To whom would you compare God? A Meditation on Isaiah 40

Isaiah presents a question to the people of God that bears pondering in every age:  to whom would we compare Him?  In a world awash in every form of paganism and self absorption, it becomes easy for the people of God to forget exactly who He is.  The world will always have its vaunted philosophers and politicians, kings and kingmakers, various priests of various religions and gods.  In our day, the voice of the dominant pagan god of the west we have named Science—her priests proclaim her wonders to the world, and her followers enter her temples to make obeisance.  She claims to have brought the world into existence by blind chance, and to rule the chaos according to her principles.  Her prophets speak in her name many blasphemous things, because she does not value life or mankind.  She is a cold and careless dominatrix, who strips from humanity and all creation not only their dignity, but their purpose of existence.  She brings so great a delusion upon the earth, that she would, if it were possible, deceive even the Elect of God.

It is tempting in an age such as ours, to wonder if our God is really up to the task of combating so great a pagan deity.  Science’s handmaiden Evolution, has already bowed the schools and the government to her will, despite the horrors she will shortly send upon us.  We are quick to forget, that atheistic Science with an Evolutionary view of the human race, brought upon the 20^th century more bloodshed than the entire recorded history of the world.  It took over whole countries, where the value of human life was held in relative esteem to those whom chance had given power.  Millions upon millions of Jews, Russians, Chinese, Europeans, Christians, and many others, died upon the eugenics altar of atheistic Science, while pogrom after pogrom sought to clear the land of people whose lives were meaningless to the regime.  Even now, millions of children have been murdered in the womb, and persecution rises in traditionally free lands, where atheistic Science and Evolution infest the halls of academia and politics.  We have brought in and tolerated this false god among us, and she has now taken tight hold of the pillars of western civilization, so that she might cast it to the ground.  Where will be the nation whose Constitution and Declaration proclaim the foundation of law and society to rest in the inalienable rights of people created equal in their Creator’s image, when atheistic Science and Evolution destroy the dignity of man and replace it with Nietzsche’s Will to Power?

Regardless of the false gods man has created to enslave and debase itself, God Almighty speaks to us through his prophet Isaiah words we must always hear and believe:

To whom then will ye liken me, or shall I be equal?

saith the Holy One. Lift up your eyes on high, and

behold who hath created these things, that bringeth out

their host by number: he calleth them all by names by the

greatness of his might, for that he is strong in power; not one faileth.

Why sayest thou, O Jacob, and

speakest, O Israel, My way is hid from the LORD, and my

judgment is passed over from my God?

Hast thou not known? hast thou not heard, that

the everlasting God, the LORD, the Creator of the ends of

the earth, fainteth not, neither is weary? there is no

searching of his understanding. He giveth power to

the faint; and to them that have no might he increaseth strength.

Even the youths shall faint and be weary,

and the young men shall utterly fall:  But they that

wait upon the LORD shall renew their strength; they shall

mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be

weary; and they shall walk, and not faint.

Indeed, every false god, together with all who follow them, will faint and fail.  Science, as it has become divorced from a rightly ordered pursuit to observe and understand the created world in light of its Creator, will be dashed upon the rocks of it atheistic pretensions, and inherit the wind of its morally bankrupt Evolution. They do not have power in themselves to be sustained, because they are not the true God—instead, they are corrupters of that which is already made good, and pretenders to a throne upon which is already seated the King of Kings.

For there is only one true God, and we have known Him by His Word since the world began.  It is He who spoke the world into being, and He who sustains it by His Almighty will.  It is He who has never let the world be without His voice, that the people might always return to Him.  It is He who entered into the fallen mess of the world, to stand face to face with all the false gods of our presumption, and in the Person of Jesus Christ, suffered and died to redeem our lost race.  It is He who has ascended to the Right Hand of the Father, and He who will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead.  It is His Spirit that ever calls, gathers, enlightens, and sanctifies His People in this world and the next.  It is His Kingdom that shall have no end, and it is His people to whom He will give grace, mercy, forgiveness, and life everlasting.

