Right-ness in Christ [Easter 5]

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READINGS FROM HOLY SCRIPTURE:

• Isaiah 12:1-6

• James 1:16-21

• St. John 16:5-15

 

May grace and peace be multiplied to you. (1 Pet 1)

 

Who speaks to you today, saying:

“when the Helper comes, He will convict the world…concerning righteousness, because I go to the Father, and you will see me no longer;”

 

The Lord includes His righteousness in His Word because it is directly a part of Him. Jesus is His righteousness incarnate. What this leads us to is to search for righteousness outside of ourselves, even though there are many examples of righteousness in life. We should take this Word from the Lord and pursue righteousness, first by receiving it gladly from Jesus alone, then practicing it in our own lives to benefit our neighbor.

 

When the Lord speaks of righteousness, He is speaking of justification. Usually, theologians will spend all their time on “courtroom language”. As in righteousness, or justification, is a word you’d hear in a courtroom to indicate acquittal, or a declaration of innocence. And that is all well and good. Jesus is our mighty Judge, after all.

 

But is that all there is to this life of faith? We live and then die, only to go in front of the Judge to be judged? It is a nice thing, to be declared not-guilty in front of God, but the problem is that that would only be according to the Law. That is, you can be justified by the Law, but that doesn’t mean that you accurately reflect that proclamation as a person.

 

This is what the last two Commandments aim at: having only an outward appearance of righteousness, but inwardly are entirely sinful.

 

Think of it this way: since tax season has recently left us, imagine a world where no one likes taxes, or the IRS, or the jail time associated with choosing not to pay this voluntary taxation. Everyone complains about it and you would be hard pressed to find someone saying, “I love not being able to keep my own money!”

 

Now, one day, a man decides to follow through on everyone’s sentiment. That is, he decides that he’s not going to pay anymore, probably because it steals care from his family. Of course, the authorities come knocking and he is taken away to be punished. 

 

Who stands up for him? Who complains about taxes when the authorities come? No one. Well, its the law, they say. Don’t break the law if you don’t want to go to jail. 

That is righteousness according to the Law. Where the outward matters more than the inward and even more than mercy and honor.

 

Repent. Everyone wants to be right. In other words, the whole world is pursuing righteousness. It is the goal of every keyboard warrior, armchair warrior, and weekend warrior. To be the only righteous one in the room is sought after by every social media influencer, virtue-signaler, and online bot. It is also an easy topic to broach with neighbors to lead others to Jesus.

 

The allure of righteousness is in the name: being right. The sports fanatic wants to be right. The political devotee wants to be right. Even the theologian wants to be right. But they only want the appearance of being right in order that they become popular or to “lord it over” others. Our sin makes a hypocrisy of righteousness.

 

The Law always accuses. As Romans says, “They show that what the law requires is written on their hearts, while their conscience also bears witness and their conflicting thoughts accuse or perhaps excuse them” (2:15). Meaning, our sinful nature always takes the law and either breaks it outright or schemes to make things appear right in other’s eyes.

 

“Christ is the end of the law for righteousness to everyone who believes” (Rom 10:4). For the reason of our hypocrisy, Jesus took away righteousness so that we could not destroy it. As our Gospel reading has declared, Jesus has placed righteousness with the Father. More precisely, true Righteousness is in Jesus’s going to the Father.

 

Pfft! Whoever heard of such nonsense? That a man can be made righteous and pious just because Christ has ascended to heaven or goes to the Father and we see Him no more? There we must say that a fool has spoken, and no wise, Son of Man. Righteousness is a virtue, to be practiced, in order to teach man what he owes others.

 

We know no better.

 

Therefore, true righteousness must come from outside of ourselves. It must be given to us, taught to us. But before that, it must be brought to us by faith alone. 

 

Jesus, in going to the Father and us no longer seeing Him, secures our righteousness in a place that we can not screw it up: Himself. In other words, God declares sinners righteous for Christ’s sake alone. Our sins have been charged to Christ and His righteousness has been credited to us.

 

Righteousness is in the Blood. “The Blood of Jesus, His Son”, says 1 John 1:7, “purifies us from all sin.”

