Tag: Word and Sacrament

THE ASSEMBLY OF WORSHIP

United by their distaste and suspicion of Jesus, the Pharisees and Herodians approached him with some false flattery: “Teacher, we know that you are sincere, and teach the way of God in accordance with truth, and show deference to no one; for you do not regard people with partiality.” Then they asked him a cynical trick question that was meant to trap him: “Now, tell us, is it lawful to pay taxes to the Emperor, or not?” And by “lawful” they of course were referring to the biblical Torah.

If Jesus had said to his fellow Jews that they should pay the imperial tax and support the Roman world order, then he would have allied himself with a totalitarian power that was robbing Israel of its sovereignty and was killing Jews. However, if Jesus had said that Jews should not pay taxes to the international imperial world order, then it would have been seen as sedition against the Roman Empire. This gotcha question was a perfect trap: “Is it Torah to pay taxes to the Emperor, or not?” So in response, Jesus answered them by calling attention to the image of the Emperor on a coin, and he famously declared, “Give therefore to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s” (Matthew 22:21).

You see, Jesus very cleverly threw the question back at the Pharisees and Herodians, and his shrewd answer raises a very important issue for his followers throughout the centuries unto today’s day and age. It reminds us that we cannot worship both the Lord our God and “Caesar” as faithful disciples of Jesus Christ. That is, we cannot simultaneously follow the ways of the Spirit and the ways of the flesh (as the Bible puts it). In other words, we cannot put our trust in the Lord and in the world at the same time. It’s a transgression of the First Commandment.

For example, even the modern-day Church of Jesus Christ has fallen into this trap within its worship life for almost a half century. For decades now, large swaths of the Church have drifted afield from the liturgical worship of Jesus and his Apostles that’s rooted in the worship of the ancient biblical Temple. For at least 40+ years, congregations of the Church have served a worldly concept of worship, calling it “Entertainment Evangelism.” Diminishing the importance of the Sacraments of Christ, Church congregations have even put sanctuary altars on wheels so they can be easily moved, or they have gotten rid of their altars altogether, turning the chancel of the congregational sanctuary into a performance stage. Indeed, for far too many years, we’ve seen concert hall worship spaces and personality cult preachers, which turns divine worship into a theater and the congregation into a mere audience. And what has the Church gotten from selling-out its great and holy birthright for a bowl of entertainment culture porridge?

So, what is worship all about? Is it entertainment or is it something much higher?

In The Voyage of the Dawn Treader from the The Chronicles of Narnia saga, the central character of Aslan tells the four Pevensie children and their cousin the reason why they were brought to Narnia. As he is sending them back to our realm, Aslan says to them, “This was the very reason why you were brought to Narnia, that by knowing me here for a little, you may know me better there.” And this beautiful dialogue powerfully illustrates why we assemble for worship in the holy sanctuary of our congregation. That is, we assemble for worship and fellowship so that by knowing Christ in the worshipping assembly for a little bit each week at Mt. Olive, we thereby may know him better out in the world.

This is why I dislike the phrase “I’m going to Church.” This is because we do not “go” to Church; rather, we ARE the Church. We may “go” to worship for our weekly Sunday assembly, and then “go” from our weekly gathering to serve, but we don’t “go” to Church because we ARE the Church. In other words, we go to worship in order to hear the gospel of Jesus Christ proclaimed and receive the Living Christ in bread and wine. Yes, as we assemble each week in person-to-person living community and access the powerful means of God’s grace (the Word and Sacrament), we are strengthened to go live daily God-conscious lives and to do the work of ministry in the world around us. For it says the following in Ephesians 4…

“The gifts he gave were that some would be apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, some pastors and teachers, to equip the saints [that’s all of us] for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ, until all of us come to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to maturity, to the measure of the full stature of Christ.”

(Ephesians 4: 11-13)

Therefore, in-person assembly for worship and fellowship on Sunday is our weekly Narnia. God’s love and grace communicated through Word and Sacrament and fellowship is that which calls us, gathers us, strengthens us, equips us and sends us “for the work of ministry” (Eph. 4:12a) out in the everyday world of our daily lives. Therefore, as we read further in Ephesians 4…

“We must no longer be children… we must grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ, from whom the whole body, joined and knit together by every ligament with which it is equipped, as each part is working properly, promotes the body’s growth in building itself up in love.”