Through all the cacophony of modern life, with all the lying voices of a thousand false gods ringing in our ears, the Word of the Lord remains.  By it, He calls us to faith and repentance, that we might receive from the only true God and Savior forgiveness, life, redemption, and hope.  Be not dismayed by the voice of devils and lying men—for the Lord our God sits forever upon His throne, and He has worked salvation for His people.  Behold the only true God:  The Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever.  Amen.

Becoming all things to all people: A Meditation on 1st Corinthians 9

St. Paul begins this chapter, upbraiding the Corinthian Christians for not only challenging his apostolic mandate, but also the reasonable liberties he didn’t even take.  He makes mention that like the other Apostles (including Cephas, or St. Peter,) he has every right to have a wife and children, and to receive wages as a pastor in order to live (just like the Law teaches from Moses.)  St. Paul, however, chooses not to have a wife, nor even to take any pay for his work preaching the Gospel throughout his missionary journeys.  He chooses rather to work with his own hands, and eschews the liberties to which he is entitled under the Law.

To the minds of modern pastors and congregations, this may sound very strange.  Modern pastors usually spend a great deal of time studying and preparing for the pastoral office, perhaps even amassing huge student loan debt in the process.  Normal pastoral education includes a four year bachelors degree, and a three to four year graduate degree, often with an unpaid year of field work called a vicarage.  They are expected to master the Bible not only in their own tongue, but in the original languages, so that they might be able to expound it most accurately.  They study the history of interpreting the Bible in systematic theology courses, so that they can recognize the truth of God versus the lies of the devil in any time or place.  They learn pastoral counseling and care techniques, so that they can apply their theological study to the individual lives of the people they shepherd.  They learn to stand in the place of Christ as an under-shepherd, speaking His Law and His Gospel to His people, and serving as stewards of His mysteries.  They learn to move as freely among the poor and oppressed as they do among the wealthy and the sophisticated.  They learn to walk with Christ’s people as they experience joy and pain, success and failure, eventually guiding them from this life to the next in the blessed assurance of Jesus’ Gospel of salvation.  They learn to stand between heaven and earth, interceding and caring for Christ’s people, and living out in their person the lonely truth that we are only pilgrims and sojourners in this vale of tears.  They see things that shake them to their core, and hear things that pierce the mind, often facing the demonic in more tangible and life threatening ways than anyone will ever know.  If they are married and have children, they must fight every day not only for their own spiritual lives, but also for the lives of their families, knowing that the devil would like nothing more than to crush a pastor by destroying those he loves most dearly.

And on top of all this, most American congregations think a pastor works just one day a week, preaching on Sunday.  They assume he also has capacity and interest in running all their various programs and projects, spending every waking hour tending to the details of various self-made priorities.  Either undaunted by, or ignorant of their pastor’s duties and training, they often foist upon him things he was not trained for, and things Christ did not send him to do.  Endless streams of board and committee meetings, social welfare programs, community involvement, finance or budget planning, and strategic planning or “vision casting” which always seem to try to re-cast the Church of Christ into some new cultural image.  Thinking their pastor little more than the community social planner, they usually pay him very little, often not enough to support his wife and children, nor to pay for those large student loans.  Add to that the constant congregational pressure to squeeze the pastor’s wife and children into an endless array of service projects and committees, so that they might get more bang for their buck, and this picture can look pretty bleak.  What many American congregations want of their pastors, is not what many pastors have been trained and called to do.  And what’s worse, is that if they don’t bend to the cultural demands of their congregation, they can find themselves without any means to survive at all—educated and trained for a calling no one wants them to do. 