In the shed Blood of Jesus, our unrighteousness is paid for. This rescue, this redemption is called Atonement. There is a wrong to be repaired, a debt to be paid for you and it is only True God and True man in one Christ that can accomplish such a thing. In sin, you are always wrong. In Christ, you are right.

 

How is it possible for an eternally and always-right God to declare sinners righteous? 

From 2 Corinthians, “God made Him Who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in Him we might become the righteousness of God” (5:21)

And Romans, “He was delivered over to death for our sins and was raised for our justification” (4:25).

 

Righteousness is more than just being right. Its even more than just being right about God. Righteousness focuses on the acquitted penalty by receiving Christ. Meaning, you, as a person are moved from eternally "condemned" to "divinely pardoned" at conversion.

 

Conversion is true righteousness. When you first believed, you were converted, that is when the Holy Ghost first Called you by the Gospel of Jesus Christ, enlightened you with His gifts, and sanctified and kept you in the faith. 

 

In other words, you cannot convert yourself. You cannot find the righteousness that leads to Faith on earth or within yourself, if only because your sinful nature always works against it, turning you to the right and left each time you get close. This leads to your second, continuous, conversion that is when you daily sin much and daily need much forgiveness.

 

Jesus keeps your righteousness for you, not that its your own, but it is yours by faith in Christ. Faith alone. This is an important point, because the other “half” of Righteousness is presented today in an equally odd way. That is, that righteousness comes when you can see Jesus no longer. 

 

That is, now, after Christ’s ascension to the right hand of the Father, we must seek righteousness. So do it. Do it by practicing true Righteousness, that is communing with the hidden God in His Supper. The true art of righteousness is practiced by first communing with Righteousness, for He desires it to be this way.

 

Our being right is secured and found only in Jesus. If you want to be right in life, you must find your life in Christ, that is in Faith and in Communion. With those two things secure, then you can face the world in the joy of the Gospel. The wrongs are Jesus’s to right. The evils are Jesus’s to avenge. The Faith is Jesus’s to hand out in Word and Sacrament.

 

Alleluia!

Amen.

 

Blind sinner, seeing Saint [Easter 4]

LISTEN TO THE AUDIO HERE

READINGS FROM HOLY SCRIPTURE:

• Isaiah 40:25-31

• 1 Peter 2:11-20

• St. John 16:16-23

 

May grace and peace be multiplied to you. (1 Pet 1)
 
Who speaks to you today, saying:

“A little while, and you will see me no longer; and again a little while, and you will see me”

 
As Jesus reveals more of His death and resurrection to His disciples at the Last Supper, that is the “not seeing and a little while and you will see”, He is also teaching us about sin in our lives. He includes this in His Word in order to teach that when we sin, we can’t see Jesus and His Spirit has left. He points us to the seriousness of sin in order that we approach Him with sincere repentance for all sins and that we approach our neighbor with love and compassion, in his sins.
 
When we encounter God, we encounter Him in our sin and He is not fair. Simply using the alleged difference between the Old Testament and the New, many people and scholars cannot match up that the God in both is one and the same. The Old Testament is rough and violent, they say, and the New is fluffy and kind. The Old Testament is full of stone-age misogynists and the New has goodie-two-shoes.
 
We mistakenly come to believe that God’s Word evolves and so do God’s people. Much worse we think that we evolve, as Christians, and some how increase our sanctification simply because we think we are doing God’s will. God’s Law, that is those things that seem to need to be done, looks like it outshines the Gospel, those things Jesus does for us.
 
Jesus then aggravates this further and says, “Whoever has been born of God does not sin…and he cannot sin”, in 1 John 3, and “If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us“ in the same epistle but the first chapter. It is as if we are given a glimpse of God, like we can almost see Him, as He causes us to be born into a new life without sin, but then covers His tracks as we must confess that we are not without sin.
 
We do not see Him and we are sorrowful, because we have chosen to place our sin in front of our eyes and let it have its way with us. We have chosen to follow the devil, agree with the devil, and give in to the sin in our lives. Submitting ourselves to sin robs us of our place in God’s Creation.
 
Why is that? Two things: sin is not a thing, it is a corruption, a cancer that makes what is right, wrong. Two: God has come, in the flesh, to accomplish salvation. That means that those whom He Calls and Saves are no longer as they used to be simply because He says so. We are not the same as the world, but are a part of the vanguard of new humanity: the Church, the Body of Christ.
 