(Ephesians 4:14-16)

Together in Christ’s Body, Pastor Tim

LIVING WATER

As Springtime has sprung and as we’ve continued to receive over-abundant precipitation this year, my April church article is focused on the subject of the “Living Water” of God. So I’m orienting my reflections on the Gospel of John reading that we had a few Sundays ago (John 4:5-42), which is concerning God’s Living Water. I’m doing this especially because this Living Water passage of Holy Scripture contains some of the most central, essential and vital themes of the good news of Jesus Christ…

Chapter 4 of John describes a time when Jesus visited the region of Samaria, which was a despised place to the Jewish People of that time, because the Samaritans were considered by the Jews as ritually unacceptable and impure. Basically, Samaria was a place that all Jews (including Jesus and his disciples) were expected to steer well clear of. Samaria was designated as a “bad place” populated by those spiritually defiled and despised Samaritans, because the Samaritans did not worship God at the Temple of Zion in the City of Jerusalem but rather at their own Temple of Gerizim near the City of Shechem. Consequently, with the Jews centering their worship on the Temple of Zion in Jerusalem and the Samaritans centering their worship on the Temple of Gerizim near Shechem, both Jews and Samaritans condemned each other as being unfaithful expressions of the ancient Israelite religious faith and spiritual life. Despite the fact that they both worshiped the same Almighty God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, they condemned one another over these differences.

Nevertheless, even though Jesus could have avoided Samaria, our Lord Jesus intentionally traveled through it. And that’s just how our Lord and Savior was when he walked this Earth during his mortal ministry among us. He often took a sledgehammer to the various ethnic, religious and cultural barriers and taboos, in order to seek and save the lost as the Great Physician of all humanity. So this is the reason the Samaritan woman in John 4 says to Jesus, “How is it that you, being a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria?” For as it also says, “Jews do not share things in common with Samaritans.” In fact, for a proper First Century Jew to share a drink from a common cup with a Samaritan would have been viewed as cavorting with the enemy!

In addition to this, it was also expected that men and women were forbidden to converse with one another outside of their family clan — let alone a Jewish man and a Samaritan woman.  However, our Lord Jesus, in stark contrast to both Hebrew and Pagan societies of the time, modeled for us a harmonious balance between the two halves of humanity (between both male and female). Just as Jesus treated both non-Jews and his fellow Jews alike, he also treated both women and men as equal in value and dignity as children of God even though we’re different sides of the same human coin.

Furthermore, at high noon when the heat of the Middle Eastern day was beginning to peak, Jesus meets this Samaritan woman at Jacob’s Well to ask her if he could have some water to drink. And if you recall from the Old Testament, Jacob met his wife Rachel at the well, and Moses met his wife Zipporah at a well too. So Jesus meeting this woman at the well should spark us to think about marriage, especially in the context of Jesus inviting this woman to become a part of his Holy Church. In other words, this is a kind of spiritual romance playing out in John 4, because Jesus invited this woman to faith! He invited her to become a part of the New Covenant “Bride of Christ” (that is, his community of believers and followers, called the Church of Jesus Christ).

Therefore, Jesus asks her about her husband, and he reveals that he knows everything about her five marriages and how she was currently with someone who wasn’t her husband. Of course, he knew everything about her past, just as he knows everything about my past and your past. He knows our whole history, including the skeletons in our closets. And by revealing his miraculous foreknowledge to the Samaritan woman, Jesus revealed that he’s more than merely a pious Jewish man, and even much more than a Prophet of God. Jesus was revealing to her that he is the Divine Universal Messiah, God’s Living Water flowing from the Heavenly Fountain of Almighty God.

Like a stream or river, Christ our Lord is the pure, fresh, ever-flowing Living Water that eternally quenches our deepest spiritual thirst. For we are all thirsty for that which our soul cannot find anywhere else! So how thirsty are you? How thirsty are you for the deep, permanent satisfaction that simply cannot be found from anything else in this impermanent and ultimately unsatisfactory world?

The Only One to satisfy this thirst is the Messiah, Yeshua (Jesus), who leads us to “worship in spirit and truth” (as it says in John 4), so that wherever we find ourselves, and everywhere we gather together in his name, becomes for us a Holy Gerizim and a Holy Zion. For Jesus is the One and Only answer to our hunger and thirst for fulfillment and peace. He is our infinite grace within this fallen and sinful world, and he is our more-than-enough within this not-enough mortal existence — he’s our “spring of water gushing up to eternal life” (as it says). And every Sunday, at our weekly spiritual watering-hole that we call worship, our Lord Jesus is with us in spirit and truth, in Word and Sacrament, offering to us Living Water for our spiritually parched hearts, minds and souls.

Almighty and Eternal God, on our own, apart from you, we have no true hope, no permanent refreshment, no everlasting fulfillment. Bring us to drink from your wellspring fountain of spirit and grace and truth which ever-flows to us through Christ Jesus our Savior, by the power of your Holy Spirit.  O Holy Trinity, we pray in your triune name: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.

