Sermon, Sun Mar 8, 2009

Second Sunday in Lent
Brothers and sisters,
Grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.
Jesus speaks to the disciples and to you this morning of how completely and utterly unnatural it is to be a disciple of Christ. Being a disciple of Christ does not come natural to us. It goes against every natural inclination that we are born with.
We see this in how our Lord Jesus reacts to Peter when Peter dares to rebuke Jesus for saying that He (Jesus) must undergo great suffering, and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again. Jesus responds by rebuking back, to the point of even referring to Peter as Satan. And then condemning Peter for setting His mind on human things and not divine things.
He completely separates human things from divine things. He doesn’t say “Peter, you just haven’t found the divinity within you yet.” In this encounter, it is clear that our sinful will and the divine will of our Creator are completely at odds and antithetical to each other. And this is further articulated in an even more powerful way when Jesus explains to the disciples that if they want to become His followers, they must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow Him, and that those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for His sake and the sake of the Gospel will save it.
So how are you doing with that? How are you doing with that denying yourself part? Are your losing your life for Christ’s sake and the sake of the Gospel? Now this is not saying that we should all go out and become martyrs. But rather, it is saying that being a disciple of Christ means that every decision we make, every thought we have, every action of ours is to flow from the claim that has been made upon us by Christ Jesus. So how are you doing with that?
The truth is we fail at this daily. Daily we fail keep our minds on divine things and not on human things. This is why we have laws. This is why we have courts and judges. And this is why we have prisons. We all struggle and fail to keep our minds on divine things, and we all fail to deny ourselves. And in prisons you have people who have come face to face with the futility of this reality to a degree that most of us can’t imagine.
When I was on internship in South Dakota I went to a prison worship service in Springfield, South Dakota, and they allowed me to distribute the wine in Communion. It was done by intinction where the worshippers, most of them being prisoners, would dip the wafer into the chalice of wine that as I was holding, and as I said to them “This is the body of Christ shed for you.” And as I looked into their eyes and they heard these wonderful words of promise from our Lord, it was almost as if I could see these prisoners being transformed. But it was not a transformation that came from inside of them or any desires that they had, but rather from outside of them in the Words of promise from our Lord as they partook of His holy and precious blood.
They had seen the futility of clinging to their own ways. They had been completely humbled by God’s alien work of the law, as their sins were exposed to them and they saw that there was no hope there. And so, having seen the futility of human things, all that is left is Christ. And there was Christ coming to them through His word in a promise proclaimed by a bumbling intern and the holy and precious blood of Christ shed upon the cross for them and for you.
And so it is for you, brothers and sisters in Christ. For the struggle of Peter in the Gospel lesson and the struggle of these prisoners and all prisoners is our struggle; the struggle to deny ourselves, as we daily fail to stay focused on divine things and give in to the temptation to focus on human things and away from divine things. Daily we put our trust more in our own human desires and wills, or human organizations and institutions, some of which might even be part of the church, than we do in the One who created us. We daily show that we trust the creation more than the Creator.
But that is why our Lord Jesus said that He must undergo great suffering and die and be raised. Left to our own will we are merely, as Paul writes “dead in our trespasses,” but being rich in mercy God doesn’t leave it in our hands, He sends Christ Jesus to take upon Himself all of our sin and death upon the cross, giving us His righteousness for our sin, His justification for our condemnation, and His life for our death. And because of Christ having been raised three days later, we are made alive with Christ. And this is not the result of any works or effort on your part, but it is purely a radical gift of God’s free grace which continuously come to us in Word and sacrament and gives us faith, nurtures our faith and sustains our faith.
And through that very faith, we are made righteous just as Abraham’s faith was reckoned to him as righteousness. Human will focuses on this tired world that leads only to death. But faith, which comes to us when we are claimed by Christ in the waters of baptism, and continues to come to us in Holy Communion and the Word, looks beyond the present reality, whatever it may be, and by God’s glorious grace through this faith, we are able to see that we are no longer sons and daughters of death, but inheritors of an eternal and glorious kingdom.
Amen