What St. Paul writes to Corinth is good for us to hear today, as well.  Should pastors be able to live on the wages of preaching and teaching the Gospel?  Most certainly.  But rather than becoming slave to the Corinthian’s false understandings, and allowing the Gospel to be swallowed up in endless controversies, he prefers to restrain his liberty.  He works with his own hands to support his needs, electing the life of what we would call today a bi-vocational pastor (sometimes called “tent-maker pastors,” or “worker-priests,” depending on the parlance of your tradition.)  He knows that he will be held in lesser regard than the other Apostles, but he chooses this path of personal disregard, so that the Gospel might not be hindered.  Unbound by the proclivities and misunderstandings of the congregations he tended, he became all things to all people, able to speak truthfully and unfettered to all:  a Jew to the Jews, and a Gentile to the Gentiles; a man of education to the educated, and a man of simplicity to the simple; to the poor he became as one content in any circumstance, and to the wealthy he became one who knew how to properly handle wealth.  He came to anyone and everyone as Jesus would come to them, so that Jesus’ Gospel might not be hindered by either his own or other’s foibles.  In this way Paul became all things to all people, so that in his witness to Jesus as the Savior of the world, by all means some of every kind of people might be saved.

But it is not St. Paul who saves anyone, and he would be the first to tell us so.  St. Paul desired himself to be reduced, his liberties curtailed, his body subdued, so that in any and all ways, Jesus might shine through him.  Paul knew that his own glory and liberty didn’t mean anything, but Jesus’ glory and His Gospel of Salvation, was and remains the very life of the world.  Should churches have full time, well trained, and well cared for pastors, whose sole focus is on the ministry of Christ to His people?  Yes, indeed.  But the ministry of Christ is not a profession, and it does not exist for the glory of the servant nor of the congregations.  It exists always and only to bring Jesus to the people, together with the full counsel of His Word.  And so, even as the Church of Christ will continue to struggle with understanding and properly executing Christ’s Office of pastor, it will also continue to require the witness and work of bi-vocational pastors like St. Paul—those who are willing to be despised by the world, even by the church and fellow pastors, so that they might more freely become all things to all people, that Jesus might work through them to save any and all to whom they are sent.

Thanks be to God for faithful congregations, who support and care for their shepherds whom Christ has sent to them for the proclamation of His Word.  Thanks be to God for faithful pastors, who quietly yet daily tend to the needs of Christ’s people, bringing His Word to bear for their forgiveness, life, and salvation.  And thanks be to God for the bi-vocational shepherds who follow in the footsteps of St. Paul, who bear the scorn of many, that the Gospel of Christ might not be hindered in any way, even amidst this secular and pagan world.  Thanks be to God, that He has become all things to all people in His Son, that by the means of His Holy Cross, He has saved even us.  Amen.

Liberty bound in Charity: A Meditation on 1st Corinthians 8

St. Paul begins this short chapter in the context of eating meat offered to idols.  In the ancient world, it was not uncommon for much of the meat offered as sacrifices to pagan gods, to end up in the public market.  Without any significant means to preserve meat, all those sacrificed animals usually went to feed the priests and servants of the temple, then what was left over was sold.  Because pagan idolatry was the basic religious backdrop of the ancient world, most of the meat sold in the markets was at some point sacrificed to a pagan god.

Rather than telling the Christians in pagan lands that they could not buy and eat meat, he tells them that in reality, these pagan gods are not gods at all.  He knows that any pagan god was at best a ridiculous myth, and at worst a demon, but never could they be gods except to the deluded people who worshipped them.  Since there is only one true God, who makes and sustains all things, such sacrifices were meaningless to the Christian who knows that both food and the one who eats it, are ultimately responsible to the Creator.  The Christian had liberty to eat whatever was available as a gift from God, and to God alone did he give thanks for it.

But, given the pagan world in which they lived, Paul was quick to remind the Corinthian Christians, that appearances do matter.  For example, to the people who actually believed in their idols and worshipped them as gods, the Christian had to be careful that in eating meat sacrificed to idols, he did not give the impression that he worshipped those false gods, too.  The Christian must only and always worship the one true God:  Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.  This is made clear in the first commandment, and reinforced by Jesus who declares that He alone is the Way, Truth, and Life—the only way to the Father.  Only the true God has created and sustained all things; only Jesus has suffered and died for the sins of the world; only the Holy Spirit proceeds forth to call, gather, enlighten, and sanctify the whole Christian Church on earth.  Therefore, only the Trinity in Unity, and the Unity in Trinity is to be worshipped and adored.  The Christian must never give the impression, or present the false confession, that he is willing to worship or tolerate any other gods along side or before the one true God.