Blessed Holy Week & Happy Easter!!!  Pastor Tim

THE POWER OF THE CROSS OF CHRIST

As winter approaches, there’s deep concern about a looming energy crisis in Europe, caused in no small part by the war in Ukraine. And our country is also experiencing its own problems regarding energy. Debates rage about how to transition to non-fossil fuel sources as energy prices go up and our power grids in some places are strained almost to the brink of collapse. And very moderate estimates say that we would need to double the size of our power grid just to begin to meet the energy requirements for a future in which the electric vehicle (or EV) is the dominant form of automotive transportation.

As brownouts roll across high population centers, people are increasingly asking: Where are we going to get the power? Is it going to come from low-carbon natural gas? From solar, wind, geothermal, or nuclear? Or is it simply a robust combination of all of these sources?

This question, in a spiritual sense, is also a question that Christianity is asking these days within our American society. Of course, I’m not talking about how we’re going to power the lights and air conditioning. What I’m saying is, spiritually speaking, where are we going to get the energy for these times of colossal societal shifts that are so much bigger than us? Where are we going to get the power?

Brothers and sisters in Christ, we face a different kind of energy crisis as Christians within our secularizing American culture. Our declining denominations of every branch of the Church, dwindling Christian institutions, and struggling congregations, are causing us to wonder (and even worry) where we’re going to get the power to move into the future. Yes, COVID took its toll on the Church, no doubt about it. However, this spiritual energy crisis for the Church in the United States was already in place, and growing, long before any of us ever heard about the coronavirus. The pandemic was merely a kind of accelerant which exacerbated trends within American Christianity that were already well established.

Seminary enrollments have seen a marked drop in recent decades. Worship attendance has been trending downward for years in every single county of the United States. The fastest growing religious affiliation in our country is “none” — no affiliation whatsoever. Volunteerism is way down across the board in our American society, which has a huge impact on service clubs, fraternal organizations, youth organizations, and, of course, on congregational life. And Church bodies and institutions have been made to reorganize, then reorganize again, and then reorganize yet again, in response to dwindling resources. So, essentially, we have an energy crisis in the Church throughout our nation, even within the mega-church congregations now.

Nonetheless, at the risk of sounding overly simplistic, I would like to suggest that we have a power source which can fuel the future of the Christian Church in America (whatever form that future might take), and this power source is right under our noses. It’s a renewable resource of inexhaustible supply, and this power is the gospel of Jesus Christ. It is the message we have been given to proclaim to the world that [1] there really is such a thing as sin, [2] our sin separates us from God and one another, and [3] we sinners are reconciled to God through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. It’s the message that we are forgiven and freed by the sacrificial blood of the cross of Christ our Lord, so that we might live a new life with God which begins now and continues forever.

In fact, the New Testament refers to the gospel as “the power of God” for our salvation in the Book of Romans. And the actual Greek word translated into English as the word “power” is the word dynamis. So if this word sounds to you like the word “dynamite” then you are correct. That is, according to the New Testament, the full gospel concerning the reality of sin, the spiritual consequences of sin, and then the forgiveness of sin granted to us by the infinite atonement of the sacrificial offering of Christ on our behalf, is an explosively saving and redeeming message. It’s a message that detonates within the receptive ear and open heart, igniting the living fire of faith and salvation. The gospel is the very power that drives faith and fuels the Church.

I believe a major factor in the energy crisis of the Church in America is that we’ve lost our focus on the power of the gospel. Far too many think it’s insufficient as an energy source — that it must be combined with something else, such as the latest fashions in entertainment and media. Or, too many people these days seek to dilute the significance of the cross of Christ, making Jesus into merely a grand religious example, a great spiritual ethicist, or the ideal leader of a liberation army. Therefore, as long as the cross is treated as an afterthought — or worse, as an embarrassment — you can expect the energy crisis in the American Church to continue.

But I’m optimistic. As other power sources we run after prove to be insufficient, the Church will continue to grow dim for a time, BUT within the growing darkness of our culture we will more and more come to see the True Light who was hanged on a central cross between two criminals. For as we see in Luke chapter 23, amid sarcasm and scoffing from those who mockingly call Jesus messiah and king, our Lord Jesus Christ reveals that he, as the Universal Messiah and Everlasting King, gives his life in love for the sake of the world. Enthroned on his sacrificial cross, Jesus uses his divine authority to welcome a penitent sinner into God’s heavenly paradise. And Jesus does the same thing for us! Thanks be to God!

