John 7:37 - 39 Pentecost: New Life in the Spirit

Grace and peace be yours in abundance through the knowledge of God and of Jesus our Lord,

            The Bible and the church teach us that our God is a God of life.  The resurrection of Jesus shows that it was impossible for death to keep its hold on him.  He conquered death and the grave.  He is alive.  He creates life and sustains it.  He invites us all to turn to him so that he may strengthen us.  He offers life in eternity to everyone, and those who accept him in faith receive the blessings of his promises.

            The Bible’s message about God’s dominion over life and death encourages us if we are feeling low.  How downcast Ezekiel must have felt as he surveyed the valley of dry bones to which God’s Spirit had led him.  But God instructed Ezekiel to prophesy to the bones that he would pour the breath of life into them and they would revive.  This promise of God emboldened Ezekiel and it fills our hearts with joy and hope today.  God is the Lord of life, who brings life to his people.  Jesus says that streams of living water flow from within all believers.  He means that Christians will be alive with the joy of faith ad that willing hearts will take the place of reluctant ones.  He lifts us people up from momentary sorrows so that we live by courage and hope and faith.  Even large scale calamities like famine or war or great storms can’t shake God’s promise that he is the master of life.

            How do we stay in touch with the living water he promises?  By coming to worship, reading the Bible, and saying our prayers every day.  It’s not difficult or complicated.  God is always available to us.

            Nonbelievers get into trouble because they shut themselves off from the Lord of life and his blessings and sometimes they make simple things complicated.  A well-known rock musician decided he was interested in mysticism.  He left the music business and went to live as a monk.  He dressed in yellow robes and gave up food and all pleasures.  He spent hours and hours in prayer and after a long time without food he believed he had turned into white light and that a white light surrounded him completely.  He later said the experience almost killed him.  “My body essence was dripping out slowly,” he said.  “My energy was just leaving my body.  It was like I was evaporating…because I was so thin and weak.  Every day I’d wake up and say, “Am I going to live or am I going to die?”  He was looking for existence on a higher plane; he looked for God where he cannot be found:  in experimentation and the beckonings of his own brain.  Instead of finding life, he found death.

            This is an extreme case, but the devil tempts all of us to seek God in the wrong way.  He tempts us to expect an immediate and personal revelation from God.  He encourages us to hope that God will call us to him and enlighten us without the help of his Word or the sacraments.  This is a common experience.  I bet we’ve all met people who claim to have seen God and that God has spoken to them directly.  We need to weigh such claims carefully.  They are usually the fruits of sin and like all sin, they lead to death, as the rock musician discovered to his dismay.

            Fortunately, our Lord offers a way out of these calamities:  faith in the person and merits of Jesus Christ, who has promised that living water, not the brackish water of sin and death, will flow freely in the hearts of all who believe in him.  Jesus means that the Holy Spirit dwells in the souls of all Christians.

            The same Spirit that enlivened Ezekiel as he contemplated the valley of bones brings us vitality today.  The same Spirit that helped to raise our Lord from the dead also raises us to new life as we meditate on God’s Word and receive his sacraments.  The Holy Spirit convicts us of our sin; he also assures us of God’s forgiveness and his eagerness to strengthen us for a better walk with him.  The Spirit picks us up and consoles us when we mourn the loss of loved ones.  The Spirit enlivens us with the assurance of God’s love at times when the world turns against us. The Spirit brings us hope of eternal life if heavy thoughts cast us down. In order to make sure we take advantage of God’s gifts, we stay close to the source of living water – what the Lord tells us in the Bible.  We ask him for self-discipline to keep our hearts from wandering toward the traps and pitfalls that lie in wait for the naïve, the lazy, and the unsuspecting.  The Spirit blesses us with the wisdom and strength to stay faithful to God and his Word.

            Today is Pentecost – the one day of the year the church sets aside to honor the work of the Spirit.  Many Christians, myself included, don’t think very often about God’s Spirit, so I want to share with you some of the insights I’ve learned about the work of the Holy Spirit.

            To begin with, the Spirit doesn’t act on his own. He comes to us through the word of Scripture.  He doesn’t startle us as we’re driving down the street.  He won’t interrupt us with a special bulletin while we’re watching TV.  He comes to us when we read the Bible, as we take the sacraments, as we worship in church.

            Another way to put it is to say that the Spirit doesn’t call attention to himself.  The Father and Son send him into the world and he draws attention to them.  The spirit is at work in us when we understand our sins and trust in Jesus for salvation.  The Spirit points to Christ and reminds us of our need for salvation.  He awakens faith in the blessings of Christ’s crucifixion and stirs us to rejoice in the miracle of the resurrection.  The Spirit builds up trust that God is for the living and that he will sustain each of us in happiness forever so long as we don’t wander away from him. 

