and sat down under a juniper tree:

 and he requested for himself that he might die;

and said, It is enough; now, O Lord, take away my life;

for I am not better than my fathers.

And as he lay and slept under a juniper tree,

behold, then an angel touched him, and said unto him, Arise and eat.

And he looked, and, behold, there was a cake baked on the coals,

and a cruse of water at his head.

And he did eat and drink, and laid him down again.

And the angel of the Lord came again the second time,

 and touched him, and said, Arise and eat;

because the journey is too great for thee.

And he arose, and did eat and drink,

and went in the strength of that meat forty days and forty nights

 unto Horeb the mount of God.

 

This vignette from today’s lectionary describes a depressing low in Elijah’s ministry immediately after a triumphant victory.  In chapter 18, Elijah had just been called out of the wilderness to demonstrate the Lords’ power on Mount Carmel, putting the pagan priests of Baal to shame who had led the children of Israel into apostasy, and resulted a widespread public conversion of heart of thousands of people back to the one, true God.  The judgement of God’s famine and drought was lifted, and the people were restored by faith and repentance in the grace of God their savior.  Victory seemed absolute, as Elijah led the people to capture the 450 priests of Baal and have them executed for their horrific crimes against God and Israel, and for their previous murders of nearly all the prophets of the Lord.

 

Yet Jezebel, the vicious pagan queen of King Ahab, in the face of inescapably miraculous public works of God to save and restore His people, vowed instead before her impotent gods to hunt Elijah until she killed him.  No demonstration of God’s love or redemption would convert Jezebel’s heart, as her mind and soul were twisted into a diabolical lust for demonic power.  Like Satan himself, knowing full well the measure of her failure and the weakness of her infernal masters before the Lord God Almighty, she chose to curse God and His people even as she faced her own judgment.  Jezebel’s thoughts and actions were not rational, but contorted by evil, malice, lust, and pride, into a murderous impulse to wound God through harming God’s people, and to do as much damage as she could in the time she had left.  Under the threat of Jezebel’s insane vendetta, Elijah fled once again for his life into the wilderness, hunted by wicked political leaders and their pagan servants.  His despair was so great that he prayed for God to take his life, that his work might be done, and that he could finally rest outside the fury of such luciferian influences.

 

There are plenty of places around the globe today, where the people of God continue to flee and hide from demonic powers in places of high earthly authority.  The underground churches of Communist Asia and the lands dominated by Islamic forces, bear testimony in martyr’s blood nearly every day to the foul and dangerous work of modern Jezebels.  Even in historically Christian lands, where pagan, Marxist, and secular forces press for ever greater totalitarian control of the levers of power, persecution is arising against the people of God to stamp out any authentic witness to Him and His Word.  Whatever their shades and variations across history, dark forces are always gathering and amassing in various places in a suicidal quest to rebel against the Creator of the Universe.  As in the time of Jezebel, the real influencers of this pattern aren’t human, but demonic; she is just as dead and gone as Stalin, Moa, Hitler, Pol Pot, or various other terrorists and dictators who have come and gone.  What remains is a fallen humanity that too often eagerly follows these dark interlocutors into paths of broad destruction, giving their already twisted minds and souls into the full embrace of hell.  Wherever fallen people remain until the Last Trumpet sounds, there will be fertile ground for blood thirsty Jezebels among us.

 

God answered Elijah’s despair through His Word and presence, as He has done for the people of God across history, and as He shall continue to do until the end of time.  The miracles and the context may change, but the Word and Spirit do not—the same Almighty God who converted the hearts of thousands on Mount Carmel, was reconciling the world to Himself on Mount Calvary, and shall come once again in the flesh as Jesus returns to judge the living and the dead.  This is the same God who walked in the Garden of Eden with our first parents, settled Noah’s ark on the mountain after the Flood, thundered with His Law and Covenant on Mount Sinai, marched with Joshua in the conquest of Canaan, stood with David against the Philistine monster Goliath, sent the Apostles and their successors into far flung lands to heal the sick, forgive sins, cast out demons, to preach repentance and the forgiveness of sins in Jesus alone, and to proclaim that the Kingdom of God has come.  This is the God who has preserved for Himself a remnant in every age, a communion of saints who cannot be destroyed by fire or sword, by intrigue or mischief, or by any power under heaven.  This is the God who abides with us by His Word and Spirit, calling all people to faith and life, and empowering those who follow Him such that the gates of hell cannot withstand them.