In other words, if we were to die tonight, and we were to enter God’s paradise, what would we say about our entry into glory? Would we say, It’s because I…? It’s because I made a covenant with God, or it’s because I am faithful, or it’s because I am this or that… No! Rather, it is because HE (Jesus). It’s because HE died for me. It’s because HE made a baptismal covenant with me. It’s because HE is faithful and true. Like the thief on a cross next to Jesus, it is entirely because HE granted us access to God’s paradise. The thief in paradise can only and ever say, It’s because the man on the middle cross said I could come. Likewise, when we’ve been there ten thousand years, bright shining as the sun, it can only and ever be said by us that it’s entirely because the man who was hanged on the middle cross said that you and I could come to be there.

The gospel of the cross of Christ is the saving dynamite that, when harnessed through his Word and Sacraments, fuels the Church. So as we try in vain to plug into other energy sources, we will come to see once again that the good news of the forgiveness of sin and the promise of eternal life through Jesus Christ provides us with all the power we will ever need.

Good Advent & Merry Christmas!!! Pastor Tim

JESUS, GOD’S PRISM

The Seasons of Advent, Christmastime and Epiphany all share together the theme of spiritual light. And Jesus of Nazareth is the Holy Son of God who shines God’s Eternal Light on us and the whole world.

Jesus said, “I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness but will have the light of life.”

(John 8:12)

Our risen Lord and Savior is the Light of God that’s revealed to us in specific and concrete ways. Through Jesus Christ, God’s Light is not only reflected to us by Jesus but it’s also refracted to us by him in very specific hues. Through our Lord Jesus who is God’s Prism, we see the Light of God refracted into its specific spectrum of colors for us to clearly see and understand.

The Universal Light of God is made known to us in the sevenfold spectrum of Jesus’ birth, his life, his teachings, his suffering, his death, his resurrection, and his ascension. Through these seven rays of Jesus’ earthly and heavenly ministry, the rainbow spectrum of God’s Light is shed upon our lives to save, redeem and guide us.

Jesus said, “If you know me, you will know my Father also. From now on you do know him and have seen him.”

(John 14:7)

Therefore, as we avail ourselves of the full rainbow of God’s Light in Christ our Lord through his gracious gifts of Word and Sacrament, we receive grace upon grace, and we are strengthened and kept in true faith. And the continuing challenge to all of us is to recognize that this grace and truth of God in Christ will never fit neatly into either a loose universalist faith or a strict fundamentalist faith. Jesus Christ is God’s grace and God’s challenge to absolutely everyone.

Revealed through Jesus Christ and his Apostles, may the New Covenant rainbow of God’s Light grant us the new life of a born again spirit (see John 3). And may Christ’s New Covenant rainbow of God’s Light fill us, challenge us, change us and renew us. Amen.

Good Advent, Merry Christmas, Happy New Year and Blessed Epiphany!!!

Together in Christ, Pastor Tim

BREAD FOR BEGGARS

As disciples of Jesus Christ we are called to share our faith in Jesus with all people. In fact, our Lord and Savior Jesus said the following: “Follow me and I will make you fish for people.” And, of course, there is Christ’s famous Great Commission statement:

“All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations…”

Matthew 28: 18-19a

However, this Great Commission can sound to us like such a colossal and monumental thing. It can sound too grandiose for an individual Christian or a neighborhood Christian congregation to accomplish. But we also know that “for God all things are possible” (Matthew 19:26).

So, what can we do with all these teachings and commandments from our Lord about “fishing” and discipling and evangelizing in his name?

Well, it has been said that Christian evangelism is one beggar telling another where they have found bread. And if we think of it like this, then the call to evangelize doesn’t seem so daunting. All of us, like all of humanity, are spiritual beggars that are in need of the spiritual bread that God so graciously has made available to us in Christ. Simply put, we are beggars who have found The Living Bread of Heaven (John 6:47-51) who wish to share with others (as best we can) where they can get this bread for themselves.

Beggars telling other beggars where we have found bread — this really is the heart of Christian evangelism and it is something we can all do, both individually and congregationally. You can give gifts to people that reflect Christian faith and spirituality. You can regularly “Check In” and “Share” and “Like” on our church Facebook page for your individual social media contacts to see. You can invite your friends, neighbors, family members and coworkers to worship services and congregational events. If you have children who have not followed through with their vows at their own child’s baptism to bring them to the services of God’s house, then you can evangelize your grandchildren by inviting and bringing them to worship, Sunday school and other activities.

As members of the Church of Jesus Christ, there are a variety of important things we must engage in. For instance, charitable service is very important. However, while we continue to do charitable service (both domestically and globally), we must also remember to do evangelism by sharing with our fellow sinners and spiritual beggars where to find The Bread of Life, who is Christ the Lord. Essentially, it is inviting people to the renewing and sustaining life, light and love of Jesus through his Holy Word and Blessed Sacrament within the fellowship of his Community of Disciples.

Happy New Year to All and Share the Good News! 

Pastor Tim