“There are two evils” that my people have committed, says the Lord in Jeremiah 2:13, “they have forsaken me, the fountain of living waters, and hewed out cisterns for themselves, broken cisterns that can hold no water.”
 
What Jeremiah is talking about is that we have turned away from the God Who Serves us living waters in His Church and instead created a church in our own image, where we are most comfortable.
 
Repent. Jesus has turned us from our sinful ways in order that we may live as He intended. He has remade us in His image that no sin may be present and that no sin have power over us. Look to the Old Testament reading for today. He gives power to the faint. He renews strength. They shall mount up with eagles’ wings!
 
Instead, what happens to you is that you continue to sin, as St. Peter teaches:
But it is not to your credit if, when you sin, you endure. 
Indeed, our own Confessions state: “It is, accordingly, necessary to know and to teach that when holy men, still having and feeling original sin, also daily repenting of and striving with it, happen to fall into manifest sins, as David into adultery, murder, and blasphemy, that then faith and the Holy Ghost has departed from them, [they cast out faith and the Holy Ghost]. For the Holy Ghost does not permit sin to have dominion, to gain the upper hand so as to be accomplished, but represses and restrains it so that it must not do what it wishes. But if it does what it wishes, the Holy Ghost and faith are [certainly] not present. (SA III:3:43 )
 
The Holy Ghost, but not the Father and certainly not the Son. For Jesus has so joined Himself with humanity that there is no space left between them. The rescue is perfect. Sin, death, and the devil have been disarmed. The Gospel message is the forgiveness of sins, that is that sin really does have no more power over you and you are free to see Jesus Christ Crucified for you.
 
Thus, the sorrow we have is three-fold: we sorrow that our Almighty God has need of reducing Himself to such a state as to be killed because of our incompetence. We sorrow that we find that incompetence, that sinfulness, inside of ourselves so deep that there is no ridding ourselves of it. And we sorrow because we cannot by our own reason or strength believe in Jesus or come to Him.
 
In Christ, we are not the same as the world. The precious Blood of Jesus has flipped the world’s script. Where the world wants sorrow at the cross, faith rejoices in the depth, breadth, and width of that Love, that chases us to the lower regions of hell for our rescue. Faith rejoices that, though sinfulness rages in us, our sainthood has been secured by the Body and Blood of the forgiveness of sins.
 
And, Faith rejoices that belief comes from God alone and not any inward strength. Do not say, “Do whatever you please; if you believe, it all amounts to nothing; faith blots out all sins,” etc. (SA III:3:42). Rather say, my help comes from the Lord Who causes the weak to stand and the sinner to be forgiven, of whom I am chief.
 
We rejoice that we are forgiven sinners, not that we are sinners. We rejoice that we see each and every one of our sins, big and small, as leading us to destruction. In this confession, the confession of complete dependence on God for sanctification, we see Jesus again, and no one can take that joy from us. For we have sinned much, therefore much forgiveness is needed.
 
In Jesus, God has done His utmost to make Himself visible. In the beginning, He was just as present as Christ was with the disciples, but that vision was lost. In Jesus, it is won back, such that we are not the same as the world. We are under the Lordship of the Risen Jesus.
 
His decree is simple: He rules. He rules not with an iron fist, but with iron nails and spear in Him. He reigns, not from a worldly throne, but from a tree, the tree of the symbol of the world’s salvation for the weight that hung upon it, that is the Body of God.
 
In this Kingdom, sin has no dominion. In this Kingdom, death has no dominion. In this Kingdom there will be no one who is born again that will sin, even if it means they have to be resurrected from the dead to accomplish it. The King has spoken. 
 
On this side of that promised glory, we dare not say “we have no sin”. We also dare not say “we have no Savior for that sin”. This is the battleground of the Christian, that at the same time he is sinner and saint. Both fully worthy of eternal condemnation and fully worthy of the throne of Christ. 
 
We have been given the right to see Jesus in His triumphant, Easter light, we are His Church, His Risen Body. And as proof of that gift, we have been given to eat and drink that promise at His Holy Supper, set before us: His enemies and His Saints. 
 