            During his farewell speech to the people of Israel, Moses said that they were either to choose life or choose death.  Choosing life means love for God, walking in his ways, and keeping his commandments.  This disciplined walk with God brings life and prosperity and increase.  The Spirit guides us to choose life.  We can even say that the Spirit acting in us like a stream of living water chooses life for us and we obediently comply with his choice.     

            I learned, also, that the Spirit not only helps us choose life, he also guides our walk with God.  This means that he puts us into a new relationship with the law.  The law tells us God’s will and it commands us to walk in newness of life, but it doesn’t give the power or the ability to carry out God’s commands.  The Holy Spirit working through the gospel of forgiveness and salvation in Christ, renews our hearts and empower us to live by God’s will.

            The rock musician I mentioned tried to find God and please him by carrying out certain laws that he thought were appropriate for a religious person. He dressed in a special way; he prayed incessantly; he fasted to the point of starvation.  But he didn’t look for God as the Spirit reveals him in Scripture and the sacraments, and the result was disaster.  He wanted to win God’s favor by carrying out works of the law.  Where God invites people to freedom, he made himself a slave to various laws.

            New birth in the Spirit frees us from the law’s whip.  The law doesn’t drive us the way the master of a dogsled drives his team.  Instead, the Spirit of Christ leads us and guides us so that we carry out our duties with free, cheerful hearts.  The works we do then aren’t law-works, but works and fruits of the Spirit. We don’t live under the law but under grace.

            We’re not perfect, of course.  A conflict between the flesh and God’s will continues in us throughout our lives.  Even though our inner selves delight in God’s desires for us, the spirit of our flesh is at war with our minds, so we submit to God’s chastening and welcome guidelines like the Ten Commandments. Though we are under grace, we accept the teachings of the law and don’t rely on our own holiness and piety or invent works for ourselves like excessive fasting and incessant prayers that the Bible doesn’t prescribe anywhere.  The law teaches us, too, that our works are imperfect so we don’t rely on them for our standing with God.  The Lord accepts our works, though, because we do them to please him and not because the law coerces us. Our works arise spontaneously from within our hearts because the Holy Spirit has renewed us.

            We’ll close then with a brief summary of the work of God’s Spirit. The Spirit sustains the world and preserves the church through the ministry of Word and sacrament.  The Spirit also acts on behalf of individuals by enlightening our minds, shaping our wills, and awakening new desires in our hearts.  He brings life to our bodies and keeps us holy.

            We all slip from time to time.  The Spirit shows us our faults and brings God’s mercy to us.  The Spirit teaches us to believe God’s Word and that he is on our side.  It’s through the Spirit that we learn that the world is not a valley of bones, but a beautiful creation of God and that keeps going day after day. Because of his mercy and pardon, we take part in life to the best of our abilities with joy and thankfulness.  In our Savior’s Name.  AMEN.   

The peace of god that passes all understanding keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. AMEN.                             

                                            

John 13:31 - 35 -- Mother's Day

Grace, mercy, and peace to you from God the Father and our Lord Jesus Christ,

            Somebody once said to me that because many people have extra money to spend and there’s a lot of stuff available to buy, our society makes more out of Mother’s Day now than in the past, and this may be true, because nowadays Mother’s Day is a secular occasion.  It actually began in the church before the Reformation, when on a Sunday in the middle of Lent, youngsters gave small presents to their mothers. Children who were away from home, especially daughters working as servants, returned to their families for a short time.  The church on this day calls our attention to deeper values and more worthwhile qualities than the habits of materialism.  It isn’t hard to think about Mother’s Day from a biblical point of view.

            First of all, the Scriptures hold women in high regard.  Two of this morning’s readings provide examples.  The passage from Acts refers to devout women in the early church.   During his earthly ministry, Jesus’ most loyal followers were women.   Many of Paul’s assistants were female, whom he praises in his letters.  You may have noticed, too, that in the passage from Revelation, John refers to the church as the bride of Christ.  From God’s point of view, the church is feminine.  You’ve probably heard the phrase “Mother Church”.  A Christian from the early days said that we cannot have God as our Father unless we have the church as our mother.  And then there was the time when Jesus said that he longed to gather the people of Jerusalem under his wings as if he were a mother hen, but they refused.  The church nourishes and sustains, supports and teaches – just like a mother.  The church leads wayward children to safety and salvation – just the way a mother or grandmother takes youngsters by the hand to keep them from trouble.  On Mother’s Day, then, we Christians remember that all of us are children in the eyes of God and need the warmth and protection of a loving mother – the church.    