 

The pain of persecution and social rejection can make it feel like the forces of darkness are winning, that the devil is stronger than the Creator, and that the powers of death wielded by wicked fiends is more powerful than those who cling to life.  But the truth is that evil flares and rises across times and places, and those who embrace it go to their place, never to return from the flames of their eternal prison.  God Almighty, Creator of Heaven and Earth, abides forever, as do those who put their trust in Him.  Reconciled and forgiven, the saints abide in the life and love of Jesus Christ, His Word and Spirit enlivening them forever.  Jezebel is dead and gone and will never torment the people of God again, while Elijah lives on, able to show up on the Mount of Transfiguration together with Moses, living in peace and joy with all the saints and angels in God’s Eternal Kingdom.  The insanity of evil persists from age to age because fallen people allow it to do so by embracing rather than rejecting it, but the life-saving power of God in Jesus Christ endures by His Word and Spirit among us unto ages without end.  Do not be discouraged or despairing in the face of modern Jezebels, but hear instead the Word of the Lord which comes to seek and to save you, to empower and enliven you, so that death is no longer your foe, because Jesus is your unconquerable, ever-present Victor.  Amen.

 

Striving for Peaceful Unity: A Meditation on Ephesians 4 for the Season of Pentecost

I therefore, the prisoner of the Lord, beseech you

that ye walk worthy of the vocation wherewith ye are called,

With all lowliness and meekness, with longsuffering,

forbearing one another in love;

Endeavoring to keep the unity of the Spirit

in the bond of peace.

There is one body, and one Spirit,

even as ye are called in one hope of your calling;

One Lord, one faith, one baptism,

 One God and Father of all, who is above all,

and through all, and in you all.

 

There’s a lot of distance between the unity St. Paul called for in his Epistle to the Church at Ephesus, and the way unity is popularly discussed today.  Politicians call for unity, as do theologians, bureaucrats, coaches, administrators, corporate executives, neighborhood gangs, international crime syndicates, intelligence agencies, financial institutions, professional associations, craftsman guilds, and likely a myriad of variations in between and beyond.  In much of the way worldly organizations speak of unity, it is a means to an end, or a stepping stone toward some other objective angling toward power, money, pride, or influence.  When a politician calls for unity, they often want consolidation of power to implement their policy against the will of their adversaries; businesses want growth and profit; team leaders want victory and prestige.  I’m not sure the average person, when they hear a leader call for unity, thinks of themselves as a manipulable pawn coalesced to solidify the leader’s ambitions for power, wealth, and influence, but sitting for a while in many political, economic, or theological strategy sessions will make it hard to miss the point.  Worldly calls to unity often come with ephemeral promises for the people who rally to the leader, but unity oriented as a means to power usually works out much better for the leader than it does for the followers.  The Pharaohs lived much better than the unified slave labor force who built their pyramids; kings lived better than their unified serfs who tended their land; most military leaders live far better than the troops in the trenches; Stalin and Mao lived far more sumptuously than their brutally unified populations; Popes and denominational leaders often live lavishly while their unified members struggle against rising secular and apostate forces which harass and wound their congregations and communities.  Unity as a means to a worldly end, rarely works out well for those people turned into a means for some other power-hungry leader’s goal.