Even as St. Paul teaches the liberty of the Christian, he also teaches that Christian liberty is bound up in charity and compassion for the neighbor.  No Christian is free to exercise his liberty apart from love for his brothers and sisters, because the Law of Love is more fundamental than the Law of Liberty.  We learn this not only from St. Paul, but from the very nature of God Himself:  for He who is ultimately and infinitely free, has bound Himself to human flesh so that He might be the Atonement for all mankind.  It is divine and eternal love that bounds the Creator’s freedom, first within the Godhead between each of the Divine Persons, and secondly binds Him to His people by the Promise of His Gospel.  God shows to us something better than pure, unfettered freedom.  He shows to us a freedom made infinitely more noble when it is infused with and bound by love.  He becomes to us the image we are called to reflect, as Jesus—fully God and fully man—binds His freedom to love in the Cross.

As we survey ourselves and the whole Christian Church on earth, it is clear that we have a preferred fondness for our liberty over love.  Being selfish and sinful creatures, our inclination is to seize what we feel should be our freedom and our rights, usually at the expense of our neighbor’s need or weakness.  We demand the hymns and songs we prefer, over the desires of others; we demand the forms of worship we prefer, over the desires of others; we demand the offices and duties we prefer, over the needs and requirements of others; we demand power and prestige, over the wounded consciences of others.  We build for ourselves shrines to our gifts and talents, while ignoring the neighbors we should be serving through them.  We heap to ourselves titles and offices, forgetting that the Lord has said that the chief amongst His people, will be their servant.  While hymns and worship, offices and titles, forms and functions may all reside within the liberty of the Christian, they are never given unbounded by love.

In such things, St. Paul admonishes us, that even in the matter of something so trivial and meaningless as meat, he would rather not eat meat again so long as the world stood, than by his freedom in eating be a cause for a single brother or sister to stumble.  And why?  Because those brothers and sisters belong to Christ, who was crucified to save them.  To whom do you think you will give an account of how you use your freedom, but to Him who bound His freedom in love to save both you and them?  This is the scandal of Christian freedom run amok—that it uses the saving love of Christ as an excuse to jeopardize the salvation of others.  Unbounded freedom is not what we learn from our Savior.  Rather, it is the old lesson of the devil and his fallen angels, who prefer freedom without love.

To you, and to me, the love of our Savior calls out once again, this time in the words of St. Paul.  Rejoice in the freedom and liberty you have been given from sin, death, and the devil.  Rejoice in the salvation won for you by the precious Blood of Christ.  Rejoice that you are no longer under the Law of sin and death, but raised up to eternal life by grace through faith in Christ alone.  Even so, cast your eyes upon your Savior to learn what true liberty and freedom is:  it is love and compassion for God and man, a mystery of faith which cannot be separated from the love of God in Christ Jesus.  Our Christian freedom is purchased by the death of the Son of God, so that we might be raised up by His Holy Spirit, to walk in newness of life.  Through Jesus we learn to bind our freedom in love, so that our fellowship is with Him—and through Him, with the Holy Trinity, now and forever more.  Amen.

Fishing for People: A Meditation on Mark 1

I confess, that the fishing analogy found in the Gospels has caused me struggle over the years—not because it is wrong, but because of the baggage I bring with me to that concept.  For me, fishing is usually done with a pole, bait, and tackle.  It is usually a casual occupation, where I seek solitude or limited company, enjoying early morning hours around a gently waking lake.  I find a certain pleasurable challenge in matching the tackle to the time of the season, and the kind of fish I’m pursuing.  While much of my fishing experience is at the mercy of the weather, the calendar, the geography, or the fish population, I have the ability to plan and adapt my techniques and tools to maximize my potential for a catch.  I become an active participant in the fishing experience, and my methodology is a significant contributor to the success of my efforts.