So it is that the life of a Christian is the life of repentance, daily and richly. For we daily sin much and daily are in need of repentance and forgiveness. We daily blind our own eyes, in sin, so that we do not see our Savior condemning, but the Gospel reveals our Savior strong to save, and strong to give sight to the blind.
 
In our newly regenerated life, we understand now why we see God and not see God. Because we are both sinner and saint at the same time, it can be true that we do not sin, in Christ, and that we have sin. Only Christ perfectly keeps the Law, therefore it is true that you are perfect, that is, righteous and blameless, in the sight of God.  In Christ, this is true!  Through faith in Christ, you are forgiven.  You are His!  If you would die this very day, your life would open up to fullness and blessing you have not yet experienced!
 
Christ has redeemed you, and we dare not confess anything different.
 
Alleluia!
Amen.

The Word is the Thing [Easter 3]

LISTEN TO THE AUDIO HERE

READINGS FROM HOLY SCRIPTURE:

• Ezekiel 34:11-16

• 1 Peter 2:21-25

• St. John 10:11-16

 

May grace and peace be multiplied to you. (1 Pet 1)

 

Who speaks to you today, saying:

“My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me” (v27)

 

Though this verse is not in our Gospel reading today, the “Voice of the Shepherd” is and it is mentioned in John chapter 10 four different times. This means that hearing the Good Shepherd is just as important as following the Good Shepherd. Therefore, God includes this in His Word to get us to realize this and point us to hearing His voice alone, over and above the voice of the world. 

 

For in our lives, there are many voices, but only one Shepherd. We must be able to distinguish between them and have ears for Jesus alone. This is accomplished by Jesus making His spiritual Word, physical. The Word is the thing, as we shall say, and when Jesus says something, it happens.

 

As the eclipse frenzy draws down to a quiet riot, now overshadowed by the next new thing, war, I must ask: why the fanaticism this time around? 

I have been through a couple eclipses and they were never portrayed in the news in quite the fashion this one was. There was more of a religious fervor this time, at least I noticed it more, with words being used such as “incredible” and “majesty” and “bring us all together”. 

 

Not to mention the screaming and cheering and crying that would put any church service to shame, but for what? Why was the eclipse “incredible”? Why should we connect the word “majesty” to such a thing? How does it bring everyone together? And let’s not forget, “you’ll never see it again” and “it was a gift given to you”.

 

Now, the Christian hears those words and ascribes any and all cosmic events to God, rightly using “incredible”, “majesty”, and “gift”. However, the media’s use was also religious in order to draw you away from God. And as proof it offers you the calculations it uses, the CGI for examples, and the low odds of such events taking place where you are.

 

Thus, you are to hear and see and believe in something not Jesus. I agree that the eclipse, really any phenomena in nature, is worthy of admiration, but not for its own sake. The world wants to distract you with elaborate mathematics and unaffordable observation equipment. It wants you to worship how great the calculations and observations are. 

 

What Scientism wants is your faith placed in it when it shows you the nakedness of the universe. See, the rain doesn’t fall when you sacrifice a monkey, it falls because of the water cycle. See, the seasons don’t change because gods are changing places on a throne, but because of astrophysics. See, your faith is invalid because there is no mystery. We can explain it all and it is all very predictable.

 

Scientism is the belief that the natural world is all there is and chance makes it so. It is just chance that the Sun is exactly the same size as the moon, in the sky. It is just chance that they cross paths every once in awhile. We can show you on this paper, with these equations. So, give up your faith, give us your money, and remember to take your Zoloft.

 

We hear the voice of that worldly shepherd and we know it and we follow it. This is the shepherd that cares for us now. This is the shepherd that gives us shiny toys now. This is the shepherd that gives me my air conditioner and microwave. I bow to him. I give him my offering. I believe.

 

Repent. Am I telling you to close your brain? Far from it. I’m telling you to open your eyes and see that traps are set all around your feet. I’m telling you to not take everything you see on TV at face value. Think about things. Ask questions. When someone says that scientism this or that is going to bring everyone together, doubt it.