            Now, if we stop and think about it, we’ll notice that mothers are prominently featured at many turning points in the biblical story.  Eve had three sons, from two of whom all people are descended.  Sarah had a child late in life through whom all nations would be blessed with the chance to lead full, abundant lives by faith in God.  And Christians everywhere remember Mary, the mother of our Lord.  The Heavenly Father chose mothers to help him carry out his plans as they nurtured their families.  We can say that the Bible is a family book, first the family of believers in Old Testament times – descendants of Abraham and Sarah and Jacob and his wives – and then the New Testament bride of Christ, the church, God’s family today.

            Families need mothers, and so God nourishes and protects the mothers he raises up.  This, too, is part of our Christian Mother’s Day celebration – the God upholds millions of Christian mothers, including the mothers and grandmothers at St. Peter’s.  You receive a share of the recognition that is due you on this day.

            The Bible doesn’t neglect the hard parts of being a mother.  The Heavenly Father knows that mothers experience trials as well as joys.  You’ll recall that Eve had to endure the murder of one son by another.  Sarah waited a long time for her only child and then suffered the stress of the possibility that Isaac might be sacrificed to God.  How joyful she was when Abraham came back down from Mount Moriah with her son alive and well.   Naomi, in the book of Ruth, lost her husband and both sons to famine, a weight that burdened her soul to its depths.  Then, too, the sufferings of Mary were sharp and painful.  But all these mothers endured in faith and the blessed Lord refined them and turned their sufferings into joy.  Believing mothers live day by day in faith.  They carry on; they don’t give up.  You carry on even after your children are grown up.  Your spirits are strong.  I’ve told you that my own mother’s family came from Finland. When I was in school, she taught me the Finnish word “sisu”, which means determination, strength of soul, the refusal to be broken.  Jesus has given St.  Peter’s mothers and grandmothers a Christian kind of sisu, which enables you never to give up and to hold on to Christ in faith, no matter what happens, for he will bless you and nourish your faith so that you will be ready to welcome him on the day of his return.

            You have the same source of hopes and strength as the faithful mothers of the Bible, for you are connected to the Lord.  He promised Eve that the Savior of the human race would be her offspring.  Sarah looked ahead to the enormous family of faithful people of which she would be the founding mother.  The child of Ruth and Boaz, whom Naomi cared for, was a direct ancestor of the Messiah.  These women believed in God and served his kingdom.  Heaven grants Christian mothers and grandmothers today the same access to the Lord.  So never give up.  Jesus carries you.  He pardons us.  He lifts us up.  He restores our strength and vitality. 

            It’s true that life in Bible times was simpler in many ways than our lives today.  Folks were close to nature.  They followed the rhythm of the seasons and carried out simple tasks.  They worked most of each day and didn’t worry, for example, about unemployment or where to find the money for fancy amenities.  It was second nature for them to turn to God at every point in their lives.  They didn’t have the conveniences and opportunities we do, the rewards and excitements, the uncertainties and corruptions of prosperous times.  But the complexities and temptations of secular life aren’t excuses for us to turn away from God but inducements to cling to him all the more.  The good Lord knows what we go through.  He pardons our offenses and holds out his hand for us to grasp.

            Jesus supports Christian mothers.  He lifts you up to nourish your children, to shine as lights in the community, to be the salt of the earth.  As you carry out your tasks with patience, love, balance of mind, and faith in God’s goodness, you do more important work than you may imagine.  You represent the Lord in a secular environment that needs to hear from him.  So on Mother’s Day, the church encourages her mothers and grandmothers to keep on.  You’re a part of God’s plan. He has a reason for putting you where you are; he will strengthen you.

            Now, I want to switch gears and bring in this morning’s Gospel text.  Jesus commands his disciples to love one another.  Everyone associates love with mothers.  Without the love of mothers, the world would be cold, impersonal, and machine-like.  It would be a lot worse than it is.  We thank our mothers for the love they give us.

            We remember that in this passage Jesus isn’t talking about a general human love but the love he wants Christians to have for each other.  Jesus brought a new kind of love into the world – a love that is focused on God and neighbors rather than selfish interests, a love with a purpose that keeps other people’s needs in mind, in particular spiritual needs, the love that reminds others of salvation in Christ.  Jesus commands his people to love one another with the same kind of love that he has for us.  The love of other Christians encourages us as we walk along the path to eternal salvation.  The Lord rejoices when he sees his people taking his kind of love as their own.