 

This is worlds away from the unity St. Paul is talking about.  Rather than calling for unity as a way to pad his wallet, build his Apostolic prestige among the other Apostles, or become a sectarian leader who could bend all congregations to his political will, Paul started the chapter by noting his personal role as a prisoner—a captured slave—of Jesus Christ.  As a servant of Jesus’ Word and Spirit, Paul called the Christians at Ephesus to start with lowliness, meekness, and a longsuffering forbearance in love toward one another.  With that, he could enjoin them to strive toward keeping their unity in the Spirit, bonded together in a fellowship of peace—a hard work of focus and devotion which did not create unity as a means to an end, but sought to keep unity as a gift to be cherished.  Such unity was a reflection among them of the deeper reality that in fact there is only One Body of Christ which is His Church, only one Spirit who calls and sanctifies that Body, only one Lord who leads and saves that Body, only one saving faith in that one saving Lord, only one Baptism that He established for uniting all people through His new covenant of justification by grace through faith in Him alone, and only one Father who is above and within and among all His people.  This was not a unity born of man, but of God—a gift of unity and fellowship in Jesus which connects all those who put their trust in Him.  This unity does not bolster the pride, power, wealth, and prestige of any man, but makes everyone who will repent and believe the Gospel a joint heir of the Kingdom of God.  Such unity is not a means to another end, but an end in itself:  the establishment of a renewed human community made one with each other because they have been reconciled to God through the shed blood of Jesus Christ.  This reality rings through eternity to the glory and praise of God alone, so that as St. Paul would say, no man may boast, regardless of whatever individual gifts or callings or talents they might be given to live and serve in God’s Kingdom.  No matter our individual diversity within this blessed unity, to us all is grace, and to God is all the glory.

 

Like so many of the good gifts of God, they give us opportunity to recalibrate our thinking, and to examine ourselves in light of them.  Christian unity is not something we make, but something we are given, and that is very good news.  In our fallen condition, with our inclinations to pride and the whole host of sins which mark our fallen race, we should not be surprised that human attempts to build unity on promises of utopia tend toward dystopia, where sinful people use other sinful people to accomplish sinful ends and leave vast scenes of human wreckage everywhere in their wake.  We learn from God’s good gift of unity accomplished in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus and given freely to all people by the power of His Gospel Word proclaimed, how far our human attempts at unity fall short of His everlasting righteousness.  Such a Law’s polished mirror should drive us to acknowledge and repent of our depravity, to turn from the paths of destruction and evil which can only lead to death and despair.  And like all of God’s Law, it is a faithful tutor to drive us to our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.

 

The gift of God’s unity in Jesus also empowers us by His Word and Spirit to keep what He has freely given us.  Not a work we do to save ourselves or to preserve our salvation, but the loving call of God’s redeeming grace which unites us to Jesus, continues to call us to live in that same faith which He gave us in the beginning.  What begins by grace through faith, continues by grace through faith and is found in Jesus alone, as Jesus alone has finished the work of our salvation from beginning to end.  The lowliness and meekness and longsuffering and forbearing love needed to strive for keeping the unity of the Spirit in the bonds of peace are gifts given to the people of God through faith in Jesus, so that our work in keeping what He has given us is actually His work ongoing through us.  We do not build the Kingdom of God nor its unity by human efforts, but God continues to build His Kingdom among us by His Word and Spirit, through means of grace which pass through human mouths and hands.  The Kingdom is His, the Salvation His, the Glory all His, while to us is given freely the inestimable riches of His forgiveness and everlasting life.

 

If you are disheartened by the world’s disastrous forays into variations of unity, and the echoes of those sinful ambitions reverberating even through ecclesiastical halls, be of good cheer, for Christ has overcome this world by His own shed blood on Calvary.  What man has pursued and failed to achieve in his fallen powers, Jesus has accomplished by His omnipotent love.  What we have often failed to reflect in our own communities and congregations and even within our own hearts, Jesus continues to create and sustain in, with, and all around us.  What man cannot do, God has already done, establishing His everlasting Gospel in Jesus Christ and drawing all people unto Himself by grace through faith.  The Kingdom is come, the Word is proclaimed, the feast is prepared, and the banquet hall rings with the joyous acclimation of Jesus Christ as our Saving and Victorious King.  To you this day, and everywhere hearts long for unity with their God and neighbor, the endless chorus of the Living God with all His saints and angels and every redeemed soul of every time and place calls out across the expanses of heaven and earth to welcome you home, and into the unified, finished work of Jesus Christ.  Amen.