 

We now live in the post-eclipse world and what did it do for all of us? Nothing. We have an experience, but we don’t really know what it was and we can’t describe it. We don’t even know why there was an eclipse. Are you a better person because of it? Is your neighbor better off? Has peace come over the world? If its just something that happens, then why get so worked up?

 

Because everything in this world is a religious event for everyone, whether they admit it or not. They either bring you closer to God or further from Him. In the beginning, the sun, moon, and all stars were made to do what, create religious events? No, to tell time and mark those things for us: “And God said, ‘Let there be lights in the expanse of the heavens to separate the day from the night. And let them be for signs and for seasons, and for days and years’” (Gen 1:14). 

 

Jesus wants us to connect His words to the very thing they create. He wants the sun, moon, and stars attached to “And God said, Let there be…” Meaning, when we encounter them, we should think of those words of creation from nothing. And contrarywise, when we encounter the words of time, we should think of the things that accomplish them. The word is the thing.

 

That is what it means to confess that Jesus is the Word. That when He speaks, whatever it is, comes to be. Pops into existence. The sun is up there in the heavens, doing its thing, because God is continuously telling it to do it. The moon and the stars as well. The word is the thing.

 

In the same way, Jesus wants majesty and glory connected only to Him. That when we hear the word “majesty” we should think, “Ascribe power to God, whose majesty is over Israel, and whose power is in the skies” for “There is none like God Who rides through the heavens to your help, through the skies in His majesty” (Ps 68:34, Deut 33:26)

 

And when we hear “glory” we want to think, “Then Moses and Aaron went from the presence of the assembly to the entrance of the tent of meeting and fell on their faces. And the glory of the Lord appeared to them” and “the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth” (Num 20:6, John 1:14)

 

You see, the glory of God is much bigger than His creation, though that should be enough to convince the world of His absolute kingship. The glory of God is also bigger than just Jesus walking around, telling us to be nice, though that also should be enough to convert everyone. 

 

The Glory of God is that God became flesh, in Christ, and suffered, died, and rose again from the dead. The glory of God is the Glory of Jesus, crucified for sinners. And that that crucifixion pays for redemption and righteousness for all who believe. For, as St. Peter says, “we did not follow cleverly devised myths when we made known to you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but we were eyewitnesses of his majesty” (2 Peter 1:16) on the cross.

 

And the Power of God is the Word of the Cross. The Word is the thing. In this case, the word is salvation and the thing is the Body and Blood of Christ. 

 

For Jesus reveals His Resurrected self to His disciples in two ways: the word and the thing. When He appeared on the road to Emmaus, He both told the disciples He was raised and showed them. From St. Luke, “beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he interpreted to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself…and…he was known to them in the breaking of the bread” (Lk 24:27, 35)

 

He told them and showed them. The word is the thing.

Again, when He appeared in the locked, upper room, He both told the disciples He was raised and showed them. “’See my hands and my feet, that it is I myself. Touch me, and see. For a spirit does not have flesh and bones as you see that I have.’ And when he had said this, he showed them his hands and his feet. And while they still disbelieved for joy and were marveling, he said to them, ‘Have you anything here to eat?’ They gave him a piece of broiled fish, and he took it and ate before them. Then he said to them, ‘These are my words that I spoke to you’” (Lk 24:39-44).

 

The Word is the thing. Jesus attaches His Word, His teachings, to His Body and Blood. Now when we think of the Resurrection of Jesus, we think of Him in His proper Body. So that, when we encounter Him, as the Good Shepherd, those things come along with Him.

 

That is, in order to distinguish between the world’s voices and the voice of the Good Shepherd, we need only match the word with the thing: the Voice of the Shepherd to His Word and Sacraments.

 

That is why God in the flesh, Jesus, is “majestic”, “incredible”, and “unifying”, because He has come to redeem all people from their sins, sacrifice His Body and Blood to do it, and bring us all under His arms. The Voice of the Shepherd is the Word of Forgiveness. The Word of Forgiveness is the thing, that is the Gospel preached and the Sacraments administered.

 

In the natural world, God is hidden. We cannot find Him in eclipses, or lightning strikes, or northern lights. Though He has made such things for us and for our enjoyment, the lights in the sky are to tell time. The times that we are to remember God: His life and His Church Service for us. But those things only come to us by His spoken Word and no other way.