            In the early days of the church, a pagan Roman said Christians love each other without being acquainted with each other.  “Their master has implanted the belief in them that people who are born of God carry a mystery within them, which unites them most intimately into one body – a mystery that no one knows but they themselves.  It isn’t a kind of fraternal union with prideful and hostile exclusion of those who are on the outside, because Christian love widens hearts so that Jesus’ people love even outsiders with a love that bears all things and hopes all things.”

            Jesus blesses all Christians, including mothers, with the love that carries us to salvation.  Christian mothers draw on the love Christ and his community have for them for strength and support.  Jesus delights in your friendship for each other.  How much it must mean to you in times of both joy and stress to know that you have strong Christian friends to call on.

            The bonds of love among God’s people has another purpose as well.  It witnesses to unbelievers that the gospel is true.  Concern for folks who don’t yet believe stretches the hearts of most Christians.  A child may marry out of the faith or move away from the church for other reasons.  Drifting away from public worship after confirmation is very common.  We pray for such folks and ask that the Savior open their minds to receive his love.  We speak to them about the church with gospel-inspired hints, and as our dear ones see the effect on us of the love we receive in the Christian community, they may think again.  “If the church means so much to my mother or grandmother,” some will say, “maybe there’s something in it for me.”  Hearts will keep from hardening because you believe in the Lord who claims you and stick with the church that nourishes.

            Like the Lord, we sometimes have a special love for those who stray.  Though they may never say so, it must mean a lot to people who’ve had some experience of God and his church to know that someone they love prays for them and cares about their salvation.

            Our Christian Mother’s day, then, encourages the women and all of us to keep salivation in mind as we continue to walk in the mystery of Christian love.  Christian mothers do something that only Christians can do: you offer the hope of a blessed future in Christ to your children, grandchildren, and others who come your way.  So keep on.  Be encouraged, In Jesus’ Name.  AMEN.

The peace of God that passes all understanding keep your hearts and minds in the knowledge of Christ Jesus.  AMEN.     

John 15:1 - 8 The True Vine

Grace, mercy, and peace to you from God the Father and our Lord Jesus Christ,

            Jesus refers to himself in many ways in John’s gospel.  “I am the bread of life,” he says.  He also calls himself the light of the world, the good Shepherd, as we explored last week, and the resurrection and the life, among other names which help us understand who he is and what it means for us to walk alongside him.  Why does he call himself the true vine?

            Some passages from the Old Testament help us find the answer.  Prophets like Isaiah, Ezekiel, and Jeremiah compared the Israel of their day with a vine.  God said through Jeremiah, “I planted you a choice vine, wholly of pure seed.  How then have you turned degenerate and become a wild vine?”  The Lord gave his beloved chosen people the best he had, but even so, as  human nature often does, they turned away from him.  He said through Isaiah: “I will tell you what I will do to my vineyard.  I shall remove its hedge.  It shall be devoured and trampled down.  I will make it a waste.  It will not be pruned or hoed.”  The people suffered. The faithful cried out and clung to the Lord.  “Give us life and we will call on your name.”

            They waited for the Savior who would undo the imperfections in God’s vineyard. Jesus came, then, to fulfill the mission that the Lord Almighty gave to Old Testament Israel.  He was reliable, faithful, and always in tune with God’s will – the true vine, as he said.

            Now, every vine has branches, and so by using this word-picture, Jesus also called attention to his close tie with everyone who believes in him.  We are the branches. We abide in him and he abides in us – and all for a purpose.  The most important part is bearing fruit, which many of the people in Old Testament Israel failed to do.  By fruitfulness, Jesus doesn’t mean external things like making our names great or making a mark in the community or piling up money or any of the other things the world encourages us to chase.  Christian fruitfulness is a more inward quality.  It comes from faith in Jesus and means first of all being like him.  Paul described fruitfulness as love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.  Paul also wrote this in another passage: “This is my prayer: that your love may abound more and more in knowledge and depth of insight, so that you may be able to discern what is best and may be pure and blameless until the day of Christ, filled with the fruit of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ – to the glory and praise of God.”  Fruitfulness for Jesus refers to qualities we can’t see or touch – like goodness, understanding, love, truth.

            Any Christian can acquire this kind of fruitfulness by sticking with Jesus.  It doesn’t take special ability or extra energy.  God can take a small amount of fruitfulness and multiply it to abundance.  The Holy Spirit works ceaselessly and steadily to transform God’s people and often in ways that surprise us – by cutting and pruning when we feel like sitting back and thinking only about what pleases us.  Although pruning can be unpleasant, it produces great results. Martin Luther was an expert on this subject.