This is not a good way to see how Jesus called His disciples to become fishers of men.  My experience of fishing is something recreational and largely tied to my own talents.  The kind of fishing Jesus is referring to, is a vocational service tied to His methods and His means.  Jesus did not call His disciples based on their own talents or ability to read the waters, but rather He called them so that He might form them in His own image, and give to them His own tackle for the work.  Before calling His disciples, St. Mark notes what Jesus was doing:

Now after that John was put in prison,

Jesus came into Galilee,

preaching the gospel of the kingdom of God, and saying,

The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand:

repent ye, and believe the gospel.

For starters, Jesus’ disciples don’t have to worry about discerning the proper time or season, because Jesus does that for them already.  He tells them that the time is fulfilled, and the Kingdom of God is at hand.  No need for His disciples to wonder if they are in the right place, or at the right time, or in the right season—Jesus proclaims that everywhere is the right place, every time is the right time, and every season is the right season, because His Kingdom is present by virtue of His divine presence.  Because Jesus the King has come to be the sacrifice which will redeem all mankind from sin, death, hell, and the power of the devil, He has brought His Kingdom near to everyone in the world.  The time is fulfilled, and the waiting is over.  The time of grace has come upon the whole world, and Jesus has called His disciples into the work of proclaiming it.

Next, Jesus doesn’t leave them wondering what bait and tackle to use, or give them a complex series of formulas to differentiate times and seasons.  Rather, He teaches them to preach repentance and the forgiveness of sins, which is the Gospel of His salvation for all mankind.  There isn’t another formula for various different people, but the very same means for everyone.  Just as there is only one Jesus whose Blood is shed for all mankind, so there is only one Name given under heaven whereby all mankind may be saved.  There isn’t a different set of tackle for the people of Asia, or the Middle East, or South America, or the Polynesian Islands.  There is only one message of repentance and forgiveness in Jesus Christ, which Jesus Himself gives to His disciples so that they may become His fishers of men.  Faith and Repentance, coming to every human heart by the power of the Holy Spirit working through Christ’s Law and Gospel faithfully preached, is now and shall ever be the means by which Jesus gives salvation to all mankind.  It is by Jesus’ Word, who is Himself the very Word of God, that His disciples will participate in gathering all mankind to Himself.

What solace this brings to the church in every age!  We are not called to wonder if our time and place is right for our tasks, because Jesus has told us that the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand, right here and right now.  Jesus makes every time and place the right time and place, by coming near to every time and place through His Word and Sacraments.  We do not have to wonder if we have the right tools to accomplish the work He has given us, because He gives His own divine Word to accomplish His will.  While the devil may deceive and distract the church, telling her that she must change or die, find new consultants and new methodologies to reach new generations, and mimic the cultural vanities of the world so as to be relevant, the Word of Christ neither flinches nor changes.  The devil, a liar from the beginning, creates fear in the disciples of Christ by tempting them away from their Savior’s Word and promises.  Jesus, however, continues to work saving faith in all who will hear Him, repent and believe His Gospel.  Jesus’ Gospel is simple, eternal, and immutable, no matter how convoluted the contrivances of the evil one may be in any generation.

And Jesus’ Kingdom is still near at hand, in our very midst, as He comes near to us in His Word.  Jesus continues to fortify the faith and repentance of His people in His Church, using the same means He uses to call all mankind to grace, forgiveness, mercy, and eternal life.  For wherever Christ is, there His saints will be gathered around Him and His Word of Life.  There, by the power of His Spirit working through His Word, people are continually called out of their darkness, and into His marvelous light.  There, Jesus continues to call disciples by His Word and Spirit, to go forth into the world with His means of grace, making disciples of all nations by baptizing them in the Name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to observe everything Jesus has taught by His Holy Word.  There, the kingdom of darkness is put to flight, the sacrificial work of seeking and saving the lost continues, and new generations of saints and martyrs are formed in the very image of Christ their Savior.

There, where Christ is present, are gathered His people around His means of grace, becoming by His Word and Spirit the very Body of Christ.  There we both rest and work in His wonderful grace, repenting and believing His Everlasting Gospel of salvation.  Amen.