            He said that Christ interprets all the suffering he and his people pass through as the diligent work and care that a vine-dresser expends on his plants to make them grow and bear fruit.  Jesus teaches us that the affliction and suffering of Christians is actually quite different from the way it looks to the world.  Christians are not afflicted without God’s consent and his will.  Choppy times are signs of God’s grace and fatherly love, not wrath and punishment, because they serve our well-being.

            To use Luther’s words, we learn the art of believing that anything that distresses us doesn’t happen to harm us but for our profit.  We compare this to a vine-dresser who hoes and cultivates his vine.  The suffering of Christians is a help and not a harm.  It enables us to bear better and more abundant fruit.

            Our faith, you see, gives us a comforting way to understand our afflictions.  “Happy is the Christian,” Luther said, “who can apply the picture of God as a vine-dresser in hours of distress and trial, when the devil assaults and torments him and the world reviles and defames him  as an apostle of the devil.  Then he can say, ‘See, I am being fertilized and cultivated as a branch of the vine.  All right, dear hoe and clipper, go ahead take away unnecessary leaves.  I’ll gladly suffer it, for these are God’s hoes and clippers.  They are applied for my good and welfare.’”

            God works on us, then, to make us fruitful.  We look on whatever we suffer as God’s way of making us more trusting of Christ, more loving, more joyful, kinder, more patient, gentler, and so on. 

            Fruitfulness is a necessary part of our walk with God, not because we need to earn our own salvations, but because our fruitfulness glorifies the Heavenly Father and it proves that we are disciples of Christ, not among the branches who will be cast away and burned in the fire.  God’s loving work prunes us and purifies us and transforms us more and more into the image of our Lord.

            The world is a perilous place, though.  Temptations abound and there are plenty of false vines for us to get tangled up in.  Then, too, our flesh is weak and we may wonder if we throw away the loving restraints that God places upon us.  Will we turn out to be one of the fruitless branches that are tossed out?

            That isn’t the Lord’s intention for us.  Jesus assures us that we are clean now through our faith in him.  He obeyed God’s law for us in every way; he defeated the devil on our behalf; he paid the price for our sinfulness and rose again from the dead.  His willingness to wipe away our sins will never run out.  He declares us to be righteous – just the way he wants us to be – and passes his fruitfulness on to us.  He makes us patient and loving; he shares his kindness and self-control with us.  He empowers us to remain with him, to stick with him, to abide in faith.

            He doesn’t ask us to do anything that’s too hard for us.  We keep on reading the Bible regularly and coming to worship on Sundays.  Many folks think about gardens at this time of year.  As a result of weeding and planting and watering, a garden grows to abundance.  So the Holy Spirit works on us.  God uses our Sunday worship and our daily Bible reading to prune us and make our lives with him fruitful and abundant.

            Another aid to fruitfulness is our daily prayers.  “If you remain in me, and my words remain in you, ask whatever you will, and it shall be done for you.”   God gives us the privilege of coming to him at any time.  He surrounds us with his love, including the times when he prunes us by shaking us up.  He is good company and the experience of his presence strengthens us to cope with the times when the world strikes at us with special ferocity.  We talk to the Lord about our joys and our griefs, about our fears, and about the small things of each day that contribute to our happiness or make us uneasy.  We talk to him as we work in the kitchen or sit by ourselves or when we are busy with some task that doesn’t take a lot of concentration.  We ask him to make us fruitful, remembering that he is in us and guiding us even at the times when we aren’t aware of him.

            We remember, too, that there are different kinds of prayer – prayers of praise and prayers of request, prayers in which we ask forgiveness and the moments of stillness when we turn ourselves over to God and invite him to be with us, to use us and to keep on making us fruitful.  And if it ever happens that we’re tangled up in worldly affairs, we ask the Heavenly Father to prune us and make us right again for his vineyard, trusting that whatever shaking up we undergo as he pulls away dead branches will be good for us.

            We live in the world and in God’s vineyard at the same time.  He overcame the world through his Son and his actions of pruning make his victory more visible in us.  Good Christian fruit grows in us because we remain in him.  We stay in his Word and we remember to say our prayers.  We welcome whatever he does with us and we rejoice in the hope that he will keep us fruitful and flourishing in his vineyard.  In Jesus’ Name.  AMEN.

The peace of God that passes all understanding keep your hearts and minds in the knowledge of Christ Jesus.  AMEN.